Producer Adrian Sherwood has been an innovator in dub, electronica, post-punk, and bass music for around four decades now – as the founder of On-U Sound, he paved the way for artists such as African Head Charge, Dub Syndicate, and Tackhead, while his collaborations and production credits include work with Brian Eno, Nine Inch Nails, Depeche Mode, The Fall, and others.
Having recently produced dub albums for Spoon (Lucifer On The Moon) and Panda Bear & Sonic Boom (Reset In Dub), this year saw Sherwood release his first solo album since 2012’s Survival & Resistance.
Entitled The Collapse of Everything, and blending dub, ambient, Ethio-jazz, and desert blues, the album was inspired by the loss of friends Mark Stewart and Keith LeBlanc, with themes reflecting personal grief and broader global instability. It’s also on constant rotation here at 909originals HQ – one of the standout long players of the year, if you ask us.
909originals was delighted to catch up with Sherwood to chat about the album’s composition, and how he continues to push musical boundaries more than 40 years since his first productions.
Thanks Adrian for talking to us. Let’s start with the latest album, The Collapse of Everything. With a title like that, maybe you’re not that optimistic about the state of the world at the moment…?
Well, it is quite dystopian times. But the record’s quite joyous as well – on tracks like The Great Rewilding. The title of the album, I thought, was very appropriate for our times. When things collapse, you have to rebuild them. We need to do a whole heap of rebuilding.
The last track, The Grand Designer, is actually quite optimistic. There are a few darker moments, and then it kind of gets a little bit more positive towards the end.
The Grand Designer could be God, or whatever people perceive it to be. But the idea was just to reflect. I think it’s quite beautiful.
I know it sounds hippy, talking about your own records – I always feel like such a w*nker in those situations, when musicians talk about their own work. [laughs] And I’m not even a proper musician.
In terms of the title of the album, Mark Stewart [lead singer of The Pop Group, who passed away in 2023] wrote a lyric years ago for something that never came out properly, and it included the line The Collapse of Everything. I’m looking at a picture of Mark as I speak to you actually, out of the corner of my eye. So it was a nod to that, and I just thought it was perfect.
I think the standout track for us is probably The Well Is Poisoned, because if you listen to that through headphones, it’s total sonic immersion. Do you have any personal favourites on the album?
The Well Is Poisoned was Brian Eno’s track, actually – he brought that one to the table. We worked on that one together.
I don’t particularly have a favourite. I have ones that I don’t like as much as others, but I’m quite happy with the whole lot, and I like the way it runs as well. In the old days you had a single, and everybody was like, ‘singles, singles, singles’. I was trying to make a record that flows as a piece of work from beginning to end.
Yeah, it has a kind of story arc. Do you see it as a continuation of your previous work? is there a theme or a thread that runs from Never Trust a Hippy, your first solo album up to what you’re doing now?
Well, I think Never Trust a Hippy was a good starting point. I was really proud of the last album, Survival & Resistance – I was going through a bit of a bad time in my head at the time, and I had just moved down to where I live now, in Kent, in Ramsgate.
I was very proud of that album, because of those stretched out and manipulated sounds – I loved where we went with it, on tracks like Starship Bahia. I was really happy with the overall sonics of that album.
I’ve got a great sound effects box from the 80s, this weird Japanese thing. So I was playing around, putting tracks on the record player, running them ultra-slowly and creating little ambiances that I then warped into the drum sonic to create the mood. Really, that’s what made the record.
It was a lot of fun. I was colliding bits and pieces together. Like David Lynch, slowing tapes down – old-school tape manipulation.
Obviously you have a massive array of digital tools available now. How have you augmented your vintage analog setup over the years with digital? Do you have to stop yourself from going too far down the digital road?
I’ve always had good engineers, and the one I’m with at the moment – Matt Smith – I’ve had for a number of years. He’s of Irish stock, very much so – he’s got one of those great Paddy faces. [laughs]
Actually, as an aside, my granddad was Irish – an orphan, actually – so I’ve got a claim to my Irish heritage as well. His name was John Lennon, if you can believe that. He got adopted by a lady called Mrs. Deans, so he became John Lennon Deans. He was a fantastic bloke – I loved my granddad. Anyway, that’s another story.
But as I said, Matt’s a fantastic engineer. There’s so much brilliant gear coming out all the time, a lot of which we try to use in the production process. Some of it goes under the radar, unnoticed. I’m lucky because certain companies will say, ‘Oh, can you try this? Would you like one of those?’ And it’s like, every time, ‘yes please’.
But then, when all the work’s done, and I’m actually mixing myself, and it’s my time – as Dennis Bovell puts it, when all the musicians and everyone else have done their job, and the ‘music’s spread all over the mixing desk’ – then I’m going to use some vintage favourites that I know. A lot of them might just have one sound, but that sound is brilliant, and it just leaps out of the mix.
