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Dennis Bovell
CHOOSING a starting point was really a matter of reverse-engineering the music I spent my formative years hearing. There can't be any one origin for UK bass culture, with its roots spread into many thousands of life stories. But over the years, I've come to imagine a kind of year zero for the British hybridity I fell for as a teenager. As the genres splintered and cascaded in the 90s, I was working backwards in my tastes, learning about the 80s warehouse parties pre-acid house, and before them post-punk. And as I did this, elements in all the UK sounds I loved fell bit-by-bit into relief: the 808s of electro and street soul, the breakbeats and absurdist samplism of hip hop, the deep diggers’ knowledge of disco and rare groove, that industrial-psychedelic urge to wring the most brain-twisting sounds out of whatever technology was available – and of course the earthquake bass of reggae/dub/dancehall.
And if there was one person this all joined up around, it was Dennis Bovell. Others had claim to being crucial connectors: Don Letts playing roots and dub to the punks at the Roxy, The Clash hiring New York graffiti writer Futura 2000 to paint behind them on stage, PiL, Killing Joke, This Heat, Scritti Politti, the Two-Tone axis all brought key elements together. But Bovell did it ALL. By the time punk arrived, he'd already had no small success with soundsystems and with his reggae band Matumbi – but it was as a jobbing producer that he started really changing things. From the most abrasive experimentation to the slickest pop, he never compromised on the value of what he was working with, and as a natural connector of people, he allowed all the scenes and sounds he was around to flow into one another. This moment, around 1978-79 – when Bovell was bringing dub's studio technique into punk recording, and at the same moment creating that distinctly British hybrid, the reggae-soul fusion of lovers rock – stood out as the start of so much that I was obsessed with.
My own most vivid memory of Bovell's music is both ridiculous and sublime. I had just cued up the first record for my afternoon DJ set – at the closing party of a semi-legal London speakeasy – when UK house legends Terry Farley and Rocky (aka Darren Rock, of X-Press 2 and Rocky & Diesel) arrived, families in tow, plonked themselves down at a table right in front of the decks. Both are DJs, both are musicians whose music I had raved to and played many times over many years – but I'd never met either and this sent me into a fit of major nerves. Oh well. I hit play on Janet Kay's ‘Silly Games’ – and instantly Rocky began lipsyncing perfectly every word, singing it to his kids in full showbiz / club singer mode as if serenading them, to their amused embarrassment.
It certainly broke the ice for me, but there was much more to it than just a bit of foolishness. Rocky is a classic house music geezer, but before that he and Farley are both London soulboys incarnate. The way both bobbed and swayed so naturally to the song was testament to its place in the fabric of British club culture – to how much lovers rock overlapped into late 70s and early 80s soulboy culture, which in turn did so much for British house and rave. But then ‘Silly Games’ is a perfect record: the perfect nexus between Caribbean, British and American sensibilities, between underground and mainstream (it was a number 2 hit in 1979). It's a brilliant mix of lethal abstraction and relatable humanity. And Bovell wrote and produced the whole thing.
Nor can you pin him down to one record or sound. From Matumbi to The Slits, Linton Kewsi Johnson to Ryuichi Sakamoto, Bananarama to The Arcade Fire, Bovell, as one of the most important British-based reggae/dub producers and musicians, has also crossed over into every corner of the music industry. And while many dub producers of his generation tend to the gnomic or mystical in conversation, Bovell is a raconteur for the ages, genial and funny, his resonant voice broadly South London with that uncanny hint of a West Country twang from his Bajan upbringing. He's very much a man about town these days, playing regularly on Soho Radio, picking and choosing interesting projects like Golden Teacher and The Beta Band's Steve Mason, in between straight-up dub projects. After showing us round his mate's record shop in Tottenham – where he reminded us about Jamaicans’ love for country and western – he was about the easiest interviewee it's possible to imagine. Any given question produced a torrent of pertinent history and anecdote.
So Dennis, where were you born?
Barbados, in a village called Rose Hill: it's in the north, in the parish of St Beecher. The longest-serving Prime Minister to date grew up there. In fact his parents were friends with my grandparents and we went to the same school.
Do you remember much of being there?
