The Strange World Of… King Tubby

In a piece by David Katz, The Quietus explores the strange world of King Tubby, the enigmatic and hugely influential Jamaican audio engineer who, through heavy mixes, deep echoes, sounds dropped out and thrown back in, and endless play with bass and reverb, turned dub from a product of Kingston's sound system culture into an independent musical language. Written to mark fifty years since the landmark "King Tubbys Meets Rockers Uptown" and ahead of Katz's new book on the history of dub, the article offers ten essential tracks as doorways into his catalogue. Katz recounts how Tubby, born Osbourne Ruddock, began by repairing radios and building amplifiers, then, in a small room in Kingston's Waterhouse district, forged a sound unlike anyone else's using an old MCI console discarded by a major studio, distinctive filters, a homemade tape delay, and a deep knowledge of electronics. In his hands, dub was never merely an instrumental B-side; it became an art of subtraction, repetition, empty space, rhythm, bass, and sonic imagination. Tubby's innovations, Katz writes, reached far beyond reggae, leaving traces in punk, early hip-hop, trip-hop, and electronic styles from house and jungle to dubstep. The ten selections run from his first experiments in 1970 to the digital dancehall era of the 1980s. Tubby was killed by an unknown assailant in 1989, a murder never solved, yet his stature grows year by year, marked by the massive bronze bust unveiled at London's Hayward Gallery in 2024. Katz's book, "Dub Revolution," is published this week.

Read the full story at The Quietus →