A wife's gift started one of Britain's most important reggae labels: a four-track recorder, given to an electronics repairman called Neil Fraser, that he could not leave alone.
Fraser had spent years fixing radios and building outboard gear for other people. With the four-track set up in his front room in Thornton Heath, he began cutting rhythm tracks of his own, on Sundays, with whichever local musicians turned up.
"I got hold of some musicians; we would meet every Sunday, and I'd put on the rhythm tracks," he has said of those first sessions, recorded between 1979 and 1981 and only now gathered in full as Ariwa Sounds: The Early Sessions, reissued this year by Melodies International.
Word travelled fast for a man working out of a semi in south London. MCs and singers who heard the rhythms started asking where they'd been cut; once they found out there was a studio behind the sound, they came round to use it. Sister Audrey, Ranking Ann, Deborah Glasgow and Errol Sly all passed through, backed by a house band, the Sane Inmates, that Fraser was assembling more or less by accident.
He had bigger ideas than a hobby. "I had this dream of being a label like Motown," he has said of that period, and within weeks he was pressing his own records rather than waiting for anyone else to.
Melodies International built its name reissuing rare soul and boogie, which makes this one a detour for them as much as an archaeology project for Fraser. Alternate versions of the same rhythm sit side by side across the tracklist, different voices over identical backing, tape rewinds left in rather than edited out.
What that rawness captures, and what the polished Ariwa records of the mid-1980s sometimes smoothed over, is how thin the line was between lover's rock and dub in these first takes: a Sister Audrey vocal stripped straight back to drum, bass and delay a track later. It plays closer to a dub plate cut for a single sound system than to a finished studio album.
That distinction mattered to Fraser, who chafed at how lover's rock got typecast even as he helped shape it.
By 1982 the front room had been outgrown, and Ariwa moved to a basement on Gautrey Road in Peckham, where Jah Shaka and Lee "Scratch" Perry would soon come looking for the sound Fraser had built from a gifted four-track and a Sunday afternoon habit. The Early Sessions is the story before any of that: unpolished, private, and the reason everything after it worked.
