Tear Drops

Yes, the wife's away and I'm bored - so here's another post. 'Let Your Tear Drops Fall' was the first single I ever owned by Horace Andy. It's one of a series that he cut for producer Phil Pratt at the start of the seventies, including 'Get Wise', 'Tag Along', and the original versions of 'Youths Of Today' and 'Money Money' - all of them seriously good tunes, many of them collected on his LP 'Get Wise'. Here's a sample:

'Tear Drops' has more of a soulful vibe, and is one of very few tunes to use melodica in the rhythm section (the only other one I can think of off the top of my head is 'East Christmas Song'). Horace's voice has never sounded smoother and there's a lovely, delicate piano line. If you listen carefully you can even hear some clanking pots and a bit of studio chat towards the end.

The dub starts off very nicely with little drop-out soloing the backing vocals, but gets a bit samey after that. The melodica is one of the things I like best about the a-side, but on the dub it just overwhelms everything else and leaves you wishing for a bit less of it.

Anyway, to round things off, here's the original version of 'Money Money' together with it's deejay cut. I still have 'Evilous Things' somewhere and it has the wickedest dub (incidentally, does anyone have the original issue of 'Tell It Black' by Big Youth with the dub on the b-side? I've been looking for that for over 20 years).