Sounds Like London

by Lloyd Bradley

‘More that rave-y kind of vibe, it went back into the university crowds – predominantly white. Drum’n’bass is a predominantly white scene, whereas jungle was a predominantly black scene. In essence, there’s no difference between jungle and drum’n’bass, but with it no longer using that reggae sampling I think it lost that Caribbean influence. Once you took that out, because the vocals defined it they were kind of forced to go back into the rave scene as such. It got harder and definitely more rave-y, because there was no vocals and it was just all atmospherics.’

  For jungle producers, the crossover was straightforward. DJs Zinc and Hype and Dillinja quickly started bossing things, likewise Fabio & Grooverider and Ed Rush & Optical; Shy FX managed to keep the ragga vibe going for years with tunes like “Bambaata”; and Jumpin’ Jack Frost signed Bristol-based Roni Size and Krush to his V Records label. Around the same time, a wave of influential newcomers brought a spectrum of black backgrounds into drum’n’bass: Goldie, the jungle-influenced graffiti artist whose Metalheadz brand would become the scene’s most recognisable creation; Neasden radio pirates 4Hero brought a reggae vibe; LTJ Bukem, who is a classically trained pianist, once had a jazz/funk band. It now became an ‘in concert’ proposition – vital for grown-up rock-world success – as acts performed with instruments and bands rather than just decks. With the style’s name readily accepted across the pop and rock worlds, it put these guys right into the mainstream mix, producing music that won accolades, sales figures and credibility in equal amounts. Annie Nightingale and John Peel championed the sound on Radio One; Roni Size’s Reprazent posse won the 1997 Mercury Music Prize with their New Forms album; and in what must be some sort of mark of distinction, David Bowie messed about with drum’n’bass on his Earthling album of that year. At the same time, drum’n’bass remained a huge influence on black music yet to develop – later in these pages, for example, Dizzee Rascal will cite it as being his pre-grime background.

  This was London, or at least a meaningful part of it. Jungle represented the world of which it was part with very few filters: a situation that was largely black but totally accepted the ‘white kids who didn’t mind a bit of argy-bargy when they went out’, as Dave puts it. As the music crossed into drum’n’bass it did so with exactly that approach – this is what we do, and of course you (white kids) will be able to get into it because it reflects you as part of our world as black Britons. As it seemed to happen too fast for the record industry to get a grip on it, before the artists and producers had set themselves up in business, it was able to continue largely unhindered. Despite its sociological relevance and musical appeal, however, jungle/drum’n’bass was being eclipsed on the London underground.

  That wasn’t so much to do with any apparent commercialisation; it was the natural order of things. Just as it seemed to be going legit, UK garage staked its claim as the street’s rhythms of choice.

  Roll Deep redefine chillin’ out. This most influential grime collective numbers among its alumni Jammer, Skepta, Dizzee Rascal, Wiley, Tinchy Stryder, Flowdon, and Target.

  ‘AS FAR AS I KNOW, OUR UK GARAGE was born out of the B-sides of house records, the dubs. Where they’d be all musical, house music or whatever, on the A-side, the B-side was a stripped-down dub which might have had a heavier bassline – or just had a bassline. We took that, with our West Indian backgrounds, and our reggae backgrounds, and out of that UK garage was born.’

  The ‘As far as I know’ that prefixes Wookie’s explanation of how UK garage got started is significant. It’s a tale that has, over time, grown increasingly overcomplicated in the telling, and he’s entirely right to qualify it like this. The origins of the garage sound lay in New York’s Paradise Garage club in the early 1980s, where legendary deejay Larry Levan span original house music blended with soul, funk, salsa and disco. Coming at the tail-end of disco, the place was a revelation, in becoming the first big, high-profile nightclub dedicated to dance and music rather than socialising or showing off – an aspect that would be echoed in Britain’s rave culture. By the second half of the decade, that kind of soul-infused house was making a considerable splash on the dance scene over here, attracting the attention of the underground who sought to retool it for sound-system consumption. The first thing to do to better attract the, er, junglist massive was to speed up the 4/4 disco-ish tempo – which meant the vocals either had to come off or be stretched – and then start building on the bassline. A good starting point would be the 1997 sound-system classics “RIPgroove” by Double 99 and “Spirit of the Sun” by Lenny Fontana, each one UK garage before the name was coined.

