loading . . . Fifty years after the release of magnum opus _King Tubbys Meets Rockers Uptown_ , the work of King Tubby still beguiles and inspires. Operating out of a converted bedroom in Waterhouse, western Kingston, Tubby was an integral force in the development of dub, the abstract reggae subgenre defined by its bass-heavy remixes and echo-shrouded disappearing vocals, the idiosyncratic audio treatments tailored for sound system events. Utilising an obsolete MCI console with a built-in high-pass filter and a homemade tape delay, Tubby’s sonic alchemy yielded a distinctive sound that was totally unlike that of his peers, making his micro-studio the prime site of dub innovation during the 1970s, with far-reaching effects. Dub’s non-standard techniques and unfettered format helped Public Image Ltd and The Slits to move beyond punk’s three-chord restrictions and there were echoes of dub in early hip hop cutups too; a defining element of trip hop, dub’s deconstructive arc can also be traced in diverse electronic dance music forms, including house, jungle, drum & bass, dubstep, grime and drill, as well as post rock and the contemporary British jazz fringe. King Tubby’s vision is an undercurrent that lies beneath all of this and so much more but it is important to keep in mind that his early work was executed when dub was merely a component of Kingston’s sound system subculture; through his refining of the form in the mid-1970s, dub gained greater kudos throughout Jamaica and gradually filtered into the consciousness of overseas music devotees, thanks to material released overseas by Jamaican expatriates.
As detailed in my forthcoming book _Dub Revolution: Jamaica’s Sonic Innovators And The Birth Of Remix Culture_ , Tubby’s backstory is complicated. He was born Osbourne Ruddock in 1941 and raised in central Kingston, their lane suffering from chronic overcrowding and a lack of public amenities, so his mother moved the family to a modest bungalow on Dromilly Avenue in Waterhouse, shortly after the area’s redevelopment as a low-income housing scheme in the aftermath of Hurricane Charlie. Tubby studied electronics at Kingston Tech and began his career building radios from found components, later opening a radio and tv repair service in a shack at the back of the Ruddock family home, where sound system amplifiers were also constructed. Tubby launched his own Hometown Hi-Fi sound system by the early 1960s and because he serviced the machines at top recording studios, he had access to exclusive material for the sound; typically cutting his acetates at Treasure Isle in the early days, but then after acquiring his own cutting lathe Tubby installed a homemade mixing desk in his bedroom and began executing exclusive mixes there himself.
With the help of hitmaking producer Bunny Lee, Tubby subsequently acquired two four-track reel-to-reels and the compact MCI console that would enable his full potential as a dub mixer, following the series of upgrades at Dynamic Sounds in 1971 that saw the gear consigned to the scrap heap. The discarded board’s high-pass filter had ten notched frequency steps that could apply filtering to specific frequency bands and Tubby’s mastery of its capacities became his sonic emblem, the application of reverb, delay and phasing other hallmarks. Soon Tubby removed the plumbing from the adjacent bathroom, padding the walls with egg boxes to make a rudimentary voicing room; after laying their rhythms at studios such as Channel One and Randy’s, underfunded grassroots producers often brought their master tapes to Tubby for voicing and mixing, with the delicious dubs that were crafted on site relegated to single B-sides. According to the producer Roy Cousins, a frequent collaborator who lived nearby, Tubby was the sole engineer at his studio for the first couple of years, but it is notoriously difficult to determine who mixed what at Tubby’s after that, since understudies such as Pat Kelly and Philip Smart were also in residence; Prince Jammy became the mainstay on his return from Canda in 1976 and Scientist a few years later, and in the 1980s, younger engineers such as Winston ‘Professor’ Brown, Pug the Chemist and Leroy ‘Fatman’ Thompson were often at the helm. Thus, not everything attributed to Tubby was mixed by him, and very little after Jammy’s entry, though Tubby’s distinctive mixing style is evident on his most revered work. Each of his understudies and several recording artists have spoken of the guidance they received from the King, yet others say that Tubby was antisocial and stingier than some of his peers, being very selective in who he would mix for.
King Tubby made tentative forays into record production in the late 1970s, most notably with Horace Andy’s ‘Pure Ranking,’ but did not become a fully-fledged producer until the dancehall era of the late 1980s, when rhythms were largely built with synthesizers and drum machines rather than live instruments. Tubby enjoyed top-ten hits with Courtney Melody, Thriller U and King Everald in 1988 and was in the process of establishing a new twenty-four track studio at Dromilly Avenue when he was murdered by an unknown assailant on 6 February 1989. The unsolved crime was a terrible blight that spoke to Jamaica’s endemic violence and deteriorating social order, but the uniqueness of his artistic vision has ensured that King Tubby is increasingly revered, as seen in the massive bronze bust of the man titled _Ruin of a Giant_ , unveiled by the artist Tavares Strachan at his 2024 Hayward Gallery exhibition _There Is Light Somewhere_. Here are ten shining examples charting the evolution of Tubby’s genius.
