With Rodney & I
by Wrongtom
September marked a decade since the release of my Duppy Writer album with Roots Manuva. With? Ok, that might be a bit of a stretch as it’s a remix album, but it has my name on the cover next to his, which I never expected to see there, and I’m still surprised I even got to make it.
How did an unassuming dub producer with little more than a string of remixes for an indie-pop group come to be working with national treasure Roots Manuva, I hear you ask? Well let me take you back to 1961, to the docks of Portishead on the bank of the Bristol Channel where my dad worked in the power station.
Portishead in fact had 2 power stations. The first was built in the ’20s, while the second, where my dad worked, began construction in 1949. They ran on coal and oil, and would soon be obsolete thanks in part to the oil crisis of 1973, and the commissioning of a nuclear power station just down the coast at Hinkley Point.
My mum hated their life in Portishead. She felt isolated, trapped at home with their newborn daughter, and she soon upped sticks back to London while my dad made the trip back and forth in his rusty Ford Anglia til his contract was up.
Summer 1994. I played my mum the claustrophobic downbeat swing of Portishead’s debut single ‘Numb’. As we listened to Beth Gibbons crying “cos I’m still feelin’ lonely, feelin’ so unholy” she grimaced “yep, that sounds about right”.
In 1999, the Magnox reactor at Hinkley Point was shut down after a safety review, around the same time Roots Manuva’s debut album Brand New Second Hand hit the shelves.
Skip forward almost a decade, to the spring of 2008 when a promo of Roots’ single ‘Buff Nuff’ dropped through my door. A moment which I had no clue would change my life as I hit play on two minutes and fourteen seconds of electro-bashment perfection. It was maddeningly perfect. I wanted to climb inside and rip it to pieces.
I called upon my exceptionally named friends Long Distance Dan and Mr Trick who both knew a guy called Jamie who’d recently jumped ship from Def Jux — the post Rawkus, pre Run The Jewels home of El-P — and was now working at Ninja Tune’s hip hop subsidiary Big Dada. I dropped Jamie a line offering my remixing services, and got back to everyday life, which at the time consisted of mainly worrying about my dad who’d recently been admitted into hospital with two lungs full of fluid. That was until I was further distracted by an eviction which left my girlfriend and I sofa surfing for the next few months.
In the midst of this mess, an email from Will Ashon popped up. Will’s now known for a brace of celebrated non-fiction books — Strange Labyrinth and Chamber Music — but in 2008 you could find him in a closet-sized office in the back of Ninja HQ in Kennington, surrounded by piles of vinyl, feverishly attempting to hip the world to some of the wildest rap records ever released. He asked if I was interested in doing a radio mix of the next Manuva single ‘Again & Again’, something which “could work with the big fellows up at Radio 1!”
Was I out of my depth here? Well…
I’d spent the past few years working alongside the multi-platinum selling Hard-Fi, and I’d had a hand in the production of their 2nd LP Once Upon A Time In The West which debuted at number 1, but most of my arguably left-of-centre input was ditched, understandably, and what I’d mainly been doing was supplying entirely non-commercial dubs and mixes of their otherwise hugely sellable product. I was in no way the man for this job, so of course I said YES!
Unfortunately I soon discovered there was a better man for this job — Shy FX — who delivered a more suitable radio mix, and mine wound up on the cutting room floor. Here’s Mr FX’s finished product…
July. Flat found. We moved in, and I had another email from Will. Did I fancy doing a few dub mixes for the forthcoming Roots Manuva LP? There was a catch, there’s only £500. They also needed it by the end of the month. So we loaded up a van, shifted a ton of furniture, thousands of records and my studio gear, and by the time I was all set up and ready, I had just 9 days to finish the dubs, which I delivered in the nick of time at an Infinite Livez gig where Roots was a secret “Cruffy” guest.
Slime & Version hit the shelves on September 1st as the bonus disc of Roots’ 4th LP. Like a lot of my stuff it’s a bit of a best kept secret, but those who heard it seemed happy.
I decided to chance it again, and pitched Will an album of vintage dancehall featuring current MCs. I wanted it to sound like Fashion Records’ mid 80s classic Great British MCs which showcased the cream of the UK’s sound system stars around the time Smiley Culture brought dancehall to the pop charts with ‘Police Officer’. Alongside Roots Manuva and various MCs on the Big Dada roster like Juice Aleem and Ty, I was hoping to get the likes Sway, Dynamite MC and The Spaceape who I thought could deliver a great Linton Kwesi Johnson style dub-poetry track.
Will had a counter proposal. Brand New Second Hand had never had dub versions, and it’s 10th anniversary was looming. Of course I said yes, and then I waited for acapellas. And I waited, and waited until we’d missed the window for an anniversary release, and no one could locate all the vocal tracks anyway.
Soon the project morphed into an album of versions spanning Roots’ catalogue, and I was furnished with a stack of discs, brimming with Rodney’s inimitable flow. I set to work between trips to various hospitals where my dad was being poked, prodded and jabbed until eventually they got to the bottom of it. Mesothelioma.
Did you know you have a very thin layer of tissue called mesothelium which covers various organs including your heart and lungs? Mesothelioma occurs when a cancer forms on the tissue, normally caused by exposure to asbestos. It turned out my dad had the job of removing sheets of asbestos in the power station in Portishead back in ’61. For nearly 5 decades it lay dormant in his lungs, and the big problem is, it’s often so hard to identify Mesothelioma that patients are on their last legs when it’s diagnosed. They gave him a few months, maybe a year or so if he was lucky.
