U.K.’s secret weapon, Gentleman’s Dub Club, has become a staple at UK’s leading festivals including Glastonbury, Bestival, and others, amassing tons of fans throughout their homeland and beyond.

The Dub Club give us the heat with their latest rager of an album from Easy Star Records, On A Mission, a truly masterful collection of music. Unpredictable and mesmerizing, from the get-go I was completely intrigued and enamored by this theatrical and at times haunting album. They’ve got a gritty, tough U.K. vibe and I’m all in.

The album kicks off with the dark and sensual “Sugar Coated Lies,” which tells the story of two lovers living out a secret fantasy.

The track, “Antidote,” drew me in instantly with its U.K. ska-reggae vibe and rapped vocals.

“Long time (feat. Sara Lugo)” is so smooth it takes you back to the summer days on the beach!

“Run for Cover” is an addictive head-spinner with a mysterious vibe. I could listen to this all day long!

The lilting and sweet “Right Place Wrong Time” feels like an experience we can all relate to as it laments a romance that never took place due to faulty timing. Timing is everything in life!

The hypnotic “High On Nothing” that closes the album feels like the struggle of life, and we keep going.

Read our enlightening conversation with bass player Toby Davies below!

Photo cred: Fatty 35mm

RF: Hey Toby! Thank you for meeting with us!  You wear more hats in this band besides playing bass, right? 

Toby: Yeah, bass player, writer, sometimes producer, and sort of general clown.

RF: (Laughs) I am already loving this! How did your base in Leeds help cultivate your music, if at all?

Toby: Well, we originally started when we were at university in Leeds. And we were like, going out to lots of different dub and reggae nights. We didn’t know each other when we went to the university. But through these nights that we were going to, we ended up getting to know each other and starting the band off the back of that. And then after, after a few years, maybe five or six years, we left to go and pursue post university life. And we brought the band with us. So, we all live in and around London now.

Yeah, I mean, London was a big recipient of the Windrush Generation when it happened. So Caribbean music is embedded into the culture in many cities: London, Birmingham, Nottingham, and many others. So yeah, we have a great debt of gratitude to all those people.

Also, London obviously has an incredibly thriving music scene anyway. On any one night, you can go out to a concert or gig or a club night, and it’ll be something that you want to watch. I remember being young – I’m from near London – I remember just being desperate before I could get into any clubs or anything. Desperate to go…I  used to go and kind of just try and get in underage. And most of the time it worked. Sometimes it didn’t.

RF: I did the same thing.

Toby: Right, right. I think it’s a rite of passage. You know, if you’re a music lover from a young age, you got to be trying to get into those bars with all the naughty stuff.

RF: You guys have now nine albums under your belts since 2006. It is clear you guys are a tight unit. What do you think has sanctified your longevity and success?

Toby: You know, I’d say the main thing is that we are basically all best friends as we came together out of luck. I’d say luck plays a big part in how we’re still together. And, you know, it’s so special to experience what we get to experience with this group of people. And even when things are going badly or something’s going wrong, if you’re with your best friends at the time, then you have people to talk to, to confide in. We’ve all been through a lot together. And that friendship really kept the whole thing together.

Also, with the people that listen to our music, some of them have been listening to us from literally the jump – from day one. We were having house parties in grimy, smelly basements.  Small festivals, we went on to the bigger ones. There are people in our chat and Facebook who have literally been messaging us for 16 years, saying they really liked the new album, or they got a t-shirt, or whatever. So that plays a huge part in our longevity, and we’re enormously grateful for it.

RF: That’s amazing. You’re so humble.

Toby: Stay humble. Otherwise, I think people make a big mistake.  They take things for granted and believe in their own hype. Those people often end up falling off hard, and it’s pretty ugly.

RF: This new album is non-stop, unbelievably creative and alluring, lyrically and musically — it’s genius!  The album is titled On a Mission. Please tell me how you derived this title. What’s the mission?

Toby: Well, I mean, in my last answer, I kind of answered this one, in a way.  We are literally on a mission to bring our energy and what we’ve made together out to the world. We’ve had periods where maybe we could have gone down a more commercial route…We had, you know, people sniffing around. Labels, major labels, writers and stuff. We’ve always just decided that we wanted to do it our way, and we wanted to make the music we love and stay true to that. So, our mission statement is basically just, you know, just keep rolling out the goodbyes.

RF: How do you feel On a Mission compares to previous albums and fits in the overall GDC catalog?

Toby:  I think the development is in songwriting. The hardest thing to do for me is to write a good song. And that’s something that we strive to do. We just want to make our songwriting better with every album and always improve our musicianship. So, I’d say, it’s different, because I think the songs are written better than the last one…I’d probably say sequentially along our journey of albums. But it still maintains that sense of energy, carefree. We’re not trying to make it more complicated. We want to make this fun.

