“Three Stripe One” Smith & Mighty

Released on Limited Edition White Vinyl (500 Copies only)– 31st October 2025 via Bristol Archive Records 

This album is pure, concentrated, 100% vintage Bristol Sound at its best, so much so that we considered adding a health warning about consuming too much of it in one session, after all, bass lines can be very dangerous things. For those of us who were here, and even for those who weren’t it’s a time portal back to those lazy days of late eighties Bristol when this music was radical and new, and we had the joy of hearing each of these tunes for the very first time.

You reach a certain age and it’s easy to reminisce through rose-tinted glasses, that’s not the case here, we knew these were special the first time we heard them, nearly forty years later, many, many people have followed their blueprint, and these originals have only grown in stature.

It’s now six decades since Dionne Warwick went into a New York studio to record her million-selling versions of “Anyone Who Had A Heart” and “Walk On By” and as they’ve faded with time, it’s easy to forget that back in 1988, pretty much everybody was familiar with the originals, they were still part of the background soundscape of our lives.

Demonstrating admirable confidence, our Bristolian heroes tackled the brace of Bacharach and David classics only instead of the luxury surrounding of New York’s Bell Sound Studios; populated with the cream of New York session musicians, they had a tiny studio on Ashley Road with basic equipment and no budget. They may have been short of funds and equipment, but they had an abundance of ideas and talent. “Walk On” starts off pretty straight, Jackie Jackson singing the hook over for 22 seconds then everything changes as the beats and bass line usher in the future of Bristol music. Just listen to all the ideas that are crammed into just over four minutes as Dionne’s beloved pop/soul classic, is turned inside out and reinvented as cutting-edge dance music.

The first of the pair that was released is even more direct, “Anyone” jumps straight into reshaping expectations and the future of music with an instant assault of beats and bass line. The use of samples is relatively restrained and Jackie Jackson’s vocal is allowed enough space to carry the track on its own merits, although for the last 90 seconds, you can hear the duo increasingly having fun exploring the possibilities of the track and the bass line coming to the fore.

“This Is The Time” takes “Anyone” and turns it into a raw hip hop outing, hip hop with a British, Bristolian twist whilst most UK contemporaries were still mimicking the accents coming from the States rather than forging a British take on the genre, Krissy Kris adds an authentic Bristol voice.

We close out Side A with “Mix Me Down Maestro” another more polished hip hop outing showcasing the lyrical talents of M.C. Kelz and the scratching talents of Lynx, it also features the reggae influence, so synonymous with Bristol’s music.

If side A focuses on vocals, Side B kicks off all about the beats, and bass with vocals reduced to snippets and samples, sharp, hard repetitive beats with bass lines that will swallow you up like a tsunami depositing you on a strange new shore a few minutes later. “Clash Of The Beats,” Killa,” and “Different Chapter”, tough tunes then and tough tunes now.

Rob’s former bandmate in Restriction, Eric “The General” McCarthy gives us the most obviously reggae-influenced selection, complete with “No, No, No” vocal sample with “Time To Rhyme”, a nice change of pace before rounding things off and travelling almost full circle with the always popular “Walk On (Mellow Mix)”.

With money tight Three Stripe focussed on releasing singles that could recoup costs quickly to allow follow-up releases and make enough impact to lead to a major deal, yet both this title and our previous album of unreleased material “Connected Sequences” amply demonstrate how easily Smith and Mighty could have pre-empted both their peers and the many who followed in their footsteps with a strong, coherent, and cutting-edge album as early as 1989. It’s intriguing to speculate what may have happened if that path had been taken, for now we present this as both a compilation of essential singles that have more than stood the test of time and a what if album that could have been released in 1989.

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