Mento Health

I just decided I had enough of heavy the other day, enough rainy doom, enough shouty shout-shout, enough emotey-motion and broke out one of my go-to summer LPs, The Jolly Boys Pop ‘n’ Mento, an album that I’ve adored since my parents bought it when I was a surly teenager.

Formed on 11 April 1945* in Port Antonio, Jamaica the Jolly Boys were said to have been named by Errol Flynn** as they were regular players at his parties. As origin stories go, this is pretty damn classy.

The Jolly Boys were a working band, bucking musical trends and earning a living playing to hotel crowds for the next 43 years until Jules Shear, songwriter for Alison Moyet, Bangles and Cyndi Lauper (and others) heard them and recorded Pop ‘n’ Mento in one take in his hotel room.

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The Jolly Boys play mento, a Jamaican musical form distinct from the Trinidadian calypso, which has borrowings from Latin and afro rhythms, English and French folk music and which could be said to have been the parent of ska and reggae. Mento has always had a reputation for gently saucy lyrics, which amused the callow 17 year old me every bit as much as the gnarlier incarnation typing this.

The instrumentation is acoustic and rustic, bongos, banjo, guitar and marimbula^ and of course some fabulous gently worn-in voices.

So what is the kick-ass, grab-em-by-the-throat opener on Pop ‘n’ Mento? it is the wonderful ‘Mother & Wife’, which sweetly posits the eternal question, which one would you save from drowning? over a sleepy clear banjo tune and a rhythm more stately than an arthritic turtle we learn the correct answer, as my own mother gleefully used to sing at me, is that ‘I can get another wife/but you can never get another mother in your life’.

Then we accelerate for ‘Love In the Cemetery’ where one of the boys suffers jolly-interruptus caused by a voice issuing up from the grave which had been repurposed as his bed and runs for it. Two tunes in and I am swaying and grinning already.

The reggae-tinged ‘River Come Down’ is a thing of tuneful and lyrical beauty which doesn’t need anything else said about it. This is aural sunshine and my fave tune here.

The gentle Yankee-baiting (barely) dance craze sauciness of ‘Ten Dollars To Two’ is sly, cheerful fun ‘I can’t do the twist or the mashed potato at all/But when it comes to the jerk, I have been jerking from since I’m small’.

Revolving around a double entendre so blatant that AC/DC would have blushed and looked away, ‘Big Bamboo’ is wonderful fun, sung with relaxed relish by men who were very definitely old enough to know better. I have been singing it, meetings aside, since playing Pop ‘n’ Mento on Sunday night.

In the wrong hands this, as well as ‘Ben Wood Dick’, ‘Watermelon’ and ‘Touch Me Tomato’ would rankle but the Jolly Boys are utterly charming and relaxed, a gentle wink to the wise; nothing more. A touch of elegant summer sauciness in an all too serious wintry world.

Elsewhere the gorgeously sultry dancing tune ‘Back To Back (Belly To Belly)’ is a real highlight, the banjo acting solely as another rhythm instrument and giving it a lazy ska feel. LP closer ‘Nightfall’ is another exercise in silkily played elegance with a wonderfully slow gait.

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Pop ‘n’ Mento gave the band some interesting momentum when it came out in 1989, my parents certainly caught the Jolly Boys live and there is something seductive about the story of a band like them having a season in the sun, ironically.

Fun and cheeky though they are, with an act finely-honed by decades of catering to tourist crowds, do not leave this page thinking that the Jolly Boys are any kind of novelty act, or calypso schtick to be patronised. There is a definite, well-worked musicality here and real flashes of how they and mento contributed to more celebrated, recent Jamaican musical forms.

Which is all on top of being a deftly played, uplifting LP on its own terms. Plus, you know rude lyrics never get old for me, especially in the sun.

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I had to buy my copy of Pop ‘n’ Mento second-hand, marginally preferable to inheriting one obviously. When it came I was sorry to see someone had scribbled their name and possibly address on the cover and the inner sleeve, don’t you just hate when that happens?

Firing up my actual brain one day (about a year after purchase) I noticed that it was in fact autographed by the classic Jolly Boys line-up^^ Joseph Bennett, Moses Deans, Allan Swymmer and Noel Howard. It is a treasure.

1287 Down.

*a mere 29,331 days from the time of writing; which as we all know is 2,534,198,400 seconds.

**a man in possession of a famously big bamboo and second only to the author in terms of swashbuckling prowess.

^not a word I get to type very often, also known as a rhumba box; as far as I can tell it is a marimba in a box, providing the same rhythmic function as a bass/rhythm guitar.

^^as opposed to the Jolly Boys Mk.2 line-up featuring Glenn Hughes and David Coverdale (another who would have baulked from some of the single entendres on show here).