Scientist: Scientist Wins the World Cup [DUB MIR]

Why you'll love it

This LP carries all 16 mixes, including the five Extra Time cuts and Golden Goal that first appeared as CD bonus tracks. Scientist mixed it as the final King Tubby's session, as the front cover proudly says, and it belongs to his famous run of themed early-1980s dub albums.

This edition

• Extra Time and Golden Goal bonus mixes

About the album

Hopeton Brown got his nickname at King Tubby's studio, where Bunny Lee watched the teenager at the mixing desk and decided the little boy must be a scientist. He had started out building amplifiers and winding transformer coils there before getting his hands on the faders. By the early 1980s he was the favourite engineer of producer Henry Lawes, better known as Junjo, and his mixes were all over the dub albums of the day, including a run on Greensleeves about his imaginary triumphs over space invaders, vampires and, here, the rest of the footballing world.

The band is the Roots Radics, his most frequent collaborators, laying down heavy, rolling rhythms for Scientist to take apart and rebuild. The sleeve plays the football theme with a straight face: ten dangerous matches, five periods of extra time and a golden goal, with echo, reverb and sudden dropouts doing the dribbling.

Later in 1982 he moved to Tuff Gong as second engineer, and in 1985 to studios around Washington, D.C. The Jamaican national side has never called him up, though on this evidence they really should.

Also at Kops: more Scientist on vinyl · browse Reggae & Caribbean

Tracklist

Listen

On Dub Mir (cat# MIR100741), a reissue of the 1982 album.