The dub album as its own art form

Third instalment (1977-78) of producer Joe Gibbs and engineer Errol Thompson's African Dub All-Mighty series, mixed at Gibbs' newly equipped Retirement Crescent studio; its dense, effects-laden mixes are regarded as some of the most adventurous dub production of the era.

Lee "Scratch" Perry's studio behind his home at Washington Gardens, Kingston, built in 1973 and running until its destruction by fire in 1979. Working with modest four-track equipment, Perry produced a sound nobody has convincingly reproduced — layered, saturated, drenched in echo and unexpected noise — on records for Max Romeo, Junior Murvin, the Congos and The Heptones, and on his own productions. The Black Ark years are the strongest argument that the studio itself, and not only the players, is an instrument in Jamaican music. The studio's 1979-80 destruction followed a period of personal crisis for Perry: his wife Pauline left him, taking their children, and he began covering the walls with dense, handwritten graffiti before eventually trashing and burning the building. People who knew him at the time attributed the breakdown to accumulating strain, extortion, drink and drug excess, and an open-door policy that let hangers-on take over the yard. Twenty years later, Perry gave Bradley a different, more deliberate explanation directly: that he had come to believe everyone around him, family, friends, peers, his record company, was stealing his music, and that destroying the means of making it was the only way to stop them.

Errol "ET" Thompson (1948-2004) was a pioneering Jamaican recording engineer central to 1970s reggae and dub. He first made his name upgrading and running the board at Randy's Studio 17, engineering early sessions for Augustus Pablo, Lee "Scratch" Perry and the Wailers, before partnering with producer Joe Gibbs as half of "the Mighty Two." Backed by the house band the Professionals, the pair produced dozens of chart-toppers, and Thompson mixed all four volumes of the acclaimed African Dub All-Mighty series.

Landmark 1976 dub album crediting Augustus Pablo and King Tubby: Pablo's melodica-led sessions with Carlton Barrett, Robbie Shakespeare, Aston Barrett and Earl "Chinna" Smith were cut at Randy's Studio 17, then remixed into dub by King Tubby. Widely cited as the recording that proved dub could stand as its own art form; its title track later appeared on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 Greatest Songs.

Horace Swaby (21 June 1953 - 18 May 1999), who took a cheap melodica and made it the most recognisable lead instrument in Jamaican music. He was already an organ player at Kingston College when a fellow student lent him the melodica — a toy, essentially, sold for schoolrooms — and the minor-key sound he built on it was called Far East: spare, haunted, and unlike anything else on the island. "Java", "East of the River Nile", "Song of the East" and "The Red Sea" came out of his early-1970s sessions, and the albums followed: This Is Augustus Pablo (1974), King Tubbys Meets Rockers Uptown (1976), East of the River Nile (1978) and Original Rockers (1979). The meeting with King Tubby produced the record dub is most often explained by. He also produced widely for others, among them Jacob Miller and Horace Andy, and ran the Rockers label — named for his brother's sound system — alongside Hot Stuff and Message, with the Rockers International shop on Orange Street. He had myasthenia gravis, a disorder of the nerves, and died in Kingston of a collapsed lung at 45. CORRECTION: this record previously gave his birth year as 1954.

Super Ape, recorded at Black Ark in 1976, pushed dub into a fully psychedelic, effects-drenched idiom and is routinely ranked among the greatest dub albums ever made.

Joel "Joe Gibbs" Gibson (1942-2008) was a Jamaican producer active from the mid-1960s, first producing rocksteady hits for acts like the Pioneers, the Heptones and the Ethiopians before international success with Nicky Thomas's "Love of the Common People" (1970). Working with engineer Errol Thompson as "the Mighty Two" and backed by house band the Professionals, he issued scores of hits for Dennis Brown, Big Youth, Culture, Prince Far I and others. His African Dub All-Mighty series (1975-1979) became landmark dub albums.

Osbourne Ruddock (1941-1989), the Waterhouse electronics engineer who invented dub. He built and repaired amplifiers, ran his own Hometown Hi-Fi sound, and began cutting versions with parts dropping in and out, drenched in reverb and delay worked live at the controls — first as exclusive plates for his own dances, then as a form in its own right. He trained Scientist, Prince Jammy and others, and his approach to the mixing desk as an instrument reshaped record production worldwide. He was shot dead outside his home in 1989. Per the engineer and broadcaster Mikey Dread, who apprenticed under him, Tubby built his first echo unit himself from two old tape recorders and constructed custom pressure-sensitive, spring-loaded switches for triggering sound effects, so that striking them harder or softer varied the result. Dread also credited a Tubby-built high-pass filter, applied to the snare and hi-hat, with producing the splashy "flying cymbal" sound heard on Bunny Lee and Johnnie Clarke productions such as "No Man Can Escape His Judgement" and "Jah Jah in Deh in Deh".

1973 dub set credited to the Upsetters, issued in Jamaica in a pressing of only a few hundred copies as Upsetters 14 Dub Blackboard Jungle, its initial issue using split-stereo spatial separation. Produced by Lee "Scratch" Perry, who had no studio of his own yet, and widely credited as mixed by King Tubby — though Perry himself has long disputed Tubby's involvement, and that dispute, rather than the question of primacy, is what he has objected to about the record. Frequently cited among the very first dub albums.

Lee "Scratch" Perry is a Jamaican producer and singer whose innovations across four decades, particularly at his own Black Ark studio, made him one of the most influential figures in Jamaican music. His 1968 single "People Funny Boy", a dig at his former employer Joe Gibbs for allegedly forgetting who helped him succeed, is presented as one of the earliest records to sound like true reggae, through its up-front metronomic bass and rhythmically played guitars echoing mento, Burru and Kumina patterns. In 1967, recording as "the Defenders", he cut "Set Them Free" as a direct rebuttal to Prince Buster's "Judge Dread" records, arguing rude boys' crimes grew from poverty rather than innate wrongdoing, an early instance of the explicit Black-consciousness lyric that later became central to Jamaican music. He also argued reggae's essential character came from rural migrants arriving in Kingston, not from the city itself.