DENNIS BOVELL

Interview By Norman Darwen (Manchester, February 1998)
Portions of this interview have previously appeared in Let’s Catch the Beat
(Dennis Bovell = DB, Nick Straker = NS, Norman Darwen = ND)

ND: Dennis, how did you get started in music?
DB: We decided to form a band at school, when I was in the second year, just to play mainly at friends’ parties and play mainly at school assembly in front of the other boys, show off basically. And this band won a talent competition in Stockwell, in London - against all odds, really. So we thought, ‘Well, we should continue with this, it might be something to do’.
ND: Were you playing bass then?
DB: No, I was playing guitar.
ND: Were you playing reggae?
DB: No, actually, we were doing Hendrix covers, and sort of 1910 Fruitgum Company, ‘Simple Simon’ and all that, I don’t know, Rolling Stones, The Who, and stuff like that. I didn’t actually start playing reggae until I was about 15, 16, round there. We had a band, the band was called Stonehenge, Nicholas and me, and we were playing with two older boys and they wanted to do something else, and we wanted to play reggae when that band broke up because Jimi Hendrix had just died and our world had fallen apart. So we decided to play some rocksteady and some bluebeat and ska, only because it was very different to what other bands were playing and it was actually considered professional suicide because if you tried to do that, then you wouldn’t get any gigs anywhere, because at that time all the bands that were getting work were soul bands - you had to be Wilson Pickett no. 32 or Otis Redding no. 44 to get work. And then we thought, “we won’t do that, we’re not following the trend, we’re going to play this Jamaican music”. So we started and we formed a band, Matumbi. We thought, “we’re gonna play Jamaican music and we’re gonna write all our own songs”, because at that time the trend was to do cover versions. As soon as a pop song come out - reggae version by whoever. We thought that was a bit tacky and we were writing songs about Enoch Powell’s recent comments and stuff like that. We actually went and recorded an album off our own backs, we contributed money, saved up some money, went into the studio, recorded an album and went to see Trojan Records, because they were the big reggae label at the time; they had like, Bob & Marcia, ‘Young Gifted And Black’, Greyhound, ‘Black And White’ and stuff like that, ‘Pied Piper’, that kind of stuff. We went to see them. During the course of doing this recording, we had recorded one cover and this cover was a version of Hot Chocolate’s song ‘Brother Louie’. We’d done it because there was a mellotron belonging to Brian Jones in the recording studio and Nick just had to have a go on it - so we did it, he had a go on it. Then we went to present our really serious songs to the record company and they didn’t like any of them, but they liked that cover version of ‘Brother Louie’! So they put that out as our first record. Then we fell out with them because they wanted us to do covers, and we just wanted to write songs - to be composers. “Oh, so and so’s got a new song out, why don’t you do a reggae version?” - ‘Oh no, we want to be original here”. So we just fell out with them and we terminated the contract, basically, because we’d gone into the studio and half done an album. We’d done a reggae version of Kool & The Gang’s ‘Funky Stuff’ and called it ‘Reggae Stuff’, and we’d also done a reggae version of the Temptations’ ‘Law Of The Land’ - that was it for covers, and we’d done some original songs as well, but we were always like, “OK, we’ll do one cover, alright, to please the record company”, and they told us, “Hey, we’ve lost those tapes”. When we wanted to finish it, they told us, “We’ve lost the master tape”, so we thought, “Right, that’s it! No more Trojan Records”. So we, Nicholas and I, wrote a song one day and we were desperate to record it, picked up the Yellow Pages, looking for a studio, phoned up the studio, said “Have you got any time - like now?” They said, “Yeah, come down”, so we went down and recorded this tune called ‘Come With Me’ - which we’ll play later on - and then we got well in with the owner of the studio because he was knocked out with the fact that it was just the two of us that had made this record. He was saying, “Well, I write songs, would you help us?” One day, out of the blue, he just turned up at my house and said, “Look, the studio’s free, will you come down now? We went down and basically a relationship started between the owner of the studio and us, where we did recordings for him of his material in exchange for free time. In this free time we recorded a tune called ‘After Tonight’ and that was to be the outing of Matumbi, we got really successful with that tune, 1974, ‘75 - and then Trojan sent us a letter saying, “You know you’re still signed to us?” We went “Off on your bike” and in the end they kind of threatened us with all kind of legal action and we ended up actually giving them that tune, because they were so envious of the fact that we’d gone off on our own and done something, you know. That’s about it, with Trojan.
