The Disciples are indisputably key figures in the UK ‘New School’ Roots/Dub scene which emerged in the mid to late 80s. Starting out building rhythms in the bedroom they progressed to making dubplates and then full albums for Jah Shaka. Later they went on to put out their own releases and to run the Boomshackalacka soundsystem & magazine. Right now in ’05 the Disciples are producing some of the toughest conscious sounds anywhere--with both new and established UK & JA singers and deejays. Initially they were a two-person crew, consisting of brothers Russ and Lol Bell-Brown. Lol has since moved on to pursue other stuff, but still retains close links to the scene. Current main man/producer Russ (aka Russ D/Russ Disciple) was kind enough to speak to Pete Murder Tone recently about the musical development of the Disciples over the years.  

What made you want to start making your own reggae tunes, to make the transition from fan to music maker? How did you go about writing/building rhythms at that early stage? What gear were you using at this time?

I had picked up bass guitar when I was 15, but it wasn’t for reggae, I never took it seriously but always had the bass guitar around, I got into reggae by the time I was 17 but it wasn’t until much later that I got into making the music, when I was about 24 I started messing with couple of cassette decks, transforming dubs, things like `king tubby`s meets the rockers uptown` and `cultures - peace truce` some others too, then I see in a magazine about these cheap 4 track recorders and drum machines so I bought a tascam 244 and a roland drumatix, to be honest the drumatix sounded rubbish to me but it was a starting point, almost all my early efforts were rebuilds of favorite rhythm tracks, a little later I got myself a better drum machine, a hammond dpm, it had individual outs and it sounded better, for fx I had a roland spring reverb box and an aria (dx1000 ?) digital delay....I started getting a little better at building the riddims and then my brother came in, he could play rhythm and lead guitar, and we’d share things like melodica and percussion, I had two cheap (CHEAP) keyboards, some cheezy Casio with a 1 sec sampler, it must’ve been about 1bit in quality, it was crap, and a Yamaha s01 synth, also crap but at the time I didn’t have money for anything better, still we did our best with these things, a little later still I did get a seck 12/8/2 mixer to use rather than the inbuilt mixer on the tascam 244...we started to hear about Shaka, we knew of him before, had some of his records but was never amongst the sound system scene, at that time it was very underground and mostly a black thing, anyways we heard some session tapes and the power and vibe that was on them gave us some inspiration so I tried to emulate it in our recordings...the roland spring had a whole heap of inputs and outputs and I was able to send the whole mix back through it, out of it and into a guitar amp that was mic`d up and sent back into the mix, heavily eq`d, and it gave it a crashing live sound system kinda sound, or at least that’s how we heard it.  

I understand your next step was pressing some dubplates which you eventually took to Jah Shaka. What happened when you met up with Shaka and he got to hear them? 

As we started to get more into the heavy Shaka vibes we started making some heavier tunes, again still mostly versions of old tracks, but stuff like freedom sounds productions, prince allah / earl zero etc, and we tried twisting the b-line around to give it our own vibe...as time went on we started to get to know a few people, guys that worked in record shops and we played them our tracks, they said to take them to Shaka, I had got myself a dubplate cut with 4 different tracks, I wanted to hear what my tracks sounded like with all the clicks, crackles, hiss and pops of the records I loved, so we took that to Shaka who had an arts and craft culture shop in new cross, we wasn’t expecting anything, just maybe some guidance or opinion, Shaka said he wanted 4 cuts of each and anything else we had in similar style, he didn’t seem to have any prejudice about us being white and making this music, he then said come to the next dance the following week, after that we was totally hooked.  

Well that first album featured 3 of the tracks that was on that first dubplate we gave Shaka and it was all recorded in the manner I mentioned before, we didn’t have any midi setup so other than programming the drum machine everything else was played all way thru...at that time it was still a hobby for us, it was amazing that Shaka put them out but we never really thought much else about it... I’m not really sure how it was received as a release but many of the tracks were mashing up in shaka dances! .... One other thing though, after seeing Shaka in session for the first time it was THE most inspirational and pivotal thing for me as far as making my music, from that point I totally understood what reggae was all about, and after that point I had no problem with coming up with original b-lines, the session had given me the vision, if that’s the right word, to hear how my rhythms would sound on a sound system at x-amount of watts, I could hear it in my head so that even when I’m laying the b-line down at low volumes in my bedroom I could imagine it at Shaka.  

