"There is no ill in the world can't be cured by dub reggae."
And no better feeling than getting dubbed up yourself.
Firstly, a nice lengthy dub instrumental to accompany your initial reading. I invite you to hit play.
Sundays are my dub day. It’s the day that I try and give to myself, accompanied as much as possible by the form of music that emerged from the fertile Jamaican reggae scene in the early 1970s, in which the studio became the instrument. Dub is now universal and can be applied to many artists and genres, and is frequently a prefix (for dub house, dub techno, dub rock etc.), but it’s still a style and a form that should be instantly recognizable for how it re-imagines what came before, and anyone who understands that concept knows that its owes its origins to Kingston (Jamaica).
My interest in dub is deep enough that two years back I penned a 8,500 word essay on “The Studio As Instrument In Jamaican Dub Reggae” for my B.A. in ‘Writing About Global Culture and Music.’ I was hoping the essay might get published in an academic journal but I guess not; I may well share it here soon to join the other, somewhat shorter ones that concerned music and global culture. Assuming I do so, I will also then share the 160-song playlist I put together to help me (and my professor) along, though you may able to find it on a couple of platforms under the title ‘Dub Reggae Pioneers.’
My love for dub started long ago. I grew up in South London, attending school in Kennington, traveling through Brixton just about every day of my most formative years; at least three days a week for some of those years, I was also up in Ladbroke Grove/Notting Hill. These were the two West Indian enclaves in London in the 1970s/1980s, and the sound of roots reggae and dub emanated not only from those communities’ own record stores, houses and carnival sound systems, but from the tinny speakers at Rough Trade and Better Badges (and from the John Peel show back home); while understood as coming from a very different place musically, spiritually and culturally, roots reggae in dub was the yan of choice to the furious yin of punk rock. I never collected it the way the true aficionados did, but from the 14-year old me who bought records by Reggae Regular, Steel Pulse, Dr. Alimantado and Mikey Dread, through to the adult me that has held on to their Greensleeves and Front Line CD releases when others went by the wayside, I have never ceased in my appreciation.
Indeed, for decades now I have had a mantra:
“there is no ill in the world that can’t be cured by dub reggae.”
And I mean it. When I emerged from my brain hemorrhage in 2021, I found myself imagining dub reggae tunes in my head from the hospital bed. With my head acting rather strange anyway as it processed what had just happened to it, I developed a fan boy crush for my Night Nurse, a dashing young Mexican man who kindly loaned me his iPad so I could watch football from that bed. Upon being discharged, I told Paula – my real Night Nurse, per the Gregory Isaacs anthem (dub mix below) – that I was going to treat myself to up to $100 worth of reggae for my recuperation period and we headed out, gingerly on my part, to Rocket Number 9 in Kingston (New York!), which I knew to have a dedicated section.
I expected to spend $15-$20 per album or more, depending on whether new or used. Instead, I found that someone had just offloaded a reggae collection full of independent limited edition 12”s pressed in Kingston (Jamaica!), Brooklyn/the Bronx and London, at least 50% of which were by, of all people, Gregory Isaacs. They were priced at around $2-3 per, and I got out of the shop with near enough a box full for about $60! The world moves in mysterious ways, and when it moves in your favo(u)r, it’s best not to question it, but rather to just trust in the process and praise Jah along the way.
Tony Fletcher, Wordsmith posts twice a week, more or less. Subscribe for free to receive these posts in your Inbox. Up to a paid subscription for exclusive posts, all the archives all the time, and the Crossed Channels podcast. I promise my best not to spend all your hard-earned subscription fees on dub reggae 12” singles.
I had a similar response when I first heard Chris Coco’s remixes of our Dear Boys single “Put It Down,” remixes that were released publicly on Bandcamp and most streaming platforms this past Friday, though they have been available to those who own the CD we have had on sale since mid-September.
Chris and I go ways back to the days he edited DJ magazine and I supplied copy from New York. He is one of the pre-eminent figures on the Balearic/chill/ambient house scene, an artist/producer/remixer with a label, radio show, Ibiza sunset DJ residencies and more, one of those people who just quietly gets on with being creative, and we have developed a close friendship over the years, hosting each other on opppsite sides of the Atlantic. I had shared with him my instrumental demo “The New Reverend Jam” shortly after meeting him for a coffee on a trip to London in 2024 and talking to him about it. My demo for what became “Put It Down” had northern soul organ, a funk approach to the amped-up rhythm guitars, and a crunching four-to-the-floor sequenced drum pattern, which I had deliberately set to 120bpm, the tempo of house… but at its core was something of a dub reggae bass line.
I was not new to this task; I’d played bass on the Apocalypse song “Sorry Mate, It’s Too Late,” the dub Section from the demo which still blows my mind, all the more so for the fact that we were 17 and 18 at the time. A reggae influence was very much part of our group sound, and for our next demo, just a few months later, in June 1982, I booked us into a brand new place called Ariwa in Peckham, as advertised in the back of the Melody Maker. When we got there, the young man I’d spoken to on the phone – Neal – told us he also went by the name of the Mad Professor, and once we discovered his love of dub, then at our request, we spent a harried last 30 minutes of the day with multiple hands on the faders making real-time dub mixes of two of our songs. (The full story will be in my forthcoming second memoir; the mixes and originals and ‘Sorry Mate’ are all on the Apocalypse 1980-82 compilation Going Up In The World.)
“Put It Down” took a lot longer to come together than any of these demos, old or new, as described in equally elongated detail upon the single’s initial release date in September. But all along the way, we Dear Boys felt that it invited a remix or three. Without a big budget on hand, I figured there would be nothing lost by going back to my friend Chris and asking if he had time and interest to take a stab at it. He wrote back that we would: “sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t but let’s have a go and see what happens.”
