Dennis Bovell, Mark Stewart, and Gareth Sager (photo by Chiara Meattelli)
On Y in Dub, released digitally last year, producer Dennis “Blackbeard” Bovell MBE and the Pop Group revisit every track on their 1979 Radar Records album Y and single “She Is Beyond Good and Evil,” creating looking-glass complements to the originals that seem long overdue. In advance of the album’s vinyl release on April 8, Bovell gave Dangerous Minds a tour of Y in Dub‘s vast, echoing mental space.
If you can cast your mind back to when you first encountered the Pop Group, what was it about them that made you want to work with them? What were your first impressions of the band?
My first impressions of the band were that, here was a bunch of budding young musicians who could handle jazz riffing and were also into, not tuneful singing, but meaningful lyrics, you know. I think to say something is better than to be beautifully in tune and saying nothing. I applauded their militancy and their approach to music in general, their likes and their dislikes. And in fact, later on in life, Bruce Smith, the drummer, joined Linton Kwesi Johnson and me with the Dub Band.
I wanted to ask about that too, because I think the Pop Group and Linton Kwesi Johnson co-headlined a number of shows together, right?
Absolutely.
Can you tell me about that? Were you at the controls ever for the Pop Group—
No, no. I had worked with both of them, and then by that time I was, like, more in the studio person than being out on live gigs, because by then, I had had it with live gigs, to be honest, you know: the confusion, the lack of organization, the long traveling hours and then being expected to perform like a circus flea, you know, I’d had it with that by then, and they hadn’t! So they were about to experience that, while I was about to crawl back into the studio with my normal self, work at my own pace.
Are you maybe ten years older then they are? They were quite young when they recorded this.
They still are quite young. [Laughter] I never really thought about how much older I was than them, but I guess that made them listen to me as the producer.
Nowadays, when I listen to the original record, but also this dub set, it strikes me that they were such young people—I think Mark was still a teenager.
I think he was about seventeen or something, yeah.
But the music in a way—I know what you’re saying about everything not being perfectly in tune—but at the same time the music is kind of sophisticated.
Absolutely.
It doesn’t sound to me like a bunch of young people playing.
Well, a lot of people said that about Coltrane. [Laughs] He was never on time, he was never in tune, but he was genius.
So how did you approach this dub set of Y?
First of all, we made sure the tapes were still playable, were still audible, and then we passed them over from analog to digital files. File by file, right? Each file: the kick drum file, switch it over, the snare drum—the whole recording. And then we went into a digital room with a young lad called Dave McEwen, and he kind of helped us to put them on a digital level where I could actually revisit each channel and have full control over it, as it were.
So I had the files transferred to digital files, and so we could manipulate them on the Pro Tools level. And then we put them in a computer and then sent them back onto an analog desk, right? So I was just using the computer to synchronize the files, but when the files came back, they were coming back to an analog desk, and I was equalizing them as I felt for that room, for those speakers, and giving the right amount of delay, et cetera, just to kind of take us back into the analog age, but using digital files.
So you did this maybe on the same kind of desk on which you recorded Y?
No, no, no. We recorded that on… oh… I’ll remember in a minute, it’s probably extinct now. We brought it back on a Midas, which is a desk from around that time, but not the same one. But equally parametrically equalized piece of equipment that you could sweep the frequencies, the frequencies were not either/or, you could sweep, whoosh! from the top end to the bottom end.
Before, we recorded it on an MCI. Good old American desk. The original recordings were on an MCI. So when we transferred the files to Pro Tools, and then made sure that we had the likeness of the file, and didn’t incur any tape hiss or low frequency buzz, and then we just brought them back to a Midas with a bunch of outboard plug-ins, you know, delays, reverbs, funny-sounding things, whatever we felt was needed for the particular song. [And Gareth] would go, “Yeah! No! No! Yeah, yeah, yeah! No!” It was like me at the desk and him sat behind me listening at the bass trap. So where he was sitting, he was my extra pair of ears, sitting behind me.
And the room is not that big; it’s a mixing room, it’s not a recording room, as such, it’s a room that’s built for mixing. Dave McEwen, whose room it is, was before then the engineer for Adrian Sherwood, and so this is his own room, and he also is the mix engineer for the Asian Dub Foundation. So we’re working with people who know what sound is, and what sound I want. And he knows—I go, “I need a sound like that,” and he goes, “Oh, well, we find it here!” And then we modify it, and I go, “Okay, let the tape run, we’re gonna do a take now.” And then we maybe do a take, and then go, “Okay, between here and there, we need to drop again, because there was something exciting about to happen but it didn’t so we’re going to make it happen now.” And really kind of be like kids in a toy shop [laughs], with the sound, and getting to do things that are now more advanced than forty years ago. That was the trip. So we mashed up the album!
Is there any new stuff on there? On “Blood Money,” there’s a bass part I don’t recognize.
Well, what happened is they had several takes of things, and this time round we were preferring another take. On “Blood Money,” actually, the first mix of that, the bass wasn’t quite what it should have been. There was the effect on it, like I think we had a flanger on it, or a phaser, or something. And then there was a double-tracked bass that we had ditched the idea of using, and then we decided to use it this time because, hello, everybody else has heard the other mix of it; we’re going back into this shipwreck and, you know, pulling out the gold pieces, you know what I’m saying? We’re floating the gold to the top!
The Pop Group (photo by Chiara Meattelli and Dominic Lee)
Was there anything you heard listening back to this stuff that surprised you?
No, because I knew it was all there, but there were things that I was surprised that I’d kept to a minimal in volume instead of, like, really loud, and now was the chance to do that, because people already heard it neat and tidy and everything its right place, and now there’s maybe a guitar, or a saxophone, that if it was louder it would have put a different dimension on the mix—RAAAAAAAH!
