Augustus Pablo - King Tubbys Meets Rockers Uptown
I got all this stuff backwards. Until we moved to London I got all of my dub stuff from a little record shop called Pop Records. We went in with a list of 60 psychedelia albums recommended to us by Andy Votel and the owner said, no, these are 80 quid records, you can’t afford these. It was around the time that lots of the early dub stuff was being re-issued and I ended up getting this or maybe an Upsetters bargain box set for less than a tenner and loved it. After that I’d go in every three weeks or so, when I had enough for an album, and he would just say, this one is next for you. I loved the looseness of the original rhythm section playing and how the parts were cut in and out with no regard to lyrical sense or melodic phrasing, but because I didn’t know the originals I didn’t really understand what they were doing in terms of transforming the original recordings or trad songs. I mean, it said that they were dubs, I’m not an idiot, but because this was the way I was introduced to them it felt like this was the song, not a remix of the song. So it really helped drive home the idea that a song can just be a bare beat and slices of sound that, in the traditional music sense, was really a decomposition of music.

In fact, later on I’d have this idea doubled down when I heard the original lovers rock version of the dubs that I had on some of these albums that I had got so into and they were kind of cheesy and I felt a bit embarrassed that I wasn’t into them. But there is was, cut into pieces by the right hands they were great into their own way.