Blues dance heaven
Blackbeard
I Wah Dub
Found in music’s catacomb of mystery: a Brit-bass concept album of a reggae night on the tiles.
NE OCTOBER night in 1974, police raided the Carib Club on Cricklewood Broadway, where Dennis Bovell was playing with his Sufferer’s HiFi soundsystem. Tempers flared, a scuffle ensued – nothing to do with Bovell – but the next day he was charged with causing an affray. He ended up spending six months of a three-year sentence in Wormwood Scrubs before his conviction was overturned.
The event inspired the blazing stand-off between selector and police in Franco Rosso’s 1980 film Babylon, which Bovell soundtracked. “But where that was a fictionalised account, mine was a true horror,” he says. “Even though I was innocent I stopped the soundsystem soon after. I didn’t want any trouble, and I got serious about being a writer, musician and producer instead.”
Born in Saint Peter, Barbados in 1953, but living in London from the age of 12, by 1974 the multi-instrumentalist had already had three years of “seriousness” with funk-reggae outfit Matumbi, and by the end of the decade he’d helped build a homegrown British scene as fecund as Jamaica’s.
“It was important to disprove the theory that only Jamaican reggae was the real deal, that British reggae was somehow inauthentic
OMarch 1980 Recorded: Gooseberry Studios, London
Chart peak: 3 (Dub Vendor’s UK reggae chart)
and couldn’t cut it,” he says.
By the end of the ’70s, his achievements included pioneering lovers rock, foregrounding female vocalists in a traditionally male domain; bringing musical militancy to the polemical dub poetry of Linton Kwesi Johnson; bridging punk and reggae by producing The Pop Group and The Slits, and innovative solo works as The 4th Street Orchestra and Blackbeard.
“I was doing so much I didn’t want to be in competition with myself, so I took on different personas,” says Bovell. “Blackbeard was the dub master, the sound system operator working out of his studio.” 1978’s throbbing was his first of two heavyweight albums issued under the pseudonym: “The aim was to get on the groove of Seh? Go Deh! [1976 recording as The 4th Street Orchestra] which had been sold on the pretext of being an import from Jamaica. It came out in a plain sleeve, no details.” 1980’s follow-up
he says, was more “London, and intentionally so. I’d discovered how King Tubby had been shifting the frequencies to create that monster sound he had, and I found my own way of delivering a similar thing but with a bit more finesse.”
At just under 30 minutes, the album’s eight tracks were
Current availability: Regal Zonophone CD all conceived as ‘specials’, originally cut as one-off acetates to play out. They were sequenced to capture the reverie of the blues dance experience, as immortalised in Steve McQueen’s 2020 BBC film Lovers Rock, which featured a cameo from Bovell.
“Blues dances had been a big part of my life since moving to the UK,” he explains. “My father, who worked for London Transport, was an ardent record collector, he bought Caribbean, African and American records from a catalogue, my mother was a nurse, so the house was a party place filled with their work colleagues.”
is heady stuff, from the steppers opener Electrocharge, built around an outtake of the drum track from Janet Kay’s 1979 smash Silly Games, to closer Binoculars, the mesmeric dub of a Matumbi flip-side inspired by Jimi Hendrix. Says Bovell, who started out in a Hendrix-inspired school band, Stonehenge: “I used [Jimi’s] tactic of running the plectrum down the fretboard so it sounds like a vehicle. Then, instead of playing on the strings, I was playing the bit where the strings are anchored above the fretboard. Just messing about really.”
In between, Steadie, Jazzz and Reflections are in-the-moment, escapist lovers rock, a safe space where ideas float free of outside oppression; Blaubart is an uprising surge of rebel energy, while penultimate cut ’Nough is the coming together moment where the imaginary dancefloor is united. It finds Bovell dismantling, then rebuilding, the Errol Dunkley A Living Way Different riddim he’d put together in ’77, “with the Eventide harmoniser which could shift pitch. I recorded Patrick [Tenyue, who played melodica on Blaubart] beefing, flipping his voice from high to low.” It sounds like he’s holding communion with aliens.
Released on Bovell’s own More Cut label, it came in a cosmic Anthony Lovindeer sleeve which cast Bovell as intergalactic dub maestro beaming messages from outer space to Africa. A bass aficionado’s choice, would become a landmark in British reggae. Afterwards, Bovell carried on producing and playing, working with artists including Lee Perry, Fela Kuti, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Orange Juice, Madness and many others.
Currently working on tracks for Jarvis Cocker and Austin indie band Spoon, plus a mystery project with Bobby Gillespie, Bovell sees
as a career high.
“It’s one of my finest pieces of work,” he says, adding, “There is hoo-ha over who owns it. I’ve had no royalties on it for the past 20 years. My lawyer is currently looking into it. They wouldn’t do it to Elton John, Mick Jagger or Paul McCartney would they? The high court has to decide.”
“It was important to disprove… that British reggae was somehow inauthentic.” DENNIS BOVELL