World of Jamaican Music

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An illustrated map of the creators of Jamaican music and how they are connected.

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Tappa Zukie

Artist. Reggae, dub, dancehall

Active
1973-present
Sunrise
1955, Kingston
Also known as
Tapper Zukie, David Sinclair

Tappa Zukie, born David Sinclair in Kingston, is a deejay whose "MPLA" was a smash hit of the roots era and who proved, on his own Stars label, a fine producer of other people's records. "Tapper" was a family name for him, after he was caught stealing milk as a boy, and the Zukies were the gang of younger boys who followed him around.

Out of a broken home, he was taking the microphone at political rallies and on small sounds in Greenwich Town while still a child, and as a teenager was drawn into the political violence of western Kingston. At seventeen his mother, his brother and Bunny Lee sent him to England to get him away from it. Lee introduced him at a U-Roy show in London, and he cut the album Man Ah Warrior there for the British producer Clement Bushay.

Back in Jamaica in 1975 he worked as Bunny Lee's bodyguard and only occasionally got to voice at King Tubby's, since Lee was not convinced by him. Jah Stitch remembered one such chance, at a deejay night Lee held at Tubby's, when another deejay froze on a riddim called "Guiding Star" and Zukie stepped up with "Jah is your guiding star." After an argument with Lee he set up the Stars label, largely with Lee's riddims. "MPLA," its title taken from the Angolan liberation movement and voiced over a riddim the Revolutionaries also cut as an instrumental, was a hit in Jamaica and, from the summer of 1976, in Britain. Patti Smith championed him: she reissued Man Ah Warrior on her own label and took him on tour as her opening act, which led to a contract with Virgin's Front Line label. "She Want a Phensic" and "Oh Lord" were his most successful records in Jamaica, and he also voiced Yabby You's "Jah Vengeance" riddim as "Natty Dread on the Mountain Top."

As a producer he recorded singers from Greenwich Farm, notably Junior Ross and the Spear and Prince Alla, whose "Bosrah" he cut at the Black Ark with Lee Perry engineering, as well as Horace Andy, Errol Dunkley and the group Knowledge. Tappa Zukie in Dub, mixed by Phillip Smart at Tubby's in 1976 and pressed in a few hundred copies, became a collector's piece. He used his Virgin money to build a community center and a home for the elderly in Trench Town, then broke with the company. In the 1980s and 1990s he produced dancehall records, including Gregory Isaacs's "Hard Drugs" and Beres Hammond's "Putting Up Resistance," and ran a record-pressing plant.

Last updated October 23, 2026

Connections

Notes

  1. Steve Barrow and Peter Dalton, The Rough Guide to Reggae, 3rd ed. (London: Rough Guides, 2004), 165 (birth name, year and place), 235 ("just how fine a producer Tappa was"). The Rough Guide also thinks his reputation as a deejay "overinflated." Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 195.
  2. His own account in David Katz, "Man Ah Warrior: The Tappa Zukie Story," Red Bull Music Academy Daily, May 4, 2015, https://daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/2015/05/tappa-zukie-feature/.
  3. Katz, "Man Ah Warrior." Katz reports that Zukie was an "enforcer" for both of Jamaica's political parties, citing Chris Salewicz's Rude Boy.
  4. Katz, "Man Ah Warrior." Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 193.
  5. Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 193-94. Zukie himself says he "enforce[d] artists to record for" Lee. Katz, "Man Ah Warrior."
  6. Jah Stitch's account in Lloyd Bradley, This Is Reggae Music: The Story of Jamaica's Music (New York: Grove Press, 2001), 303. Stitch dates the night to 1974; the Rough Guide dates Zukie's return from England to 1975. Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 193.
  7. Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 194.
  8. Bradley calls "MPLA" a "smash hit" and sets it against the Manley government's Cuban ties and Jamaica's 1975 economic crisis. Bradley, This Is Reggae Music, 460. On the Revolutionaries' instrumental of the same rhythm: Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 229. On Britain: Katz, "Man Ah Warrior."
  9. Katz, "Man Ah Warrior." The Rough Guide credits "the patronage of Patti Smith" for his reputation in the late 1970s. Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 195.
  10. Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 165, 194, 195. Bradley names "MPLA" and "She Want a Phensic" as "the two most enduring examples" of his style. Bradley, This Is Reggae Music, 304.
  11. Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 194, 235. On "Bosrah" at the Black Ark: Katz, "Man Ah Warrior."
  12. Barrow and Dalton, Rough Guide to Reggae, 234, 235.
  13. Katz, "Man Ah Warrior."
  14. Katz, "Man Ah Warrior."

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