In 1970, The Abyssinians’ Bernard Collins stepped out of Studio One in Kingston with his fresh-pressed record, Declaration of Rights,  and walked straight to Bob Marley’s shop. There he played the track, and got a hero’s welcome. Marley began to dance around like a madman, shouting: “Sing about Jah! You have to call out Rasta’s name inna your tune!”
Hearing that tune in concert on an inky December eve in Tulse Hill, it’s easy to see why Marley got so excited. The trill of the drawbar organ sounds like the seethe of Caribbean crickets, and the music’s dank landscape transmits a store of hardships endured, patiences exhausted.
Through his cuddly, grey-bearded exterior, Bernard Collins conserves the flinty directness of a Jamaican ‘hills man’. He grew up in the hills surrounding Kingston in the fifties – one of the traditional refuges for Rastafarians at the time. The image of Jamaica as the spiritual home of Rasta was a distorted one until recently. They were violently ostracized by Christian society until roots reggae, with its core Rasta ethos popularized the movement.
Collins remembers: “We were the first group to bring Rasta into reggae and start the roots movement. That’s why our song Satta Massagana is known as the anthem of reggae music.”
This isn’t just a boast. Satta Massagana was so ‘roots’ that it was partly sung in Amharic, the old Ethiopian language, vocalizing an increased desire amongst displaced black Caribbeans to discover their African past. The song is now a reggae classic that has been covered by dozens ranging from Big Youth to Third World.
One less savoury side of the religion that has recently been getting a lot of airplay recently is its homophobia. Modern dancehall stars Beenie Man and Buju Banton have received performance bans after preaching gay hate from the vocal booth – Collins however, doesn’t see a problem. “They [dancehall artists] are more warriors when it comes to these sorts of issues. They have a right too. Gays don’t trouble me. But don’t bring it to me. I don’t agree with it – that’s not a Rasta ting – that’s a conscious man ting – a man who knows the truth. I just can’t deal with that. Man has woman.”
As mentioned, the group played this December at Hootananny’s in Tulse Hill, and after remarkably nimble bravura performance in a vermilion and gold African robe, Collins appears for our interview deflated in a grubby grey jumper, looking all of his sixty-odd years. He also displays an irascible side that betrays his years, although this comes second to the caramel warmth of his eye-to-eye stare.
The power of his Satta Massagana track is palpable still in the audience’s reaction – lighters raised, frenzied ‘wheel’ [rewind] exhortations and insidious serpents of weed smoke all met the opening bars of the tune the crowd had come to hear.
Weed is still the mainstay of Collins’ creative drive: “It puts me in a meditation, where I can do what I wanna do. If I go for a rhythm session, I take my herb, if I’m gonna sing, I take my herb – if I’m gonna write some music, I light my spliff – like Bob Marley – ‘excuse me while I light my spliff’!”
Collins tells me he’s even smoked herb with Richard Branson, when Branson went to Jamaica in 1978 to sign up the island’s reggae talent for Virgin Records. Branson went with Don Letts and the Sex Pistols’ John Lydon, and invited reggae’s penniless stars to the Sheraton Hotel, where they would puff away by the pool. Collins remembers Letts and Lydon as mere “cronies” to me, adding “Rumour was he [Branson] was there with a suitcase with $1,000,000 in it. We sorted out a contract. After six months, however the contract was torn up by Virgin. I felt cut up about it, I tried to get a lawyer but they have so many big lawyers that you just can’t win.”
Virgin or no, The Abyssinians still became roots reggae stars, without the slick Island Records marketing of a man like Marley. If you want proof, watch the first scene of Rockers, arguably the rawest and best film about reggae. In it, the group perform Satta Massagana in its most fitting environment – a Rasta hill camp, behind dense ganja plumes, with those Caribbean crickets playing organ offstage.

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