Pama International

How’s running your own label going?

Hard work - harder than I thought. I haven’t run a label for a few years and it’s getting harder and harder to sell music these days. American exports, selling to HMV, it’s hard because surviving purely on grass roots sales isn’t quite enough. But all in all it’s been enjoyable, we’ve got some great releases coming up. We’ve got the Detonators – John Collins who produced Ghost Town’s band. He’s credited by many as producing the first ever UK dub track, called Lift Off, which was on the flip side to a hit by Victor Romeo Evans called At The Club, bit of a lovers track. The Specials heard that and asked him to produce Ghost Town. But John’s instrumental side was the Detonators and he made this album that came out in ‘79, and he did things like building his own drum machine because none were available at the time. I mean Dennis Bovell was probably doing dub first but this had an electro vibe that was like nothing else.

There’s kind of a Lee Perry Influence to his production on your album

Well two of the influences from the outset were Black Ark – Heptones Junior Murvin – and King Tubby’s. And John totally understood that. I tried several producers before I found John. I mean he was a bit like King Tubby – building his own equipment and stuff like that.

Is there a difference between cutting an album for your own label and say, Trojan?

Money. The budget for Trojan was next to nothing anyway and most of it went on the guest artists. But there was still money there for studio time. But this one I took my time, bought a studio set up, got a mac, did all the recording myself so it was quite affordable. When I’d knocked it into shape I just took it to John.

But was there any creative input from Trojan on your previous album?

Nah. Trojan didn’t have a clue. They just let us get on with it. It wasn’t really Trojan it was Sanctuary. Trojan has two legacies – one is this amazing back catalogue and the other is bad business, people getting ripped off, not being paid. I don’t think people will look back on the Sanctuary years fondly. I doubt they’ll even remember them to be honest. There was nothing built there. But then their hands were tied because Sanctuary had just paid something like 11 million for the back catalogue so the money men were probably thinking “we’ve just paid that much, so why do anything new?”. They don’t care about the artists – hence the hundreds of box-sets of cds for 7.99 where the royalty the artists get is nothing. But that’s the music industry – it’s about the industry not the music.

There are a lot of political tracks on Love Filled. Was this a conscious decision?

I think I’m getting more pissed off. It was the first album without a love song on. There was one that didn’t make the cut. I just write about my surroundings and how it’s getting tighter, tougher for an everyday bloke with a family to get along. And even Lynval wrote his first song since The Specials Wonder Wonder which is just a piece of observational writing.

It’s symptomatic of widespread discontent with society when such a happy-go-lucky band are so angry.

There comes a point where things get so bad that if you don’t say something you’re part of the problem. But it is quite ironic that the album’s called Love Filled Dub Band and there are so many angry tunes. We always try and keep an upbeat message in there and there’s a few of them in there.

You say “I’m not interested in political commentary” in the track Come As You Are, yet there’s plenty of it. Are you a reluctant revolutionary?

Yes. I don’t vote and there are many people out there like me – maybe we should. But when you’ve got idiots like Bush out there you have to say something because it’s affecting you personally. I don’t care about political commentary but its just common sense – don’t lie, don’t make up reasons for going to war. That track is about how we have a sort of code red thing - conditioned paranoia, sitting on the tube thinking “who’s that guy?” ; being suspicious of our neighbours.

Come As You Are also takes famous anti Vietnam-rhetoric and gives it a modern application. Do you see Iraq as a modern Vietnam?

It’s very far removed from that, but the fundamentals and principles are the same. We shouldn’t be there - we interfered in a country where we don’t belong. It’s a hard one because there was a leader who was corrupt and doing wrong himself. But it’s all money – they don’t steam into other places where wrong is going on. And at the same time troops were in Afghanistan. I have a friend who was reporter who was feeding these reports daily about soldiers being killed and no one was interested. It’s very soon forgotten about.

What are your views on climate change?

It’s hard not to be scared. I’m wondering how we can reverse it, because no one’s really doing anything about it on an international level. It comes back to the States really…

And China.

But it’s hard to see how China can change it, pull that back. America could do something but not while they’ve got someone like Bush in power. Maybe with the next election it might change. It’s funny – it really sums up how bad Bush is - but looking back on the Reagan years you think, “what a diplomat! He averted the cold war”. And those were terrible times. I hope when Bush leaves office Americans will tackle it more. We can’t go on like this.

The trouble is no one wants to be told to use technology less and yet we’re suspicious of technological solutions.

