As we approached the Number One Gate at Kindley Field, close to midnight on the eve of the first day of Cup Match, two armoured jeeps and a White Maria roared across the bridge and swung through the gate.

In the vehicles were police officers, swathed in Kevlar, carrying guns. This was the Police Armed Response unit, on its second visit of the day to the Wailers and Skatalites concert.

Inside the gate, one?s very worst fears were confirmed. The unit was not responding at all; it was merely throwing its weight around. Only God and the Minister of Finance know what it cost the rest of us to have this brave bunch of men, who are exactly what is needed when the chips are down, flying around Bermuda interrupting people when the chips were potato.

Their presence, it will be argued, was necessary because of what had transpired at Horseshoe Bay prior to the scheduled London/Kingston DJ clash: the discovery of a cache of machetes and other weapons buried in the sand, in anticipation of a spot of communal bloodletting during the event.

But Wednesday night?s concert was a different crowd, and a more placid audience could not have been imagined. Alcohol was not for sale. The average age of those present was probably about 40.

To give you the executive summary of the show: everyone had a great time. The crowd was sparser than one might have wished, but all the performers, local and foreign, acquitted themselves well.

Those who did attend ? about 50/50 black and white, and a similar ratio of younger fans and older hands ? behaved impeccably, although a little more enthusiasm would not have gone amiss.

Now the complete report.

The Bermudian acts appeared first, as is usually the case. With Jahstice lined up across the stage in a tent the size of City Hall, the locals marched on, did a couple of songs or three, and marched off.

Jahstice played their own set, too. The band is a Bermudian institution, and retains its ability to impress as personnel come and go.

To be honest, I listened to this part of the show from afar, letting the sounds of summer drift across Ferry Reach to God?s country. I am thus ill-equipped to provide specifics.

The charge that local reviewers never show up until the big names are on is usually an outrageous slander in my case, but on Wednesday, for once, it was true.

Sources within the tent tell me that everyone performed with distinction. They were, in an order of which I am uncertain: Flookie, Squinty, Daddy Wild, Mango Seed and Blac.

A memo to whoever it was that I promised to interview, but was then unable to find: e-mail or call me and I will see if I can have the 15-minute spotlight turned on for you.

It is a little absurd to describe the headliners at Wednesday?s show, the Wailers and the Skatalites, as foreign. That is exactly what they are not, to anyone who has listened to popular music in the last four decades.

The songs the Wailers performed, for instance, are as familiar as the back of one?s hand. And of lead singer Gary Pine, it could truly be said that he sounds just like Bob Marley.

That made the 11-piece band?s performance bittersweet. The more they sounded like Bob Marley and the Wailers ? on ?Stir It Up?, for instance, they essentially replicated their exalted forebears ? the more you enjoyed it and simultaneously ached for the presence of the real thing. Despite the presence of Aston (Family Man) Barrett, Al Anderson and Earl (Wya) Lindo, this was the Wailers redux: an excellent band, playing excellent songs, through an excellent sound system, just one heartbreak shy of perfection.

The Wailers were preceded onstage by the Skatalites, who are akin to the founding uncles of reggae music through their tireless devotion to a predecessor form, ska.

Other than ?sex?, there is no more exciting three-letter word in the English language or the Jamaican argot than ?ska?.

Calypso, rock steady, ska, reggae, dancehall: although it was never that clear-cut, such is the order in which the dominant forms of Jamaican music evolved before, like most other popular forms, it stopped dead in its tracks a few years ago. Jamaicans barely see it that way, preferring to think of their musical contribution as a continuum.

Lester Stirling and Lloyd Knibb were part of that continuum, in the original Skatalites? line-up when the band was formed in June 1964.

They were still there on Wednesday night. Both must be of pensionable age, as was evident when the band moved from backstage to the front of the house.

Often, performers dash up the stairs and on, adrenaline pumping, but a few of the Skatalites shuffled gently towards the proscenium.

No matter: onstage, with the traditional introductory countdown completed (twice), their fingers and sensibilities were as nimble and finely-tuned as ever.

Their magic exists in the flowing counterpoint between the three brass instruments, two saxophones and a trumpet.

It hasn?t changed since it was first heard by Clement Seymour (Coxson) Dodd, the great Jamaican producer who was the band?s first one-man road crew. Rumour has it that the Honourable P.J. Patterson, Prime Minister of Jamaica, managed the band at one point.

From the opening beats of ?The Freedom Song?, the first tune the Skatalites delivered in their 90-minute set, here was the true sound of an original art form. They are today an instrumental six-piece.

Doreen Shaefer joined in after a while, another original Skatalite, and an accomplished vocalist who paid musical tribute to several of her peers with a series of cover versions of much-loved ska songs.

I doubt that the woman onstage on Wednesday could have been performing in 1964, because she looked much too young, but then I spent a part of the evening with a Bermudian woman whom I had taken for a teenager, only to discover that her daughter will be 24 next birthday.

Another confession: this is the music I grew up listening to. Not at home ? God forbid! ? but in the bars of Soho, in the seedy centre of London.

At the age of 15, I began haunting such places, ostensibly out studying, but instead soaking up every ska beat, every reggae intonation, on records being brought into Britain from Jamaica.

The clubs were essentially for black people, but in my unprepossessing youth, I was never taken for anything more than an oddity. I wasn?t there for the girls, which would have seen me shivved up in no time flat, but for the music.

In the near total darkness that passed for atmosphere in those clubs, as the music reverberated, we were all the same colour, anyway.

When the lights went on, people were revealed to be busy enjoying more basic pursuits than worrying about me. I can?t say I ever became part of the scene ? monumentally uncool, then as now ? but the scene became a part of me.

To this day, my heart beats to a ska riddim, which may be why I found loitering with intent last Wednesday so satisfying, down deep in what passes for my soul.

Of the sound system, a few words are in order. Jonathan (Stalk) Trott?s Spanish Town sound systems have graced this island for as long as I can remember.

Stalk is as good as Bermuda gets, both personally and technically. The sound on Wednesday was crisp, and exactly loud enough, without being too loud. (Airline passengers arriving on the runway just behind us might have felt otherwise.)

It is customary at such events to turn all the knobs up to 11. What Spanish Town did was to run them at about nine, providing maximum clarity with minimal distortion.

Stalk, who calmly and quietly belies the notion that there are no black Bermudian role models, runs the technical side of Spanish Town.

Glenn Doers runs the operational side. On Wednesday, the entire eight-hour show unfolded without a single hitch, which can only mean that Mr. Doers is as good at what he does as Stalk is at his end of the business.

If Bermuda were ever to change its motto, from the laissez-faire Quo Belco Ferunt, it might do worse than become the Show Me Nation.

Bermudians expect of their concerts a thorough degree of professional organisation, and of local and international performers, nothing less than the best show imaginable.

Last Wednesday night, as the great Cup Match hiatus yawned before us, there was no disappointment on either count.