  Such was the dominance of jungle by the end of the 1990s, that this new sound was relegated to the secondary room at big clubs, and small local clubs or rooms behind pubs in London – the Arches in Vauxhall was probably UK garage’s biggest early adopter. Indeed at one point, in the capital, fledgling garage was known as the ‘Sunday Sound’, because promoters or venue owners that would put it on wouldn’t take a chance on it for a Thursday, Friday or Saturday night, leaving Sundays as the only nights available. Not that UK garage’s secondary status lasted too long, as Dave Jones explains:

  ‘What started out as UK garage was, essentially, a load of guys in their mid-twenties who loved US house, the sexiness of that music, but weren’t playing it in the way US house parties intended it. They changed it up and MCs were chatting over it, bringing in the sound-system way of doing things – different music but the same vehicle. Around the same time, the jungle/drum’n’bass metamorphosis was happening via acts like Ed Rush & Optical – I don’t want to name just them, because there was a lot of others, but they were the biggest purveyors of what I call the ‘motorbike sounds’, where the bass goes weearrrr! weearrrr! like a motorbike’s being revved up. Basically, it scared all the girls away. They wanted to go elsewhere to get their sexy little groove on, and the garage raves was where that was.’

  It was when London producers like Tuff Jam and Dreem Teem (one of whom was DJ Spoony) or the Heartless Crew sound system started making tunes which totally related to the scene that things really took off. The rush of music fuelled a rush of dedicated radio pirates and clubs: original stations London Underground and Freek FM were supplemented by ICE and Magic FM, while the seminal nights were Twice as Nice, Cookies & Cream and Sun City. It was at this point that the media and the record industry caught onto it, and it was briefly called ‘speed garage’, to differentiate it from US garage. Suddenly record shops and review sections were awash with fast, skittering tunes that didn’t really acknowledge a black London heritage, weren’t looking to develop the music, and, as Wookie puts it, ‘sounded all the same’. It’s hard to find anyone who was making the music on street level who has anything good to say about ‘speed garage’. To the relief of many, it didn’t last too long, and was replaced by 2step, the underground’s answer. Wookie runs down the differences:

  ‘House music is four to the floor, and what they called speed garage was four to the floor but with those fast, skippy beats in there. The garage we were making wasn’t four to the floor. We changed it when all those skippy kicks came in and ended up with something irregular – boom … te-te … boom. That’s where it must’ve got the name 2step from because you could probably do the side-to-side step to it!’ [Wookie laughs hugely at this.]

  This new, unique pattern fed into a cauldron along with hip hop, rap, soul, reggae, dancehall and of course drum’n’bass/jungle to create what became UK garage, a London style that was strong enough to support a wide range of differing strands. Between about 1998 and 2000, it was all over the place. Almost literally – Ayia Napa, a resort on the south coast of Cyprus, became the party town for young black Londoners between May and September, turning its nightlife over to UK garage, with big-name deejays, artists and clubs taking up residences.

  ONE OF THE MOST SIGNIFICANT effects of 2step’s freeing-up rhythm patterns was to allow enormous potential for variation. The music’s ability to sprout in all directions was illustrated b
y Wookie’s “Scrappy” and “Down On Me”. The former was positive and cheerful, the latter dark and edgy, but both became huge hits and enduring garage anthems. Dave’s first big hit as Zed Bias, “Neighbourhood”, was very nearly pure dancehall that brought the jungle vibe up to date with garage beats:

  ‘When I started I’m loving this new sound [garage], but the only thing wrong with it is the beat is too rigid. Then somebody played me this 2step remix of “Spirit Of The Sun” on Labello Blanco. I was one of the first people to hear it. I was like “You know what, I’ve come home. I know what I’m doing now.” It was jungle, but it was so not jungle! It was swinging! Jungle of that time had become all about the extremities, but back in the day there was always other things going on. This got into that gap for people who like the aesthetics of how jungle was, but wanted to play to this audience.’

