Collaboration and an ever-expanding musical network lies at the heart of Adrian Sherwood’s On-U Sound Records. From hanging out with Neneh Cherry and Ari Up in the squats of post-punk London to resurrecting Lee “Scratch” Perry’s career and releasing records by the likes of Tackhead, African Head Charge, Mark Stewart and Dub Syndicate, this is a story of creative and communal co-operation. As Sherwood looks back upon five decades of experimental dub, he proudly tells Joe Muggs: “I’m still doing what I want more than 40 years on…”

On-U Sound all came together in and around the squats of London. “When I met Ari, she was living with her mum and John,” starts a typical label founder Adrian Sherwood anecdote: he’s referring to then just-ex-Sex Pistol John Lydon, his life partner Nora Forster and Nora’s daughter Ari Up of The Slits. “I think Nora wanted Ari out from underfoot, so she went and opened up a squat for her – she’d been roller skating past it, seen it was empty and just opened it. Ari said: ‘Oh Nora’s found me a place.’ And I ended up living there for a year with Ari, Glenmore Williams, who was her boyfriend and father of her twins, and Neneh Cherry!” 

Now 65, with several lifetime’s worth of experience, his mighty On-U Sound label and collective is 43 years young and still going strong. Talking from his girlfriend’s house, down the road from where he lives in Ramsgate, Kent, he’s endlessly genial and proud to look back over the achievements of the label and his work with everyone from Lee “Scratch” Perry to Depeche Mode. In the last few months alone, the label has released the mind-bending Afro-techno-dub of label stalwarts African Head Charge’s ‘A Trip to Bolgatanga’, hyper-politicised country-soul with dub-wise horns on Jeb Loy Nichols’ ‘United States of the Broken Hearted’, and the monumental ‘Midnight Rocker’ from the 72-year-old legend Horace Andy – all of them produced or co-produced by Sherwood. But there’s a note of sorrow shot through it all as he speaks, too, at remembering so many lost friends and colleagues. Just a week ago, after all, he was at the memorial for his lifelong collaborator Mark Stewart, so a lot of those memories are raw. 

Back when he was living with Ari, though – in 1978, right at the start of his illustrious career as a producer, with the ideas that would coalesce into On-U bubbling away – he was only just 20. He’d already racked up some serious musical experience, mind. He’d grown up in High Wycombe, a commuter town to the north west of London with a large population of Jamaican and St Vincentian families: from an early age he loved to go to friends’ houses and have “chicken, dumplings, properly seasoned food”, and from 12 he was attending all-night blues parties with ska, rocksteady and very early reggae cranked up loud. 

He was barely into his teens when he started avidly collecting records, then DJing – he was encouraged by local club owner Joe Farquharson who he says, “was a true father figure to me”, and quickly suggested that they get into the business of distributing reggae records. JA Distribution (“it meant Joe & Adrian, not Jamaica!”) took off quickly, and began working with revered labels like Trojan, and as soon as Sherwood could drive he was off, “mapping out the country by reggae shops”. 

Naturally gregarious, he began making friends and valuable connections this way. The journalist, academic and songwriter Vivien Goldman, who would later record with him, recalls being struck by “this absolute cherub of a teenager with long hair and bright eyes coming into Dub Vendor in Notting Hill with these amazing records”. Adrian in turn remembers going into Revolver Records in Bristol and noticing Mark Stewart – then still a schoolboy, on the cusp of forming The Pop Group – “who really stood out because he was so tall and spotty and enthusiastic”. Already a network was forming.

He was making musical connections further afield too, with Jamaican musicians including the great singer/producer Prince Far I, who became a close friend, sending Sherwood his master tapes to play around with, which he mixed to become ‘Cry Tuff Dub Encounter Volume 1’. He pulled together a bunch of High Wycombe friends and connections, plus reggae musicians from their extended network like prodigious percussionist Bonjo Iyabinghi Noah, to overdub new parts and got the dubmaster Dennis Bovell to engineer. “I was this kid pestering him,” he says, “going: ‘Turn this up! Do more of that!’. He’d roll his eyes and go: ‘Right, OK’.” 

Eventually, Sherwood coaxed this ragtag backing band into the studio to record original material, and they began gigging. Their studio sessions became ‘Dub from Creation’, and they became Creation Rebel, thus starting a pattern of very loose “bands” falling together by happenstance that would repeat again and again through the decades. Immediately Creation Rebel started making waves. Sherwood had connections into the punk scene already, via his record shop networking, but even more because High Wycombe rocker – and investor in JA – Ron Watts was promoter of Thursday nights at punk’s ground zero, the 100 Club, and Sherwood’s friend and now bandmate Dr Pablo would drive him there each week. 

