Classic Album: Dub Pistols, Speakers and Tweaters

Sunday Best, 2007

These days, when Future Music pops over a producer’s house to take some snaps of their studio, you can tell they’ve cleaned up – they’ve Hoovered the floor. Polished the synths. They’ve emptied the ashtray. One can only imagine what the Dub Pistols’ working environment looked like circa 2007, when they were making this explosive skank-fest. According to their driving force – producer/DJ/character Barry Ashworth – It was messy, to say the least.

“They were hedonistic days,” chuckles Barry. “We worked stupid hours in the studio all the way through the day and night. We blacked out all the windows, put ‘crime scene’ tape everywhere, and slept under the desk.”

This bunker up, party down mentality is what drives the album. You can sense the amount of labour they put in – expert programming, deft genre hopping required skill; the time and precision. On the other hand, the party-starting playing and vocals feel in-the-moment and gleefully loosened by many late-night libations. Like the mullet, it’s ‘business in the front, party in the back’ for this lot.

“I can remember sleeping under the desk on the floor, without any kind of mattress,” adds album co-producer, Jason O’Bryan who was integral to the group from 1997–2010. “I would wake up and put my hands on the padded section on the front of the desk, pull myself up, hit the space bar and we’d be off again. It was hardcore.”

Speakers and Tweeters may have been recorded with a thick haze over it, but it remains an incredibly focused body of work, bursting with scope and ambition. It manages to fit in turns from UK rap legends Blade and Rodney P, standout performances from ska royalty Terry Hall, and a cover version of Blondie’s Rapture. Somehow it all makes sense.

Barry Ashworth and his merry band of pranksters are perennially on the road, and currently pushing their dynamite new album, Crazy Diamonds. May they shine on.