Sherwood was born on the outskirts of London in 1958. By the tender age of 11, he was lurking about the door of a reggae club to hear the music. Within two years he was DJing at the club for teenage reggae parties. Sherwood attributes his proclivity for black music to growing up in a multiracial community. "I think England's unique, in that we have a very, very healthy cross-fertilization of musical cultures in London. I have mates who are Indian, Chinese, Japanese, African, Jamaican - everybody's in London and everyone does tend to mix up a lot here." Very postmodern.

After high school, Sherwood and a Jamaican friend started buying Jamaican reggae records and reselling them in the north of England where such things were scarce. Within a year they were doing well enough to start their own label, Caribgems, which released reggae albums by Black Uhuru, Trinity, Dillinger and others in the U.K. (now rereleased by Sherwood under his Pressure imprint).

"I loved reggae first, but then dub became the thing. We used to smoke loads of weed and sit around, and the dub records were great: all the funny noises and everything. While you are lying on your back, with a very nice spliff and a huge bassline running over your chest, it's fucking great," he affirms.

Although Sherwood plays "some bass," he considers the mixing board his main instrument, appropriate for his transformation from DJ to producer. "I bullshit my way along, really," he says.

"I had enough money to run a session, so I ran a session. I paid the musicians, told the bass player what to play. I made a kind of dub album - for like $300 U.S. (rereleased as Creation Rebel's Historic Moments) - and it sold a lot more than the stuff we had licensed from Jamaica because I made it for people like myself, who wanted it a bit spacier.

"I thought, this is easy. You get together some good players, you get the whole system together. If you pay for the musicians and studio time, and you run a session, then you're the producer. Then by playing more and more I got more proficient and more confident, and as the years went by people started paying me good amounts of money to help them make their records."

The On-U-Sound label was started 1980; around '84 Sherwood met drummer Keith Leblanc, bassist Doug Wimbish (later of Living Colour), and McDonald - who collectively had been the house band at seminal rap label Sugar Hill Records - at the New Music Seminar in New York, and together they became Tackhead. All are featured on Hard Grind as well.