Session Transcript:
Dennis Bovell
Red Bull Music Academy, Rome 2004

The video stream for this lecture can be watched here.

RBMA: »That’s obviously a very different sound from the lovers rock feeling. When you hear that you forget about the other stuff, this is menacing, dark.«

Dennis Bovell: »Well, what happened to me during that time. One night, Friday 13th October 1974, what we call Black Friday, I was playing my soundsystem in the Carib Club. Now on Friday nights, I had two gigs, an early one in the Metro Club in Ladbroke Grove, the same area where they have the carnival. I’d play there from 7 to 11, then I’d go to another club in Cricklewood till 6 in the morning, the Carib Club. And on this day Lee 'Scratch' Perry, the Upsetter, had come to London and I’d gone to meet him at the airport to pick up a pile of fresh dubplates that he’d brought from Jamaica. I was anxious to get hold of these before anyone else because I was playing that night in a competition against another soundsystem called Lord Koos and another called Count Nick’s, it was a soundclash. Usually, it would just be two soundsystems against each other, but this was the start of a three soundclash where I was the champion, I was battling against two other sounds now, instead of just one. At that time Johnny Clarke was doing his first tour of the UK and my band Matumbi was the backing band for his tour. His producer, Bunny Lee, was in town and he had a batch of dubplates, and of course, when you have them you’re not going to sell them to just one soundsystem, you’re going to sell it to as many as you can. So he was selling Johnny Clarke dubplates, Cornell Campbell dubplates, a song called The Gorgon, which was famous at the time. Now the other sound was a friend of Bunny Lee and he had those dubplates and I got them because my band was backing Johnny Clarke. But I went to meet Lee 'Scratch' Perry because I knew he had some dubplates and I wanted them, thinking: "Just give me the exclusive one for tonight, you can sell them to who you want tomorrow, but tonight I wanna be the first play on it, I’m gonna be the means by which London first heard these dubplates." So, we’re on the dance, and when the time came for me play them the crowd was "Whaaaa!", proclaiming me the champion. At the same time some policemen had entered the club and were leaving with a prisoner they’d arrested in the toilets, six policemen and one prisoner. At the same time I was playing this dubplate the crowd decided to seize the prisoner off the police. So they freed that guy and a few policemen got a few slaps and one of them got stabbed. All hell broke loose because the police came back with about 500 more and beat nearly everybody in the club. It was on the third floor and no elevator, so you had to go down six flights of stairs. And as you came out there was two policemen on every stair, hitting people, kicking people and arresting as many as they liked. The next morning I went to Ladbroke Grove and people were going: "Whoa, what you doing here?" "What you mean?" "The police are looking for you, man." "Why?" The police were asking everyone at the station: "Who is the DJ of Sufferer’s Hi-Fi? We want to get the DJ because he put the record on, he’s the one who got the microphone and said: ‘Kill the cops’." Nothing like that ever happened, I promise you on my mother’s life, on my children’s life, I never said: "Kill the cops." So I went to the police station and said: "I heard you’re looking for me," and they said: "Yeah, come on inside." So I went in and they interrogated me for eight hours or so, asking what I’d said, what did I do to cause it all. And they laid it all at my door, said I’d started all that trouble. As a result I was charged with causing an affray, which in short means inciting a riot. So I’m in the Old Bailey, the court where they charge real murderers and shit, in court number one, the highest court, and I’m charged with being the ringleader of a gang of twelve people who I’ve never met before. They’re my gang and we beat up policemen in clubs! The trial lasted six months, everyday I’m in the Old Bailey from 12 to 4 trying to defend myself against the accusations. At the end of the trial nine were acquitted, but on three there was a hung jury, where they can’t decide one way or another, and I was one of those three. I thought in British law a person is innocent until proved guilty. You haven’t proved me guilty so I must be innocent, you’ve got to let me go. But no, the judge said: "We’re going to retry you," so I had a retrial, started all over again from top to bottom. This lasted three months, nine months altogether with the two trials. At the end of the retrial at 12 noon the jury went to decide, by nine they still hadn’t decided. So the judge said: "If they don’t decide by ten we’re going to throw it out, we can’t try you three times." At five to ten, the jury came back and said: "Ten of us think he’s guilty, two think not guilty." The judge said: "That’s good enough for me – three years in jail." That was the first time I’d ever been into a police station even. I always used to think when people said: "The police fitted me up, I didn’t do it," that they must have done something. But here I was now in the same chair, being accused and being innocent but being found guilty and getting three years. But I didn’t give up, I went to jail and while I was in there - I was in for six months of that three year sentence - I appealed to a higher court. After two sessions of listening to the case the judge said: "This guy should never even have been charged with that, there’s no evidence. Let him go." So they let me go that day, I was free, I was on the news, I was a big star and my band was going to be in the charts next week (laughter / applause). So Linton Kwesi Johnson came to me and said: "I want to do some music with my poetry." I was like: "Whenever you’re ready, dude. I know what you’re saying, I know how true it is, man. Let’s get in that studio." Richard Branson gave us some money and we went in the studio and cut LKJ’s first album, called Poet & The Roots on Virgin. We cut it in three days, the whole album, top to bottom. So our marriage has been made, and we’ve been working together 25 years now and we just brought out a new DVD - Live In Paris.«

