You were born in Guyana and moved to London when you were 13?
Yeah, 13 or 14.
Why were you so interested in electronics?
Electronics for me – at the time when I got into it – was nothing else but magic. It started when I was a little boy. The first magic was outrageous: I'm listening to the radio and I said to my mom, "Where is the man in the radio? Why is he in the radio?" It's that basic curiosity that led to everything.
Did you have access to gear that you could take apart, repair, and start understanding how it was working?
Well, there are always old things that don't work, like my grandfather's radio. I attacked that and found out why it didn't work. It starts from there.
When you were a teenager some of the first dub records coming out of Jamaica were finding their way to the U.K.
Yeah, man. I knew reggae from Guyana. I saw a whole different type of reggae – from the end of the '60s – before I left Guyana. I saw the whole development. By going to England, I heard a different reggae. That's when I realized that the reggae reaching Guyana was different from the reggae reaching places like the U.K. It led me to understand more about the whole migration path of certain labels and productions. Some people, like, say, Byron Lee, had more of a foothold in the Caribbean. Certain other labels would have a Belgian connection, because they had family in Barbados, and family in Guyana, as well as the whole Chinese and Sudanese network that existed that was different from the network that was in London. Certain labels and artists weren't reaching the Caribbean. For instance, I went back to Guyana around '72 and I saw Dennis Alcapone, The Chosen Few, and people like that who weren't that popular in the U.K.; not as popular as, say, I-Roy. Coming in from the first reggae – Jamaican ska, Treasure House Records, and Studio One – I saw the whole development.
What drew you to wanting to produce and mix dub?
Well, by the end of the '60s and early-'70s there were basically three or four types of music, regardless of what anyone says. There was rock music, or pop if you want to call it that: The Beatles, Rolling Stones, and that mainstream sound. Then, at my school, if you want to break it down into race and color, the white guys would be listening to pop or rock, and the black guys would mainly be listening to reggae. But both people would be listening to soul, like Motown and Stax. For me it was either soul or reggae; there was nothing else. I didn't identify with pop. As I grew older, I enjoyed some songs from The Beatles and music like that, but the bulk of what I liked was reggae. Of course, we also had calypso, which people used to lump in as reggae because it's Caribbean music. As I went down the road, I realized a lot of reggae records were actually versions of soul songs, like Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin. There was nothing else for me to listen to.
There's something about the aesthetic of dub that's so different. What made you gravitate to the style?
Dub developed around the very early '70s. Dub is technical music. You feel that. It brings the whole technician into putting a stamp on the recordings and the mixing. People with a technical ear would gravitate towards dub.
What dub records were making it to London?
The very first dub that made it to London was a record that Prince Buster had done, a record called The Message Dub Wise. I've still got my copy; it was a basic dub record. You could hear that there were songs somehow, because you could sometimes hear some focus in the background, but it created a mood. It didn't have much echo in it. I'm not sure who mixed it. I got it in a record shop in London, and I played it over and over again. When you go to a sound system, you would hear the dubs; dub was popular in the dances. Bass and drum, we used to call them. By '74 a lot of people started to do dubs. King Tubby [and The Aggrovators] made Shalom Dub, which took everybody. That was very, very popular. It engulfed people. Lee Perry might have done [Upsetters] Blackboard Jungle Dub, but it wasn't popular dub then.
How times have changed! It's popular now.
Yeah. It's been through popularity several times, up and down. It first got popular around '76 or '77. That was the first real wave of the whole Perry dub thing getting popular. The most popular Perry album was King Tubby Meets The Upsetter at the Grass Roots of Dub. That was so popular.
Which was huge for that genre.
Oh yeah, man. That was a big-selling record. It was very popular. You'd hear that record everywhere.
Around 1979 you started Ariwa Sounds. You started with some pretty basic gear?
Well, I built what I could build. What I couldn't build, I'd buy. I didn't have much money.
Your first record as Mad Professor was Beyond the Realms of Dub [(Dub Me Crazy! The Second Chapter)].
That came out in '82.
How were you finding people to work with and to get your foot in the scene?
Well, people found me. My own records weren't particularly brilliant, because the whole market was quite competitive. I'd put out a record in my front room with basic 8-track equipment, and it'd be competing with "Waiting in Vain" by Bob Marley, or with [Dennis Brown's] "Money in My Pocket." Records that were done in state-of-the-art studios and mixed by engineers who knew exactly what they were doing. I didn't. That's what I was up against.