I sent him the same stems I had sent our mixing man Danny Blume, who was finalizing the 7” and 12” at the time. I invited Chris to hear those mixes and he declined; he preferred working from instinct. Given Chris’s (extensive) track record, I fully expected him to return with a chilled-out Balearic sunset vibe. So sure was I of this that simultaneously I reached out to Mad Professor to see if by chance he remembered us and wanted to return full circle all these decades later. I did not hear back.
Just as well. Trust the process. Because when I got the mixes back from Chris they came with a typically succinct e-mail as befits a minimalist: “Here’s a link to Chris Coco dub and dub of the dub of Put It Down. The idea was to make it a version and a dub in the old school late 70s style.”
The two mixes – nine minutes long apiece! – were entitled “Tweaks” and “Tweaks Instr.”, which did not reveal much about them. But from the first notes, it was evident that Chris had not gone Balearic on us, Rather, the drums instantly echoed with the sound of a sound system. And when the vocals kicked in… it was with lyricist and lead vocalist Tony Page’s voice removed – and that of backing vocalist Paula very much to the fore.
We happened to be in London at the time, and Paula was on hand, being that we were on holiday together; shocked and surprised by what Chris had done, I hit pause and switched to headphones immediately. I had only asked Paula to sing during the overdub process at my home studio in Kingston (New York!) to quietly bolster Tony’s lead; in doing so, I had suggested she sing “neutral,” so as not to interfere with his vocal character.
I knew Paula would be horrified and embarrassed to suddenly be pushed to the front, hence switching to headphones. But I found on first hearing – and still find now – that that neutrality in the voice has an endearing quality, a nonchalance of sorts, and that by highlighting it, Chris had turned “Put It Down” from a pop-rock song with a dance vibe into a Lovers Rock number instead.
For those who don’t know it, Lovers Rock is a vocal reggae that favours romance over spirituality, and is often at its best with a female lead; the sound seemed especially well suited for the British reggae scene, where the likes of Carroll Thompson came to the fore, but the benchmark recording has always been Janet Kay’s massive 1979 hit “Silly Games,” as written and produced by Dennis Bovell, and discussed in the charming British TV documentary about the genre trailered below.
But I digress. Per Chris’s e-mail, the second half of ‘Tweaks’ was a dub of the original, though like that original, he had resequenced the song from how it had been structured on the stems, an extra act of devotion to the cause. The Instrumental Tweaks, meanwhile, was a deep deep dub of the first 9-minute mix, for which Chris had mined down into its core, fixating primarily on my bass line and Buddy’s drums. Sly and Robbie we are not, but Chris had done an amazing job of suggesting we could be.
I waited to tell Paula (who remains even now as embarrassed as I suspected) about becoming lead until after telling my bandmates, which I did at the end of a fun day shooting a video on the South Bank. As I had hoped, Pagey seemed unflustered by the notion: he had always intended “Put It Down” to be a male-female duet in the first place, and besides, it’s a co-write, so as I told him, he could view it as a cover version if he wanted to. This was a relief for Chris, who told me over a beer in Soho (London!) a few days later he’d been worried that he might have created some kind of Spinal Tap scenario in following his own artistic instincts.
Over that beer, I suggested that we put a little bit more of the Hammond organ back in during the pre-chorus “ska” sections, where he had kept Pagey’s charming voice in on his vocal mix, and that we break up that vocal mix into two, a shorter Lovers Vocal and a slightly longer Lovers Dub, the latter of which seems to be the version of choice, and keep the Instrumental at full length, titling it Double Dub. I also suggested he might want to release these remixes a few weeks down the line from his CD, through his own DSPPR label, knowing that he has a much wider audience than we do. Chris concurred with all of this, and that was it. Trust the process.
For myself, and for Buddy to some extent as well I believe, this process has resulted in a dream come true, Not only is this the first time my own music has received the remix treatment in general, but it’s also the first time it’s been turned into a true dub, something with broadcast-able quality and integrity. For my musical partner and best mate Pagey, it’s all a strange bonus; he’s a punk rocker at heart, and while he loves his short ska anthems from the 60s, he doesn’t fully understand reggae, let alone the dub process. Of the Double Dub, he declared loudly on a group call that he couldn’t imagine anyone making it the whole way through all eight minutes and forty five second. A few days later, all those eight-minutes-and-forty-five-seconds of the Double Dub were featured, alongside Bob Marley and other true greats, on ‘The Brilliant Show’ on Portobello Radio, a station emanating from the heart of Notting Hill.
Indeed, it was hard to keep these mixes off the airwaves once the files got out, confirmation that their quality is not merely a matter of personal ego. And kudos of the highest order followed a couple of weeks back when I managed to get in contact with Dennis Bovell himself, who replied with an instant vote of approval and promptly spun the “Lovers Dub” on his monthly Soho Radio show cutely entitled Dub-on-Air, alongside the likes of Carroll Thompson herself. I have no plans to die any time soon, but when it does happen, I will die that much happier.
And if there is a heaven, I fully expect it to have that Sunday dub vibe in full effect. I hope you enjoy yours.
Hiya Tony. And i agree wholeheartedly...since discovering reggae and dub specifically in the late '70s, my belief has been that, on really hot days, dub can lower the temperature by at least ten degrees. Thanks! And as a fellow zine creator, I must recommend this new great book about Wash DC music zine history (of which I was part of) KEEP AN EAR TO THE GROUND, out now by John R Davis, from Johns Hopkins Press. Cheers!