Second Light is the second album by the British band Dreadzone

Dreadzone

Dreadzone are a British band whose music is an eclectic fusion of dub, reggae, techno, folk and rock. They have so far produced six studio albums and two live albums.-Career:...

. It was released on Virgin Records

Virgin Records

Virgin Records is a British record label founded by English entrepreneur Richard Branson, Simon Draper, and Nik Powell in 1972. The company grew to be a worldwide music phenomenon, with platinum performers such as Roy Orbison, Devo, Genesis, Keith Richards, Janet Jackson, Culture Club, Lenny...

 in 1995. John Peel

John Peel

John Robert Parker Ravenscroft, OBE , known professionally as John Peel, was an English disc jockey, radio presenter, record producer and journalist. He was the longest-serving of the original BBC Radio 1 DJs, broadcasting regularly from 1967 until his death in 2004...

 had already supported their first album, 360°, giving it heavy airplay; similarly for Second Light, which he cited as one of his favourite albums of all time, and the album was heavily represented in the Festive Fifty

Festive Fifty

The Festive Fifty was originally an annual list of the year's fifty best songs compiled at the end of the year and voted for by listeners to John Peel's BBC Radio 1 show...

 for 1995. Dreadzone tracks appeared at #5 ("Zion Youth"), #9 ("Maximum"), #16 ("Fight the Power"), #23 ("Little Britain"), #35 ("Captain Dread") and #48 ("Life, Love & Unity").

Four tracks became UK chart hits: "Zion Youth" & "Captain Dread" (both #49), "Little Britain" (#20) and "Life, Love & Unity" (#56).

Track listing

1. "Life, Love and Unity" (Williams, Roberts) (5:43)
2. "Little Britain" (5:14)
3. "A Canterbury Tale" (Roberts) (8:40)
4. "Captain Dread" (5:16)
5. "Cave of Angels" (Williams, Bran, Roberts) (6:13)
6. "Zion Youth" (6:05)
7. "One Way" (Roberts, Bran) (6:00)
8. "Shining Path" (Williams, Roberts) (7:22)
9. "Out of Heaven" (Roberts) (5:57)

Samples & influences

Greg Roberts

Greg Roberts (musician)

Greg Roberts is a British rock drummer. He was part of Big Audio Dynamite, who had a No. 11 UK hit single with 'E=MC2', from 1984–1989....

 has said in interview that

• "Life, Love and Unity" contains a sample from "Disco Dub" by Johnny Clarke
  Johnny Clarke
  Johnny Clarke , Whitfield Town, Kingston, Jamaica) is a reggae musician.-Biography:Clarke grew up in the Kingston ghetto of Whitfield Town. In 1971 he won a talent contest in Bull Bay, his prize a meeting with producer Clancy Eccles, with whom he recorded his first song, "God Made the Sea and the...
  
  . The female voices saying "hello" at the beginning of the track are sampled from Monty Python and the Holy Grail
  Monty Python and the Holy Grail
  Monty Python and the Holy Grail is a 1974 British comedy film written and performed by the comedy group Monty Python , and directed by Gilliam and Jones...
  
  
• "Little Britain" contains dialogue from Lindsay Anderson
  Lindsay Anderson
  Lindsay Gordon Anderson was an Indian-born, British feature film, theatre and documentary director, film critic, and leading light of the Free Cinema movement and the British New Wave...
  
  's film if.... of the headmaster showing off his school: "Britain today is a powerhouse of ideas, experiments, imagination"; the line "You and the land are one!" is spoken by Perceval
  Perceval
  Perceval may refer to*Spencer Perceval, British prime minister*Percival or Perceval, Arthurian knight...
  
   (Paul Geoffrey) to King Arthur
  King Arthur
  King Arthur is a legendary British leader of the late 5th and early 6th centuries, who, according to Medieval histories and romances, led the defence of Britain against Saxon invaders in the early 6th century. The details of Arthur's story are mainly composed of folklore and literary invention, and...
  
