British dub: from the sound systems to the front room studio

Dennis Bovell arrived in London from Barbados in 1965 and landed in sound system culture immediately, because his father had one.

His definition of the thing is as plain as it gets: an amplifier and a couple of boxes, and in those days that was a sound system. His father’s rig was called Tropical Soundmaster.

Dub in England starts here rather than with an imported record. It starts with a rig in a living room, and with whoever decided what went out through it.

The black radio stations

By 1968 and 1969, as Bovell’s generation came up, London’s sound systems already had their big four: Coxsone, Duke Reid, Shelly’s and Neville the Enchanter.

They were not one entertainment among many. They were, as Bovell puts it, the black radio stations of their time: the place where a community decided what it listened to.

The contest between systems was not won on volume. It was won on weight, meaning how much bass you could put into a room while keeping it clean.

The attraction to soundsystems in the beginning was, who could be the heaviest. Not the loudest. But the heaviest, with quality.

In the same stretch of years, in Lewisham, a young man who had come from Jamaica as a small child started working with a system called Freddie Cloudburst. Then he built his own and named it after the Zulu king Shaka: he became Jah Shaka.

Where other systems ran a team of selectors and DJs, he did all of it himself. By the late seventies his dances had a cult following, known for their atmosphere and for the way people danced at them.

A British record had to pass as Jamaican

There was an obstacle that tends to get forgotten: those systems played Jamaican records, and an English reggae band started at a disadvantage.

Bovell got round it with dubplates, one-off acetates cut for a sound system. A friend heard the ones he had made with his band Matumbi and invited them onto his own system, Sufferah’s Hi-Fi.

The stories of how he got selectors to play British bands, and not only Jamaican records, are part of his legend.

Running a sound system in those years also carried a cost that never appeared on an electricity bill. The sus laws, the power to arrest on suspicion granted by the Vagrancy Act of 1824, were revived in the seventies and used against young black men.

December 1977: how to set up a dub

The most useful document on how dub was actually made in England is not a record, it is an article. In December 1977 Sounds sent Vivien Goldman to have Bovell explain, step by step, how a session gets set up.

What came out of it is an accidental manual. He records onto two-inch tape carrying sixteen tracks, through a twenty-four channel desk, and setting up the desk takes him about twenty minutes.

The layout never changes: drums hard left, the rhythm section in the middle, vocals to the right. The echo crossing between the speakers, he says, sounds like a train going through the room.

One limit explains the sound of those records better than any adjective. With reggae the highest you can go is around six decibels, because the bass is so heavy that past that point the grooves interlock when the record is cut.

The other rules are just as practical. Never reverb on the bass drum, which has to stay dry, and a great deal of it on the snare, to make it sound like a big room.

And then there is the line that is worth the whole piece: the rhythm guitar is the policeman of reggae, because it keeps every other instrument in check.

Listen while you read

Bovell put that method out under the name Blackbeard: Strictly Dub Wize in 1978 and I Wah Dub in 1980. On the second, released by More Cut Records, he plays the drums, bass, guitar, piano, organ, Fender Rhodes and percussion himself, and takes the mixing credit.

The sleeve notes of that record thank Sir Coxsone, Duke Reid, Jah Sufferer, Neville the Enchanter and Count Shelley. A British record thanking sound systems rather than musicians.

Two studios carved out of houses

In 1979 Neil Fraser inaugurated Ariwa in the front room of his house, at 19 Bruce Road in Thornton Heath. The name comes from the Yoruba word ariwo, meaning communication.

The equipment was a Teac 3440 tape machine and gear discarded by other people. In May 1982 the studio moved to a basement in Peckham, and that same year brought the first chapter of the Dub Me Crazy series: by 1993 he was up to the twelfth.

The other route was opened by Adrian Sherwood, who founded On-U Sound in 1980 with Kishi Yamamoto, having already tried three other labels. The first single was the New Age Steppers’ “Fade Away”, from that same year; the first album came in 1981.

The Steppers had Ari Up of the Slits and Mark Stewart of the Pop Group on vocals. This is the point where the Jamaican method stops being a genre and becomes a way of working, applicable to post punk, to industrial and later to jungle.

The distance from an amplifier in a living room to a basement in Peckham took less than twenty years to cover. By the end of it, in England, dub was no longer music to import: it was a trade taught between neighbours.

Worth hearing

• Blackbeard, Strictly Dub Wize (1978): the first of the two dub albums Dennis Bovell released under the pseudonym.
• Linton Kwesi Johnson, LKJ In Dub (1980): dub versions of the poet’s pieces, mixed by Bovell.
• New Age Steppers: On-U Sound’s first album, with Ari Up of the Slits in front of a band of reggae players.
• Mad Professor, Dub Me Crazy!! (1982): chapter one of a series that had reached its twelfth by 1993.