“Someone Loves You Honey” by British-Jamaican singers June Lodge and Jamaican toaster Prince Mohammed (George Nooks) topped the Dutch Top 40 in the summer of 1982, staying at No. 1 for six weeks. It was the best selling single in the Netherlands that year. The song was recorded by Clive Hunt at Joe Gibbs’ studio in Kingston, Jamaica. However, on July 15, 1982, when Lodge performed the hit on the Dutch pop music TV show Toppop, Prince Mohammed was absent. Nooks now shares his side of the story, revealing that he never received any royalties for his contribution to the 1980s hit.
“We have JC Lodge’s ‘Someone Loves You Honey’—’One time daughter, one time I say, if you make up your mind,'” Nooks recalled, singing the part he toasted as Prince Mohammed. “That one went platinum, and Joe Gibbs had his name on the record as the writer. I never saw Joe Gibbs write a song, but his name was on it. ‘Someone Loves You Honey’ was Charlie Pride’s song. Then they came in, sued for everything, and I didn’t get any royalties.”
While Nooks mistakenly refers to the song as American singer and guitarist Charley Pride’s original, it was actually written by Don Devaney and first released by Johnny Rodriguez in 1974. Pride recorded his version in 1978 for RCA Records, making it a No. 1 hit on the U.S. country charts in April that year, which eventually made its way to Clive Hunt, who was working with June Lodge in the early 1980s.
Lodge showed up in Netherlands for the Toppop performance, without Prince Mohammed which created a problem for the show. The TV show team devised a creative solution: enlisting Patrice Tan, the older brother of AVRO TV presenter Humberto Tan, to stand in for Nooks. Patrice Tan pulled off the role smoothly, sitting casually on the floor until it was time for Prince Mohammed’s part, then rising to deliver the toasting lyrics with confidence.
Nooks recalls being in Jamaica when he found out about the TV performance. “I get to understand that they made a video with JC Lodge and someone else,” he said. “If you look at the video online, you’ll see it’s not me. I was dealt with wickedly on that one.”
That video, featuring Patrice Tan standing in for Prince Mohammed, remains the most popular version of the song, amassing over 6 million views on YouTube. Nooks, however, dismissed the explanation for his absence: “They claimed JC Lodge was in Europe with the company, and they couldn’t find me, which is a joke.
Clive Hunt, who Nooks is currently working with, explained two years ago on I Never Knew TV that the other musicians who worked on the track did not get paid either. “No one ever get paid for that (‘Someone Loves You Honey’) enuh because they were working for me, and they never did it for nothing. We were working on Joe Gibbs’ studio time and on Joe Gibbs’ tape,” he explained.
He further added that he was there when Gibbs was sued for the track after putting his name as the writer on the record. “Till one day I was in Miami, in Opa-locka, at Joe Gibbs’ place when the sheriff—black sheriff—came and called him outside with a big yellow tape and said, ‘Man, I am ashamed of you.’ Because they had sued him over the song. What he always did—and what a lot of them used to do, and some of them still do—is if I produce a song and walk away, a man just puts his name on it, ‘written by him.’ It was marked produced by Joe Gibbs, written by Joe Gibbs, when he wasn’t even in the place,” Hunt relayed.
“I was able to see the sheriff come and lock down the whole building…. And I ended up working, producing Charley Pride and his son a few years later,” he added.
Hunt also said that Charley came to Jamaica and told the story of the true origins of the lyrics in St. Ann, at what is now Irie FM.
“Charley sat down and told the story of the song, saying it wasn’t his song either. He got it from a man in Canada,” Hunt recalled.
