Lloyd Daley
Producer. Ska, rocksteady, reggae, dub
- Active
- 1950s-1980s
- Sunrise
- July 12, 1939, Kingston
- Sunset
- March 18, 2018, Florida
- Also known as
- Matador, The Matador, Lloyd the Matador
Lloyd Daley, "the Matador," was an electronics engineer, soundman and producer whose Matador label made some of the most distinguished and most Rasta-minded records of early reggae. He took the name from an image he had of himself alone in the ring, fighting a bull before thousands of onlookers, and those who worked with him found him feisty and secretive.
He ran a radio and television repair business and built his own amplifiers, and his sound system, Lloyd the Matador, was based at Waltham Park in Kingston. At first he cut boogie and ska records only for play on his own sound; in the rocksteady years he started the Matador label, and he came into his own at the end of the 1960s. By his own account, the young King Tubby came to him with a noisy reverb, and Daley drew him a schematic that fixed it.
His records included Little Roy's "Bongo Nyah" (1969), the first of a run of Rastafari-themed songs by the singer, the Uniques' "Secretly," and sides by the Wailing Souls, the Paragons, the Gladiators, Alton Ellis, John Holt and Dennis Brown, with instrumentals by the organist Neville Hinds and the trumpeter Johnny Moore and deejay versions by U-Roy, Big Joe and I-Roy. Alton Ellis's "Deliver Us" and "Back to Africa" were among the more commercial takes on Rastafari chants of the period, and the Abyssinians cut "Yim Mas Gan" for him, their only record for the label. U-Roy came to him in October 1969, before his breakthrough with Duke Reid, to cut "Sound of the Wise" and "Scandal." The band that became the Upsetters, the Hippy Boys, also recorded for him. Little Roy's "Hard Fighter," on Daley's Syndicate label in 1971, is usually counted as the first vocal record with a full dub version on its flip side.
He felt that others had pirated his work and denied him his due, and he withdrew from the business and refused interviews for decades, opening up only to the writer Rich Lowe in his last years. He departed in Florida in March 2018.
Last updated October 9, 2026
Connections
- Dennis Brown (artist)
- U-Roy (artist)
- John Holt (artist)
- I-Roy (artist)
- Alton Ellis (artist)
- Wailing Souls (artist)
- Roy Cousins (artist)
- Little Roy (artist)
- The Hippy Boys (artist)
- The Abyssinians (artist)
- Johnny "Dizzy" Moore (artist)
- The Paragons (artist)
- The Gladiators (artist)
- The Uniques (artist)
- Big Joe (artist)
- King Tubby (collaborator)
Notes
- The Rough Guide counts him among "reggae's new big hitters" and calls him a "former sound-system man, and noted builder of 'sound boxes'" responsible for "distinguished records." Steve Barrow and Peter Dalton, The Rough Guide to Reggae, 3rd ed. (London: Rough Guides, 2004), 100, 108.
- Rich Lowe, "Tubby and the Matador (Book Extract)," Sonic Street Technologies, May 5, 2025, https://sonic-street-technologies.com/tubby-and-the-matador/. Dan Polletta, "Cleveland Writer Unearths Story of Reggae Great ‘The Matador,’" Ideastream Public Media, February 7, 2020, https://www.ideastream.org/arts-culture/2020-02-07/cleveland-writer-unearths-story-of-reggae-great-the-matador.
- Polletta, "Cleveland Writer Unearths Story." Bradley lists "Lloyd the Matador (Waltham Park)" among the "local" sounds that by the 1970s were "starting to carry the swing." Lloyd Bradley, This Is Reggae Music: The Story of Jamaica's Music (New York: Grove Press, 2001), 311.
- Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 81, 100.
- Daley's own account, in Lowe, "Tubby and the Matador."
- Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 108, where the Uniques' "Secretly" is "arguably the Matador's greatest production of them all."
- Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 132, 183.
- Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 218.
- Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 128.
- Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 219, which dates the recording to March 1971 and says it was "probably mixed by the pioneering Lynford Anderson."
- Polletta, "Cleveland Writer Unearths Story."
- Lowe says only that he died in 2018. Lowe, "Tubby and the Matador." Discogs gives March 18, 2018, in Florida. "Lloyd Daley," Discogs, accessed October 6, 2026, https://www.discogs.com/artist/218014-Lloyd-Daley.
