Lovers Dub | 03

"Pure Niceness (Flashlight III)" - Death Is Not The End

"Just For Your Love" - Sonia Ferguson

"Echo Valley" - Afternoons In Stereo

"'Cos You Love Me Baby" - Paulette Tajah

"Meet Me In Brooklyn" - Yaya Bey

"African Dub Signals" - Mad Professor

"Moonlight Walk" - Skinshape

"The Dub Father" - Ambient Warrior

"Give Me Your Dub (Dub Mix)" - Soul Sugar meets Dub Shepherds

"Sun Shines Softly" - The Soul Session, Anaj

"Bang Bien (feat. Yasiin Bey)" - Nightmares on Wax

"Osaka Ska" - J.C. Lodge

"Love Has Found Its Way" - Dennis Brown

"East of the River Nile (Alt. Take)" - Zara McFarlane, Dennis Bovell

"Lot Of Love (Waxist Edit)" - Sheila Hylton

“Pure Niceness (Flashlight III)” — Death Is Not The End

The mix opens with a fragment from Pure Wicked Tune: Rare Groove Blues Dances & House Parties, 1985–1992, a 2022 archival collage assembled by the London label and NTS show Death Is Not The End from DIY cassette recordings of South and East London house parties. Sirens, rewinds, and toasting frame rare groove and boogie selections played soundsystem-style through the early-morning hours. The MC here is hyping The Memphis Horns' 1977 instrumental "Just for Your Love," the same rhythm Sonia Ferguson rides next.

“Just For Your Love” — Sonia Ferguson

Ferguson's 1978 debut paired her vocal with Delroy Witter's "Harlesden Skank" on the flip, planting the record squarely in the North London Sound of Success orbit Witter would later codify through his D-Roy catalog. The chorus quotes The Memphis Horns' instrumental from Get Up and Dance; the verses are her own, an approach typical of the best Lovers Rock conversions. Lloyd Bradley's Bandcamp Daily guide to the genre sets the wider context: children of the Windrush generation building a Black British pop sound from reggae, soul, and the Beatles, away from the mainstream industry. The 2023 Rocka Shacka 7-inch reissue, paired with The Heptics' "Little Girl," made Ferguson newly attainable for collectors who weren't paying London prices.

“Echo Valley” — Afternoons In Stereo

The opening title track of Echo Valley (Timewarp Music, 2016) is the work of Canadian producer Greg Vickers, whose Hamilton-bred analog sensibility had already pulled in two Hamilton Music Awards before he linked with the Athens-based Timewarp imprint. The album's mastering credit goes to Angelos "Timewarp" Stoumpos. Vickers spent a decade hosting Urban Modernists on Hamilton radio, curating jazz, soul, afrobeat, and downtempo lanes, all of which thread through this album's tripped-out fusion of jazz and funk. The brief title cut works as an overture, a cinematic soundscape that continues the tri-tone reflection of the previous tracks.

“‘Cos You Love Me Baby” — Paulette Tajah

Tajah's reggae rendition of Deniece Williams' "Cause You Love Me Babe" came out of a 1983 referral to London producer Sir Lloyd, arranged by her younger sister Amanda. The track established her on the Raiders label and remains the calling card she still leads with on the Lovers Rock circuit. The original belongs to Williams' 1976 This Is Niecy, produced by Maurice White and Charles Stepney, the Earth, Wind & Fire architects whose harmonic instincts give Tajah's version its underlying lift.

“Meet Me in Brooklyn” — Yaya Bey

A 1:29 micro-cut from Remember Your North Star (Big Dada, 2022), Yaya Bey's first full-length on the relaunched label. Bey produced it herself with Marcus Mims mixing, working a classic dancehall riddim into a quick single. A Bandcamp interview details how Bey, daughter of Grand Daddy I.U., wrote about his loss and self-recovery. The reggae feel here comes from her paternal Barbados lineage.

“African Dub Signals” — Mad Professor

A latter-day Ariwa cut on The First Dubs Are The Deepest: 40 Years of Dub Pt. 2 (2021). The studio was founded in 1979 in Thornton Heath, in the front room of Neil Fraser's family home at 19 Bruce Road, with a name drawn from the Yoruba ariwo, meaning "communication." Fraser, born in Guyana, built his own mixing desk and grew the operation into the cornerstone of dub's second wave, eventually attracting collaborators well outside reggae circles, the No Protection Massive Attack remix album among them. This particular dub leans into the heavy-bass roots-Ariwa sound rather than their more experimental crossover work.

“Moonlight Walk” — Skinshape

From Nostalgia (Lewis Recordings, 2022), the seventh album from Will Dorey, a Swanage-born, London-based multi-instrumentalist who records nearly everything himself on vintage analog gear and runs the reggae reissue label Horus Records on the side. Nostalgia was conceived as a soundtrack to a life rather than a specific film, the cinematic sweep nodding to Quincy Jones and Ennio Morricone, the warmth filtered through Dorset childhood memory. "Moonlight Walk" is one of the album's dub-flecked passages, with twilight tempo and ghost-town reverb.

“The Dub Father” — Ambient Warrior

Dub Journey's, originally issued on Lion Inc in 1995 and remastered from the original DAT tape for Isle of Jura's 2021 reissue, is one of the more genuinely strange UK dub albums of its decade. Founder Ronnie Lion conceived the project as a deliberate sidecar to his Brixton-based vocal roots label, a license to bring tango and bossa nova touches into a dub frame through Andrea Terrano's Italian, Armenian, and Russian heritage and a wider international cast of players. "The Dub Father" credits Umran Ali on bass, the bottom-end pulse against which Lion and Terrano build their drift.