ND: That was around the time Trojan went bust, wasn’t it?
DB: That’s right - and deservedly so, because they had ripped off everyone in the business. Trojan are still ripping us off now. We go to Japan or places like that and we see mint copies of this album, including the tapes that they told us they’d lost years ago, suddenly resurfaced, not mixed or anything - but out. To this day, they’re still selling that record, and it’s annoyingly named ‘The Best Of Matumbi’ and it’s not nearly... it’s an unfinished record really. I mean, you can hear parts where we’re singing the horn parts, going ‘la la la, ba da ba da ba da’, it’s like “ This is what the horns are going to play”, and the vocalist was just singing the horn parts because we were going to dub them on later - it wasn’t to be. But the record’s out now with us going “Ba da ba duh dum’. It’s that tune, ‘Take It From Me’ we’ve still got that ‘Ba Ba Bah’; actually I’m going to record that tune one day because it was an original, one of my tunes.
ND: What kind of set up was it at Trojan when you first went there?
DB: Free and easy - yeah, it was because what they were doing was putting out people’s records who were in Jamaica who were not likely to know that they were putting the record out and then if the record was a hit then they’d have to own up to it but if it wasn’t in the national chart then no-one would ever know how many they’d sold or anything. There was no way of keeping tabs on them. Largely a dishonest company. Absolutely - Lee Gopthal - oh my God. Bunch of crooks, I swear to God.
NS: When we signed the contract with them - do you remember? They had us in the office there, no legal representation, they just gave us this piece of paper...
DB: They said, ‘Sign here’.
NS: They just expected us to sign - which we did, stupidly.
DB: Because our manager said so...
NS: Our manager also didn’t know anything, he was “Ah, umm, what shall we do?”
DB: He was “I’ve got you this deal, lads. You’ve got a record deal - sign!” We were like 17 or 18 years old - this is the biggest reggae record label and we wanted to be in the business, so we signed, and then we signed that we would get three percent of our own record to share it out between us - seven members!
NS: They made a mistake with it...
DB: They made a mistake with it that we got three percent each, right, but they still never paid us nothing.
ND: Arawak Records?
DB: Arawak Records? I made a record with a girl called Janet Kay, a tune called ‘Silly Games’, and I was looking around for a way of putting it out. I’d met this guy that said that he was doing a new label and basically when I looked at the label it was full colour and that was what attracted me to the label, the label colours were unprecedented. No one else had a label that beautiful and that well set out, it cost a fortune, so I gave him this record. I said, “Look, put this record out and we’ll see what happens”. Then suddenly it went zzzippp! Out of control really. I didn’t expect that it would have that much popularity. In fact I made a joke with Janet one night, going home in the taxi I said, “What you gonna wear on ‘Top Of the Pops’?” - just a joke. Then about two weeks later someone phones up and goes, “Here - you’ve got ‘Top of the Pops’!” I was like “Yeah, oh yeah”. So I phoned Janet up and said, “Janet, we’re going on ‘Top of the Pops’, what you gonna wear?” She was like, “Look, don’t pull my leg”. I was like “Look, the record’s going!” In three weeks it was at the top of the charts. It was like, “What do I do? What do I do?” - panic, panic, panic, panic! We didn’t have a follow-up or anything, just break this one record. It was just that she phoned me up one day and said, “Look, if you got any records...” - because she was doing a session for a producer, and the producer was asleep, and I was the sound engineer, and he didn’t have a clue about where the harmonies should be. They were trying to arrange the harmonies and they were getting it horrendously wrong, and so I thought, “Well, I can’t let them stay there and get it wrong” - it’s not my job, it’s not my business, all I’m there to do is to press the buttons and go “Right, it’s a take” or “Rub it off, do you want to do it again?” Then I started interfering, I started arranging. She was so grateful to me that she said, “Right, you got any stuff?” I said, “I’ve got a song as it happens” - because she could sing this really high note and I’d written this tune and it had that really high note in it. I’d written it really thinking about Minnie Riperton, sings “Loving You’. Minnie Riperton, I was in love with her, her voice, the way she could hit them notes - ooh yeah, I feel something, right, yeah, arouse me! I wrote this tune, I thought, “If I could get Minnie Riperton to sing this tune, I’d be sold”. Then Janet could hit that note - I thought, “Right, you’re gonna sing this tune”. So I taught it to her, and the rest is history!
