Wookie works that Malcolm X vibe on a London rooftop.
WHAT’S ACKNOWLEDGED to be the earliest jungle tune, despite its lack of toasting, dates from 1988. Built on a ragga bassline, “We Are I.E.” by young Londoner Lennie De-Ice ruled dancefloors. It was punctuated by the Amen break – an almost regulation breakbeat, sampled from the Winstons’ 1969 soul song “Amen, Brother” – as well as sampled gunshots, and topped off with eerie vocals from “N’Sel Fik” by Algerian husband-and-wife duo Cheba Fadela and Cheb Sahraoui, which in 1983, fact fans, was the first internationally successful rai music song.
In reality, “We Are I.E.” was the first high-profile manifestation of a distinct scene that had been building steadily, as a crowd that would have been raggamuffins now called themselves ‘junglists’. Sound systems had been gradually shifting, as women seemed to love jungle, and flocked to it, bringing everything the guys could ask for – a dancehall dress sense and the sort of moves that would have earned a XXX rating anywhere else. Jungle also appealed to the hip-hop set looking for something genuinely homegrown, as the tunes owed a fair bit to that style, using breakbeats as well as many of the same samples and sounds. The toasting itself may have been ragga in delivery, but the hybrid accent was just as familiar to the hip-hop crowd, giving it that degree of instant communication General Levy was talking about. Also, UK hip hop had, likewise, been moving in a direction that acknowledged rave sounds, corrupting them into a pretty unique uptempo hybrid. One of Marc Williams’ old groups, A Homeboy, A Hippie & A Funky Dredd – I think he was the Hippie – had a couple of massive club tunes in 1990, “Freedom” and “Total Confusion”, with that kind of running-man hip-hop vibe that seemed to owe a debt to hardcore.
The establishment of jungle as the capital’s main homegrown black sound also marked the beginning of east London’s dominance. Garage producer and deejay Wookie, Hackney born and bred, remembers how the area’s Unity sound system was central.
‘My earliest memories of that music was from east London at the very end of the 1980s, and Shut Up And Dance. I was sixteen or seventeen. They were jungle before the name even came in, they had a tune called “Ten Pounds To Get In” which came from a hardcore edge but it had a different sound to it – they were probably the first ones to come with a little tinge of sound-system reggae. That tune was massive, later they did a remix called “Twenty Pounds To Get In”! Then there was [DJ] Hype, who made this big tune “The Bee” with a guy called The Scientist, I was at school when that came out, and the intro was just a bee going zzzzz zzzzz, then the beat started and it was that hardcore sound, but it had a breakbeat and bassline.
‘The switch had started from hardcore and it was out of that sound jungle was born. It happened because of the samples they used – these guys would have grown up listening to soul and reggae and hip hop and playing it on their sound systems, so that was the samples they were using, and it changed the way hardcore was sounding. They started playing with breaks like a James Brown loop and chop it up and make this groove out of it, then they might have a vocal sample from a sound system to put on top. That was how the jungle stuff was developing, and more and more it became, essentially, reggae on a fast beat.
‘You could say that was when London took it back from the north, because the hardcore scene was predominantly Manchester – A Guy Called Gerald and all of them up there. When it came into the jungle thing it was developed down south, in London, and the east London sound system scene was central to it. Hype used to be in a sound system with PJ of Shut Up And Dance from the Pembury estate at the bottom of Sandringham Road, and there was Unity Sound – my dad used to be in Unity. It had been going since the seventies, and had a link up with Jammy’s in Jamaica so they were at the forefront of the new digital reggae sounds. Now people coming off that sound them were carrying into this new scene. Peter Bouncer used to sing on that sound system, he did Shut Up And Dance’s “Raving I’m Raving” and “Junglist” for Congo Natty; and the Ragga Twins were the Unity MCs Flinty Badman and Deman Rockers. East London had a massive part to play in that dance music scene, because as well as the sound systems and the early jungle raves there was the pirate station Kool FM, which was probably the first to really start playing the music.’