To drown my sorrows I went head on into this remix album, sketching out a few ideas and getting some rough backing tracks together, when another email from Will popped up. It turned out there was a clause in Roots’ contract stating he gets an advance for a remix album, even if he’s not producing it. I don’t think Rodney cared either way, but his manager was trying to enforce it, despite the label only having a tiny budget. I waited once again, but was warned it wasn’t looking hopeful. I’d had worse news.
And then, success! Manuva’s management relented. I was getting a 2 grand advance against 5% of profits, and I was so relieved that I didn’t even consider how many streams and units we’d have to sell to recoup. I just wanted to make a load of dusty old reggae tunes for Rodney’s vocals, so, I said YES!
And we were off! Okay, I was off. Every so often Will would relay a message from Rodney, and I’d reply and wait for the message to come back via Will. I had some new backing tracks ready, and Will informed me Rodney and Ricky Ranking were working out a version of a lovers rock tune for one of them, until my computer died and I lost everything, and I never found out what song they wanted to cover.
New Mac = advance spent, and I was left to battle on with the remixes. In an attempt to make sense of the job at hand, I imagined Rodney’s afro-futurist originals as the remixes, while my remix album was, in fact, a collection of his vintage originals on muffled tapes and crackly old 7”s which we’d stumbled on. The stuttering electro-ragga of ‘Hol It Up’ got the Treasure Isle treatment as ‘Butterfly, Crab Walk’ with a rattling marimba replacing Roots’ glacial synths. ‘Proper Tings Juggled’ was a nod to Tubby’s Tempo riddim, and ‘Motion 82’ took Roots’ early hit and dragged it back to that Junjo style 80s dancehall. I avoided ‘Witness (One Hope)’. It was too iconic, but referenced it in a skit and left it at that. One I knew I had to tackle was ‘Big Tings Gwidarn’, and I can’t believe it’s taken me a decade to produce something else for Seanie T!
As the months rolled on, and I spent more time visiting my dad in various hospitals — the Royal Marsden while he had chemo, St Helier when they discovered fluid around his heart — I began to question what I was doing with this record, why I thought a guy with limited technical skills, who didn’t even quite understand how chords work, should be making a reggae record with anyone, not least Roots Manuva. But somewhere down the line, the chemo seemed to be working, my dad was looking healthy, and perhaps in turn, the record started sounding good. All was well.
I enlisted a couple of friends to help me along the way. My mate Dante — sometimes known as Tenoshi — supplied the trumpet on ‘Worl’ A’ Mine’, and Ed Zed — one half of Casual Sexists — dropped by with his theremin on a freezing winter morning, which explains the fingerless gloves in this clip.
What we needed to finish it off was something new. Cue Rodney to the rescue. It turned out he’d been living barely a mile away from me this whole time, I was finally working with Roots Manuva. He stepped inside my ramshackle home studio, downed a can of Nurishment, and asked me what I’d been up to at the weekend. “I’ve been working on the album” I told him, probably sounding a little indignant “what about you?” We then sat scrolling through his phone as he showed me photos he’d taken from a trip to a bomb museum.
Rodney brought over an unfinished track called ‘Jah Warriors’. A bleeping quasi-dubstep tune which I soon stripped back, adding a new drum kit, bass guitar and steel pan drums, and then it was off to his gaff to record vocals, plus some adlibs for possible album skits.
Album in the can. Mastering booked. We took it over to Soundmasters where sonic legend Kevin Metcalfe could normally be found polishing off the likes of Orbital, Zero 7 and Simply Red. Kev was also a go-to reggae guy, having mastered much of the Greensleeves catalogue since the late 70s, including Scientist’s dub LPs.
As we sat there watching this wizard at work, news came in of the passing of Guru. Suffice to say Gangstarr was a big influence on mine and Rodney’s music, and we sat there discussing our Gang Starr favourites. Meanwhile in Iceland, thousands were stranded following the eruption of Mount Eyjafjallajökull. Gordon Brown deployed the Royal Navy to retrieve hundreds of disappointed British holiday makers. Anyway, here’s a playlist of Guru tracks…
Back in Soundmasters I was haranguing poor Kev with questions about cutting dubs and lacquers for Dennis Bovell and Labi Siffre — he did Labi’s 1975 LP Remember My Song which features some of Chas n Dave’s finest work — and he asked what we were planning for the album artwork.
Good question. I told him I loved all those old Scientist cartoon sleeves by Tony McDermott, and we were hoping to find someone who could recreate that style. “Why don’t you just ask Tony?” he offered, scrolling through his phone for Tony’s number. Was it really that simple? Somehow Tony seemed like a myth, not a guy you could just call up. How wrong I was. A month later, on my birthday, while spending the weekend away with my family, I opened an email with Tony’s initial sketches for the sleeve, and if it wasn’t for my dad sitting with me, looking worryingly frail, I may well have considered this the best birthday ever.
Elsewhere that weekend, a Boeing 737 overshot the runway at Mangalore airport in India, killing 158 passengers and crew. In LA, filmmaker Simon Monjack was found dead from pneumonia which had taken his wife Brittany Murphy’s life just 5 months prior. Meanwhile at the 63rd Cannes film festival, Apichatpong Weerasethakul won the Palme d’Or for his meditation on mortality and reincarnation, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives.
To be continued.
