It may be a quirk of history, or down to the man himself, but Prince Buster, who deserves to be a household name, risks becoming a footnote in the pop music cannon. He didn’t die young, like Bob Marley, so missed his chance to become a sanitised saint. Nor, like Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, did he have the knack for crafting a potent mythology, guar­an­tee­ing crackpot cult hero status. But Prince Buster’s place in the firmament of Jamaican music stars is alongside those two, even, perhaps, above them.

Born in 1938, Cecil Busta­men­te Campbell took an unusual route into the Jamaican music business he would come to dominate. His career began not behind the mixing desk or in front of the mi­cro­phone, but in the boxing ring. Hired by Clement “Sir Coxsone” Dodd to provide security for his Down Beat soun­d­sys­tem, he earned his nickname, the Prince, with his fists. Buster was not, however, a mere muscleman, and in 1959 set himself up as a rival to his mentor, opening a shop, Busters Record Shack, and launching a soun­d­sys­tem, calling it Voice of the People, an early hint at the conscious, Afro-centric lyrics that were to become one of many tra­de­marks.

His next step, a move into the studio, was to change Jamaican music forever. Little Honey, by the Buster Group was among the first release to cap­it­al­ise on the waning en­thu­si­asm for pure American R&B on the island as rock ‘n’ roll. By fusing the R&B shuffle with island musics like mento and buru, Buster launched the syn­co­pated style, with a lurching after-beat, that came to define ska, and, later, rock­steady, reggae and dancehall.

He had a hit on his hands with Little Honey, but his next release, the Folkes Brothers’ ‘Oh Carolina’, pushed further, called in Count Ossie and his troupe of Rasta­far­i­an nyabingi drummers to provide rhythmic backing, marking the birth of a uniquely Jamaican pop music.

In 1962, Buster took to the mi­cro­phone himself and revealed that his midas touch at the mixing desk was matched not only by a fine voice, but a knack for stirring up con­tro­ver­sy. Launching broad­sides at rival island producers like Duke Reid and Leslie Kong, Buster stirred up such passion between rival soun­d­sys­tems that the Jamaican au­thor­it­ies forced a public re­con­cili­a­tion to quell the violence that spilled off the vinyl and onto the streets.

Buster was not just about making trouble, though. His output was so prolific in the 1960s that he had to launch a slew of imprints to keep up with the steady stream of releases, and their names provide something of a clue to his themes. Wildbells, Islam, Soulville Center and the original Voice of the People imprint all point to his eccentric adoption of Marcus Garvey-inspired Afro­cen­trism, bound up with hardline Christian fun­da­ment­al­ism, itself oddly matched with philo­so­phy culled from the Black Muslim movement in the US, all tied together with Buster’s self-pro­claimed status as spokesman for working-class Jamaican youth.

The Ten Com­mand­ments seemingly presented a wildly mis­o­gyn­ist­ic worldview, but it was quickly followed by answer songs from women DJs, produced by Buster himself. The stunning Judge Dread series flipped Buster’s previous hardman re­pu­ta­tion on its head - an answer Derrick Morgan’s Tougher Than Tough, in which a ma­gis­trate leniently releases a gang of murderous Yardies, the titular Judge Dread gave the fictional mis­cre­ants serious jailtime. A complex political soap opera in song followed, as singers and DJs across Jamaica rushed to respond, prompting a national debate on violent crime and the judicial system.

At the same time, Buster was crafting the hits - Madness, One Step Beyond, Al Capone - that marked his unique con­tri­bu­tion to British music. The seminal Blue Beat imprint, founded to bring his music to the UK, released a stag­ger­ing 600 singles through the 1960s, which were not only popular with the Caribbean immigrant community, but Mods, and, later, Skinheads too. In the mid-60s he toured the UK to rapturous reception, pushing Al Capone into the Top 20, the first Jamaican-produced song to do so, and appearing on Ready, Steady, Go in 1963 in regal African garb. These UK successes even­tu­ally sparked ska’s second wave in the 1980s, centred around the Two Tone label - founded by The Specials’ Jerry Dammers, who is set to support Prince Buster at TripTych - and typefied by Madness, a group named after a Buster pro­duc­tion who scored their first hit covering his One Step Beyond.

Prince Buster’s final, typically con­tro­ver­si­al, re­in­ven­tion came in 1968, when he turned to ‘rude reggae’, releasing the likes of Wreck A Pum Pum, Rough Rider, and the ever popular Whine And Grind, all featuring ‘slack’ lyrics that set the template for dancehall’s pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with matters sexual. Then, as reggae replaced rock­steady, Buster found his star on the wane. Un­com­fort­able in the genre he had inspired with his earlier Afro-centrism, and unable to con­v­in­cingly adopt Rasta­far­i­an­ism having converted to Islam in 1961, in 1973 Prince Buster retired as an artist, pre­fer­ring to rely his past glories. Releasing numerous Greatest Hits packages, complete with elo­quently ranting liner notes decrying what he saw as the sorry state of con­tem­por­ary music, he con­cen­trated on his business interests - the Record Shack remains open to this day, and throug­hout his musical career he made canny in­vest­ments in jukebox and fruit machine bus­i­nesses. Even­tu­ally re­lo­c­at­ing to Miami, Buster remained silent through the Two Tone explosion, making sporadic live ap­pear­ances in the late 1980s, embarking on a tour of Japan with the Skatal­ites at the dawn of the 1990s, and returning to the studio to cut a fresh version of Whine And Grind in 1998, marking a belated return to the UK charts.

Now, Prince Buster seems happy to enjoy his role as elder statesman, not quite forgotten in his native Jamaica, but embraced by gen­er­a­tions of Jamaican music fans in the UK, whether drawn to his music through reggae, Two Tone or the third wave of ska led by US punks. Still a force to be reckoned with on stage in his late 60s, this latest revival is not a swansong, but, perhaps, Prince Buster’s chance to reclaim his deserved place at the top of the Jamaican music tree.

This preview was first published in The Sunday Herald in March, 2005.