The next Disciples album, “The Disciples Pt 1” (Jah Shaka), comes out in ’89: here the playing, production, and drum programming certainly sound a good deal more accomplished than the last LP.  While retaining a raw feel the arrangements are noticeably more sophisticated and the whole record has a very ethereal/spiritual feel to it. There’s a very interesting contrast here between more classic roots styles and the more relentless and hard-hitting tracks like  “Jah Man”. That track especially, seemed to have had a big impact in the dance…  

Well, when Shaka had said he wanted to release our first album I felt insecure with the production quality, so at the time I went to a local semi-pro studio, I ended up wasting my time and money because they new nothing about reggae and I was still in infancy where more professional recording equipment was concerned so I couldn’t handle the studio’s gear myself, after that experience I knew my only way forward was with my own studio, so after the first album I started upgrading the studio again, I bought a fostex m80 1/4" 8 track, and the newly released alesis hr16 drum machine, that drum machine had a far superior sound than the hammond dpm, and to me it also suited a more `live` drum programming approach, so I made more effort with the programming, the rest of the instruments remained the same, but I guess we got better at playing and of course we were learning all the time...some of the tracks we originally did on the 4 track but I felt to rebuild them and make them sound better, I also borrowed a friend of a friends keyboard one afternoon to put some piano chops in rather than always guitar chops...its also possible I had got myself a digital reverb as well, I’ve never been bogged down in this thing of having to have springs and tape echo’s to emulate old school JA dub, things can be done with digital gear and we were / are in a different era, so I always figured do things in our own way....

I don’t think we had any specific vision or inspiration of what we was doing with the music other than it was being made to be played on shaka`s sound so it had to be made suitably so, and we was attending enough of his dances at that time getting vibes and seeing the reaction to tunes. I don’t read music and had no formal musical tuition, so everything is made up as we go along, I might have a vibe that ill want to do a steppers this time, or a one drop the next, and maybe ill hear some other tune and get an inspiration from that, sometimes after I build a tune ill wonder where I got the idea for such a melody or whatever, I don’t know... jah works maybe!  

The next year saw the release of your third LP “Disciples Pt 2: Addis Ababa” (Jah Shaka). It marks a big shift from the more trad roots styles of the first and second. What production/ compositional changes had u made by this point? You have said elsewhere that the more explicitly digital/machine-like direction taken by Shaka--following Dread and Fred--was a big influence. Why was that? Its been said that the impetus for a lot of the new UK roots productions at this point was the drying up of roots releases from JA (with the steady rise of digital dancehall/ragga). Given that, it might seem a bit strange that you turned to production methods that had a lot in common with the then current JA tunes, even though the UK digital roots ultimately sounded very different…

I was always looking to try to make better quality sounding music, in between the first and 2nd albums I had started looking into the midi thing, that, as said, was inspired by seeing shaka in a studio in brixton that had a programming room with about 7 Yamaha dx7`s linked to a sequencer and two seck mixers, I thought the sound was tuff and the style of the riddim he was building was different, very similar to dread and fred, their tune warrior stance was very influential but I’d never seen their setup so it was that time with shaka, that day I came straight home and started programming my hr16 to sound like a machine rather than like a live drummer, and there was something different about the style of the b-line, hard to define in words, maybe just more simple / strict, and of course making it with a keyboard bass gives it a next tone as well... I was inspired by the JA productions at the time, even though dancehall was the most prevalent style there was still nuff roots vibes as well, but earlier on I couldn’t build that style because I didn’t have the equipment, later I got a couple of sound modules, Casio vz8m and a roland u220, and I got myself a roland mc50 hardware sequencer and that’s when I changed over to working strictly with midi. The scene was also moving fast and in different directions, so I just moved with it, JA music never remained static it always moved on either in style or production, like how Scientist redefined the sound of dub away from Tubby`s.... for me it was mixing the old school roots vibes with the JA/UK digi vibe, but we was still making just instrumental / dubs, and the JA digi style of riddim was made more for vocals, so we had to come with a slightly different style that could work on its own.

That record, “Addis Ababa”, along with the late 80s productions of Shaka, Manasseh and Dread and Fred and co. seems to define the UK roots sound that was to take off in a much bigger way soon after with folks alike Alpha and Omega and the like. 

Did you expect anything like that to happen? And how do you feel about that period now, looking back?

Well, A&O was there from that early time as well, but they were based way outside of London so maybe it seemed like they were later..i don’t think any of us foresaw how the scene would go, Manasseh was on the radio, along with Joey Jay on kiss fm (pirate at those times) so it was good for the promotion of the music and scene, and the crowds really started to pick up in the dances, there were a lot of other artists / producers doing there thing on the scene as well, the music was fresh and it was exciting to many of the newer crowd,  and it had to move on from being entrenched in only the original roots music, and that’s what we all did, maybe not even by desire but by the techniques and equipment we used...we all had a hard time from some of the longer term reggae cognoscenti, but we remained strong in what we was doing... for me I would have loved to have been making the music I’m making now back then, especially from the quality point of view, because the vibes back then was wicked, I’m not totally sure what to make of things now, really I just do what I please to do, everything in its time I suppose  

Cheers Russ!

Do yourself a favoyur and go to the Crucial Disciples/BSL website: http://www.disciplesbslbm.co.uk/

Lotsa goodstuff for roots/dub heads there

And check for the BSL live broadcasts featuring wicked weekly mixes and sound tape clips of Disciples dub plates in the dance back in the day : http://www.disciplesbslbm.co.uk/wsp3.htm

Big thanks also to Dave Kennar and Messian Dread for the assistance.