Roots N' Dub Dept. - Bim Sherman

My knowledge of roots and dub is nowhere near as deep as my love for what I am familiar with. I can't explain why it made an immediate connection with me where (say) the blues never has. I'm as white as Navin Johnson in my musical DNA - Perry Como is my soul brother - so it's strange that a culture so alien to my own whitebread suburban seemed such a natural fit. I'm not claiming that even the finest set of white rasta dreads would make me welcome at a Kingstown chalice party, or that I found the whole Black Starliner thing particularly convincing, but the music ...

John Peel, inevitably, gets the credit. I heard Two Sevens Clash on his show, my first roots album, and after that Bob Marley sounded, well, a little thin. Chris Blackwell deserves all credit for introducing Jamaican music to the UK, but he left something behind - he couldn't pull out the roots, and they were hard to find. And I'd kind of moved on by the eighties, filing roots and dub as a geo-historical [is this a word? - Ed.] phenom. New reggae seemed to be burping with synthesisers, and even worse, drum machines.

So learning about Bim Sherman recently has been a revelation. Long story short - brought to the UK by Adrian Sherwood, recordings fall into Jamaican and post-Jamaican. The album that turned me on (man) was the recent reissue of Ghetto Dub ['88 - Ed.] which doesn't feature his incredible voice but struck me as the true heart of dub, and sent me scurrying back through his extensive (and it has to be said patchy, in later years) catalogue.

 

Today's deliverable is Ghetto Dub and Across The Red Sea ['82 - Ed.], both pretty fucking amazing. More to come, but if you're unfamiliar with Bim, this is as good a place to start as any. Speaker-rattling, bowel-churning bass, space as deep as the Mariana Trench, heavenly vox, mind-warping FX, this is the real deal. Nice tunes, too!