Baker's Dozen

Artists discuss the 13 records that shaped their lives

9.

King Tubby – King Tubby Meets The Upsetter at The Grass Roots of Dub

That year, I was in Brockwell Park, Brixton, sat on the grass flogging that album with Joe Farquharson (co-runner of the J&A music distributors). We were selling this for £15 a copy, which back in the mid-70s was a huge amount of money. But it was that rare, a limited number had been pressed. It was a white label.

I’d heard that album played on dubplate by a Jamaican sound system in a club, prior to its coming out. We’d been going in under age early on. But this album sounded like a sound system in my front room. Which was the effect I was looking for when I started cutting my first things, which I started doing just a couple of years later. Thing is, as long you’d got the tempos levelled, you could drop this in to any contemporary dance music to a crowd today and it would work, no trouble. Listen to the bass.

Selected in other Baker’s Dozens: Lord Spikeheart, Tom Ravenscroft
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