Earlier this year I had the pleasure of participating in a conference call with Adrian Sherwood, Crucial Tony Phillips and Dennis Bovell. The latter had just beaten a bout of Dengue Fever. The conversation kicked off with us all comparing beards. It was generally agreed that Dennis’ was the best. Sherwood has since shaved his off. Part of the interview was published in Electronic Sound, to help promote the reissue of Creation Rebel’s seminal debut, “Dub From Creation“. 

However, Dennis in particular was so full of great stories and good vibes, that I was left with a lot of cracking copy. Much of it concerned with the start of Dennis’ engineering and production career. For example, how he helped turn London’s Gooseberry Studios into “The House Of Reggae.”

Since Dennis has just announced a compilation of his `70s studio work, named after his sound system, Jah Sufferer, I’m gonna post the rest of that interview here…

Dennis, when was your first time working in a studio?

I started engineering in my school studio, in around 1968. The studio had been set up to produce sound effects for the drama group, but me and my friends sneaked music in the through the back door, as it were, and started recording reggae. From the age of 15 I was frequently at John and Felicity Hassell’s famous house on Nassau Street, in Barnes, cutting dubplates. It was John who showed me what frequencies to stay away from, to avoid tripping a cutter head.

John decided that I was such a cheeky chap that he would take me on and show me what not to do in studio. What frequencies I should stay away from. Those that would trip the cutter head. Cutter heads were expensive shit. If the head tripped and the needle broke John would have to send away to Germany for a replacement. It was a Neumann lathe. So he said, “Right, come here before you ruin my life. These frequencies are unacceptable. You can’t put 16K on vinyl.” He taught me well. In those days all we had was vinyl, so it a tune didn’t cut well you were dead in the water.

You’ve called Gooseberry Studios “The House Of Reggae”. How did you find Gooseberry?

My friend Nick Straker and I went along there. We’d written a song, called “Come With Me”, and we wanted to record it immediately (tries not to laugh). We got out the old Yellow Pages and started thumbing through, phoning studios to see if they had time for us to come in there and then. We didn’t want tomorrow, or the week after. We wanted to go to the studio immediately. We were so convinced that we’d written a hit (laughs).

Nick and I were in Matumbi at the time, but only the two of us went up to Gooseberry. It was a basement, beneath a dentist’s on Gerrard Street, in China Town. The engineer and the owner both asked, “Where’s the band?” I said, “We are the band.” I played drums. Nick played piano. Then I played bass and he played organ. I also played guitar and did the vocals. However when we got the tape back home we discovered that the mix was distorted. It was fuzzy and the needles were off the scale. So we went back to the studio and I said, “Oi, what’s this?” And the owner agreed that it was not a good mix, and that it was down to the studio equipment. He then gave us some more time to record another. He also voiced an interest in Nick and I helping him to do some recordings. His thing was putting poetry to music. To this Nick and I both said yeah. Then about a year later Gooseberry’s owner came round to my house and asked me to come in and help out on some sessions. Gooseberry later had an opening for an engineer, and I then started bringing more reggae sessions to the studio.

Where were you working before Gooseberry? 

I was working full time as an engineer in a small studio in Brockley, in South London, where the multitrack was built by a guy called Steve Wadey. Steve had been in a group called Los Bravos – they had a hit record called “Black Is Black”. It was an 8-track, but only 7 of them worked. I made loads of records in this Brockley basement, largely for the reggae label Dip. We also launched the Lovers Rock label from there.

I’d been recording with Matumbi since the early 70s, plus my solo stuff. I made a few albums under a few aliases like 4th Street Orchestra, African Stone, Dennis Matumbi. I was in the studio 24 hours a day. I was intent on proving that good reggae could be made in the UK, and stand up to reggae made anywhere else in the world. I was making so much music, and we were turning these albums out fast so there were lots of pseudonyms flying about.

While I was based in Brockley I’d be brought in for sessions at Gooseberry, until I convinced their chief engineer, Dave Hunt, to go to Berry Street in Clerkenwell. It was Dave who engineered the Matumbi records. The rest of the band didn’t want me to do it. They said, “You’re just the guitarist”. I was like “Everyone else wants me to engineer their records” and they were like “We don’t want to sound like everyone else”.

