This album had little or nothing to do with Creation Rebel, and everything to do with ADRIAN SHERWOOD and myself losing our minds in BERRY STREET STUDIOS Islington in early 1980. Adrian has his version of the Starship Africa story I am sure, however if my memory serves me well this is what actually happened: Adrian and I had gone into partnership in the late seventies, the idea being to simply create some great music, which in our case of course would be mainly reggae based or influenced, particularly the ‘DUB FACTOR’. Adrian had previously had a label called ‘HIT RUN’, which had put out a few ok reggae releases, but nothing particularly original or mind blowing. Adrian though was one of the best ‘white’ sound guys I had ever seen, he was very young then and when I did a show for the ‘Roots Encounter Tour’ featuring Prince Far I/Bim Sherman and Prince Hammer, I was literally blown away by Adrian’s inspired mastery of the live Jamaican sound. My basic idea was how to get the brilliant sonic dynamic of what he could do live into the records we wanted to make. Obviously there were people in Jamaica like KING TUBBY, LEE ‘SCRATCH’ PERRY etc, doing some seriously mind blowing stuff dub wise! We knew we could not ‘be’ this, but we also knew that there was a way to do a whole different take on the dub style in our own way. Obviously you had UK based reggae producers like for example DENNIS BOVEL (who was not in fact Jamaican), but generally speaking UK reggae production and indeed artists, were pretty soft when compared with the brothers and sisters in Jamaica.

I had come up with the concept of Starship Africa, and had discussed it with Adrian a number of times, he was, I recall very enthusiastic. I outlined the ideas which was basically to create a form of ‘PSYCHEDELIC DUB REGGAE’. I was a huge fan of people like KRAFTWERK, CAN, LA DÜSSELDORF, NEU and TANGERINE DREAM, all ‘THE GERMAN ELECTRONIC BASED MUSIC’! and people like STEVE REICH, PHILLIP GLASS and TERRY RILEY whose ‘RAINBOW IN CURVED AIr’ was and still is a work of pure minimal genius, so I felt we could somehow fuse together all this with the Jamaican Dub Factor, with Adrian’s mastery of the mix, as the empowering factor.

Adrian said he had an old multi-track tape from Creation Rebel, which we could do whatever we wanted with (it is important to understand that in the ‘Jamaican music scene’ of the time the ‘producer’ owned the tape and was the ‘creator’). So we booked time in Berry Street, dusted down the tape and (again if my memory serves me well) dropped a tab of acid each, I had been an LSD enthusiast for a long time and felt Adrian’s ‘CREATIVE KARMA’ would definitely experience a serious upgrade from the experience, and judging by ‘Starship Africa’ I was probably right! However, looking back through time from the ‘Pure Mind Non Smoking Non Drinking Vegetarian No Drugs at all Buddhist’ I am today, it is hard to connect with who I was then or indeed what I was thinking!

We literally turned the multi track inside out, upside down, in fact everything that you could do with studio technology at the time, we did it, so the finished recording had no trace or connection with what it once was. Adrian’s often repeated story in interviews etc, is that I spent the whole session, shouting "More, more, more effects, it’s got to be wilder!" Forcing Adrian and the excellent engineer Nobby Turner, who deserves much credit for the whole thing, to go way beyond anything that had been done before.

The resulting album was a ‘SONIC MASTERPIECE’ unlike anything we had ever heard, and we were as stunned by it as everyone else. During the few days after the recording Adrian and I discussed who the ‘artist’ should be on the album, should it be ‘Sherwood & Garland’? Or any number of wacky names we came up with. Eventually though, and in retrospect a great and misleading, mistake, we put it down to ‘Creation Rebel’. The band of course hated it and said quite rightly that it had nothing to do with them or their music, or indeed anybody else’s music. We took it round to GEOFF TRAVIS at ROUGH TRADE (then round the corner from where I lived in KENSINGTON PARK ROAD NOTTING HILL, Geoff loved it and agreed to put it out for us on our own newly created label (a pun on how Jamaicans would pronounce the word) ‘4D RHYTHMS’ (not to be confused with 4AD).

The reviews I recall were great and continue to be so to this day, the album was and indeed is seen as a unique ‘one-off', a ‘sonic journey into dub space’ and has over the years achieved considerable iconic cult status. Sadly subsequent releases did not feature my name on the production credits, which they certainly should have done, Adrian however did at least credit me as the originator of the concept and artwork, we learn, one must say, many lessons in the music industry.

Part of the Starship Concept was for a movie to be DIRECTED BY DON LETTS (later of BIG AUDIO DYNAMITE together with MICK JONES of THE CLASH.) Adrian, Don & Myself were sharing a rather seedy set of offices at the time in Great Windmill Street in SOHO, and we would spend hours discussing the movie concept outline which was to have featured kind of ‘Alien Dreads From Beyond The Stars’ come to ‘Liberate Black Africa’ and establish ‘Rastafari’ as the one true king! I even developed a script outline for it but, it never got of the ground for any number of reasons.

Neither Adrian or I ever created anything like this again! It is easy to be wise in retrospect, and of course we should have recognized what we had created, put it out under our own names and built on it. However, I left the UK soon afterwards, our partnership broke up, Adrian went on to create the excellent ON U SOUNDS. Happily we are still friends after all these years, and are perhaps older and wiser men these days.

A very close friend at the time (and indeed today) was a polite, charming young public school drop out, called Jonathan Grey, who is better known today as LEGENDARY IBIZA DJ JON SA TRINXA. Jonathan was a talented, gifted photographer and was in the studio I recall for the whole 'Starship Session'. He has in his archives many wonderful studio and other photographs of this period, which will hopefully surface one day. Jonathan in fact shared a flat in those days with Adrian Sherwood in Goldbourne Road Notting Hill, an experience Jonathan has attempted to erase from his memory!