New Age Steppers - Action Battlefield (LP)

Action Battlefield catches New Age Steppers in full flight, that sweet spot where late 70s punk’s nerve plugs straight into deep dub electricity. It arrived in 1981 on Adrian Sherwood’s On-U Sound, the second LP from his loose London collective, and it still feels like a dispatch from the frontline of a new kind of sound system. You can hear the city in it, the mix of West Indian bass culture and post-punk abrasion, smoke curling up from a mixing desk that gets treated like an instrument of chaos and clarity all at once.

The voices are the anchor. Ari Up, fresh from The Slits, is all spiky charisma and sudden yelps, treating the riddims like a jungle gym. Then there’s Bim Sherman, whose haunted tenor floats over the top like a benediction. The two approaches should clash, yet Sherwood threads them together into something strangely tender. His early On-U sessions were notorious for happy accidents and late-night experiments, but there’s craft here too, a sense of songs being carved out of fog. The delays bloom and retract, snares crack like snapped branches, basslines roll in thick, and you get those classic Sherwood dropouts that leave only a hi-hat or a stray guitar flicker hanging in the air.

What makes Action Battlefield special isn’t just the fusion, it’s the feel. Plenty of post-punk records dabbled in dub; few surrendered to it with this much joy. The band works like a relay team. A line of rhythm guitar will skank politely for a bar then distort into a metallic scrape. Horns come in like apparitions. Keys wobble and detune then land perfectly on the one. You can picture Sherwood at the desk, riding faders in real time, flicking tape echo on a vocal phrase and letting it dub itself into a new hook. It sounds intricate, but in the moment it’s playful, almost cheeky. Ari Up will toss off a line that feels made up on the spot, then Sherman arrives with that devotional calm and locks the whole thing into place.

The record also tells a London story. By 1981, punk’s utopian shock had settled into scenes that were learning to talk to each other. On-U Sound was a hub for that conversation, and New Age Steppers were its flagship experiment. Members and friends orbiting Sherwood brought in roots reggae know-how, punk nerve and improviser energy, and Action Battlefield bottles it. If you trace the lineage to later UK bass music or the moodier corners of trip hop, you can hear the blueprint in the negative space, in those echoing snares and gravity-heavy low end.

Critical affection for the album has only grown. When On-U Sound rolled out the Stepping Into A New Age 1980-2012 reissue campaign in 2021, this one stood tall, not as a curio but as a vital chapter that still sounds fresh in a modern system. Spin an original Action Battlefield vinyl if you can find it and the low frequencies hit with a lived-in warmth that streaming never quite gets. Even the remastered pressings keep the air in the room, that slight waver from tape and the tactile clack of the desk. It is the kind of record that makes collectors go quiet for a minute, then start flipping sleeves to see what else from that era is hiding nearby.

If you’re hunting New Age Steppers vinyl, this is the copy you want to pull from the wall, the one that makes you ask the clerk to play side A while you browse. In a Melbourne record store, it’s the one that lures the dub heads and the post-punk tragics to the same listening station. And if you need to buy New Age Steppers records online, keep an eye on reputable shops that actually grade properly, because clean copies do not linger. New Age Steppers albums on vinyl tend to trade hands quietly, often within the community that knows what they are. The good news is that reissues have kept the music in circulation, so it’s not all auction-site mayhem.

Action Battlefield is not a museum piece. It still feels like a live wire, a reminder that collisions can be generous and that production can be performance. Put it on late, let the bass carry the room, and listen to Ari Up grin her way through the fog while Bim Sherman steadies the compass. For anyone mapping the fault lines between punk and dub, this is a touchstone. For anyone building a shelf of vinyl records Australia wide, it is a keeper, a record that earns its square of space and then some.