Easy Star All-Stars: Ziggy Stardub
A review of the latest Easy Star All-Stars project. They are so good every time. Reinventing classic rock and pop as reggae.
Easy Star All-Stars
Ziggy Stardub
Easy Star Records
It felt like a gimmick at first, when I got into Dub Side of The Moon it was as a total Floyd devotee - keen to hear the silliness of transporting that classic album to another genre. But, holy shit, and instantly, I loved the Easy Star take. Helps that this is a crack session band with winning guest cameos - singers from some of the biggest contemporary and classic reggae groups. So I stayed on board for the Dubber Side remix project, and adored their Radiodread project (obviously that music really has some great pockets of nuance to explore). They couldn’t possibly have nailed it when they took on MJ’s Thriller (for Thrillah!) I remember thinking. But no, again, it’s a very clever work. So for two decades now, the Easy Star crew have been giving us interesting reworking of classic pop and rock records, reframed as reggae.
Now they get to Bowie. Picking his Ziggy Stardust to remake as Ziggy Stardub.
Yes, yes, some Bowie freaks will instantly recoil - Bowie is goth if anything, not reggae…but he was a polymath, and his music took from R’n’B, which shares roots with reggae and its offshoots. Anyway, park any assumptions (unless of course you’re a Bowie fan that also loves reggae - and there will be many in that camp) and have a go. Because the results are astounding. Maybe this is as good, in its way, as that original Dub Side project. It certainly makes more sense than the Thriller and Sgt. Pepper’s Dub albums (and they were fine).
It’s just how easy these songs slip into the reggae groove. Particularly Soul Love, Five Years and Moonage Daydream. Some big name singers contribute - and the most welcome of cameos, and most truly affecting, is Macy Gray stepping up to sing Rock’n’Roll Suicide. My god, it is wonderful. A song truly recast. But there’s also David Hinds from Steel Pulse (Five Years), Maxi Priest (Starman), Carlton Livingstone (Star) and Fishbone (Hang Onto Yourself). And in a nice coda to the album, the band’s vocalist Kirsty Rock fronts a version of the Mott song Bowie wrote around the same era and played at so many of his live shows, All The Young Dudes.
I love the way the Easy Star band makes you rethink how a song can be - makes you have a whole new appreciation for genres, and how slippery tunes can be, bending and writhing easily into new shapes. I’ve loved everything they’ve done, on some level at least, and this is one of their finest. There’s that added thing too, where you instantly reach for the source material after. And as much as I love so many Bowie albums, Ziggy was my gateway, so it will always hold a special place in my heart.