Wookie makes a good point when it comes to the importance of east London. SUAD launched their own record label, which quickly became the benchmark for early jungle with their own cuts, tunes from singer Nicolette, and genre classics from the Ragga Twins including “Hooligan 69” and “Spliffhead”, both of which made it into the lower reaches of the charts. SL2 were from Loughton, The Scientist from Basildon, and both the influential DJ Zinc, and Leviticus, of “The Burial” fame, hailed from Hackney. Northeast London played its part too, with the grim warehouse-dominated landscape of Edmonton’s Lea Valley Trading estate playing unlikely host to London’s hottest early jungle rave at the roller disco Roller Express. But it was far from strictly parochial. In south London, the pirate stations Phaze One and Passion FM pumped jungle out across that side of the Thames, while Streatham boys Fabio & Grooverider were developing their own take on the sound at a club called Rage. Jumpin’ Jack Frost, producer of that seminal track “Burial”, was from the south side. In north London 4Hero and LTJ Bukem were flying the flag, while the Tottenham-raised Rebel MC was reinventing himself as Congo Natty and making serious waves as a born-again junglist.
As the style progressed and became increasingly sure of itself, the reggae connection became more pronounced. As well as sampled vocals from singles and Jamaican sound-system mixtapes, many producers built their tunes on classic reggae riddims, just as JA producers had been doing from the days of rock steady onwards. Of particular note were the Ed Solo tunes “When I Was A Yout’” and “Top Rankin’”, constructed around, respectively, Pablo Gad’s “Hard Times Style” and the riddim that began life as “I’m Still In Love With You” by Alton Ellis. Likewise the Ragga Twins’ “Shine Eye” brought Black Uhuru’s “Shine Eye Gal” to a new audience, billing onetime Uhuru vocalist Junior Reid in a ‘featuring’ spot. Not that the ex-sound system twosome were unconditionally enamoured with Jamaican music; they titled their 1991 jungle album Reggae Owes Me Money. SL2 pulled off a memorable skank when they put Wayne Smith’s “Under Mi Sleng Teng” and Jah Screechy’s “Walk And Skank” into the top twenty as the foundations of jungle hits “Way In My Brain” and “On A Ragga Tip”. Somewhat ironically, “Walk And Skank” is a take on Slim Smith’s Studio One classic “Never Let Go”, one of reggae’s most versioned riddims.
The Artist Formerly Known as Rebel MC, now the righteously Rasta Congo Natty..
Special mention in this area must go to the former Rebel MC, who had turned his back on pop rap after chart success had earned him the undying scorn of the credibility-obsessed mainstream music press – as well, curiously, as sections of the UK hip-hop scene. Now as the righteously Rasta Congo Natty (aka Conquering Lion, Ras Project or Tribe of Issachar), he praised Jah inna jungle style and used the lyrics on his albums Black Meaning Good and Word Sound And Power to delve into blackness from a London perspective. He was musically clever enough to pull it off for a broader-based audience, and his ragga/jungle brought in such talented JA guests as Dennis Brown, Barrington Levy, Super Cat and Capleton, but it was never short of a sense of fun – his take on John Holt’s “Police In Helicopter” starts off ‘To all the jungle-ists … To all the ‘erbalists …’
JUNGLE DIDN’T MERELY BORROW RIDDIMS from reggae. As its producers moved away from the rave-y, sometimes open-ended grooves favoured by house deejays, towards more conventionally timed twelve-inch singles, once again the soundman’s dubplate was the be-all and end-all of his sessions. The demand from junglists for one-off specials caused a revolution in London’s smaller disc-cutting operations. Wookie watched it happen:
‘I’ll guarantee you that everybody that’s in this music scene, their dad was in a sound system or around one and they were influenced by that. As I said, my dad was in
Unity, and I can remember him coming home at seven in the morning, bringing back his Tannoy speakers and I can hear them all outside, with the van and that, the sun’s coming up and I’m looking out of the window. [He laughs warmly at the memory]. Because of these sound-system backgrounds, when jungle and drum’n’bass came in they started cutting dubplates because they’d taken on the whole reggae persona – record a tune on a Thursday night, mix it on Friday and you’re cutting the dubplate on Saturday for the rave that night.
