Review: Dub War, Fleece

Remember the mid-’90s? The meeja were obsessed with Britpop and the fabricated battle between Blur and Oasis, in which one yearned for both sides to lose. In rock, grunge was peaking and lank-haired Generation X pretended to be sour and world-weary until nu-metal came along. Locally, it was impossible to escape Portishead’s moody Dummy and what was to become the trip-hop millstone. So where did a positivity-radiating punk-metal-ragga quartet from Newport fit in? Nowhere, that’s where. Too popular among adventurous fans of each genre to appeal to the too-cool-for-school crowd but insufficiently popular to achieve a commercial breakthrough, Dub War eventually had a spectacular falling out with their record company and split. Benji Webbe went on to enjoy overdue success with Skindred after a long slog and that seemed to be that.

Now, suddenly and unexpectedly, they’re back. The reason for this, and its implications for Skindred, if any, seem a little vague. But there’s no shortage of punters eager to re-live the Dub War experience at their old Bristol stomping ground. The Fleece is rammed for the band’s first show here in two decades. But there’s also a certain nervousness. Will they be a creaky, ill-rehearsed shadow of their former selves? In short: absolutely not. Over 75 minutes, they completely nail it with a well-judged set that blends the obvious shoulda-been hits with fan-pleasing obscurities.

Dapperly attired in his red and black outfit from the Fun Done video, Benji elicits a huge cheer as he cranks up the air raid siren that traditionally signals the start of a Dub War show. He’s his usual engaging, wise-cracking, heckler-baiting self as Dub War rattle down Memory Lane, though there’s none of the tiresome self-indulgence to which he is occasionally prone. Weirdly, nothing seems dated and their music makes a lot more sense in this genre-bending millennium than it did in the last. The hard rockin’ Words of Warning proves an early highlight; Nar-Say-A-Ting gets the audience dancing and headbanging, often simultaneously; and the acid-jazz/dancehall/whatever Fool’s Gold sails as close to the mainstream as they’re prepared to go.

If Benji’s lyrics occasionally tend towards the simplistic in his determination to deliver a positive message to inner-city yoof (did anyone actually throw away their drug paraphernalia after he advised: “Don’t smoke crack/It’s gonna make you whack”?), they do make a welcome contrast to the more fashionable swaggering gangsta self-aggrandisement of much ‘urban’ music. And while Washington DC’s somewhat over-praised Bad Brains are generally credited with pioneering the rock/reggae crossover thing, all they really did was alternate rock songs with reggae ones. They certainly never produced anything as inspired as Dub War’s finest mash-up, Strike It, which transforms the Fleece into a giant mosh-pit. Jeff, Richie and Mikee are on such good form that it’s as though they never went away.

Introducing their biggest chart hit, Enemy Maker (number 41 with a slow-moving bullet), Benji tells of how a German woman accused the band of trying to sound like Bon Jovi. Had she cited Faith No More, she might have had a point. It’s back to the Pain album for first encore Gorrit and even further to 1994’s Words of Dubwarning for the concluding Over Now. As Benji repeats “You think it’s over now?” as if referring to Dub War’s career, everyone present rather hopes it’s not.