Max Romeo, the beloved reggae singer best known for recording such widely sampled songs as “War Ina Babylon” and “Chase the Devil” died in Saint Andrew Parish, Jamaica on Friday (April 11) at age 80. A statement on the singer’s Facebook page read, “It is with deep sadness that we announce the passing of our beloved Max. We are deeply grateful for the outpouring of love and tributes and kindly ask for privacy at this time. Legends never die.”
While no official cause of death had been announced at press time, according to The Guardian, the singer born Maxwell Livingston Smith died from heart complications.
Born in St. D’Acre in St. Anne, Jamaica on Nov. 22, 1944, Romeo left home as a teenager to seek out a music career in Kingston in the late 1960s, where he met such future reggae superstars as Bob Marley and Peter Tosh and got his first small taste of success as part of the group The Emotions. Though he would later make a name for writing conscious, political songs such as “Let the Power Fall on I,” Romeo first burst onto the scene in 1969 with the explicit, lascivious “Wet Dream.” The tune on which he sings “Every night me go to sleep, me have wet dream/ Lie down gal, let me push it up, push it up, lie down,” became a British top 10 hit despite getting banned from BBC Radio stations due to its cheeky lyrics.
The accompanying 1969 album, A Dream, didn’t spawn any other hits, but Romeo returned in 1971 with the more politically focused Let the Power Fall, which mixed skanking covers of songs by Neil Diamond (“Crackling Rosie”) and Bob Marley (“Chatter Box”) with that album’s breakout anthem, “Let the Power Fall On I”; the song became the theme for Jamaica’s People’s National Party during its winning 1972 election campaign.
“I’m gonna put on an iron shirt/ And chase Satan out of Earth. I’m gonna put on an iron shirt/ And chase the devil out of Earth,” Romeo sang on the the steady rocking “Chase the Devil,” one of several hits from the pair of albums Romeo recorded with pioneering reggae producer Lee “Scratch’ Perry. The song has been widely sampled over the years by everyone from The Prodigy (“Out of Space”), to Jay-Z (“Lucifer”) and Cage the Elephant (“Ain’t No Rest For the Wicked (Wicked Devil Reggae Remix),” among many others.
The fruitful relationship between Romeo and Perry launched in 1975 on the album Revelation Time, with the Perry-produced reggae-fied take on the traditional children’s song “Three Blind Mice.”
By the next year, Romeo was all-in with Perry, using his crack studio band, the Upsetters, as his house band on the career-peak War Ina Babylon LP. Infused with Perry’s signature reverb-drenched dub style, the album opened with the hypnotic “One Step Forward” — a broadside against Prime Minister Michael Manley’s declaration of a state of emergency in 1976 — and included the pleading title track, which mirrored the political and social turmoil that gripped the island nation in the mid-1970s.
The song was part of a rising tide of roots reggae anthems commenting on the nation’s turmoil, with Romeo singing, “War ina Babylon/ Tribal war ina Babylon/ It sipple out deh [it’s slippery out there].” The album was considered to be the first in a “holy trinity” of LPs from Perry’s mystical, chaotic Black Ark recording studio, along with Junior Murvin’s Police and Thieves and the Heptones’ Party Time.
After releasing 1977’s Reconstruction album, Romeo moved to New York where he co-wrote and starred in the musical Reggae, as well as providing backing vocals on the Rolling Stones’ Emotional Rescue track “Dance (Pt. 1).” Stones guitarist Keith Richards co-produced and played guitar on Romeo’s next album, 1981’s Holding Out My Love to You.
Though he never managed a Marley-like breakthrough in the U.S., Romeo released nearly two dozen albums from the 1980s through his final studio effort, 2019’s Words From the Brave. In 2023, the singer filed a $15 million lawsuit against Universal Music Group and Polygram Publishing over what he said were improper royalty payments.
Listen to some of Romeo’s most beloved songs below.
