No one in reggae turns it out like Beres Hammond. It's not just that mellow, whiskey-grained voice working deep, sultry sex at the low end of the scale, then spiking to rapturous heights. It's not even those breathless old school "please please please" stylistics or even the huge canon of achy breaky love songs that makes the front-row dawtas scream so loud! It's the sobs at the back of his throat crowding his beatific smile, as if this tender-hearted strongman's about to break right down and cry.

Audiences have been begging this reggae legend for more since 1972, when as a teenage schoolboy, he took first prize at an amateur talent show with covers of "Perfidia" and Jerry Butler's "Need to be loved".

"The crowd said I should do them two again," Hammond recalls. "So I had to do them about three times more. I felt good. I didn't know much about the dangers of being on stage then. Now, me 'fraid!" he laughs.

Not too afraid to have created A Day In The Life, Hammond's latest release on VP Records. A Day in the Life finds reggae's ranking soul man in top form. As usual, he skirts all the cliches, instead tracking the subtle nuances of romance with rare sensitivity and insight. Opening track "Always Be There", makes a quintessentially fervent Hammond love pledge. But promises are made to be broken, as Hammond confesses in "Nothing's Gonna Change". I'm a bad boy/ a really really bad boy/ Try if you want/ 'cause nothing's going to change me," the background chorus chants in between such explanations as "I'm always in love/ love seems to find me wherever I go." It'd followed, fittingly, by "I'd Give Anything", a classic "ain't too proud to bef" Hammond regret song. Then again, "Sorry Mi Brethens" finds Hammond neing a good boy, just saying no to his running bussies: "I can't leave paradise tonight."

But Hammond's truest love is music. "I never enjoy anything in this world like making a song," he says. "Trust me. There's nothing more I enjoy than making a song. If I don't go to the studio for a day, something's wrong. It's a habit I don't think I want to quit, and, to be honest, it's the happiest time of my life."

Yet, he spent the first ten years or so of his career suffering through more false starts than a Springtime yearling race. Over and over, Hammond came within a hair's breadth od stardom, and each time, music business injustices led him to withdraw. He sang lead for Zap Pow, Jamaica's top backing band of the mid-70s, when they recorded 1975's Zap Pow Now. But the label focused on other acts, UK Band Steel Pulse and a young singer named Bob Marley. Three years later, Hammond's debut solo LP, Soul Reggae, kicked off a series of chart dominating singles, beginning with "One Step Ahead", the number one tune on Jamaica charts for four months. Another album "sold like the rest of them", says Hammond, "But no money still".

In 1985, he switched from soul to hardcore reggae and came out with the year's number one boomshot, "What One Dance Can Do." It was followed by other international reggae sensations, like "Groovy Little Thing" and "She Loves Me Now". Hammond formed his own label Harmony House, and released even more number ones, among them "Standing In The Way", "Double Trouble", and "Putting Up Resistance". After this, he lay low again, this time for three years, then returned in 1988 with "Tempted To Touch". It sparked off a chain of Hammond musical explosions that's yet to be broken.

This lastest set finds Hammond in a singularly philosophical mood. As good as his love gets, he's just as masterful when it comes to giving inspiration. "I found myself singing mostly about life, the ups and downs," he says. "I don't know why, but I tend to go along with life as it comes. So it;s just the usual BERES, BERES just lives."

"Victory" is a gem of reggae resolve, the kind of self-talk that helps listeners to keep on trodding over life's potholes. "'Victory' is one of my daily routines," says Hammond. "It has to do with every day living, the rough things you have to go through." "Let's Face It", a passionate plea for social sanity and human kindness, would have done Marvin Gaye's What's Going On materwork proud. the title track finds Beres resolved to fight for justice, his conciliatory singing tones revealing his hurt yet masking his determiniation, like a velvet glove hiding an iron fist.

In short, A Day In The Life's 16 tracks give this complex, brilliant, and exceptionally versatile artist room to stretcg out and express himself, to move back and forth between grade AA booty-knocking background selections and equally blood-heating please for a better world, one ruled by One Love.