Sly & Robbie

Channel One

Lowell Fillmore Dunbar, born May 10, 1952 in Kingston, was called Sly for his love of Sly and the Family Stone; he told Benji B in 2008 that Sly's the boss. He played in the Yardbrooms from 1968, backing the saxophonist Tommy McCook, and on Dave and Ansell Collins's "Double Barrel" in 1971 at 18. Robert Warren Dale Shakespeare, born September 27, 1953, played with Bunny Lee's Aggrovators and the Hippy Boys. Their accounts of how they met differ, from 1972 to 1975; Dunbar says they met downtown near Randy's Record Store and Robbie invited him to Channel One, where their first song together was John Holt's "Too Good to Be Forgotten", as part of the Revolutionaries, the Hoo Kim brothers' house band.

Their breakthrough was the Mighty Diamonds' Right Time (1976, Channel One, produced by Joseph Hoo Kim), which Rolling Stone called one of the finest reggae LPs ever released. Wikipedia credits them with introducing the harder Rockers beat that year, though Sly says the beat was already in the air, introduced at Studio One by Phil Colander and popularized by Bunny Lee. Dunbar worked with Peter Tosh from 1977 to 1981, and they toured with the Rolling Stones in 1978. Chris Blackwell brought them to Compass Point in Nassau in 1980 to work with Grace Jones, and Robbie said they did more than 30 tracks in two weeks. They founded the Taxi label around 1979 or 1980, with Sly and Robbie Present Taxi collecting its songs in 1981.

Their own records on Island include Language Barrier (1985), Rhythm Killers (1987, produced by Bill Laswell, with "Boops (Here to Go)" at 12 in the UK), Silent Assassin (1989, with KRS-One) and Friends (1998). They won a Grammy for Black Uhuru's Anthem in 1985 and for Friends in 1999, and Dunbar had 13 nominations. They played on Chaka Demus and Pliers's "Murder She Wrote" and "Twist and Shout" in the early 1990s and Simply Red's "Night Nurse" in 1997. Their live band was the Taxi Gang. Robbie Shakespeare died on December 8, 2021 in Miami, aged 68, and Sly Dunbar on January 26, 2026 in Kingston, aged 73. The Gold Musgrave Medal went to them in October 2015, and uDiscover says their sparse, drum-machine-driven sound helped lay the groundwork for ragga and digital dancehall.