The Pop Group – Y In Dub

Mute

There’s a famous scene in Howard Hawks’ unbelievably brilliant 1946 film adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep set in the Acme Book Shop. Humphrey Bogart’s Philip Marlowe, staking out a bookshop which is actually a front for illegal pornography, calls into a rival bookshop across the street looking for a surreptitious vantage point only to find that the sales clerk is a promising sleuth in her own right, and that their chemistry is more explosive than a whole barrel full of trinitrotoluene.

When the clerk – jaw-droppingly played by future Oscar winner Dorothy Malone – makes the prototypical gambit of taking off her glasses and letting down her hair, Marlowe does a mesmerised double-take and simply says “Helloooo”.

So, in similar fashion, as Y In Dub sashays into the room and let’s down its hair: hellloooooo.

It’s not often that one gets to review the same record twice. However, on this occasion The Pop Group’s 1979 masterpiece has come roaring back, fresh from an appearance on What Not To Wear, with a serious makeover – new wardrobe, new hairstyle, confident and turning heads – demanding to be given some further attention.

Playing the Trinny and Susannah role in all this is the estimable Dennis Bovell, producer, musician, reggaemeister supreme and – very recently – Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE). His new gong is almost certainly due to his work on Y, as Her Majesty is well known to be big fan of The Pop Group.

And, dubbing up the original session tapes he first recorded at Ridge Farm Studio in Surrey, it’s a fine, fine job Dennis has done too. It’s often said that in hindsight some of the greatest inventions were so bleedin’ obvious that it was a wonder that no-one had ever thought of them before. In many ways that same logic applies here; given the dub chromosomes that, from the very offset, were nestled within The Pop Group’s DNA, it’s a forehead-slapping revelation that dub remixes of them, particularly this album, weren’t attempted years ago.

The result is like a beautiful but filthy vintage car, an E-Type Jag or 1968 Mustang perhaps, run through a car-wash: nothing has fundamentally changed, but the result is completely eye-catching. One looks again and sees the beauty anew. Here there is no solve et coagula, no complete reinvention of the material, just a subtle and perfect infusion of space, echo and the time-stretching, gravity-defying ethos of dub.

First time around, Bovell was keen to demonstrate his production skills outside the reggae and lovers rock genres, latterly pushing his consummate technique into a variety of post-punk recordings, of which Y was the first. Over forty years later, with nothing to prove, it feels like he has just thrown all cares to the wind and gone wherever he feels is right.

All the album’s classic cuts have responded very well indeed to this treatment: “Thief Of Fire”, soaked in reverb, forms into little dark pools, rivulets of sinuous bass linking them all together; “She Is Beyond Good And Evil” is killer, the bass and drums a blur of sound and Mark Stewart’s vocal as clear as though it was recorded yesterday, whispering sinister nothings straight into your ear; “We Are Time” rocks and floats simultaneously.

“Savage Sea” and “Don’t Call Me Pain” are particular highlights, the former’s staccato Residents-y boogie even further untethered from normal space-time and the latter smoother, calmer and more Spartan than the original, yet sacrificing none of the intensity. “Blood Money”, too, sounds particularly lumbering and threatening. You really wouldn’t want to meet it down a dark alleyway, even though it’s now in middle age.

So, what do we make of all this? Musically, the ‘post-punk’ output of the strange, dark transitional years that bridged the dog-end of the Seventies and the dawn of the Eighties has increasingly come to be seen as a something of a touchstone in terms of liberation creativity and innovation. And rightly so. So much fresh energy was being channelled into new directions, exciting hybrid forms and experiments heedless of the consequences.

Certain albums – Y, This Heat’s “Blue and Yellow” album, Gang Of Four’s Entertainment; I could go on – encapsulate this lost nirvana so perfectly that, pardon my language, going back to fuck around with them is a decidedly uneasy prospect. To return to the car metaphor used earlier, “Hey, we’ve restyled the E-Type Jag!” Yeah, and totally ruined it.

Bovell has chosen to revisit a classic of its type, but instead of putting ego ahead of art and messing around with it for little more reward than merely the irritating addition the latest high-tech production toys, he has approached it more obliquely, polishing, shaping and expanding.

Y In Dub is artfully done, and a tribute to both Bovell and The Pop Group that the results still sound so good.

-David Solomons-