I basically booted Dave out of Gooseberry, because I wanted to work there. Berry Street were making moves for me to work there, but I didn’t think the sound was as good as at Gooseberry – so I convinced Dave to take that job, and I took his instead (laughs). Fun times they were (1).

Can you tell me about some of those early Gooseberry sessions? 

In `74, I went into Gooseberry with producer Lloyd Coxsone, and recorded Louisa Mark’s cover of Robert Parker’s “Caught You In A Lie”. This 45 is widely recognised as the start of lovers rock. It sold a lot of copies. 10, 000 copies in its first week (2).

I also mixed the first Creation Rebel record, “Dub From Creation”. I did this in a three hour session. I did it for free, as a favour to Chips Richards, who was Adrian Sherwood’s partner in the Carib Gems label. This was the first time I met Adrian, and he was shouting, “More echo! More reverb!” This was something that people wouldn’t normally let me do. Most people did not want dub, but dub was what I wanted to do. So when Adrian came along and said, “We’re gonna do a lot of dub”, I was like, “Yeah mate, let’s do it!” We were actually egging each other on.” I’d make a funny noise, and Adrian would shout “More!”” (3)

Can you please explain a little bit about what made Gooseberry special? 

It was an inexpensive studio. When it was 8-track it was something like 4 quid an hour, 16-track, 8 quid. It eventually went to 24-track, but it was still cheap. 18 quid an hour? Most places were way more than that.

Labi Sifre used to come down and record, and a lot of African musicians. There was this guy called Akie Deen, coming out of Sierra Leone, who had a label called Afrodisc. So I was recording these African records, and the reggae records, trying to come up with our own unique sound. Lots of groups recorded at Gooseberry because it was known to have that sound.

Some of my dub effects were personal, unique. I had a quarter inch Revox that took tape either side of the reel, and I had a vary-speed on that as well, so I could tune the tempo of the song. Not a lot of people had that. It was either 7 & 1/2 or 3 & 3/4 but I could go in between those. This was something that was made for the studio by our technical wizards, our soldering iron boys. They were there around the clock because the studio wasn’t allowed to break down. We`d have to wake them up, “Oi a tracks gone down!” It was Dave who bulit it. He saw what I was doing and said, “Let me make you something.”

Linton Kwesi Johnson had heard about the sound we had at Gooseberry, and he said to me, “Listen, I’m ready to put some reggae with my poetry now.” Now that we had the bass heavy enough. It was Vivian Weathers who told him that I knew how to capture the sound.

However, it was on the back of the success of “Caught You In A Lie”, that Gooseberry became “The House Of Reggae”. The studio was flooded with reggae people who wanted to record there. The studio was open 24 / 7. There was a queue. Up until then a lot of UK reggae had sounded “thin”. The engineers had been “economical” with the bass frequencies. I actually got into a lot of arguments with other engineers, about how much bass I wanted to put on. I was like, “Nah mate, this is wicked. We need it to bump and thud.” The reason that I knew all about bass was that I also operated a sound system, “Jah Sufferer Sound”.

Can you tell me a little but about Jah Sufferer? 

I’d do these sound clashes, every Friday night, at The Metro Club, on St. Luke’s Road, in Labdroke Grove, and because I ran the soundsystem, I could judge what the bass would sound like outside of the studio. Usually in a studio, the speaker stacks weren’t` set up right, and the levels of bass we wanted would be bringing the walls down. However, at  Gooseberry we had the sound down pat.

I remember Bob Marley was in London, recording “Exodus”, and he took the Friday night off to come an hear the sound system. He gave me some dubplates, because he wanted to see how his new music would be received by the audience. I wasn’t allowed to say he was in the building, but I was playing his music, and he was upstairs in the cafeteria shouting, “Yes man! Yes man! More bass!”

I’d bring in other sounds for the clash. I had Fatman in there quite regular, Admiral Ken, Metro Downbeat, Quaker City from Birmingham. I would try and make it a spectacle and I would play my own dubplates. That was the only way that I could be sure that what I had was exclusive. I had all the Coxsone dubs, but so did everyone else.

