Legendary dub reggae producer Mad Professor (aka Neil Fraser) tells Kim Hill it was a Kiwi friend who encouraged him to perform onstage for the first time.
DJ and music producer Mad Professor (aka Neil Fraser) Photo: Supplied
Mad Professor plays at Auckland's Earth Beat Aotearoa Festival on 22-26 March and in Wellington on 2 April.
Dub reggae – a hypnotic sub-genre of reggae that's heavy on drums, bass and reverb – was the soundtrack to Fraser's childhood, he tells Kim Hill.
After moving to England from Guyana in 1970, Fraser had been mixing dub reggae musicians in his Croydon studio for decades with no intention of becoming one himself.
That was before the night in 1993 when Wellingtonian John Pell (aka DJ Goosebump) booked him to perform at an underground club in Brixton.
Although mixing live dub music in front of an audience was something Fraser had always wanted to try, he was also "the shyest guy you could imagine."
About 70 people turned up to his first 'Mad Professor Mixes Live' show in London, the next show a month later attracted over 200 people, including a couple of French guys who invited him to play a show in the south of France.
Soon Fraser was playing Mad Professor shows almost weekly, his fame peaking in 1995 with the release of No Protection – a remix of Massive Attack's 1994 hit album Protection.
As a kid in 1960s Guyana, reggae was "number one", Fraser says, and moving to London at the age of 15, he feared he wouldn't find any there.
Instead, he became part of a thriving dub reggae scene and part of a large Caribbean community which many white Brits assumed was exclusively Jamaican.
Dub music, which Fraser has described as "the skeleton of reggae", was born out of Jamaican reggae MCs and singers vocalising on top of rhythm tracks at parties in the 1960s.
It is electronic music engineer King Tubby (aka Osbourne Ruddock) who should get the most credit for pioneering the genre, though.
In addition to being "the main geek in Kingston", King Tubby had an interest in music and in the 1970s started experimenting with adding drum and bass effects, reverb and delays, in the studio he created.
Jamaican dub legend Lee 'Scratch' Perry, who worked with King Tubby, came into Fraser's life in 1983 as he was retiring as a producer to focus on singing.
Perry, who died in 2021, was a "very eccentric guy" with an incredible work ethic, he says.
"He would turn up at 10 o'clock in the morning and work through until 10 o'clock at night. He would just work and record track after track …and his brain was so sharp. His brain was like a computer. I've learnt a lot from him both on the stage and in the studio."
Jamaican record producer, composer and singer Lee Scratch Perry Photo: Pit Buehler
