LITTLE ROY

Jah Nirvana

Elder statesman of reggae Little Roy presents his dub-flavoured tribute to Nirvana, Battle For Seattle, as part of the Perth International Arts Festival on Friday, February 10, at the Festival Gardens. TRAVIS JOHNSON has a word to Roy about this strangest of all genre mash-ups.

There’s reggae music pounding in the background when Little Roy answers the phone in his London home.
“Let me just turn down this,” he says, somewhat apologetically, in his rich, honeyed voice, before returning to the subject at hand, which is Battle For Seattle, his album of reggae covers of Nirvana standards. The most pressing question - or at least the most obvious one - is how Little Roy, a reggae veteran of some 40-plus years, came to be involved in such a project?
“I would say it wasn’t my idea,” he tells us. “It was the idea of a producer called Mike Pelancoli (also known as Prince Fatty). He offered me to do the work, so I went along with him, and I was grateful to see that the work came out that good and was appreciated by everyone.”
The result is an album that avoids relying on tweeness and novelty, instead delivering an uplifting and ultimately reverential take on the music that - cliché though it may be - defined a generation. The arrangements retain the hard, raw, emotional core of the original versions, while imbuing them with the hard-knock optimism of reggae.
Of the process of actually translating Nirvana’s sound to the reggae idiom, Little Roy says, “It was interesting, and it wasn’t that hard, you know? Because reggae’s a thing that, translating a song to reggae... it’s not something that gives that much of a problem. You just need to get that mean chop on the guitar, that reggae chop, and to get a good tempo on it. All the tempo of these songs, they coincided with the Nirvana songs, you know? All the drums that we laid down, it was the same tempo as the Nirvana songs. It wasn’t that hard.”
Of course, this isn’t the first time we’ve seen the reggae aesthetic applied to rock standards; Dub Side Of The Moon comes immediately to mind, as does Radiodread, both by The Easy Star All-Stars. But Nirvana is sacred ground to a lot of folks who came up in the ‘90s, and given that Battle’s 2011 release coincided with Nevermind’s 20th anniversary, was there ever a concern about potential backlash from the Cobain faithful?
“Some of them, they were unhappy,” Little Roy admits. “But others supported it a lot, because they would see that the songs used to be sad songs to them, but I made them pleasant, and so the songs are more happy sounding songs now. They do appreciate it; a lot of them, they love it, and they show their appreciation.”
Indeed, the album’s success has opened up a whole new listening demographic for Little Roy - white people. “Yeah, it’s a lot of new audiences, because when I do reggae shows it would be mostly like - how do we say, black people? But now when I do Nirvana shows, it appeals to a lot of whites.”