A chat with Nadine in 1993 …
 Nadine Sutherland : Action Girl

                 by John Masouri - reprinted with permission

    "I don't want to be like a tight mini-skirted ho or have that R&B or lovers image everybody have. Everyone wants to see me like a Whitney Houston! And let's not even mention the Soul II Soul experience with Jazzie B. So we decided to go dancehall and for me to do anything I wish. I don't want anyone to ever say 'She sound like somebody.' You have to set a vibes and a tone so that others will want to follow you. Your style, the way you dance, your personality… that's why I love Marcia Griffiths so much, she never pattern and she's versatile. And please mention I've just sung on Judy Mowatt's new album 'cause that one's gonna be great!"

    Nadine Sutherland, whose Action with Terror Fabulous stayed near the top of the reggae charts for months earlier this summer, is on the brink of a major label deal and at last enjoying solo success after years of providing backing vocals for a host of reggae giants. In fact, she's that rare item: a female singer capable of voicing any style, but one whose roots are embedded in the very heart of Jamaican culture. Nor is the allusion to former I-Threes Marcia and Judy superfluous. At the tender age of 11 she won a Tastee talent competition and was invited to record at Bob Marley's Tuff Gong studios by its one-time manager Sangie Davis.

    At 19 she sang Higher Ground for Bob Andy (whose War in the City she sings on the new Songs of Bob Andy tribute album) but it wasn't until Gussie Clarke coaxed her into voicing You and Me Tonight and Mr. Hard To Please at the tail end of the 80s that thoughts of a solo career again began to take shape.
    Her debut was Starvation, a song that reached no. 1 on the JA charts and which began a four-year apprenticeship under the watchful gaze of the Wailers and Marley family members. "Tuff Gong was like my second home," she recalls, smiling. "You don't realise until you are an adult how so much history was being created there. I did a couple of tunes after Bob passed on, even finished an album, but words cannot describe the great loss in that place once he'd gone. Tuff Gong still hasn't recovered from his death. The vibration and the energy that was there .. it was a crucial vibes!"
    "I started singing background vocals for him first, 'cause I hadn't been singing for awhile, not since touring with Rita and Ziggy anyway, so I'm grateful to him for pulling me out of my shell. The first of these new dancehall songs I did was for Bobby Digital - Since You've Been Gone. Then we did Wicked and Wild for Penthouse (it's now been remixed with Buju and called Wicked Dickie.) Missing You Baby was written in London. It was the first time I'd been away from Jamaica for so long. It was a very depressing time for me, but a stimulating and inspiring one also."

    Inevitably talk comes round to the rumour of her signing to Atlantic, as yet unconfirmed. "Yes, there's been some interest expressed," she admits, "so I'm doing some new stuff for them, y'know? In a variety of styles but it will be mostly reggae, and have my little craziness injected into it. And I've been writing songs, I can't believe how many! There's a new song coming out for Bobby Digital, although it's a remake, and I did this one for Fatis called Baby Face. What I realise now is that artists have been signed to record companies and then shelved; their careers have been put on hold and they cannot go into the ethnic market because they have no current songs. So songs will keep coming out: not a flood, but pre-planned to keep my name abreast. Suppose the first single they release from an album is an R&B influence? You can't play that in a dance and the rootsman nah like it. So we're going to try and exploit the benefit of a deal without robbing our original people of their music and without me being pigeon-holed - cause I'm a woman first, then a singer; whether it be reggae, soul, or rock 'n roll. Don't put any ropes on me or I'll bust them away!"

    Now that's the kind of fighting talk even Marley himself would be proud of.


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