8.
Augustus Pablo – Ital Dub
The thing is, I listened to Natty Dread in tandem with another one that came out on the back of it. See, what was unique about reggae was that if a song became popular, there would be several versions of it. The producers would listen to a song, and there’d be a reggae version come out a few weeks later, recorded in London. I was thinking of doing a collection of crap reggae cover versions – things that are so bad that they’re great, things like Denzil Dennis doing a version of ‘Mama Weer All Crazee Now’ by Slade – I wouldn’t have put it past them to strip it down completely and just do a DJ and trumpet version of it. There were loads of things like that.
Natty Dread came out and then later came out Ital Dub. Clearly, what they’d done is re-record some of the best things on Natty Dread and done their own versions. And so we’d play both together, they went nicely into each other. So, although Ital Dub isn’t the best thing Augustus Pablo ever did, it was a very integral album – I had to have it, together with Natty Dread.
Pablo wasn’t the first melodica player in Jamaica – before him, there had been people like Joe White. He was just the one who popularised it. I had loads of stuff on vinyl – so much more from that era. I just gave so much of it away. I’ve mates with walls and walls of this stuff, worth a fortune.