RBMA: »How does the relationship work, the writing and the music?«

Dennis Bovell: »In the beginning Linton would come to me with the poem and the bassline, and he’d say: "I want you to play this," (imitates bassline) ‘cause that’s what he could hear in his head to go with his words. Then I’d play it until I got bored, change it a little bit, and sometimes he’d like it, sometimes he’d say: "Oh no, don’t change it." Sometimes I’d take it real far out, depending on whether he’d let me change it at all, and we’d go in the studio and do it like that. Then after a while I thought: "You got a bass mind, so let me teach you how to play the guitar." So I became his teacher, I showed him some exercises to improve his fingers. Then one day he came back to me and said: "You know that exercise you showed me? I wrote a song." From then on I’d let him go into the studio with a bass and a metronome and get him to put down what he was feeling with the poem, and that way he couldn’t blame me for not getting it right. 'Cause sometimes he’d say: (imitates bassline), and I’d go: (imitates same bassline). He’d go: "No, that’s not what I want." "So here, here’s the bass, here’s the notes, show me what note you’re hearing in your head." We’d have these conversations all the time, just him and me. We’d thrash it out, and then he’d say he needed an introduction. So for a poem like Unfinished Revolution, I had this choir in my head, like I was in church (imitates sound of church organ). He said: "Did you dream that you died? 'Cause that music sounds like music to a funeral." "No, it goes with the song, the Unfinished Revolution." So we’d take a break and I’d come back with that theme, then I’d be the one who comes up with the bridge part.«

RBMA: »According to this book I’ve been reading, Bass Culture, dub poetry was the first occasion of music originating away from Jamaica and then going back to Jamaica and having an influence.«

Dennis Bovell: »While Bob Marley was alive, he’d signed us to his Tuff Gong label, but he passed away before he put any records out. Steel Pulse and Linton were signed to his label. I was the first person to take Steel Pulse into a recording studio. They won a talent competition, for which first prize was a day in the studio with me, and I produced a bunch of their singles in the beginning.«

RBMA: »You explained to me earlier that this album (indicates Linton Kwesi Johnson - Making History) was the first of those with Linton where you took control of everything. Up till then Linton had a habit of getting his friends on drums.«

Dennis Bovell: »And stuff, yeah. We’d go into the studio with two or three of everything and me being the spare part. We’d have two drummers, two bass players, three guitar players, four keyboard players. It’s like picking the team. "This one you play bass, you play drums, you play keyboards and you play guitar. This isn’t working, we need to change the bass player, we need to change the drummer." And musicians would be sitting there waiting to go on saying: "I could do that better than him, let me at it, let me at it." And it was a competition between the musicians to do their best for the project. So that worked for a while until the music exhausted its two chord, one chord, and it had to go a bit more orchestral. Some of these people were just old friends of Linton who used to go to school with him and he’d thought: "They’re as good as anybody else. There’s lots of people on TV who don’t even play their instruments, miming, these are my friends, give them a chance." But my patience had worn thin by the time we made this album and also I’d formed a band called the Dub Band, 'cause I’d made an album in 1980 called Braindamage and I needed to put this band together to go and perform this music. (someone holds up album) Oh wow, this guy’s on it, that’s the album.«

