Buccaneer

Andrew Bradford, alias Jamaica's Fourth Tenor and the Buccaneer of "Skettel Concerto" fame, is a twenty-four year old dee-jay set to change the face of ragga music. In fact he already has, with his outrageous, operatic style of sing-jaying spawning endless variations among his dancehall competitors. <br><br>

Yet there's more to Buccaneer than first meets the eye. The classical element in his tunes is no one-trick gimmick adopted for a few easy, attention-grabbing hits on the local charts. He was taught piano and music theory by his mother as a small child in the Kingston suburb of Havendale. He was already well-versed in the works of Chopin, Brahms and Mozart before a change in family circumstances entailed a move to Waltham Park; a ghetto area of West Kingston renowned for it's reggae singers. Artists like Sugar Minott, Triston Palmer and Barry Brown had come from there, and many still lived in the simple one-storey houses tucked away behind the ubiquitous zinc fence or low stone walls running the length of the dusty, hot roads. It was there in Waltham where he learnt about ghetto living, an experience he'd later comment upon in "Poverty". "Me 'ave two vibes as a child", he recalls. "The decent, an' then the opposite of that because me grow up inna the rough, an' am a street yout' first. Mi flex better pon that".