The Police are, without a doubt, one of the most influential rock bands of the 20th Century, selling over 50 million albums worldwide, and, along with the Clash helped introduce the sounds of Jamaican dub reggae to a wider audience by adopting the riddims and pacing into their own works. So it seems fitting that 30 years after they formed, DubXanne takes their tunes and rework them into a dub reggae sound for a new generation.

Of course, this has been done before – The Easy Star Allstar’s Dub Side of the Moon and Radiodread gave Pink Floyd and Radiohead respectively the dub treatment, and I suspect that some of the Easy Star Allstars had their hand in this record too, although the exact line up of DubXanne is a mystery. Like those other two releases, there are some outstanding reworks, and a couple which miss the target. And, maybe it’s because the dub structure is already there in the original material, or maybe it because I prefer the Police as a band, I’m yet to determine, but out of the three I think DubXanne works the best.

Walking on the Dub (Walking on the Moon) kicks the album off and the etherealness of the original is retained and amplified to create a much more psychedelic experience. Dubxanne (Roxanne) features Eased from Berlin outfit Seeed, and his deep voice provides a really great antithesis to the original Sting whine. Whenever I listened to Message in a Bottle I used to think of a cold, bleak English Coast island, but Message in a Dub featuring Earl 16 brings a warmer, West Indies feel to the song. Spirits in a Dubworld (Spirits in a Material World) has given greater meaning thanks to Benjamin Zaphaniah’s new lyrics.

Being dub, many tracks have the lyrics totally stripped, with only a few phrases being sung and echoed instead of the entire song sung. It is here where the misses strike. Driven to Dub (Driven to Tears) and Dub on the Night (Bring on the Night) both seem a little bit “K-Tel”, but this is only because of the brilliance of the other instrumentals like Regatta De Dub (Regatta De Blanc) and Can’t Stand Losing Dub (Can’t Stand Losing You).

Overall, despite the misses, this album is brilliant. This could have been a quick and nasty knock off, produced to cash in on the Police’s reformation, but the effort that DubXanne have gone into to make the tracks into dub masterpieces, as well as the obvious love of the original material, makes this album truly great.