Adrian Sherwood on On-U Sound

“Creating mischief and creating magic” – this is what Adrian Sherwood says he learned from his friend, the late, great Jamaican producer Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry.

In this interview, the On-U Sound kingpin and British dub iconoclast talks about the disparate elements that went into his unconventional sound, and why reggae purists didn’t approve of it. He also discusses working with the best rhythm sections in the world, the delights of dub and reggae’s endless ‘versions’, and the awesome power of Tackhead live.

Going back to when you started in the late seventies, when you started producing, how did you start to get your sound together?

It came from being amongst a lot of older Jamaicans really. My dad died when I was very young and basically the biggest influence on me was a friend, Joe - Joseph Farquharson, who died a couple of years ago of cancer - and he basically shaped my life, to be honest, he wasn't a musician but he started to put me into the business and introduced me to people and I kept listening to what people said regarding running a label - you know, build a catalogue, build a catalogue so people like distributors take you seriously if you're doing business with them and things like that.

And then another recurring thing I kept hearing was when I started meeting musicians and producers, and I met some very great musicians and producers early on - the likes of Keith Hudson and Prince Far I, I met [Jamaican producer] Sonia Pottinger.

The Jamaican producers like Lee Perry would all pride themselves on having their own identifiable sound. I soon started realising by being in the studio a lot more that by using a couple of techniques that I liked, like flying things through speakers and remiking them and then using certain reverbs and certain EQs and certain distortions, I’d started formulating something that people started recognising as ‘my sound’.

So people eventually started saying “that sounds like an Adrian Sherwood record or an On-U Sound record”. By then, I'd started developing something where you could hear the ideas and also by mixing with your hands, which I still do to this day, I think certain people can pick up on it. Obviously, I was never that successful by comparison to hugely successful producers. But what I did do, I did kind of work on formulating in inverted commas 'my own sound'.

You also always had a kind of constantly shifting collective of people around you [at On-U Sound], which you used in different ways in different formats in different kind of bands. How did that work?

That was quite simple. When we started for example, we did some of the most pioneering gigs in Holland. I think the first reggae shows out there were people like Keith Hudson, Dillinger, and we were among them, we went with Prince Far I using the name Creation Rebel.

Our drummer, we were using Style Scott when we started, but he went off to do things with Roots Radics. And then Charlie [Eskimo] Fox, who I've known since he played the first ever Gregory Isaacs tour. And I met him when I was about 15 and we had him drumming.

So one week, he would go to Holland and he'd be backing Dillinger, and the band would be called the Freedom Fighters. And then the next week, he'd be back at the same venue with us backing Prince Far I under the name Creation Rebel.

It was hard for us sometimes. Doing English reggae, you know, it was kind of frowned upon by the reggae fraternity, for them it’s got to be from Jamaica, that was the real deal and ours was like a pale imitation. So there was no point, in my mind, copying what was coming from Jamaica.

And I had friends who were playing me other stuff, they'd subject me to Pink Floyd and stuff, which I wasn't a big fan of. My hippie mates would be sitting there listen to fucking Love or Yes, then other ones that played things that I found interesting, like Captain Beefheart, just like mad stuff. And I started hearing bands like The Fall and other things with some attitude to it and I met Mark Stewart and one thing led to another, so I started adding stuff to my productions.

Some of the more purist reggae critics were a bit dismissive of On-U Sound records.

The purists were never going to like On-U Sound, it was too unconventional. Some of them are a bit more open-minded than others, but they were never going to like On-U Sound. I mean, [DJ David] Rodigan, to his credit, he's always said to me, to my face, that he doesn't really like my records, but I respect that, I'd rather somebody who really doesn't like what you do, or really loves it, than they're a bit indifferent.

Steve [Barrow] who started Blood and Fire [Records] was on my side. I had a lot of support from the Jamaican artists and musicians, you know, they liked pushing it a bit. Not all of them, but some did. And I was doing other things anyway, not just the reggae. After Prince Far I was murdered in 1983, I kind of didn't do any reggae for nearly three years, until we did that ‘Time Boom’ album with Lee Perry. I moved into doing Tackhead and remixing and all that stuff.

How did you bring the Sugar Hill Records house band from New York to On-U Sound [Keith LeBlanc, Doug Wimbish and Skip McDonald]?

The first time I did anything with a drum machine it was with [musician] Steve Beresford. We did a song called ‘Watch Yourself’ with [singer] Akabu [in 1984]. And I knew Neil Cooper, who ran the cassette label ROIR in New York, I sent him a cassette of it, like you did in those days. And he played it to Tommy Boy [Tom Silverman, founder of Tommy Boy Records]. And Tommy was starting a new label, Body Rock, a division of Tommy Boy, and he brought me to New York and gave me like, quite a lot of money at the time for the rights to it. And I stayed with him and we became friends.

He took me to the studio and one of the first things he was doing was overdubbing a Sylvain Sylvain tune with live drums and that [drummer] was Keith LeBlanc who’d just done the Malcolm X record [‘No Sell Out’, 1985]. We got on, we were chatting and said we should do something together.

While I was in New York the second time for the New Music Seminar, Tommy put me on a panel there with Conny Plank and Arthur Baker and some other people. And they'd all put one tune that had sold more than everything I've ever done. And that evening, I met Doug and Skip as well. And then one thing led to another, Keith came first and then we just started experimenting and enjoying ourselves. And we've been friends ever since.

