“Get up in the morning / Slaving for bread sir / So that every mouth can be fed / Oh, oh, the Israelites.”

Desmond Dekker was one of the first truly international pop stars to come from a Third World Country. I’m sure I’m forgetting someone, but I can only really think of Jimmy Cliff and Millie Smalls before him. With his compulsively danceable songs about hard ghetto living, Dekker was an ambassador of reggae to the rest of the world before Bob Marley. His best known hits were Israelites, 007 (Shanty Town) and It Miek. Dekker became an icon of rude boy and Mod culture and from this performance you can see why. The Beatles even made a reference to him in their ska-influenced Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da (“Desmond has a barrow in the marketplace”) [And “Margo Tenenbaum” was said to have been (briefly) married to him in The Royal Tenenbaums!].

Here’s Dekker on the lyrics to Israelites:

“It all happened so quickly. I didn’t write that song sitting around a piano or playing a guitar. I was walking in the park, eating corn. I heard a couple arguing about money. She was saying she needed money and he was saying the work he was doing was not giving him enough. I relate to those things and began to sing a little song - ‘You get up in the morning and you slaving for bread.’ By the time I got home it was complete.”