Tune of the Week: Scientist

In the early 80s Kingston based audio engineer Hopeton Overton Brown, aka Scientist, mixed and recorded a series of four dub albums for the UK based label Greensleeves. Each one featured a cheeky title portraying the dub mixer as a hero type character along with amazing cover art by Tony McDermott. The third album of the series, “Scientist Rids the World of the Evil Curse of the Vampires” is by far the best of the lot. Not only are the dubs superbly mixed, but the whole album serves as a creepy kind of concept album indebted to all things scary. Unfortunately, due to a very horribly litigated copyright lawsuit, Greensleeves has gone forward with taking Brown’s credit off the albums and has now turned the producers of the original tracks into the heroes on the covers. This historical revision is vile and ruins the legacy the great Scientist as well as tarnishing the already muddled story of reggae. That’s the REAL horror story, folks!