Never Trust a Hippy (2003)
11 tracks, 58 minutes
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Adrian Sherwood was already one of the biggest names in modern dub by the time he released this album, and that’s even more impressive when you account for this being his debut.
Okay, that’s splitting hairs a little bit. Sherwood is most well known as the founder and producer of On-U Sound, the legendary UK dub label with a stable including African Head Charge, Dub Syndicate, Tackhead, Gary Clail and New Age Steppers as well as many Jamaican legends such as Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry and Prince Far I. As the producer of most – if not all – of the On-U catalogue, Sherwood curated the label’s whole sound and developed his own musical brand while he was at it.
On Never Trust a Hippy (oddly released on Real World Records rather than On-U Sound), you can hear Sherwood revelling in the even-freer-than-normal reign. Everything here is the juiciest dub, but he’s not content to stick to King Tubby, Lee Perry-style productions. Sherwood brings in so much more than just roots reggae with a heavy bass and some delay – the sounds here are so diverse, with techno trance, acid jazz, Asian underground and new age among many, many other styles that are explored, in depth or in passing, over this hour-long whirlwind. That doesn’t even count the many diverse samples that he uses throughout too, that are so chopped and changed as to become entirely new elements, which then evolve further in Sherwood’s ever-shifting musical contexts.
A boon of releasing on Real World is that their own back catalogue became fair game for Sherwood’s treatments, and he took good advantage of that privilege to include two remixes among his original compositions on the album: ‘Dead Man Smoking’, from S.E. Rogie’s beautiful palmwine ‘Dieman Noba Smoke Tafee’, and ‘Paradise of Nada’, from Rizwan-Muazzam Qawwali as already filtered through the dubwise lens of Temple of Sound. Both of these remixes shed a light on Sherwood’s approach to his work. Both sound radically different from the originals, with completely different structures, atmospheres and even styles, but the musical meaning at the core of both pieces are pristinely intact.
Listening in this way helps to understand the way he moulds his own compositions too. The individual pieces may vary wildly in their styles and approaches to sound, but Sherwood makes sure that they all have the same consistent meaning running throughout, yes building, yes changing, but always with the same deep respect for ears and minds and always, forever, the deepest dub.
When you have already pioneered and pushed boundaries for decades before you release your first solo album, there’s no way that that album is going to be anything close to ordinary. With Never Trust a Hippy, Adrian Sherwood explored a whole deep jungle of music with his signature daring and inventiveness and emerged with something extraordinary.
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