Dennis Bovell

FERGUS MURPHY

For that extra special Friday feeling it’s an absolute pleasure to welcome Dennis Bovell [applause]. We’ve got enough music for the whole day and we’re going to start talking and get into it all in a moment. But first a song.

DENNIS BOVELL

Yeah, this one’s called “Love the Reggae.”

(music: Dennis Bovell - “Love the Reggae” / applause)

That's a song I constructed to be a tone of appreciation to all people that have been involved in reggae over the years. Unfortunately, I couldn’t name everyone, so at the end I say [adopts toasting style], “If you never get this message accept this apology.” [laughs] The reason why it’s still at the drawing board stage, why it’s never been released, is because I played it to my good friend, the poet Linton Kwesi Johnson, and he said, “I don’t like that song. You never mention me.” [laughter] So I said you’ve got my apology on that one. At the moment I’m involved in producing an old ska band from England called Madness.

FERGUS MURPHY

One Step Beyond

DENNIS BOVELL

...and all that kind of thing. They’ve just reformed and I’m currently doing their new album. And they wanted to do that song, so I just thought I’d share that with you right now.

FERGUS MURPHY

You can hear from the song, you shout out various countries. Reggae has brought you all over the world, almost in a very traditional way as a musician and a travelling producer.

DENNIS BOVELL

It sure has, it’s taken me to places I could never have afforded to have gone to; or maybe I wouldn’t know that I’d have loved to have been to. One of the craziest places was Poland, and in the early ’90s we went to play the shipyard in Gdansk. It was with Solidarity and the ANC in Poland, when Lech Walesa and Solidarity won the elections there. We went there to play and I was surprised at the knowledge of reggae. Also Iceland, in Reykjavik. And also Salvador de Bahia, and we’re quite frequent in Japan. I’ve recorded several Japanese artists. In fact, the first one was Ryuichi Sakamoto, the chief of Yellow Magic Orchestra. Don Letts, who’s a friend of mine, called me up one day and said, “I have a guy in Japan, who wants to meet you.” And it turned out to be Sakamoto, who was putting his first solo album togegther after Yellow Magic Orchestra, and this album was called B2 Unit. He heard I was building a studio and wanted to be the first person to use it, even before me. So he came over and cut the album, and since that I’ve been a frequent visitor to Japan. I cut the first Japanese lovers album, with a singer called Iriya, and produced Yellow Magic, Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra and a new Japanese band at the moment called Dub Sense Mania, the new reggae band on Sony. Also a couple of diverse lovers singers and I have to say the Japanese are out in front when it comes to appreciation of reggae, outside of normal reggae grounds. They have absolutely everything, they’re ardent collectors. They surprised me with having stuff you can’t even find in Jamaica.

FERGUS MURPHY

That’s today, but in fairness bring us back. Where did it all start? Where was little Dennis?

DENNIS BOVELL

At the age of 12 I was ordered to London by my parents.

FERGUS MURPHY

From?

DENNIS BOVELL

From Barbados. I was living with my grandparents in Barbados and my parents were living in London. And when I was 12, they thought it was time for me to go and live with them; and I didn’t want to go but I had to. They were already there, working, my mother was a doctor and my dad was a bus driver.

FERGUS MURPHY

That would be quite a common thing that people would leave to work in England and leave their children behind with the grandparents.

DENNIS BOVELL

And I was a victim of that circumstance. I ended up in London at the age of 12. I’d just begun to learn how to play guitar, which was one of the main reasons I didn’t want to leave, because my teacher was there, my mum’s younger brother. He was a musician touring around the world with a soca band because in Barbados the music tends to be more calypso being in the Eastern Caribbean, rather than Jamaica in the West with reggae. I’m arriving in London and my parents had lots of Jamaican friends. In the late ’50s, ’59, a couple of my uncles had gone to study in Jamaica at the University Of West Indies – one in mathematics, one in chemistry – and they would bring home Jamaican music. So we’d get to listen to it and I’d get interested in that. Then there was all my parents’ Jamaican friends, so there was lots more Jamaican music to listen to and I’d met up with a group of young boys my age who had a group. This was a pop group and they were looking for a singer and a guitarist, so I got in there. And we were trying to imitate Jimi Hendrix or B.B. King or Wilson Pickett or Otis Redding. On the death of Hendrix it was like the world had caved in. “What are we going to do now? The master has gone.” I didn’t fancy myself trying to create music in the same way Hendrix did, so we thought about being the most obscure thing you could imagine being and that was to be in a reggae band. At that time, reggae was very little known and very little liked. We’re talking 1966. Desmond Dekker had a hit with a song called “007,” and to me that was electric, so I wanted to play that kind of music. Everyone else was trying to do Otis Redding, Sam & Dave, trying to be funky. I was told, “If you’re going to play reggae, you’ll never get a gig.” But that was what we wanted to do. It was the kind of music where you could get hold of a girl and dance with her. Well, the funky stuff was all apart, but reggae was like, “Yeah, come on!” That appealed to me. [laughs] I wanted to make that kind of music too. So we formed a band called Matumbi. The word ‘Matumbi’ was the most African sounding name we could come up with, because having been brought up in London, there was no African history, it was Richard III and Charles I and shit like that. Henry VIII, what’s that got to do with me? I wanted hear about Shaka Zulu and people like that. So we started to investigate African history and show our Africanness by choosing an African name. And it’s ironic that that name came from an English lesson. We were doing O-level English, and it was a book called Mister Johnson by a novelist Joyce Carey, it was later made into a film. And in that book there was a Sergeant Gallup, and he had an African woman and her name was Matumbi, and the description of her was the most beautiful. And the word looked good on paper, too. So we took that name and we started to record our own songs. And we became political because at that time there was an English politician called Enoch Powell, who was blatantly racist, he was the father of the National Front.

FERGUS MURPHY

He made that famous speech about, “Rivers of blood will flow...”

DENNIS BOVELL

That’s right. And it was ironic because when black people started to come into England in numbers in the late ’50s, ’58 and ’59 – and he was the Minister of Health and he would’ve overseen lots of black people coming because lots of black people went to work in the health service – he would’ve initially picked the entrants. And then, when there was more than he wanted, he said, “Close the door now.” So he made a speech saying England was about to be swamped by an alien culture, there was going to be rivers of blood, racial war, all that shit. So we decided to answer him with some of our poems and songs. But when we went knocking on the record company doors they were, “We don’t want to hear that, can’t you write some love songs?” We wanted to be real here. So they turned us down because our original material was deemed too political, so we went into the studio and cut for a joke a cover of a Hot Chocolate song called “Brother Louie.” Now that song in itself was racial but they didn’t see that, because the story of Brother Louie is the story of a mixed relationship between a black girl and a white guy. So they didn’t let us talk on other political issues but they didn’t see that one, so they put it out. I was singing and I wasn’t really the singer of the band, I was the guitarist, so we did it sort of like a joke. And also because Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones had left his Mellotron, which was the first string machine, the first machine you could use to try to imitate an orchestra. And he’d left it in that studio where we were working and next door were Average White Band, who were doing their first album. We asked the guys if we could use it, and the instrument had been used on the Hot Chocolate version of that song. So we just did a reggae version of that and they let us in, gave us a contract and we were signed to Trojan Records, the beast.

FERGUS MURPHY

We’ll get onto that later. Matumbi was about exploring Africanism and there’s obviously a sense of exploring identity through music. You’ve come to somewhere else, and you’re in a new culture.

