Music

Champion Dub

Mikey Dread's Reggae Roots

by Charles Mudede

Tools

• Email This
• Print
• Share
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • Newsvine
  • Reddit
  • StumbleUpon
  • del.icio.us
• 0 comments

+ Enlarge this Image

MIKEY DREAD Dub pioneer.

Michael Campbell, AKA Mikey Dread, is an important figure in the current resurgence of dub's popularity. He's noted in the history of Jamaican popular music for operating the first reggae show on the Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation, from 1977 to 1979. The show was called Dread at the Controls, and ran from midnight to 6:00 am every night except Monday. Before this show arrived, reggae didn't have substantial support on the airwaves, despite its enormous popularity in Jamaica and the rest of the world. This was due to the snobbery of the Western- educated snobs who ran JBC; they preferred European and American music to reggae, which was considered to be street music.

"I have eight O-levels and A-levels in physics, maths and applied maths; my electrical engineering qualification is from the University of Technology," says Mikey Dread in Lloyd Bradley's book This Is Reggae Music. And it is this advanced level of high-school education, coupled with extensive college experience, that landed Mikey Dread a job at JBC, and later, after negotiations, a DJ spot during the radio station's dead hours. By 1978, Dread at the Controls was the most popular show in Jamaica. In 1979, Mikey Dread released a now-classic yet hard-to-find LP, Dread at the Controls, which was based on his radio show. The following year, he produced a number of tracks for the Clash, the most famous of which was "Bank Robber."

In the late '80s, Dread resurfaced with a near-perfect pop tune, "The Source (Of Your Divorce)," which was big with the American hiphop community. And for much of the '90s he has toured, toasted, VJed on Jamaican TV, and DJed for radio stations in northern Europe. But what makes him important to the current world of electronic music is the resurging interest in dub, a form he not only helped promote on his radio station in the '70s but contributed to as a sound engineer, working with dub masters like King Tubby. For those who are discovering DJ Spooky or the Twilight Circus Dub Sound System, Mikey Dread is the father of their future sounds.

charles@thestranger.com

Buy Tickets for Other Events