Lion Rockers HiFi main-man Josh Llewellyn has just moved to Kare Kare from nearby Piha because the driveway at his old pad was too steep and difficult to drive his sound system up it.
The equipment is prodigious. He built it himself, piece by bass-heavy piece. His crew can’t set up the “sound” that often because of the speaker’s grandiose nature, but when they do it in Auckland later this May, it’ll be for a six hour, cutlery-rattling jam session with British roots music musician RSD.
Lion Rockers HiFi & Josh Llewellyn's hand made speakers Photo: Supplied
A key aspect of roots music culture is bass. Huge towering thunder-clouds of pillowy bass. Llewellyn’s eyes light up at the thought of it. You can see he yearns for the thump and boom his speakers create.
“They say the sound system carries the swing and is just such an important part of Jamaican culture,” Llewellyn says there wouldn’t be reggae music or even Bob Marley without the soundsystem.
“Without the foundation in the late ’50s, early ’60s when those soundsystems were [about] making music for fun and then it became a business.”
He’s an authority on the mysterious conventions of Jamaican sound system culture. When talking about the live roots music experience he says “It’s like a loud church! The MC is the preacher”.
There’s no mixer in the band set up, just as King Tubby would have done it in the early days near Kingston. As simple as the set up sounds, it actually pioneered a new genre of reggae music – giving us the words “remix” and “dub”.
A steady flow of glorious 7” singles has inspired a new generation here in New Zealand, and abroad, to construct stacks of speakers that do these recordings justice; the original cuts were mixed especially for these outdoor sound-systems, not for the radio.
Listen to Nick Atkinson’s feature ‘The Secret Life Of Soundsystems’ here:
Lion Rockers HiFi will be hosting a jam session at The Bacco Room in Auckland, May 23rd at 9pm. Special guest RSD from Bristol.