**Bunny Lee All Stars – ‘Ivan Itler The Conqueror’ (1970)**
Hailing from Greenwich Farm in western Kingston, the record plugger Bunny Lee became a hitmaking producer in the late 1960s and was one of the first to begin reusing master tapes on a regular basis, stripping a previous recording of its vocals to create a platform for new instrumentals or songs led by rapping deejay patter. A well-connected scenester who helped Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry and Niney the Observer to find their feet in the music industry, Lee was an early supporter of King Tubby who encouraged him to become a remix engineer and later to establish his own studio. This one-off oddball featuring future Wailers bassist Aston ‘Family Man’ Barrett on organ was likely the first record to showcase Tubby’s talents, its spoken introduction referencing characters from _The Good, The Bad And The Ugly_ subjected to excessive application of reverb, prefacing more noteworthy things to come after Tubby acquired the MCI console with Lee’s assistance.
**God Sons – ‘Merry Up’ (1972)**
Glen Brown enjoyed a special working relationship with King Tubby. They had known each other from childhood days, before Tubby moved to Waterhouse, and both were heavily into jazz; Tubby was a Coltrane fanatic and Brown the lead vocalist of local jazz acts the Cecil Lloyd Quintet and the Sonny Bradshaw Seven before switching to music production. ‘Merry Up’ began life as ‘Welcome To My Land,’ a patriotic original sung by B. B. Seaton and Ken Boothe, but according to Brown, a rival producer wiped the vocal in his absence to sabotage the surefire hit; therefore, Brown turned the rhythm into the instrumental ‘Merry Up,’ with Joe White on melodica, which Tubby tweaked to make more distinctive, adding a blast of reverb at the start and stripping the rhythm down to pure drum and bass towards the end, prefacing standard dub practice. The disjointed rhythm and Tubby’s unusual effects helped the song to top the Jamaican charts in the spring of 1972, making dub a fully embedded reggae subgenre in the process.
**Lloyd & Kerry – ‘Tubby’s In Full Swing’ (1972)**
Dub’s reconfigured format was playful by nature and as King Tubby refined his techniques, he sometimes took the opportunity to employ audio illusions, deceiving the listener with misleading edits. ‘Tubby’s In Full Swing’ was one of the first releases to credit him by name and it was produced by Prince Tony Robinson, an upcoming producer with a sound system background who often featured deejays on his releases. Carey Johnson thus provides the spoken introduction and then Tubby drops in the opening bars of the Staple Singers’ ‘I’ll Take You There,’ only to have fellow deejay Lloyd Young reveal Tubby’s joke on the listener, the rhythm soon shifting to an unrelated instrumental featuring trombonist Ron Wilson. Another peculiar cutup aimed at sound system attendees, ‘Tubby’s In Full Swing’ reminded that dub has endless capacity for reinvention and emphasised that Tubby was the prime candidate for the job.
**The Upsetters – ‘Elephant Rock’, from**** _Upsetters 14 Dub Blackboard Jungle_****(1972)**
Following an introduction by Bunny Lee, the eccentric producer Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry made regular use of King Tubby’s Studio in 1972-73, prior to the opening of his own Black Ark Studio. The result was always striking when the pair’s creative energies fused, the supercharged result taking its most spectacular form on _Upsetters 14 Dub Blackboard Jungle_ , the original issue of the album better known as _Blackboard Jungle Dub_. Exactly who did what has long been contested, especially since Perry often tried to downplay Tubby’s role, though he later conceded that Tubby was the engineer and Perry in charge of the sound effects. The album first surfaced in Jamaica in November 1972, a full year before the Black Ark was functional, and this recasting of the Hurricanes’ ‘You Can Run’ is mixed with hard channel splits, relegating the horn fanfares to the righthand speaker and drum and bass to the left; backwards tape interludes appear in places, and a touch of delay on the drums adds to the sense of otherworldly disquiet.
**King Tubby – ‘King Tubby’s Rock’ (1974)**
Raised in western Kingston by a Garveyite father and a devout Christian mother, the singer and producer Yabby You sought to emulate Jesus in his youth, wandering the land to debate spiritual doctrine, which led him to the Ites People, a Rastafari subgroup with strict edicts that operated an iron foundry on a Waterhouse gully bank. Stricken with arthritis and other serious ailments that affected his mobility, he began producing music in 1972 after acting as a racehorse tout, and developed a close working relationship with Tubby, who mixed stunning dub B-sides to most of Yabby’s 45s. ‘King Tubby’s Rock’ is a beautiful dub of ‘Beware God Is Watching You,’ the vocal an alternate mutation of Yabby’s ‘Conquering Lion’ debut; along with the telltale high-pass filter manipulation, there are snippets of studio dialogue, lifting the lid on the process that brought the song into being.
