For some reason recently I have become academically interested in Judge Dread, not the 2000AD comic character ("Judge Dredd"), but Alex Minto Hughes from Snodland in Kent: a rather vulgar white cockney reggae artist who, inspired by Prince Buster, had a successful career on Trojan records in the 1970s. He had eleven UK hits, all banned from the airwaves. In 1973 Hughes was interviewed in the NME by the jeering, bohemian, faintly Leavisite ego Nick Kent, who had him pegged as a "working class hero and the Robin Hood Of reggae." Kent's interview is full of the expected sniggering sarcasm and it frames the Judge as a joke. Hughes in turn, defends himself as a true folk phenomenon (he was rarely helped by TV or radio) who loved reggae and had his finger on the commercial pulse of popular taste....