4. King TubbyFreedom Sounds In Dub
I moved to Birmingham in 1989. I was friends with a guy who built custom speakers and was quite an authority on reggae and dub and smoked great skunk weed. It was an ideal combination: I’ve got an expert in dub reggae, very good skunk and custom made speakers. He would explain the way that dub and reggae all fitted together, I remember him playing me just all this amazing music and it was so mind-blowing. Every so often I’ll go back to something like King Tubby, Scientist or Lee Perry and hear it as if for the first time. It’s just so incredibly inspiring and exciting to me, the sound world and the way they’re playing the mixing desk. I can’t believe how good it is, that’s it. I lived in Balsall Heath at the time and there was a venue called the Moseley Dance Centre where they had reggae dances. I went, and I didn’t know what was going on and I loved that because it’s so pure when you don’t have the mental script of ‘what will you hear? How will you act?’ You just take it as you find it, your brain can’t understand it so it snaps and then allows you into the unconscious. It’s like a Zen thing, isn’t it? Videos of people DJing seem to set up what people are supposed to do in those environments, it’s really odd: I want to tear it up.