He didn’t take much to punk (“a bit of a din if I’m honest”), but the punks loved dub, and, as Noah bluntly puts it: “Right then we were the only band in the world playing dub, no vocalist, just dub reggae.” 

“We were gigging a lot,” Sherwood recalls, “so before long we were supporting The Slits, supporting The Clash, and because I was mixing the sound live, people were coming up to ask if I could mix them too.” After moving to London, he found himself in the thick of a fertile scene, mingling with the likes of Lydon, Jah Wobble, The Raincoats and of course The Slits and Mark Stewart – who had by this time moved up from Bristol along with his Pop Group bandmates.

The atmosphere bubbled with creativity, with anyone and everyone getting roped into recording sessions. “We were young and excited about the future,” says Noah, “I was happy to be playing in a band as good as Creation Rebel, so I was happy to play with whoever else come by too.” Goldman recalls an atmosphere where “you might go round for dinner and end up singing harmonies – I’d be singing along to something with Ari and Neneh, and a couple of girls just from the neighbourhood. Adrian only ever noted down people’s first names on recordings at first, so people often assumed I was Viv Albertine from The Slits, but that was the atmosphere we were working in”. The American singer-songwriter Jeb Loy Nichols recalls visiting the squat, being woken in the morning by Sherwood who greeted him with the words: “Hi, can you drive?” and immediately being asked to help deliver some records “and becoming best friends from that day to this”.

After a couple of false starts, this frenetic activity came together with the birth of On-U Sound in 1980, releases coming from the short-lived collective The London Underground and most importantly, reflecting the sprawling collaborative ethos, New Age Steppers. N.A.S. featured an insane array of talent including various Slits, Raincoats and Pop Group/Rip, Rig & Panic members, experimentalist Steve Beresford (best known for Flying Lizards), reggae musicians Bim Sherman, Style Scott, Ras Levi and Crucial Tony and more, all held together by Sherwood’s increasingly out-there production. 

It would be impossible to list all the radical characters that orbited and contributed to On-U in those early years, but they manifested both on the label and off. With backing from Rough Trade, Sherwood set it up “to be a showcase to get people a deal with other companies” and never contracted anyone to the label, rather seeing it as a sprawling family of some 40 people. Collectives would form within it – as with Dub Syndicate from the various reggae players, among which Style Scott emerged as a leader – as would more abstract entities like African Head Charge which started as a studio project built around Noah’s percussion and gradually mutated into a steadier band.

People would also come from outside – as with the New York poet and performer, Annie Bandez. Crass Records called Sherwood in to record her first solo album as Annie Anxiety, and as she tells it: “We had fun together trying things out, and once we were speaking each other’s creative language it felt like home.” A decade later she would end up making an album for On-U as Little Annie – the alias she uses to this day – and remains close with Sherwood and many of the label family now. Sometimes it was literally family: Sherwood and Kishi Yamamoto, whose keyboards are all over the Annie Anxiety album, and who designed the On-U logo and many of the most iconic sleeves, were dating at the start of On-U and would soon marry.

There were ups and downs to say the least. On-U was perpetually in debt early on. “I was paying for studio time upfront; I had debts secured on my mum’s house,” says Sherwood. He credits Yamamoto with keeping the business on the straight and narrow, and Mute’s Daniel Miller – another lifelong friend who he just saw at Mark Stewart’s memorial – with giving him remix work for Depeche Mode, which in turn made him a producer of choice for huge acts like Ministry, helping to keep the label afloat. Things got very shaky, though, in 1983 when Prince Far-I was shot dead in Jamaica. “That shook me up really badly,” says Sherwood. “It was so stupid and mindless; we’ve lost so many great people that way. I found it hard to make or play dub for some time after that.” 

However, the following year the collective got a huge boost. Sherwood, with Steve Beresford, had produced ‘Watch Yourself’ – an electro-funk track by Akabu, and incidentally the first time he’d used a drum machine – and it attracted the attention of Tom Silverman from legendary hip hop label Tommy Boy. He flew Sherwood over to New York, where he made a whole bunch of new friends – most notably the revered session musicians, Doug Wimbish, Keith LeBlanc and Skip McDonald, better known at that point as the Sugarhill Gang band. They were busy, playing with the likes of James Brown, at the time, but also jaded after an exhausting couple of years on the road and shabby treatment from Sugar Hill Records.

Doug Wimbish, like so many others, remembers the social aspect as vital. “He (Sherwood) had real clarity of vision,” he says, “but more important, after I met him at New Music Seminar, he came to hang out at Keith LeBlanc’s pad on 14th Street. I was able to introduce him to friends from uptown and downtown, and we could just talk at length about his vision – and we realised he knew exactly what to do with this little trio.” 

