Dub Pistols
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The Forum presents DUB PISTOLS plus guests Frozemode
Dub Pistols continue to celebrate their Silver Jubilee into 2023.
Not many acts stay together for a quarter of a century and still remain firing on all cylinders. But the Dub Pistols juggernaut rolls on, exploring fresh sonic pastures and accelerating into 2022 — their 25th anniversary, their Silver Jubilee — like there’s no tomorrow.
The Dubs may have had an easier ride of it if they’d been a cartoon band like Gorillaz. There wouldn’t have been assorted band member casualties along the way, for starters, as life on the road took its toll. The multi-cultural collective has involved dozens of artists and musicians over the years — some remaining for years, a few for the duration, and others just popping in for a guest appearance. Their sound has accordingly morphed a variety of times since their inception: taking in dub, punk, jungle, ska, breakbeat, hip-hop and a whole lot more, it’s been a long road travelled.
Throughout an eight-album career and literally thousands of shows, the band has rolled with the punches — enduring setbacks and fuck-ups before piecing themselves back together and morphing into one of the most loved and enduring festival bands on the circuit. Hardest-working band in showbiz doesn’t even cover it.
The genesis of the Dub Pistols began when former club promoter and Deja Vu singer Barry Ashworth started DJing in the mid-90s. Unable to mix records properly at first, Barry got assorted pals to scratch and play horns over the top of his sets. Inspired by the anything-goes attitude of the late 90s genre that came to be called big beat in the UK — acts like the Chemical Brothers, Fatboy Slim and Propellerheads, labels such as Wall Of Sound and Skint — Barry was drawn to start making tracks for his DJ sets, alongside long-term cohort Jason O’Bryan. Polyrhythmic first offering ‘There’s Gonna Be A Riot’ was signed by Concrete Records, and a string of missives followed in its wake — ‘Best Get Better’, the explosive ‘Westway EP’, and then a chipper ‘Cyclone’, which dented the UK national charts.
These singles were bundled together into the ‘Point Blank’ album, and when big-shot US record exec Jimmy Iovine heard it he signed the Dubs to Interscope Geffen for a cool $1.5million. Life was sweet. Then, just as the subsequent ‘Six Million Ways To Live’ long-player was about to drop, the 9/11 terrorist atrocity happened in New York. Given that various album tracks contained explosive references to geo-political events that had seemingly just played out on the international stage, the project was reluctantly shelved. The Dubs had become a fully-fledged band by this stage and had been touring the US extensively while also remixing the likes of Moby, Limp Bizkit and the Crystal Method. But now they had to return to the UK to lick their wounds. With most of their record deal advance blown, they had to rebuild from the ground back up.
Barry had become a decent DJ by this point, and mixed the latest instalment in the acclaimed ‘Y4K’ series for Distinctive Records — blending a mixture of house and breaks tracks by Layo & Bushwacka, the Chemical Brothers, Adam Freeland, Soul Of Man and more. When he finally got the ‘Six Million Ways’ album back off Geffen, Distinctive signed it and led its release rollout with the ‘Problem Is’ single which featured Terry Hall, former singer of 2-Tone legends The Specials.
As the noughties unfolded, Terry Hall started doing shows with the Dubs and featuring on new tracks such as ‘Running From The Thoughts’, ‘Peaches’ and their cover of ‘Rapture’ by Blondie. The rapturous reception Terry received when he appeared with the Dubs alongside his other former Specials bandmate Lynval Golding at the Rise anti-racism festival in London in 2008 was a major factor in The Specials reforming later that year.
Now signed to Sunday Best Recordings, the Dub Pistols by now had become adept at co-opting people into their collective, and for next album ‘Rum & Coke’ they recruited former Freak Power man Ashley Slater, Lindy Layton from Beats International, DJ/producer Justin Robertson and UK hip-hop pioneer Rodney P. Part-recorded in Barbados, where — like their friends Happy Mondays before them — “the wheels fell off the band” while they were out there, according to Barry, it captured the band at the height of their renegade hedonism.
Next album ‘Worshipping The Dollar’ was more political in places, tracks with Akala and Red Star Lion demonstrating how the band still had a social conscience, while rowdy rabble-rouser ‘Mucky Weekend’ — a tale of living for a weekend of excess — was given a first airing. Long-term co-producer Jason O’Bryan left for pastures new as the second decade of the 21st century saw them consolidating their position as festival-rocking favourites, due to a lot of hard graft and touring virtually non-stop. The next two albums, ‘The Return Of The Pistoleros’ and ‘Crazy Diamonds’, reflected their increasingly off-the-chain, exhilarating live shows, with much more jungle/drum & bass incorporated into their dubwise sound and the permanent recruitment of rapper Seanie T into the fold.
