Beats Internation Feat Lindy Layton – Dub Be Good To Me [1990]

It still boggles my mind how anyone could dislike this track even considering how overplayed its been over the years. Its got a killer bassline, drenched in Reggae tuned riffs and Layton’s vocals over the top just destroy any opposition anyone could have to this track. If your head isnt nodding from the get go, there has to be something wrong with your soul man.

Its one of those tracks that has really never fallen out of favour with me. From the second I hear Johnny Dynells “Tank Fly, Boss Walk” sample at the beginning, I have a massive grin on my face. Stick with the 12″ mix, the radio edit just isnt long enough. Hard to believe this track came out 24 years ago last week…

From Wikipedia]
Written by Norman Cook aka. Fatboy Slim, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, “Dub Be Good to Me” was the sole number one single for Cook’s genre-hopping outfit Beats International.

The track started out as an instrumental with the title “The Invasion of the Estate Agents”. While also included as the B-side to this single, it originally appeared as the B-side to Norman Cook’s 1989 single “For Spacious Lies”. This instrumental track is heavily based on the bassline from The Clash’s “Guns of Brixton” with a sample of the distinctive “harmonica” theme from the epic western film Once Upon a Time in the West, written by Ennio Morricone. This instrumental, in slightly remixed form, had vocals added from The SOS Band’s “Just Be Good to Me” (as re-recorded by Lindy Layton) to form “Dub Be Good To Me”. The track also features the distinctive vocals of David John-Baptiste, more commonly known as DJ Deejay or just DJ. The opening and closing line “tank fly boss walk jam nitty gritty you’re listening to the boy from the big bad city, this is jam hot, this is jam hot” was from Johnny Dynell’s 1983 hit “Jam Hot” and became an instant classic and was repeated often, being used as the most common reference to the song. The song was a massive hit, spending four weeks at number one on the UK Singles Chart in February 1990. It was the seventh best-selling single of 1990 in the UK. In the U.S., the song reached #1 on the Billboard Hot Dance Club Play chart and #76 on the Billboard Hot 100.