Dub Inc

Dub Inc Yes, it’s true. Before the album came out, we decided to do a tour of small venues for a month, to recapture the atmosphere we hadn’t had in recent years, because we had been playing much bigger venues or big festivals. We wanted to do a tour of France, to have fun with people. Then we released the album, played a few concerts in France, and this summer we’re doing a few big festivals. The big tour will be at the end of September.

Dub Inc When we decided to go into the studio for this new album, we were at the end of last year’s tour. The plan was to go to West Africa, the Maghreb and also Jamaica, to make three parts of the album, and work with people in the countries that influence us. We ended up in a mess because our distributor went bankrupt without telling us, taking with him all the live money, so not huge sums, but enough to carry out this project. Overnight, everything fell through, and it was hard to approach the studio. We decided to try to make the journey but in our heads. In the end, it wasn’t so bad, we rolled up our sleeves, we did bricklaying for two months, and we did everything ourselves, in four months. So this album is a bit special. In terms of influences, we stepped outside the reggae codes a little and moved more towards world music. That doesn’t rule out going back to Jamaican things for the next album.

Dub Inc We handle the studio better than before. We’ve gained quite a lot of experience, whether with Dub Inc or with everyone’s solo projects. We very quickly set up our own studio, where we spend a lot of time when we’re in St-Etienne. Today, the studio is no longer a pretext for going on stage. On this album in particular, it was a big musical outlet for us. We toured for two years without a break, we travelled a lot abroad… We had loads to say, and now it’s really a way of expressing ourselves in its own right. We approach the studio not with more professionalism, but we know much better what we’re getting into, and how to use our instruments. What’s hard for a live band like us is getting the same energy we have live onto an album. Now we’ve understood that we can’t necessarily transcribe it, so we try to do it another way. We no longer think about what we’d do on stage but about what we want to listen to. Plus, it lets us develop other things on stage afterwards.

Dub Inc We’ve been very influenced by Africa since our beginnings. Our lyrics tackle themes like Françafrique and Mother Earth. We wanted an album name that could be understood in every country. While travelling, we realised that "Dans le décor" didn’t refer to anything abroad. Our audience is mainly in France, that’s for sure, but when we’re travelling, we wanted people to understand straight away which path we were taking.

Dub Inc We haven’t toured much in Africa, only in Senegal and Réunion. It’s very complicated to organise tours there, especially as there are 14 of us on the road. We try to develop long-term relationships, building slowly but surely. In Western Europe, on the other hand, even without necessarily having a big audience, we manage to bring people along and share things. We work a lot with sound systems, which are often made up of people motivated to move reggae forward in their country. In Greece or Poland, reggae isn’t as developed as in Germany or France. We manage to travel, it’s not necessarily lucrative to go to those countries, but it lets us open up and discover different cultures.

Dub Inc It’s a bit our identity. You hear a lot about diversity in France, especially from politicians. For us it’s not a concept, it’s a reality that we put forward through words. It’s an identity that comes naturally to us, we were born with it, we don’t need to make a fuss about it. It’s not only the France of tomorrow, but the key to the future.

Dub Inc We started working on the album almost a month or two after Sarkozy’s election. We went through a frankly dreadful year politically. Under Chirac it was the same, we would probably have said the same thing. Our first big tour in Germany took place during the riots in the suburbs. We could really feel there was going to be a track on the album about Sarkozy’s harshness. We really have a problem, he has developed radical methods on social matters. There is really no dialogue at all any more. As performing arts freelancers, we see hard-won rights disappear one after another and it’s becoming more and more difficult to do our job properly. What’s more, being privileged, we see that workers, fishermen, everybody is having a hard time. Even the cops are having a hard time, even though they were the first to rejoice at Sarkozy’s election. There is really something wrong with our president and our government.

Dub Inc It’s possible, frankly. We don’t consider ourselves a political band, we simply bear witness to the point of view of a certain youth in its time. On each album, we try to take a snapshot of our point of view. Without forgetting to look back when we want to talk about slavery or colonisation.

Dub Inc Not really. The purist reggae movement has really developed in ten years. We have quality sound systems, producers like Bost & Bim, backing bands like the Homegrown… French bands take inspiration from Jamaica but also draw on the culture we have received since we were kids. Some add rock, as we do, for that matter. Within Dub Inc, we all have really different cultures, so you’ll find more influences, but I find that reggae is really diverse in France. What’s more, there are bands that get really close to the modern Jamaican sound. When we started ten years ago, you had those doing festive ska-rock, and those taking up the ingredients of Jamaican roots music. For the past two or three years, there have been really good new-roots bands picking up the Firehouse Crew sound. We play at a lot of festivals where there are bands of all kinds, and reggae is really not the least diverse music.

Dub Inc Seen from France, it’s true… I want to make vinyl with my label, and I fully realise it’s going to be an economic disaster. On the other hand, with the Internet we have a medium that our generation hasn’t yet managed to tame completely. I made my first "dematerialised" music purchase not long ago. We’re still in a culture of the object, of buying an object on top of the music. We don’t really know how it will play out in the future. Most independents like us who have used the Internet as a free means of promotion are starting to see its limits, economically.

Dub Inc We take things very much as they come. Our independence means we don’t really know how things will unfold. We came out of the album with a slightly unfinished feeling, not because of the album, which is very well finished… but in the end we had enough for a double album. It’s a very personal point of view, but I feel as if it were volume 1 of a double album. We have enough to follow straight on after the tour, not counting everything we’ll compose during the tour. We have a lot to say musically and in our lyrics, we’re almost ready for a next album already. We want to bring "Afrikya" to life, play our new tracks on stage and enjoy touring, because we stopped for almost a year and a half in France. We have a big tour in preparation, with four or five concerts a week from September to December. I think we’ll follow with an album, a bit like usual. We don’t really want to get any bigger than we are now, above all we want to carry on like this, precisely now that we’re living what we had hoped for over ten years. What we didn’t even dare hope for, in fact.

Dub Inc We all have our own personal production projects. I set up my little label, Green Yard, and I’m about to release a series, the Jah Light Riddim, with Horace Andy, Omar Perry, Brahim… It was a bit of a trial run, we’re going to release the series for the pleasure of it. I’m preparing another one, more hip-hop ragga. It’s a personal approach, which matches the music I listen to, unlike Dub Inc, which is a sauce made of everything each of us listens to in the band. Everyone has their own way of getting out of the common mould. Because we all have the same right to speak in the band, there are no leaders. That means we always make decisions as ten.

Dub Inc Composing the tracks stays simple because it’s natural and we’ve been developing it for ten years. It’s always the same principle: one of us brings an idea and we all develop it together. What’s more complicated is handling all the details: choosing a support act for a concert, the album sleeve, the colour of the T-shirts we’re going to make… All of that is systematically settled as ten. Sometimes you want to escape from those things, because those debates can last for hours! But that’s the strength of our structure.