ND: ‘Loving You’ was Janet’s first record...
DB: That’s right. So when I heard her sing that, I thought she could sing that tune. So when she said to me, “Have you got anything?”, I thought, “Yeah, I’ve got one tune that you could sing for us”. So I went in the studio and I brought Drummie Zeb, the drummer from Aswad. He played the drums and I played the rest of the instruments on there, it’s overdubbed, and Janet did the singing. So the three of us were like in the room. We couldn’t think of a name for the three of us, so I said, “Well, Janet, it’s got to be Janet Kay”, because he was in Aswad, I was in Matumbi. We couldn’t think of a name for the three of us, but I said, “Well, it’s got to go under your name”. Janet’s going, “Oh, I don’t know” - “Well, just put it out and see what happens”. I was producing the Slits at the time and Ari came into my room and said, “They’re playing your record on the radio”, and I thought she was lying because I’d had a cassette of it and she came in with this ghetto blaster and it was on there. I said, “Let me see that!”, and I opened and it weren’t a cassette in there, it was the radio... and then the bloke goes, “Just in the charts at number 21 this week, and I thought, “Fucking hell!” - my bowels nearly came undone! Then even now, I still hear it on the radio, all the time. I’ve changed all the music on there, kept the vocals and done a new version for my 25th Anniversary, it’s 25 years in the music business I’m celebrating this year. I’ve redone the music like a slow ballad with the same original voice, but I dunno, I might put it out. It depends if she agrees or not. I can’t just put it out, she’s got to be able to promote it, I can’t just put it out. I’ve got to speak to her. She’s signed to Sony at the moment and is doing a new album for Sony. She’s selling hundreds of thousands of records in Japan - very, very, very popular in Japan. She’s kind of given up over here, because she went into acting, did a bit of acting in that Channel Four series and we went our separate ways really.
ND: You’re often credited as the originator of Lover’s Rock...
DB: Well, I would say that the originator of that kind of style is John Kpiaye, because in ‘75, ‘76 we were working for a record company called Dip, DIP International, and he had a recording studio, and he had a hit with Susan Cadogan, “Hurt So Good’ and with the proceeds of that he built himself a recording studio of which I was the sound engineer. John Kpiaye was co-engineer with me and between us we did a lot of recording and it was like the company had two sides to it, John and me, and occasionally we’d come together and do stuff or go apart. The Lover’s Rock label was really made up to put John’s product on. It was the name given to the style of music we were playing, it was the name to be given to that kind of smoochy reggae. The first record on the Lover’s Rock label was a song called ‘I’m In Love With A Dreadlocks’ by Brown Sugar, of which the singer was Caron Wheeler, the girl that sang that Soul II Soul record, and the producer and the author of that record was John Kpiaye. So he was the first producer of Caron Wheeler really, she was, I don’t know, 15 at the time. She came actually to a Sunday afternoon audition that we used to have, every Sunday afternoon auditions for singers to come, and she just came - boom!
ND: At the same time as you were doing that, you were doing some pretty heavy dub stuff as well?
