However, it was the b-side that attracted greater attention. “My life seemed very normal to me – even though I was only 17, I took fame in its stride,” she told the Express in 2016.Īfter leaving Island in 1970, she recorded for legendary reggae label Trojan Records, where her first single was a cover of Nick Drake’s Mayfair. However, Small was unable to replicate the success of My Boy Lollipop, scoring only one further hit, a soundalike called Sweet William, later the same year.īut she continued to tour and record, and appeared frequently on 1960s pop shows like Juke Box Jury and Ready Steady Go. Image copyright GETTY IMAGES Image caption Small was given a hero’s welcome when she returned to Jamaica after the success of My Boy Lollipop “It is the ska equivalent of Elvis’ Heartbreak Hotel or the Sex Pistols’ God Save The Queen – the disc that popularised a sound previously considered to be on the margins of mainstream consciousness,” wrote music historian Laurence Cane-Honeysett in Record Collector magazine. Released in February 1964, it made her an international star, and helped popularise ska music around the world. Small was enrolled at the Italia Conti Stage School for speech training and dancing lessons and she toured the UK before cutting My Boy Lollipop with a group of London session musicians (Small claimed Rod Stewart played the harmonica solo, but he has denied being present at the recording).
There, she teamed up with reggae singer Roy Panton, and they became one of the island’s most prolific duos, scoring a major hit with We’ll Meet.īlackwell took an interest in the singer after releasing some of those records in the UK on his fledgling record label, Island, and brought her to London in 1963. End of Youtube post by El enano trapecistaīorn Millicent Small in Clarendon, south Jamaica, she was one of seven brothers and five sisters, raised on the sugar plantation where her father was an overseer.Īt the age of 12, she won a talent contest at the Palladium Theatre in Montego Bay and by her teens, she was recording for Sir Coxone Dodd’s Studio One label in Kingston.
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