DENNIS BOVELL

A halfway house, nearly back to Africa.

FERGUS MURPHY

And what was the process of resolving that?

DENNIS BOVELL

It’s yet to be resolved because we still don’t know it all. Every October now is black history month, where you get to find out what black people did. But January to September and November to December, nothing said. It’s just the fact that the contribution of black people to this modern world has been played down, really heavily played down, so the young black kids are made to think that black people have done nothing in this world and deserve nothing in this world. And it’s all the political bullshit that we’re trying to clear away. For instance, if you told someone the blood bank was initiated by a black person, the traffic light, that was invented by some black guy, why should anyone want to deny us the right of knowing our history? What are they afraid of?

FERGUS MURPHY

Do you think it’s denied?

DENNIS BOVELL

It’s definitely denied. It’s underwritten. It’s been shoved under the carpet because of the greatest crime to humanity in history, known as slavery. I think there’s a great fear that if black people did what was done to them during that time, there would be hell on earth.

FERGUS MURPHY

Is Barbados still home or do you call London home?

DENNIS BOVELL

The world is home, man. Earth is home.

FERGUS MURPHY

You were doing funky stuff when you formed, and I have here a record of Matumbi doing a Temptations song, “Law Of The Land,” which is also a political song.

DENNIS BOVELL

The thing was, Trojan were more intent on making quick bucks. A song would be popular, “OK, make a reggae version.” It was cheapening reggae because it seemed reggae people weren’t able to compose stuff. We had to wait until something was composed and then we’d adapt it. That’s not the way.

FERGUS MURPHY

That’s a Jamaican tradition, though.

DENNIS BOVELL

Yeah, but there were also lots of great Jamaican composers that were played down because it was easier to get somebody to do a cover version than get people used to a new composition. That was the prejudice of radio, because radio DJs would play some tune that everyone knew and it would be easier to get on the circuit instead of playing something that was new and working it in the same way. All of the stuff that became popular had to be new at some time, and somebody had to play it, play it until people got to know what it was about, like it or not. How many times have you heard a song that you hated first time, and you’re walking down the street, it’s been pumped on the radio, you’ve been brainwashed by it and all of a sudden you find yourself whistling that tune? We weren’t given the same exposure. Reggae was mainly a soundsystem thing. The soundsystem was reggae’s radio. The soundsystem suddenly sprung up, and people would be doing dubplates and specials and making the reggae world wider. And then until they started having it on the radio... and in London we took it a stage further and started having reggae radio, there’s at least ten or 12 stations that play reggae, flat out, 24/7, and they’re illegal. What have you got there?

FERGUS MURPHY

“Law Of The Land.”

DENNIS BOVELL

This is a great song, The Temptations did the original. We covered it with Matumbi.

FERGUS MURPHY

What was the line-up of Matumbi? These are the guys you hooked up with when you first arrived.

DENNIS BOVELL

I was in school with these guys from the age of 12. There were three vocalists, of whom I was one. We had all come from a spiritual background. My grandfather is a preacher, the father of the guy who’s singing the first line on this song was a preacher, and the other one is now a preacher. So coming from a heavy religious background, it taught us how to deal with harmonies, because the church singing is very melodious. A lot of people were surprised that at the age of 14, 15 we could sing a harmony, so that was the focal point of our vocal ability. And then we had bass, keyboards, a horn section, and there we were pursuing being an orchestral outfit, because we had strings. We were trying to take reggae to an almost philharmonic division, by trying to do a Norman Whitfield song, because he was a great composer and great producer. And The Temptations being one of my all time favourite bands, the first bassline I ever played in public was the bassline to “My Girl,” [imitates bassline to “My Girl”].

FERGUS MURPHY

We’ll get you to play that in a minute. This is “Law Of The Land.”

(music: Matumbi - “Law Of The Land” / applause)

Audience Member

[inaudible]

DENNIS BOVELL

It’s called “Law Of The Land,” and the band’s called Matumbi. I was 17 then.

FERGUS MURPHY

That little scream at the end, that was the 17-year old you. Can you still get up there?

DENNIS BOVELL

Yeah, yeah. This was not really finished. As you can hear the lead voices are very far down in the mix. We’d done the track, but we hadn’t done the voices yet. Then we fell out with the record company, and they told us they’d lost the tapes. We went away and decided to do a bunch of stuff on our own. I was the engineer of a recording studio at that time, and we could get free studio time. So we were recording at my expense and not with Trojan paying. Trojan had paid for this recording up until that point where we’d done the backing track and we thought we’ll have room to negotiate for recording the vocals. They were like, “No, we’ve lost the tapes anyway.” And then, about two or three years later, once we’d gone and done our own recordings and were quite popular without them, these recordings suddenly appeared on an album called The Best Of Matumbi. As you can hear the voices there on that album you can hear the singers doing what would have been the horn parts [imitates horn section]. Then they put out that album and we never recovered from that really because to this day we’ve been having legal wrangles with them. For the last 30 years they’ve paid us no money and I’m really surprised to see that this track is out now because the company changed hands about five different times. Each new owner would call us and say, “Yo, we’ve just bought your stuff.” And we’d say, “Show us the contract,” and they were never able to show us any contract. The new Trojan Records is owned by a company called Sanctuary, which is a whole bunch of rock people. The owners of that company is a famous rock band. Is it Motörhead?

FERGUS MURPHY

Motörhead, that’s Lemmy.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

Black Sabbath.

DENNIS BOVELL

Black Sabbath, that’s right. That’s who owns it. They sent us contracts and said, “We know what went on in the past, but it wasn’t us and we want to make things right with you.” So I said, “Well, you’ve got 30 years of back royalties on that title for a start.” And I’ve seen that album as far as Korea, always fresh mint copies. San Diego, I’ve seen that album, and nobody’s ever paid us any royalties on that album. We just had a contract last week, which our lawyers are looking over.

FERGUS MURPHY

Dealing with the beast.

DENNIS BOVELL

That’s why we call them the beast. The original owners of Trojan, when we went there in 1971 looking for a deal, we were told, “This is the deal, sign it in ten minutes or get out of the office.” As a bunch of 15, 16, 17-year olds, what do you do? The door’s half open, we can sign and go in. We found out the deal meant the whole group, all seven of us, were going to get 3% off the recording. 97% was going elsewhere, while we were getting 3% between seven of us.

FERGUS MURPHY

It was very common in reggae that people would get paid for a session and you could forget about the rights.

DENNIS BOVELL

People would sell themselves. You could go to a company and they would not discuss royalties. Royalties were not part of the deal. It was like, “How much do you want for this tune?” And you’d get £100, £200, £300, then that was it, it was theirs.

Audience Member

[inaudible]

DENNIS BOVELL

In London. There were lots of people who had records released in Trojan, who didn’t know it had been released because they lived in Jamaica. It caused a lot of violence too. Leroy Smart, a friend of mine, he came to London because he found out someone had released his record in England. He didn’t know the guy, didn’t have a deal. So he walked into the place and said, “Who’s that guy?” Someone said, “Yeah, me.” And he walked straight up to him and stabbed him, a couple of times. Everyone was like, “Yeah [claps], great.”

