Pass The Dutchie – The Best of Musical Youth
Pop music is littered with cautionary tales about the perils of child stardom and Musical Youth, a reggae-pop outfit comprising five Brummie-Jamaican school friends who conquered America and became the first black artists to be played on MTV, is one well worth heeding.
Pass The Dutchie, a sanitised adaptation of Mighty Diamonds’ Rasta anthem Pass The Kouchie that famously substituted the titular cannabis pipe for a cooking pot, sold 5m copies worldwide and instantly made household names of its pre-pubescent performers. Topping the UK chart in October 1982, PTD became a hit in Europe, Australia and North America, peaking at no. 10 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Despite their young years, Musical Youth became best friends with Michael Jackson, recorded with Donna Summer and released an album, Youth of Today, that went gold in the UK and Canada. But as keyboard player Michael Grant told the Guardian in 2003: “Black artists get ripped off, child stars get ripped off. We were doomed from the start.”
The band were too young to fully appreciate being signed to a record label, let alone being dropped by one. When MCA let them go barely two years after the stratospheric success of PTD, keyboardist Michael Grant’s heartbreaking first question was whether he’d have to sell his BMX bike.
The wheels were beginning to fall off in more troubling ways. With the Grant and Waite brothers embroiled in internecine legal battles, singer Dennis Seaton called time on the band in 1985. Worse, the Waites appeared to be struggling with substance abuse and mental ill health. Patrick died of heart failure in 1993, and Freddie died in 2022 while receiving treatment for schizophrenia.
Musical Youth deserve much more credit than they get for helping bring reggae to the masses. Marley and Blackwell rightly receive most of the acclaim for bringing Jamaican music to the world, but singles successes like Musical Youth, Althea & Donna and proto-rude boy Desmond Dekker before them put reggae, via TV, directly into the homes of millions for whom the phrase “Sounds to make you rub and scrub” probably meant music to do the housework to!
