Bob Andy obituary
The Jamaican singer-songwriter Bob Andy, who has died of cancer aged 75, enjoyed a long and fruitful career. Best known in Britain for the chart successes he achieved with Marcia Griffiths in their duo, Bob and Marcia – notably with Young, Gifted and Black (1970) and Pied Piper (1971) – he was also responsible for some of the most enduring classics of the reggae songbook in Jamaica, where he was widely admired for his emotive voice and poetic lyrics.
Between 1967 and 1970 Andy released a string of Jamaican hits at Studio One, beginning with I’ve Got To Go Back Home (1967), which yearned for an African homeland. He followed up with two songs about heartbreak, Too Experienced (1968) and Desperate Lover (1969), and then My Time (1968) and Unchained (1969), which explored the disenfranchisement facing poor black Jamaicans. In 1969 he also recorded Always Together, a superb duet with Griffiths that was an open declaration of love.
Frustrated by financial disappointments, Andy had begun to record away from Studio One in 1969, cutting an uptempo version of Joe South’s Games People Play for Federal and the autobiographical ode The Way I Feel, for Rupie Edwards. The producer Harry Johnson then persuaded Bob and Marcia to record a cover of Nina Simone’s To Be Young, Gifted and Black, which in 1970 got to No 5 in the UK singles chart after Trojan Records applied orchestral overdubs, making its reggae vibes more palatable to a general audience.
Following an appearance on Top of the Pops and an extensive tour of Europe, sharing stages with Elton John and Gilbert O’Sullivan, Bob and Marcia settled for a time in Lewisham, south London, working with the arranger Tony King on an orchestrated cover of Crispian St Peters’ Pied Piper, which peaked at No 11 on the UK singles chart in 1971.
After returning to Jamaica, Andy continued scoring hits in his homeland with the contemplative, self-produced Life (1972), the forlorn You Don’t Know (1973), and the caustic Fire Burning (1974), a commentary on the island’s violent political divisions at the time. His 1975 album The Music Inside Me (1975) explored the positive power of music, with its song Nyah signalling Andy’s embrace of the Rastafari faith, while the deep roots reggae album Kemar (1977) caught Bob and Marcia at the tail end of their relationship, although they remained close friends.
Born Keith Anderson in the Jamaican capital, Kingston, Andy endured an itinerant childhood with virtually no schooling, raised by his abusive mother in a city slum and by maternal grandparents in rural Westmoreland. After his grandmother died, he was placed with extended family members, but ran away from home after mistreatment, lodging briefly with a family that sheltered him, and whose piano allowed early musical experimentation. After further conflict with his mother, in desperation he fled to the Maxfield Park children’s home in Kingston, pleading to be taken in. Although his mother opposed the idea, a judge ruled in Andy’s favour, and it was on the home’s piano that he continued to experiment.
By the age of 13 he had already filled a notebook with songs and had begun singing informally with his friend Tyrone Evans, with whom he would later form a noted vocal quartet, the Paragons; they recorded four songs at Studio One in 1964, but conflict with the lead singer John Holt led Andy to quit the group. He remained at Studio One as the predominant ska style shifted to rock steady, delivering records to earn some steady cash while writing songs for Ken Boothe, Delroy Wilson and the young Griffiths, with whom he also recorded duets at the start of a romantic relationship that continued until the late 1970s.
Andy performed in Cuba in 1978 and starred in the film Children of Babylon, set in the Caribbean, in 1980. He released the album Friends on the London branch of his I-Anka label in 1983 and toured Japan in 1985, after which he became a talent scout at the Bob Marley family’s Tuff Gong label in 1987, releasing the album Freely the following year, shortly before he appeared in the cop drama film The Mighty Quinn, which starred Denzil Washington and was shot in Jamaica.
Andy was based in Florida from 1992 and although his output subsequently slowed, interest in his work was revived by dancehall adaptations of Fire Burning by Griffiths and Too Experienced by Barrington Levy, resulting in the 1997 album Hanging Tough.
In 2005 he performed in front of huge crowds at Africa Unite, held in Ethiopia to commemorate what would have been Marley’s 60th birthday; the following year he was granted the Order of Distinction by the Jamaican government.
He is survived by Godfrey, his son from a relationship with Virginia Wellington, Bianca, his daughter with Jessica Jones, two grandchildren, Godfrey Jr and Tiffany, and two great-grandchildren, Noel and Jayda.
• Bob Andy (Keith Anderson), singer-songwriter and record producer, born 28 October 1944; died 27 March 2020
