NUCLEUS ROOTS - The Heart of the Matter
Interview by Norman Darwen at Nucleus Studio, Manchester, England

P. Lush interviewed by Norman Darwen, Band On The Wall, Manchester, England 23rd April 2004

“This is the fourth album. The thinking around it, like most Nucleus Roots albums, is to promote the artists from the studio. Like the Front Line albums I grew up on, it represents all the different styles as opposed to just having one singer and a load of tracks.

The album is a representation of what we actually do live these days, so if you come to see us, you’re going to hear a lot of these tracks with the exception of a few artists who don’t come out with us. We have a core crew who represent what Nucleus Roots is all about.

The opening track to the set is ‘Nucleus Roots Inna Ya Area’. You hear MC Country Culture on it, he mentions all the artists who’ve been working in Nucleus Roots studio.

‘Feel The Groove’ is a great track that Moses came in with. It was one of those kinds of tunes that happened accidentally. He came round with some lyrics and we tried some ideas but it just wasn’t happening at all. So he went away with the track and he came back the next day with something totally different. We tossed it around, and I got out my bass and Moses had the idea of doing it in an old school almost ska rhythm with that up beat. So I was working on the bass line and put a walking bass kind of style in there. It’s just one of those songs that stuck and it really represents the style of Moses, it’s got that little commercial edge to it.

‘Far I People’ is a tune written by Peter Technical. I was sifting through some of Peter’s old material and thought, “Yeah, that’s a great tune for Nucleus Roots”. We developed it, put it together and then Country Culture just put some lyrics on it. Culture is an artist who’ll just write something live. He’ll do it a few times and right – that’s a track for you. So Country Culture claimed that rhythm track.

‘Lie Dem A Tell’ – I think that was a little bit of a backlash to the industry really from Simon Dan. It’s like people knock you back or badmouth you. Simon had just written some lyrics and I had a track called ‘Realist’, an inspirational track working over an old school style rhythm again. We just got together and penned some lyrics about people in the industry knocking you back and trying to dismiss your ideas.

‘Anything U Want’ – Ossie Gad of the Naturalites works in the studio now. He heard the track when he first came round – again, Ossie Gad is one of those people you stick in front of a microphone and he writes his song as he goes along. We just penned it together; ‘Anything U Want’ was the first track I wrote with Ossie Gad.

‘Shoulder To The Wheel’ – Another one of those tracks by Sammy Clarke written in about 10 minutes really. It’s quite an interesting track because it was one of these tracks he was playing on his guitar just prior to him leaving the studio. He was singing, “Put your shoulders to the wheel, my brothers”, and I thought, “Right, let’s get you upstairs, man, we’ll write that and we’ll put it down”. Within ten minutes we’ve got this rhythm track, we put the bones down to it, and it started sounding as though it has a kind of Burning Spear feel to it. It sounds a little like ‘Slavery Days’ but with a steppers feel to it.

‘Educate To Emancipate’is by a local poet/ artist Ras I-Chy who was pointed to the studio by Simon Dan. Simon told him, “You ought to go and see these guys, they’ll write you some rhythms”. He came from Jamaica in the eighties. He’s been looking for somebody to produce music for his poetry for a long time and he was just so excited to find the Nucleus Roots studio. He came to the studio and we just struck up a rapport and I started building some rhythm tracks for him. Again, he’s quite an easy person to write for; I’ll fling him a rhythm and see if his poetry will fit on top of it. Spoken word sometimes is a lot easier.

‘Bow Down’ - Simon Dan has got a spiritual side to him, so it’s more about that really. Again, the rhythm track is quite a down beat one drop – I do like my one drops.

‘Together Again’, that was another track I wrote with Ossie Gad one weekend. Again, he just came over, sang some lyrics, we put it together, and there it is – ‘Together Again’, nice.

‘Holocaust’ is one of the more recent tracks I’d written for I-Chy. I came up with that track on the drums, when I was playing the drums, based on some old school style rhythms. Again, if you listen to it, it’s got that old school one-drop type of rhythm. I was just humming bass lines while he was chatting the poetry to me. I was on the drums and we got it together. Just a really nice track.

‘Love Was A Thing’was a beautiful track that we found from Peter’s archives, we flung it to Culture and played out a few times and he’d written a song on it. He tends to write a lot of his stuff as it happens so we catch that moment. It has become quite an anthem with Nucleus Roots, it gets the hands in the air and lighters and all that stuff.

‘Sleep And Slumber’- it’s a track that Moses had been writing at home. He has himself a little set-up and a little studio and he builds some ideas. He brought the track to the studio for us to develop. We took it from the raw idea he had and we got together with Peter, the other producer, and came up with that. We did change a few things around on it. It’s an idea from Moses basically that was developed in the studio.

‘Behold’, that’s a track I wrote a long time ago with Don Hartley. It’s funny as well: Don Hartley came over in his dinner hour from work, and he just re-voiced it for me in half an hour. It’s such a great track and I was on to Peter for ages, “we’ve got to get this organ sound”, so now it sounds a little bit reminiscent of Santana – so my brother says anyway!

‘I Want to Be Free’ – Desnya Lashimba, one of the early tracks, it’s got to be about ten years old. I’ve recorded with him about four times now. I phoned him up about two weeks before putting the album out. I said, “Come on, Des, let’s get you on the album. ‘I Want To Be Free’, we’ve never released it”, and he came in, we got it together and he sang it. We changed the arrangement a little to incorporate a bit of his chatting style. He never used to do the chatting in it. It’s a track that I’ve always loved, one of the first tracks that I’d ever written with Desnya Lashimba. He doesn’t work as prolifically these days in the studio but I’ve always got time for him. He’s not always there but we had to get him back on this album because he missed out on the last album.

‘Rocker’s Delight’ is a track that I released on the last ‘Dubhead’ compilation, and because the introduction to the album is from Stix Dan - he says, “Who knows the Nucleus, heart of the matter?” – and that’s where the name of the album came from, I thought, “Yeah, what a great name for the album!” So because he opened the album, I wanted him to close it. I got my mobile studio together and went over to his house and recorded him, and just mixed it as a dub. That’s the album.

I think it’s one of our best albums. The album represents what is right now for Nucleus Roots, and the way it has come about, we’re going to go forward and use this as a real template for future albums.”

- Interview by Norman Darwen