Dub housing?

I’ve been listening to this tune a fair bit lately:

“Invasion” by King Tubby from 1975’s Dub From the Roots. You may agree with me that this thing starts off in quite striking fashion with that synth sequencer thing going off, and what it initially put me in mind of the music from Joe D’Amato’s film Anthropophagous (WARNING! You will see scenes from a Joe D’Amato movie):

But it’s clearly not actually that despute the similar skittering synth bass noises, and in any case the record predated that film by about five years. And so, in order to satisfy my own infernal curiosity because I am cursed to want to know about these things, I decided to try and find out more even though I suspected that might be near impossible…

…though I could’ve been wrong about that. This rather helpfully observes the original is this:

However, as you can see, the version on the B-side here is actually by Augustus Pablo, not Tubby. So I’m guessing Tubby’s version was specifically made for his own LP? What complicated things was checking Discogs for more information, which turned up a single by Jackie Edwards called “Invasion” on which Tubby is credited for the dub, but it’s not the same as the one on the album… but whatever. That just left the mystery of the “title card sequence”…

…which, implausibly but evidently, is THIS thing, a “special report” by CBS News from 1967 about homes of the future and what 1967 thought 2001 would look like. Apparently they thought computers would be common by then. That synth thing or whatever it is must’ve seemed suitably “futuristic” to serve as the opening titles music; what I wonder now is, was it conjured up specifically for the program or was it library stock? And none of this explains how Tubby got his hands on it or why, but I may have to leave that mystery unanswered… at any rate, there are a few other tracks on that album deploying these “sci-fi” sounds, so it wasn’t just “Invasion” he was being peculiar with.

Author: James R.

The idiot who owns and runs this site. He does not actually look like Jon Pertwee.