FERGUS MURPHY

Don’t try this at home. [laughter]

DENNIS BOVELL

Don’t do it home, that was 20 years ago, now you’d get life. But it was kind of righteous violence as we saw it. He stabbed the guy and the police put him in jail. And when he came out of jail he came to see me and said, “Let’s make a new record.” “When?” “Now.” “You got the money?” “Let’s do it right away.” “You got the songs?” “No, I’m a singer, play what you like.” We were making up tracks right there and then and he’d say, “That’s one finished, I’ve got the lyrics to that.” And by the time we got to nine, I was thinking, ‘I’m writing songs for you here.’ And he was like, “Weeeelll, just do one more and that will be it.” I said no. “But an album’s ten, you’ve got five a side.” So we said, “Tell you what, sing another song on that track.” And that was the birth of doing a different song on the same rhythm track, and the album’s called Propaganda.

FERGUS MURPHY

A version?

DENNIS BOVELL

Yeah, but actually singing another song on the track that belonged to another song. Completely new composition, completely new top-line but the same chords. And we recorded and mixed the whole album in one night. And the next day he was out of there on a false passport and back to Jamaica. And that was because of piracy.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

What was the socio and economic status of visible minorities in London at that time? And do you think that played its part in your troop and other reggae troops being taken advantage of in terms of signing record deals, just taking bare minimum?

DENNIS BOVELL

For sure. The reason a lot of black people came to England in the first place, it was cheap labour. The same reason a lot of factories relocate to China, and Korea or Pakistan, is because they get even kids to work and don’t pay them. And the big fat cat stays the big fat cat and there’s lots of profits on that side and on the labour side it’s poverty. So coming from an Afro-Caribbean background it was positively sure that your parents would not be rich and your whole community would be rife with poor people. So life was cheap, let alone anything else. So that was the social standing of people who came from that area. And the first thing they’d say to you is, “Well, you know, we’re not going to sell a lot of this. So straight away the value of it is minus, so if we take it from you, we’ll be doing you a favour.” So you’d go into the studio and make your record and the guy would say, “Well, this is useless but I’ll take it off you.” And then you see it in the charts and they’d say, “Hey, I bought this from you, it’s in the contract, it’s mine forever more and the day after forever more.” Until it became illegal to sell your soul, a lot of souls were sold as a means of surviving or becoming popular. It’s really depicted in that Jimmy Cliff film, The Harder They Come. If you’ve ever seen that film, that’s real, that’s not beefed up. In fact, that’s mild compared to what went on. A song like “The Israelites,” Desmond Dekker, that song is planet famous and the authorship of the song is credited to a guy called Leslie Kong, a Jamaican Chinese guy, and he’s dead 30 years. So where’s the money going? Not to his family, but to the various record companies, a little bit here, a little bit there. I mean, the guy’s dead anyway, it’s nearly public domain. If you were alive, you’d be hard pushed to get something. There were a lot of artists on a label called Studio One, and the tales, artist after artist after artist after artist who was on Studio One never got paid, or they were bought out. The guy would say, “OK, I’ll give you ten shillings for this record and it’s mine forever, you’ve not got no more claim on it.” And, if you’ve never had ten shillings before and you wanted it, you’d say, “Yeah.” You’ll be thinking, ‘I can write more songs than this.’ But that was probably the one song that was going to make you a millionaire, and you’ve sold it. It’s very tempting, especially when we were 17, 16-years old, just left school, and your father’s working every hour god sends and he can only make so much. You’ve just cut a record and you’ve made more than he’ll make in a whole week, and you’re like, “Dad, you should been a musician, dude.” And he’s saying, “Yeah? You wait till they rip you off.” And he was right.

FERGUS MURPHY

Was that experience an influence on you becoming a producer? And at what point did playing guitar and singing and wanting to cut a deal turn into wanting to take more control?

DENNIS BOVELL

Absolutely. I was fortunate enough to go to a school that was pretty much like this and had a recording studio. That’s where I got my teeth into recording and twiddling the knobs. It ended up that every time we went into the studio, there’d be arguments with the engineer trying to describe what kind of sound we wanted. At that time it was, “You can’t have that much bass, you’re crazy. It’ll blow the speakers. You can’t have your treble like that. Everything must be very flat. Zero, zero, zero. You can’t go above zero.” Sometimes I’d just go, “Stand aside. You see those knobs? I know how to twiddle them. You see that piece of paper? That’s my diploma.” And consequently, when we went into the studio, instead of having an engineer, I’d say, “Give me an assistant. I want someone who can plug stuff in. I don’t know how your patch bay works. You get me someone who patches your patch bay. The sound is in here and I’m going to put the sound that I want on my record. When you’re doing Status Quo or whoever, do it like that.” Can you imagine saying to Jimi Hendrix, “That’s in the red.” Or to Jeff Beck, “That guitar’s distorted, man.” [laughter] And we would get that all the time from the sound engineers. They would go, But it’s in the red!” I wanted it in the red, I wanted it to go like that ’cause it’s not loud enough. Also, it was the battle of ears against eyes. Your ears would say it’s good, whereas your eyes would say, “No, it’s in the red.” So what? Cover your eyes and cover the dials. It’s sound, dude, it ain’t film. Use these. If it sounds good and you like it, walk with it. After many arguments with engineers and recording studios, I decided I’m going to do this, I’m going to be a producer and I’m going to dictate what the sound sounds like. That was my reason for becoming a producer, and also that I would own the rights to all my own recordings. Instead of some guy coming along and saying, “I’m the producer.” “What did you do?” “I paid the studio.” That was the criteria for a lot of reggae producers, they paid the studio. In 1974, I was invited to be the musical director of a recording with Louisa Mark. We went in and did a track called “Caught You in a Lie.” I ended up playing bass, the organ, piano, guitar and doing sound engineering as well on this track. And when the record came out, the guy who booked the studio, it was all passed to him, produced by this guy. And to this day the guy wouldn’t know A from B. He wouldn’t know how to tune, whether it was in or out of tune. We wanted to cancel that. The producer should be someone who knows about the music, who knows how to play that stuff. If the musician’s not playing what the producer wants, he should be able to take that instrument and show him how to play it, or if he can’t get it, say, “Yo, you’re dismissed.” Many times I’ve been in and just ridiculed the so-called producer, deliberately played out of tune. Play the guitar bang out of tune, and the producer’s sat there going, “Yeah, great.” And then the band will be like [suppressed laughter], and then you’ll go, “I think I’ll do that again, it’s out of tune.” And he’ll say, “Yeah, I thought there was something strange about it.” You know?

FERGUS MURPHY

And what were the first productions that you got involved with?

DENNIS BOVELL

At first I was my own guinea pig. I started to produce stuff using a bunch of different names. It was always ‘try and spot Dennis Bovell’ because I had the ability to play lots of instruments and do lots of things and it seemed unreal to a lot of people. “Is that you again?” “Yeah.” “Oh!” “Is that you again?” “Yeah.” “Oh!" So I started giving myself different names, I called myself Blackbeard and African Stone, as well as Matumbi and then the Dub Band later. And I called myself Dennis Curtis then Dennis Matumbi and another time it was 4th Street Orchestra. And I’d look in the reggae charts at the Top 20 and say to myself, “Yeah, I got fourteen in there.” But I was exposed by a guy, who was supposed to be my friend, who went [affects angry voice], “Dennis, it’s you, we’ve got to tell people it’s you.” And I did a program for the BBC called Rockschool where I let them film me doing the drums one time, playing the bass another time, playing the keyboard another time, guitar, doing the vocals, I was the engineer and I let them show it on TV and I was exposed. So I had to be just Dennis Bovell after that.

FERGUS MURPHY

They did you a favour [laughter]. You’re going to play us something from those early producing days.

