“Dreadlock Holiday” by 10cc

10cc went island-hopping for "Dreadlock Holiday", the reggae lead single from their 1978 album Bloody Tourists, and the song grew out of real trips, or near enough. Eric Stewart and Graham Gouldman wrote it from things that happened to Stewart and the Moody Blues' Justin Hayward in Barbados and to Gouldman in Jamaica. Stewart remembered watching a white man try far too hard to look cool, wander into a group of Afro-Caribbean men and get put firmly in his place, and a chat Gouldman had with a Jamaican about cricket handed them another line.

Storm Thorgerson directed the video, though its beach scene was filmed a long way from the Caribbean, on the Dorset coast near Charmouth. The record went all the way to number one in the UK, Belgium, New Zealand and the Netherlands.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.