Zak Starkey and Sshh Liguz’s Trojan Jamaica brings punk rock attitude to reggae music

Photo courtesy of Trojan Jamaica.

Dailyreggae.com interviewed Zak Starkey and Sshh Liguz about their incredible musical journey, the founding of Trojan Jamaica, bringing Toots & The Maytals’ Grammy-winning record, Got To Be Tough, to life, and the importance of attitude and collaboration when it comes to bringing new music to life. 

Now I know you both have a long history with music, but I’m curious, where did your love of reggae first begin?

SL: For me, I grew up with reggae. I grew up in Australia. My Dad was born in Birmingham and introduced me to UB40. I think the first gig I went to was UB40 and I would see them every year ever since I was two years old. 

My Dad would tell me about these mad reggae house parties he would go to in Birmingham. He’d always play a bit of Big Youth and U-Roy knocking around the house. It was always there. Once I got into making music it wasn’t reggae but we would still listen to it and make mad remixes of Big Youth. But being able to get in touch with these artists is a dream that came true. 

ZS: My Mom had a Bob Marley & The Wailers’ Live! record and she hipped me to that, and my Dad hipped me to Burning Spear. He gave me his Man In The Hills record. I heard The Slits do Man Next Door and that’s how I heard about U-Roy.

Congratulations by the way on your U-Roy album and all the collaborations on that. It’s absolutely wonderful. And kind of leading into that, a catalyst for what began your journey starting Trojan Jamaica was your cover of “Get Up Stand Up” on Issues. Can you tell us about that track and the following performance at the Peter Tosh Museum and how the led to starting the label?

ZS: We have a band called Sshh, which is both of us and so far eleven drummers. I was the first in and the first out the door. That’s because good drummers are never available. A good drummer is hard to find. 

Anyway, we were about to sign our album, which was finished, to a label that kind of shut down, so we had been asked by SiriusXM to do a radio series playing our music and showcasing the music that influenced it. We thought that was kind of boring and everybody else does that already, so we decided to re-record the influences of our music with the rhythm sections if they were still around with me playing guitar and Sshh singing and that’s what we did. We got The Sex Pistols, The Ruts, Marilyn Manson’s guys (Gil and Twiggy), Kenney Jones from the Small Faces, the rhythm section from Primal Scream, Amy Winehouse’s rhythm section (Nathan and Dale). Dale had previously been a part of the Sshh band and Nathan had previously for a short time. 

We were in LA cutting some of these tracks and Gil Sharone from Marilyn Manson’s band, even though you think he’s a metal drummer, he has written a really interesting drum book on how to play reggae drumming, and he’s interviewed a lot of people. 

We were talking about Peter Tosh a lot; we are like deputies of the Peter Tosh mantra - Get Up Stand Up. I don’t want peace, I want equal rights. It’s kind of a heavy thing to say. 

Gil passed me the phone and I said, “Who is that?” It was Santa Davis, who I consider to be kind of like the Jamaican Keith Moon. He’s got such a big drum kit and big fills (I’m air drumming). Daily Reggae Team laughs 

I asked him and Fully Fullwood, who also lives in Los Angeles, if they’d record Get Up Stand Up like the second lineup of Word, Sound and Power did in 1982 at the Greek Theater. So that’s what we did.

A friend of ours, Native Wayne, who has a radio show in LA on 95.5 KLOS, showed our video with Santa and Fully to Kingsley Cooper, who is the curator of the Peter Tosh Museum. He called up and asked if we’d go and play the show. 

SL: We should also mention that Eddie Vedder is on that track.

ZS: Yes, Eddie’s the only guy we could think of who is righteous enough. 

We went over and played the show in 2016. Then they invited us back the next year and we stayed for three years. We shipped our studio from the UK to Jamaica and hunted for someone to build a studio because we’d been over twice and we made so many musical allies and friends that it felt like the right thing to do. 

We finally set up the studio in a disused store owned by Chris Blackwell, who became our landlord. We set up the studio and made the first record, Red Gold Green & Blue. Now we didn’t have a label. At the time there was no idea for a label. There was just the idea for that record. 

The idea for the record was to take the lyrics of the blues and change the music into Jamaican music. We didn’t want to be tied to any chord structures. We worked up these songs from the ground with different singers and made the record. We finished that record and went into meetings with Hartwig Masuch, the CEO of BMG and mulled over the idea of doing Trojan Jamaica. 