Yeah, of course. It was typically Caribbean, so the drive was to become educated – so you could go out in the world with some knowledge, and become whatever you wanted to be. And of course the music: I grew up listening to The Mighty Sparrow, Ray Charles, The Drifters, Ben E King, Sam Cooke. There was a local band called The Merrymen. In 1958, my mother's eldest brother went to join my granddad's brother, who had gone to Jamaica to teach cricket, a cricketer called George Headley1. My mum's brother studied at the University of the West Indies and became a professor of mathematics, he taught in Brock University in Ontario in Canada for some 40 years. And his younger brother followed in his footsteps, did science in Jamaica: he was professor Oliver Headley, who is connected with the invention of the solar panel. So we had quite close ties with Jamaica. And we were fortunate enough to have a record player. When my uncles came home for summer holidays, they'd bring this collection of records: Tommy McCook, The Skatalites, the Skatalites’ singer from Barbados, who was called Jackie Opel. He died early in the 60s in a car-crash, but he was very dynamic. I remember Bob Marley saying that he idolised Jackie Opel, saying he would have liked to have been that dynamic. So Jackie Opel was the connection that Barbados had with ska – so we had this big love of ska. And then aged 12 – when I was forced to join my parents, who were living in the UK – I had just learned to start playing the guitar. And when I first got here I was immersed in the pop culture. Being one of three-four black kids in that year, I naturally heard the other kids’ music.
Whereabouts was this?
This was in Wandsworth – and there were kids at school my age who had guitars and amplifiers and they were Small Faces fans. They had this group called Roadworks Ahead, and they were looking for a guitar player and singer, and I thought, “Yeah OK, that's me”. So at 13, we were doing 1910 Fruit Gum Company, ‘Simple Simon’ – “put your hands in the air / Simple Simon.” And then I moved on to things like BB King and all the hippy music, the blues, the Stones, the Who and whatever…
Did the musical connection come naturally?
The thing is, my Dad had a soundsystem – he had all the latest Jamaican pre-release records, and the latest r’n’b from America: like Otis Redding, The Supremes, The Four Tops, Wilson Pickett, and also Desmond Dekker, Toots and The Maytals, Byron Lee and The Dragonaires. And the Mighty Sparrow, so it was quite a melting pot. But I decided that I wanted to be a Hendrix fan. Hendrix was my idol.
He's super-familiar now from exposure – everyone recognises Hendrix instantly – but it must have been pretty mindblowing to see him on the TV for the first time
Yeah and hearing the way he played the guitar, it was like WOW. I remember a friend saying to me “Eric Clapton would never be able to do that” [laughs]. Right? And of course I was a Clapton and a Jeff Beck fan, but when I saw Jimi I was like “Uh uh.” So later on I was working as a sound engineer in Eve Studios in Brockley, run by this old guy, Dennis Harris. I used to play bass guitar on sessions, but in Matumbi I was a guitar player. So Dennis Harris said to me, “I think you're a great bass player but your guitar playing sucks. I know this kid who plays the guitar and he would wipe the floor with you”. So I said “Who is this kid? Bring him and let's see how good he is”, because I thought I was pretty good. And he went “Yeah OK, I'll bring him down”. So, he brought the guy down, he plugged in and started playing, and I was like “Bloody hell!” So, I said to the guy, “Let's form a band. You play guitar and I'll play bass.” That was John Kpiaye – and that was the beginning of the Dub Band. We started working on songs for young ladies in reggae. Reggae was male dominated – it still is to an extent – and there were not that many female featured vocalists. I mean OK we could name loads – Marcia Griffiths, Judy Mowatt, Rita Marley, Phyllis Dillon, Lorna Bennett – but in England, there was far less. Lots of club singers, but of recording stature, very, very few: Christine Joy White, Norma White, very few. But in our younger generation I knew that there were girls that could sing their face off – but they were shy. But once I'd written and recorded this tune that required a really high note to sing, and once I'd found a singer that could do it, Janet Kay, suddenly the myth was broken that reggae music could not be made in the UK successfully or that a young girl couldn't front a reggae outfit. With that one song, I dispelled both myths. But I wasn't prepared for its popularity.
‘Silly Games’ was a turning point in many senses. But can we talk about influences, and how you found yourself in studios. You'd played in a rock and roll band, you were into Hendrix – were you going to soundsystem parties?