DENNIS BOVELL

Yeah, my most hailed production is by a girl called Janet Kay. I met her when she was doing backing vocals in the studio and I was the engineer. As an engineer you usually don’t interfere with the production, you just do your job, fiddle with the knobs. “You want it louder?” “Louder.” “You like that frequency? More treble, more bass?” “No.” Just like a machine. But I felt sorry for them as they were trying to battle their way through these harmonies and they didn’t really know where to put the nine or six or the 11 or the 13, it was a musical thing. I could’ve sat there and we’d have been trying to do it all night. I’d have been making money because you’re sitting there, they’re getting it wrong, you need more time. But I had other things to do [laughter], so I said, “Look, I’m going to show you how to arrange it. Now you sing that note, you sing that note, you sing that note. Go! OK, record it.” And they were like, “Wow, we thought you were just the engineer, we didn’t know you had any musical ability.” So she gave me her telephone number and said, “If you’ve got anything you want doing at any point.” And she was a great singer, she is a great singer. Janet Kay, one of the best reggae singers, full stop. She had the ability to sing really high votes, almost Minnie Riperton style. And I’d written this song called “Silly Games,” and it had this very high note in it and people kept telling me, “You ain’t gonna find anybody to sing that,” because it was (sings very very high note) – one of them. Minnie Riperton. “You think Minnie Riperton gonna sing that? She’s dead anyway.” (laughter) When I heard Janet, I thought, ‘Woah, she can scale that tune.’ So I got her in the studio and got my friend Drummie Zeb from Aswad. He and I went into the studio and cut the drums and the bass track, so he’s in the drum booth, I’m in the control room and I’m engineering and playing the bass. He doesn’t know what he’s playing. I’m telling him, “This is the line, this is the drum pattern,” because I play bass and I invented this drum pattern, because Sly Dunbar had taken over the whole of reggae drumming, he was the king, and so I was like, “Woah, we gotta get in there somewhere.” It was all this four-to-the-floor (imitates drum beat) everywhere, every song was that. I was like, “Yo, the secret to changing reggae is hi-jacking the drum pattern; get enough people to follow you, and you’re gone.” So I invented this drum pattern. “Whoa, not a lot of people are gonna be able to play this, it’s difficult.” So I went to Drummie Zeb, who for me in England at that time is the greatest reggae drummer. He’s still in the top ten, but I don’t know who’s come up since then. So, I went to explain to him that I what I wanted him to do was play on the hi-hat and that was going to lead the whole thing and the snare would come sometimes, quite similar to Afrobeat and calypso things where the hi-hat is the main focus. He’d invented a thing called ‘the flying cymbal,’ he used to call it ‘the pea-soup beat’ (pss-sppp, psss-sppp). Disco stole that, but before that it was reggae, in the days of Johnny Clarke “Move Out of Babylon,” all them kind of tunes there, we call that the flying cymbal.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

It was also very close to bebop drummers.

DENNIS BOVELL

Absolutely. So I’d come up with this beat and we had the drum and bass track down, then I got Janet in, and then over the course of two months I put all the other instruments on in my own time. So the three of us were the band, we released the record and it got to number one in three weeks. “What are we gonna do now? Ain’t got time to make another one, let’s go on tour.” [laughter] And this is the song.

(music: Janet Kay - “Silly Games” / applause)

FERGUS MURPHY

That’s what’s called ‘lovers rock.’ Not everyone knows what lovers rock is. It is still the case that some people just don’t get it.

DENNIS BOVELL

Well, this is going to help you, I think. This is a new album that’s going to be released on November 1st, and it’s a compilation of all the old lovers rock that we did in the ‘70s.

FERGUS MURPHY

What defines lovers rock?

DENNIS BOVELL

Lovers rock has to be a love song and it’s mainly female vocalists. At the time I thought of having female vocalists on my productions. Women weren’t really involved in reggae that heavily unless they were backing vocalists for a male singer. It’s true to say that there was and still is Marcia Griffiths from I-Threes and Rita Marley and Judy Mowatt, they were three great singers, but they were still relegated to second division when Bob Marley was singing. Because it was a man’s world, girls were shoved to the side, in the background. I thought, ‘Well, Aretha Franklin is the queen of soul, why haven’t we got a queen of reggae?’ And a lot of young girls in London fancied themselves as the vocalist, upfront, throwing it down. So we held auditions at the recording studio every Sunday where anyone could come down and try out to make a record, because we were about to make a new record label, and it was going to be lovers. Because at that time it was roots rock, and there was steppers, and this was all macho music, really macho, all rastafari and all that. Women were being shoved to third division. So we wanted to bring them to the front. So we formed this label called Lovers Rock. And the first tune was called “I’m In Love With A Dreadlocks.”

FERGUS MURPHY

Why the name Lovers Rock?

DENNIS BOVELL

Well, Augustus Pablo, who I love very much, had a song called “Lovers Rock,” which I thought was a great title. Reggae was constantly changing its name ‘cause a new beat would come out and then suddenly... Before it was reggae, it would’ve been ska and then it was rocksteady and then it arrived at reggae, where it stayed for a long time. Then the fractions of reggae would come up, there would be steppers, which would be that kind of disco beat [beats foot on floor], then there’d be the one-drop, where the kickdrum would land on the third beat of the bar [imitates one-drop beat], all these different styles. So we felt we’re going to have this music called lovers rock and it’s going to be music for dancing to, call it smooch reggae if you like, where couples can get hold of someone and turn the lights out and get busy there [laughter]. It was a purely a sexual thing [laughter], we wanted to [adopts earnest voice] ‘be at one with the women,’ yeah?

FERGUS MURPHY

Not with jah? [laughter]

DENNIS BOVELL

I had a big soundsystem, called Sufferer’s Hi-Fi, we played music for women because a lot of the hardcore rasta stuff seemed sexist. So a lot of the girls wouldn’t go those dances, they’d go where they could hear some soul, some soft music. And, you know, where the girls were, the guys would definitely be there [laughter]. So we catered for the ladies and then the guys just came.

FERGUS MURPHY

It’s always the same. [laughter]

DENNIS BOVELL

“We’re sold out, we’re sold out.” [laughter] So, from that Augustus Pablo song called “Lovers Rock” I decided that the two words went together well to be the term for this new hybrid of London-based reggae and couples-dancing style, it wasn’t hard and it was all about love. And it was rocking as well, lovers rock. Sade came and used my title, I don’t know who she paid... And the guitar player and my great friend John Kpiaye, we’ve been playing together now since 1975, he wrote a lot of songs in that vein, as we all did. We were trying to write a lot of love songs and convert them to a nice reggae beat. And he wrote the classic song “I’m in Love with a Dreadlocks” and these three girls came down intending to be three solo singers, but we decided they should get together and be The Supremes of reggae and they were called Brown Sugar. One of them, her name was Caron Wheeler...

AUDIENCE MEMBER

Soul II Soul.

DENNIS BOVELL

Yeah, she was 15 at the time and we cut the first record with her. There she is, in fact, and this album’s going to be out next month to commemorate the whole lovers rock movement, because once we started it, everyone was on the wagon.

FERGUS MURPHY

It was worldwide, wasn’t it?

DENNIS BOVELL

Worldwide. This label was called the Lovers Rock label. The owner of this label was a guy called Dennis Harris, who’s now passed away. And his son, Peter, who’s the boss of a record company called Kickin’, they put out records by Blaze and people like that. Kickin’ is more house and old school and jazz rock ’cause his dad made reggae, so he didn’t want to do that. Then suddenly I met him and he unfortunately didn’t know his dad as well as I did, because I was the engineer in his dad’s studio, so I spent a lot of time with his dad.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

He was a real Jamaican?

