PRESS RELEASES

 

 

Black Market-- Detroit’s Hall of Fame award-winning band--releases new limited edition (180 gram) vinyl record Nuclear Reaction.

 

Produced from newly discovered tapes, Black Market's new album Nuclear Reaction captures on vinyl the raw vibe and carefree times of the band’s Jamaican experience.           

 

These 1980s Black Market sessions--recently found in storage by drummer/producer Mitch Purdy—have been sourced from the original reel-to-reel tape recordings.  At the Alliance Recording Company the tapes were played back on an analog recorder. The raw sonic quality of the recordings amazed Purdy, who pursued putting them on vinyl.  Nuclear Reaction chronicles the band’s early sound inspired by Jamaican culture and music.      

 

Before these Detroit sessions, band members Larry Duncan, Mitch Purdy, Rick Purdy and Stuart Brady had lived for extended stays in thatched roof cottages near Jamaica’s western cliffs.  Venturing up in the mountains, they ate food cooked on fire pits and philosophized with the Rastafarians.  In the sleepy town of Negril--located at the end of the beautiful “Seven Mile Beach" (still uninhabited in the 1970s)—they frequented the Negril Wharf Club. The only place on Negril Beach with electricity that sold cold drinks, the Wharf Club (pictured on the record cover) attracted a colorful mix of locals, the musical elite, smugglers, and CIA- looking types, who drank Red Stripe and rum with the jukebox as a back drop blaring Jamaican music. 

 

On the “west end” cliffs of Negril Black Market jammed with local musicians and wrote the original songs featured on this record. To add to the group's musical repertoire, Larry Duncan searched Montego Bay record stores for Jamaican 45s as well as resurrecting songs he heard on the Wharf Clubs jukebox.  

 

Back home, Black Market played one-nighters in punk clubs and on university campuses. The band also performed as a supporting act for such legendary reggae artists as Jimmy Cliff, Third World, Gregory Isaacs, Toots & the Maytals, The Wailers, Black Uhuru, Steel Pulse, Yellowman, Fatman Riddim Section, John Holt, Tyrone Taylor, Half Pint and Blue Riddim Band.  In between the band’s rigorous schedule, Black Market recorded these live studio sessions that blended Detroit roots with authentic Jamaican music.