The Comedy of Errors: The Ragga Twins featuring Junior Reid - Shine Eye (12 June 1992)

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I’ve often felt that one way John Peel could have tempered any frustration he felt over his listeners’ conservative choices on a Festive Fifty would have been for him to give out some unofficial awards as a way of recognising records or artists who hadn’t made the chart.  The likes of the Kold Sweat label and Shut Up and Dance should have been given some form of acknowledgement at the end of the year.  In Shut Up and Dance’s case, they should have been given the Best Collaborations award.  Having seduced listeners with their Peter Bouncer team up, Love is All We Need earlier in ‘92, the label provided another dream match when it put together The Ragga Twins with Junior Reid and in the process invented Kanye West.  The title of the track is patois for a female gold digger.  But many years before West made his name with Gold Digger, Black Uhuru had got there first with their 1979 single, Shine Eye Gal.  Rather than sample it, The Ragga Twins hooked up with Reid, who had been Black Uhuru’s lead vocalist in the mid-80s to sing the opening verse and bestow some sense of authentic link to the original source material, while they worked nascent jungle music magic over it.  It’s a perfect match.  Reid’s strident vocal drawing out the frustrated passion of the lyric amid the frenetic arrangements.  My advice is to create your own collaboration between the two versions by listening to the Ragga Twins/Reid version to psych up with before going out for the evening and then chill with a nightcap and the Black Uhuru original before bedtime.



Videos courtesy of X-Dream USA (Ragga Twins) and markobolwyn (Black Uhuru)