“Give Me Your Dub (Dub Mix)” — Soul Sugar meets Dub Shepherds

The B-side dub of the 2025 Gee Recordings 7-inch Give Me Your Love, a roots-reggae conversion of Curtis Mayfield's 1972 original. Soul Sugar is Guillaume "Booker G" Méténier, a Paris keyboardist whose previous covers have included Timmy Thomas, Marvin Gaye, and Luther Vandross, all reframed through a reggae lens. Dub Shepherds are the trio of Jolly Joseph, Dr Charty, and Jahno, joined here by lead guitarist Sam Isoard. The session was tracked live at Blue House Studio by Christophe "French Kiss" Adam, dubbed at Bat Records Studio on 24-track analog tape, and mastered by Paul Kozmik. The Wailers reportedly modeled aspects of their harmony approach on The Impressions, continuing a cover tradition tied with Jamaica’s longstanding Mayfield affection.

“Sun Shines Softly” — The Soul Session feat. Anaj

From two (Agogo Records, 2017), the second album by Munich multi-instrumentalist and producer Ralph Kiefer, who came up through Poets Of Rhythm and Hipnosis before launching this project. Kiefer's method runs through loop-born sketches that evolve in a mobile studio, with vocalists often recording in their own rooms and the final shape emerging in the final assembly. Anaj, a Berlin artist who works across design and sculpture as well as music, treats her voice as another instrument rather than a featured hook. The track fits the album's broader move into spiritual and eclectic territory beyond one's harder funk backbeat.

“Bang Bien” (feat. Yasiin Bey) — Nightmares On Wax

The lead single from George Evelyn's 2025 Warp release Echo45 Sound System, framed as a continuous sound-system journey in the spirit of Leeds pirate-radio memory. Evelyn traces the title to a battered speaker box he bought as a child for a fiver, the moment that connected him to Kevin Harper and Nightmares On Wax as a working unit. He sent Yasiin Bey four or five tracks ahead of a three-day Ibiza visit, and this is the one Bey latched onto. Their conversations about ancestry, including Bey's partial Native American lineage, steered the vocal toward something meditative and incantatory rather than a conventional verse. Andy Baker's animated video traces a young Evelyn through Leeds landmarks, his breakdancing crew Soul City Rockers, and assorted Nightmares On Wax Easter eggs.

“Osaka Ska” — J.C. Lodge

From Love For All Seasons (1996), Lodge's Mad Professor-produced album where Lovers Rock and dub interlock across the same tracklist rather than splitting into vocal and version. Lodge is British-Jamaican, born June Carol Lodge, with one of the more genuinely unusual reggae careers on record: a parallel life as a fine artist and teacher, plus the distinction of having recorded the best-selling single of 1982 in the Netherlands, her cover of Charley Pride's "Someone Loves You, Honey." The "Osaka Ska" title nods to Ariwa's standing relationship with Japan, where the album circulated in dedicated editions.

“Love Has Found Its Way” — Dennis Brown

The title track of Brown's 1982 A&M album, written with his wife Yvonne Brown and recorded at Joe Gibbs' studio in Kingston with Errol Thompson engineering. The session pulled a Jamaican all-stars roster: Sly Dunbar on drums, Lloyd Parks on bass, Willie Lindo on lead guitar, Winston Wright on organ, Dean Fraser on saxophone. Lloyd Parkes recalls the date in The Gleaner, where he describes recognizing it as a hit in real time. The single peaked at #42 on Billboard's Black Singles chart and gave Brown his largest stateside chart presence. Jeff Mao's reDiscovered piece for uDiscover places the record in context as a deliberate crossover bid, slick on the surface, still rooted underneath, with "Get Up" closing the album in unsweetened roots register. The Crown Prince knew exactly what he was doing.

“East of the River Nile (Alt. Take)” — Zara McFarlane with Dennis Bovell

The 2019 Brownswood EP gives Augustus Pablo's 1977 melodica classic four readings, with McFarlane carrying the original topline as wordless vocal. The session lineup is essentially the new London jazz wave checking into a roots studio: Moses Boyd produced and played drums, Nathaniel Cross arranged and handled trombone, Binker Golding on tenor, Ashley Henry on keys, Jay Darwish on electric bass, Junior Alli-Balogun on percussion. Dennis Bovell, the foundational producer of UK Lovers Rock and "Silly Games" architect, mixed the dubs and laid the soundsystem perspective over the top. The alternate take stretches the form to give the players room to improvise inside Pablo's frame.

“Lot Of Love (Waxist Edit)” — Sheila Hylton

Hylton's 1979 Jaywax/Harry J 7-inch is one of the more sought-after Jamaican covers in the modern collector circuit, a reggae-disco translation of Neil Young's "Lotta Love." The original was a #8 Billboard hit for Nicolette Larson in early 1979, produced by Ted Templeman as the lead single from her debut album Nicolette. Hylton's version followed the same year through Harry Johnson's orbit. Lyon-based DJ and digger Waxist, whose Red Stripe Disco project has been excavating Jamaican-produced disco, modern soul, and funk for over a decade, gives the track an extended edit built for a slow-burn piece of late-night Lovers Dub delight.

Listen to: Lovers Dub | 01