I might use a half dozen of these – out of about 20 in total – on every final mix I do. But yeah, I’m always embracing the new stuff, because there are great things out there.
So there’s almost an Adrian Sherwood trademark ‘sheen’, with this vintage gear that you use in the final mix?
Well, I hung out with a lot of Jamaicans when I started out, and everybody used to say, ‘My sound, that’s my sound.’ Everyone was very proud of having their own sound. And obviously, you had the great Phil Spector and all these production houses that did have a sound about them.
So, very early on I figured out that I loved the effects every bit as much as other people loved the music. I was obsessed with all the things you could do. And being a non-musician, it was me thinking: ‘I’m gonna push these things, make them sound crazy, make them bleed’.
We’d cover up the metres and just overload everything, and you soon learn what fun you can have with sound tools. Being in the hot seat, when it comes to making a record, I’ve got the options to shape that sound.
So you’re taking the tools to a different place, beyond their stated use?
You don’t want everything to be too polite. Sometimes you want something very gentle, acoustic… but then my right hand’s twitching, wanting to mess it up.
You’ve worked with so many artists over the years. Does it create added pressure when you don’t have an artist to answer to? When you’re the guy who decides whether a project sinks or swims?
To be honest, I don’t feel under any pressure when I’m doing something for myself. Because I can do what I like, and I can do it in my own time as well.
To be honest, if I never made another record, people would just say, ‘Well, you’ve made enough over the years’. But I still think I’ve got so much to offer – plus this record’s great.
The reality is, though, you’ve got to get noticed. There’s not a world waiting for the next record. You’ve just got to push yourself to do something great, whatever you do.
When I’m working with a singer, or for them – even when I’ve invited someone to make a record with me for the label – then I’ve got to satisfy them, myself, and everyone else involved. And that’s much more demanding than doing something just for myself.
It’s 13 years since Survival & Resistance. After releasing three solo albums, you went on to work on other projects – with Spoon, Panda Bear and Sonic Boom – before deciding to do another solo album. Was there a case of unfinished business there? It’s quite a big gap between albums?
Yeah, in that time I did Reset in Dub – that’s a great album. I did the work with Spoon, I did some other collaborative things, and more directly, I did Sherwood & Pinch, which I was very proud of. That one maybe didn’t get as much love as I thought it might. I really enjoyed working with Rob Ellis [Pinch].
But there’s nothing like doing something completely for yourself. It’s not about being conceited, it’s just that you’ve got to stand by what you’re doing in your heart. Sometimes you think, ‘okay, it’s good, but it could be better’. But with this one, I felt I nailed it.
Are you quite selective with who you work with? How do those relationships start? I’d imagine it’s quite inspiring for you, working with those kinds of artists.
Well, with Pinch, Rob and I met and got on really well. I love the guy. We had some fun collaborating for two or three years.
With Spoon, they approached me to do a couple of tunes. They liked what me and my crew brought to the table. That evolved into an album of collaborations, which was challenging because Britt Daniel [lead singer] is a very difficult taskmaster. But that’s good – it puts you in a position where people are pushing for more, or for different things, and you have to deliver. He very much got what he wanted out of it, and that was a good challenge for me.
With Sonic Boom and Panda Bear, I liked the record they did, and I thought I could reinvent it and make it into something even more tripped out.
You probably regularly listen to stuff and say, ‘I’d love to work with those guys, and do some kind of dub odyssey with their work’?
It depends what gets on my radar, because a lot of the time I’m just so engrossed in doing what I’m doing that I don’t really take on as much as I should. It’s like the news. If you don’t watch the news, someone’s going to say to you, ‘Have you seen this? Check this out.’ And that’s how it works with me.
I read a quote from you about having to get used to seeing your name on the front of albums rather than the back. Obviously, you’d been doing On-U Sound and producing for other people for 30-odd years before deciding to do a solo album. So what made you decide, ‘okay, I’m going to get out of my comfort zone’?
That was the case for Never Trust a Hippy. Real World Records had approached me to do some remixes. But I couldn’t get permission for some of the things I wanted to do from their catalogue.
So, Bobby Marshall, who’s a close friend of mine and was helping with management at the time, said, ‘Why don’t we make a solo album and put Adrian’s name on it? Would he consider doing that?’
It was a logical step, in a way, because I’d been doing gigs where I’d been mixing our bands live for ‘On-U Sound Revues’, featuring African Head Charge, Dub Syndicate, Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, Mark Stewart, and so on. People knew my name, but by doing that solo record I was suddenly projected into something else, and a more useful addition to a poster, for a promoter.
