I am Coming Home - Pat Kelley (sic but Kelly) - GAS 125 - 1969

B-side beauty - this is the flip-side to ‘If It Don’t Work Out’, which is a great track but this is yet another top tune from Pat Kelly (6 Aug 1944 - 16 July 2019), whose singing career spanned 50+ years (1966-2018). Audio recorded from my copy, but apologies for a few scratches here and there.

According to Wikipedia and https://sflcn.com/, after leaving school, Kelly spent a year studying electronics in Springfield, Massachusetts, United States during 1966, gaining a degree in audio electronics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, before returning to Jamaica, where he initially recorded as a solo artist for his former schoolmate, producer Bunny Lee. In 1967, when Slim Smith left The Techniques, Kelly was brought in to replace him, recording for Duke Reid in the rocksteady era when Reid's Treasure Isle studio/label was dominating Jamaican music. Kelly's falsetto voice, strongly influenced by the American soul singer Sam Cooke, in combination with Winston Riley and Bruce Ruffin, maintained the success that The Techniques had enjoyed with Smith. With The Techniques, Kelly sang lead on hits like ‘I Wish it Would Rain’ and ‘Love Is Not A Gamble’.

From the late 60s, he sang solo but in the 1990s he was part of a revived Techniques, alongside former members Johnny Johnson and Lloyd Parks. Kelly had cut back on live dates in 2017 due to illness, but on his return in 2018, performed at Reggae Geel in Belgium, as well as club dates in South Florida and Southern California.

The Gas label was created by Pama in late 1968 (alongside the Crab imprint). It is described by 2003 book ‘Tighten Up! The History of Reggae in the UK’ as “...a rag-bag and pretty much the only common threads were Eric Barnett productions and Pat Kelly numbers.” The A-side ‘If It Don’t Work Out’ being one of the label’s big successes (it was a reggae version of ‘Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye’ by The Casinos, in fact). The record is a Bunny Lee (23 August 1941 – 6 October 2020) production [Discogs], which would normally have seen issue on Pama’s Unity label, a Bunny Lee production vehicle, observes ‘Tighten Up! The History of Reggae in the UK’ but offers no further explanation as to why this might have been.

And that Eric Barnett? Discogs says he didn’t exist, but was a made-up name used for various artists on productions by female producer Enid 'Del' Barnett of Jamaica’s Deltone label.

In that same book, ‘Tighten Up! The History of Reggae in the UK’, Pat Kelly is claimed to have accused Pama of holding back some of his records by not distributing them well. And contracted to Pama, Kelly could not take up an offer from an unnamed Beatle to record for the band’s Apple label, the book further adds.

Pama weakened from 1970 on, going out of business in 1973, with a winding-up order dated 11 June of that year issued. But Pat Kelly saw singles released on a relaunched Pama main label that appeared during 1975 (Ocean, Bullet, Camel & Punch labels were also running). Pama became Jetstar Phonographics in 1978 but folded in 2008. It is Jetstar Music today, having been rescued by Phoenix Music International after that collapse, and titles itself “The Home of Reggae”. Indeed, ‘Tighten Up! The History of Reggae in the UK’ states that Jetstar “is the most prominent distributor of reggae in Europe”. That was in 2003, before digital streaming got going, and today Jetstar’s reggae is digitally streamed.

Copyright holder is allowing this video, thanks: [Merlin] Phoenix Music International - On behalf of: Pama