RBMA: »It’s a teacher, that’s you on the cover.«

Dennis Bovell: »That’s in my beard and dreadlock days. Linton, who meanwhile had been touring with a tape recorder, because once we did the stuff in the studio, we’d just make a backing track minus his voice so he could go out and gig. And he’d go out and gig with John Lydon, Public Image, and he’d open the show for them just using tapes and people would go: "Whuurr, get off!" And he said: "I can’t do it anymore, I can’t play in a stadium with 20.000 people and a tape recorder." So I taught my band his songs and we set out to tour Scandinavia, Sweden, Iceland, just to kind of tune it up and put it all together, and it went down really, really well. So from then on, we were the band on the road, and when it came to making this album I said: "You’re not gonna get those old boys in, no way, the band’s tuned now." So he let me do that.«

RBMA: »Pick a tune for us from this album.«

Dennis Bovell: »Let me see now, Wat About Di Working Claas. This is a song, a poem, for working class people.«

(music: Linton Kwesi Johnson - Wat About Di Working Claas / applause)

»That was a chance to show off the band. We don’t just play reggae, we play music. In that poem Linton’s drawing reference to the tanks that were rolling in Gdansk in Poland to the ordinary working class man in the street. He’s saying: "From England to Poland every step across the ocean, the ruling classes them are in a mess. The Soviet Union’s in disarray, so’s America, has been for years, the British system ain’t working, so who’s fault is it? Well, don’t blame it on the blacks, racist, blame it on your boss. Blame it on your past. We suffered the loss, we paid the cost. And we’re not gonna forget what you did to us."«

RBMA: »Incredible writer.«

Dennis Bovell: »Yeah, man.«

RBMA: »We could go on and on and on.«

Dennis Bovell: »We don’t want to bore you.«

RBMA: »I don’t think there’s any chance of that. A lot of people here are involved in producing music, and we had Bernard in here last week talking about funk and soul. But a lot of people struggle with writing the bassline. Obviously, you’ve spent a lot of time doing that, maybe you don’t want to give away your secrets. Could you maybe show us something that might be useful? How would you go about writing the bassline?«

Dennis Bovell: »I think the chord structure determines where you can and can’t go. The top line, the melody will constrain you as well, unless you want to directly oppose what’s going on. With bass playing, sometimes less is more. That whole feeling with the bass being there, then suddenly not being there, then being there again, can give you that kind of space, the groove to let other people come through. The choice of note in the chord, say your guitar is playing six notes in the chord, anyone of those could be the bass note. It will change whether the chord is on its head or its feet, but it won’t change the chord, it’ll be contained in that chord. So, quite often between thirds and fifths, sixes and nines is where the tastiest melodies inside the note are contained. My favourite bass player after Jaco Pastorius is Aston ‘Family Man’ Barrett from The Wailers. I like the way he lays back and let’s the chord go. And when that chord isn’t there anymore and you’ve got something else, then he gives you a taste of what the chord before was. He can still be a part of the new chord, it’s about linking chords together and aiding the melody and being minimalist. There’s been tunes where someone said: "OK, you’re gonna play the bass on this tune." And I’d say: "I can only hear one note. Just play (imitates bass guitar playing one note) and all the chords are going everywhere and I’m just staying right here." It’s like holding a big kite that’s flying, I’m about to take off in a minute. And reggae is famous for doing things like that, playing two chords but a thousand million different basslines around them.«

Participant: »They say that you know you’re a good player, if you can play just one note.«

Dennis Bovell: »Yeah, I agree, Duke Ellington said that. There’s a piece of Linton’s and it’s called Sonny’s Lettah, and he often likes to have contrasting lines, where the same thing is playing an octave up and an octave down (plays bass). Another line of Linton’s is Reggae For Peach. Blair Peach was a schoolteacher from New Zealand, come to England and was involved in an anti-fascist march in Southall in England where he lost his life. He was hit on the head by a policeman with a truncheon and at the time the pathologist had said the dent in his head could only have been made by a police truncheon. But that’s as far as they went, they didn’t say this particular policeman had killed him. But a policeman had killed him and Linton wrote a poem about it, and the lyrics went: "Everywhere mi go, mi hear people seh, everywhere mi go, it’s the talk of the day, that the SPG is a murderer, murderer, we can’t let them go no further, cah them kill Blair Peach the teacher, them kill Blair Peach the dirty murderers." I thought Linton, this is death, you put that out, they’re going to come for you next. Britain’s had a history where we don’t give policemen guns because they tend to kill people when you do that. The ordinary policeman in the street has a radio and he calls somebody, who has a gun, if he needs help and he doesn’t have one himself. And I think that’s quite a civilised move. But then you have the SPG, the Special Patrol Group, and those guys had guns and they’d be on the street corner harassing people, especially in Brixton. And it was that paramilitary section of the police force that had killed that guy and it resulted in them having their guns confiscated. So I said: "Linton, if you make this poem and say something bad about these guys they’re going to come round you’re house and take you away, we’ll never see you again." He said: "I don’t care, I’m going to do this poem." I said: "I’ll help you but don’t put my name on the record." So he did it, we did it, the record come out and my name’s on the record! (shouting) "I said don’t put my name on it. I’ve just been released from causing an affray, inciting people to kill policemen and shit, and now you’ve brought me right back in there." He said: (very calm voice) "We did it together, and I think you should be proud we did it together, and if I’m going down you’re coming with me." (laughter) The bassline was very strange (plays bass to Reggae For Peach). It’s just one note, and that’s Linton going: (plays more bass to Reggae For Peach) "Yeah, the police killed that guy." And I’m going: "Oh man!" (laughter) Then 15 years later, I’m watching TV, news item: "The police have just paid compensation to that guy’s wife for having killed him." It took them that long to hand over some cash and admit it. But I’m thinking Linton should write another poem saying we want the guy who did it. It can be acapella.«