DENNIS BOVELL

He was a real Jamaican guy, yeah. I worked for him for six to eight years, we cut a lot of tunes. I was trying to tell Peter about his father and the records we used to make. And a lot of the tapes, I had them anyway, so we put together this lovers rock tribute and it’s called Lovers Rock Story.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

So by that time you dropped all these political songs and went to love?

DENNIS BOVELL

I hadn’t dropped the political songs. I had a multi-life going on, because in one part I was working with my band Matumbi, in another I’m working with my soundsystem, Sufferer’s Hi-Fi, then my job is as a sound engineer in a recording studio where I’m doing work that people want me to do. And at the same time we’re trying to invent a new style to try and make a name for ourselves, to become famous. So I’m doing all those things at the same time as beginning to work with the poet Linton Kwesi Johnson. This is the man who made me give up the lovers style, because how many love songs can you sing? And he’s made seven albums and never said, “Baby” [laughter], never said, “I love you.” Insurrection and stuff he’s talking about, and how bad the police are. Well, we all know that. I hadn’t given up, I was just pursuing other means of trying to make a buck. So, OK, this is Brown Sugar - “I’m In Love with a Dreadlocks.”

(music: Brown Sugar - “I’m In Love With A Dreadlocks” / applause)

That was the first song that Caron Wheeler sang, aged 15. About the same time I had a bet with Dennis Harris in the studio. We had this rhythm track, I said, “We should write a new tune right now.” He said, “Yeah, I’ll bet you £100.” “Put the money on the table, put the money on the table.” So he put it on the table, I got my pen out and went [imitates writing very fast]. He said, “Who’s gonna sing it?” “I am.” That’s another £100. “Who’s gonna do the backing vocals?” “I am.” That’s another £100. He’s going, “Nah, nah, you can’t do that.” I said, “Put the money on the table.” And I did this tune.

(music: Dennis Bovell - unknown / applause)

FERGUS MURPHY

Lovers rock with a P-funk flavour.

DENNIS BOVELL

Yeah, well, Kool & The Gang and P-funk, my father had all these kinds of records at home, so we’d listen to that and try to incorporate stuff like The Temptations or Otis Redding, who was the great love song singer. In fact, that synthesizer was called the ARP and it was a brand new synthesizer and not many people could get their hands on one, so we used it in a song.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

Let’s talk a bit about arrangements in reggae music. For me, reggae has too much bass in the groove.

DENNIS BOVELL

Too much bass in the groove? You can’t get too much of that (loud applause / laughter).

AUDIENCE MEMBER

Weren’t there strong Motown influences in the sound? Because I listen to reggae and I feel a lot of James Jamerson influences.

DENNIS BOVELL

A lot of Jaco Pastorius influences in reggae. Jaco used to go to Jamaica and get out of his head and play on a lot of tunes. A lot of tunes that people don’t even know it was Jaco playing those basslines there. Also, the bass player from Booker T & the MGs.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

I don’t know them, but I know the name.

DENNIS BOVELL

Booker T and the MGs , their most famous song is called “Green Onions.” [imitates Green Onions] Now, what happened was these guys were on holiday and heard a song called “The Liquidator,” [imitates “The Liquidator”] then when they were back in America they were doing a session with the Staples Singers and the bass player said, “I heard this lick in Jamaica, let’s do a song around it.” All of a sudden that song comes out [sings Staples Singers “If You’re Ready, Come Go With Me”], leaning on that bassline. Bass has always been the top line in reggae. What made a new reggae tune wasn’t what the guy was singing, but what the bass player was playing, because it was so minimal that a lot of reggae tunes were just two chords. So how many different basslines can you play on two chords to make it someone else’s song?

AUDIENCE MEMBER

Basslines are very independent, just like Motown classics, there are a lot of octaves in there.

DENNIS BOVELL

What was his name, Donald Duck? Donald Dunn, yeah. He was one of the greatest bass players that never got famous, although a lot of his licks have been incorporated into other peoples’ things. Donald Dunn, but they used to call him ‘Duck,’ he was the bass player for Booker T. & The MG’s.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

And the Blues Brothers too.

DENNIS BOVELL

And the Blues Brothers too. This man knows his thing (laughter). Him and Steve Cropper, the guitar player, and he, if you listen to a lot of Otis Redding tunes, he’s just going [imitates rhythm guitar, which then speeds up].

AUDIENCE MEMBER

In a lot of reggae, the guitar just sounds like a percussion instrument.

DENNIS BOVELL

Well, yeah, that’s the idea, to play percussively. And that’s coming directly out of R&B. Steve Cropper invented that style of play. When Otis Redding was huge, that was the style of guitar play. If you have a chance to listen to all the Stax, there’s some CDs out, 9-CD box set with 240 hits of Stax. You’ll see reggae started off emulating that and then people like me tried to take it another way and put some other elements in it; times changing, other styles are coming in, melodies like Beatles harmonies and that kind of thing; Original Five Blind Boys, doo wop harmonies and then later on hard rock sounds, synthesizers, fuzz guitars.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

Another thing is how faithfully Soul II Soul incorporated that sound in their early recordings like [“Keep on Moving.”]

DENNIS BOVELL

Being brought up in London we were exposed to a lot of pop as well as rock, as well as trying to cypher through a lot of American garage, because the Americans don’t just make one or two records, they make 1 or 200,000 and throw them all at you. And you try and pick out of that the elements that we liked most about anyone and fuse them together and hopefully come up with a taste that satisfied us, and hopefully other people would try to emulate as well. Soul II Soul was a soundsystem before they did stuff like “Keep On Moving,” and when Caron became the singer, I knew it would be successful. Because after we did a bunch of reggae stuff with her, a friend of mine called Bill Farley and an Italian called Fabrizio – I can’t remember his second name now – but in the early ’80s we used to do disco with Caron singing, although I can’t remember what name she used. She was already Caron Wheeler in the reggae world, so for the funk world we had to give her another name. None of those records were hugely successful, but that’s just given me another idea, maybe I should get those records and put them on a compilation for future generations.

FERGUS MURPHY

We’re just hitting the early ’80s and lovers rock and you mentioned that you were wearing many different hats. You were obviously very well-known all around the world for your work with Linton Kwesi Johnson and this album Bass Culture, apart from lending its name to books and things, am I right in thinking it was one of the biggest selling reggae albums in the world until the Bob Marley compilation came out?

DENNIS BOVELL

That’s right, for Island Records.

FERGUS MURPHY

Obviously, an album that travelled all round the world.

DENNIS BOVELL

Definitely.

FERGUS MURPHY

I’m going to play something off this.

(music: Linton Kwesi Johnson - “Street 66” / applause)

DENNIS BOVELL

This song in many ways was the beginning of sampling for us. I’d done, on the previous record, a song called “Sonny’s Lettah,” which was a poem written from a boy in prison in England to his mother in the Caribbean explaining how he finds himself in jail with his younger brother, because the older brother has killed a policeman while being falsely accused of something. And on that track I had a harp player called Julius Finn, whose real name is Augustus Arnold, who’s from Chicago and the brother of Billy Boy Arnold, a great harp player and the harp player for Muddy Waters. Julius also played with Archie Shepp and people like that. I needed some more harp for this song, but he wasn’t around. So I went back to “Sonny’s Lettah” and took a sample of the harp from that song and with the aid of a broomstick and a vari-speed... you may ask yourself how did a broomstick get in there. Well, the broomstick was the means of keeping the tension on the loop of tape that I’d made. I got a loop of quarter-inch tape and made several notes [imitates notes rising in scale] and with the aid of the vari-speed I could vary it in tune. So because he wasn’t there, I put that loop on the tape recorder and while the master was going, just feed it back in and stretch it a little bit there and get the broomstick to keep the tension on the tape and spin it back in. And Linton was like, “How did you get the harp player on? He’s gone back to Chicago again.” Tricks of the trade. [laughter / applause]

FERGUS MURPHY

That’s obviously a very different sound from the lovers rock feeling. When you hear that you forget about the other stuff, this is menacing, dark.

