Croydon Dub Club with The Mad Professor
When he was growing up, Neil Fraser didn’t play football or marbles with the other boys on his street in South London. With an insatiable curiosity about electronics, the young boffin, who had come from Guyana to London aged 12, was too busy dismantling the few items of communications equipment his parents possessed. That’s why they called him the Mad Professor.
Today, the name Mad Professor is known around the world and is indelibly associated with dub, the bass heavy style of Jamaican music of which Fraser was an early international pioneer. As much an approach to music and sound as a specific style, dub springs from reggae but re-interprets it, emphasising previously unnoticed elements of a song to create a hazy atmosphere, laden with effects and unusual sounds.
Although dub rarely troubles the charts, it’s cited by musicians of all stripes as a key influence; the sound has come a long way since Fraser first started putting together home-made sound systems and recording set ups in his teenage years.
“I picked up a lot through magazines and through visiting electronic shops around London, I even used to salvage a lot of wires and parts from waste outside the telephone exchange, stuff that they weren’t able to use.”
In a time before specialist music equipment shops, improvisation was the name of the game: “You had to be able to build and use the equipment needed for recording music yourself or know someone who could do it for you,” says Fraser.
