Don Letts has compiled an album for the Late Night Tales series, a twenty one track dub excursion that pulls together all sorts of strands, strains and offshoots of dub, punk and post punk. Among the highlights are a bunch of cover versions. Capitol 1212 and Earl Sixteen cover Love Will Tear Us Apart, a dubbed out version of the song with a cool vocal and buckets of echo.
Wrongtown Meets The Rockers deconstruct The Clash's Lost In The Supermarket, bassline and FX, a snatch of melodica carrying the topline. The Easy Star All Stars break out the sitars for a very stoned version of Within You Without You. Gaudi and The Rebel Dread tackle Big Audio Dynamite's E=MC2, samples from Performance and a mangled, cut up vocal while the bassline prods and pushes Don's old band's song along.
Black Box Recorder's cover of Uptown Top Ranking, a Prince Fatty cover of Jefferson Airplane's White Rabbit (becoming Black Rabbit), Zoe Devlin Love's lovers rock take of The Beach Boys Caroline No and Yasushi Ide's version of Ain't No Sunshine further blur the boundaries, drawing wobbly lines between then and now. Matumbi and Dennis Bovell, Ghetto Priest, John Holt and Mad Professor all show up. None of this feels like a novelty or a joke, it's all part of a much greater whole, a celebration of the culture that has seeped from radios and Dansettes in the 60s and 70s to whatever device or platform you're using to listen to music at the tail end of 2021.
