King Tubby is one of the most important figures of Jamaican popular music.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Tubby was responsible for turning dub into an art form, the creative re-mixing he pioneered at a tiny front-room studio in the Waterhouse ghetto making a long-reaching impact. Like his friend and sometime rival, Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, Tubby was one of a handful of Jamaican visionaries whose innovations not only changed the shaped of reggae in unprecedented ways, but which also formed a template for so much contemporary music production, be it in rap and hip-hop, jungle, garage and grime, or various forms of electronic dance music — especially dubstep, the British bastard offspring of Jamaican dub.

Greatly misunderstood, and sometimes under-represented in music literature, King Tubby was not a standard record producer until very late in his life, and his regular occupation was providing transformers to stabilise the electrical current of island businesses and sound systems alike. Nevertheless, the remix culture we take for granted today is largely reliant on Tubby’s ingenuity, the techniques he introduced indelibly changing the way contemporary popular music is made and issued.

He was born Osbourne Ruddock in 1941 and was raised with three brothers and four sisters close to the Kingston Harbour on High Holborn Street, one of the more prominent roads on the eastern edge of downtown. Then, in the early 1950s, he moved with his mother to 18 Dromilly Avenue, in the Penwood section of Waterhouse, an expansive area of western Kingston, where a number of new housing developments had recently been built. Compared to the serious overcrowding of downtown, Penwood must have felt like a step up in the world. Yet, the neighbourhood would later become another flashpoint district, once politically-motivated violence became a serious issue.

Rather than referring to his waistline (which was definitely slim), the nickname ‘Tubby’ stems from his mother’s surname, Tubman. He developed an interest in electronics in his teen years, and studied the subject at the College of Arts, Science and Technology in uptown Kingston, supplementing his knowledge through correspondence courses from the USA. He began building radios from discarded parts salvaged from business rubbish tips, and soon opened an electrical repair shop at the rear of his mother’s home. In addition to the transformer work he later did at the premises, Tubby began building and servicing amplifiers for local sound systems there, and in 1958 he established one himself, an initially small set known as Hometown Hi-Fi, which played American rhythm and blues music, and only appeared at select local venues in the early days. Nevertheless, its popularity led to the crowning of King Tubby following a Waterhouse sound clash in the early 60s, and towards the end of that decade, once U Roy became the set’s star toaster, King Tubby’s Hi-Fi shifted gears and moved into the major league. His sound system was also the first to unleash reverb on the general public — a major sonic innovation at the time. Tragically, the sound was destroyed by police in 1975, their hostile actions a terrible affront.

From the mid-1950s, Tubby acted as a mentor to his younger neighbour, Lloyd ‘Jammy’ James (who lived a few chains down at number 92), and according to Jammy, he briefly operated a pirate radio station during the ska years (called TRS, for Tubby’s Radio Station), but dismantled it when soldiers were dispatched to find the source, since the station’s emissions clashed with those of the mainstream Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation’s radio frequency. Tubby and Jammy would remain extremely close in the decades that followed — even when Jammy eventually decided to become a rival producer himself.

Because so little was documented at the time, King Tubby’s early involvement in music has sometimes been misrepresented. Tubby’s nephew recently clarified that although he maintained equipment at Duke Reid’s Treasure Isle studio during the late 60s, he was not an apprentice engineer or staff dub cutter there, as has often been stated. Additionally, legend has it that Tubby was present when soundman Rudolph ‘Ruddy’ Redwood had resident engineer Byron Smith mix off some exclusives for his sound system, on which the vocal was inadvertently removed, paving the way for the phenomenon of ‘version’ B-sides, in which previously recorded vocal songs would have their rhythm tracks removed for alternate instrumental versions or toasting deejay cuts — though Tubby once claimed he was the first to do this himself. In either case, Tubby acquired a two-track tape machine which he began using to mix ‘versions’ as exclusive acetates for sound systems. The singer Pat Kelly, who was an audio engineer for Tubby in the early days, says he was working at King Tubby’s from perhaps as early as 1969, though others have questioned Kelly’s memory.

Things definitely stepped up a notch after Bunny Lee helped Tubby acquire an obsolete MCI mixing desk from Dynamic Sounds in 1971, leading Tubby to turn the front room at 18 Dromilly Avenue into a remix studio, adding delay and reverb to the ‘version’ B-sides he was mixing, thus creating dub as we now know it. Soon the most important independent record producers with no studios of their own were beating a path to his door, with Niney the Observer, Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, Keith Hudson, Yabby You and Augustus Pablo being among the most noteworthy to benefit from the Tubby treatment. From 1972, the space was regularly used for the voicing of rhythm tracks as well, though it was not big enough for a full band to record there. According to Cornell Campbell, who claims his rendition of ‘Never Found A Girl’ was the first song voiced at the premises, Tubby was initially reluctant to record artists there, but after hearing the results, and with encouragement from Bunny Lee, he built a voicing booth in a converted bathroom for that very purpose. It then became standard practice for the independent producers to bring their unvoiced rhythm tracks to Tubby’s studio for voicing, as well as to have their dub versions mixed there.

King Tubby was also instrumental in making the dub album a viable format for release, leading to the growing overseas popularity of the form during the mid-70s. Yet, the limited nature of Tubby’s recording equipment has stimulated much debate over the years. An important element of the mixing desk was its high-pass filter, which Tubby used to dynamic effect on many of his greatest dubs. And it was always a team of engineers that were working there, rather than just Tubby himself. In the early days of his studio, singer Pat Kelly was one of the resident engineers on an on-off basis, but he was replaced by Philip Smart in late 1973; when Smart subsequently migrated to the USA, it led to a temporary return for Kelly, until Prince Jammy came back to Jamaica in early 76 to become Tubby’s right-hand man. Towards the end of the 70s, the young Scientist became another important apprentice, and Peter Chemist and Professor engineered some fine records at Tubby’s in the early 80s too.

Meanwhile, Jammy was in the process of breaking away from Tubby, setting up his own studio at his home in nearby St Lucia Road. The massive success Jammy had with the Casio-driven ‘Under Mi Sleng Teng’ in 1985 convinced Tubby to upgrade his studio and the make the shift to computer-driven ‘digital’ beats. However, once the studio was up and running, Tubby took even more of a backseat role with the actual productions, leaving associates such as Peego, Phantom and Fatman Thompson to conduct the majority of his sessions. The end result was that he was often in Jammy’s shadow in the early digital phase, though he scored some noteworthy hits of his own too.

King Tubby’s life was cut tragically short on 6 February 1989, the victim of another senseless murder. The unidentified gunman took cash, jewellery, and most notably, Tubby’s licensed firearm, which was probably the reason he was targeted in the first place. Though Tubby’s murder struck a terrible blow for reggae, the music he made is truly immortal. What follows are ten supreme examples of wonderful work to surface from King Tubby’s studio, conceived and mixed by the King himself, along with some of his closest peers.