Trojan Records and Skinhead Reggae
Trojan Records is the label that made Jamaican music a fixture of British working-class youth culture. It launched in 1968 as a joint venture between Lee Gopthal, a Jamaican-born businessman who had arrived in Britain on the Empire Windrush and built a chain of Caribbean record shops, and Chris Blackwell of Island Records. The timing was not accidental: there was already a substantial Jamaican community in British cities, the sound systems were running, and young white skinheads were buying the same records as their Jamaican neighbours.
How the label worked
The basic operation was licensing. Trojan picked up Jamaican recordings, pressed them in Britain, and pushed them through the distribution networks that Gopthal had been building since the late 1950s. The label was not precious about genre: ska, rocksteady, and the newer reggae sound all came through. What held it together was a consistent feel, the heavy offbeat rhythm, the bass-forward mix, the terseness of the songs. It suited the dance hall crowd in Brixton, Brixton, Handsworth, and Leeds, and it suited the skinheads who were at those same dances.
Between 1969 and 1976 Trojan placed nearly 30 singles on the UK charts. That is a remarkable strike rate for a label that most of the mainstream music press did not take seriously at the time.
The skinhead reggae moment
The period between roughly 1969 and 1970 is what collectors and historians now call skinhead reggae, though that label was retrospective. At the time it was just reggae, the music skinheads were dancing to. What made it distinct from earlier Jamaican pop was the tempo: reggae dropped the pace below ska and rocksteady, leaving more space in the rhythm for that stomping, physical dance style that the skinhead crowd favoured. The rude boy connection ran all the way through it. The music, the dance, the defiant posture, all of it had Jamaican roots that the early skinheads knew and respected.
Desmond Dekker had already crossed into the mainstream with “Israelites,” which topped the UK chart in April 1969, but the skinhead reggae scene was less interested in crossover pop and more interested in the rougher, harder-grooving records that stayed in the dance halls. Derrick Morgan, Laurel Aitken, and the Pioneers were among the artists whose Trojan releases circulated heavily in that circuit.
The most explicitly skinhead-coded act of the era was Symarip, a British reggae group who recorded for Trojan and released the album “Skinhead Moonstomp” in 1969. The title track became an anthem, built on the template of Derrick Morgan’s “Moon Hop” and addressed directly to the skinhead crowd. Songs like “Skinhead Jamboree” left no ambiguity about the intended audience. It is rare for a subculture and a record label to be so openly in conversation with each other, and the Symarip records are the clearest document of that moment.
What Trojan meant culturally
The label matters beyond the music, because it complicates the easy story about British skinheads. The original skinhead scene was built on Black Jamaican music: not sampling it, not borrowing it at a distance, but actually sharing venues, sharing sound systems, sharing records with the Jamaican community. Trojan was the infrastructure that made that possible at scale. It put Jamaican recordings into the shops on the high street and the jukebox at the pub.
That cultural history is also why the later association of skinhead with far-right racism is so historically perverse. The clothes, the music, the whole aesthetic had come from cross-community working-class life in British cities, and Trojan was the main commercial vehicle for the Jamaican half of that exchange.
After the skinhead era
Trojan kept running through the early 1970s, broadening into lovers rock and dub, before financial trouble caught up with it. The label went into liquidation in 1975 and was quickly revived under new ownership, with the back catalogue intact. That catalogue turned out to be the real asset: the skinhead reggae records never went away, and when two-tone broke at the end of the 1970s, a generation of bands reached straight back to Trojan for their reference points. Symarip’s “Skinhead Moonstomp” was re-issued in 1980 and charted again, carried by exactly that revival energy.
Trojan Records is still active today and the catalogue is widely available. For anyone tracing the full arc of British youth music from the Jamaican dancehall to the two-tone revival, it is the essential primary source.