Similarly now, with this record, I’m grateful to still have a decent name and still get booked all over for DJ events or live dub shows. But this time I’ve made a very conscious decision to really go for it with the live thing. We’re playing The Barbican in London in February next year.
That’s something that’s going to be really out of my comfort zone, but I thought: if I don’t do it now, I’m never going to do it. I want to prove a point, a little bit – or at least try to create something really special.
Did you produce the album envisaging how it would work in a live setting?
No. I just made a record that I thought would be interesting sonically. With the live show, I’m going to have one or two downtempo tunes, but I also want it to have some energy – basically an all-out audio-visual attack with the visuals and the sound.
Obviously the visuals on your last couple of album sleeves has been really impressive. Is it about taking that aesthetic into a multimedia setting?
That’s the great Peter Harris. He’s a wonderful, wonderful artist. I first met him when he teamed up with Lee Perry. They were doing some artwork together. Peter and I became friends, and it was a lovely time because Lee was such good fun, and he and Peter were very creative together.
Since then, he’s done the last few videos and covers for the On-U albums, including the recent African Head Charge records. He made a wonderful video for Dub Inspector, which is on the new album. It’s really great.
Is the Barbican show the only one – are you planning to take it on the road?
Well, firstly, we’re going to Japan. I do a thing called Dub Sessions – I’ve been running it with our crew in Japan for about 20 years now. It’s under the banner ‘Adrian Sherwood Presents Dub Sessions’. Over the years I’ve had Andrew Weatherall, Dennis Bovell, Lee Perry, African Head Charge – you name it. We’ve had lots of guests, always supported by some of the best Japanese crews: Audio Active, Dry & Heavy – really important groups in the evolution of Japanese sonic culture.
This year I’m going out there with Neil [Joseph Stephen, aka Mad Professor], and Dennis. Dennis has a new record, and it’s also the 20th anniversary of Neil’s Method To The Madness record, so we’re going to reproduce that. I’ll be there with a live band on stage for three shows. And then, after that, we get ready for next February.
Obviously you’ve been running On-U-Sound for four-plus decades now, and you’ve always been a strong advocate for looking forward and not dwelling on the past. But you recently did the Five Decades of Destruction EP series, delving back into the catalogue and exploring different periods in its evolution. That must have been a learning experience as well – rediscovering what you did at certain stages of the label’s history?
Yeah, it was a bit of a blur [laughs]. The thing is, when you’re making a record, you’re listening to it every day, every single day, for ages while you’re making it. And then after it’s released, some of the tunes you play out for a few years. But then after that, you just don’t play them.
So, with Five Decades of Destruction, some of the records I hadn’t played for 30 years. Listening back, you think, ‘Oh, that sounds good,’ and it kind of casts you back to memories of that period – some of which are sad, because people have passed on.
There’s probably ones you listen back to and say, ‘I wish I’d done that’, or ‘I wish I’d changed this or that’?
By and large, I look back and think, ‘God, you spent your whole life making these silly records and now here you are’. I’m only joking. I’m very proud the label is still ticking over after all this time.
How do you keep things fresh? How do you keep pushing boundaries and keeping yourself excited about it?
I think you’ve got to keep working with a combination of young people, new people. Embrace new ideas with the technology, the plug-ins, all that. Listen to what people are getting off on – even though you might think, ‘Oh, I’ve heard it before.’ You may realise it’s not what you thought it was.
Also, embrace the things around you – like my family, my kids, and what they might be checking out with regard to certain grooves. There are always good things in there to commandeer for yourself [laughs].
Obviously with the catalogue going increasingly digital, you have younger generations discovering these tracks for the first time. What do younger people think?
Well, I would really like to get young people to check it out. That’s a difficult thing – getting anybody to notice anything. That’s what any artist wants, I think. We’ve got younger fans, but I want to get a lot more.
If I get a young crowd in a club or at a festival, I always have a great result – getting them to understand what your legacy is about, the amount of work you’ve done and what links up. They might be fans of one or two of our projects, but until you promote yourself and help them understand it, it’s difficult. Attracting a younger fan base is one of my desires.
And you have to be multimedia now. You can’t just put out the album and say, ‘okay, it’s out there’. You need to do social media, visuals, all that sort of thing.
It’s just so uncertain out there. I’m very grateful to still have a good amount of interest in what we’re doing and trying to make that last. You just have to work really hard at it.
Thanks to Adrian for talking to us. Adrian Sherwood live with African Head Charge & Speakers Corner Quartet takes place at The Barbican, London, on 17 February 2026 – tickets and further information can be found here. The album The Collapse of Everything is out now and can be purchased here. Main photo by Nana S.R. Tinley.
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