DENNIS BOVELL

Well, what happened to me during that time. One night, Friday the 13th of October 1974, what we call Black Friday, I was playing my soundsystem in the Carib Club. Now on Friday nights, I had two gigs, an early one in the Metro Club in Ladbroke Grove, the same area where they have the carnival. I’d play there from 7 to 11, then I’d go to another club in Cricklewood till 6 in the morning, the Carib Club. And on this day Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, the Upsetter, had come to London and I’d gone to meet him at the airport to pick up a pile of fresh dubplates that he’d brought from Jamaica. I was anxious to get hold of these before anyone else because I was playing that night in a competition against another soundsystem called Lord Koos and another called Count Nick’s, it was a soundclash. Usually, it would just be two soundsystems against each other, but this was the start of a three soundclash where I was the champion, I was battling against two other sounds now instead of just one. At that time Johnny Clarke was doing his first tour of the UK and my band Matumbi was the backing band for his tour. His producer, Bunny Lee, was in town and he had a batch of dubplates, and of course, when you have them you’re not going to sell them to just one soundsystem, you’re going to sell it to as many as you can. So he was selling Johnny Clarke dubplates, Cornell Campbell dubplates, a song called “The Gorgon,” which was famous at the time. Now the other sound was a friend of Bunny Lee and he had those dubplates and I got them because my band was backing Johnny Clarke. But I went to meet Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry because I knew he had some dubplates and I thought, “Just give me the exclusive one for tonight, you can sell them to who you want tomorrow, but tonight I wanna be the first play on it. I’m gonna be the means by which London first heard these dubplates.” So, we’re on the dance, and when the time came for me play them the crowd was “Whaaaa!“ proclaiming me the champion. At the same time some policemen had entered the club and were leaving with a prisoner they’d arrested in the toilets, six policemen and one prisoner. At the same time I was playing this dubplate the crowd decided to seize the prisoner off the police. So they freed that guy and a few policemen got a few slaps and one of them got stabbed. All hell broke loose because the police came back with about 500 more and beat nearly everybody in the club. It was on the third floor and no elevator, so you had to go down six flights of stairs. And as you came out there was two policemen on every stair, hitting people, kicking people and arresting as many as they liked. The next morning I went to Ladbroke Grove and people were going, “Whoa, what you doing here?” “What you mean?” “The police are looking for you, man.” “Why?” The police were asking everyone at the station, “Who is the DJ of Sufferer’s Hi-Fi? We want to get the DJ because he put the record on, he’s the one who got the microphone and said, ‘Kill the cops.’” Nothing like that ever happened, I promise you on my mother’s life, on my children’s life, I never said, “Kill the cops.” So I went to the police station and said, “I heard you’re looking for me,” and they said, “Yeah, come on inside.” So I went in and they interrogated me for eight hours or so, asking what I’d said, what did I do to cause it all. And they laid it all at my door, said I’d started all that trouble. As a result I was charged with causing an affray, which in short means inciting a riot. So I’m in the Old Bailey, the court where they charge real murderers and shit, in court number one, the highest court, and I’m charged with being the ringleader of a gang of 12 people who I’ve never met before. They’re my gang and we beat up policemen in clubs. The trial lasted six months, every day I’m in the Old Bailey from ten to four trying to defend myself against the accusations. At the end of the trial, nine were acquitted, but on three there was a hung jury, where they can’t decide one way or another, and I was one of those three. I thought in British law a person is innocent until proved guilty. You haven’t proved me guilty so I must be innocent, you’ve got to let me go. But no, the judge said, “We’re going to retry you,” so I had a retrial, started all over again from top to bottom. This lasted three months, nine months altogether with the two trials. At the end of the retrial at 12 noon the jury went to decide, by nine at night they still hadn’t decided. So the judge said, “If they don’t decide by ten we’re going to throw it out, we can’t try you three times.” At five to ten, the jury came back and said, “Ten of us think he’s guilty, two think not guilty.” The judge said, “That’s good enough for me – three years in jail.” That was the first time I’d ever been into a police station even. I always used to think when people said, “The police fitted me up, I didn’t do it,” that they must have done something. But here I was now in the same chair, being accused and being innocent but being found guilty and getting three years. But I didn’t give up. I went to jail and while I was in there – I was in for six months of that three year sentence – I appealed to a higher court. After two sessions of listening to the case, the appeal judge said, “This guy should never even have been charged with that, there’s no evidence. Let him go.” So they let me go that day, I was free, I was on the news, I was a big star and my band was going to be in the charts next week [laughter / applause].

So Linton Kwesi Johnson came to me and said, “I want to do some music with my poetry.” I was like, “Whenever you’re ready, dude. I know what you’re saying, I know how true it is, man. Let’s get in that studio.” Richard Branson gave us some money and we went in the studio and cut LKJ’s first album, called Poet & The Roots on Virgin. We cut it in three days, the whole album, top to bottom. So our marriage has been made, and we’ve been working together 25 years now and we just brought out a new DVD, Live In Paris.

FERGUS MURPHY

How does the relationship work, the writing and the music?

DENNIS BOVELL

In the beginning Linton would come to me with the poem and the bassline, and he’d say, “I want you to play this,” [imitates bassline] ’cause that’s what he could hear in his head to go with his words. Then I’d play it until I got bored, change it a little bit, and sometimes he’d like it, sometimes he’d say, “Oh no, don’t change it.” Sometimes I’d take it real far out, depending on whether he’d let me change it at all, and we’d go in the studio and do it like that. Then, after a while I thought, ‘You got a bass mind, so let me teach you how to play the guitar.’ So I became his teacher, I showed him some exercises to improve his fingers. Then one day he came back to me and said, “You know that exercise you showed me? I wrote a song.” From then on I’d let him go into the studio with a bass and a metronome and get him to put down what he was feeling with the poem, and that way he couldn’t blame me for not getting it right. ’Cause sometimes he’d say, (imitates bassline), and I’d go, (imitates same bassline). He’d go, “No, that’s not what I want.” “So here, here’s the bass, here’s the notes, show me what note you’re hearing in your head.” We’d have these conversations all the time, just him and me. We’d thrash it out, and then he’d say he needed an introduction. So for a poem like “Unfinished Revolution,” I had this choir in my head, like I was in church (imitates sound of church organ). He said, “Did you dream that you died? ’Cause that music sounds like music to a funeral.” “No, it goes with the song, the ‘Unfinished Revolution.’” So we’d take a break and I’d come back with that theme, then I’d be the one who comes up with the bridge part.

FERGUS MURPHY

According to this book I’ve been reading, Bass Culture, dub poetry was the first occasion of music originating away from Jamaica and then going back to Jamaica and having an influence.

