Max Romeo, who has died aged 80, reached his peak as a roots reggae singer in the mid-1970s with two albums, Revelation Time and War Ina Babylon, that focused on Rastafarianism and its juxtaposition with the fraught politics of post-independence Jamaica – ostensibly parochial topics that nonetheless gained him a worldwide audience.
Much of Romeo’s best work was done with the producer Lee Scratch Perry in the mystical Black Ark studio, where he wrote a number of reggae classics, including One Step Forward, Stealing in the Name of Jah and the memorably bombastic Chase the Devil, in which he declared: “I’m going to put on a iron shirt / and chase the devil out of earth.”
