Johnny Clarke – Yard Style LP

Mad Professor produces Johnny Clarke inna 1983 fashion on his Ariwa label, subtly galvanising the legendary vocalist’s era-defining ‘70s sound with a futurist but soulful ’80s style & pattern.

After more than a decade as one of JA’s most distinctive voices, working with top producers of the time - Bunny Lee, Lee Perry, Errol Thompson, King Jammy - Johnny Clarke skipped to London to lay vox for ‘Yard Style’, one of two LPs, along with ‘Give Thanks’, that he cut for Mad Professor’s relatively young Ariwa Studio and label.

The 9-part album kept Clarke in step with reggae-dancehall’s shift toward more explicitly electronic sounds, but without sloshing the baby out with the bathwater, finely balancing his mellifluous, soulful croon with Mad Professor’s precision-tooled early ‘80s production. Evident from the eerily futurist, spectral diffusion of his voice on opener ‘You’re All I Want’ and again on the puckered halfstep and dread themes of ‘Nuclear War’, thru closer ’Top Fight’, the taut production really suits Clarke, as also heard on the standout pressure of ‘Party’, with its sticky synths, or the crispness of ‘Draed Like a Lion’