DENNIS BOVELL

While Bob Marley was alive, he’d signed us to his Tuff Gong label, but he passed away before he put any records out. Steel Pulse and Linton were signed to his label. I was the first person to take Steel Pulse into a recording studio. They won a talent competition, for which first prize was a day in the studio with me, and I produced a bunch of their singles in the beginning.

FERGUS MURPHY

You explained to me earlier that this album [indicates Linton Kwesi Johnson's Making History] was the first of those with Linton where you took control of everything. Up till then Linton had a habit of getting his friends on drums.

DENNIS BOVELL

And stuff, yeah. We’d go into the studio with two or three of everything and me being the spare part. We’d have two drummers, two bass players, three guitar players, four keyboard players. It’s like picking the team. “This one you play bass, you play drums, you play keyboards and you play guitar. This isn’t working, we need to change the bass player, we need to change the drummer.” And musicians would be sitting there waiting to go on saying, “I could do that better than him, let me at it, let me at it.” And it was a competition between the musicians to do their best for the project. So that worked for a while until the music exhausted its two chord, one chord, and it had to go a bit more orchestral. Some of these people were just old friends of Linton who used to go to school with him and he’d thought, ‘They’re as good as anybody else. There’s lots of people on TV who don’t even play their instruments, miming, these are my friends, give them a chance.‘ But my patience had worn thin by the time we made this album and also I’d formed a band called the Dub Band, ’cause I’d made an album in 1980 called Brain Damage and I needed to put this band together to go and perform this music. [someone holds up album] Oh wow, this guy’s on it, that’s the album.

FERGUS MURPHY

It’s a teacher, that’s you on the cover.

DENNIS BOVELL

That’s in my beard and dreadlock days. Linton, who meanwhile had been touring with a tape recorder, because once we did the stuff in the studio, we’d just make a backing track minus his voice so he could go out and gig. And he’d go out and gig with John Lydon, Public Image, and he’d open the show for them just using tapes and people would go, “Whuurr, get off!” And he said, “I can’t do it anymore, I can’t play in a stadium with 20,000 people and a tape recorder.” So I taught my band his songs and we set out to tour Scandinavia, Sweden, Iceland, just to kind of tune it up and put it all together, and it went down really, really well. So from then on, we were the band on the road, and when it came to making this album I said, “You’re not gonna get those old boys in, no way, the band’s tuned now.” So he let me do that.

FERGUS MURPHY

Pick a tune for us from this album.

DENNIS BOVELL

Let me see now, “Wat About Di Working Class.” This is a song, a poem, for working class people.

(music: Linton Kwesi Johnson - “Wat About Di Working Class”/ applause)

That was a chance to show off the band. We don’t just play reggae, we play music. In that poem, Linton’s drawing reference to the tanks that were rolling in Gdansk in Poland to the ordinary working class man in the street. He’s saying, “From England to Poland, every step across the ocean, the ruling classes are in a mess. The Soviet Union’s in disarray, so’s America, has been for years, the British system ain’t working, so who’s fault is it? Well, don’t blame it on the blacks, racist, blame it on your boss. Blame it on your past. We suffered the loss, we paid the cost. And we’re not gonna forget what you did to us.”

FERGUS MURPHY

Incredible writer.

DENNIS BOVELL

Yeah, man.

FERGUS MURPHY

We could go on and on and on.

DENNIS BOVELL

We don’t want to bore you.

FERGUS MURPHY

I don’t think there’s any chance of that. A lot of people here are involved in producing music, and we had Bernard Purdie in here last week talking about funk and soul. But a lot of people struggle with writing the bassline. Obviously, you’ve spent a lot of time doing that, maybe you don’t want to give away your secrets. Could you maybe show us something that might be useful? How would you go about writing the bassline?

DENNIS BOVELL

I think the chord structure determines where you can and can’t go. The top line, the melody will constrain you as well, unless you want to directly oppose what’s going on. With bass playing, sometimes less is more. That whole feeling with the bass being there, then suddenly not being there, then being there again, can give you that kind of space, the groove to let other people come through, the choice of note in the chord. Say, your guitar is playing six notes in the chord, anyone of those could be the bass note. It will change whether the chord is on its head or its feet, but it won’t change the chord, it’ll be contained in that chord. So, quite often between thirds and fifths, sixes and nines is where the tastiest melodies inside the note are contained. My favourite bass player after Jaco Pastorius is Aston ‘Family Man’ Barrett from The Wailers. I like the way he lays back and let’s the chord go. And when that chord isn’t there anymore and you’ve got something else, then he gives you a taste of what the chord before was. He can still be a part of the new chord, it’s about linking chords together and aiding the melody and being minimalist. There’s been tunes where someone said, “OK, you’re gonna play the bass on this tune.” And I’d say, “I can only hear one note. Just play [imitates bass guitar playing one note] and all the chords are going everywhere and I’m just staying right here.” It’s like holding a big kite that’s flying, I’m about to take off in a minute. And reggae is famous for doing things like that, playing two chords but a thousand million different basslines around them.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

They say that you know you’re a good player, if you can play just one note.

DENNIS BOVELL

Yeah, I agree, Duke Ellington said that. There’s a piece of Linton’s and it’s called “Sonny’s Lettah,” and he often likes to have contrasting lines, where the same thing is playing an octave up and an octave down [plays bass]. Another line of Linton’s is “Reggae Fi Peach”. Blair Peach was a schoolteacher from New Zealand, came to England and was involved in an anti-fascist march in Southall in England where he lost his life. He was hit on the head by a policeman with a truncheon and at the time the pathologist had said the dent in his head could only have been made by a police truncheon. But that’s as far as they went, they didn’t say this particular policeman had killed him. But a policeman had killed him and Linton wrote a poem about it, and the lyrics went, “Everywhere mi go, mi hear people seh, everywhere mi go, it’s the talk of the day, that the SPG is a murderer, murderer, we can’t let them go no further, cah them kill Blair Peach the teacher, them kill Blair Peach the dirty murderers.” I thought, ‘Linton, this is death, you put that out, they’re going to come for you next.’ Britain’s had a history where we don’t give policemen guns because they tend to kill people when you do that. The ordinary policeman in the street has a radio and he calls somebody, who has a gun, if he needs help and he doesn’t have one himself. And I think that’s quite a civilized move. But then you have the SPG, the Special Patrol Group, and those guys had guns and they’d be on the street corner harassing people, especially in Brixton. And it was that paramilitary section of the police force that had killed that guy and it resulted in them having their guns confiscated. So I said, “Linton, if you make this poem and say something bad about these guys they’re going to come ’round your house and take you away, we’ll never see you again.” He said, “I don’t care, I’m going to make this poem.” I said, “I’ll help you but don’t put my name on the record.” So he did it, we did it, the record come out and my name’s on the record! [shouting] “I said don’t put my name on it. I’ve just been released from causing an affray, inciting people to kill policemen and shit, and now you’ve brought me right back in there.” He said, [very calm voice] “We did it together, and I think you should be proud we did it together, and if I’m going down you’re coming with me.” [laughter] The bassline was very strange [plays bass to “Reggae Fi Peach”]. It’s just one note, and that’s Linton going, [plays more bass to “Reggae Fi Peach”] “Yeah, the police killed that guy.” And I’m going, “Oh, man!” [laughter] Then 15 years later, I’m watching TV, news item, “The police have just paid compensation to that guy’s wife for having killed him.” It took them that long to hand over some cash and admit it. But I’m thinking Linton should write another poem saying we want the guy who did it. It can be accapella. [inaudible shout from audience]

He’ll find a way! I had a letter in the post saying, “Thank you for joining the ANC.” I never joined the ANC. I told Linton. He said, “I did that. Now you’re remembered!” “You could’ve asked me, I wouldn’t have objected.” He joined me without telling me. He’s gone, “Yeah, you should be a member of that.” But he’s my man.

