Adrian Maxwell Sherwood (born 20 January 1958) is an English record producer specialising in the genre of dub music. He has created a distinctive production style based on the application of dub effects and dub mixing techniques to other forms of electronic dance music and popular music outside of the genre. Adrian has been credited as a pioneer in the emerging genre of reggae-EDM. He has worked extensively with a variety of reggae artists as well as the musicians Keith LeBlanc, Doug Wimbish and Skip McDonald. Sherwood has remixed tracks by Coldcut, Depeche Mode, the Woodentops, Primal Scream, Pop Will Eat Itself, Sinéad O'Connor, and Skinny Puppy. In his role as a record producer, he has worked with a variety of record labels; however, his best-known label is On-U Sound Records which he founded in 1979. Sherwood has been a member of the band Tackhead. He considers himself tone deaf, and focuses on making sounds and noises rather than melody.

Career

Sherwood was co-founder of Carib Gems and Pressure Sounds, and founder of Hitrun Records as well as Green Tea Records and Soundboy Records. He is also the fourth member of industrial hip-hop outfit Tackhead, credited as "mixologist".

During the early 1980s, he brought together many Jamaican artists under the collective name of Singers and Players, including Prince Far I, Mikey Dread, Bim Sherman and many others; this helped promote the individual artists at the same time as promoting the On-U Sound Records label. He also worked with Suns of Arqa on many of their early records.

He produced the original score for the 2006 independent film Johnny Was, starring Vinnie Jones, Roger Daltrey and Samantha Mumba. Since 2015, Sherwood commissioned an album from Bristol dubstep artist Pinch; which he twiddled a few knobs on and released under the moniker "Sherwood and Pinch".

On 21 September 2022, American rock band Spoon announced Lucifer on the Moon, a track-by-track dub reworking of Lucifer on the Sofa, with all remixes by Adrian Sherwood. The album was released on November 4, 2022.

Sherwood released his ninth studio album, The Collapse of Everything, on 22 August 2025.

Discography

Adapted from AllMusic.

  • Never Trust a Hippy (2003) (Real World Records)
  • Becoming a Cliché (2006) (Real World Records)
  • On-U Sound Crash: Slash and Mix (2006) (EMI)
  • Tackhead Sound Crash Slash and Mix Adrian Sherwood (2006) (EMI)
  • Dub Cliche (2006) (Real World Records)
  • Dub Setter (2009) (On-U Sound)
  • Survival & Resistance (2012) (On-U Sound)
  • Fire (2023) (Salgari Records)
  • The Collapse of Everything (2025) (On-U Sound)

References

  • Official Adrian Sherwood website
  • Greg Whitfield's Uncarved interview with Sherwood
  • Adrian Sherwood's "roots" in Punk Rock
  • Official On-U Sound Website
  • Adrian Sherwood RBMA lecture
  • interview with ONU drummer, Eskimo Fox