Album Review: Brain Damage meets Big Youth – Beyond the Blue (2021)

Released earlier this year on the Jarring Effects label, Beyond the Blue is an album with quite a sobering backstory. A collaboration between legendary Jamaican DJ Big Youth, France-based dub producer Martin Nathan (aka Brain Damage), and Jamaican-born studio veteran Samuel Clayton Jr., it was recorded in Kingston in March 2020, just as the first wave of Covid-19 sent the planet into meltdown, and lockdown. And that’s when things took a tragic turn for the worst.

The trio had barely started the process, recording just a few takes before both Nathan and Clayton Jr. contracted the virus. Nathan somehow managed to return to France, with the remaining pair opting to try to continue with the album in Kingston alongside fellow Anchor Studios producer Stephen Stewart. Sadly, Clayton Jr. would not survive, succumbing to the virus before the project reached completion. 

With the support of his label, Nathan resolved to finish the album, mixing the work-in-progress and adding the finishing touches back in Lyon, after eventually winning his own prolonged battle with Covid-19. The result is Beyond the Blue, a masterclass in reggae toasting and dub production, and a fitting tribute to the talent and determination of all three key protagonists. 

For the uninitiated, Big Youth (Manley Buchanan, to his Mum) is something of a legend in Jamaican DJ circles. With the recent loss of Jamaican uber producer Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, you could say he is one of the last great survivors of the reggae’s 1970s and 1980s golden age. Now in his 70s, he is one of the pioneers of the popular “toasting” vocal style, alongside contemporary U-Roy, who coincidentally, is another of the genre’s greats to pass in 2021. 

The album itself is superb. A compelling mix of rootsy flavours, rocksteady, ska, jazz (yes, jazz) it finds Big Youth in fine vocal form. There’s a couple of jazzy remakes of the classic ‘I Pray Thee’, which bookend the 12-tracks on offer, and beyond the usual declarations of faith and chants of praise, there’s a fair bit of prescient social and political content as well. As you’d expect. 

And naturally, given the context, there are also a couple of references to the virus itself. There’s a nice touch on a couple of tracks where the recording of in-studio spoken narrative or preamble is left in, raw and unedited, presumably as a tribute to Clayton Jr. 

I especially enjoyed the old school rocksteady-paced stuff, with the ridiculously infectious, yet relatively simple groove of ‘Those Days’ in particular, quickly becoming a firm favourite. 

But they’re all pretty good tunes, and Martin Nathan, wearing his Brain Damage hat, deserves enormous credit for not only providing the compositions which allow Big Youth to shine, but for bringing the project to completion at a time when it might have been easier to simply shelf it. The album can be found on Bandcamp here. 

R.I.P. Samuel Clayton Jr. 

Here’s the 2020 version of ‘I Pray Thee’, which opens the album: