
Hailing from South London, Peter Hunnigale is one of the UK’s most respected and talented Reggae artists. From the beginnings of his career during the 1980s through to his latest release Free Soul, he has remained a successful artist both locally and internationally, and has toured extensively across Europe, the Caribbean, and North America. I got the chance to sit down with Peter at his Studio in Brixton back in April, here is the first of our conversation, focusing on the foundational stages of his career, his record label (Street Vibes), his work with Tippa Irie, and what it was like growing up around some of London’s heaviest Sound Systems.
MNP - To start off what was your first exposure to music growing up?
PH - Im not sure (laughs) it was just something that’s just part of me, I don’t know where it came from as such. My parents are form Jamaica, but the actual bug for music I’m not sure where it comes from, but as long as I can remember I’ve always loved music. Music’s everywhere, I’m from the UK, I was born in the UK, and I guess the music that I was exposed to at the time was sort of like UK pop music which was early days Manfred Mann and everything else, and obviously Jamaican music from my parents and stuff. But then, there was no such thing as Reggae then, it was Ska, Blue Beat, Rocksteady and stuff. So I had the best of both worlds, you know what I mean? That was my food if you like, my true knowledge, my pool of knowledge, and I drew everything from there.
MNP - At what point did you make the decision that music was something you were going to seriously pursue in your life?
PH - Its kind of a good question, because I thought about that as a young man. You think to yourself ‘I wanna be an artist, I wanna play my guitar and sing when I grow up’ or whatever, but if you’ve got that spirit—I can’t explain where it comes from—I think you’re vocation is to be that. The decision is what commitment you’re gonna make to it. I think to myself, ‘well, I love music, and no matter what I do with my life I’m going to have to, you know, give it a try’. I love the guitar, you know, so my interests are there, so when I got to secondary school I made sure we was able—me and a few other friends—was able to forge a lesson from the teachers. Instead of doing other subjects we could do guitar and stuff, and we can learn about music and the guitar and anything else. Certainly from a young man, from as long as I can remember, through what we call junior school, or grammar school, the interest and the love was ever so strong. Reggae music was fabulous back then. You’re talking about sixties, you know what I mean? It was like, infectious, you know? But the best part of the professional side and the working side came for me through secondary school, that we was able to get a few teachers to say ‘look we don’t wanna do RE’ and stuff like that, and a few like minded people like myself we decided that we wanted guitar classes and stuff. And that’s where it came from, that’s where my nurturing actually began.
MNP - Tell me a little bit about your first recording at De Wolfe studio.
PH - How I managed to be at De Wolfe, life again. Going back to that story when I was in secondary school, one of—and he’s my partner today, still is today—I met a like minded colleague called Fitzroy Blake. But Fitzroy Blake came from the other side of music, you know. He started life out pulling radios apart and ‘hows that work’ type of things, you know? He’s sort of like a very electronically minded type of character. We got to about 15, 16 in our Secondary School years and Fitzroy disappeared, cause he’s a year my senior, and he went on to do Tape Op work at De Wolfe studio. That was his first apprenticeship. After being there for a period he won himself free weekends in the studio , when office hours closed he could work in there and do little tape spins and whatever. Obviously, myself being a musician, guitar, and a few other colleagues that was cool he would say ‘look, come down on the weekend to De Wolfe, you know, we can do a few recordings in there’ whatever. And that was my first exposure to a real working studio back in the day. Proper 8-Track studio it was, and it was something else. It was quite a learning curve, I was quite fortunate to be in tat situation. And that went on for a good while, you know what I mean, weekend after weekend when we could get in we’d be up at De Wolfe in a professional studio, getting the best of, you know what I mean? Learning our craft, you know, playing guitars and getting the odd drummer to come in and play sessions and stuff. At the end of the day, what was the tracks that was born… one of my first recordings was a track called “Slipping Away”, and “Slipping Away” was recorded at De Wolfe studio—at least some of the bits and pieces of it was. That was, I suppose, something indicative of the time we spent there. De Wolfe himself was a really great guy to us, helped us along a little bit, you know? Because after we had “Slipping Away” me and Fitzroy continued to produce records—him mixing and me playing and singing them. And our first label which was Street Vibes label, our stuff was recorded at De Wolfe studio. We saved our money together, and got our own label together, and made our first recording.
MNP - Going back before Street Vibes tell me a little bit about Vibes Corner.
PH - Vibes Corner, again, Fitzroy Blake, my partner, he put a 4-Track studio together back in the day—pre-digital, you know we had no digital information, no drum machines, everything we used we would play live, real drums, real bass. Vibes Corner was a great place, if I can explain Vibes Corner in a nutshell, it was born from the concept of Fitzroy Blake and another colleague of ours called Raymond Simpson. But it had its extensions because there was Jimmy Simpson, who was Raymond’s elder brother who also contributed to building. In actual fact we built the studio in Jimmy’s flat, you know what I mean. And then around that came Barrington Levy, myself, Al Campbell—the legendary Al Campbell coming from Jamaica and cutting his teeth in the English market. It was a great place, I learned a lot of my musical skills there. And the ironic thing of it all was, we had no teachers. We taught ourselves, and we had great discipline for music. Well, I’m one of the main exponents from those days, Vibes Corner. So Vibes Corner was a 4-Track studio put together by Fitzroy Blake, Raymond Simpson, and around we had the musicians like myself and whatever, that was great days. We had one recording from that, we released one record and it was called “Dancing Time”, Raymond Simpson being the primary singer and me sort of like dueting and doing the harmonies and guitar work and everything else, you know what I mean. It was a fabulous track, but unfortunately it was the only song we ever released at Vibes Corner. If you can find it now, keep it, cause it was a good track (laughs).
MNP - How was the process of starting up your own record label (Street Vibes)?
PH - Although we recorded our first song at De Wolfe called “Slipping Away”, it was released through a young entrepreneur in the area called Lloyd Roberts, and he had a record label, and he had a bit of cash he’d put up to get a release done. So we released that record through him. But ideally that wasn’t the thing to do, it didn’t benefit us in any way and it was a nightmare, truth be known. So me and Fitzroy decided that’s really not the way to go. Now the concept of Street Vibes records comes from Fitzroy. He had the idea, saying ‘let put a label together’ you know what I mean? ‘Lets go about doing the artwork’ and everything else we need to do, and do our own thing. So we said ‘ok’, got a designer in, designed the label, found a printer who would do it, and that was the birth of or own stuff. Because Fitzroy and myself, we were still producing. When we had left De Wolfe we was at Fitzroy’s flat up in Kennington, in his bedroom, you know, myself, his young brother who’s Commander B, and some other colleagues playing keyboard and flute with us at the time. Delroy Clarke, you know, we’d be up there, producing stuff, and it had to come, we needed an outlet for ourselves, there were no record companies signing us at the time. And I guess it was a great way to learn the business, hard, but it was good, it was your own. So we got this label manufactured, and we went on to check out, like, processing, and the record, getting it pressed, where we could go to and have that done up. And we learned a whole new school about the industry. So I think it was the need that really brought us to having to develop our own label, cause if it weren’t for the record company, we’d be cool, you know, we’d be on a record company’s label, half the things I know about, I probably wouldn’t know. Because we had to do everything ourselves, it was really difficult, you know? But it was good, it was a great learning curve. So yea, that’s where the concept comes from, Fitzroy Blake. We ended up with thirty-two titles in our catalogue, and an LP, so not bad.

MNP - Tell me about your first album In This Time.
PH - In This Time was a celebration of what Fitzroy and myself—and now we had taken on other colleagues—what we had achieved. The new members to the band was, like I said, Delroy Clarke was playing keyboards, a percussionist by the name of Tucker Rainbow, he was a Rasta bredda, lovely bredda. And various independent musicians around the area, Philip Linton who’s sadly no longer with us, he’s a talented keyboardist. Local talents around the time, you know, lending harmonies, Yaz Alexander, she did a few harmonies on the tracks, on some of the bits and pieces we had developed at the time. And it was a celebration of what we was doing, me and Fitzroy produced so much stuff that we said, ‘look, its lime for an LP’. I had a successful single from my Street Vibes days called “Be My Lady”, and it was off the back of that, you know, that was like a springboard for me, and it brought me into notoriety in terms of the UK Reggae scene, you know, ‘this young guy Peter Hunnigale, we’ve heard of him before because we know he’s been popping around in bits and a few people’s projects and stuff’. And they had heard about me but this track “Be My Lady” really got my name into the charts, and at that time it was the UK Reggae charts, it got to number four, and I got a lot of respect out of that because the Jamaican market was dominating the UK scene. And from there we just used the springboard and kept it rolling.
MNP - In the late eighties you linked up with Tippa Irie, was it a big transition for you to start working with a Deejay?