‘The place to go was Music House in Finsbury Park, in that parade of shops that’s opposite the park in Seven Sisters Road, by the Kentucky, there’s a chemist shop that’s been there for ages and Music House was above that, on the top floor. It was owned by Chris Hanson, who used to be in the reggae group Black Slate – I think he bought John Hessle’s lathe when he retired. My dad and my brother used to work there, so Chris is literally like an uncle to me, and I used to hang out there. When I made my first tunes I used to take my keyboard into Music House and he’d put them on DAT for me.
‘It was a hub for the London sound-system business back then [late 1980s]. They had practically all the reggae sound systems going there, Saxon used to go there, although I think Unity used JTS in Tottenham Hale. Jazzie used to get his dubs cut there, Chris was the first one to cut a dubplate of “Fairplay”, “Keep On Movin’” and “Back To Life”, in fact he might have been the first one to master that stuff, as he was doing all their Africa Centre stuff. This was before it really took off for them, because Jazzie was still driving his white convertible Golf – that was where I first met him in that car, parked outside Music House. [Wookie used to be an in-house producer at Jazzie’s Camden Town studios.] As jungle got big it really boosted Chris’s business, then it got so big it completely took over Music House to the point at which the old soundmen couldn’t even go there no more.
‘They’d moved to Eden Grove in Holloway, and it’s when they went there that jungle exploded. You’d go in there and there’d be a big queue, like eight or nine people waiting and he’s cutting five tunes, he’s cutting ten – these are all jungle guys, and the reggae man’s like “Blood claat!” and he’s walking out of there vex! These young bloods stolen not their bread and butter, but their whole way of doing things, the whole way of cutting their dubs. It was the same when garage came in, at first when they tried to get in there for cutting their dubs there wasn’t enough of it to make a difference, but when it got big they prevailed and that’s definitely where Music House made their money.’
As a natural progression from this, jungle producers started pressing and selling their own records to independent shops, like Black Market Records in Soho, this scene’s answer to Contempo or Groove. That moved things away from being almost exclusively in-the-dancehall, and, as Wookie describes, turned jungle into quite a lucrative business:
‘This is where the dubplate comes in to play, because now you’ve got raves that are playing tunes, as in six-minute tunes – twelve-inch singles. Although there were a lot of white labels, a load of jungle was getting released. All those guys had their own labels. As well as Shut Up And Dance, Hype had Ganja Records, Jumpin’ Jack Frost had V Records, with this guy Brian Gee from Bristol – they signed Roni Size and Dillinja … Records were selling massively. You had the masters, get it pressed yourself and then go up and down the place to the shops yourself, or use one of the street-level distributors that were springing up. All twelve-inch vinyl. Back in the day Hype was selling fifteen, twenty thousand of one record, and he’s just one man doing his thing, they were all doing it.
‘It was like lovers’ rock in that respect, except that the people that bought the records weren’t necessarily “Ooh, I like that record, I’m going to buy it and play it at home”, this was more about wannabe deejays. By that point in the nineties, the whole deejay craze had gone … crazy! You’d see all those big superstar deejays in all different types of music so everyone wanted to be a deejay, but in jungle and drum’n’bass more than most.’
OF ALL LONDON’S POST-EIGHTIES black-music genres, jungle is probably the most underappreciated, and the least understood. While this may have played a positive role in its development, it’s particularly unfair. Jungle was so important. By building on the foundations described in the previous chapter, it succeeded where other styles had fallen short, and by providing a bridge between large-scale rave culture and the specialised sound-system world it created a sustained black-music scene that was open to everyone. It went nationwide relatively speedily. The Midlands became something of a jungle heartland, with Milton Keynes as its focal point. Local boy Dave Jones, who later made a dubstep name for himself as Zed Bias, Maddslinky and Phuturistix, explains that particular whereabouts:
The birthplace of large-scale raving in a club, legally, was the Sanctuary in Milton Keynes, the biggest club in the Midlands. It had a capacity of three thousand, and if they wanted they could spread into the venue next door, Rollers, which would make it six or seven thousand. They’d put a funfair and everything in there. This happened because after the Castlemorton rave in ‘92 [a five-day free festival, so well attended by an estimated forty thousand ravers that the authorities were unable to shut it down] they weren’t going to let that happen again, so they fixed it so they could just come in and confiscate your gear. Then there was the Act [the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act] in about ‘94, and all of that basically made it so the superclubs had to exist, because nobody was going to risk their money putting on these big illegal raves any more. Jungle Fever, Fantazia, Helter Skelter and Dreamscape, they were all put on at the Sanctuary.
