Happiness is a warm gun

Right now, there’s a band you’ve probably never heard of stuck in the back of a bus travelling the highways and by-ways of the US. They’re thousands of miles from home and they’re probably not too sure how they got there. For a while, Barry Ashworth and his Dub Pistols were that band. After flitting with fame on the edges of the big beat/breakbeat scene in 1998, they scored an unlikely big bucks deal and left the mean streets of London for the bright lights of LA.

Ashworth – sometime punk, dub fan and a proper acid house veteran – remembers it all too well. “After we started Dub Pistols, our manager went into a meeting with Jimmy Iovine of Interscope. Our manager played a track we had done and he reckoned it was the best track he had heard in 15 years. Two days later I was on a plane to LA, first class and signed a million-dollar deal. It was the start of a beautiful nightmare…”
After three-odd years of touring the US, remixing the likes of Korn, Limp Bizkit and Moby, working with Busta Rhymes and, oddly, scoring the title track to arthouse hit, Y Tu Mama Tambien, the party ended and Barry and co wound up back in London. Would he do it all again?
“When a big deal comes along, you have to take it,” he asserts. “It was brilliant fun for a couple of years. We did some amazing things that I would never have got the chance to do. But when it goes wrong – and for most artists it does – it’s a nightmare. They hold on to you for as long as they can in case someone else makes it work for you and they look stupid. You basically have to rot in hell as they own your arse. Would I do it again? Maybe… but I’d try to use my experience to avoid the pitfalls.”
Now Dub Pistols Mk II are back. A patchy first album – “a collection of dancefloor singles and mixes stuck together to make up an album” has given way to a more accomplished second one, Six Million Ways To Live. And Ashworth is, for the first time in a while it seems, completely pleased with the final product. “With the new one, we had more time to work on songs and make the whole thing more musical,” he enthuses.
And more musical it is – gone are the obvious dancefloor bangers, replaced by a more gritty, thoughtful and serious sound. Flitting between contemporary dub, torch songs, Rae and Christian-esque hip-hop and breakbeat, there’s plenty of bounce for your ounce. Or, as Ashworth puts it: “An urban fusion of hip-hop and dub with a splash of The Specials.”
That “splash of The Specials” refers to the ska touches, the occasional wry look at city life… and Terry Hall. Hall guests on one of the album’s standouts, the delightful ‘Problem Is’, an authentic Specials homage that manages to avoid being a pastiche.
“Terry was number one on my wish list – I’ve always been a huge fan. I thought he’d never, never do another ska record as long as he lived, but he loved the track and came over and recorded the vocals in my front room. It was a dream come true.”
Ashworth, a lifelong dub fan, also managed to rope in another one of his idols, velvet-voice reggae icon, Horace Andy. “Horace is the perfect gentleman with a voice like no other. He turned up eight hours late dressed in a gold lame suit.” Andy – the man who added vocals to Massive Attack’s first two albums – adds gravitas to the album on ‘World Gone Crazy’, a track that’s lyrically similar to Massive’s ‘Hymn Of The Big Wheel’, concerning itself with worldly matters best described as “bad shit”. Ashworth reckons this isn’t a more “personal” album, more something he’s been working towards since he started making music. “A lot of the lyrics are kinda reflective of my life and the whole world around me. It was the first time I ever had the time or the resources to make an album just how I wanted it.”

Dub Pistols’ Six Million Ways To Live is out now on Distinctive