Patience a virtue for Dub Asylum
09 October 2002

Patience is a virtue, Peter McLennan - aka Dub Asylum - has discovered. He talks to Mike Houlahan, NZPA. From www.stuff.co.nz

A decade ago, Peter McLennan was the guitarist in a highly-promising band called Hallelujah Picassos.

Their grimy mix of funk, punk, hip hop and reggae soon found favour with a wide variety of music lovers, and their explosive live shows are still fondly recalled.

Two albums and a few eps down the line, Hallelujah Picassos called it a day. They are a band McLennan still recalls fondly.

"A friend was saying to me just the other day if we'd hung around for couple more years until that whole Californian ska/punk thing got big, we'd would actually have been hip," he says.

"A lot of the ideas we had did come into wider currency I guess."

With the lessons of patience and determination well-learned through the Hallelujah Picassos experience, McLennan soon found a new forum in which to utilise them - Dub Asylum.

Using a nucleus of musical gear he collected during the Hallelujah Picassos days, McLennan in 1997 started assembling a basic home studio and began experimenting with home-made dub and dance tunes.

Equipment wasn't the only thing he borrowed from the Picassos.

"Yeah, there is an element of that band's sound in there," he says,

"A lot of the things we were trying to do with the Picassos, particularly towards the end when we were using samplers and keyboards - I think if we'd kept going we'd have ditched the guitars and bought turntables - has come into Dub Asylum.

"I've taken those elements of the band and brought them into the electronic realm."

The first Dub Asylum ep was released in 1999, and the following year renowned talentspotter Trevor Reekie picked up R U Ready? from the ep for a compilation on his Antenna label.

Reekie also suggested McLennan might want to offer him an album, an offer that McLennan was all to keen to accept.

"A year ago I developed my sound to the point where I thought I'd compiled enough tracks and it was finished," McLennan recalls.

"Trevor Reekie said to me 'Go away and write some more songs.' It really pissed me off at the time because I thought it was finished, but one of the reasons why I like working with him is that I trust his judgment, and he was right.

"I went away and wrote some more songs with Sandy Mill (SJD, Spacesuit) - there are songs on the album like What The Funk that came out of that - so it's a better album for that I think.

"It's nice to get an album out when you want to get it out, but it's also nice to work on it and try and make it a more solid offering."

Patience was indeed Dub Asylum's watchword.

It's also the title of one of She Dubs Me, She Dubs Me Not's most impressive songs. Boasting an infectious shuffling beat and a cutting vocal from Paulette Edwards, it marks the beginning of the Dub Asylum story, McLennan says.

"Patience was originally on the first ep I released. It was one that I was keen to give a wider exposure because that ep was a CD burn that I put out myself and it didn't have the hugest amount of exposure. It sold a few copies, but it wasn't that huge.

"Some of the tunes on the album I laboured over, but the ones I'm happiest with are the ones that came about almost by chance.

"One I did with Sandy called Scratch And Sniff came about because I was playing this old record at home one day and it came to the end and the run-out groove was quite rhythmic.

"I thought, that almost sounds like a drum loop, so I sampled it and chopped it up and used it. It's nothing more than the scratch at the end of a record, but it became something more. I like happy accidents like that."

Thankfully, for those seduced by Dub Asylum's debut offering, a second album shouldn't take as long to make, McLennan says. Two new tracks have been finished for an upcoming summer tour and four other tracks are under way at the moment.

The best thing about finally having album number one out, McLennan says, is that he now has something to live up to.

"It's good having the album done and various remixes from Paddy Free (Pitch Black) and Jed Town (Fetus Productions, ICU) on it - it's set the benchmark so anything I produce now has to be a step up.

"It has to be as good or better than what I've already done, which is a challenge but it's a satisfying one."