RF: Did you change your creative approach for this record, or have you largely stuck with the same formula? Is there one mastermind writer or is this more collaborative? Essentially, what’s the creative process look like creating/recording with such a big group? 

Toby: Yeah, there’s multiple writers. So, there’s business cells, but then for On A Mission, we drafted in an amazing producer/songwriter called Bradford Ellis. The singer, Johnny, is one of the writers. Our keys player, Luke, is another one of the writers. Finally, everyone else in the band chips in with mainly with their instrumentation, or if they have any ideas… then it’s a kind of an open book.

We try and keep the final bit of the writing between a smaller group of people just because it’s way more efficient. Tommy Evans, our drummer, is also a brilliant songwriter. He has written several of our most popular tunes. When you’re writing an album, it’s just way more efficient to have a smaller group of people, right?

RF:  “Gone”, It takes a new spin on love that is lost, but more an uplifting reminder of why there’s an ex! Can you tell us how this track came to life?  Was there an actual relationship that inspired the song, or was it written more generally speaking about those relationships we are happy to see come to an end?

Toby: Yeah, it was after a particularly difficult relationship that one of the band members was just way too deep in. He felt like he couldn’t escape. And then it just became more and more apparent that he had to do it. And then when he finally did, he just felt like a weight lifted off his shoulders. That’s kind of where that song came from. The song itself is probably a bit more kind of sarcastic and bitchy than how he felt. But we just took an emotion and ran with it.

 RF: “Play My Games” (feat. Hollie Cook) this is such a gem of a song. Did Hollie contribute lyrics as well or just sing on the track?  

Photo cred: Fatty 35mm

Toby: That was a contributing situation. Yeah, Holly and Johnny our singer wrote the lyrics together. She is a good friend of ours. We have collaborated with her before on many gigs. We are friends, and we love her dearly. She is an incredible musician to collaborate with. It’s like a very dreamy combination. That’s amazing.

RF: “Antidote” (feat. Gardna and Josh Skints) this is my favorite on the album! Can you elaborate more on this one?

Toby: We were talking about how we liked the sound of like, heavy guitars in dub and reggae. We like the idea of the combination of those two things. A lot of reggae revolves around like a riff, like maybe a two-bar motif or whatever, like a baseline. Then we thought maybe we can just up that and put some distortion on the guitars and make it a bit more rock and roll.

We had Gardna, who’s another good friend of ours, in mind the whole time because he’s an incredible lyricist. Then, Josh Skints, who is in an amazing band called The Skints. He is also in the same lane – just a lyrical genius. Flows incredible. The vibes are unbelievable. So yeah, that kind of came together quite quickly. We knew who we wanted to get on it. And it turned out nice. Yeah, it’s unreal.

 RF: “Sleepwalking” has a darker tone and I’m hooked! Can you share with us the inspiration of this track?

Toby: I guess we wanted to make something a bit more like, deep and heavy, and like maybe a bit slower. Tony had these lyrics about how it was during the pandemic. It was just about how everyone was kind of sleepwalking towards the disaster, and no one really had any agency or control over anything or even knew what their future looked like. It’s a bit more of a darker subject matter. But the instrumentals are also quite dark and heavy and concrete. Spooky.  I felt like that was a good combination.

RF: Your music has such mystery and intrigue, storytelling of pleasure and pain, feels so real.  It’s magical! I was having such a bad day and then I listened to your music, it changed my whole mindset. Do you realize the impact you have on your fans? What kind of feedback have you gotten from fans about this album or your music in general?

Toby: It’s hard to know how everything sounds, because I’ve just been doing it for ages. We don’t know what that feels like to hear for the first time, because often, when a song gets released or whatever, we’ve been living with it for six months or something like that.

But I guess the closest we could come to that feeling is maybe when rehearsing a song that we’ve never played before, and everything kind of comes together, or if we’re writing and an idea comes together all at once. And that’s so exciting and inspiring.

And I guess that kind of thing is inspirational for life, when you write a good tune that just really speaks to you. I guess that’s the closest we can come to that feeling.

But also, people are generous and complimentary to us. You know, particularly when we came out to America when we were playing in California. Through people coming up to us, and they’re  just so hyped, so kind and complimentary. And it kind of feels weird when it happens in our view…we’re just having fun, and we’re just like getting away with having a ridiculously lucky existence.

RF: Anything else you would like to add?

Toby: We are releasing a drum and bass remix of “High Hopes” with Selecta J-man and Eva Lazarus. It’s an absolute banger. So, check that out. And yeah, just sending love out to everyone who has taken the time to listen to our music and messages and come to our shows. It’s a quite ridiculous situation we’re in where we get to do what we love and make a living out of it. So yeah, just thanks to everyone.