U-MAN MUSIC
A shinehead with a wicked grin: British dubmaster Adrian Sherwood and his On-U Sounds label are an institution in such disparate music circles as industrial, dub and European pop, having released truckloads of albums from the likes of Dub Syndicate, Bim Sherman, Tackhead and Mark Stewart. His mixing desk techniques are practically a trademarked international brand recognized for its bass-heavy and whooshing "vacuum pumping" dynamics. From his noted football fanaticism to his remixes and production for everyone from Yazz to Depeche Mode and Prince Far-I, Sherwood has lived a London life and then some. With renewed energy and an evident lust for that life, Sherwood’s back to move on and attack another career’s worth of projects.
Words: Matt Fisher
Images: Christopher Woodcock
Adrian Sherwood has a bad sunburn. After a week in the LA sun, he's in San Francisco recuperating and applying lotion to his pink head.
"I look like a proper English tourist, don't I?" he asks in his characteristically self-effacing way. "Sunburned, bald and fat."
He's quiet for a moment and just as the room starts to feel sorry for him, his friend Ray adds, "And old." Everyone bursts out laughing.
Feigning hurt for a moment, Sherwood gets caught up in the mirth and can't help breaking out in a wide grin. "Not that old," he laughs, though he sounds like he doesn't quite believe it himself. He's only 43, but this legendary producer, who possesses the mischievous energy of a 20-year-old, also carries the wearied look of a much older man.
Sherwood's musical career, which began when he was only 17, has spanned nearly three decades. It's a career punctuated by wild spurts of creative output, but just as often marked by erratic distribution, conspicuous disappearances and, to the recent frustration of his fans, diddling on various side projects. He's worked with a dizzying array of artists, from dub legends Prince Far I and Lee "Scratch" Perry to Asian underground man Talvin Singh and post-industrialists Ministry.
He's earned a reputation for some of the heaviest, brain-battering music ever recorded via his own projects like Dub Syndicate, African Head Charge and Tackhead. His early use of found sound and tape cut-ups predated digital samplers by half a decade. His influence on contemporary production teams like Kruder & Dorfmeister and Thievery Corporation is undeniable. And yet at 43, Sherwood remains somewhat of an enigma, even to his fans. As he gets ready to release his first album in three and a half years, a solo project under his own name, the maverick producer needs to explain where he's been.
Sherwood's in town for a week, but it's tough to pin him down to talk. It's not that he's an unwilling interview subject. Quite the opposite: He's gregarious, energetic and seems more than willing to let me in on his life. But there are few brooding moments, no dark cynicism that sheds light on the inner workings, no quirks of personality except for the tacky tropical shirt he's wearing. It's only when we talk about his past and his music, when his normally bright blue eyes become steely and hard, that Sherwood reveals a glimpse of the superhuman focus and determination that's at the core of his being.
"I decided very early on that I was going to have my own sound," he explains. "There was no way I could compete with the tone and quality of sound that was coming out of Jamaica, so I worked very hard to make something that sounded good in England. That was my own angle on it."
Seduced from an early age by the heavy rhythms emanating from Jamaican mixing boards, Sherwood fell under the influence of one of the island's most original DJ voices, the great roots chanter Prince Far I. Sherwood brushes off any attempts to paint the singer as a mentor, but it's clear the relationship left a deep impression. "His rhythms were very spacey, primarily one-drop, and very slow and dirty," explains Sherwood. "We were always pushing it to sound like what we were hearing in our heads, and I learned from working with him that with good dub, you hear your own things and you get pretty absorbed-particularly if you've smoked a few spliffs."
Steeped in the lessons of dub, Sherwood founded his fabled On.U Sound label in the early '80s, a record label based on his vision of damn-the-consequences experimentation fused with an almost utopian optimism. "The attitude was very punk rock, like 'we're gonna fuck you up and do something great.' We had a bunch of people who probably never should have been in a room together, people studying Burroughs's cut-up techniques, people obsessed with feedback and distortion, Jamaican session musicians like Style Scott and Flabba Holt, Africans, Indians, Irish, and Japanese," says Sherwood. "It was like a United Nations of sound."
The memories are obviously sweet, and it's as if his inner 20-year-old almost gets carried away with the memory of an impossible optimism. Then, like a sheepish adolescent who finds himself exposed, he shifts to the role of cynical adult. "I could sit here misting off like some hippie twit, but we really felt like we had something very special going on, and I genuinely didn't care what anyone else thought."
Misty idealism or no, it was during those golden years that the legacy was founded: Sherwood released over 50 albums in a five-year period by his own estimate. From the psychedelic percussion and atmospherics of African Head Charge to the spaced-out rhythms and samples of Dub Syndicate, projects were coming out of On.U Sound at a fantastic rate.
One of his more radical and fully realized experiments was African Head Charge, an idea sparked by Brian Eno's 1979 textural experiment My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, which sent Sherwood veering off into his own vision of a psychedelic Africa and into completely uncharted musical territory. "African Head Charge was just a name I had. It was a bunch of dub undercurrents and a lot of experimental sounds, which I built around Bonjo Noah's percussion," he explains. "We were taking loads of speed and acid at the time, and I wanted to make a really trippy African dub record that also appealed to my sense of humor."
