How many bands have the career longevity to release ten albums? They might have been perilously close to falling apart on various occasions in their history, but the Dub Pistols have rolled with the punches and are now gearing up to release their tenth album in early 2025.
It’s been a long road travelled, full of twists and turns, but with their legion of faithful fans and numerous collaborators and friends the Dubs are in a better place now than they’ve ever been with a new album, their own festival, a documentary, a book and more international tours on the horizon. These renegade Pistoleros are unstoppable.
The Dub Pistols grew out of the big beat explosion of the mid-1990s. Big beat was the anything-goes reaction to formulaic house music, where — thanks to the wonders of sampling technology — literally anything could be thrown into a dance tune. Taking a cue from the Chemical Brothers and Fatboy Slim, main man Barry Ashworth began making block rockin’ beats with pal Jason O’Bryan, and bombastic first offering ‘There’s Gonna Be A Riot’ was signed by Concrete Records, a subsidiary of DeConstruction. A string of missives followed in its wake — ‘Best Get Better’, the explosive ‘Westway EP’, and then a chipper ‘Cyclone’, which dented the UK national charts — and debut album ‘Point Blank’ was released in 1998.
The Dubs were on a roll when big-shot US record exec Jimmy Iovine heard the album. He immediately signed the Dubs to Interscope Geffen and put them on the road. They’d become a fully-fledged band. They played some huge shows with the likes of Blink 182, Korn and Limp Bizkit, and recorded their second album, ‘Six Million Ways To Live’. But just as their second long-player was about to drop, the 9/11 terrorist atrocity happened in New York. Given that various album tracks contained explosive references to geo-political events that had seemingly just played out on the international stage, the project was reluctantly shelved. They had to return to the UK to lick their wounds and rebuild from the ground up.
The Dubs had remixed the likes of Moby and the Crystal Method by now, and Barry had become a fine party-rockin’ DJ. He started some club nights called The Truth in his native West London with pal Carl Loben, and was asked to mix the latest instalment of the acclaimed ‘Y4K’ series for Distinctive Records — blending a mixture of house and breaks tracks by Layo & Bushwacka, the Chemical Brothers, Adam Freeland, Soul Of Man and more. When he finally got the ‘Six Million Ways’ album back off Geffen, Distinctive signed it and led its release rollout with the ‘Problem Is’ single which featured Terry Hall, former singer of 2-Tone legends The Specials.
