9. King TubbyKing Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown
My mum has always been a really big reggae and soul fan, and I guess it had quite a heavy influence (and on my dad’s side, a lot of folk).
I remember a friend of mine actually gave me this record. I’d listened to a bit of reggae and I always really like it, but I found this quite challenging at first because nothing really happens, and I couldn’t quite understand what it was. And I remember one day it just clicked. That mesmeric, undulating rhythm just suddenly gets really under your skin. And this, especially after listening to so much fucking white music, opened up a whole other space in a way. And actually, it’s the type of music that once you start listening to it, it becomes difficult to listen to anything else. I got really into stuff like Pablo Moses and Scientist afterwards.
I really love how you can feel the joins in it somehow. It’s reliant on such a limited palette of sound. It’s really psychedelic and out there, but there’ll be really short snippets of a voice or a song that’s happening somewhere else, and it’s all buried in the music. That really opened me up to a whole new world of music really. It’s so homemade sounding – that’s what I was trying to say. It still sounds human. I sometimes feel alienated by music where you can’t feel the person behind it; it’s just a bunch of noises. This isn’t that way at all. Sonically it’s wild. That’s a really crazy way to make music.
I definitely had to work to get into it, and those records that challenge you a bit and then you suddenly really understand them – that’s always a very satisfying thing, and you’ll always have a bit more of an important relationship with those records I suspect.