What did they bring to the whole On-U Sound sound?

Well, basically, they were one of the world's great rhythm sections, you know, they played on all those fantastic records. And I've just been so lucky. I was working with Style Scott and that rhythm section he ended up being part of in Jamaica - you know, the only time in the history of Jamaican music where the top 20 in the charts number one to 20, every track was played by Roots Radics, every single tune one week on that chart, no Sly and Robbie, every single track was played by them. So I was working with rhythm sections like that.

You were reusing and repurposing lots of the recordings that you made in different formats too.

Not all of them, but it was being done under the unique thing you have with reggae, which is version. It still to this day fascinates me, like all reggae fans – if you’ve got a good rhythm, you want to hear twenty versions of that rhythm.

It’s like an art form, you know, a great rhythm. I could never understand why other genres didn’t do this – have a big hit with a great track and then just take the artists off, put another couple of artists on it and just reinterpret it. That is effectively a remix, but remixes for me all come from what Jamaicans call version.

The whole remix culture didn't start in the eighties, it started earlier in Jamaica didn't it?

Well, yeah, because the Jamaicans started having a song on the A-side of a record and an instrumental on the B-side. But then they'd use the version at dances and DJs would shout over the top or whatever and then then it evolved so the B-sides started getting more adventurous with the likes of Lee Perry, which was the evolution of dub versions, treated instrumental versions. Then that accelerated into the seventies, so you’d record loads of people on the same rhythm.

I love versioning to this day and I'll have Horace Andy on one song, Daddy Freddy on the same rhythm, then a horns version and another twisted version.

With Tackhead you were also doing that using repurposed rhythms. But you really took it to the extreme, rhythmically it was so heavy.

Tackhead at the time was such a violent force, a very daunting little crew. I was very competitive, I always wanted to go in, make the loudest noise you’d ever heard and completely mash the place up.

To be honest with you, we deliberately didn't record lots of singers on the On-U label. If we had a singer, we tried to place them with a big label, because I didn't have the budgets to promote them. On-U was all kind of quite underground.

So the idea with Tackhead, we were cutting up bits of people’s words, preachers or news stories or Thatcher or whatever and making sound collages like Keith [LeBlanc] did with the Malcolm X record, or Mark Stewart did with the kind of Brian Gysin/William Burroughs cutting and pasting.

You also had [MC] Gary Clail of course…

Gary was Mark Stewart's mate from Bristol, we just gave him a go on the mic and suddenly he had a hit record.

You worked with quite a lot of people from the post-punk scene and helped develop this kind of reggae/post-punk crossover. Why do you think that that those two things really sparked off each other and created some really interesting music?

Well, my mate  from High Wycombe had a band called Brewers Droop and he used to run the punk night on a Tuesday at the 100 Club [in London]. And the Thursday night was run by an old Jewish couple. If you went on the Tuesday, it was not for me, it was a fucking horrible din. But Thursday nights, you'd go there form the reggae night and like, John Lydon would be there and other people from the community, obviously The Slits, my friends, and everybody was listening to the reggae and then they want to express themselves doing their version of that.

So along come The Slits and Public Image, and to a degree The Clash, with Mikey Dread and ‘Police and Thieves’ and stuff. Mark [Stewart] was into the funk and he was also into Burroughs and the dub stuff. The punky reggae party, or whatever you want to call it, just morphed into 'right, we're going to now start embracing and doing our own things according our own sensibilities, versions of funk, dub and whatever else'. 

You’ve kept yourself independent over the years. I guess there's been financial implications because of that. But I'm more interested in how being independent has been important for the actual music that you've made over all this time.

It meant I could do what I want. Running the label cost me, I probably put hundreds of thousands of quid from jobs into the label to support it, to do the things I wanted to do. I didn't do it thinking it was going to make me a fortune. I've always done better if I'm doing big jobs for people - if I could be arsed to do that, because I'd obviously rather be doing my own stuff for my own company. And here we are now, we're still in the game and still making good records.

What influence in general do you think reggae has had on the sound of popular music over the past few decades?

All these massive delays, these phases, these distortions and things. With reggae, there's more space than anything. There's a frequency for everything. And space is king.

Dub is a genuinely progressive, innovative sound but it’s also more than that, it’s an idea of how to make music…

Dennis Bovell put it very well, he said that dub is the time of the engineer. When the musicians have finished their job, the engineer deconstructs it and creates another picture altogether. But dub is only version, it's not like a type of music. People make ‘designer dub’ records now, I've done a few myself. Which isn’t actually what dub was when it started, because it all used to be versions of songs. Although a lot of people make dub records from scratch now, originally all those great albums of Lee Perry, Joe Gibbs, Errol Thompson and all that, they were derived from songs.

What do you think you learned from Lee Perry, as a producer?

I learned how to unthink things, and how to create magic. I didn’t want my music to be too cold, I wanted a bit of charm and a bit of mischief and a bit of fun in the productions. Something to mess it up a bit. That’s what I learned from Lee Perry. Lee was all about creating mischief and creating magic.

Interview by Matthew Collin for ‘Dream Machines’, January 27, 2022.

Photo: On-U Sound Facebook page.