Mel Cooke, Freelance Writer
Fredlocks points to the road sign in Ethiopia which indicates Shashemene, where many Rastafarians live on land donated by Haile Selassie. - CONTRIBUTED
WESTERN BUREAU:'Seven miles of Black Starliner coming in the harbour?
I can hear them saying
These are the days, for which we've been praying'
- Fredlocks, Black Starliner
IT WAS by air on British Airways, not by sea on the Black Starliner of which he sang in his seminal hit of the same name recorded 30 years ago, but singer Fredlocks finally made it to Africa Ethiopia, specifically and he is a very happy man.
And this is despite not getting to perform before what would have been his largest ever audience.
"At the beginning of the year, it started on a positive note, musically, because I attended the Bob Marley birthday celebration in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. I was not billed for the show, but I was supposed to get a guest spot. But some of our own people fight it down," he told The Sunday Gleaner.
"Rita Marley had sent for me and wanted me to do even one song, but some people who were in charge of the stage did not make that possible," Fredlocks said.
NOT PERTURBED
He is far from being perturbed, or even ruffled about that, simply saying "Jah know everything". In fact, there is hardly anything that seems to faze the man born Stafford Elliott, who has a consistent twinkle in his grey eyes and a smile tugging at the lips that first recorded a song, 'A Get It', for Studio One in 1967, as part of the trio The Lyrics.
"I went on to sing in Shashemene alongside Bob Andy and some residents of Ethiopia, from different parts of the Twelve Tribes branches. They have a band over there, they back Rita Marley," he said.
His impressions of the place that he has been yearning to go to for decades are very positive.
"Over there really nice, you wouldn't believe it. Some a de youth dem used to live a America and now reside over there. Cedric Brooks (tenor saxophonist) play horn in the band. He has been there for two years.
"We performed in the Shashemane Stadium, which was renamed the Bob Marley Stadium after the event, so that is a part of the history, then I went on to a place called Nazareth. I did one song in Shasemene, but in Nazareth I got to do like four songs and I was well accepted," he said.
Both shows were to audiences of 5,000 to 6,000 persons.
The experience has been recorded - literally - in a song called 'My African Experience' and has been a part of a deluge of material from Fredlocks that has come out of what he describes as "an experience of a lifetime".
It has been a lifetime in music for Fredlocks, who went solo in 1975 after his partners in The Lyrics, Delmar Campbell and Albert Tomlinson, migrated. It was in that year that his signature song, 'Black Starliner', was made. However, his songwriting had started years before, when at 12 years old he wrote 'I Thought She Loved Me', which he sang at 15 with some Vauxhall schoolmates.
Things have a way of coming full circle, though, and he is currently remaking the 'Black Starliner' album, one of three or four full-length efforts that are in the works, including one that he is producing himself.
And that is in addition to four songs, 'Special Mama', 'Murderer', 'Living Sacrifice' and 'Want You Into My Life', that are done as singles.
AIRPLAY
It is the continuation of a prodigious output from Fredlocks since returning to Jamaica in the late 1990s from an extended stay in the US. But there is the matter of airplay for the material, Fredlocks saying that many disc jocks on radio are not giving 'fairplay'.
He got ample justice at a show in England some time after the Marley birthday celebrations, though, a concert that should have featured Junior Delgado but turned into a tribute of sorts to him when he died.
"Junior Delgado, when he died, we were supposed to do a show together ? Israel Vibration, Waling Soul, Meditation, myself and him ? at the Astoria. He passed before the show, but we still went ahead. When I went there now, they had me like the second act to come on stage. The promoter eventually change and say he got encouraged by other persons not to put me so early," Fredlocks said.
It proved to be a wise decision, as Fredlocks, with no signs of boasting, said he "took the show for the Lord" to a sold-out audience. Then there was a performance shortly after in Wolverhampton, where Fredlocks says "the place done", that concert, done with Prince Malachi, ending at about 5:00 a.m.
Fredlocks performs by the philosophy passed on to him by Dennis Brown and can be summed up in two words, the 'reh' and the 'boo'. "I don't watch the 'rey' (the cheers of the crowd. I watch the boo," he said. "I don' wan' get no boo."
And he never has, with performances on the revived Foundation Night at last year's Red Stripe Reggae Sumfest, as well as concerts in Trinidad and other parts of the Eastern Caribbean.
As for British Airways taking him on his first visit to Africa, Fredlocks says he wishes it could have been the Ethiopian Airline, so he could have had the experience of the Conquering Lion, but he is philosophical and satisfied about getting there any at all.
"When we say "seven miles of Black Starliner", it doesn't mean that we have to take a ship to reach," he said, smiling.
