Adrian Sherwood is feeling the riddim

NOT MUCH reggae music came out of the Home Counties during the early 1970s, but an awful lot went in. More than you might think. Quite a lot of it made the journey from London in the record bags of Adrian Sherwood, would-be reggae rebel, junior DJ, and pale-faced teenage entrepreneur of the skank, a boy so transfixed by Jamaican rhythm and its culture that, by the age of 15 he'd already committed himself to the life while skulking around the clubs of Luton, Dunstable and High Wycombe, getting off on the "better and better, madder and madder" threads of reggae's '70s narrative.