   (Nigel Terry
  Nigel Terry
  Nigel Terry is an English stage and film actor probably best known by film audiences for his portrayal of King Arthur in John Boorman's Excalibur . However, he has had a long career in classical theatre....
  
  ) in the 1981 film Excalibur
  Excalibur (film)
  Excalibur is a 1981 dramatic fantasy film directed, produced and co-written by John Boorman that retells the legend of King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table. Adapted from the 15th century Arthurian romance, Le Morte d'Arthur by Thomas Malory, Excalibur features the music of Richard Wagner...
  
  . The introductory bars are from an unidentified piece by Purcell
  Henry Purcell
  Henry Purcell – 21 November 1695), was an English organist and Baroque composer of secular and sacred music. Although Purcell incorporated Italian and French stylistic elements into his compositions, his legacy was a uniquely English form of Baroque music...
  
   while the rest of the track relies heavily on Carl Orff
  Carl Orff
  Carl Orff was a 20th-century German composer, best known for his cantata Carmina Burana . In addition to his career as a composer, Orff developed an influential method of music education for children.-Early life:...
  
  's Carmina Burana
  Carmina Burana (Orff)
  Carmina Burana is a scenic cantata composed by Carl Orff in 1935 and 1936. It is based on 24 of the poems found in the medieval collection Carmina Burana...
  
  .
• "A Canterbury Tale" features dialogue samples from Powell and Pressburger
  Powell and Pressburger
  The British film-making partnership of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, also known as The Archers, made a series of influential films in the 1940s and 1950s. In 1981 they were recognized for their contributions to British cinema with the BAFTA Academy Fellowship Award, the most prestigious...
  
  's 1944 film of the same title
  A Canterbury Tale
  A Canterbury Tale is a 1944 British film by the film-making team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. It stars Eric Portman, Sheila Sim, Dennis Price and Sgt. John Sweet; Esmond Knight provided narration and played several small roles. For the postwar American release, Raymond Massey narrated...
  
  , including "What wouldn't I give to grow old in a place like that?", spoken by Sheila Sim
  Sheila Sim
  Sheila Beryl Grant Attenborough, Lady Attenborough , known professionally by her maiden name Sheila Sim, is an English film and theatre actress and the wife of actor and director Richard Attenborough.- Career :...
  
   (as Alison Smith, while riding on a horse and cart past a large country house); the music uses extracts from Vaughan Williams' The Lark Ascending
  The Lark Ascending
  The Lark Ascending is a work by the English composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, inspired by George Meredith's 122-line poem of the same name about the skylark. The work was written in two versions: violin and piano, written in 1914; and violin and orchestra, written in 1920. The orchestral version...
  
  .
• "Captain Dread" contains samples from "The King of Ballyhooley" by Patrick Street
  Patrick Street
  Patrick Street is an Irish folk group.The band was formed in Dublin in 1986 with Kevin Burke on fiddle, Jackie Daly on button accordion, Andy Irvine on bouzouki and vocals, and Arty McGlynn on guitar...
  
   and "Bostich" by Yello
  Yello
  Yello is a Swiss electronica band consisting of Dieter Meier and Boris Blank. They are probably best known for their singles "The Race" and "Oh Yeah", which feature a mix of electronic music and manipulated vocals, as does most of their music....
  
  ; also a snatch of the song "I want to be a sailor" from the 1940 film The Thief of Bagdad
  The Thief of Bagdad (1940 film)
  The Thief of Bagdad is a 1940 British fantasy film produced by Alexander Korda, and directed by Michael Powell, Ludwig Berger, and Tim Whelan, with contributions by Korda's brothers Vincent and Zoltán, and William Cameron Menzies...
  