We ended up making five albums, a label deal, followed by two additional albums. Three of them have come out and one of them won a Grammy! (laughs). 

And then one you’re talking about is the wonderful “Got To Be Tough” by Toots. 

ZS: Yes, the greatest singer of all time!

Can you tell us about your experience recording “Got To Be Tough”? 

Yes, it’s very simple. Toots recorded himself playing everything with drum machines and then he brought that to our studio. We wiped the drum machine off them and added Sly Dunbar. We wiped some of the guitars off them and added me. We added Cyril Neville on top. Toots was there producing this whole session. He sort of handed it to me to finish the record, to take it away and edit it. 

"Having a Party" was two minutes long but we extended it to five. When you’re having a party you don’t want it to finish in two minutes, do you? Daily Reggae Team laughs. That’s a really obvious one and another was "Three Little Birds” (featuring Ziggy Marley). That had such a great vibe, so I made it six minutes. I just edited it. I did most of the work at my Dad’s studio in LA. Sshh came along and sort of produced me doing that. We placed some of the guitars with the best sounds. My Dad would keep popping his head in and say things like that needs a tamborine. I told him well if you think it needs tamborine then you better do the tamborine then! So he did the tamborine on "Three Little Birds." He said on "Having A Party" that the drums are great they are really busy; they need a cowbell to run down the middle  and hold it all together. Well, we said you better do that too. He did that and that’s how his involvement came about. 

We had worked with Toots four times before. 

SL: Yeah, we first met Toots in Jamaica in 2012. We’d seen the movie, Jamdown and took a trip to the island. At the time there was a lot of dancehall. The roots revival hadn’t really happened yet. 

We ended up staying for a month and the last week we were talking about Toots and the waiter where we were at said they knew Toots and that he was playing in Kingston tomorrow night. We were like no fucking way!  He played more of an acoustic show and it was incredible. It was a warm-up for his tour. We went backstage and met Toots, the band, and some of his family members. It was a great time. 

We lost touch for a few years, but when we went back to Jamaica in 2016 we linked up with him again. He and I did a duet for a different project (a Marc Bolan tribute record for teenage cancer). That was the first song we worked on together. 

When we did the first Trojan Jamaica record, Red Gold Green & Blue, he was one of the artists featured. He did three songs including "Man Of The World." The other two have not come out yet. 

ZS: He also has a song that was going to be on the U-Roy tribute album, but has not been released yet. 

Toots became a really good friend and understood that we are obnoxious little punks (laughs). We had a really great musical relationship and became friends. We had planned with Toots to make more records because he had so many songs, but unfortunately shit happened. 

As musicians working with him, what were some of the biggest musical lessons you took from your experience? 

SL: Expect the unexpected.

ZS: Yeah man! That’s brilliant. 

Laughs. How so? Are there any stories that lend to that?

ZS: He had a very personal way of producing. If I was playing guitar, he wouldn’t stand in the control room, he’d come to sit next to me in the live room. We’d sit with headphones on. The guitar amp would be facing us and is blowing our fucking heads off and he loves that shit man. 

How much of an influence has rock and roll had on reggae music? 

ZS: U-Roy said that he got his licks by listening to the U.S. radio DJs in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Those wild guys like Wolfman Jack and Murray the K. They were getting whatever was coming out of Miami or I suppose Louisiana. Whatever could reach Jamaica. 

SL: However it was coming in, the one-drop was cutting in and out. They were only hearing the three. That influenced reggae’s interoperation. 

ZS: Radio was U-Roy’s biggest influence apart from peace and unity. 

That’s crazy to hear about the impact of hearing the signal from that far away dropping the low end on the one is what made a whole sound. 

ZS: Sshh and I understand the beats because we’ve been having it all our lives, but we have engineers who in their editing process are just baffled about how to edit no bass drum on the one. And no bass on the one most of the time either. We sit there and laugh at them and say come on you work it out. It’s pretty obvious.

I think I saw you talk about how working with these legendary reggae pioneers that a big part of the groove is when everyone is coming down on the backbeat, the instruments aren’t exactly hitting all at once. 

ZS: Every great band is a flam. If everybody landed at the same place it would sound like fucking soulless crap. 

Sly & Robbie are the greatest example of this and so are Jackie and Horsie, who we worked with quite a bit. Jackie Jackson and Horsemouth Wallace. 