  This swing became a big part of 2step. Introducing a degree of soul and melody to proceedings, it encouraged a conventional musicality in some areas – MJ Cole, who played the oboe and had studied at the Royal College of Music, gave garage an orchestral accent, while the Artful Dodger put a rock-group sound on it. All of which invited producers to put singers on top of the beats, and facilitated the arrival of UKG as a bona fide pop music. Echoing aspects of lover’s rock, this was a street style that embraced the pop world within which it existed. Producers anticipated demand from their primary audiences, but were also identifying a way into the mainstream, which was obligingly receptive. As had also been true with jazz/funk, the industry believed it had a straightforward reference point. In the US, throughout the 1990s, the grafting of sweet vocals onto tuff hip-hop backing had turned the likes of Boyz II Men, Bobby Brown and Mary J Blige into household names, and allowed Sean Combs to reinvent himself as Puff Daddy/Puffy/P Diddy and so on. By the end of the decade, singers like Craig David, Mis-Teeq (Alesha Dixon’s trio), Artful Dodger, Daniel Bedingfield (Natasha’s older brother) and Kele La Roc were mainstream stars in the UK. According to Wookie, that affected how the music was developing at street level:

  ‘The scene had established itself where there’s a pool going on, everybody’s self-sufficient and the street is making money, they’re pressing their own records and they’re selling loads – it’s a sound-system mentality, nothing’s changed. The major labels look at it and say “Ooh, there’s a lot of revenue being made here” and start to pluck up all the top people, who now turn away from what they were doing before and start working for these people. They were facing this way, then [he swivels in his chair] they turn around that way and they’re working on their albums. It’s progress, don’t get me wrong, but it neglects what they were starting to do before.

  ‘So because there is only so many good people – a pool – the next level down start scrabbling [he does a rodent-like mime with added scrabbling noise], the music isn’t the same quality and there’s no vocals because all the singers have been snapped up. So the only people to do vocals on those kind of things is the MCs, meaning the music’s getting tailored towards the MCs. It’s getting faster and darker and there’s less of a happy vibe, this is when the So Solids and the MC crews came along – they saw an opportunity and they jumped on it.’

  It was around this time that the garage scene evolved into a state of apparent high bling, a clubland metaphor for conspicuous consumption: champagne and ‘yack’ (cognac), designer clothing, fancy cars and pole-dancer-style women. Little more than working-class kids have always done, perhaps – dressed up on a Saturday night and spent money getting wasted and impressing the opposite sex. Wookie agrees with many older guys when he says:

  ‘That champagne-and-girls scene was the older rude boys who wanted to dress criss, but they didn’t do it even half as much as the generation before then. Talk to my dad and he’ll tell you he spent three or four hundred pounds on a shirt … what!?!?! … no wonder my mum’s cussing you!’

  The videos and lyrics that began to dominate the mainstream end of the genre came to define the image of UKG, and also reflected pressure from the record industry, which was using the more visible end of the US rap spectrum as its benchmark. A long way from Craig David’s first hits, which nodded to the roots of garage by setting videos in pirate radio stations, this process spectacularly imploded when acts like So Solid Crew and Mark Morrison appeared to buy into the clichés, and spent more time in the dock than in the charts. ‘They were,’ maintains Wookie, ‘just little kids who wrote their own downfall.’ It also triggered a shut-out of UKG at many venues, giving club managers the excuse they seemed to have been waiting for to hang a sign reading ‘trouble’ around UKG’s neck. And while sections of the press seized upon gunplay in nightclubs with worrying enthusiasm, the style itself was shooting itself in the foot.

