Ranking Dread

Ranking Dread (born Winston Brown; c. 1955 – 1996) was a Jamaican reggae deejay and was born in the Jamaican parish of Trelawny but grew up in the Kingston ghettos of Rema and Tivoli. He became famous for his work with the Ray Symbolic sound system in the 1970s. His later years in the UK and North America were ended by legal issues.

Biography

Ranking Dread first became known as a deejay on the Ray Symbolic sound system in Jamaica, but by the late 1970s he had moved to London, where he worked with Lloyd Coxsone's sound system. He released four albums starting with Girls Fiesta in 1978, produced by Linval Thompson, and worked with producer Sugar Minott on his third album, Lots of Loving. He had a minor UK success in the early 1980s with "Fattie Boom Boom", but in the mid-1980s, he faded from the music scene and became more notorious for his criminal activities, where he was labelled "the most dangerous man in Britain and the number one Yardie Godfather". This was backed up by his appearance on a British television programme in the late 1980s entitled The Cook Report. However, when interviewed by the television journalist Ben Chin in 1990 for a Canadian TV documentary, he denied...

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