Dreadzone are still in the groove

They were contemporaries of UK acid-house era acts Leftfield, The Orb and Massive Attack, but Dreadzone’s roots reach back to Mick Jones’s urban groove-oriented post-Clash act, Big Audio Dynamite.

Greg Roberts auditioned to become B.A.D’s first drummer in 1984, and when that dissolved in 1990, he took more than keyboardist Dan Donovan, bassis, Leo Williams and sounds-effects operator Don Letts with him. He also took technical expertise, which he employed to great success in Dreadzone. “It was a brilliant learning curve,” he says. “A great band to work with. Joining B.A.D, I got given a drum machine and I learned how to use a sampler and a sequencer, so by the time I’d left B.A.D I was able to write something completely new, with no real restrictions.”

His first post-B.A.D vehicle was Screaming Target, with Letts and Williams. But it was with Dreadzone, which he formed in 1991 with keyboard player and programmer Tim Bran, that Roberts wrote the layered, up-tempo music that assimilated dub, reggae and techno influences with a progressive house sensibility. He ingeniously sampled movie dialogue and had a magpie approach to borrowing from other musical genres. Donovan and Williams were also on board.

“It was just fun,” Roberts says. “You know, it was very creative to do that. It’s still from the point of a musician. Obviously, there’s a lot of the dance scene coming through. There was a lot of DJ-led stuff, which kinda limits the scope. I’m not putting DJs down, but we come from a live band, so there’s a lot of ideas there. Especially working with people in a band context.

“Sampling and putting all the bits that we like together, the good beat, the dub bass, the spoken-word sample… it was really something fresh that we could concentrate on, at the beginning, because we weren’t really putting any vocals in. So there’s a lot of soundscapes to mess around with there. It just came together naturally, really.”

The line-up has fluctuated, and vocalists have included Earl Sixteen and MC Spee, but for two decades the core sound has remained intact.

Says Roberts: “What we’re kinda about, now, is trying to capture the mood, what we’re feeling, emotions. You know, moving people — falling in love, falling out of love — through song, through lyrics, through a good melody, and I’d like to think we’re improving as songwriters. That whole soundscape thing that we did at the beginning was a good foundation to build everything on. But I still like sampling. I think it’s an important, integral part of what we do.”

In 2011, the original B.A.D line-up reformed for some live dates. Jones contributed backing vocals and guitar to ‘Too Late’, one of the tracks on Dreadzone’s seventh studio album, Escapades, which was recorded in Jones’s London studio.

“Mick Jones is still the number one influence in my life,” says Roberts. “It was great to do the reunion with B.A.D. You know, we’re still friends. Me and Leo, obviously, being in the band together, playing together as a rhythm section for 30 years plus. Dan lives around the corner, and Mick we see from time to time and we use his studio. It would be nice, maybe, to get some new B.A.D material out there, but, in the meantime, we’re hungry to keep writing stuff, so Dreadzone keep doing things.”

- Dreadzone play Crane Lane Theatre, Cork, Thursday 25, and Roisin Dubh, Galway, Friday 26.