DB: Yeah, because Matumbi was a vocal band and the focus was mainly on vocals and harmonies. I’d write lots of songs and we couldn’t put all our songs on the albums, so I’d have an overspill of songs. I’d not do a vocal thing because it would clash with what the band was doing but just some dub stuff, drum and bass and instrumental stuff. In fact I called the band The Fourth Street Orchestra and made about four or five albums under that name and that was the other side. The Lover’s Rock label was on one side and the Rama label was on the other side, and that was in conjunction with the guy, Dennis Harris. So I’d do this instrumental stuff and call myself the Fourth Street Orchestra but we got twigged - a journalist by the name of Snoopy who worked for ‘Black Echoes’ - we let our singer, the Matumbi singer, sing one track on the record and up until them everyone thought it was coming from Jamaica because they were saying that reggae couldn’t be made properly in London and that you had to go to Jamaica, and I’m going, “Bollocks! They ain’t got any better tape recorders than us - it’s in the playing. If you can play it...” Of course, there’s a special way to do the engineering, of course, with the heavy bass. I’d been fortunate enough to go to a school in south London, in Wandsworth called Spencer Park where we built a recording studio at school and we were learning how to use this equipment - so when we went into studios I wouldn’t put up with the engineer going,” Oh, you can’t touch that, man, you can’t go over that red”. I’d go, “Well, I want it all in the red so put it there, will you?” Can you imagine telling Led Zeppelin you couldn’t have a bit of distortion! So I took that out on them - Right, I’m at the controls now and started finding frequencies that were what we wanted to hear. So we’d just make these records and put them out. There was no information at all, there was just a white label - like the music, buy it - because by then you had, “Oh, I like that, who is it? Matumbi, oh, they’re English” - it was that kind of prejudice, so we foxed them and that record shot up there and then, because we’d let our singer sing one tune on there, it gave us away. It came out, “We know who it is, it’s Matumbi, it’s not a group from Jamaica or anything”. We went, “How the hell did they know?”, and then the band went to me, “You went and shot your mouth off to the press, you couldn’t keep it to yourself, could you? You had to go and tell them!” I said, “No, I didn’t, I didn’t”, and then the reporter said, “Look, you lot are so stupid”. I mean, the voice of our singer was so distinctive and he thought, “Hang on a minute, that’s that guy doing singing on there - it’s them!” Of course, then he started comparing the records, and the drummer was the same, the same drum sound, and the same kind of licks on the guitar, he thought, “Ah hah, it’s them!” - and we were exposed. We thought it would do us harm but it did us a lot of good - but if we had come out and said this, right from the beginning, I don’t think it would have been that well-received. We completely fooled the public that we were this Jamaican outfit.
ND: You’ve worked with Linton Kwesi Johnson...
DB: Yeah, I’m still working with him now. We’ve just finished his new album in fact - not yet, I’m gonna master it on Monday, then it’ll all be over, and then we’ll have to start touring. Yeah, Matumbi was playing in a place called The Four Aces Club, we used to play there every last Sunday night in the month. This club was famous for booing artists off stage. I’ve seen blokes that have been on ‘Opportunity Knocks’, groups, and I’d go “This one’s appearing at The Four Aces Club, I’ll go and see them” - second song, “Boo, Boo, off, off, off”. Sunday night was a live group and they would boo the group off stage like clockwork - first tune, second tune; by the third tune, “Boo”. The audience, they just loved doing that on a Sunday night, and then they got us the gig to play there on a Sunday night. We went, “This is the booing night, right?”, but we needed the money so we took the gig. We had a great idea - we went and learned all the new Jamaican records, all the records that weren’t released yet, all the pre-releases that the sound systems were just beginning to play, we were learning them and so when we came on, we started playing these tunes and it was like, “Hey?”... they didn’t clap, but they didn’t boo - they let us finish our show, they was like, “All right, you lot are not bad”. I tell you what - to have not been booed off that stage on any Sunday night was a mega achievement, and while we were doing that, suddenly this reporter came to interview us for the BBC World Service, and it was Linton. He said, “Well, I write poetry”, I said, “I know” because I had seen his books. He said, “I’m going to make an album”, and one day Richard Branson gave him some time in the studio, he was working for Branson at the time, Virgin Records, and he came to me and said, “I want to make an album this weekend” - and we did. We went into the studio and by the end of the weekend we’d finished ‘Dread Beat & Blood’, and from there on we’ve been working together ever since.
ND: Isn’t the LKJ label a joint venture with you?
DB: Yes. Well, this show tonight is the LKJ Records Showcase: John Kpiaye, we got Winston Francis, and also myself. Also there’s Steve Gregory who’s not here this evening because he’s recording a religious album with the gospel choir and it’s clashed with this, and he’s a Christian and he’d rather do that so...
NS: He’s hedging his bets...
