Max Romeo’s career spanned the early days of ska through rocksteady to fiery roots reggae with a political conscience, peaking in the mid-’70s.
I first discovered Max Romeo when he teamed up with Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry and The Upsetters to record his breakthrough War Ina Babylon. That came along decade after his first huge hit with Wet Dream.
Released in 1968 just as rocksteady evolved into reggae – arguably the moment they merged – Wet Dream was a Top Ten hit in the summer of 1969 despite a BBC ban on account of its “suggestive” lyrics.
Romeo (Maxie Smith to family and friends) insisted the song was about his leaky roof. You may disagree, especially when you hear him sing: “Give the fanny to me.”
It was Romeo’s first solo release after cutting his teeth in a vocal group called The Emotions (later The Hippy Boys), whose modest success with Buy You A Rainbow and the skinhead favourite Clap
Clap earned him enough to stop working on a sugar plantation.
He turned political in the early ’70s, writing and recording a social justice anthem, Let The Power Fall On I, for the People’s National Party during its successful 1972 election campaign.
Romeo teamed up with Lee Perry in 1975 for a political update of the nursery rhyme Three Blind Mice – about a police raid on a party – before his big breakthrough with War Ina Babylon (“It sipple out deh”).
The album produced another hit in Chase The Devil (I’m gonna put on a iron shirt / Chase the devil out of Earth”) ; later famously sampled by The Prodigy on Out Of Space.
After moving to New York in 1980 he sang backing vocals on a track called Dance on The Rolling Stones’ album Emotional Rescue.
Wet Dream uses the riddim of Derrick Morgan’s rocksteady tune Hold You Jack and Romeo initially wrote the lyrics for Morgan who turned them down, as did at least two other singers, John Holt and Slim Smith.
There’s not a lot to them, consisting largely of the lines “Every night me go to sleep, me have wet dreams” and the self-explanatory “Lie down girl, let me push it up, push it up, lie down” repeated over a jaunty rocksteady riddim.
Later in the song comes the confusing couplet “You in your small corner, I stand in mine / Throw all the punch you want to, I can take them all,” followed by the one that sent the Beeb’s censors into a sweat: “Look how you’re big and fat, like a big, big shot / Give the crumpet to big foot Joe, give the fanny to me”.
After playing it twice, the corporation instructed DJs Tony Blackburn and Alan Freeman that they could only refer to the song as “a record by Max Romeo.”
Despite his initial implausible claim that he was singing about his leaking roof, he changed his tune in later life, claiming his song started the sexual revolution, and that he wrote it because “the devil made me do it.”
Further evidence, of course, that the Devil has the best tunes, and it went down a treat with audiences both in Jamaica, with a history of loving “slackness” in songs, and the UK, where the skinheads were early adopters of reggae.
RIP Max Romeo (1944-2025)