Adrian told me that the film Babylon is actually about you and Creation Rebel bass player, Keith “Lizard” Logan. Is that true? 

Me and Lizard were tight. I had a tune called “Run Rasta Run”, and while I was working on it, Lizard would do these falsetto backing vocals, which cracked me up, so I ended up using his idea on the record. The “Babylon” story is this: 

We were holding a dance at The Metro, and the police came in and arrested someone. As they tried to take him out, the crowd were like, “No, no, you’re not having him.” That night Lee Perry was standing right next to me, and Bunny Lee was on the other side of the hall. The sound I was playing against was called Lord Koos, and he and Bunny were bredren, but Bunny was also in my camp, because Matumbi were the backing band for Johnny Clarke when he toured the UK. Bunny had given both of us, Lord Koos and me, dubplates, but when Lee Perry arrived, earlier that day, my friend Larry Lawrence – rest in peace – had collected Perry from the airport and brought him straight to the Sufferer’s camp in Battersea. We held Perry there until the dance was over, because we wanted exclusive use of his dubplates. I knew that if we let him go, everyone would have them. He’d flog them to everyone. Instead, this meant I had first play of them. When I put on the first Perry dubplate, the audience went crazy. Perry looked at me, got on the mic and said “I am the Upsetter” and straight after that all hell broke loose. The audience were fighting with the police, and I was charged with inciting a riot. All I’d done was play a record. The police said in court that I’d got on the mic and said, “Get the boys in blue!” Me to a bunch of black people, “Get the boys in blue”? I said “We don’t call you “the boys in blue”, we call you Babylon.” A few of us were found guilty and sent to prison. We, of course, appealed. Lizard was the first to be acquitted.

Dennis Bovell’s Sufferer Sounds is available to order directly from Disciples. 

The compilation collects 15 cuts from Dennis’ earliest days in the production chair. Providing a cracking cross-section of the various shades of UK reggae that he helped pioneer. From the fast and funky, crunchy Clavinet-driven dub of Joshua Moses’ Africa Is Our Land to the super stripped back Blood Dem, which prophetically predicts the dread sonics of Burial Mix and Rhythm & Sound. There’s Errol Campbell’s Jah Man, a swinging wah-wah-ed hymn to H.I.M. and Pebbles’ dynamic DJ version of Errol Dunkley’s Little Way Different. Matumbi cover Bunny Wailer. Young Lions do a roots reinterpretation of  Dave Brubeck. Dennis Curtis’ Come With Me – a strange, synth-y, socially conscious call for action – and African Stone’s heavily Black Ark-influenced Run Rasta Run (both singled out in the interview above) are highly sought after rarities. There’s also, of course, some lovers rock, the genre that Dennis arguably created / defined. Angelique’s Cry comes with its crazy dub counterpart, which is crammed with mad tape effects. Then there’s Game Of Dubs, a radical delayed drenched remix of Janet Kay’s chart-topping Silly Games, where snatches of the much-loved song flash by like wistful memories. Another prized item, for many this alone will be worth the price of the album. 

If you’re in London, there’s a launch party on November 18th. You can purchase tickets here. 

NOTES:

(1) Dave Hunt called himself Nobby Turner. It was Hunt who did the incredible mix on Creation Rebel`s “Starship Africa”.

(2) Regarding Louisa Mark, this is a quote from Adrian Sherwood taken from the same interview: “That tune, it must have sold 150, 000, but none of the sales were in chart return shops. The industry was so prejudiced. I’d overhear conversations that’d make your skin crawl. All the massive tunes that Dennis made sold enough to be in the national charts. There was a lot of racism in the music industry. The record companies didn’t believe that black acts could sell albums, and at the time, it was all about albums. It was the time of bands like Yes, prog rock. “Caught You In A Lie”, without a doubt, if it hadn’t been for the fuckery would have been a number one record.”

(3) Again from Adrian Sherwood: “From that day to this my friendship with Dennis has grown and grown, and I’m totally indebted to him, because he understood dub, and I was completely obsessed with it. From standing over his shoulder I became totally addicted to being in the studio. I was like, “Right, I love this!”