Ambitiously, the Dubs threw their first festival in 2019 — Mucky Weekender in the Sussex countryside. Featuring Leftfield, Stanton Warriors, Don Letts, Manasseh Soundsystem and many more, it caught the tail-end of the summer sun and was raved about by all attendees. The success of the first Mucky set it up nicely to become an annual event.
Barry has been very open about his addictions and mental health issues over the years, and in 2019 he did his first Wing Walk — strapped to the top of a bi-plane — to raise money for Tonic Music For Mental Health. This has evolved into an annual Flying Circus fundraiser, involving friends from the music world such as Bez from the Happy Mondays, and Barry has now become a patron of the Tonic organisation.
The Dubs had readied their next album, ‘Addict’, just as the Covid pandemic struck in 2020. The solidarity single ‘Stand Together’ — featuring 2-Tone legend Rhoda Dakar (ex-Bodysnatchers/Special AKA) — dropped just as the Black Lives Matter protests were commencing worldwide, while tracks with soundsystem stalwarts the Ragga Twins, newcomer Natty Campbell and more kept their pot on the boil. The album shot into the top three of the UK dance charts and the top ten of the UK indie charts. But the history of the Dub Pistols is so much more than the sum of their album releases and chart positions — Barry truly has stories for days.
As 2021 began and the pandemic saw little sign of waning, the Dub Pistols released their cover of New Order’s seminal ‘Blue Monday’ on the third Monday of January to raise funds for the Tonic Mental Health Trust. A couple of months later they released their ‘Welcome To The Jungle’ mix album on Jungle Cakes, featuring a whopping 50 tracks by various dubwise jungle associates as well as artists like Deekline, Ed Solo, King Yoof and the Beat Assassins remixing some choice Dub Pistols cuts. This release also shot to the upper reaches of the UK dance charts. Once Covid restrictions were lifted in mid-2021 the Dubs were delighted to get out touring again. They rocked an assortment of festivals and also staged the second iteration of Mucky Weekender, this time on a new site in Hampshire. Groove Armada, Leeroy Thornhill (ex-Prodigy), The Freestylers and the Ragga Twins were just a few of the acts to nice up the dance over the long weekend.
Fast-forward to 2022 and the Dubs are celebrating 25 years of riotous mayhem and righteous marauding with a new album, a documentary, another festival, and a whole lot more. It’s their Silver Jubilee — 25 not out. But who’s counting?
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Sometimes you have to go through the mill to realise why you were put on this Earth. So it is with the Dub Pistols, the reggae-breaks-jungle mashup, the gangster-swaggering festival stalwarts whose rollercoaster story reads like a rock’n’roll cautionary tale on a grand scale. When big beat ruled the clubs the Pistols were snapped up for $1.5m by legendary Interscope magnate Jimmy Iovine and anointed Geffen Records’ priority act for America. But Geffen put their album out the week that 9/11 happened, so the Dub Pistols ended up broke and label-less instead of US superstars. This is how it happens. They get knocked down — but they get back up.
Over an 18-year career the Dub Pistols have worked with heroes like The Specials, Horace Andy, Madness and Gregory Isaacs. They’ve burned through different members and hundreds of thousands of pounds on assorted capers and hedonism, and done — in the words of dapper frontman and prime mover Barry Ashworth, a ducking, diving South London graduate of the Summer of Love generation who started a band because he loved Happy Mondays and never looked back — “more fucking drugs than we knew what to do with.”
It should have been a recipe for oblivion. “We’ve got a saying in this band,” says Barry: “Whatever can possibly go wrong, will go wrong.” Instead it was the making of the Dub Pistols. The band that started out in the mid-90s with Barry DJ’ing while musicians jammed over the top (“a right fucking racket,” he laughs) has metamorphosed into a mighty reggaematic bass-driven live machine, a super-tight festival regular that keeps winning over new fans at Glastonbury, Bestival, Beat-Herder and across Europe.
And that hard-won discipline gets its showcase in their new, sixth and best album, ‘Return Of The Pistoleros’, released on Rob Da Bank’s much-loved Sunday Best imprint. From the the Ennio-Morricone-goes-drum’n’bass title track to the armagideon horns and implacable bass march on ‘Real Gangsters’ — with guest MC Neville Staple of The Specials — via the pure skank of ‘Sticky Situation’ and collaborations including MC Earl 16, Lindy Layton, Jamaican stars Chezidek and main vocalist Seanie Tee AKA Dark Horizon, it’s a full-on dub-quaking anthemic extravaganza built for big fields and summer sound systems.