DB: He’s hedging his bets (laughs) but he’s such a good sax player that we couldn’t ever think of saying to him, “On your bike!” You know, the amount of history and the amount of talent, I mean, he’s played with everyone, really, Steve Gregory, including George Michael’s ‘Careless Whisper’, and he’s done loads, ‘Jumping Jack Flash’, he’s on that, the Rolling Stones, or is it ‘Honky Tonk Women’? Dusty Springfield he’s played with, Vangelis, everyone, him, Van Morrison, and he’s with us now, so we’ve got to let him have a day off to go and do his religious album with the London Community Gospel Choir. The other day we were in some airport terminal and he said, “I was stood here last week” - they’d done ‘Songs of Praise’ from there. “I was stood here last week with my saxophone on ‘Songs of Praise’”, he said, in Gatwick or Heathrow, I don’t know which one, and in ‘Eastenders’, when Sharon was going to do her debut thing as a singer, who was stuck in the back playing saxophone right behind her? - Steve Gregory. We were in a bar somewhere and it come on, I went, “Oi! Oi! Look! It’s him!” He crawled under the table to get out of there! He said to me, “Hey Den, watch this, I’m gonna come on in a minute”, and I grassed him up in front of all the public, he was like, “What did you do that for?”
ND: Right. Another innovation - you were supposed to be the first band to play dub live?
DB: Yeah, I’d like to think we were because what happened was Billy Williams of the Clare Brothers P.A., they do Michael Jackson and all that, he was actually the sound engineer for Elvis Costello. He’s one of my pupils, I taught him. He had this p.a. system and he didn’t know what to do with it, and I said to him, “Right, you come on the road with us and we’ll use your p.a. system and I’ll teach you how to equalise and stuff”, and the last time I met him, in Paris, he was the sound engineer for Vanessa Paradis, but in the beginning he didn’t know how to do all the echo things, right, so we used to have to do it from the stage because we just didn’t have that many echo units to do all the dub bits, so we started playing them, the musicians started playing them, and then it became the thing to do, because the engineer couldn’t possibly change the speed of the delays as quickly as we can and get them as accurate as we can. It’s just more hard work. My man here, Henry Holder, he’s the master of that, he’s the dub specialist.
ND: Even though you’re an innovator, you use a lot of the older musicians...
DB: Yeah, because they’re the best. Actually, not Henry and Paul, they’re the youngsters but all the others are ... seasoned, seasoned geezers.
ND: What about someone like Shake Keane?
DB: Shake Keane? Shake Keane’s just died. Whilst we were doing Linton’s new album, we had a telephone call, he died in Norway just before Christmas. He was cremated in Norway and his ashes were scattered in the North Sea. When Shake died, I had half a dozen copies of his album sent to his native St. Vincent, because the Prime Minister is an old friend of his and he said to me, “Oh, send some”, because I sent about two or three hundred cassettes there when it came out. Funnily enough, I was in St. Vincent, on the beach and I heard two guys talking and they were going, “I wonder what happened to Shake Keane?”, and it was none of my business, it was just a conversation. I said, “Gentlemen, I’m sorry, I’ve not been eavesdropping on your conversation or anything like that, but that man that you’re talking about, I’ve just made an album with him”.
ND: You always like to push the boundaries of reggae, and other musics...
DB: Yeah, why not? Everything can be wider, anything can be wider, and it should be, if you want to. I remember in the days of Matumbi, right, and I got a fuzz box - “Where you going with that? That’s white man’s style”. I’m going, “So what? I suppose Jimi Hendrix was a white man, was he?” “Oh, I dunno about that, it’s a bit loud, them guitars”. Look at it now, everyone a Hendrix wannabe!
ND: One of my favourite things you did was ‘Differentah’...