PH - Yes, it wasn’t strange but it was new for me, and it wasn’t planned. What happened, Delroy Clarke, our keyboardist, went to America, had some work to do in the States, and he come back and was saying ‘yea Peter man, the Dancehall things going on out there and its cool’. Now, as simple as it is, your buddy comes back from where he’s at and he’ll be talking, and you’re musicians you know what I mean, and the man’s talking about a particular musical vibe, and you’re saying ‘yea yea’ and make a little beat out of it. Well I developed this Dancehall thing, you know, and I make the music at the crib, so I developed this beat, you know, this Dancehall thing, just off the vibes that Delroy was telling me cause you’re feeling it, you know? And I built this rhythm track and I though to myself, ‘right, some lyrics that will sit on it’ and it’s a Dancehall track so you can’t put no lover’s stuff on there, and I’m not really a hardcore Deejay, so I’ve gotta put something commercial on it. So I put a commercial/lover’s rock track on there, something catchy and whatever, and it was about this ragamuffin girl, “she’s no chicken stuffing”—nothing to do with food, the terminology is ‘she’s not soft like chicken stuffing’ she’s a hard core girl, you know what I mean, and then go on to explain the lyrics and whatever. Anyway, I don’t this recording, and the guys are saying ‘yea yea’ they’re saying ‘it’s cool, but get a Deejay on it.’ Now, my partner Fitzroy Blake, he’s got a younger brother called Paul, and Paul is who we now know to be Commander B from Choice FM. He had a bredrin called Tippa Irie, and he came and said ‘Peter, yea, Tippa can do that’ you know what I mean? We knew Tippa from the days but Tippa is slightly younger than me, so we knew Tippa and Paul from me and Fitzroy were Bredrin. So anyway Paul says ‘yea bring my bredrin Tippa’ and we said okay cause we need a Deejay to do something on it. Now Tippa didn’t take any lyrics from me, didn’t take any concepts form what I’d written, he had already had the lyrics, going “rice and peas and chicken stuffing” so it was just like ‘okay, just put the two together’ and it worked out. Now, that song was fabulous for me and Tippa simply because when we first made it a lot of people were saying ‘why they talking about chicken stuffing, and da-da-da that ain’t gonna happen, that’s a flop, they’ve gone mad’ you know what I mean? And after I’ve released the song after my first LP and everything else, I’d gone crazy, all the critics were saying. The song went to number one, so a lot of those critics was sort of like ‘ohh, okay’ and even members of our own team was asking us if we’d gone crazy and stuff, you know what I mean? But, when the money came in, then they didn’t ask ‘was this so crazy’ after all. So it was great, and me and Tippa have never looked back, that was the beginning of a Deejay/Singer marriage, and we still move together today, we’re still like skin and bone.
MNP - What was your relationship with the local Sound Systems?
PH - Oh my god man let me tell you something about the Sound Systems. Sound System, and its true to say, a lot of the most successful productions in terms of Reggae come from producers who own Sounds. That’s coming from Jamaica, you know what I mean? A lot of the best producers come from the Sounds. Now here, as a young man, they were fabulous days, when I was growing up and was able to sort of like, go to the local club down the road when I was about eleven, twelve; back those days you had a great Sound culture here in the UK. Man would build speaker box that were big like the wall and, you know, three, four speakers in there. It would take six man to carry that into a dance. Its like you had to be part of a Sound, its like part of a football team, you know what I mean, you had to be part of a Sound. Now, I’m born in Brixton, right? So we’ve got one of the world’s famous—at least Europe based—Sounds which is Coxsone, in our neighborhood. Then we had Tubbys, we had Neville King, we had so many prominent, popular Sounds of the days, you know what I mean. And my Sound—I can’t say my Sound, the one I used to follow—because there were so many good Sounds. When I was a youth Woppi King was my Sound, that one used to play down the road. As I grew up a little bit older Supertone—he has a record store here in Acre Lane—and then as you’re getting a bit older up the scale Stereograph, who came from Soferno B Sound System, who was a popular ravers sound of the day. So Sound has got a lot to do with my life in terms of music. Most definitely I make records, but also got this thing, I like the way they look as well, I don’t know what it is, it’s a childhood thing, you know (laughs) but I’ve cooled out of it. So yea, it just thrills me to the bone, Sound System has played a huge part in my life and I’m still with it now because I still make a lot of specials for Sounds, globally now with the clashes and everything else. And I like the clash thing, although I’m a lover’s rock singer and I’m not a hardcore artist—in terms of hardcore music—I still like clash, because, you know, clashes is like a sport now almost, you’ve got different legs and you’ve got Sounds from around the world, Japan, Germany, its like a little sport to a degree. And if you can get a clash winning song on one of the top Sounds, you know what I mean, its good for you as well. Yea I do like it, my hearts still there, and plus one of our youths is David Rodigan as well and he’s fighting from the UK camp as well and we support David Rodigan. Hes a great exponent of UK music in terms of its output and radio play. And also Sounds like Saxon and all those Sounds they’ve done a lot to put UK music on the map as well, you know, globally they’ve represented well. So nuff respect to them and quite a few Sounds, just to show the importance they play in Reggae music.
Photos by Prasanna Balasundaram
Words by Tristram Keefe
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**Part 2 Coming soon…**