In tribute to singer John Holt who died on October 20 in London, England, the Jamaica Observer presents ‘Holt a Day’, a daily feature leading up to his funeral slated for the Holy Trinity Cathedral in downtown Kingston, on Monday.

WITH a growing West Indian community, the United Kingdom was the largest overseas market for Jamaican music in the 1960s. No surprise then, that the country hosted the first major reggae festival.

The Empire Pool in Wembley was the site for that historic event which took place in April 1970 and attracted a diverse audience.

The show featured the music’s biggest names of the time: John Holt, The Maytals, Desmond Dekker, The Pioneers, Bob and Marcia and Count Prince Miller, who was also its MC.

All had sizeable hit songs in the UK. Holt was a regional star through hits like Tonight and OK Fred, while Dekker (Israelites, Shantytown), Bob and Marcia (Young, Gifted and Black) and Miller (Mule Train) scored national hits.

The Empire Pool show was filmed and eventually released as Reggae, a documentary by British film-maker Horace Ove. It helped expose acts like Holt and The Maytals to white Britons who bought albums like 1000 Volts of Holt and the raucous Funky Kingston in the early 1970s.

Reggae also opened new doors in Europe for the Jamaican artiste. Dekker and The Maytals excelled on that continent for decades but, ironically, Holt’s European dates were limited to the UK until 2010 when he did the Garance and Superjam festivals in France and Germany, respectively.

— Howard Campbell