At one point I became the DJ of a soundsystem, called Sufferers Hi Fi. So what happened was a recording studio had been built at school for the English department to record sound-effects for plays. I was fortunate enough to be one of the aficionados, and had other ideas – about turning it into somewhere you could record music. And I started to do that on the quiet, experiments in the studio making dubplates. And the first dubplate I made, I basically sampled a track. This is when reggae appeared with the version on the other side: no vocals, just the music. I had the idea to snatch a section of the music from a very popular record – Bob and Marcia, ‘Young Gifted and Black’, it was number one. I snatched a couple for chords, made a loop and spun it on the reel-to-reel to last for three or four minutes, then recorded it on another recording. Then when I got one of the teachers, who played trombone and flute, to do a version of ‘Guantanamera’, and sold it for three quid to a soundsystem called Jim Daddy. One night we went to a blues dance, and I said [goofy voice] “look I got a dubplate here,” except in those days we used to call it a wax. [Goofy voice again] “Here Mister Selector, I've got a wax here!” [laughs heartily].
So you actually had it cut?
Oh yeah, I had it cut and transferred to disc. Because that was another thing I was interested in. I used to go to R.G. Jones in Wimbledon, which was the only place I knew that had transcription services, so you could transfer a piece of music to disc. Before that, at Battersea Park in the funfair, my dad used to make Christmas greetings on a floppy disc [i.e. a flexidisc]. There was a booth you could go and say or sing what you wanted, and you would get a little disc at the end. The Beatles released that tune ‘Money’ on a floppy disk, so that was a way to record the voice – but to record the music you needed to have something to play it back. So I went to Jones's to do that. And when he jacked it in, I found a guy in Barnes in the Yellow Pages, called John Hassell. He had a German lathe in his front room.
Ahh you've spoken about this before in interviews: he worked with his wife
Yeah THE John Hassell. He took me on as a youth, he taught me a lot about frequencies and what can transfer from tape to disc. Which was a tricky thing, you had to learn the limitations you know? I'm very grateful to him for that. So I'd been cutting these dubplates – and then I met an old friend from school who said: “Hey, we're building a soundsystem and I heard that you got all these dubplates. Can I come and listen to your selections and see if I wanna buy a few?” And he came around, and to my amazement, every dub I played he's going: “Yeah I'll have that, yeah I'll have that as well”. I was like; “Mate, who's gonna play this music? If I'm the DJ you won't have to buy the music. I'll chuck that in as my share of the soundsystem.”
So you're still at school at this moment? Had music become your ambition and just taken over?
I worked it out that my dad had gone to my grandad's house to learn music – and met my mum, and the first tune they made was me [laughs]. I was the first production. So I figured, well, it's music, I wanna be a musician. My dad's like: “Oh you'll never eat a decent meal. All the musicians I know are broke by the time they hit 70! They make good music but they've all been ripped off”. I'm going: “Dad, I wanna change things,” and he was like, “Yeah? You and whose army?” He wanted to disarm me: “Get a proper job and do music as a hobby.” And I said: “NO! You can't do that? If you wanna do music then you really gotta go the whole hog. Make a few sacrifices.” And he's going: “Alright then, but on your head be it, off you go”. So, I then became the DJ of this soundsystem, which afforded me all the new releases coming from Jamaica. As well as being in a group, Matumbi, who were then the designated backing band for visiting Jamaican artists: Pat Kelly, Ken Boothe, Derrick Morgan, Nicky Thomas, Johnny Clark, I-Roy. As a musician I was rubbing shoulders with these guys, as a sound engineer I was recording Matumbi, Janet Kay, as a soundsystem operator, I'm playing the latest Burning Spear dubs, Big Youth, all the happening stuff from Jamaica.
What sort of dances?
Big raves, I think in excess of 800-1000 nightly. We had a residency at Landsdowne in Stockwell on a Sunday night at a youth club, 7-11, but if you weren't there by 7.20 you couldn't get in because the queue would be around the corner from 5.30.
And what kind of audience? Majority black? Mixed?
Majority black, but there were some white kids there too, you know? And they were mainly girls. From that we got a residency on a Friday night in Ladbroke Groove. It was practically unheard of that a sound from the South would have a residency in the North West, because of territory. If you come from Brixton, you play in Brixton – maybe once in a while to Ladbroke Groove, but don't make a habit of it [laughs]. Do you know what I mean? And the South London boys were like “OK, so you got a sound in Ladbroke Grove, you stay there.” Every Saturday night you'd have blues dances, but no one in Wandsworth was gonna book a system from Ladbroke Grove to play at a party in Battersea, you'd hire a Battersea sound. At a stretch from Brixton or Balham. Never from bloody Finsbury Park. Because they were so heavy on territory.
