As a former bouncer at Brixton’s Ram Jam club, Alexander Hughes met Prince Buster and Derrick Morgan. He also worked as a bodyguard and – for a while – as a professional wrestler (The Masked Executioner), before becoming a debt collector for Trojan Records, where he learned the harsh realities of the music business.
By the end of the ’60s, Hughes was working as a DJ with a local radio station and running his own sound system. It was Prince Buster who provided the impetus for Hughes’ metamorphosis into a recording artist.
He was taken by Buster’s seminal Big Five and went into Trojan’s studio to record his own follow-up. Over the rhythm of Little Boy Blue, he recited a slew of hilariously rude nursery rhymes.
It was by sheer chance that Trojan label head Lee Gopthal walked by during the recording. He was so impressed that he immediately signed Hughes.
His song was titled Big Six, and Hughes chose the name Judge Dread in honour of Buster.
The single was initially just an underground hit, but when Trojan signed a distribution deal with EMI in 1972, the single rocketed up the charts, even though the distributors refused to carry the record, and the song attracted a BBC radio ban.
Big Seven (another innuendo-laced reggae nursery rhyme) was an even bigger hit than its predecessor, hitting #8 on the UK singles charts. Big Eight was also a huge hit, although the Judge’s debut album, Dreadmania, failed even to scrape the bottom of the charts.
But the British had an insatiable desire for his singles – including the inevitable Big Nine and Big Ten, Grandad’s Flanelette Nightshirt, a cover of Je T’aime (which managed to be even more suggestive than the original), The Winkle Man, Y Viva Suspenders and the delightfully daft farmyard mayhem of Up With The Cock – and his everyman approach to reggae and ska scored Dread more UK chart hits than any other reggae artist in the 70s, including Bob Marley.
He was also the first white reggae artist to actually have a reggae hit in Jamaica.
Always a larger-than-life individual, Dread died on stage in Canterbury on 13 March 1998 after suffering a fatal heart attack.
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He was taken by Buster’s seminal Big Five and went into Trojan’s studio to record his own follow-up. Over the rhythm of Little Boy Blue, he recited a slew of hilariously rude nursery rhymes.