The rapport was so total that the trio would almost immediately become part of the On-U family, first as The Maffia – the backing band for some of Mark Stewart’s most extraordinarily brutal work – and then in their own right as Tackhead. The UK connection wasn’t without some culture shock though. Sherwood laughs as he remembers picking up LeBlanc from Heathrow on his first visit and to get to East Ham driving through Wapping when the print strikes against Rupert Murdoch were kicking off. “There was a full riot – horses, petrol bombs, the lot – he thought: ‘Fuck me, England’s mental!’” 

From here into the early-90s was On-U’s imperial phase. “We were such a good crew,” says Sherwood. “We could deliver anything. By the time Tackhead were on board we had this incredible funk rhythm section, we had the best reggae musicians, we had African music, when Talvin Singh came in (the teenage Singh played on many On-U releases at the start of the 90s) he brought Indian music... we had a very good posse.” Mixing this potent groove factory with eccentrics like the late Andy Fairley (“he spent every penny he got his hands on on Russian literature, a very, very bright man, beautiful guy and a great poet”) and the firebrand Gary Clail generated gold creatively and even commercially. In 1987, Sherwood helped resurrect Lee “Scratch” Perry’s faltering career, starting a close relationship that would last until Perry’s death in 2021.

The collision of dub, funk, industrial, poetry, psychedelia and more kept the post-punk spirit alive through the glossy 80s, and sparked inspiration for many inquiring minds. Optimo’s JD Twitch for one. “In the mid-80s,” he says, “On-U Sound had such an impact on me I became evangelistic about it, and it directly led me to DJ. My very early sets were probably around 40% On-U or Sherwood, and of course my moniker, ’Twitch’ came from the Sherwood produced Ministry album of the same name.” 

The late Andrew Weatherall was a huge fan too, and their worlds often overlapped, with Sherwood describing Weatherall as his “favourite DJ”, and On-U keyboardist David Harrow working on several projects with him in the Sabresonic/Bloodsugar years.

The creative and personal intensity of so many radically different, incandescently brilliant creative minds all firing off one another was unsustainable though. Sherwood and Yamamoto broke up in 1994, and without her business nous and steadying hand, he hit a point of mental and financial collapse. 

“I got swamped,” he says, “with having to talk to too many people, trying to deal with business and expectation, and just hit the shank and went through several years of not really being in good shape at all.” He never stopped working though. Indeed, he produced some great work like the monumentally moody 1997 ‘Echo Dek’ rework of Primal Scream’s ‘Vanishing Point’, but it was sporadic and took him the best part of a decade to pay off his debts.

The slow climb out of this trough began in earnest with the lively, dancehall-infused ‘Never Trust a Hippy’ – remarkably his first solo album – signed by Peter Gabriel’s Real World in 2003 and picked up significantly as newer generations connected to his work. Unsurprisingly, the dubstep movement provided a point of connection, with artists like Mala and particularly Pinch championing On-U. Pinch’s introduction to heavy bass had been through his brothers’ copies of the On-U ‘Pay it All Back’ compilations, and he and Sherwood struck up an instant personal and creative rapport.

“He’s like a son to me,” says Sherwood. “In fact, him and his missus are coming to stay in a couple of days.” To date, the pair have made two albums together and performed many heavyweight live shows.

As post-punk and industrial gained new traction, Sherwood’s work has found new fans in more Bohemian corners of clubland too. NTS radio stalwart DJ DEBONAIR describes her discovery of African Head Charge’s ‘Songs of Praise’ thus: “There was something distinctly punk yet spiritual about that record which made me play it over and over trying to wrap my head round it. This definitely appealed to the budding DJ in me, always fascinated in music that was somehow unclassifiable – making a nod to different disciplines but creating something of its own.” She also points to his newer work as vital – notably Japanese hypno-rock band Nisennenmondai appearing on On-U in 2016, and the Pinch collabs: “Where you can feel the sound of the UK underground crackle through.”

So now – for all that he’ll talk unabashedly about past fuck-ups, and his sadness at the loss of friends like Mark Stewart, Scratch, Style Scott (who was also shot in Jamaica in 2014) “and way too many others” – Sherwood is happy with his lot. His kids are involved with music too, and he is as busy as ever. He’s just finished reworking Sonic Boom and Panda Bear’s collaboration from last year and enthuses about putting together a new solo project which will be performed in Dolby Atmos surround, which he hopes to take into cinemas as “an audiovisual attack on people.” 

And despite the rollercoaster nature of On-U’s history, he seems notably short on regrets. “I often wonder,” he finishes. “Whether I should have taken it more seriously as a business, got proper investment, actually tried to make some hits. But then if I had, I probably would have ended up selling it out – whereas now it’s still going, it’s still independent, and I’m still doing what I want more than 40 years on. That’s definitely something, right?” 

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This article first appeared in issue four of Disco Pogo.

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