Dubhead's Top 2020 Reggae Reissues

2020 mostly sucked for the music industry. The global pandemic and subsequent precautionary restrictions around international travel, live events and the hospitality and retail sectors impacted majorly on many people. Despite these setbacks, the market for new vinyl records and reissues of vintage recordings has been remarkably resilient.

As a selector, my focus in recent years has been on vintage reggae and especially the 7-inch single format. I won’t go into why I’m so crazy about collecting and playing 45s, just know that it is still a popular thing in the reggae community.

Vintage reggae reissues are a boon for collectors like myself as a great way to acquire rare tunes that are now both extremely scarce and expensive. Here I present my pick of those that were just reissued in 2020. Of these, one has never appeared on a 7-inch before now, and three of these titles were originally issued only on Jamaican blank-label pre-release, so are consequently almost impossible to find in the wild.

There is further good news for those who prefer to consume music digitally – most of these record companies have now set up bandcamp pages, so even if you dig this amazing old music but don’t need to own it on vinyl, you can still purchase many of these tunes as files and at a fraction of the price.

An old-time selector might say, “They simply don’t make music like this anymore”, and that folks is exactly the point here. Although the music itself may have been recorded in Jamaica some forty or fifty years ago, we can all now enjoy freshly minted, brand-new copies. What a time to be alive!