So my soundsystem set out to break that down. We had a residency in the South and the North West, then one in the West End. We'd play at the Four Aces Club in Balls Pond Road, and then we'd do shows in Birmingham, Manchester, Gloucester, Swansea, places like that. And because the name Matumbi was linked to the name of Sufferers Sound, I would go with the band somewhere and someone would go “Ere are you connected to Sufferers sound? We wanna book them for something!”
What did you think of punk when it all went off?
The very first time Matumbi played at the 100 Club, I met this guy called John Lydon. And after that, he'd hang out – I remember him coming into our dressing room one day and drinking all the beer while we were all on stage. After the gig, he's lying on the floor. And someone wants to toe his head in. And I'm like: “No no, leave him alone, that's John Lydon!” He's lying there with a smile on his face and going [creditable impression of Lydon's snotty sneer] “Oh what are you gonna do? Beat me up? Hurr hurr” [laughs]. Some of the band wanted to give him a kicking, and I'm like, “Nah, he's only had a few pints of lager for fuck sake, we got it for nothing anyway.” [laughs] Anyway, we made friends. And I was summoned to Island Records, after I'd made an album for Virgin with Linton Kwesi Johnson, Poet and the Roots. Linton was touring with Siouxsie And The Banshees, The Stranglers, and John Cooper Clarke, right around the UK.
They must have been some challenging audiences
Yeah, right? He told me he was opening one time for Public Image at the Rainbow, and he came on stage and said, “I am not the wise man from the east. I bring you no glad tidings of peace.” And all the punks went: “Off! Off! Off! Off!” [laughs]. He didn't have a band – he was just reciting poetry, they didn't wanna hear any poetry. And John came out to rescue him and went: “Give him a chance!” Linton said after that the audience fell silent, no applause, no appreciation. And when he did the last one, they went “WAAAAAYYY!” [mimes waving arms of crowd going wild, laughs]. So Blackwell summoned me: “Look I've got this group that I've signed, and it's gonna be the first female punk band. Are you interested in doing the production?” I'd just done production for The Pop Group in Bristol –
– who were already taking the spirit of punk, but getting pretty sonically adventurous
Yeah. Dick Odell had called me up and said: “You know all about rock music don't you? Do you like feedback?” [laughs]. And I was going “yeah, lots of it” because I like Hendrix of course. And he said: “Right, I've got this group and they're called The Pop Group.” He said: “We wanna make an album and we wanna do it in a residential studio.” So we went to this old converted barn, Ridge Farm2. And the equipment was Jon's from Yes, except he didn't know we were using it because they were on tour. Off the back of that, Blackwell said: “Why don't you do The Slits?” I was like “OK, we'll do it in that studio.” So, I took them down to Capel, Surrey, Ridge Farm Studios, and they had never been in a residential before, so I had to keep real tight wraps on them, because Ari was 15. When I said: “Alright, go to bed now”, they would just be like “Fuck off! We're not going to bed, who you talking to?” I'd tell them there was a few bits to tie up and they'd say: “You're not working on our record while I'm not there!” I'm thinking “What's wrong with this kid?” I said: “There's stuff we have to do that is nothing to do with you, and you can't possibly help us. You would be better off feeling fresh for tomorrow”. She goes: “I don't care, I want to be there. If you're doing something to my record, I wanna be there, I want to know, because I might not like it.” I was like, “Oh right, fair point.”
One time we were trying to do this acoustic guitar bit and Viv was taking such a long time to do it. So I took the guitar from her, just to demonstrate the direction of what she should be playing, and I played this really quite flashy lick, and I thought, “Yeah it sounded really good!” And she's started crying. She just went: “Sounds great and everything, but no one's EVER gonna believe that I played that.” And I had to think for a minute: “You know what Viv, you're right. Try and place as close to that as you possibly can, and take your best shot”. Then I think they started to appreciate the fact that I was producing their record, but I wasn't going to impose ME on the record, because they were the ones that were gonna have to face the public. And if suddenly people are like, “Yeah, you're in the studio with Dennis Bovell, how many instruments did he play?” In fact I barely squeezed on some keyboard there, because they said “OK, we can have that in the background as a feature thingy”. But they didn't want me playing on the record. Tessa, the bass player, had some amazing basslines, but she just didn't have the experience of how best to execute them. So being a bass player, I go: “Well, if you wanna play that you could do it up there,” and show her the different octave options, and let her choose which one she thought she could best remember. Budgie on drums is an amazing drummer. You'd say, “Budgie lean to the left”, and he'd say: “How far to the left?” Budgie and Tessa, that was a solid rhythm section. And Viv's guitar? Very girlie, but worked. Sometimes she just played two strings like ting-a-ling-a-ling, but it worked perfectly with the vocals and the drum’n’bass. So, after some 12 or 14 weeks, we turned out Cut. I was very happy to read in a poll recently that it turned up as the second most influential album of the Top 100, right behind the New York Dolls in some NME Poll or something.