Yeah, we had fun doing that, pulling bits from the wreckage, as it were. ‘Cause by that time we’d mixed it, and then scuttled it, and now we were going back to the wreckage to find what else was in there that we didn’t take the last time, or what was that we didn’t expound on the last time. We’re gonna do it now and give the mix another dimension!
Was there anything that you set out consciously to put in the foreground?
Yeah, the drums, most definitely, the drums. Because then the drums were neatly tucked away behind the voice and the guitars and all that. And now, because we’re doing dub, and drums are so important in people’s ears and minds and groove now, and Bruce Smith was such a monster of a drummer, this was the time to let what he played shine.
Yeah, he’s amazing.
I know.
I’ve seen him play a couple times, and he has a big smile on his face when he plays.
Always happy, always happy, always happy, man. I remember one night we were playing [signal breaks up] Linton Kwesi Johnson, Bruce on drums, and who come running down the aisle was John Lydon. Saying “Linton! Linton! Linton!” And security was hot on his heels, ‘cause he’d refused to pay, in true punk style. “No, those are my friends in there, I’m not paying. My name’s John Lydon, don’t you know who I am?” While we were onstage, and Linton’s shouting from the stage, “Leave him alone! He’s my friend, I know him.” And then the security backing off…
That night, John discovered what a monstrous drummer Bruce was, and the next thing you know, Bruce was like, “John’s invited me to PiL, man. I’ve always wanted to play with John, man.” “Do it, bro, do it!” And he’s been with John ever since! He even returned to America, Bruce, ‘cause he’s from San Francisco, around there, you know.
Oh really?
He was born there, yeah, and then he was raised in Bristol, so he has a kind of Bristolian-American accent.
When this project started, it grew out of some live performances you did, revisiting Y?
Yeah. They did a tour a couple of years back, and they invited me to be the front of house engineer. So while they were on stage, to kind of beef the show up a bit, I’d do some dubwise things. They’d have dub sequences in the tour. And we went all over Europe, man, you know, Germany, France, Italy, and I was having fun working the front of house, because I being the one who put a lot of those effects in there in the first place knew when they were, and when they were coming, and when they were due to explode! And I was having fun revisiting having done that in the studio, and now doing it in front of a live audience, and watching the audience pop off every time you dropped a dub bomb.
And then someone said, “Hey, you guys should rework Y,” or maybe Mark said, “We should do Y again like that,” with me at the controls and a live bass. We did one at Rough Trade in the East End where they did a live thing, and then they set up the original files of “Beyond Good and Evil,” and I mixed it live in dub, and it was quite a feature on the internet for a while, people played it a lot. And then Mark was like, “C’mon, we gotta do the dub album.” And Gareth was like, “Let’s go.”
Was it just you and Gareth in the studio?
Mark was there sometimes, but the studio only has room for three people. There’s only room for three people in that suite, and Mark is a rather large lad.
[Laughter]
Yeah, he’s a tall man.
He’s a big boy. I think he decided, there’s not enough room in here for four of us. So he was resigned to listening after we did it and then commenting, and if he had something to say that we needed to change, we’d do that. Because each time we’d put a song on the table, we’d go through it thoroughly and then not just wipe it off immediately, but leave it for a day so it could marinate. And then we’d decide: “Well, we close this case?” “Yeah, it’s done.” “We all happy with it?” “Yeah, close the case.” Zip it up. Next tune.
Are you working on anything else you can tell me about?
Animal Collective sent me some files and I’m doing a mix on one of their tunes right now. My friend Tyler Pope from LCD Soundsystem sent me a track that he’s working on for his solo album. I just mixed that. Before that, I’ve just been working with Jonny Greenwood and Thom Yorke, ‘cause they, a pair of Radioheads, have just formed a new group called the Smile, and they’re having Tom Skinner as drummer. They just dropped a new single called “The Smoke,” and I’ve twisted and turned “The Smoke” for a twelve-inch mix which is soon to be on the market, so look out for “The Smoke” remixed by Dennis Bovell.
Anything live-wise?
I’ve been doing some DJing and stuff, because I have a new album coming out on the 25th of March on Trojan Records. This album is The DuBMASTER: The Essential Anthology, so I’m going right back from the beginning of my solo career and my endeavors with producing other artists, as well. It’s a journey through where I started to where I am right now, because there’s some material there that’s never been released, and some material that’s been freshly made, and material that was made since 1973. So it goes through a journey.
I had someone else who had an eye on my career tell me “this one,” “that one,” “the other one,” and Laurence from Trojan Records made a selection of what he figured was, for him, what I’d done that shone. So I said, “do it,” because for me, each title is like one of my children. I love them all dearly, I can’t really choose between one or another, or if I was made to, I don’t know how I would do it. Because each song has its beauty. Each song might have its flaws, too, but I enjoyed the way they put it together, looking back at myself.
Are you still working with Linton Kwesi Johnson?
Yeah, in fact, he just sent me a message today saying “Call me,” and I know that means he’s ready to go into the studio, ‘cause I told him that, anytime now, we could go into the studio. ‘Cause we’ve been in the studio for a while, doing things, and he’s not been happy about things, and we’ve been reworking things, and he wants to come out with a dub album first. So I’m like, “Yeah, let’s go!”
I picked up the reissue of Making History. I’m happy to see that back out, that’s a great record.
I feel so too.
Below, in a Dangerous Minds premiere, hear the Pop Group and Dennis Bovell MBE perform “Snowgirl,” “We Are Time,” and “She Is Beyond Good and Evil” live at Terry Hall’s festival at Coventry UK City of Culture last summer.
Y in Dub, currently available on CD and streaming, will be released on vinyl April 8. Visit the Pop Group’s website and Dennis Bovell’s Bandcamp for more magical musical transmissions.