Key to the new set-up is a mix of old and new Dub Pistols including Barry’s “go-to man” Tim Hutton who has co-written for Groove Armada, Ian Brown and the new Prodigy album. Tim slots in for departed Dub Pistol Jason O’Bryan who “ran off with a Djakartan princess.” And the album’s title carries its own message.
“There’s always been a bit of the outlaw in classic reggae,” explains Barry, “a bit of spaghetti western, Mexican feel. That's what we feel like ourselves. We don’t have to try to fit in any more. We’re not going to be anyone’s flavour of the month. We’ve got our crowd and we’re getting new people all the time, from the ska dads to the festival kids. It’s all word of mouth, no marketing, just from our live show. So I thought yeah, Pistoleros. Outlaws.”
An avid Liverpool FC fan, Barry always wanted to be a footballer when he was growing up in South London among a family of transplanted Scousers. He went to Carshalton Boys School, lived on the same street as future superstar DJ Carl Cox and — like thousands of likely lads before him — started out on a road that led from The Clash and The Specials to reggae to jazz-funk and the inevitable fateful visit to Ibiza in 1987. “I took a pill and never kicked a ball again,” he smiles.
A growing love of DJ Alfredo’s Balearic mixes at Amnesia led Barry into promoting events, DJ’ing and a taste for hard partying. At one point he found himself in a three-day rave that Flowered Up had thrown in a mansion in South London. “The most insane party I’d ever been to,” he remembers. “The police had to carry us out in the end.”
Barry never intended to start a band. He began to make singles purely for DJs — big beat stompers like ‘There’s Gonna Be A Riot’ and ‘Cyclone’ — which led to an album, which led to touring, which somehow led them to Jimmy Iovine, who said their ‘Six Milion Ways To Live’ album was the best he’d heard in 15 years. Signed to Geffen, the Dub Pistols’ taste for excess became legendary even amongst the dance royalty of the day. They’d take limousines across two states to visit a strip joint, spend money like water and do “so much drugs it was ridiculous.”
They visited Mexico to record a track for the road movie ‘Y Tu Mamá También' with Molotov, the biggest-selling band in South American history. “We lived there for a month and everything was mañana, mañana, peyote and mescaline — it was fucking nuts,” Barry recalls. “We were out of our minds.” Figuring that nobody would hear this tune anyway, he knocked out a filthy sex rhyme with plenty of graphic detail. So their biggest song in South America consists of Barry yelling ‘here comes the mayo!’”
After the Geffen deal fell apart, Barry came home thinking he had £150,000 in the bank. But they’d spent so crazily that he was £16,000 overdrawn. “I was shaking,” he admits. “I nearly shit meself when I heard.” He took a deep breath, paid everyone off with whatever money he could find, and started again from nothing.
It turned out to be a good move. After the cash-crazy dance world of the 90s cratered, it left behind a real crowd who had learned to love an outdoor mega-festival — a new natural audience for the Dub Pistols. They spent the Noughties building that crowd. Now they’re masters of their own fate.
Since then they’ve worked with the artist Gavin Turk and created music for a Banksy documentary. Ben Allen, the rising star of British street art, told Barry that he created his whole collection while listening to the Dub Pistols. They’ve had Bono and The Edge at their shows and Howard Marks doing their sleeve notes. They cut a track with Busta Rhymes called ‘The One’ for the soundtrack to ‘Blade II’. And they were partly responsible for getting Barry’s heroes The Specials back together. Terry Hall and Lynval Golding shared a stage for the first time in decades with the Dub Pistols at Bestival. “That was a real high point,” says Barry, “and it was a bit of a catalyst for the reunion. I had tears in my eyes when they got back together.”
Now the Dub Pistols are one of the few remaining working class bands who carry the flame of reggae-driven sound system music, the secret rhythm of Britain from ska and rocksteady through Soul II Soul to grime and dubstep and beyond. “I always thought that being in a band wasn’t for people like me,” Barry admits. “It was more a middle-class thing. It was the Mondays that changed that. We’re part of street music, working class music. That’s never going to go away.”
Recently the reformed Happy Mondays tweeted that the Dub Pistols were the best live band they’d seen in years. And Shaun Ryder’s crew will feature in a documentary that Barry is putting together, a mix of archive and new footage that charts the Dub Pistols’ strange journey from chancers to hot property to epic fuck-ups to unlikely triumph. It’ll be called ‘What The Fuck Can Possibly Go Wrong? The History of the Dub Pistols’.
“It’s about everything that’s ever happened to us, all the ups and downs, the victories and disasters,” says Barry. “I call us the most successful unsuccessful band of all time — and the hardest-working lazy bastards in the world. Sometimes I can’t fucking believe we’re here, but we’ve survived and we’re doing better than ever.
“You know what? It’s just like they say,” he grins. “If you’re doing something you love, you never work a day in your life.”
