“I’m not a musician, I’m just a fan who owns a lot of music,” smiles Tom Roebuck over a video call from his home in Essex, “so to get people who I really respected saying that they liked what I was doing was nice and made me feel like maybe I was doing something right.” Roebuck knew he was onto something when NTS DJs like Jack Rollo and blogs like Test Pressing started following his Instagram account, Dubwise Vinyl. Much of his inspiration for starting the Instagram blog-turned-record-store came from Jack Rollo and Elaine Tierney’s radio show, Time is Away, and the way Rollo would share clips of records on his Instagram with a bit of context for each track. Roebuck thought that this level of detail was lacking on most Insta blogs posting about records, so decided to emulate it, sharing clips of his own reggae record collection with the world.
Between 2018 and 2019, his following grew to the point that he wanted to turn it into a physical shop and teamed up with Hex Records, a store in Ipswich. But Roebuck soon found out that Hex’s clientele were more into guitar music and he was having more success selling his niche of dub and reggae online. So when the pandemic struck he traded footfall for page clicks. “Being internet-only makes me feel a bit awkward,” he admits. “Record shops played a big part of my life growing up. I had my favourite record shop in High Wycombe and it played an important part in my musical education. But I couldn't make [running a physical shop] work. I don’t think a niche shop in a small provincial town works.”
70’s Jamaican roots reggae and dub is at the heart of Dubwise Vinyl because, according to Roebuck, “everything spawns from that.” He likens following reggae and dub as like peeling back layers of an onion: reggae’s history is complex. Its popularity was intertwined with Jamaican politics back in the 70s when it was used to coax voters along to presidential rallies, and there have been many disputes over who owns the rights to what record. One example Roebuck brings up is the controversy between British label Greensleeves and Jamaican dub producer, Scientist, which has led to their being doubles of records like “Scientist Meets the Space Invaders” and “Linval presents Space Invaders”.
Anyone who is new to reggae might get overwhelmed by the many versions of a track that get made and the riddims that get recycled. Dubwise Vinyl’s charm lies in how it tries to make dub and reggae accessible to newcomers and share the diverse ways in which this pioneering genre has been interpreted around the world. “My store probably isn't the place to start if you've got 40 years of experience in reggae and dub,” admits Roebuck. “Bringing it back to the onion layers, if you’ve followed reggae all your life, you're probably near the core and you want to go to someone who's got those last [records] you haven't got. I’m working my way to the middle in my own little way and bringing people along with me.”
On the site there’s a section called “Essentials” where you’ll find King Tubby’s “King of Dub”, The Upsetters’ “Blackboard Jungle Dub” and a cluster of Vivian Jackson 7”s. I ask Roebuck if he thinks finding a vocalist like Vivian Jackson is a good gateway into reggae. “There are key figures in 70s roots and dub that are worth pursuing. In the case of Vivian Jackson (AKA Yabby You), he's a producer too. It’s good to find singers who are producers because they will have a big body of work.” For Roebuck, it was Horace Andy who led him to reggae after he heard him sing on Massive Attack’s Blue Lines LP.
Roebuck wasn’t always a dub head. He grew up listening to heavy metal before getting into drum and bass and then trip hop. He therefore wants Dubwise Vinyl to reflect a similarly roundabout musical journey. “It’s called Dubwise Vinyl because I love reggae and dub but I also listen to other types of music and always recognise different connections with them to dub,” he explains. Although we don’t have the King Tubbys or the Lee Scratch Perrys of the world around any more, 70s and 80s dub lives on through modern dance music.
“Dubbing something is a process that will always live on,” Roebuck says. “Everyone dubs stuff up. You could say with quite a lot of legitimacy that house music is a dub version of disco. What did they do? They stripped out the vocals and they pumped up the drum and bass. You could say that techno is a dub version of electro. What did they do? They stripped it back and pumped up the drum and bass.” The record by Equohm – available on the Dubwise Vinyl site – is a good example of this. Sub bass moseys along beneath scattered drum patterns and metallic textures in a way that lands somewhere between industrial techno – like Regis played at half-speed – and Bristolian broken techno.
Having this dubwise approach to reggae forces Roebuck to look further afield and stock interesting records. He’s currently waiting on a batch of jazz dub records from Japan which he got sent by an artist on Instagram. Usually it’s safer for record stores to stick with distributors – since the profit margins are better – but Roebuck tells me that sometimes it’s worth putting in the hard yards if it leads to a record that no one else has. “Amazing records sell; that's the life affirming factor of it,” he smiles, before admitting that it’s thanks to social media that he’s made these connections. “As long as it leads to real world interactions I think [social media] is a good thing,” he argues. “If you get caught in a thing of posting online just to get more followers to get more likes, there’s no real world element to it. I find the real world interactions absolutely fascinating because this stuff would never happen otherwise.”
The future of Roebuck’s record store is intertwined with the future of reggae and dub. Reggae lives on through the many ways musicians today reinvent it, and it’s up to Roebuck to use all the tools at his disposal to find those latest iterations. Social media might be a much maligned tool, but without it online stores like Dubwise Vinyl would never have existed and with it they can continue to thrive.