Was this inspiring for you, working for people trying to get this instant inspiration straight to tape without the musical technique?
Yeah, because I was able to give them the benefit of my experience. And also, with what they wanted, the fun was coming up with new ways of getting it.
Did the same apply with The Pop Group? Because they wanted to turn everything upside down
Absolutely. I remember one evening just recording feedback with Gareth, different tones, different volumes, feedback with echo, feedback with tremolo, with reverb, with whammy bar – “FREEOWWWWOWOWWOW” – and then editing it, so we could throw it back into the recording. Like with my tape-loops this is the idea of sampling before samplers. And them thinking, “We thought you weren't gonna like this!” And me like, “Well, if you thought I wasn't gonna like it why did you call me in?” They said: “Because we knew you liked Hendrix!” “Right,” I said, “There you are!”
Also they had some soundsystem experience in Bristol. So it connected with what you were already involved with
Yeah. They loved reggae. And a lot of rock music until then was very thin, you know. The focus was on loud guitars, the bass frequencies didn't get in there. And quite a lot of rock bands, the drums weren't that loud. I mean Bill Bruford's were, and Keith Moon, and Mitch Mitchell –
– and Bonham [laughs]
Yeah, right? But, generally, drums were seen as a background thing. We wanted to put the drums and the bass in your face, but still be able to hear the vocals and the fuzz guitars, you know. There had to be some frequency shaving, so these elements would come out as they intended, coming out battling against each other, but at the same time fusing to make a new sound. All the punk records I made were calculated, they had that reggae heaviness, and the treble end of pop – then the vocals had to be heard on top of it all.
Youth of Killing joke told me a funny story, another John Lydon falling-over story [laughs]. Lydon was producing them in your studio, and he'd passed out drunk. So Youth and Mark Lusardi were messing around with the tape, and from that session they got their dub thing happening
Mark and I worked in the same studio, he did the day sessions, I did the night. The daytime was all Pistols and that lot, and at night it would be reggae. The studio ran solely on those two genres, right? One evening I had a session to do Gary Numan but I was busy, so I got my assistant, this young Irish kid, John Caffrey, to do it. And he got on really well with them – he was like a third engineer brought in for sessions Mark or I couldn't do. And his first session was Linton Kwesi Johnson's second album, Forces of Victory. John ended up doing [Einsturzende] Neubauten. But yeah, he engineered ‘Are Friends Electric?’ and I'd done ‘Silly Games’ in the same studio about the same time, released by Warners at the same time, and ended up in the charts, Numan number one, Janet Kay number two.
So what did you think of the electronic stuff coming out at that time?
It was great! It was another part of the mix, and we were right in the middle of it all. Subway Sect used the studio, Gary Numan was in there all the time, so was John Lydon and so was I. Oh and Labi Siffre. It was in Soho, in Chinatown. The sessions I did with Linton Kwesi Johnson, quite often we'd begin at midnight. Mark [Lusardi] would finish 8-9pm, and we'd get ready to go for the next session at 10- 11pm, by the time we got all the drums sorted. The reggae musicians preferred to work at night anyway, so it was perfect. The studio was never out of clients. And I had Viola Wills in there: “Uh-huh, mm-hmm, gonna get along without you now.” 3 And I had a funk outfit, all boys from school. My school had a healthy music department and we had had a FULL orchestra – out of boys from the school who had done good in the music business, Phil Towner was a drummer, I think he played with Linda Lewis and Tina Charles. Tony Mansfield in New Musik. Nick Straker was the original keyboard player of Matumbi, but then he started the R&B thing and ended up huge in Germany and America, ‘A Little Bit of Jazz’.4 So suddenly we had a bunch of boys from the same school, but diversified so much, so we came back together as a kind of funk outfit. I wanted to make this record with Viola Wills, so I got them on top of it plus my guitar player, John Kpiaye. He'd written that song, “I'm in love with a dreadlocks / I've never felt this way before” 5 – and that had become an anthem for Lover's Rock, which was the label we worked for in trying to establish female vocalists.
