smacks of musical laziness or creative bankruptcy. However, in the 1970s, as remixing became a greater and greater part of the Kingston studio culture, it evolved into dub, which was an art form in itself. In Jamaica, to ‘dub’ a tune meant more than merely to remix it. Using echo and reverb, sound effects, ...
social change as much as it does the other way around. No other community has had such a large and successful musical output. The music is also extremely influential: without dub the reggae remix culture would not exist, and reggae’s deejay style is directly responsible for one of the biggest international genres of recent times – rap. But then no ...
Hank Thompson (b. 1925) is one of the most difficult country stars to classify. His Brazos Valley Boys were for a number of years one of the most talented and revered of western-swing bands, yet Thompson was never really a western-swing performer. He recorded a number of songs that remain honky-tonk classics, but he was never just a honky-tonk ...
(Dance/vocal group, 1987–present) Founders and exponents of a downtempo groove of trip hop, 3D (Robert Del Naja), Daddy G (Grant Marshall) and Mushroom (Andrew Vowles) began working together in Bristol in the late 1980s in a loose collective under the name of The Wild Bunch. Named after a line in a comic book, their debut album Blue Lines ...
(Vocal/instrumental group, 1982–present) Glaswegian Bobby Gillespie was the drummer in The Jesus And Mary Chain before forming Primal Scream in 1982. Early releases paid tribute to the 1960s sound of The Byrds and Love before beginning to steer towards Cult-like rock territory on second album Primal Scream (1989). Discovering the acid-house scene was a revelation to the now stable line-up ...
UK Top 10 and a good self-titled debut album followed in 1978. Their second collection, 1979’s Metal Box (packaged in a metal box) was extraordinary: a beguiling mix of dub, Krautrock and Eastern-inflected weirdness and Lydon’s inspired, spooky rants, it was released as Second Edition (1980) in the US, and amazingly made the UK Top 20. ...
(Electronic group, 1989–present) The main fountainhead of creativity was the highly collaborative Dr. Alex Patterson. The Orb redefined ambient music taking listeners on journeys irrespective of genre-fusing elements of dub and even progressive music into long extended pieces. Singles ‘A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules From The Centre Of The Ultraworld’ (sampling Minnie Riperton’s ‘Loving You’) and ‘Little ...
of Smokey Robinson’s ‘Tears Of A Clown’ before forming their own Go-Feet label, again with the assistance of Chrysalis. Their strident punk-reggae protest songs, influenced by both Jamaican dub and classic 1960s pop, brought them transatlantic success before their split in 1983. Dave Wakeling and Ranking Roger went on to form General Public, while Andy Cox and ...
that sampled heavily from some of folk music’s most admired singers, including Coope, Boyes & Simpson, Kate Rusby and the great Norfolk traditional singer Harry Cox. Asian Dub Foundation’s full-blooded, politically slanted merger of Asian and British dance cultures could be interpreted as a vignette of modern folk music, too. The ex-Led Zeppelin singer Robert Plant’s ...
was clear that there was a need for a more relaxed accompaniment to the high-octane beats. Even at early acid house clubs, DJs like Alex Paterson, from ambient dub act The Orb, were in charge of providing a soothing musical antidote in a second room. Consequently, the late-1980s saw the release of classic ambient albums including The ...
Norman Cook had been dabbling in dance music since the mid-1980s, first fronting the dub-a-delic band Beats International, then putting out house records under names such as Mighty Dub Katz and Pizzaman. Legend has it that Norman Cook (Fatboy Slim) took fellow Brighton pal Damian Harris to the amyl nitrate-fuelled Heavenly Social in London to give the Midfield General ...
sparse, jagged rhythm tracks, often sounding deliberately computerized as it made the most of the advancing technology, and the first dancehall vocals were deejays toasting live on dub plates (special one-off acetates of songs, cut for sound system use only). In the dancehall. Because of its ‘one-off’ nature, dancehall’s popularity was always based on releases of ...
Dancehall reggae was all about deejays, and as they moved to centre stage, characters like Yellowman (‘Mr Yellowman’), Eek-A-Mouse (‘Wa Do Dem’) and Michigan & Smiley (‘Rub A Dub Style’) proved to be hugely inventive. The 1990s generation of deejays brought MTV-style showmanship to their craft: Ninjaman, Supercat, Bounty Killer, Capleton, Buju Banton, Lady ...
While many hit doo-wop records featured full instrumental accompaniment, the groups themselves had usually started out singing a cappella. It was, in short, a music that required collaborative effort but no instrumental outlay or expertise, to be performed on street corners as a means of escape, public entertainment, personal fulfilment and professional ambition. Deriving its ...
thoughts on being Asian and British. It was a fashion that soon faded in the mainstream media’s eyes, but the likes of Talvin Singh, Nitin Sawhney and Asian Dub Foundation had already transcended categorization and become international stars. In Paris, the archetypal café accordion music was a folk sound that had, like flamenco in Spain, become ...
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David Bowie
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