Dub And Thunder
This month’s deep sea salvage operation: Anglo-Jamaican space-reggae sorcery.
Prince Far I & The Arabs Cry Tuff Dub Encounter Chapter IV TROJAN, 1981
IN MID-’70s High Wycombe, teenager Adrian Sherwood had started DJing at reggae parties at the town’s Newlands Club, and within a few years founded his own Carib Gems label. He also accommodated touring Jamaican musicians at his mother’s house. These included Prince Far I (real name: Michael Williams), a sometime security guard and ‘chanting’ deejay from Kingston, whose gravel-throated exhortations on tracks like 1976’s Under Heavy Manners epitomised roots reggae’s mood of ‘dread’ and earnt him the epithet, the ‘Voice Of Thunder’.
“Mum was a secretary,” Sherwood told this writer in 2011, “living in a little two-uptwo-down, but she was really open-minded letting these guys stay. She used to call Far I the ‘Honey Monster’ [after Sugar Puffs cereal’s benignly growling mascot] and he called her ‘Mummy’. Eventually I ended up mixing gigs for him.”
With Sherwood ensconced at the desk, his mentor Williams arrived for a tour in late ’77 with a suitcase full of tapes cut in Kingston with the fledgling Roots Radics band, with a view to cooking up a dub album in London. Cry Tuff Dub Encounter Chapter 1 was remixed by the pair at the basement facility Gooseberry in London’s Chinatown. Released in March ’78 on Sherwood’s Hit-Run imprint, two further chapters followed, each progressively more outlandish and abstract in the face of increasingly generic dub records churning out of JA.
Though sales at the time weren’t astronomical, the Cry Tuff series has aged spectacularly, coming to be appreciated for its extraordinary invention and sound palette – most of all, 1981’s Chapter IV, which boldly went where even the likes of King Tubby and Scientist had never ventured before, with its own spectral, near-ambient sound.
By this stage, Williams was actively seeking out idiosyncrasy: to that end, he convened a team of players at Kingston’s Channel One studio who specifically weren’t the hot sessioneers of the moment, amongst them a white guitarist from Connecticut named Andy Bassford (an auspicious dubwise monicker), who’d landed on the island the previous year with Horace Andy, and was tracked down by Williams at the street-corner hang-out, Idler’s Rest.
“Far I really knew how to pick a band,” Bassford says from the Bronx, “because these were not the regular session guys. In that period, there were probably 20 people playing on most of the records in Jamaica, whereas this combination of musicians had never played together, and you would’ve probably considered them as maybe the B or C team – people like [rhythm guitarist] Little Dee, who’d played with Cedric Brooks’ Light Of Saba, and [bass player] Larry Silvera, who spent some of his time in Canada. So it ended up pretty left-of-centre, because Far I was aiming somewhere else.”
Unusually in those reggae circles, Bassford kept a diary: the session took place on May 11, 1981. Channel One opened around 10am, and they were recording by 11.
All eight tracks were nailed in one day, “ever ybody playing each track straight through, then on to the next one.” He adds: “I said to Far I, ‘How strange can I sound?’ and he said, ‘Do anything you want!’ I played these chords in fourths at one point, which definitely wasn’t done in reggae at the time, and thought, Anything goes!”
After getting underpaid by Far I, Bassford vividly recalls the journey home: when he changed buses near Bob Marley’s house at 56 Hope Road, the area’s many record stores were blaring Wailers tunes. He soon heard the news that Marley, who’d been fighting cancer, had passed away.
The tapes from the day’s session most likely went over to the UK in Far I’s luggage on his next tour for Sher wood to mix. “Everybody in Jamaica spoke very highly of Adrian,” says Bassford, who never actually met him. “Style Scott [early Roots Radics drummer] in particular had worked with him a lot, and was always telling me he was the real deal.”
Sher wood, who’d launched his On-U Sound label the previous year, however, was never credited as the mixing mastermind behind Cry Tuff, perhaps for contractual reasons, or maybe to maintain an illusion that the records were pure Jamaican wizardry. Anyone familiar with Sher wood’s sprawling subsequent oeuvre can detect his sonic fingerprints in an instant: the extra-cavernous sound, the hi-tech squiggles using kit unavailable to JA producers, and also the presence of the baleful saxophone of ‘Deadly’ Headley Bennett. Bassford believes that Bennett probably added his parts, on the blissfully mournful Deadly Command and others, in London.
Possibly through Williams’ deal for a concurrent vocal set (entitled Voice Of Thunder),
Chapter IV came out via Trojan. Far I’s friendship with Sher wood continued until tragedy struck: on September 15, 1983, Williams was gunned down outside his home – during a robber y, some say, while others maintain it was retribution for political slogans emblazoned around his property. The effect this had on Sher wood was seismic, as he largely ceased production of reggae for some years, instead exploring a brutal form of protoindustrial electro-funk with Tackhead and The Pop Group’s Mark Stewart.
“It was a response to the anger and upset I felt about Far I’s death,” he admitted, “just sickened by the whole Jamaica situation – like, ‘What’s the fucking point?’”
Bassford, meanwhile, only heard the finished Chapter IV years later when he tracked down a vinyl copy in New York. “I just went, ‘Wow, this is even better than I remember it!’” Those who’ve basked in its lunar majesty surely feel the same with every airing.
“Far I was aiming somewhere else.” ANDY BASSFORD