Sly’s kick (laughs) is really weird to explain. I don’t know how the fuck it works. Sly’s kick is always a little bit ahead, but the snare drum is late so that Robbie can come in a bit later. But they don’t know why. That’s how they feel. You leave the studio for ten minutes and all hell breaks loose on the music. Do two bars, loop it, and tell me how it feels. It’s a feel thing. 

And Jackie and Horsie are kind of the same. They are a bit more punk rock. They are very different. 

For a while, I had to watch Sly’s left hand to learn how he landed. I had to watch him all the time on the first record, but then we got in tune. 

We have a very in-tune scene going on at our studio with all these guys coming in and out all the time. Sometimes Sly would come in on days he’s not drumming to hang out. It was really great. We cannot wait to get back soon. 

They feel it and we feel it. We don’t know why we feel it until we know why. 

Over the summer of 2021, you released the fantastic collaborative album Solid Gold U-Roy by the late great U-Roy. How did you go about curating and recording the different collaborations on this album? What was it like working with U-Roy?

SL: It was amazing working with U-Roy. 

ZS: Yeah man! A good friend of ours again Native Wayne is Jamaican and splits his time between Jamaica and LA. He’s a full-blooded Arawak Indian, so he’s an original Jamaican. We had just gotten to Jamaica and he called up with an idea. We went and met Daddy U-Roy and he was into the idea. 

He was going on tour. It took three weeks to start the recording with Sly & Robbie. We only had four days to make the record. We cut the backing tracks. Nine of them were done on day one. Get on that. Nine tunes in one day. The next day we did three more and one of those is not on the record, because we couldn’t fit it on the vinyl. Guitars and everything were cut live. Then Daddy U-Roy voiced his vocals. Then Big Youth arrived and they did a vocal clash, which we’ve got a film of. It’s amazing. Jesse Royal came in and sang "Small Axe." 

We were sitting outside with Robbie talking about singers. He called someone and passed me the phone. I went, “Who’s that?” And he said, “Shaggy”. (Laughs) He sent back "Rule The Nation" within two days. Everybody has respect for Daddy U-Roy because he’s one of the originators of the genre. 

Sshh got in touch with Santigold, Richie Spice, Rygin King, David Hinds and produced those vocals. 

It took six to nine months to get everyone else on it. 

I heard when you asked Santigold to do "Man Next Girl," that was her favorite song. You did a great job of selecting.

SL: I got a hold of her and she recorded in LA. 

ZS: Everyone contributed in such great spirit with respect for Daddy U-Roy. 

Just down to the wire, in January/February 2020, Sshh and I went with Daddy U-Roy to Brazil and toured there for three weeks. It was right before the pandemic. We were really lucky to be able to do that. 

SL: They worshipped him. 

ZS: One show a couple of hundred thousand people came to the town square and were waving his old records. 

Sly & Robbie were on tour at the time, and Jackie and Horsie weren’t available. We had a Jamaican sound system and that was the rhythm section. I played guitar and Sshh sang all the tunes. We did U-Roy’s songs from that record and a few others and basically toured Brazil. 

It was righteous. They came. They all came.

SL: It was a beautiful thing to see. I’m really pleased he got to experience that and see how much love and respect there was out there for him. 

ZS: Everyone loves his album. It’s doing amazingly well. For college radio in the U.S., it was number one on the world chart for two weeks. Things like that don’t usually happen (laughs).

Laughs. True! 

ZS: Daddy U-Roy crosses right over. It’s a beautiful thing. We’re going to do a couple of other singles and we’ve got a few other tracks that we’re finishing. They are new originals by U-Roy that we managed to record live before he died. We’re hoping we can keep his legacy going as long as we can you know. 

Absolutely. We have some wonderful singles to look forward to on Trojan Jamaica. Is there any new music from Sshh and you as a duo? 

ZS: God I’d love to. It’s my favorite band to be in! Writing music together. 

SL: I’ve just produced the greatest that we’ll ever do and that’s our baby (laughs). 

Congratulations again! That’s wonderful 

I write for her. She’s been my main inspiration. Lullabies and songs to make her happy. 

A children’s lullaby album! I don’t know, I think it’s a good idea. 

SL: She also loves "Psycho Killer" by the Talking Heads and doo-wop. She’s definitely her parent’s child.