For over 40 years, Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare have been at the heartbeat of the reggae industry.

The two started out as session musicians, working with the likes of Peter Tosh, Bunny Wailer and Bob Marley, and have grown to become legends in their own right. Sly and Robbie are said to have played on around 200,000 songs in their musical lifetime (that’s 13 songs a day, for those playing at home), and their experimental sounds have been a driving force for change in the genre since early in their careers.

It’s no mean feat considering both Sly and Robbie were self-taught. Robbie learnt the bass by picking up a communal guitar while no-one was playing it, and Sly taught himself to drum by banging on his classroom desk with a friend during free periods.

“I got into drumming by going to school,” says Sly. “A friend of mine, Willi Williams, used to come by my home with a tape recorder and I would try to keep time. I’d listen to The Skatalites, Al Jackson, and listen to the Motown stuff… I tried to practise what I heard and realise what was going on. When it was my time to shine, I thought, ‘There’s so many good drummers in reggae,’ and I didn’t know what to do. I tried to do something different to what they were doing, you know?”

Sly decided to develop his style by translating the body language of the performers he saw in his community into a musical language of its own. “My mother and I used to sit and watch the creative dancers, a kind of ballet dancing, but what we used to call creative dancing in Jamaica. I’d watch the body movements of the drummer, his rhythm of his body as he was playing, the beat of his drum, and I was like, ‘Wow!’”

Sly is a man profoundly influenced by the greats who have come before him. His nickname is attributed to his love for Sly and The Family Stone, and he is known for incorporating different genres in his compositions. “Every day you’re learning stuff,” he says. “I listen to a lot of hip hop – I listen to a lot of stuff in general, but I still listen to a lot of Motown because I think [it] was kind of the cream of the crop.

“But in Jamaica there is an old type of music called mento, and for example, there is a song called ‘Murder She Wrote’. For that one I went back and took something from the old school, the mento. Taking something from the old and bringing it forward to make it sound new. It’s something for people to move their body to, and that’s what it’s all about.”

This passion for using the old school to progress the new is key to the duo’s most recent project, a dub trilogy that riffs on their lifestyle in Jamaica. As they prepare to take the stage alongside UB40 and Inner Circle, it’s clear they’ve moved way past their former status as session musicians and into the annals of reggae royalty.

“For the dub, it is always there, and will always be there,” Sly says. “We’ve got two dub albums, so this next one will be the third. It’s called Dance Hall Dub, and it will be a different thing, and I don’t think that has been done before.”

Sly and Robbie perform at Reggae Royalty,Enmore Theatre onWednesday February 17, with UB40 and Inner Circle.

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