  : "I want to be a sailor sailing out to sea, No plowboy, tinker, tailor's any fun to be". The line "All right my hearties, follow me!" is spoken by Errol Flynn
  Errol Flynn
  Errol Leslie Flynn was an Australian-born actor. He was known for his romantic swashbuckler roles in Hollywood films, being a legend and his flamboyant lifestyle.-Early life:...
  
   in the 1935 film Captain Blood. Also featured is an extract from Derek Walcott
  Derek Walcott
  Derek Alton Walcott, OBE OCC is a Saint Lucian poet, playwright, writer and visual artist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992 and the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2011 for White Egrets. His works include the Homeric epic Omeros...
  
  's poem "The Schooner Flight":
• "Zion Youth" contains a sample from "Dread Lion" by Scratch & The Upsetters
  The Upsetters
  The Upsetters was the name given to the house band for Jamaican reggae producer Lee "Scratch" Perry. The name of the band comes from Perry's nickname of Upsetter, after his song "I Am The Upsetter", a musical dismissal of his former boss Coxsone Dodd....
  
   and dialogue from the film Rockers spoken by Leroy "Horsemouth" Wallace:
• "Shining Path": at the end of this track, the child on the beach saying "over here" is taken from the 1967 film Far from the Madding Crowd
  Far from the Madding Crowd (1967 film)
  Far from the Madding Crowd is a 1967 British drama film directed by John Schlesinger, adapted from the book of the same name by Thomas Hardy. It was Schlesinger's fourth film and marked a stylistic shift away from his earlier works which explored contemporary urban mores. The cinematography was by...
  
  .
• "Out of Heaven" contains a sample from "Before Long" by Ryuichi Sakamoto
  Ryuichi Sakamoto
  After working as a session musician with Haruomi Hosono and Yukihiro Takahashi in 1977, the trio formed the internationally successful electronic music band Yellow Magic Orchestra in 1978. Known for their seminal influence on electronic music, the group helped pioneer electronic genres such as...
  
   and an inexact extract from The Shooting of Dan McGrew
  The Shooting of Dan McGrew
  "The Shooting of Dan McGrew" is a narrative poem by Robert W. Service, first published in The Songs of a Sourdough in 1907 in Canada.The tale takes place in a Yukon saloon during the Yukon Gold Rush of the late 1890s...
  
  by Robert W. Service
  Robert W. Service
  Robert William Service was a poet and writer who has often been called "the Bard of the Yukon".Service is best known for his poems "The Shooting of Dan McGrew" and "The Cremation of Sam McGee", from his first book, Songs of a Sourdough...
  
  :

  "while high overhead, green, yellow and red, the North Lights swept in bars? Then you've a hunch what the music meant. . . hunger and night and the stars"

Personnel

• Greg Roberts
  Greg Roberts (musician)
  Greg Roberts is a British rock drummer. He was part of Big Audio Dynamite, who had a No. 11 UK hit single with 'E=MC2', from 1984–1989....
  
   - drums
  Drum kit
  A drum kit is a collection of drums, cymbals and often other percussion instruments, such as cowbells, wood blocks, triangles, chimes, or tambourines, arranged for convenient playing by a single person ....
  
  
• Tim Bran - unknown
• Leo Williams - Bass guitar
  Bass guitar
  The bass guitar is a stringed instrument played primarily with the fingers or thumb , or by using a pick....
  
  
• featuring

Dan Donovan

Dan Donovan (keyboardist)

For other people with this name, see Dan Donovan.Daniel "Dan" Donovan is a British keyboardist probably best known for being a member of Big Audio Dynamite. Following a brief stint in 1990 with The Sisters of Mercy he became a founding member of Dreadzone...

 - additional keyboards

Earl Sixteen - vocals on tracks 1 & 6

Donna McKevitt

Donna McKevitt

Donna McKevitt is an English composer based in London. She studied viola with Gustav Clarkson and voice with Linda Hirst and gained a BA Hons in music at Kingston Polytechnic....

- vocals on tracks 3 & 9; viola on track 2

• Vicky Bogal - created the stained glass window featured on the album cover
• Love, Respect and Admiration are also expressed towards a long list of friends & influences.