VMP Magazine

Lee “Scratch” Perry’s Black Ark studio is a place of hallowed renown. The site where some of the heaviest, strangest and most psychedelic reggae and dub were ever recorded, it was constructed in a converted carport at Perry’s home on the outskirts of Kingston as a projected haven for the Rastafari faithful who faced daily persecution in Jamaica. Similarly, King Tubby’s front-room voicing and mixing facility in the nearby Waterhouse ghetto was home to some of the deepest and most mind-bending dubs ever committed to tape. Yet, the first album to surface from the Black Ark, which was voiced at Tubby’s studio because the Ark had not yet been equipped with adequate microphones, was an unexpected blend of pop and soul cover tunes and love ballads, with a hint of Rasta consciousness and some trance-inducing dub cropping up in unexpected places. Some 35 years after its initial release, the Silvertones’ Silver Bullets can be viewed as an atypical Black Ark classic worthy of deeper investigation, evidencing the complexity of reggae in flux and the diverse pallet of Perry’s musical imagination.

The Silvertones began as the singing duo of Gilmore Grant and Keith Coley, teenaged friends who came to know each other in eastern Kingston shortly after Jamaica achieved its independence from Britain in 1962. Grant was originally from a rural location in the parish of St. Mary in northeast Jamaica and Coley from St. Elizabeth in the far southwest, their countryside upbringing lending rustic qualities to their voices. Nothing much happened for the group until they chanced upon Delroy Denton, a tall, striking lad with a distinctive baritone and good command of the guitar, all of which made him a natural front man. Their debut recording, a ska re-casting of Brook Benton’s “True Confession,” leapt to the top of the Jamaican charts in 1966 and was followed swiftly by a more languorous take on Wilson Pickett’s “Midnight Hour,” refashioned in the emerging rock steady style with Jamaican audiences firmly in mind; the original ballad “It’s Real” was also popular.