**Augustus Pablo – ‘King Tubbys Meets Rockers Uptown’ (1975)**
The visionary keyboardist and record producer Augustus Pablo launched a sound system called Rockers during his youth and became a session musician after dropping out of the prestigious Kingston College, due to a series of detrimental health issues, including an eye injury, pneumonia and a botched skin graft. Breakthrough hit ‘Java’ was executed with a borrowed melodica, the child’s plastic training device becoming his signature instrument and after early self-produced work based on Studio One favourites, more impressive productions were made with Jacob Miller, the emotive lead singer of Inner Circle; innocuous love song ‘Baby I Love You So’ was totally transformed by Tubby as ‘King Tubbys Meets Rockers Uptown,’ his reconfiguration so stunning that Chris Blackwell made it the A-side of the single that Island Records released overseas in 1975, demoting Miller’s vocal to the B-side. The dub became the centrepiece of a Pablo-produced album of the same name that was released the following year which found favour with punk audiences in Britain, thanks in part to Don Letts’ DJ sets at the Roxy.
**King Tubby – ‘Dub Magnificent’, from**** _The Roots Of Dub_****(1975)**
In late 1974, Bunny Lee shook up the Jamaican music scene with Johnny Clarke’s ‘None Shall Escape The Judgement,’ on which drummer Santa Davis of his Aggrovators band opted for an open-and-closed hi-hat pattern – loosely based on the rhythm of the _Soul Train_ theme song – which began the ‘flying cymbal’ craze that ruled Jamaica into the following year. Such rhythms were perfect fodder for King Tubby’s dramatic manipulations as amply demonstrated by the high-pass filter tricks and delay loops of ‘Dub Magnificent,’ a recasting of Cornel Campbell’s adaptation of Marvin Gaye’s ‘Wherever I Lay My Hat (That’s My Home)’. The song appeared on _The Roots Of Dub_ , one of a handful of dub albums using Lee’s rhythms that helped King Tubby obtain broader exposure in 1975, thanks in part to their release on Total Sounds, the label run by Jamaica’s most prominent record distributor.
**Harry Mudie Meets King Tubbys – ‘Dub With A Difference’, from**** _In Dub Conference Volume One_****(1976)**
Spanish Town-based producer Harry Mudie was an electronics specialist and sound system owner who began producing music in the late 1950s, notably with Count Ossie and Rico Rodriguez. In the late 1970s he produced a series of _Dub Conference_ LPs with King Tubby, the pair reportedly mixing dubs of Mudie’s productions at Tubby’s studio, side by side. ‘Dub With A Difference’ strips down an orchestrated cut of the Heptones’ forlorn ‘Love Without Feeling’ and Tubby does an excellent job of isolating specific instruments while weaving the violin in and out, contrasting the Jamaican musical core with the overdubs done in London.
### Referenced artists
#### _Lee Perry_
Reissue Of The Week: Lee Perry & The Upsetters’ Battle Of Armagideon
#### _Wayne Smith_
Like a Human Flood: Attempting to Uncover the Real Sleng Teng Story
#### _Horace Andy_
Home Away From Home: Green Man 2023
**Horace Andy – ‘Pure Ranking’ (1979)**
During the late 1970s, King Tubby made a few tentative stabs at record production, but as he had no label of his own, he fielded the output to Carlton Patterson’s Black & White label. Recorded at Harry J’s and mixed at Tubby’s, Horace Andy’s ‘Pure Ranking’ spoke to Kingston’s spiralling gun violence, of which Tubby was all too aware, since his studio was close to the boundary that separated Waterhouse from Tower Hill, the former a stronghold of the left-leaning People’s National Party and the latter aligned to the right-wing Jamaica Labour Party, whose armed followers often clashed in nearby streets. On the original extended twelve-inch release, Tubby and assistant Prince Jammy make maximal use of the rhythm, segueing into an extended dub section that heightens the drums, bass and percussion whilst applying delay to the voice, keyboards and guitar, with selective high-pass filtering at odd intervals. The strength of the result points to the surefire success Tubby would have achieved as a producer in the late roots reggae phase, had he not inexplicably taken a long production hiatus.
**Anthony Red Rose – ‘Tempo’, from**** _Red Rose Will Make You Dance_****(1986)**
Having concentrated on his electronics business for several years, leaving younger understudies to run his studio, King Tubby returned to music with a vengeance in the mid-1980s, becoming a fully-fledged producer himself with the launch of the Waterhouse, Firehouse and Kingston 11 labels in 1985. Following the incredible success of Wayne Smith’s ‘Under Mi Sleng Teng,’ produced by Tubby’s protégé, Prince Jammy, Jamaican music was now made with synthesizers and drum machines, and Anthony Red Rose’s ‘Tempo’ was one of his first hits to utilise the new format. A boastful song of sound system battles that warned against drawing the ruling sound’s temper, should you be foolish enough to risk a contest, it was mixed by Fatman and Peego, a dynamic engineering duo who were then the in-house mainstays, showing that Tubby was a formidable production force in the digital dancehall phase, despite largely eschewing the mixing desk.
_David Katz’ new book, Dub Revolution: Jamaica’s Sonic Innovators And The Birth Of Remix Culture, is published by White Rabbit this week_ https://thequietus.com/interviews/strange-world-of/king-tubby-best-music/
