Ali
our Christmas present for last Christmas.
It was an unplugged album, because we
decided to call it ‘cuddly reggae.’ It was so
AC: Nothing at all. I hated folk music. In
the true son-and-father style, I completely
ignored the folk music and went for reg-
gae. Which disappointed him greatly. But
then he did have two other sons, David
and Duncan, who were into folk music.
Duncan even used to sing with my dad.
And then when he joined the Dark Side,
we were all shocked because he was a folk
singer, you know? So you don’t have a
folksinger singing reggae, normally. And
that’s why he’s not very good.
IE: Musically speaking, there was proba-
bly no more productive a place or time
07•2017
cuddly. There’s no bass on it, you see. No
bass guitar at all, which is unprecedented,
of course, for a reggae record. You can’t
have reggae without bass, can you? But
you can. We decided you can. So we did
an unplugged album of a lot of our hits,
and just some songs that we loved. And
that went down lovely. And we were rec-
ommending that people buy that CD
along with a bottle of our wine, because
Hey – that’s your Christmas Eve sorted,
right there!
IE: And you’re actually the son of a
renowned Scottish folksinger, Ian
Campbell. What did you learn from him?
10 illinoisentertainer.com july 2017
than Jamaica in the ‘60s and early ‘70s.
AC: Well, yeah. But you know what’s even
more exciting? If you look at the MTV
Awards that just happened, or if you look
at Ariana Grande, Justin Bieber, Rihanna,
even Katy Perry. They’re all making reg-
gae records. Contemporary music is being
influenced more by reggae now than it
ever has been. It’s more influential now
than it was in the ‘70s, ‘80s or ‘90s.
IE: You were one of the only bands to
experiment with dub in the early days,
too.
AC: Yeah. We were the first to get a dub
album into the mainstream charts. It was
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