Steve Barrow, the British historiographer, compiler, and liner note writer whose decades of dedicated work helped preserve the history of Jamaican music for future generations, died in May 2026. He was 80.
Born September 29, 1945, Barrow came to reggae the way the best music obsessives usually do — through the physical act of being around records. Working at Honest Jon’s record shop in London, he met Peter Dalton, a collaboration that would eventually produce ‘The Rough Guide to Reggae’, one of the most essential reference works the genre has ever had. But long before that book existed, Barrow was already doing the work. Between 1979 and 1980 he was hired freelance by Island Records to compile a series of vinyl releases — ‘Intensified’, ‘More Intensified’, ‘Catch the Beat’, and ‘The Blue Beat Years’ — and from the 1970s through to 1992 he compiled albums and wrote liner notes for Trojan Records in London. This was the quiet, unglamorous, enormously important work of making sure people knew what they were listening to and where it came from.
In 1993 he co-founded the Blood and Fire record label with Simply Red’s Mick Hucknall, specialising in reissuing older roots reggae and spiritual dubwise Jamaican music — some of the most beautiful and historically significant recordings the island ever produced, brought back into circulation with the care and context they deserved. That same spirit of preservation and scholarship led directly to the Jamaican Reggae Archive Project, funded and owned by Chris Blackwell with Barrow serving as de facto chronologist, historiographer, and curator. Between 1994 and 1995, alongside Don Letts and Rick Elwood, he conducted a series of interviews with Jamaican artists for the archive, building a body of primary source material that remains invaluable. Reggae author David Katz credited Barrow’s personal recommendation to Island Records with his own involvement in compiling the 1997 Lee “Scratch” Perry CD set ‘Arkology’, one of the most important Perry collections ever assembled.
In 2004 he co-founded the reggae reissue label Hot Pot Music, and in 2012 Soul Jazz published two books he compiled alongside Stuart Baker — ‘Reggae Soundsystem: Original Reggae Album Cover Art’ and ‘Reggae 45 Soundsystem: The Label Art of Reggae Singles’ — the kind of beautifully produced volumes that bring the visual culture of the music to the same level of attention its sound has always received.
His bibliography includes ‘The Rough Guide to Reggae’, ‘The Rough Guide Reggae: 100 Essential CDs’, and ‘King Jammy’s’, co-written with Beth Lesser. Three books. Dozens of compilations. Hundreds of liner notes. A record label. An archive. A body of work that ensures the music he loved is understood and not just heard.
Reggae has always deserved a historian of this quality. It was very lucky to have one.