‘I man a go show you how fi operate’

Time is really running and passing. Tonight we note that another great Jamaican studio man is gone. “Errol “E.T.Thompson engineered and mixed some of the greatest music ever released in Jamaica. He died Sunday.

“Them time there [early to mid-1970s], Tubby try and experiment more fi dub, but me and Errol start dub music,” says Clive [Chin]. “When I say start it, I’m not saying we going to take credit for any other man that put out a dub album, but we really experiment, because we had the time and the facility to do it. Another man like Phil Pratt or Niney, time was so important that you have to run in and run out … that’s how studio used to run.”

Clive Chin is the son of Vincent Chin, who owned and operated Randy’s record shop and studio at 16/17 North Parade, Kingston. With Errol Thompson as his engineer, Clive produced a string of hits in the early 1970s.

Thompson was an old school friend of Clive Chin, and he became the chief engineer at 17 North Parade after completing a brief apprenticeship at Studio One. “We had Bill Gamett, and then we had this other engineer from one of the radio stations – I think his name was Neville. A man named Mr Galbraith used to come to our studio to fix the organ – he was very good at the amplification and electronic part. He brought Errol down as an apprentice, because my father told him he was seeking an engineer. Errol came in when he had just come out of Studio One, but I knew him before that from Choir School out by South Camp Road and North Street. I had a good relationship with Errol, a very innovative relationship where we wouldn’t just idle talk about things on the street or girlfriend business. We would talk more like how we could further the music, how we can do a different kind of fixture to it, spice it, rather than have the same old pattern of just Tommy [McCook] blowing a horn, Bobby [Aitken] playing a guitar, Winston [Wright] playing an organ.”

This mp3 for you is a well-known tune that features E.T. in a comical studio set-piece. A man comes in to beg a little job. He can’t operate but will co-operate. E.T. runs the tape and demonstrates how he works the tracks for effect. “Watch this bass now, I go play the bass and equalise it. You see it? Watch how it make the gal them a wiggle them waist…”

Extra-ordinary Dub – Errol T., Bingy Bunny, General Echo

It’s a version to Lloyd Parks’ Ordinary Man, taken from a record called Java Java Dub (alternatively Java Java Java Java), one of the very first dub albums (only 1000 ever pressed).

Thompson keeps the bass at the top of the mix for the whole of the disc, shuffling in reverb-treated keyboards, guitar, horns and the odd snatch of vocals or melodica. […] The album’s concentration on drum and bass was a radical departure, and underlines not only the strength of the Randy’s session musicians but, more importantly, the creative interaction between Clive Chin and Enrol Thompson at the mixing desk. “It was works done between me and Errol,” Clive emphasizes, “and it was something new at the time. There wasn’t an album out there that wasn’t a mento, a calypso, or one of them uptown reggae albums by man like Byron Lee or Tomorrow’s Children, so we wanted to do something different and say, ‘Boy, we a go give them a wicked dub album.‘ We didn’t commercialize it, we do it more like a dub plate special, so the market at that time wasn’t great enough to keep the dub flow. People was just starting to listen to this new music, so we didn’t consider it was going to be a big hit.”

Excerpts from Solid Foundation – An Oral History of Reggae by David Katz (Bloomsbury, 2003).

• see also: ET obit from reggae-vibes.com