DB: Wow! That was with Julio Finn, the brother of Billy Boy Arnold. He’d also been on Linton’s album, on ‘Sonny’s Lettah’, there’s a mouth organ on that. Julio came over from Paris to see us for a weekend and ended up staying in London for one year or more. He was living in Paris, just came over for one weekend to talk about some stuff, because the King Of Cameroon’s son wanted to do a reggae record and Julio was bringing him over to introduce him to me, Prince whoever, I’ve forgotten his name now. He said, “Yeah, I’ll just be here for the weekend”, and he was there in London for one year or just over a year, stayed with us and we were doing sessions, he was playing harp. He was with Archie Shepp, he was with Muddy Waters, and he was a wicked harp player. I was working with Ian Drury and the Blockheads at the time, we were on tour with them and I thought, “Right, I’m gonna do this Blues - Reggae kind of thing”. I did this track and Errol had this song, “Little Way Different’, so I said, “Errol, will you sing that on here?”, and he did. Then I said, “Julio?” The thing was that the tune was in a minor key and he was playing a major harp on there, so some people were going, “Pfhooo”, but it actually worked. I think so. In fact the other night I actually found a record on EMI that they’ve actually cut a little piece of the harmonica into the vocal version on a compilation somewhere that I didn’t know about. I didn’t sanction it, I just found this record, I’ve never played it, and I thought, “Ah, that’s a good idea”, so now I’m going to use that version on my 25th CD.
ND: I remember seeing you on a programme that Julio introduced...
DB: Oh, with Eddie C. Campbell - “Cheaper To Keep Her”. Oh, Eddie C., man, he’s a funny guy. Oh man, he’s a gem, a gem of a musician. We backed him at Hammersmith Palais one time. Mind you, it was a bit dodgy because I’d been in Barbados and I just got back that day via New York - I’d been a naughty boy in New York, so I wasn’t feeling too well, and I had to go and do a show straight off the plane - jet-lagged, to boot. But we got through it. Eddie C. Campbell, “Cheaper To Keep Her”.
ND: He lived over here for a while...
DB: He did? I didn’t know that. Screamin’ Jay used to live up this way, didn’t he? He’s dead now. We did a gig with him in Italy two years ago - it was a show and a half, man. He had that snake thing... and Steve Gregory had played on his first record. Him and Steve was like, “Heeeyyyyy!”
NS: Yeah, and he was moaning about the lighting...
DB: That’s right - Screamin’ Jay, in Pisa, in Italy, outside the Leaning Tower. We love Pisa, we just did a Christmas Special there with an Italian singer from Napoli called Pepe Barra, a kind of (imitates opera singing) and did some wicked dubwise and African style music and brought the house down, at Christmas, Boxing day. Wicked show, wicked! Henry Holder: You wouldn’t have liked the rehearsals though...
DB: No, the rehearsals were crap, but the show! We got centre spread in the daily paper the day after. They was knocked out, in fact on the strength of that we’ve been offered to do the soundtrack of a film in Italy at the moment - we’re probably gonna get it, by next week we’ll know.
ND: I wanted to ask you about your TV work, ‘Rhythms Of The World and “Empire Road’, things like that...
DB: Ah, the boy who won the pools. Well, some woman contacted me, Brenda Ellis is her name and her daughter was a fan of mine and said that she should check me out to write the music for this TV series, for TVS in Southampton. I said, “Yeah, all right”. She said, “How long will it take you to do it?” I said, “Two weeks”. She said, “Really?” I later found out that she let me have a go because everyone else had said to her that it’s gonna take three or four months to do this. I’d said I’d do it in a fortnight so she thought, “Well, I’ll give him a fortnight - if he doesn’t do it, I’ve got nothing to lose”. But in that fortnight I came up with 17 songs and she was knocked out - she had to give me the job. So we got the job and I managed to wangle us into a bit of acting as well. So we went off down to Southampton to shoot this, and Steve Gregory played the saxophone on the theme tune - I’ve been working with Steve a long time, since about 1975. Vivian McComb played the lead part in that, and what it was was that ITV were experimenting with the first straight half hour, because up until then ITV was like 15 or 20 minutes - break. This was gonna be like the first straight half hour show, on a Sunday, and they had taken off ‘Black Beauty’ to put this show on. ‘Black Beauty’ was like the only thing on on a Sunday in them days and this show was gonna replace it, so we was gonna be in the mega-big-time - or were we? No, it was great! We did very well, I think.
ND: Can you tell me about the Edmonton show and Bob Marley...
