Dennis Bovell: Interview
In this interview, he talks about making tape loops at school, UK sound system culture, being a prog fan, using synths in reggae, and his work with Linton Kwesi Johnson, Ryuichi Sakamoto and members of Radiohead.
You did your first recordings when you were at school, using a reel-to-reel machine, is that right?
That's right. The school had a studio meant for making sound effects for the drama group so it had a couple of quarter-inch Ferrograph tape recorders, and that’s when I began experimenting with loops, because I’d been reading that The Beatles and George Martin had been making loops. So the first loop I actually made, I helped myself to a few bars of a very popular reggae tune, ‘Young, Gifted and Black’ by Bob and Marcia.
I got four bars out of the instrumental side, because this was the time when reggae started having version sides, so one song would be spread over two sides, sides A and B on the 7-inch. So A would be the vocal and B would be some kind of instrumental version. I went a little way into the tune and chopped four bars, linked them together, and then with the help of one of the masters, recorded a version of ‘Guantanamera’ using that loop, and we even managed to incorporate the flute part. So there I was, helping myself to snippets of versions and making other tunes.
What did you do with them?
I played them on my sound system [Jah Sufferer].
You already had the sound system at that point?
Well, the sound system was just beginning to kind of, you know, be formed. And we knew that we needed exclusive material. To be a reputable sound system, to be recognised, you had to have exclusive material that only you had access to, exclusives that would make people go, “Did you hear that version?” And being a musician, I was able to employ the services of many other musicians: horn players, trombone, saxophone, guitar solos, keyboard solos, organ or piano, and make instrumental versions of excerpts of other tunes.
So the reggae band you were in at the time, Matumbi, was also feeding your sound system…
Yes. That was our little secret because we didn’t have money to fly to Jamaica and avail ourselves of the latest King Tubby’s dubs and all that. That came later. But to get off the ground, I made our own.
This was do-it-yourself in action.
Yes. It was most definitely a DIY job. And it gave us the satisfaction that no one else had those versions.
Where was the sound system playing out at that point?
Well at that point, we're playing in a place called the WCCR, which was the Wandsworth Council for Community Relations building. And ironically, it was across the road from a police station. But it was alright, because it meant that people who were intent on doing, you know, wrong, didn't come there because it was 50 yards from the police station, so only the people who were kind of alright in this regard came down, and there's quite a lot of those people.
We played there on Friday nights. And then on Sunday nights, we moved to a youth club in Stockwell called the Lansdowne on Lansdowne Road, that I think that that establishment is still there. In fact, the Lansdowne youth club became so popular that just down the road, opposite Stockwell underground station, there was a pub called the Swan and because our thing was constantly oversubscribed, I mean, we'd open at seven o'clock and if you weren't in by 7.30, we'd have to shut the door because sorry, capacity. And there'd be a lot of people outside so [sound system operator and reggae producer] Duke Reid opened up just down the road, upstairs at the Swan opposite Stockwell tube station, and that took the overflow from our youth club, you know. And then we became the resident sound at a youth club in Ladbroke Grove, called the Metro. And that was a very brave step, because you know sound systems were similar to football - very territorial. So the thought of a sound coming from Battersea to go all the way over into Ladbroke Grove, it would seem to many sound systems was suicide. But we were fortunate enough that we entertained.
And our sound system was about stamping out fights at dances. Because fights at dances were just pain, and they'd be over stupid things. And we were about saying “make love, not war”. Because love is lovely but war is ugly. That was our phrase. So we had like security in the dance and if something was igniting, our security would pounce on it straightaway and have them outside. And that would be our way of dealing with the Ladbroke Grove crowd because they're quite fiery those boys over that side, you know.
So we started playing two gigs on a Friday night. One gig at the Metro from seven to 11. And another gig at the Cricklewood club in Cricklewood from midnight to 6am. I mean, these dances were really, really popular. This was ’73, ’74, ’75.
Why was the independent cultural institution of the sound system so popular and so important?
Because it gave people a sense of freedom, a sense of ‘turn it up, make it really loud and heavy and drench our very soul in the sound’. People spent lots of money making sure that their system was high-powered and hi-fi.
These were heavy times weren't they, the 1970s - overt racism, police violence, the [extreme right] National Front [political party] were on the march…
Yeah, and we went through it listening to sound systems and dub reggae and all that wherever we could, and whenever they busted up dance one day, we'd go and do another one somewhere else. And I'll tell you what, later on, the rave people took on what we'd been hounded out of, and they got hounded out of their raves too.
Your first dub album was ‘Strictly Dubwise’ but you were doing things before that as well weren't you?
Oh, yeah. I made loads of other dubs. In fact, Strictly Dubwise was a response to my band Matumbi not being completely comfortable with me having a career making solo records outside of the band. Because some members thought well, if you do that you're in competition with yourselves because it was pointed out to me that in one Black Echoes [music magazine] chart, one of my solo records was at number one for some time. And the band could only muster number five or something and it was like, “Yeah, you've kept the band off of number one”, and I started to think, well, I don't want to be in competition with myself so I'll tell you what I'll do, I'll become Blackbeard. And I became the dub man.
