Keith Hudson - Disc of the day

Keith Hudson
Playing it Cool & Playing It Right

(Joint International, 1981/Basic Replay, 2003)

Dub dentist goes soundscape mental on the spookiest record in the genre

Remember the days before the electric interweb when you could own an album about which you knew so little that it somehow added to the magic of the sounds within? Playing It Cool... was like that for me. I knew Hudson was the Kingston dentist who’d sunk his earnings into his own record label and produced hits for the likes of John Holt, Delroy Wilson and Alton Ellis, but what was this? There was no information on the sleeve and the sounds within suggested some kind of Manichean battle between light and darkness. Hudson’s voice was weary and odd and the album was sequenced so that his mournful attempts at dancefloor reggae were followed by their nebulous dub doppelgängers, ghostly slide areas of delirious boom sodden with reverb and snatches of distorted voice and guitar. Turns out the tracks were cut in New York in 1981 with fellow ex-pat, Lloyd Bullwackie Barnes and were originally intended as backing rhythms for his son to sing over. How that simple idea became this formless infinity of weird is anyone’s guess but if you fancy hearing a genre pushed to its absolute terrifying limits look no further.

Andrew Male

Posted by Danny_Eccleston at 6:00 AM GMT 15/01/2008