By 1985 Beres Hammond had a decade of Jamaican hits and very little to show for them. Recording Let’s Make a Song at Aquarius, paying for studio time with harmony sessions, he brought in a friend to handle the business side. “It never worked out either,” he told David Katz in Caribbean Beat. “When I wanted to collect some dollars, he was nowhere around.” His response, like Gregory Isaacs’s a decade earlier, was to become his own label.
Harmony House
Hammond founded Harmony House Records in 1985 “to ensure that he would have an outlet whenever arrangements with other companies fell through,” AllMusic records. He also changed course musically. “I decided to put out a reggae single for myself, cause all along I was concentrating more on R&B, so I mixed down a song called Groovy Little Thing and it shaped up nicely,” he recalled. He produced it himself. It became one of the top hits of 1985 — and, for the first time, the cheques from an overseas distributor arrived. “I cannot tell you how good that felt.”
‘What One Dance Can Do’
It was overtaken by his next single, a collaboration with Willie Lindo, his producer on Soul Reggae. “What One Dance Can Do” — a tale of temptation on a bare, early-digital riddim — nodded to the emerging dancehall style and became, AllMusic judges, his biggest Jamaican hit ever, the record that began to break him internationally. “Here I am, a balladeer, breaking into a different area, and it’s the area that all the other entertainers were afraid of me entering,” Hammond said. “What One Dance Can Do overtook Groovy Little Thing and they both entered the British charts.” Pressings appeared on J&W and Revue 12-inches in 1985 and a WKS 7-inch in 1986, per Harmony House Silekshan, and the song anchored his self-titled 1986 album.
The riddim bred answer records. The most successful, Audrey Hall’s “One Dance Won’t Do,” produced by Donovan Germain, reached No. 2 on the British charts. “That was a beautiful sort of turn of the tables for me,” Hammond said. “That was when I start seeing some financial compensation.” “Settling Down” added another hit in 1986.
1987: the break-in
Then, amid his growing fame, the career stopped. In 1987 armed thieves broke into his home, tied him up and ransacked the house. “They wanted to kill me, and I had to talk myself out of it,” he told Caribbean Beat; he convinced them trigger-happy police lived next door. “That kind of took toll on me for about three years … I just slipped out of the business for a while.” He left for New York and stayed with relatives, away from the spotlight. There he reunited with Lindo for the ballad-heavy Have a Nice Week End (1988) and cut the duet “How Can We Ease the Pain” with Maxi Priest, then the rising star of British reggae.
Why it matters
Harmony House is the reason Beres Hammond owns his catalogue; “What One Dance Can Do” is the reason the dancehall generation claimed a soul singer as one of its own. Both were forged in the same year — and both would be needed when he came home in 1990.
Listen and dig deeper
- Play the self-titled Beres Hammond (1986) and Have a Nice Week End in the Listen library. Browse Maxi Priest and Donovan Germain.
- Previously: ‘One Step Ahead’ (1976). Next: ‘Tempted to Touch’ and Penthouse (1990).
Sources: Caribbean Beat — “Beres Hammond: soul survivor” (David Katz, Issue 55); AllMusic — Beres Hammond biography; Harmony House Silekshan — “What One Dance Can Do” pressings; Roots Archives — Beres Hammond.
Editor’s note: This entry is part of the JamaicansMusic online museum — a career timeline assembled from the archive. It is dated to the era it documents; every claim is drawn from the linked sources.