(inaudible shout from audience)

Dennis Bovell: »He’ll find a way! I had a letter in the post saying: "Thank you for joining the ANC." I never joined the ANC. I told Linton. He said: "I did that. Now you’ve remembered!" "You could’ve asked me, I wouldn’t have objected." He joined me without telling me. He’s gone: "Yeah, you should be a member of that." But he’s my man.«

RBMA: »It’s time to hand it over. Any questions?«

Participant: »Can you tell us something about the recording process in reggae and dub. It’s a very clean sound, a lot of delay sometimes, can you tell us something more about that?«

Dennis Bovell: »I’ve made three volumes now of LKJ In Dub. It stems from the actual work, but everyone’s out of the studio. I’m in there alone and I wanna mash it up, show as little respect as possible to any one instrument. With dub, nothing’s important, nothing is untouchable, nothing deserves the right to be there for any one time. So I’m putting things out, in, out, in, out. Before I used to have go (moves hands to imitate moving knobs), now with a computer I can write at what point something’s not there, at what point it’s louder than something else, at what point it’s there but right down there. At what point it has a double-time echo, at what point it has a half-time echo, at what point it ceases to sound like something sounded on the original track. At what point do I take the bass frequency away from the bass and make it all trebly, at what point do I do that to the snare drum, at what point do I do that to the hi-hat. I decide. And when I think that’s good enough, that’s it, next! It’s all to do with the person who’s creating it. Whatever you do, it’s dub. If it’s received well, is another matter. But whatever you do, whatever you don’t do, it’s dub. With the dancehall and that stuff, that’s not live playing, it’s machines. So that’s easier to cut holes in it. It’s going to be here for two beats here, four beats there, the whole bar there. We don’t want to hear it again for another eight bars, than bring it back in. This is the chorus, that’s got to be featured. Take all the other instruments away at the chorus, just add the vocals and the harmonies. Whatever you can throw in, whatever seems to fit the part.«

RBMA: »Was there any resistance from Jamaican musicians to accepting English musicians?«

Dennis Bovell: »Yeah, you’re not joking! The whole idea behind me and my friends making music in London was because in the beginning soundsystems were prejudiced against reggae that was not Jamaican-made. If it wasn’t made in Jamaica, it was inferior. A lot of guys would grab the microphone and say: "We don’t play non-Jamaican reggae," and put it down. But because I was straddling two borders, I was in the soundsystem world and in the live music world, I was able to make records that fooled ‘em all. I’d never seen a Jamaican tape recorder or console, I never heard that Jamaicans made tape. They made music, but all the equipment was made in England or America or somewhere. So it depends on you knowing how to use that stuff and get the same results or better. So I formed this group called the 4th Street Orchestra with no information about who was playing, what the songs were called. It would be a white label. You like the record? Buy it. It would say 'Made In Jamaica' on the side. Mind you, there were songs done in London that weren’t up to it on the engineering side, the playing side. But there were some that were as good, if not better. To cut down this prejudice I made the Rama label and did stuff as if it was coming from Jamaica. And nobody knew, you either liked it or you didn’t. And it sold, so I disproved the fact that you had to go to Jamaica to get a particular sound. Also, our 7” singles, the 45s, if it was made in London it would have a tiny hole in the centre, but, if was an import you had a great big hole and had to get a middle to play the record. So I pressed the records in London and bought a machine called a dinking machine to make a big hole in it. You take it to the store and say: "Import." They go: "Yeah, slurp!" Lap it all up. It looked like an import! Then later on, everyone goes: (adopts accusing voice) "You did those in London." I could manufacture in London for less cost, sell for the price of an import for more profit. Trying to make some money.«