FERGUS MURPHY

It’s time to hand it over. Any questions?

AUDIENCE MEMBER

Can you tell us something about the recording process in reggae and dub. It’s a very clean sound, a lot of delay sometimes, can you tell us something more about that?

DENNIS BOVELL

I’ve made three volumes now of LKJ In Dub. It stems from the actual work, but everyone’s out of the studio. I’m in there alone and I wanna mash it up, show as little respect as possible to any one instrument. With dub, nothing’s important, nothing is untouchable, nothing deserves the right to be there for any amount of time. So I’m putting things out, in, out, in, out. Before I used to have go [moves hands to imitate moving knobs], now with a computer I can write at what point something’s not there, at what point it’s louder than something else, at what point it’s there but right down there. At what point it has a double-time echo, at what point it has a half-time echo, at what point it ceases to sound like something sounded on the original track. At what point do I take the bass frequency away from the bass and make it all trebly, at what point do I do that to the snare drum, at what point do I do that to the hi-hat. I decide. And when I think that’s good enough, that’s it, next! It’s all to do with the person who’s creating it. Whatever you do, it’s dub. If it’s received well, is another matter. But whatever you do, whatever you don’t do, it’s dub. With the dancehall and that stuff, that’s not live playing, it’s machines. So that’s easier to cut holes in it. It’s going to be here for two beats here, four beats there, the whole bar there. We don’t want to hear it again for another eight bars, then bring it back in. This is the chorus, that’s got to be featured. Take all the other instruments away at the chorus, just add the vocals and the harmonies. Whatever you can throw in, whatever seems to fit the part.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

Was there any resistance from Jamaican musicians to accepting English musicians?

DENNIS BOVELL

Yeah, you’re not joking! The whole idea behind me and my friends making music in London was because in the beginning soundsystems were prejudiced against reggae that was not Jamaican-made. If it wasn’t made in Jamaica, it was inferior. A lot of guys would grab the microphone and say, “We don’t play non-Jamaican reggae,” and put it down. But because I was straddling two borders, I was in the soundsystem world and in the live music world, I was able to make records that fooled ’em all. I’d never seen a Jamaican tape recorder or console, I never heard that Jamaicans made tape. They made music, but all the equipment was made in England or America or somewhere. So it depends on you knowing how to use that stuff and get the same results or better. So I formed this group called the 4th Street Orchestra with no information about who was playing what, what the songs were called. It would be a white label. You like the record? Buy it. It would say ‘Made In Jamaica’ on the side. Mind you, there were songs done in London that weren’t up to it on the engineering side, the playing side. But there were some that were as good, if not better. To cut down this prejudice I made the Rama label and did stuff as if it was coming from Jamaica. And nobody knew who it was, you either liked it or you didn’t. And it sold, so I disproved the fact that you had to go to Jamaica to get a particular sound. Also, our 7" singles, the 45s, if it was made in London it would have a tiny hole in the centre, but if was an import you had a great big hole and had to get a middle to play the record. So I pressed the records in London and bought a machine called a dinking machine to make a big hole in it. You take it to the store and say, “Import.” They go, “Yeah, slurp!” Lap it all up. It looked like an import! Then later on, everyone goes, [adopts accusing voice] “You did those in London.” I could manufacture in London for less cost, sell for the price of an import for more profit. Trying to make some money.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

When Bob Marley started making records with Chris Blackwell and they had that cleaner sound, did he encounter the same resistance, people saying, “It’s not reggae ’cause it’s got an American guitarist?”

DENNIS BOVELL

No, ’cause that was Bob, anything Bob did was accepted [imitates applause]. A lot of Jamaican studios up to that point had good sound, but they only had four tracks, or up to 16 tracks. The more you bounce stuff around the quality goes, the treble end goes, it gets woolly, you’re bouncing on analogue tape. So you had to have more facility, so it made sense either to go America or to London or anywhere, but Jamaica where they didn’t have as much as a 16 track recorder. By recording in London Bob was able to have much more scope with the multitracking, which meant he could put much more on the tape. A lot of the recordings in Dynamic Studio, for instance, in Jamaica you’d have the drums and bass on the same track ’cause they didn’t have room; and then a bunch of rhythm instruments on another track – the guitar, the piano, the organ, all that lot on one track mono. Lee Perry had a three track machine and he was king of the jungle, he had three tracks. Then when it went up to eight tracks, then Dynamic went to 16, then to 24, but Bob wanted to experiment with hard rock guitars. I mean, you listen to “Concrete Jungle,” you know, he was going some place else. Also, the producer had a lot to do with it, Karl Pitterson and the influence of meeting John Williams and people like that, who were signed to Island as rock artists, Nazareth and Free and those guys, and he had the chance to meet them and get them to put some of their feel into reggae. An old album of his was Soul Rebel, where he’s singing old soul tunes, even “Go Tell it on the Mountain,” which is an old church song. So yeah, he probably had some opposition, but that faded away because he’d made a better move for the movement.

FERGUS MURPHY

We could go all day, but just a last thing before we wind up, something I didn’t realise until we met last night is that you’re somewhat of an honorary Italian.

DENNIS BOVELL

[laughter] I was in a film that was out in Italy about four years ago, called South Side Story by the director Roberto Torre. I was invited to be the musical director of the film. I’d been producing Hortablo Paglione and the singer Roberto Rondelli, who’s a great friend of mine, was going to play the lead in this film and I went to do to the music, and once we’d done the music, I was invited to be one of the actors. So they dressed me up different, and I made it to the end [laughs].

FERGUS MURPHY

And you’ve produced a lot of Italian reggae.

DENNIS BOVELL

I worked with 99 Posse, Balapudiva, Pepe Barra, Lele Carraciolo, few other people.

FERGUS MURPHY

What is it like for an Italian reggae, or a reggae scene in any country for that matter to try and gain respect?

DENNIS BOVELL

I think the idea is to please the people at home. If you’re making reggae, don’t alienate your kin, your folk. Please the people at home then think about those outside. If you try to please everybody, you’re going to end up pleasing nobody. I done stuff in Japan with a singer called Iria, and she’d previously been a punk rock singer and a racing driver. She wanted to be a reggae singer and came to me, I thought we could do it. Let me give you an example of some Japanese reggae I made not all that long ago. She’d had a hit with a pop sound and I thought she had an interesting voice and wanted to do this album. Unfortunately, she’d had a baby and brought the baby to London and wanted the baby to sing on the record.

(music: Iria - unknown / applause)

»It’s been fun making reggae all around the world. In Africa, with Alpha Blondy, I made six or seven albums with him including his first album. He came to my studio in London with The Wailers. In Brazil, with O Rappa, they came to London.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

You haven’t talked about the influence Afrobeat had one you.

DENNIS BOVELL

I worked with Fela Kuti in the ’80s. I recorded about 20 titles in my studio in London with him. Afro beat taught me how to be percussive in reggae. It plays an important part in reggae. A lot of reggae bands don’t have percussionists anymore because they’re troubled people, usually [laughter], and they get drowned out by electrical things. But, yeah, Afrobeat did teach me how to percuss my reggae in a different way. And also a group called Savannah 75 from Sierra Leone and Prince Nico and a group called Nwagadudu from Liberia.