Twelve dub records, in order
A route through dub itself rather than through reggae: twelve albums in sequence, from the first tentative experiments to the point where the method left Jamaica altogether.
Stories
Everything we have published, newest first. 17 pieces and counting.
Soundsystem Music
Roots and dub were never really album music. They were built for a room, a stack of speakers and a selector who knows what the crowd needs before the crowd does.
The mixing desk became an instrument
In a small room in Waterhouse, King Tubby stopped using a mixing desk to balance records and started using it to play them. Everything we call dub comes out of that decision.
Rockers, and how Channel One changed the drum
A studio on Maxfield Avenue, a house band with something to prove, and a drummer who put the kick on every beat. Reggae's centre of gravity moved and never quite moved back.
Building the bass
A roots sound system is not a big hi-fi. It is a room-sized instrument built by hand, tuned by ear, and designed around one frequency range most speakers never reach.
What the songs are actually saying
Roots reggae is often heard as pleasant music with a faint spiritual atmosphere. Listen to the words and it is something much more specific, and much less comfortable.
Version excursion
The instrumental on the back of the single started as a way to save money. It ended up producing an entire way of making music, and eventually most of modern pop production.
Scientist Rids the World of the Evil Curse of the Vampires
A 1981 dub album with a comic book sleeve and a silly title that happens to be one of the sharpest, funniest and best sequenced records the form has produced.
Studio One was the university
Almost everybody who mattered in Jamaican music passed through one building on Brentford Road. What came out of it is still the common language the whole music speaks.
Nyabinghi, the drums underneath everything
Before the bass line there was a hand drum, a chant and a fire that burned for days. The oldest layer of this music is also the one most listeners never hear.
When dub came to Britain
The music crossed the Atlantic in suitcases and stayed. What British sounds did with it was not imitation, it was a second tradition growing out of the first.
Ten records to start with
Not the ten best, and not the ten rarest. Ten that will teach you the most about how roots and dub work, in an order that makes sense.
Sleng Teng and the day the music went digital
In 1985 a preset rhythm from a cheap Casio keyboard went to number one in Jamaica and took the whole industry with it. Forty years on, people are still arguing about what was lost.
U-Roy and the birth of the deejay
Somebody talking over a record was not a new idea. Doing it so well that the talking became the record was, and one man on King Tubby's sound worked out how.
The word over the riddim
Dub poetry put spoken verse in Jamaican language over a bass line and asked to be judged as literature. Britain in the late 1970s is where it did its hardest work.
Ariwa, and building a studio out of nothing
British dub did not wait for the industry's permission. It built its own rooms, in south London and elsewhere, and made records the industry did not understand for another twenty years.
King Tubbys Meets Rockers Uptown
The record people hand you when you ask what dub is. Fifty years on it is still the right answer, and still stranger than its reputation suggests.