Classic Album: Caspa,

Everybody’s Talking, Nobody’s Listening!

From the moment UK reggae legend David Rodigan, bathed in reverb and echo, asks, “Are you listening? Because Caspa’s playing,” on the album’s intro, you know you’d better pin back those lugs. What follows is a right earful of dubstep. It’s the sound of late 2000’s West London. But via ’90s jungle, Houston ‘screwed & chopped’ music, a bit of Only Fools and Horses, and a lot of doing whatever he wanted.

“It was still an ‘anything goes’ time for dubstep,” says Caspa. “Not a lot of albums were floating around, not a lot of compilations. I knew people would look at it and judge it going, ‘So, this is dubstep?’ I wanted to show people what it was about.” For Caspa it was about showing you how deep it could go ( Low Blow), how banging it could be ( Marmite), how cheeky it was ( Disco Jaws), and how much it owed a debt to the club styles that preceded it ( Back To ’93).

After the album dropped he was dubstep’s new ambassador, and everyone was listening. From the sell-out crowds at LA’s historic House of Blues, to his roadblock album launch party at Fabric.

“It was like a virus,” he says, “It just went mad. I couldn’t play enough shows. I could have played seven days a week for like three years, I reckon. It just went absolutely crazy.

“It took me to the other side of the pond. All that early heavy wobble kind of sound just went off.” It even caught the ears of a certain global yeast extract brand. “Marmite hit me up after the album came out and said, ‘We hear you have a tune called Marmite. We’d love you to do something with us and be a music ambassador’.

“I was like, ‘Fuck that! That’s not what I do. I make dubstep. I don’t do fucking adverts for Marmite’.

“My dad was saying I was crazy! I could have been rich. I said, ‘Dad! I don’t do it for the money!’ [ laughs].”

Caspa’s latest release is the Ghost Town EP, which is out now on Bassrush Records.