Participant: »When Bob Marley started making records with Chris Blackwell and they had that cleaner sound, did he encounter the same resistance, people saying: "It’s not reggae 'cause it’s got an American guitarist"?«

Dennis Bovell: »No, 'cause that was Bob, anything Bob did was accepted (imitates applause). A lot of Jamaican studios up to that point had good sound, but they only had four tracks, or up to 16 tracks. The more you bounce stuff around the quality goes, the treble end goes, it gets woolly, you’re bouncing on analogue tape. So you had to have more facility, so it made sense either to go America or to London or anywhere, but Jamaica where they didn’t have as much as a 16 track recorder. By recording in London Bob was able to have much more scope with the multitracking, which meant he could put much more on the tape. A lot of the recordings in Dynamic Studio, for instance, in Jamaica you’d have the drums and bass on the same track 'cause they didn’t have room; and then a bunch of rhythm instruments on another track – the guitar, the piano, the organ, all that lot on one track mono. Lee Perry had a three track machine and he was king of the jungle, he had three tracks. Then when it went up to eight tracks, then Dynamic went to 16, then to 24, but Bob wanted to experiment with hard rock guitars. I mean, you listen to Concrete Jungle, you know, he was going some place else. Also, the producer had a lot to do with it: Karl Pitterson and the influence of meeting John Williams and people like that, who were signed to Island as rock artists, Nazareth and Free and those guys, and he had the chance to meet them and get them to put some of their feel into reggae. An old album of his was Soul Rebel, where he’s singing old soul tunes, even Go Tell It On The Mountain, which is an old church song. So yeah, he probably had some opposition, but that faded away because he’d made a better move for the movement.«

RBMA: »We could go all day, but just, a last thing before we wind up. Something I didn’t realise until we met last night is that you’re somewhat of an honorary Italian.«

Dennis Bovell: »(laughter) I was in a film that was out in Italy about four years ago, called South Side Story by the director Roberto Torre. I was invited to be the musical director of the film. I’d been producing Hortablo Paglione and the singer Roberto Rondelli, who’s a great friend of mine, was going to play the lead in this film and I went to do to the music, and once we’d done the music, I was invited to be one of the actors. So they dressed me up different, and I made it to the end (laughs).«

RBMA: »And you’ve produced a lot of Italian reggae.«

Dennis Bovell: »I worked with 99 Posse, Balapudiva, Pepe Barra, Lele Carraciolo, few other people.«

RBMA: »What is it like for an Italian reggae, or a reggae scene in any country for that matter to try and gain respect?«

Dennis Bovell: »I think the idea is to please the people at home. If you’re making reggae, don’t alienate your kin, your folk. Please the people at home then think about those outside. If you try to please everybody, you’re going to end up pleasing nobody. I done stuff in Japan with a singer called Iria, and she’d previously been a punk rock singer and a racing driver. She wanted to be a Reggae singer and came to me, I thought we could do it. Let me give you an example of some Japanese reggae I made not all that long ago. She’d had a hit with a pop sound and I thought she had an interesting voice and wanted to do this album. Unfortunately she’d had a baby and brought the baby to London and wanted the baby to sing on the record.«

(music: Iria - unknown / applause)

»It’s been fun making reggae all around the world. In Africa, with Alpha Blondy, I made six or seven albums with him including his first album. He came to my studio in London with The Wailers. In Brazil, with O Rappa, they came to London.«

Participant: »You haven’t talked about the influence Afrobeat had one you.«

Dennis Bovell: »I worked with Fela Kuti in the '80s. I recorded about 20 titles in my studio in London with him. Afrobeat taught me how to be percussive in reggae. It plays an important part in reggae. A lot of reggae bands don’t have percussionists anymore because they’re troubled people, usually, (laughter) and they get drowned out by electrical things. But, yeah, afrobeat did teach me how to percuss my reggae in a different way. And also a group called Savannah 75 from Sierra Leone and Prince Nico and a group called Nwagadudu from Liberia.«