Listening to AHC's brilliant debut, My Life in a Hole in the Ground, with its ghostly samples, submerged vocals and warped drumbeats, it's as if you're being plugged directly into Sherwood's own hallucinating brain. It's clear he's having a laugh, but at what? Sherwood was brought harshly down to earth when, in 1983, Prince Far I was senselessly gunned down in Kingston in a disagreement over a small amount of cash. "I hate the way [they] treat life so cheaply in Jamaica, it's just so horrible," he states. He can barely contain his disgust as he absentmindedly shreds a club flyer while he recounts painful memories. "The truth is, Far I's murder did my fucking head in a bit, and I didn't make any reggae records for over four years."
When he did return, Sherwood came back with a bang, recording pioneering dub maniac Lee "Scratch" Perry's Time Boom X De Devil Dead, an album widely recognized as one of Perry's best. But the early momentum had been lost. "You can't maintain that level of output forever," says Sherwood, explaining the drop-off. "But it's also the administration, particularly if you were running the label like I was."
If Sherwood has any professional regrets, it's that his enthusiasm for the mixing desk never carried over to the business side of the record business. For years his wife, collaborator and business partner Kishi Yamamoto compensated for his lack of business savvy and kept the ever-precarious On.U Sound label finances afloat. "Kishi was fantastic at handling the accounts, but we split up in '94, and that coincides with the beginning of my problems." He fidgets uncomfortably and looks out the window. "I had a choice to bankrupt the label or sell everything I own and pay off the debt. I decided [that] if I left my burden with all the suppliers and other people involved, I'd be an idiot."
Sherwood repeatedly deflects my clumsy attempts to goad him into self-reflection. But when asked about touring, he launches into a story that adds color to the play between his larger-than-life sense of duty and his penchant for chaos. In 1994, Sherwood found himself in a muddy clearing somewhere in the Peruvian rainforest. A rickety stage had been rigged with a sound system of sorts, and from where he sat, Sherwood could see an increasingly agitated crowd waiting for him to take the stage.
As a favor to a childhood friend, he had flown to Lima from London, recut an album and embarked on an erratic tour through Peru's most rural areas to help raise money for Peruvian farmers who'd been wiped out by torrential floods. As he watched the crowd swell, he could see that a large number of the audience seemed to be carrying automatic weapons. "It was the maddest gig I've ever done in my life," he says, breaking into a grin.
"[Guitarist] Skip McDonald, [singer] Bim Sherman and myself had gone down there to do this benefit and there were armed guerillas there, Shining Path and whatnot. The MC was dressed in camouflage and draped in bullets. When he announced our names, he fired this huge machine gun into the air and the crowd was going wild. And I was sitting backstage with food poisoning, my head between my legs, puking my guts out. It was absolutely fucking crazy. Great gig."
Sherwood continued to cut against the grain that year and released Little Axe's "dubblues" album, The Wolf that House Built, and then Bim Sherman's Miracle, an acoustic showcase of one of reggae's most underrated vocalists. Neither album received the popular attention they were due, and Sherwood continues to be frustrated by the ambivalent reception.
"Miracle, in my opinion, is a fantastic album," he says with utter conviction. "It should have sold a million copies." But like most of his music, both albums occupy unusual sonic territory. And while Sherwood bemoans his lack of commercial success, he can't even entertain the idea of selling out. "The music business is not committed to support[ing] the musician's lifestyle unless you're hit-oriented, in which case you become a prostitute or a snark rather than agonizing and making something really good."
By the late '90s, On.U Sound had effectively shut down. But even as he struggled, Sherwood remained devoted to the music he loved. Together with his friend Pete Holdsworth, he formed Pressure Sounds, a label dedicated to reissuing classic Jamaican recordings. Sherwood describes it as a labor of love and says he takes very little money out of the label. "It's a little payback 'cause we're fans, and Pete has built it into a solid company, and it's doing very well."
It's the end of his stay, and I've been waiting for the right time to ask about the death of his friend and frequent collaborator Bim Sherman, who passed away suddenly from cancer last year.
"I just can't imagine him not being around, do you know what I mean?" A pained expression crosses his face as he searches for the words. "He was a hugely genuine person, very charming and a tremendous talent who was always looking out for his friends."
Despite the blow, Sherwood soldiers on. He describes his solo project, his negotiations with Fat Possum records over the release of the next Little Axe album, and the particulars of marketing his slicker, uptempo dub act 2 Bad Card. He floats the idea of restarting On.U Sound, and the space he now has to produce works he believes in.
"I've cleared my responsibilities by doing loads of jobs for other people, and I've learned quite a few things working with other artists over the last few years," he says. "I'm still capable of making good records. My intention is to take advantage of my name, to promote myself, have fun and make a little mischief."
Then he digs a little deeper. "Lee Perry is the king of mischief. His mischief runs riot through all his music-it's fun and it's got that spirit of a naughty boy in it. I want to keep that childlike quality and I want to instill in it something that draws in the person on the other end of the speakers, and make something that will last for the next 20 years."
A wan smile crosses his face and, unburdened, he leans forward. "Does that make sense?" But the question's almost moot-it's always made sense to him.