5.
Sly & Robbie – A Dub Experience
Again, this is one introduced to me by my older brother. Along with, a bit later on, Pay It All Back Volume 3 – which is on On U Sound – it was essentially my entry point for dub music. I was only about ten, eleven years old at the time, so I hadn’t heard about King Tubby, I hadn’t gone through that 1970s golden period of dub. I got into it through the mid 80s dub sound, which maybe wasn’t the most revered period in dub. But that album, A Dub Experience, retrospectively you can see that it was, in a way, a sort of accumulation of the knowledge and experience that they’d built up over the 70s, and sonically even until today I still think that’s one of the best produced albums I’ve heard. It sounds great. It wasn’t until later on – probably my late teens, going on until I was about twenty or something like that, when I started backtracking through all the 70s stuff, the King Tubbys, getting that original side of things, so for me [A Dub Experience] initially did personify dub music.
I didn’t hear dub on big sound systems until I was much older, not until I got to Bristol really. I grew up in Newport in South Wales, and there really wasn’t any possibility to go and check out something like dub. Your best bet of catching jungle was like half an hour at the indie club [laughs], ‘Super Sharp Shooter’ or something like this. It wasn’t the most musically rich part of the world to go and check things out, and dub music was never really an option. So I didn’t have a live dub experience until I was much older. I was listening to this stuff unaware that the bass was going to slap you around the room if you had the right man on the controls. It wasn’t about the physical experience for me, it was just the music I was hearing as I was hearing it.
When I met Scientist, and I was showing him dubstep tunes, chatting to him about his older days, we were talking about… One of the things in dub is that it is quite a traditionalist scene, if you go to dub [events], a lot of people can be quite reactive to things that stray from the expected path of dub, shall we say. But originally it was a scene that was built purely on experimentation. One of these conversations I had with Scientist, talking about King Tubby, he was saying ‘Yeah, if King Tubby was alive today, this is what he’d be into – he’d love dubstep, he was always all for pushing things forward, doing things differently and experimenting, and trying to achieve new ground’. For me, that philosophy in dub is very fundamental to my approach. The actual dub scene, much as I love it and have friends involved in various things, is a bit too stuck in its ways sometimes, and I don’t think people are so welcoming of the experimental side, which is essentially what gave it the space to exist in the first place. But sonically I’ve always just connected with dub – the space and the possibility to affect your perception of time, which are essentially two very simple things you can do a lot with, have always fascinated me.
