r/REGGAE_HISTORY

This shelf alone spans roughly 30 years of Jamaican music history, from ska to rocksteady to roots reggae. From Alton Ellis to Bob Marley, and from beloved classics to super rare treasures like Haile Selassie Is the Chapel, these records tell the story of a culture, a sound, and an era.

What makes this archive even more extraordinary is that Roger did not just collect the records. He met the artists, interviewed them, and gathered the stories behind the music so he could preserve the full picture beyond the song.

For collectors, a 45 is never just a record. It is history in your hands. A label. A pressing. A version. A moment in time that somehow survived.

And this is only one shelf.

That is what makes Roger’s archive so special. It is not just a collection. It is a living map of reggae’s journey, preserved one record at a time.

History Lives in the Groove.

WARNING: 25 years of filming. Hard-drive failures. Lost footage. This documentary was made from what survived.

Long before reggae became part of mainstream culture in Europe, French artist Fluoman was already painting its history.

Born in 1952, Fluoman discovered reggae and the Rastafari movement in the 1970s, and it changed the direction of his life and his art. From that point on, Jamaica, Africa, Rastafari and the musicians carrying that message around the world became central to his work.

And Fluoman wasn’t simply observing the reggae movement from a distance.

He became deeply connected to it.

When major reggae artists passed through France, many visited his studio. Over the years, Fluoman met and worked around some of the most important figures of the music, creating concert posters, stage backdrops, album artwork and paintings that today have become increasingly difficult to find.

In August 1980, he even painted a mural at Bob Marley’s Tuff Gong studio in Jamaica.

Fluoman developed an unmistakable visual language using fluorescent acrylic paint. Under ordinary light, you see one painting. Turn on ultraviolet black light and another dimension appears: colors, contrasts and details hidden moments before suddenly come alive.

For Fluoman, the idea had a natural connection with reggae itself. Just as one riddim can produce countless versions, singers and mixes, one of his paintings could reveal different versions of itself depending on the light.

He eventually produced more than 600 fluorescent paintings, while his work expanded beyond reggae into Africa, Ethiopia, Pan-Africanism, the fight against apartheid and his own memories of the continent where he spent part of his childhood. He even collaborated with Thomas Sankara, one of the great symbols of Pan-Africanism.

Among the treasures preserved in Roger Steffens’ Reggae Archives is a fantastic original Culture concert poster designed by Fluoman for the Bataclan in Paris — another surviving piece of an extraordinary period when reggae, visual art and political consciousness were exploding together across Europe.

Artists like Fluoman remind us that reggae history isn’t preserved only on records and tapes.

It is also on walls, posters, album sleeves, canvases and in the work of the artists who helped give the music a visual identity.

History lives in the groove… and sometimes under a black light.