Nevertheless, its popularity led to the crowning of King Tubby following a Waterhouse sound clash in the early 60s, and towards the end of that decade, once U Roy became the set’s star toaster, King Tubby’s Hi-Fi shifted gears and moved into the major league. In addition to the transformer work he later did at the premises, Tubby began building and servicing amplifiers for local sound systems there, and in 1958 he established one himself, an initially small set known as Hometown Hi-Fi, which played American rhythm and blues music, and only appeared at select local venues in the early days. He began building radios from discarded parts salvaged from business rubbish tips, and soon opened an electrical repair shop at the rear of his mother’s home. He developed an interest in electronics in his teen years, and studied the subject at the College of Arts, Science and Technology in uptown Kingston, supplementing his knowledge through correspondence courses from the USA. Rather than referring to his waistline (which was definitely slim), the nickname ‘Tubby’ stems from his mother’s surname, Tubman. Yet, the neighbourhood would later become another flashpoint district, once politically-motivated violence became a serious issue. Compared to the serious overcrowding of downtown, Penwood must have felt like a step up in the world. Then, in the early 1950s, he moved with his mother to 18 Dromilly Avenue, in the Penwood section of Waterhouse, an expansive area of western Kingston, where a number of new housing developments had recently been built. He was born Osbourne Ruddock in 1941 and was raised with three brothers and four sisters close to the Kingston Harbour on High Holborn Street, one of the more prominent roads on the eastern edge of downtown. Nevertheless, the remix culture we take for granted today is largely reliant on Tubby’s ingenuity, the techniques he introduced indelibly changing the way contemporary popular music is made and issued.
Greatly misunderstood, and sometimes under-represented in music literature, King Tubby was not a standard record producer until very late in his life, and his regular occupation was providing transformers to stabilise the electrical current of island businesses and sound systems alike.
Like his friend and sometime rival, Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, Tubby was one of a handful of Jamaican visionaries whose innovations not only changed the shaped of reggae in unprecedented ways, but which also formed a template for so much contemporary music production, be it in rap and hip-hop, jungle, garage and grime, or various forms of electronic dance music - especially dubstep, the British bastard offspring of Jamaican dub. King Tubby is one of the most important figures of Jamaican popular music.ĭuring the late 1960s and early 1970s, Tubby was responsible for turning dub into an art form, the creative re-mixing he pioneered at a tiny front-room studio in the Waterhouse ghetto making a long-reaching impact.
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