SKANK YOUR ENTHUSIASM (2)
By:
October 5, 2025
One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating our favorite… ska records! PLAYLIST HERE. Series edited by Josh Glenn.
In 1964, Millie Small brought Jamaican music to a global audience with “My Boy Lollipop.” She never had another hit of that magnitude, but in 1970, her first single for the British reggae label Trojan Records was a catchy trifle called “Mayfair,” presumably about the posh London neighborhood of that name. She sings its opaque lyrics with conviction, switching to her piercing upper range for the last few refrains. It wasn’t a hit — apparently its B-side, “Enoch Power,” a swipe at anti-immigration politician Enoch Powell, did better — but the surprising thing about it was its source: “Mayfair” was a cover of a then-unreleased song by the chamber folk musician Nick Drake.
Time Will Tell, the peculiar album on which “Mayfair” appears, features a handful of songs co-written by Small with her then-partner and producer, the painter and art historian Eddie Wolfram, as well as covers of “White Boys” (from Hair), a pair of Desmond Dekker songs, and what appears to be an answer song to Hank Williams’ “They’ll Never Take Her Love from Me.” (In 2019, she called Time Will Tell “the best thing I’ve done.”) On the album’s sleeve, Millie is straddling a gigantic banana, apparently paddling it like a canoe. She’s holding that album cover in a photoshoot she did later in 1970 for a British soft-porn magazine, also called Mayfair.
But the question remains: how did the artist who had made the all-time bestselling ska single come to record a Nick Drake song, of all things? One connection may have been Millie’s longtime manager (and Trojan’s co-founder) Chris Blackwell, who had also released Five Leaves Left — Drake’s only record at that point, which had not yet found its audience, to put it mildly — on his label Island the year before. Another may have been Robert Kirby, a colllege friend of Drake’s who arranged the strings on his first couple of records, and also wrote the slightly overambitious arrangements for Time Will Tell. (That album “was one of the first things I did when I left university, thrown in at the deep end with a proper reggae band,” Kirby later recalled — Millie’s backing group appears to have been Symarip, the British group best known for “Skinhead Moonstomp.”) Or she may have just become a fan of Drake’s on her own: she had been part of the London art-and-music scene for years, and knew the good stuff when she heard it.
SKANK YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Josh Glenn | Lucy Sante on Margarita’s WOMAN COME | Douglas Wolk on Millie’s MAYFAIR | Lynn Peril on Prince Buster’s TEN COMMANDMENTS | Mark Kingwell on The [English] Beat’s TEARS OF A CLOWN | Annie Nocenti on Jimmy Cliff’s MISS JAMAICA | Mariane Cara on The Selecter’s ON MY RADIO | Adam McGovern on The Specials’ GHOST TOWN | Josh Glenn on The Ethiopians’ TRAIN TO SKAVILLE | Susannah Breslin on The [English] Beat’s MIRROR IN THE BATHROOM | Carl Wilson on Prince Buster / Madness’s ONE STEP BEYOND | Carlo Rotella on The Mighty Mighty Bosstones’ THE IMPRESSION THAT I GET | Rani Som on The Bodysnatchers’ EASY LIFE | David Cantwell on Desmond Dekker’s 007 (SHANTY TOWN) | Annie Zaleski on The Mighty Mighty Bosstones’ SOME DAY I SUPPOSE | Mimi Lipson on Folkes Brothers’ / Count Ossie’s OH CAROLINA | Alix Lambert on The Specials’ TOO MUCH TOO YOUNG | Marc Weidenbaum on Dandy Livingstone’s RUDY, A MESSAGE TO YOU | Heather Quinlan on Fishbone’s MA & PA | Will Hermes on The [English] Beat’s WHINE & GRINE / STAND DOWN MARGARET | Peter Doyle on The Skatalites’ GUNS OF NAVARONE | James Parker on The [English] Beat’s SAVE IT FOR LATER | Brian Berger on The Upsetters’ RETURN OF DJANGO | Francesca Royster on Joya Landis’ ANGEL OF THE MORNING | Deborah Wassertzug on The Bodysnatchers’ TOO EXPERIENCED | Dan Reines on The Untouchables’ I SPY FOR THE FBI.
JACK KIRBY PANELS | CAPTAIN KIRK SCENES | OLD-SCHOOL HIP HOP | TYPEFACES | NEW WAVE | SQUADS | PUNK | NEO-NOIR MOVIES | COMICS | SCI-FI MOVIES | SIDEKICKS | CARTOONS | TV DEATHS | COUNTRY | PROTO-PUNK | METAL | & more enthusiasms!