Lion – Exile One, 1977

🇩🇲🌴🎺🎸🔥 Based in Paris since 1976 and signed to Barclay, Exile One keeps on surprising. After records where cadence-lypso rubbed shoulders with funk and disco, Gordon Henderson and his band went into the studio in May-June 1977, on avenue Hoche, and came out with Lion, an all-reggae album and a real parenthesis in their discography. The cover certainly catches the eye: designed by Laurent Lesserre (who has also designed covers for Malicorne), it depicts, beneath wide-eyed gazes and in a desolate world, a three-headed lion proudly facing off against dinosaurs. Eight tracks, only one with a French title, La Route Est Longue. Julie Mourillon wrote the opener, Down Pression, Fitzroy Williams Trust – and adds a touch of marimba –, Pat Patrice So Many Lords, and Henderson most of the others, from the very Marley-esque Chasing the Devil to Precious Day. The mastery of the whole, dotted here and there with touches of dub, shows, if it were needed, that reggae is definitely a Caribbean affair. With Kremlin Fingal, Frank Winfield and Pierre Labor, the horns hold it all together, and Stephen Max-Aihtson’s liner notes cry out against oppression and injustice, under Jah’s protection. The dinosaurs didn’t make it, but the lion is still going strong!