You’ve got half the world trying to make things go faster and the other trying to slow it down. We did the sleeve for the album and the feel was a lot more organic, a lot rougher than the Trojan album, so I wanted the sleeve to be the same – rough, organic, recycled card. And it cost me twice as much to get it produced as a glossy booklet! There’s something very wrong there. It would be cheaper in somewhere like Sweden where they’re very positive about things like that, but not Britain. There need to be a few more bold steps. It worries me when they have these global meetings, set these targets of 2020. I mean you’ve got to step it up a bit.

On a lighter note – what’s the story behind Lovely Wife?

Finny came up with the line. He was singing it at one sound check and I kinda liked it.

Did he ever say it to anyone?

I don’t think so! There’s diiffering stories about that!

Describe your songwriting process.

It varies. It could start with a good opening line, or chorus line, a great bass line, a nice brass part. Every tune’s kinda different but it all starts with a small seed and grows. I pretty much do all the writing. I often sit down at the piano to write ideas.

You play at Koko in March – what can we expect?

It’s gonna be phenomenal. We’ve Michie One guesting – first time she’s performed live since the last world cup. We got Rico (Rodriquez) guesting, doing a couple of numbers as well as Lovely Wife which he played on for the album. There’s a couple of surprise guests we’re still working on and for the rest of the bill we got the Nutty Boys - Lee and Chris from Madness. They haven’t played together for about 5 years so it’s a bit of a homecoming for them in Camden. The opening bands are Newtown Kings who are on a modern two- tone tip, while Revelation are more roots…

So it’s almost like a mini festival?

Yeah we’re very much mixing it up. We got Trojan Sound doing old tunes, and Wrongtom on the other end doing a more modern take on it.

Will you be playing more big venues in the future?

I think so – after Koko we’re doing the 30th anniversary of Rock Against Racism in Victoria Park, at the end of April; they’re expecting about 100,000 people for that. They’re trying to get as much of the original line up as possible. Then we’re doing a bigger tour in June/July in bigger theatres with three bands on Rockers Revolt. There’s the Slackers and we’re gonna do an album with them as well. The Pie Tasters from Washington DC who are on a ska soul tip – they actually backed James Brown before he died. Been going a few years - as long as the Slackers. And Mungos Hi fi, who I love, who go from old time to ska through to dubstep. I love to mix up the eras of music so you get a spectrum of everything.

It stops it from being just “retro”, doesn’t it? Instead of historic, accurate note for note recreation, the listeners get to join the dots.

I love that. Other people hate it. As we’ve found from the odd review! We’ve been accused of cashing in on Lily Allen. We obviously are very influenced by the queen of reggae of course!

How did you end up working with Michie One?

Through myspace actually. I dropped her a line and she came to our show at the Jazz Café and liked it. And then I was writing High Rise a month later and had the chorus and was really struggling. Such a hard subject to tackle - kids killing kids - and everything was coming out too hard, too soft or too patronizing, “put that knife away young man”! I then remembered Lynval telling me about seeing a kid get beaten up in Chalk Farm and no one doing anything and then I remembered Michie One had lived there for years so she must have her own angle on it.

And did you know straight away that was the first single?

Yep. I like the subject matter and I liked the idea of using Cherry Oh Baby to draw you in and make you feel safe. Such a well loved tune from when it was a big festival hit (for Eric Donaldson). On the UB40 side it was huge so lots of UB40 fans would think we’d covered one of their tracks! So I wanted to make them feel comfortable with a nice melody, nice pace, and…

Hit them with the message!

Yeah but what good it will do I don’t know. Just put it out there.

First Impression has a bit of a classic Bob Dylan sound. What are your non-reggae influences?

That one Finny wrote the lyric and I built the chords around it. He comes from an Irish background - altogether different influences to me. But we all like Soul, Stax, Motown, very good writing, Johnny Cash, all the classics. My influences outside reggae were Two Tone, bit of punk, the Clash, the Jam, Ian Dury, Bragg, great songsmiths in the classic British style. The original concept for Love Filled Dub Band was a pastiche of Sergeant Pepper so we started to make a list of who influenced us but the list was endless. So we narrowed it down to what had influenced this album and there was no-one before 1979.

What about Michie One?

Oh yeah… she’s the only one then!

Where does Pama International go from here?

We’re promoting the album for the rest of the year. We’re making a feature film to capture all the things we’re doing. We’re doing a session at Abbey Road on Monday in studio 2, the famous one, which gets broadcast by a company called World Space Radio, and we might do as a session on Craig Charles BBC show. Obviously the Beeb have their budgets – and if you’re not Radio One, budgets are limited. We’ve been asked to co-host Glastonbury, the leftfield stage. So we’re making the film to tie it all together.

Interview by Angus Taylor