Chaka Demus & Pliers

Rough-voiced deejay Chaka Demus, born John Taylor in Kingston, Jamaica in August 1963, joined forces with smooth-toned vocalist Pliers, born Everton Bonner in Rockhall Hills, Jamaica on April 4, 1963, to form one of Jamaican music’s most enduring and commercially potent partnerships. They became the first Jamaican act to land three straight singles inside the British Top Five, and their commercial reach has persisted for decades. Reggae website Real Groove once described the pair as “sexy, soulful and poppy enough to be saleable to U.S. R&B blandoids yet still tuff enough to raise gunshots and shouts of ‘Murder’ back in the Kingston dancehalls.”

Each artist had already built a solid solo résumé before their paths converged. Growing up in Kingston’s Waterhouse district, Demus began spinning for the Roots Majestic sound system and cut his first record, the King Jammy-produced “Increase Your Knowledge.” His breakthrough arrived in 1986 with the duet “One Scotch” alongside Admiral Bailey; further successes followed, including the Yellowman collaboration “Everybody Loves Chaka,” the Scottie duet “Bring It to Me,” and the solo outings “Everybody Loves Chaka” and “Chaka on the Move.” Pliers, meanwhile, worked with producers King Jammy, Winston Riley, King Tubby, Black Scorpio, and Coxsone Dodd, scoring solo hits with “Snake in the Grass” and a hip-hop reinterpretation of the Toots & the Maytals classic “Bam Bam.” In a 1998 interview Demus recalled his first impression of Pliers: “The man has a sweet melody voice. Any time I listened to him and listened to myself, I knew I could mesh with him.”

After initial team-ups on “Gal Wine” for Ossie Hibbert, “Brenda” for Ranking Joe, and “Rough This Year” for Blackbeard, the duo scored their breakthrough with Sly & Robbie’s production of “Murder She Wrote,” a track Pliers had previously released as a solo single. Their follow-up, “Tease Me,” lodged in the British Top Ten for three months, peaked at number three, and moved more than 300,000 copies. Subsequent Top Five entries included the Curtis Mayfield cover “She Don’t Let Nobody” and a remake of the Isley Brothers and Beatles hit “Twist and Shout,” the latter cut with Jack Radics and Sly & Robbie’s Taxi Gang. Their January 1994 debut album, Tease Me, collected those first six singles plus a fresh reading of George Clinton’s “One Nation Under Groove.” The 1995 release She Don’t Let Nobody reached number four on the British album chart, and For Every Kinda Person appeared the following year.

Following a lengthy recording hiatus, the pair resurfaced in 2001 with Help Them Lord on RAS. Later albums Trouble and War (2003), Back Against the Wall (2005), and So Proud (2008) surfaced on various imprints while the duo maintained an active touring schedule and festival presence.