It’s the Christmas reggae song the Grinch would love – I’ve Got You Nothing For Christmas.
Brisbane musician, producer and reggae dub master Mick Dick wrote that song for his partner, acclaimed artist Kellie O’Dempsey, a couple of years ago and has now decided to share it with the wider world, for better or worse.
“I didn’t get my girlfriend anything for Christmas that year,” Dick recalls. “So, I wrote the song and gave her that. She had said, ‘just get me something small’, so I thought that would do. ‘I wrote this song and recorded it for you’, I told her. She just went into the kitchen.”
Which was a kind of critique of the song, I guess. But now, unabashed, Dick wants to share it with the world (and hopefully he has actually bought O’Dempsey a present this year).
The song is reggae style and is a comic number sung, or intoned at least, in a gritty British accent for a bit of theatrics – preview it on YouTube, below, or buy it on Mick Dick’s bandcamp site. The song could just take off and replace all those schmaltzy Christmas tunes that we get year in year out.
You might like
It’s a bit of fun but a diversion from Dick’s more serious work, which is spreading the gospel of reggae dub. Mick started out as a bass player in bands and progressed to become a bit of a jazz man. He has played with the likes of Wynton Marsalis and O’Donel Levy, among others.
Dick, 63, has lived and played in a number of cities including Singapore, where he lived as a boy for some years and where he worked as a musician much later.
He studied jazz at the Victorian College of the Arts and has performed across many genres. Now he’s actively involved in sound design. As well as recording numerous albums in his favorite genre, reggae dub, he and O’Dempsey team up on projects. They will be appearing at the Horizon Festival on the Sunshine Coast next year and have performed at MONA FOMA, the National Gallery of Australia and elsewhere.
It was an installation of O’Dempsey’s at the Museum of Brisbane a few years ago that led to my discovery of Dick’s work. I was interviewing O’Dempsey and noticed her soundscape seemed to be rather dubbish. When I inquired, she explained that her partner was a reggae dub recording artist and producer.
Being a reggae and dub fan I was intrigued, so I visited his studio at Brunswick Heads in northern NSW. The couple then moved to Brisbane where their New Farm garage has become Crusty Dub Studio, as he calls it.
Dick’s biography describes what he does rather well: “Using retro analogue sound gear, custom made bass instrument and audio sampling his work appears to alter time and space through a colourful and absurd palette o subtlety and wonder.”
Subscribe for updates
The Aria Award-nominated musician has a solid track record of creating solid dub albums. If you’re not sure what dub is, he explains that it’s a style of reggae stripped of vocals mostly. It grew out of reggae in the late 1960s and early 1970s and is considered a subgenre of reggae.
“Bass and drums are important,” Dick explains. “It’s kind of deconstructing an existing tune and dropping the vocals out and using effects to change it up.”
He performed with renowned Jamaican dub master Scientist (Hopeton Overton Brown) at The Zoo in Brisbane last year. Creating dub albums has become his thing following a massive stroke in 2016.
“I nearly died and it took months of rehabilitation to learn how to walk and talk again,” he explains. “I thought I would never play again.”
But he manages to dabble in various instruments including keyboards, melodica and guitar when building, layer by layer, his acclaimed records.
They include catchily titled albums such as Dub Day Afternoon and Dirty Dubs Done Dirt Cheap, a tribute to AC/DC. He has also applied his dub magic to an album of classic Australian rock songs (10 Dubnamic Hits), creating tracks such as Dub on the Avenue ( a tribute to Richard Clapton’s Girls on the Avenue) and other numbers based on great Aussie rock. Carlton Dub is a homage to Skyhooks.
His last two albums have been jazz tributes – Id of Ra is a salute to the otherworldly American jazz artist Sun Ra. Any jazz aficionado will get it when they hear the title to his recent album – A Dub Supreme. Yes, it is a tribute to John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. “These are homages,” Dick says.
He’s happy that dub has made its way into the mainstream lately through electronic and other contemporary styles, although he thinks a lot of people still aren’t quite sure what dub is. He’s a bit old school in his approach. He loves the anti-establishment and social justice messages of reggae and dub reggae and this music has helped him recover after his stroke. He has gone on to forge a unique place in Australian music history.
There are a few other dub masters around – but only a few. And I’m not sure any of them have put out a Christmas reggae song.
If you don’t approve of yuletide consumerism, I’ve Got You Nothing For Christmas could become your new silly season theme song. Yeah, mon.