7. Augustus PabloKing Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown
Exploring music – in a pre-internet age – was a very different kettle of fish. I remember buying this, blindly, on tape, from the old Virgin on Tottenham Court Road, when I was about 15. It looked cheap, amateurish (Augustus’ name was even spelt wrong) but something about it grabbed me. It seemed loaded with confusing code. Was Augustus Pablo the artist? It’s title was King Tubbys Meets Rockers Uptown – what the hell was that supposed to mean? I grew up – like so many others – nourished by my dad’s record collection. Jimi Hendrix, Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, etc. My only exposure to reggae at that point had been Bob Marley’s Legend. This was the first dub reggae record I had ever heard. An album that lives on with me to this day. I know this record inside and out – I played the tape to death – every bit of hiss, every bass line, drum thump and crack, every vocal snippet and clipped guitar chop dropped in – like fragmentary transmissions received from outer space, all of this imprinted in my DNA forevermore. I loved the way the bass and the drums seemed like the lead instruments; vocals, guitars, keys, horns all seemed secondary to the foundational rock of the rhythm section. I was hooked, and spent any money I had on further exploring the sound-worlds of early seventies Jamaican dub and roots. There are many other fine examples – the works of Keith Hudson, Yabby U, Lee Perry, Scientist, Glen Brown, et al – but this was my first.
I hated The Beatles when I was a kid – they were everywhere! ‘Yellow Submarine’, ‘Octopus’ Garden’, yeah, whatever.
But this – especially to my up-to-that-point drug-free, clean and hungry 15-year-old mind – THIS was truly psychedelic music!
Duncan Brown
