Under the Influence: Killing Joke's guide to dub

Founder of the first psychedelic trance label and an instrumental figure in UK ambient, Killing Joke's Martin 'Youth' Glover gives us an education in all things dub with nine of his personal favourites

Feature by Martin 'Youth' Glover | 20 Oct 2015
Lee 'Scratch' Perry & The Upsetters – Super Ape (1976)

I was already into Perry by the time this came out but Super Ape just seemed to go further than the others. The atmosphere, the ambience and the mashing up of everything was unbelievable for me at the time. Subsequently learning that he was doing that on a little eight-track mixer with the barest minimum of equipment was mind-bending. It certainly illustrates what any great dub album does: he’s taking backing tracks from other records and productions and reinventing them, alchemising them. It’s just blinding. I recommend it to anyone.

Augustus Pablo and King Tubby – King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown (1976)

Augustus Pablo is a great melodica player and a great master of melodies. What Tubby does with the dubs and the way he reinvents is just revolutionary, like Perry, but Tubby’s more bass and drums focused. I remember listening to this record in 1977 when it came out, in west London where the Killing Joke was squatting. You’d go into a very small, dark living room in the bottom of a Victorian house in the basement and there’d be a small room, maybe 6 foot by 4… very minimal lighting – just shadows. You’d be rammed up next to loads of other people with a tiny little bar at the back and smoke from ganja weed. It was an amazing place to hear that sound – the bass would just penetrate your bones. With Tubby, the crispness of the hats and the drums really set him apart... he still remains one of the great innovators of the genre.

Scientist – Scientist Meets the Space Invaders (1981)

I remember being with [The Orb's] Alex Paterson when we had a bedsit in Earl’s Court and we’d go down to the kebab shop that had Space Invaders and Asteroids. We’d literally be in there for three or four hours just getting really good and then we’d go back to our room and listen to dub, so when Scientist did one based on Space Invaders we couldn't believe it. It just appealed to our infantile sense of humour and it was kind of comic book and silly. He would go crazy and just add the most silly sounds – all these household sounds like creaking doors – and dub them up with big reverb. And it was busy as well. It was crazy to the old dub heads, who found him a sort of young upstart, but for us at the time it was just fantastic.

Aswad – A New Chapter of Dub (1982)

Another classic from the time, which is unusual because it’s British. Aswad lived in Ladbroke Grove near where we lived, so we were in awe of them. I think what they managed to achieve was to meet, and even go beyond, what some of the Jamaican dub masters were doing. And I think the first track, Dubfire, with the horns, was just blinding. It had a bass line from heaven with this spritely synthesiser thing doubling it. I play that track in some of my DJ sets before we come on with Killing Joke. It’s the dub album that we can recall from memory.

The Orb – The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld (1991)

I’m going to do a little bit of self-promotion here and mention someone I’ve been involved with. I produced Little Fluffy Clouds. By this time, me and Alex had got a lot more experience in the studio. We just started to dub in our way with our vocabulary and our language from where we’d been growing up in squats in west London. I don’t know what more to say: I think it’s a masterpiece today, I think it’s a monumental piece of work and it has been frequently used in classic dub compilations, so I have to include this.

Hallucinogen – In Dub (2002)

Simon Posford was a young assistant I picked up from Olympic Studios. He was too hippy and wild there. Eventually I badgered him and bullied him into doing trance and he became and still remains a premiere producer and the artistic benchmark of trance music. Hallucinogen's In Dub was made with me and him and another one of my in-house Butterfly engineers, Ott, who’s also become huge in the electronic psych-dub scene and is now touring the world. I’ve very proud of that – that two of my former assistants have eclipsed me. What a great validation! This became a ground-breaking album on the psych-trance and chillout scenes and remains a kind of benchmark of dub production.

Suns of Arqa – All Is Not Lost, But Where Is It? (2015)

This is really unique production featuring John Cooper Clarke and many others. A great dub excursion mixed by big Wadada who’s made over twenty dub albums infused with traditional Indian music. It has a lot of electronic influences, it’s got some heavy bass lines and it’s a very modern album: the kick drums sound different than they did in the 90s. I think this new album’s eclipsed everything he’s done over the last 20 to 30 years.

African Head Charge – My Life in a Hole in the Ground (1981)

An Adrian Sherwood one… he’s done so many! I grew up with his industrial dub and it’s been such a pivotal inspiration – again, British. He keeps reinventing himself. He had a great album with these New York guys, Tackhead, and his U-Sounds label was huge. I like the dubstep album he did a couple of years ago and I love his politics, the stuff he was doing with Mark Stewart from the pop group As the Veneer of Democracy Starts to Fade; it’s got very politically conscious lyrics. And there was Dub Syndicate… but I’m going to have to go with the African Head Charge album. They had Jah Wobble, one of the great bass players of dub. And Skip McDonald, a great guitarist.

Public Image Ltd – Metal Box (1979)

Again, it features Wobble. And Lydon. Although I love the first album, Metal Box is a masterpiece, a monumental work, with Dennis Morris’s packaging it in a metal film box with three 12-inches. I thought they just got that whole art punk thing. They fulfilled the promise of punk. They did everything I wanted to do with Killing Joke first! They were the big influence, and they remain a vital force in music individually.



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Pylon by Killing Joke is released on 23 Oct via Spinefarm. Killing Joke play Manchester Ritz on 1 Nov and Glasgow O2 ABC on 3 Nov. http://killingjoke.com