Graham Reid | | 4 min read
Third Light by Pitch Black, Adrian Sherwood dub mix
In 1984 I moved to Christchurch and began work at the Court Theatre as a props designer.
Over time I met local artists and, in my time off, we would meet up and talk about music. I was very much into the industrial scene and on one occasion was describing a 23 Skidoo record, The Culling is Coming. As my description didn’t sound like what my friends thought the band sounded like, we arranged a listening session at my flat, where we discovered that Urban Gamelan was indeed by the same band.
They also bought some other records with them, some of which were on a label called OnU Sound. I was mesmerised by the soundscape and the dub, and so was set off on a whole new direction of musical appreciation.
Twenty eight years later, I moved to London and, as secondhand CDs and vinyl were cheaper than in NZ, started filling the gaps in my OnU collection. One day I saw a post about an upcoming radio show by someone called Dr Dub which would feature a selection of unreleased and alternative versions of OnU tunes that he had recovered off 1⁄4” tapes he had found, apparently in a disused shower.
As it was on during the day in the UK, I decided to record the radio show for my fellow OnU Sound lovers back home. Once recorded, I put the audio up on Mixcloud, assuming that this Dr Dub would never notice.
How wrong I was!
Within 30 minutes, I had a message from Patrick (Dr Dub’s real name), thanking me for recording the show as he had forgotten to do it himself. I was obviously quite relieved not to be in trouble, and we started chatting about the label, and what he was doing with archiving its history.
A few months later Patrick was in London to play support at a Gary Clail show, so we met up and I offered to help out by taking over the DAT side of the archiving project. A little while later a couple of hundred DATs arrived at my house, which I digitized in my spare time.
One day Patrick invited me to come to Ramsgate for an OnU Sound-system show that he was DJing at.
So I headed down and had a great night, during which I got chatting to Adrian Sherwood about the DAT archive, my love of OnU and my video work. He said he also had loads of video recordings that needed digitising, but was very wary as he had lent a box to someone once and they had lost them all.
I promised not to lose a single one and began working on the tapes.
Archiving the video lead to me going along to every gig Adrian did that I could get to and documenting them. At one of the shows he asked if I could make videos for his upcoming Time Boom X tour, where he would be remixing live the master tapes from his work with Lee Scratch Perry. I obviously jumped at the chance.
In return for creating the video show, Adrian offered to remix some of my tracks, and a short while after the tour, I went down to his studio with a selection of tracks for him to choose from.
He got stuck into the day and eleven hours later I left with remixes of two Pitch Black tracks and one by Misled Convoy.
Two years later, Gaudi, who I’d met a few times, asked if we had any new tracks for an upcoming compilation he was putting together. He liked Adrian’s previous remixes and asked if there were any more. I reached out to Adrian about doing something new, and he was keen.
Gaudi was a fan of Transient Transmission, a track from our fourth album, Rude Mechanicals, and asked if it could be remixed. From my previous sessions with Adrian, I knew having more melody lines to work with would lead to the best results, so contacted David Fullwood from Ital Horns.
We’d first met on a Pitch Black tour of Europe way back in 2002 or so and had reconnected in Hackney in 2013 when we discovered we lived close to each other. I asked him if he would be interested in creating a horn line for the remix and the resulting melody really helped create a fantastic version.
Some time after I had moved back to NZ, Adrian asked me to come to London and do visuals for OnU’s 40th Anniversary show at the Forum.
As a thank you, he offered to create another remix and this time worked on 1000 Mile Drift, also from Rude Mechanicals, with Doug Wimbish from Tackhead adding an extra bassline.
1000 Mile Drift by Pitch Black, Adrian Sherwood mix
In a final twist to the tale, the man who had introduced me to OnU Sound all those years ago, Andrew Bancroft, created a new version of Adrian’s Transient Transmission remix by editing the alternate takes from the session, and his edit graces the limited edition Echoes of the Night 10'' 45rpm vinyl edition.
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You can hear and buy Echoes of the Night at bandcamp here where you can also order the limited edition on 10'' vinyl.
For more on Pitch Black at Elsewhere go here, for more on Mike Hodgson's Misled Convoy go here.
To read Elsewhere's review of this music go here.
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