Zed Bias rocks the house at Club FWD>>.
‘Milton Keynes made sense because it is right in the centre of England – if you drew a dot on the centre of a map that would be it. It was the meeting place for all the romance and all the trouble between London, Nottingham, Manchester, Leeds, Wales, Bristol … This was the same sort of thing as the jazz/funk and soul weekenders and all-dayers, it was before 1Xtra and with no involvement by the mainstream record business, it was people, enthusiasts, who wanted to go somewhere to celebrate their love of this particular music, more than just going to listen to it. They put on their best clothes and go down there with all their boys and they are raving.
‘I worked as a doorman there, walking around inside – herding sheep we used to call it, because all the kids that were in there were goggle-eyed, didn’t know where they were and needed herding around. It was amazing for me, witnessing these early jungle raves – there was happy hardcore upstairs, but you wouldn’t catch me there – the big people at the time were Zinc and Hype and Rocky and a very young Shy FX. I can remember when he played “Bambaata” for the very first time in a rave, and that is still one of the most honest reactions I’ve ever seen. You talk about marketing all you want, but I saw three thousand people stop and stand still, they didn’t know what they were listening to, then all of a sudden the drop came in and there was like a delayed reaction. It seemed to go on forever, a good six or seven seconds, then the place went absolutely mental. I’ve never seen anything like it, as everybody in the place realised what was happening to them. That’s when you know something massive’s happening.’
In the middle of all this, jungle had set an easily accessible template of profitable, mainstream-accessible self-sufficiency for everything that came after it. Jungle bypassed the record companies, trusted its own instincts and audiences, swapped conventional music media for flyers, and replaced Radio One with tower-block pirates. Nothing that hadn’t been done before, but enough to elevate jungle to a point at which, during its 1994/1995 peak, it was a pop-chart regular, had spread far beyond London into huge venues with multiracial crowds, and yet seemed to maintain its outlaw status. Check “Incredible”, General Levy’s 1994 collaboration with M Beat – pure dancehall on top of speedy drum’n’bass, with a video showing a crowd of mostly black kids dropping dancehall-style moves, it’s on the independent Renk Records and went top t
en in the pop charts.
BY THIS POINT OLD-SCHOOL JUNGLE was mutating, thanks in part to its fiercely unregulated nature. While the lack of regulation may have been creatively stimulating, this free-for-all entailed inevitable copyright problems. An early high-profile case should have served as a warning. In 1992 Shut Up And Dance put out “Raving I’m Raving”, a pop-friendly, bassline-loaded, house-y number that rocketed to number two. Almost as quickly, it was banned from the airwaves. The tune was built on a rock song called “Walking In Memphis” by Marc Cohn, SUAD hadn’t cleared the sample, were tied up with m’learned friends for months, monies earned from the record were ordered to be given to charity, and the label was left more or less bankrupt. Lessons weren’t learned, however and Wookie reckons the cavalier attitude to sampling hastened the demise of jungle:
‘Why jungle changed is because they could no longer sample the reggae stuff they’d been using for ages. The reggae artists and producers have all got connections in London – through the sound systems – and they had started catching on. Whereas things might have been let slide, now they were looking at it thinking “This music’s getting big, they’re sampling my voice and they ain’t paying me no royalties!” They wanted money! For instance when they sampled Top Cat on a certain tune he took them for a lot of money. That was the beginning of the downfall of jungle, because they could sample less things and the artists hadn’t developed that could recreate the energy of that sound in the studio over here.’
That shift took jungle away from its ragga connections, with producers moving into drum’n’bass – shorthand for ‘socially acceptable jungle’. Drum’n’bass had been around for a while, a by-proxy pop music, which was, as Wookie describes it:
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