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.
There is a version of this record’s reputation that does it no favours. It gets called the definitive dub album so often that people arrive expecting a primer: something orderly and instructive, dub with the working shown.
It is not that. It is a genuinely odd record, and the oddness is the point.
The melodica
Augustus Pablo’s instrument was a melodica, which is a toy. You blow into it and press keys, and in almost anyone’s hands it sounds like a school music cupboard.
In his it sounds like grief. The tone is thin and slightly reedy, and he plays in a minor key mode he called Far East, phrasing like somebody who has decided not to say the important part. Set against a bass line the size of a building, that thinness becomes the most affecting thing on the record.
Tubby’s hand
The mixing is patient to a degree that later dub rarely attempted. Effects arrive and are allowed to finish. Whole passages run with almost nothing in them. Where Scientist would put a joke, Tubby leaves a hole and trusts you to sit in it.
The title track is the famous one and deserves to be, but the album works because of the sequencing around it. There are stretches here that are close to unbearable in the way that a very slow film is unbearable, and then the bass returns and the relief is physical.
Where to start, and how
If you own one dub record this should probably be it, but do not treat it as homework. Put it on late, loud, with nothing else happening. It does not reward attention paid in the background, and it is not trying to teach you anything.
Verdict: the canonical choice, and it has earned it.