DB: Yeah. There we were, booked to play the Edmonton Sundown. It was actually the first concert for Ethiopia, for the famine relief in 1973, and Bob Marley and The Wailers were on there, and we were on there. In fact, we were previewing our single at the time which was called ‘Reggae Stuff”, which was a version of Kool & The Gang’s ‘Funky Stuff’ in reggae. Bob, it was his first show in England. We did the show, and afterwards in the press, they’d written that we, Matumbi, sounded harder than Bob Marley, and the rest of the band members were like, they were not happy about that, in fact they wanted to lynch the reporter who wrote it, because Bob Marley was our idol. We idolised him and it was an honour for us to be on the same show as him, and then to be written up as though we’d sounded better than him... I think what it was was that they probably didn’t have a decent enough sound engineer at the time with them, who understood their sound, whereas we did. And with living in London at the time, we were kind of flavour of London at that time, so it was easy for us to be accepted as home-grown roots - but then Bob Marley was at that time just another Jamaican artist to the world at large. To us, he was special, so it was a bit of a blow to be written up as harder than Bob Marley - and also we thought, “Oh, we’d better stay out of his way now, he’ll want to kill us!”
NS: It was before ‘Catch A Fire’ though.
DB: It was before ‘Catch A Fire’, it was pre ‘Catch A Fire’, I know because when he brought out ‘Catch A Fire’ we went out and bought it straightaway, we lived on it. 1973 that was, in Edmonton, in the Sundown.
NS: I remember that gig specifically because I went into the dressing-room looking for you (i.e. Dennis) and you were talking to the Wailers, and I went in, “Hey Dennis, what’s happening here”. The Wailers: “Hey white boy, fuck off ya blood claat!”
DB: Somebody tried to get you out...
NS: Tosh, I think it was, thinking back on it...
DB: It was Peter. Peter was so outspoken. I mean, when I cut my dread off, right, he wouldn’t let me mix his album because I’d done that. In fact, I went to his yard, right, he was staying in Number One Harrington Gardens in Gloucester Road and I went there and I was just talking and I took my hat off, and immediately he kind of carried on the conversation as though I wasn’t there. I felt so uncomfortable that eventually I just left, yeah, I just left. Up until then he loved me, he was like, “Yeah, mon, me and Dennis Bovell bredrin”. Then he phoned the record company and said, “You tell Bovell there’s some things a man shouldn’t do - cutting his dreadlocks is one of them. And I don’t want him to mix my record now, thanks very much”. That’s right. He did. He told that to Bob Curry at EMI. Bob said, “What did you do to Peter, what did you do?”, because I was like a kind of house producer, engineer, at EMI.
ND: What were the Wailers like back in ‘73?
DB: I thought they were great. They’ve always been great. Listen, right - I mean, Carlton Barrett, the drummer of the Wailers, is the greatest reggae drummer that ever lived, I’m telling you, the greatest reggae drummer that ever lived. There’s no other drummer on the face of this planet that has done as much nor will ever be able to, because he’s dead now, so he’s out of the race technically, but all the others have got some catching up to do, they’re never gonna catch up to him. If you listen... his drumming... Henry Holder: Sly Dunbar...
DB: Sly Dunbar’s not in his league at all. Sly Dunbar’s my mate and I like him and respect him a lot and he’s a good drummer, but he hasn’t invented half of the stuff that Carlton Barrett has invented. I’ll tell you what, Carlton Barrett’s preciseness, in the days of non Klik Track - second only to the machine. Sly and them lads there had that to learn from, to come through with, but Carlton was the first innovator, he invented all that stuff - all them rolling and all them off-beat timings. I tell you, his rolling power was like...it’s just like throw the whole rhythm away and just roll, and come back in and the roll would be just like...something else. It would take time to sink in, you’d go “Was that right?” You had to play it again, “Was that right?” - and it was!
ND: What was Bob Marley like back in those days?
