His name is already a statement: Eek-A-Mouse is not the least funny of the Jamaican singers. With a stage name borrowed from a racehorse he used to bet on regularly, he enjoyed almost immediate success with Joe Gibbs (Once A Virgin), with whom he began working in 1979 and who foreshadowed the cocktail to come: rub a dub, humour and panache. After Barrington Levy, Sugar Minott, Yellowman and, more recently, The Mighty Diamonds, VP Records continues its reissues with Eek-A-Mouse. Like the previous "Reggae Anthology" sets, this box set consists of two CDs and a DVD taken from his performance at Reggae Sunsplash in 1982. The double CD thus traces the singjay's career at a time when, bogged down in legal troubles and ill-considered statements, it seems to have come to a standstill.
Most of the 33 compiled tracks are well known and have already proved themselves. The box set captures the peak of Eek-A-Mouse's career, when he was racking up hits with the producer Junjo Lawes and the Roots Radics: Wa Do Dem, For Hire and Removal, Operation Eradication (inspired by the death of his friend, the deejay Errol Shorter), and Ganja Smuggling. The latter owes a great deal, moreover, to Tell Them, a song produced by Carlton Patterson on his label Black & White.
For this "Eek-Ology", while it carefully covers the singjay's best-known period, also puts other tracks in the spotlight. For example, the first two songs Eek-A-Mouse ever recorded, when he was still Ripton Joseph Hylton, one pupil among others on the school benches: the box set thus includes Creation and My Father's Land, produced by his maths teacher, Mr. Dehaney, and available for the first time (as is Wicked Can’t Reign). Just as rare are the four tracks (Wa-Do-Dem, Hitler, Assassinator and For Hire And Removal) recorded in 1983 during a BBC Session with the presenter John Peel. To be fully comprehensive, this anthology had to show the famous rodent on stage. The DVD thus offers a short but delightful extract of his performance at Reggae Sunsplash in 1982 (to be discovered with the video below). No doubt about it, this "Eek-Ology" does justice to this singer with a unique style.
