UNTIL Desmond Dekker hit the British and US charts in 1967, ska and reggae were obscure local beats, little known outside the Caribbean.

With hits such as 007 (Shanty Town) , Israelites and It Mek, Dekker put the rhythms of Jamaica on the world map, He also helped to launch a fashion craze in Britain, where young mods and later skinheads adopted elements of the "rudeboy" culture of Kingston’s downtown ghettos to which he gave voice.

His dominance as the best-known figure in Jamaican music only ended with the emergence of Bob Marley as an international star in the mid-1970s. By then Dekker was resident in Britain, where he enjoyed iconic status among the immigrant Jamaican population.

For a while he struggled to adapt to the new "roots reggae" sound emerging from Jamaica and the more militant school of Rastafarianism. But he enjoyed a second lease of life in the early 1980s with the ska/mod revival led by two-tone bands such as the Specials. He remained a perennially popular figure revered as a pioneering figure in reggae’s history.

Born Desmond Dacres in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1942, he was orphaned as a child and sent off to grow up in the rural surroundings of Seaforth in the parish of St Thomas. By his mid-teens he was back in the Jamaican capital where he worked as a welder. At the time, the Jamaican music industry was in its nascent stages, and although he enjoyed singing, he had little thought of doing so professionally.

Encouraged by the praise of workmates who heard him singing around the workshop and by the emergence of a growing number of record studios and labels as Jamaica shrugged off its colonial past and prepared for independence, in 1961 he auditioned for Coxsone Dodd at Studio One and Duke Reid at Treasure Isle. Both turned him down but, undeterred, he next tried his luck with Leslie Kong, owner of the Beverley’s label.

Kong signed him but kept him waiting two years before recording him, demanding that he first write a hit song. Dekker eventually got to record in 1963 when Kong deemed that his Honour Your Mother and Father had hit potential. He was proved right when the song became the first of Dekker’s 20 No 1s on the Jamaican chart, and was picked up for British distribution by Chris Blackwell, the Jamaican-born, Harrow-educated future Island Records boss.

A string of further local hits followed. Sung in his trademark falsetto, they included Sinners Come Home, Labour for Learning and Generosity. It was an exciting time in Jamaican music, and Dekker was at its cutting edge. Independence in 1962 had bestowed a new cultural confidence, expressed in the growth of ska, a mix of imported rhythm and blues and jazz elements, combined with such local forms as calypso and mento and characterised by a fast, metronomic tempo and a strongly accented offbeat.

In 1965 Dekker released a song called King of Ska, backed by the Maytals, that epitomised the new sound and as the song’s title predicted, elevated him to stand alongside the music’s biggest stars such as Derrick Morgan, Laurel Aitken and Prince Buster.

His success allowed him to form his own vocal backing group , the Four Aces (Marley, Peter Tosh and Bunny Livingstone were working in similar style as the Wailers at the time), with whom he recorded further ska classics including Get Up Adinah, This Woman, Mount Zion, Jezebel and Rock Steady, a 1966 hit that took its title from the name of another variation on the distinctive ska beat.

By now, the rudeboy culture — which cultivated a love of lawless imagery drawn from gangster films — was in full swing in Kingston. Derrick Morgan was the first to sing about it, when he recorded Cool Off Rudies in late 1966.

He followed early the next year with Tougher Than Tough, with Dekker and his brother George singing backing vocals. Seeking a piece of the action himself, Dekker then wrote and recorded 007 (Shanty Town), a rudeboy anthem that included not only references to James Bond but to the Frank Sinatra film Ocean’s Eleven.

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