Establishing this uniquely British sound
Yeah, in London, you know, We were in and out of studios all year round, in the South East, the West End, North London. People were booking three months in advance. Then I started doing stuff with a Nigerian band, The Funkees, and a singer called Nana Love,6 which led me into working with Fela Kuti. A lot of different musicians and a lot of different stuff. I then started to do productions with The Thompson Twins and moving in a different direction: Maximum Joy and people like that.
Maximum Joy being an early Adrian Sherwood connection. Did you know Sherwood then?
I certainly did. He contacted me because he had made an album and he wanted it mixed. So he came down to see me and I mixed his first album, Creation Rebel's Dub From Creation. That was me showing Sherwood what could be done first hand. After that he was off on his own. I recorded stuff with him recently, we did ‘Iron Man’, me and him and Scratch. There's your Black Sabbath bass! [laughs].
So he was a quick learner?
He's a very sharp kid. You show him something once, that's it, he's gone. He'd also been hanging around with lots of Jamaican artists, because he ran Click Records, so he was in and out of Jamaica all the time. Prince Far-I and Prince Hammer were all close mates, and when I became too busy to be working with The Slits much, he took over. He took on my loose ends, because he'd start working with Mark Stewart [of The Pop Group] and Ari and The Slits and all that lot. That's what he got from me, and I thought that he was the best person to do it if I wasn't there to do it. If I wasn't there, I'd go “Ask Adrian!” And Ari and Adrian hit it off and became very good mates.
He had this amazing ability to tie it all together into a bigger collective, first New Age Steppers, then On-U Sound
And he knows sound. Adrian grew up in High Wycombe and there was a club there called Newlands in the bus station that my soundsystem would go up and play once every two months. Adrian once told to me about his first experience of listening to my soundsystem, he was like 13, and understandably they wouldn't let him in, and he said: “You know my fondest memory was standing outside and hearing the bass tearing the door off [makes a rumbling sound]. And thinking I want to be in there.” And his neighbour, Clem Bushay, worked for Trojan Records and was heavily involved with lots of artists from Jamaica. Louisa Mark, I'd made ‘Caught You in a Lie’, her first record, and ‘All my Loving’ and stuff like that – she was then produced by Clem Bushay, who did ‘Sixth Street’ with her [sings]: “I know you're having an affair / and I know who and know where / it's that easy going chick down there / and she lives at number six, sixth street.” He done that with some friend of mine from Shepherd's Bush, the band was called Zabandis. It was three brothers from Grenada, Tunga, Unwalah and Tendai. Tunga is guitar player for Misty In Roots. Unwalah, drummer of Zabandis, is Estelle's dad, who did the tune ‘American Boy’. And Tendai is Angel's dad, the R&B singer Angel. So Angel and Estelle are cousins. That's the whole musicality of London: North, South, East, West. I mean Janet Kay came from Wembley, And there's me, this young kid from Battersea, making records with her. Aswad were Ladbroke Grove, and there I am with them, doing the soundtrack for the film Babylon.
This book is about that, where people's uncles ran soundsystems and they ended up in jungle or dubstep or whatever. Or someone in drum’n’bass has a younger brother or sister who makes another style. People who started out on the reggae soundsystems – like The Ragga Twins – ending up in rave
I watched it happen even up to now: “Wow, these kids. We've invented lovers rock, so they can invent whatever it is they wanna call it.” Grime. Spit? [laughs]. And I've watched it happen and I've thought, “Yeah, yeah, very good.” I was happy they were taking elements of what we'd done – nicking it, but giving it some appreciation.
There's lots of big bits of dialogue from the Babylon soundtrack that ended up in jungle tunes
So what were you doing through the 80s?
I thought I'll have to open my own recording studio, so I did. The first production I did was Ryuichi Sakamoto.7 He met Don Letts, when Don was with Mick Jones in Japan, and said he wanted to get in contact. So I get this phonecall from Japan, I'm thinking, “Are you pulling my leg?” Ryuichi said: “Well I heard you were building this studio, I want to use it.” I said: “OK, when it's ready, I'll let you know”. He's going: “No. I want to use it. I want to be the first person to use your studio.” What a baptism, what an inauguration, to have the great Sakamoto come over from Japan and use my studio! One of the tunes I did with him was a tune called ‘Riot in Lagos’. And, listen, what's that DJ, Tim Westwood, he rode on that tune, he made that tune big, he broke that tune!
