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.
More after the jump…