DB: He was willing to do anything, he was calm, a lot calmer in those days. It hadn’t gone to his head yet - later on it did, I’m sorry, but it did. I mean, I knew him before and I knew him after and I watched his kind of attitude change. I mean, the only person I know who’s ever become a star and has not changed one iota is Edwyn Collins. I’ve know Edwyn Collins for the best part of 15 years, I’ve worked with him since Orange Juice, ‘Flesh Of My Flesh’ and all that, I produced all them, four Orange Juice albums after that right up to ‘Girl Like You’ was the last album I played with him - in fact, he wasn’t happy because he wanted me to do a tour somewhere because I was in Africa working with Alpha Blondy on the last Alpha Blondy album. I think I’ve made 12 or 14 albums with Alpha Blondy. In fact, he’s angry with me now because at the moment he’s in Jamaica doing a new album and I wasn’t able to go because I’m doing this and I was doing Linton’s new album and I just couldn’t fit it all in. I had to say ‘No’ to someone, and I can’t say ‘No’ to Linton and I can’t say ‘No’ to our lads because... well this is a funny thing here, there’s Nicholas and me, we’re gonna be 45 this year, and there’s Henry and Paul, the drummer and the keyboard player who’re only going to be 30 this year, and then there’s my son who’s our sound engineer who’s only just turned 20, and all five of us went to the same school.
ND: What about Marie Pierre, the album ‘Love Affair’?
DB: Well, Marie Pierre, she was the first female singer that I worked with, she’s family. She’s my sister-in-law, and since she was about 16, once dressed her up as a boy and took her into school so we could use the studio at school. Put trousers on her and a cap on in our school uniform, I did, to get her past the school-keeper’s gate. Remember the school-keeper used to be standing there - I dressed her up in a school uniform and sneaked her in, took her into the studio and did recording up there. I put her in our blazer, cap, the lot, tucked all her hair up in the cap and everything and took her into the school. Terry Furlong, our English teacher who was in charge of the studio, when we got in there and took her cap off and her hair fell out, he fell on the floor laughing, he was going, “You little cheeky monkeys!” This recording studio was meant to record English, like ‘Macbeth’, or Shakespeare plays and we turned it into a dub room. Some good stuff come out of there, Marie Pierre...
NS: We used to make up tape loops in there, in the old days before looping, we used to make up tapes of drumming and bass lines and just do overdubs on them, they sound wicked! Ask people to play on them, there were a few teachers who could play instruments, there was a trombone player, Swinburn, Swinny who could play sax...
DB: ...and there was an English teacher who could play trombone... HH: Swinburn, he was a pretty good player.
NS: He had his own band, a fusion band...
DB: Yeah, he was the head of the Art Department. John Swinburn, he was a Welshman. He was the first man I seen play two saxophones at the same time. Roland Kirk did it but I didn’t see Roland Kirk do it, but I saw John Swinburn do it. He was still there when Stephen was there - when our school closed down and Stephen went to another school, Swinburn was there as well. I tell you what, it was funny, when I went to take my son to school, when he was in the first year, the first day I took him in I walked straight in to my old housemaster, who said, “Bovell!” I’m like, “Yes, Mr. Wallace!” “Ah, you’ve brought your son here, have you? We’ll give him the same thing we gave you”. He was an opera singer, Dr. Chapman.
ND: Marie Pierre’s album came out on Trojan...
DB: Yes, because I was holed up in a studio in Caple in Surrey, the studio was called Rich Farm, and this was at the beginning of Rich Farm Studio. Well, I recorded the Pop Group there, the Slits, Matumbi, the Marie Pierre album. I was living there, making records. My family would come to see me at weekends, go back to London. In fact, a year or so ago I made an album called ‘King Cool’, it was a compilation of covers of old soul tunes like ‘Heard It Through The Grapevine’, and ‘Sweet Soul Music’, ‘Under The Boardwalk’, ‘Stand By Me’ and ‘Chain Gang’, songs like that, for BMG, and it sold nearly 200,000 copies in France only - it couldn’t get arrested over here. Marie Pierre was on it and we did a really good version of ‘Say A Little Prayer’, really, really good. I’m gonna put it out in this country soon. The video got shown on Breakfast TV, on “The Big Breakfast’, but we didn’t push it any further because we were doing so many things at the time, we just couldn’t put another budget out and if it was really successful we’d be caught short, so we haven’t put that out yet - it’s yet to come.
ND: You’ve got ‘Stand By Me’ on it?
DB: Yeah. Winston Francis sang it.
ND: OK. Last question, what plans have you got for the future?
DB: Well, I’ll do anything that I’m allowed - that’s my future plans. Anything that they’ll let me do, I’ll do it. (laughs) I’ll do what I damn well like!
ND: That’s brilliant - thanks very much, Dennis.
DB: Cheers!

Norman Darwen