Entertainment

Goring for 'Gold' - VP talks Reggae Gold

By TEINO EVANS, Staff Reporter

James Goring - contributed

The following interview is in keeping with the Star/Reggae Gold artiste of the month feature. Today The Star talks to Senior products Manager of VP Records, James Goring.

THE 'REGGAE GOLD' compilation CD, produced by VP Records, is among the hottest selling compilation CDs to drop each summer and caters to hardcore dancehall fans.

According to James Goring, senior products manager at VP Records, the product which was formed as a filler for their 'Strictly The Best' compilations released in the fall, has now grown into one of VP's biggest-selling products.

Goring, who is a part of the main driving force behind the Reggae Gold compilation CD, says it was only coincidence that he had joined the VP family the same year that the Reggae Gold Compilation came into being.

"Reggae Gold incidentally started the same year that I started working at VP in 1993," Goring said.

Summer best

"David Sanguinity had the idea. We used to put out Strictly The Best in the fall and David was like why don't we put out a compilation of the songs that we had left over from Strictly the Best and drop it in the summer because these songs would be too old for the next fall," Goring explained.

The Reggae Gold product has developed and come into its own, and as Goring points out, with each of the 13 years since the compilation has been released, the product gets significantly better the following year.

"The compilation has, over the years, become our best-selling product and has attracted people who are not necessarily reggae fanatics, as it would be the only reggae CD that they buy for the year," Goring said.

Reggae Gold has even become the launching pad for some of reggae's biggest names, like Sean Paul, Beenie Man, Kevin Lyttle and others.

In the 13 years since its inception, Reggae Gold has set a high musical standard for reggae compilations with an exciting mix of established and breaking hits. The annual round-up of dancehall, roots and culture and lover's rock styles has consistently earned the Reggae Gold series best seller status on the Billboard Top Reggae Chart, with sales of Reggae Gold 2003 exceeding 300,000 units in America.

As with any compilation CD, it can prove quite a tedious task when it comes on to the selection of songs for the compilation, and especially in cases where dozens of high-quality songs are churned out by artistes, the selection process may not be so easy.

Goring, however, says they try to spot songs that have the greatest potential to cross over.

"We try to get the songs that have potential to cross over. The people we have to market Reggae Gold to is not just the Caribbean but also the mainstream. So for example, King Of The Dancehall by Beenie Man, people might say its old, but it could still be relatively new for us (on the international market)," Goring explained.

Overwhelming support

Goring says the support for Reggae Gold has been overwhelming, and more so in the U.S, where the compilation is rated highly.

"In the U.S. specifically, we get a lot of support from them, like from New York and Connecticut.

"The American equivalent to Reggae Gold would be Now That's What I Call Music. I think Now and these types of compilations actually looked at reggae compilations and modelled them, not the other way around," he said.