In terms of British dub, what was there before you were doing it, was there anything?
I think not. I was probably in the first wave of making British dub. And of course, after that came Mad Professor, and you know, he's kind of put dub in different brackets because he started doing live mixing of dub on stage, turning the dancehall into a big, huge studio and doing what we did in the studio, but did it live in front of an audience, you know? But as for making dub albums, I think I was probably amongst the first - before me was [sound system operator] Lloydie Coxsone who made a dub album called King of the Dub Rock [in 1975]. And I mixed some of the dubs on there because I had been working with Lloydie with [singer] Louisa Mark, and we turned out ‘Caught You in a Lie’ and started her career off - and the British genre of lovers’ rock.
One interesting thing about ‘Caught You in a Lie’ is that not only is it a pioneering lovers’ rock record, it’s one of the first reggae records to use a synthesizer. How did that come about?
Well, I was in the recording studio and there was a Moog synthesizer there. Being a fan of people like Rick Wakeman, Yes, Deep Purple and King Crimson, I was no stranger to that kind of sound and I wanted to have that sound in reggae. And that was my chance.
While I was in the studio, [Jamaican bassist] Robbie Shakespeare was present and I was doing a bit of showing off with the Moog: “I bet you don’t have one of these in your studio in Jamaica!” I put the tape on and I played the Moog, and Lloydie Coxsone went: “Did you record that? Keep it in, that sounds new, that sounds good.” And that became my arrangement of that song. If you listen to the original, by Robert Parker, that instrument is not there. And that notation is not.
It's an example of how reggae music can be really innovative.
Yeah. We were the rebel generation, as [dub poet] Linton Kwesi Johnson calls us. We were not ashamed to destroy something and put something better in its place - what we thought was better, anyway.
The albums that you made with Linton Kwesi Johnson were very, very powerful. That atmosphere of dread, all those feelings of fear and anger and violence that he's dealing with in his lyrics, capturing that heavy atmosphere in British society at that time, how did you go about interpreting that in music?
Well, what we did was we researched the darker tones and the minor chords to underline both very powerful words that he seems to just pick out of a hat, you know, just pick the right word for the situation. So I had to have the right chords to go with it and the right sound - dark tones and minor chords.
Going back to your own dub albums, you did some under the name of the Fourth Street Orchestra. Were you again trying to kind of conceal your identity because of Matumbi?
It was two-pronged. It was widely thought that reggae couldn’t amount to much if it was recorded in the UK. I was hell-bent on proving that wrong. So the Fourth Street Orchestra sounded like something from Kingston, or at least New York, but not London. And being an Orchestra gave a dimension to it - that means I could put strings, I could do horns, I could do crazy percussion. I could do wild stuff. It was an orchestra so it was orchestrated, right?
And then when we released the Fourth Street orchestra material, I didn't put "Made in England" on the label. And for the 45s, we've got a dinking machine, which is a machine that is used to put that big fat hole in 45s that we got on imports, right? And that differentiated imports from inland pressings. So if someone saw a big fat hole in the middle of a 7-inch, they would immediately associate that with an import, you know, and that that would alleviate a certain amount of prejudice. And if they didn't know who the artist was, they would have to think that it was an artist from overseas. Therefore, the only thing that would prejudice the record is whether they like it or not.
Do you think that dub has changed the way people listen to music?
Oh yeah, most definitely. Dub changed the way people listen to music and it changed the way people conceive music and compose music. There are now an awful lot of dub bits in what we would term the pop genre, or music that you wouldn't normally have dub in it. I mean recently, Jonny Greenwood and Thom Yorke approached me with a view to mixing a song that they just recorded with their new group Smile. They said they want me to do one of my dub mixes on this and I thought, Oh great, because I really like these guys - I mean, Radiohead are massive. And so I remixed their recording, lengthened it, like I would have a 12-inch dub mix.
You did some engineering work with Ryuichi Sakamoto on his ‘B-2 Unit’ album back in 1980, tell me how that came about.
He came over to use my studio. And I’d just built the studio. And he was going to be my first client. I was a big Yellow Magic Orchestra fan, and to hear that the boss had summoned me to do some dub on his new creation – oh, that was an accolade.
He came over with some equipment that I had never seen before. It was a Prophet-10. And we'd only seen the Prophet-5. In fact, Sakamoto is the only person I've ever seen with one, they probably built that for him, I don't know. And then he came into my studio, and we started to record it using only that synthesizer to do the drums, to do the percussion, to do the bass lines, to do the flute lines, to do that song ‘Riot in Lagos’.
Once he finished recording it, Ryuichi said to me: “Do your thing.” So I mashed it up. I’ve realised it was actually the first Japanese electronic dub album – made in 1980.
Interview by Matthew Collin for ‘Dream Machines’ on April 28, 2022.
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