Adrian Sherwood on tour: Everything could collapse

“Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry is central to my musical development,” says Adrian Sherwood in an interview for the fan book “I feel everything you say, I feel everything you hear”. Perry, the Jamaican producer who died in 2021, is the only mixing superstar that dubreggae has ever produced.

In the meantime, it would be entirely appropriate to place this crown on Adrian Sherwood’s head. Not only because the British producer, sound engineer and operator of the On-U Sound label, who was born in London in 1958 and has been active since the late 1970s, has also achieved global recognition – like Perry. In any case, Sherwood has produced several Perry albums for On-U Sound and also helped the Jamaican madman to a worthy career conclusion with “Rainford” and its dub version “Heavy Rain” (2019).

Adrian Sherwood’s own profile is characterized by a sensitivity to the environment, also comparable to his role model. For Perry it was sounds from the jungle and its lush naturewhich he often embedded in the music, with Sherwood it is a (post-)industrial sci-fi sound image from the London habitat.

Sherwood has a love for low bass frequencies; he has a modulatory understanding of the fundamental changeability of any existing sound. And he relies on the sensational yet elaborate sound language of the sound effects.

Studio burned down

Lee Perry had already sworn off the Dub madness in the Black Ark recording studio in Jamaica at the end of the 1970s and burned down the studio building. Since then, the Jamaican has traveled around the world as a source of ideas and word acrobat on the microphone, giving preference to other producers at the mixing desk. And so Adrian Sherwood was soon there and created the On-U-Sound album “Time Boom X De Devil Dead” (1987) for Perry; more Perry-Sherwood collaborations were to follow.

The great “Punky Reggae Party”, the interaction of the rebellious punk scene with Dubreggae, its experimental production style and the sound system culture as it was celebrated in London in the late 1970s, was, so to speak, midwife for Adrian Sherwood’s own label On-U Sound. He had previously released contemporary reggae on small labels.

At that time he also initiated transatlantic collaborations, for example with the ambitious series “Cry Tuff Dub Encounter”. Through jump start help from experienced producers like Dennis Bovell Sherwood established himself as a driving force at the beginning of the 1980s in the fusion of reggae and postpunk. After Sherwood’s work on Creation Rebel’s experimental album “Starship Africa”, On-U Sound became the cutting edge address between dub, reggae and avant-garde, world music, industrial, electro, blues and hip hop for the next 15 years.

Dub Syndicate was the first Dub live band in Europe

In many works, components of all these genres were found in the sound soup. The On-U-Sound band African Head Charge indulges in a distinctive style that is considered the blueprint of psychedelic Afro-futurism. With Dub Syndicate, Sherwood also launched the first Dub live band in Europe.

And together with Doug Wimbish, Keith Le Blanc and Skip McDonald, actually backing musicians for the pioneering rap label Sugar Hill Records from New York, he finally founded the funk-dub-industrial conglomerate Tackhead in the mid-1980s – to name just the most important On-U-Sound projects.

As a result, Sherwood became a sought-after producer beyond Dub and created remixes for mainstream bands such as Depeche Mode and Nine Inch Nails. His work at the mixing desk for reggae artists like Bim Sherman continued. Sherman’s great album “Ghetto Dub” (1988) is currently being re-released by the Cologne label Week-End Records. The preservation of Dubreggae’s archives began in London, where Adrian Sherwood co-founded the reggae reissue label Pressure Sounds in the mid-1990s.

It wasn’t until the new millennium that the restless British Luddite devoted himself to his solo career. So far he has released four albums under his own name. Be it drum machines, digital software and computer tools – Sherwood remains technologically up to date and musically open to influences from global pop to film music to dance floor. In Japan he even scored a real hit with “Animal Magic” in 2006, a cute piece of breakbeat pop in which he once again paid tribute to Lee “Scratch” Perry.

Land of 1.000 Dances

Since the 10s, Sherwood has been traveling through the land of a thousand dances: making mixes for jungle artist Congo Natty, collaborating with dubstep producer Pinch and refining the warm roots reggae and rocksteady sound of US soul crooner Jeb Loy Nichols (“To Be Rich Should Be a Crime”).

The album “Midnight Rockers” (including the dub version “Midnight Scorchers”), produced by Sherwood, gave old master Horace Andy a late masterpiece in 2022. In addition, Sherwood – now always with the young sound engineer Matthew Smyth – produced well-received du albums for the duo Panda Bear and Sonic Boom as well as for the US indie rock band Spoon.

His latest solo album “The Collapse of Everything”, released in 2025, can confidently be called the title of the year. It is Sherwood’s most ambitious work. His sound signature echoes an aesthetic of surprise and dissection. Reggae elements only play supporting roles; harsh beats and sticky synth pads, oriental melodies and homely brass instruments, electric guitar noise and Italo-Western echoes are more striking.

From remix to production method

Everything is extremely cinematic and atmospherically densely staged: music as a soundscape, for which Sherwood long ago coined the term “Designer Dub”. The source material is no longer originals, which he remixes into alternative versions. Instead, tracks are created that are garnished with dub techniques such as reverb, echo and delay during their creation. In this way, dub has gone from remix to production method.

Thanks to software and plug-ins, the mixing console has become an instrument with which sounds of all kinds can be layered and collaged, constructed and broken down. And this is exactly what happens at concerts.

Accompanied by mind-expanding visuals from long-time On-U colleague Peter Harris, in Sherwood’s live dub show we experience how the master creates dub mixes in real time directly from original multitracks. That will be exciting to hear, because in principle the entire On-U sound archive is available to him. Through his actions, everything could collapse and at the same time something new could arise.

The performances are also a challenge for Adrian Sherwood himself: “It took me a while to get used to the idea, but now I feel comfortable on stage. I catapult myself out of my comfort zone with sound.”