Story of the Song: Little Britain by Dreadzone

From The Independent’s archive: Robert Webb on ‘Little Britain’ by Dreadzone

Dreadzone: among the more versatile and scholarly of ambient dub acts (Virgin Records)

A decade before the comedians Matt Lucas and David Walliams reduced us to a nation of regional stereotypes, Dreadzone – aka Greg Roberts, Tim Bran and Leo Williams – were exploring a quite different little Britain.

Their aim was to “join the dots on a sound picture of a multicultural Britain”, as their website put it, and their second album, the mesmerising Second Light, fuses dub reggae with Celtic folk riffs and sitar glissandos, and chops up clipped dialogue from the wartime films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger into a bouncy trance-electronica.

In 1995, Dreadzone bubbled up from the underground and into the charts with the single “Little Britain”, proving themselves to be among the more versatile and scholarly of ambient dub acts. At Glastonbury that year, it seemed that the sound of Dreadzone chugged and floated from every sound system and tent.