Then I did Linton Kwesi Johnson. I did Orange Juice, just after ‘Rip it Up’, Lean Period, ‘Wheels of Love’, all that. In fact I produced the only ever Orange Juice album. And then Edwyn had a problem. He was going, “The wee man; can he tour?”. And he's going on about Zeke Manyika. Zeke came over on a student visa and joined a pop group in Scotland, become a drummer! But he's not entitled to do that on no student visa, and none of these bands he played for – Style Council, all that lot – could tour with him. Because if he left the UK, they'd never let him back in. So when we did Edwyn's first solo album, Hope and Despair, it was a German record company and they wanted us to record in Germany. So that's torn it, Zeke can't play. And Edwyn went: “I've got this really great drummer in mind”, and I said: “Who's that?” He said: “Dave Ruffy,” and I was like “woaaah yeah!” Because Dave had been in The Ruts, he was playing with Yazz and also with Aztec Camera. Which is Roddy Frame of course, a mate of Edwyn's. So the four of us go off to Germany – Edwyn, Roddy, Dave and me – to do this album. But on the day of recording, Dave turns up in a wheelchair, he was like: “I'll play top kit”. And I was like: “But what about his knee, how about the kick?” and he was like: “I've programmed the whole album”. So, he programmed the kick drum of all the songs, and just played the top kit. Just an electronic kit going ‘dof-dof-dof-dof’ – you wouldn't have noticed, it was fucking brilliant. He was like: “I'll still do a gig” and he turns up in a fucking wheelchair. But he's got technology on his side.
And you've just kept working solidly since then, on reggae and whatever else
I've done a bunch of stuff in Italy, with a singer called Rosa Paeda. And another group called The ’99 Posse, and one called Octavo Padaleone. In Japan I've been working with Dubsense Mania, a girl called Iriya and a new singer Tommy 115. In Hawaii with this guy Titus Kinimaka, the Kawaii boys. On that I found myself working with Boz Scaggs and Taj Mahal. There's this tune called ‘Quicksilver Fever’ – Quicksilver who make the surfing gear are sponsoring the album – because the singer is also a champion surfer, as you would expect in Hawaii. And Taj Mahal is playing guitar.
How old is he now?
Fucking ancient.8 As old as the Taj Mahal or as close to [laughs]. And he's going: “So what do you hear me playing in here”, and I go “woww wow wow wowow wowww” [guitar noise], and he's like: “Yeah, sing that again.” “Woww wow wow wowow wowww.” And as I'm singing it to him, he's playing it. He's going: “This is the easiest session I ever did. You done my heart, you did my work for me”. And I'm like, “Yeah if I hear Taj Mahal, I imagine you would be going [makes guitar noise].” And he's going: “Wow, you hear me like that?”, and I said, “Yeah so put the tape on”. And everything I mouthed, he was playing. And when Boz Scaggs heard I'd done that he's going like [sardonic voice] “Tell me what to play” [laughs]. And I was in my element, just singing things that came into my head and thinking “well you're Boz Scaggs, your guitar playing has been like this – ” – and he's like: “Oh OK well, I'll play that on here then.” And it was on reggae, right. So yeah. I've had fun.
Do you also play alongside more experimental electronic acts?
Threehead are friends of mine, and there's this Italian programmer of techno stuff, Matso Prudo. A friend runs an Italian agency – he was our agent for a long time, Linton and me – and he said, “You should work with Prudo for this trip hop thing.” And Jean Binta Breeze. I'm like, “Wow that's a fusion right there, mm, mm.” So, this kid makes all the trippy drum programmes and I play reggae bass and Jean is reciting her poetry. The album's called Eena Me Corner. You can hear examples of it on my show that I do every two weeks on Soho Radio, and on my Mixcloud. It's a completely different way of looking at reggae basslines, with these trippy drum patterns and then the roots Jamaican voice.
So when you hear these younger guys doing trip hop or dubstep or whatever, do you hear echoes of what you started?
I feel very good to know I'm the giant upon whose shoulders they stand [laughs uproariously].
