We’re this time trawling the megahertz of the global village groove that is dub. But what is Dub? We all use it, we all abuse it and one or more popular artists at one time allege to have forged some deep, quasi-religious connection with it. Gorillaz even managed to score a number of hits claiming they were Dub’s original pop vagrants. They weren’t of course. It was often the people whose faces and names can’t be remembered for want of a thankless popular culture trying to erase them. It was folks like King Tubby – whose two-track engineering experiments gave birth to the form. I should know. I’ve just read it on the ‘net – and the ‘net is never wrong. So where does Dennis ‘Blackbeard’ Bovell a.k.a. Matumbi stand in all this? A little to the right and with an awesomely smokey spliff in his hand.
But this still doesn’t answer the question. What is dub? And why do all these tracks all sound so damned familiar?
The way I see it, some studio maverick saw that a rhythm – singled out already by a separate track – could be stripped down to its bass and drum bone, daubed in reservoirs of reverb and echo and used as a thick spacey slab of instrumentation to which any number of jiggery vocalists at Clement Dodd’s Downbeat dances could add their sweet and jiggery thing. Sounds a bit like Ambiant? Well yes and no. Dub is a little more ‘special’. Dub naturally consists of one-off acetates or ‘slates’ or ‘dubs’ recorded and mixed exclusively for that one sound system in mind and with the spontaneity and impulsiveness that only true pros can muster. Ambiant is an unfortunate consequence of long hours spent at the computer with little or know knowledge of traditional scoring but with a whole lot time, a whole lot of weed and a whole lot of dub records at your disposal, and typified by the pale and willowy middle-class white boy.
Anyway, for the sake of references you could hang your coat on, think of Kingston’s Prince Buster, Neville The Enchanter and the sound of Sir Coxsone. And if you really, really must, think of Albarn’s dub monkeying Gorillaz.
‘I Wah Dub’, released originally in 1980 is a sound inspired by all these things and more.
This classic reissue takes Dennis ‘Blackbeard’ Bovell back to the days before he became his more familiar manifestation, Matumbi and used the unlikely surroundings of a 1960s South London school to put down cut n’ paste remixes of popular reggae tunes and sell them to sound systems for as much as three pounds each. Or at least that’s what it says on the press release. But dub is always at one remove – here today and gone tomorrow and as elusive as a bagful of Pimpernels. Nobody knows where it comes from. Nobody knows why it’s here, and nobody knows what it means – least of all me.
But you know wah?
I wish I wah there before Gorillaz came along.