I Hear A New World

Reggae and particularly dub music have played such a rich part in my life that they feel like old friends, fellow travellers to place next to Philip K Dick and Charles M Schulz and that great US sitcom Barney Miller.

Friends that you don’t write to for ages, because you know they’ll still be there for you years later when you choose to reconnect. In the meantime there are other less solid relationships that require your attention.

If I had to trace it back to a specific point in time (although there is rarely a specific point in time, love at first sight etc.), then it would be Christmas 1980. The Clash had just released Sandinista!, their triple album masterpiece (or ultimate act of self-indulgence – you could pick sides back then) and I’m guessing it had come back to Southend with its owner (my brother) and become the currency of the season.

It sprawled. It grabbed your attention. Not just the music – so much of it, so varied and so loose – but the accompanying tri-fold lyric sheet with cartoons by Steve Bell, which in itself was a world in which you could lose yourself. I was fifteen years old and my own record collection at this stage would have been modest to say the least. Sandinista! held a place in my heart, cemented by the time I came across it.

The Clash had championed reggae music, jazz, soul and a myriad other influences throughout their career, but here in the space enabled by six sides of vinyl they could really express themselves. Legendary Jamaican DJ and producer Mikey Dread got to remix several tracks. The paw prints of dub were all over the record, bursting out of unexpected corners.

At the same time I would’ve been a keen listener to John Peel and his shows were to open up a whole raft of new experiences. At the top were Misty in Roots (a personal Peel fav) who recorded numerous sessions for his show and whose Live at the Counter Eurovision was the bible of choice for devotees of the reggae genre. The Ruts were a punk band who got their break through Misty’s own label and who fused punk and dub in a way few outside The Clash had done to such heights.

But there was also a seemingly exhaustive list of old and new names to absorb. The Wailing Souls. Natural Ites. Culture. Mighty Diamonds. Lee Perry. Phyllis Dillon.

The big breakthrough for me came with the release of a compilation album called Pay It All Back. It was marketed at 99p (at the time the standard price for an album was probably £4.99). There’d been a very successful compilation similarly marketed by Cherry Red records called Pillows and Prayers – this is also worth discovering, although it catered to wispy, lo-fi indie bands and solo performers. Clearly the people behind Pay It All Back had witnessed the traction that Cherry Red had got from that cut price release.

Pay It All Back was the brainchild of On-U-Sound records and On-U-Sound records were the brainchild of Adrian Sherwood. Adrian Sherwood was (at that time) a young, white guy from east London. He was an unlikely candidate to be at the forefront of Jamaican dub music. But reggae music had emigrated to the UK alongside the West Indians encouraged over here to fill vacancies in post war Britain.

But this is not a history lesson. I struggled to grade C at O-level history, so I’ll leave that to someone better qualified to talk about.

Pay It All Back was great. It was worth every one of those ninety-nine pennies. It opened me up to the world of On-U-Sound and over the coming years I searched restlessly to buy up as much of their vast back catalogue as I could find. In true Jamaican style, bands on the label often shared some of the same personnel and tracks would be passed around between different projects, shifted and shaped into different forms by Adrian Sherwood from behind the mixing desk.

A further mark of multiculturalism came from the cross pollination between UK musicians from the punk era – Ari Up from The Slits, Gareth Sager from The Pop Group etc. – and established reggae stars such as drummer Style Scott, singer Bim Sherman and the legendary Prince Far I.

Bands on those early On-U-Sound rosters included New Age Steppers, Creation Rebel, Dub Syndicate, African Head Charge. The music ranged from traditional reggae to dub to more experimental fusions, ambient music and more. Although the back catalogue is filled with classics and more obscure gems, the high water mark for me was the first four albums from Singers & Players, considered back then as a sort of dub music supergroup. Key contributors to these records included Bim Sherman, Prince Far I, Mikey Dread and members from bands like the Congos and Burning Spear. I wouldn’t care to single out any one of those albums, you just need to hear them all.

There are a few bumps and turns in the On-U-Sound story. Before the label came into existence, Adrian Sherwood had been involved on a range of records with Prince Far I and his backing band at the time (Creation Rebel). It was this close relationship that was at the heart of everything On-U-Sound did. But Jamaica was sometimes a violent place and musical rivalries were often more serious than you might think and politics was also intertwined in everything that was going on.

Prince Far I was shot and killed in 1983 in a robbery that was allegedly related to a dispute over money. It brought an abrupt and tragic end to On-U-Sound’s predominantly dub and reggae output. A lot of the in house musicians remained, but the musical output slowly transitioned towards hip hop and more industrial soundscapes.

1983 was also the age when digital technology was starting to take its grip on the music industry. Records On-U-Sound released from 1984 and beyond were often incendiary, radical, influential on groups that were to flourish a decade later (such as Massive Attack), but they also had a more brittle sound to them. Dub music thrives in the spaces left between the instrumentation, these new records were busy and clattering, urgent and relentless. Some elements of dub were still in the DNA but it was a distinct (if understandable) shift in tone.

I didn’t lose faith in On-U-Sound, I still bought a lot of the records that were released, but I didn’t love them in quite the same way I loved all those earlier albums. There were five Singers & Players albums in total, but the fifth volume didn’t appear until 1988 (a long gap from the original quartet that had been released over four consecutive years at the start of the decade).

On a broader scale, the 1970s were the decade where dub and reggae hit the heights. The list of great artists, legendary producers and standout bands would be endless. The music influenced so much of what came through punk, new wave and electronic music in the UK from 1977 onwards. It also bred a whole slew of homegrown bands such as Misty, Steel Pulse,  Aswad, Black Slate etc. Bristol had Revelation Rockers, Bunny Marrett, Big Roy and others – those sounds helped to influence The Pop Group, Maximum Joy, Rip Rig & Panic, and bred a lot of what was to come from Massive Attack and others when Bristol dominated the music scene in the 1990s.

If you start down the rabbit hole on YouTube you could lose days, weeks or even months of your life hopping from one part of the scene to another and another and another. Keith Hudson (a personal favourite of Joy Division’s Ian Curtis). Dennis Bovell (producer of both The Slits and The Pop Group’s debut albums). Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry. Augustus Pablo. The Mighty Diamonds. Culture. Gregory Isaacs.

You can read about all the music and all the characters involved elsewhere. There are loads of interesting documentaries that cover this scene. Even unlikely figures like The Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart plays a part in Studio 17: The Lost Reggae Tapes a documentary that gives a good flavour for what was happening back in Kingston, Jamaica in the 1970s.

On-U-Sound considered their music to be futuristic – each album would be credited as having been created a decade later than its actual release date. In retrospect that seems like a lack of ambition. They weren’t ahead of the curve, they were beyond the curve. And the best dub music is timeless. It’s trademark echoes and delays, weird clangs and whooshes, and distant vocal samples, make it sound like something beamed back to us from outer space. These were the hallmarks that drew me to the genre – alongside the effortlessness of the music, the richness of its tone and the sense that it was a living, organic thing that could evolve each time you gave yourself up to it.

 

A Random Selection of Reggae, Dub and Dub related music

Misty in Roots – Live At The Counter Eurovision

The Wailing Souls – Inchpinchers

Denis Bovell – Sufferer Sounds

Creation Rebel – Starship Africa

Prince Far I – Cry Tuff Dub Encounter Chapter 1

Lee Perry – Open the Gate

Keith Hudson – Pick a Dub

Jah Lion – Colombia Colly

Scientist – Scientist Meets the Space Invaders

Seefeel – Quique