  ‘I WON’T NAME NAMES, BUT IN 1999, in London, there was a garage committee formed by deejays, producers and promoters, said to be in the top of the scene. It was done in a very Mafioso way, calling meetings, and if you weren’t invited you weren’t allowed in, that sort of thing.’

  The perennially cheerful Dave Jones is almost spluttering:

  ‘They used to tell people what they could play and what they couldn’t play, who would get booked at whatever venue … trying to run it like the Illuminati. Then there’s kids like me coming though from places like Milton Keynes, and I don’t give a monkey’s what you lot say! I’m still going to do what I’m going to do. You haven’t let me in, but I’ve had, for a couple of years, some of the biggest tunes in the city. Full stop. I’m still going to see you down at Freddie Fresh’s shop, I’ll see you down at Music House and I know you’re gonna want a cut of this tune that’s coming out of the speakers … yet I wasn’t part of this.

  ‘I wasn’t an advocate, I used to slag it off, and they couldn’t keep me down. And I wasn’t the only one that felt like this. So there was a revolt – the Garage Revolt of 1999, you could call it! – and I was probably at the head of it. This is the whole reason dubstep’s here.’

  As I sit talking to him over a full English with extra fried bread in a cabbie’s caff by the side of Euston station, this is the first time his demeanour has wobbled. Even though he pulls it back with the crack about the Garage Revolt, this self-appointed legislature is clearly a sore point. And so it should be: it’s an entirely similar restraint of trade as was exercised against Norman Jay and his sound-system counterparts by the Soul Mafia twenty years previously. The reaction was the same too: let’s sort something out for ourselves.

  Dubstep as a style had been bubbling under for a while, as a result of mainstream garage relishing its pop status and the established underground doing its best to get there too. Garage had stopped behaving like sound systems and driving itself forward with innovation. Even prior to the forming of the cartel you’d hear essentially the same tunes at raves all across town, with the big ones on heavy rotation on pirate radio. Dave believes that was because this self-appointed UKG aristocracy couldn’t keep up with the evolution of the music:

  ‘Their reason for doing all of this was their insecurities. They all thought it would all get out of their control. But they stitched themselves up because it’s all very well being lord of all you can survey, but you’re only lord of that. It’s down here where all your potential audience is, but you don’t see them because you don’t appeal to them. The kids aren’t coming to your shows because you’re old and you’re no longer relevant – that’s just how things are – so at that point you move over and you become a support net and work with people that are relevant. That’s how you get your longevity, you don’t start closing people’s opportunities down and trying to keep them for yourself. The control they tried to impose was a control they weren’t due – they weren’t allowed that control, so they never got it.’

  A generation of young deejays and producers was coming up who drew on a different, wider set of influences and wanted to shift the music away from the limitations of proto-pop. They were relegated to the back rooms of raves like Garage Nation – if th
ey got gigs at all – but being away from such main-hall pressure allowed for greater experimentation. The music forming was what became dubstep, a dub reggae approach to 2step, stripping it down to its bare bones, then building upwards from a big bassline, leaving enough space to incorporate other elements. It created music that could be shaded in any way the producer fancied, but would always have a compulsive, heavy core. The music was, Dave reckons:

  ‘More in the attitude, really, and that was an attitude I got from people like [King] Tubby’s or even Congo Natty’s jungle, leaving enough space for the elements you’ve got in there to breathe and work. To move speakers and move people.’ In those early days, he admits, ‘more didn’t work than did.’

  The major problem was that this scene lacked a focus. These contemporary soundmen didn’t have their own lawns, or regular venues where they could feed off each other or build a crowd. That’s where Club FWD, one of contemporary London music’s most important establishments, comes into play. It was the brainchild of Sarah ‘Soulja’ Lockhart, who achieved at least as much for the scene as any deejay or producer.

  East Londoner Lockhart had the organisational expertise to transform this fragmented scene into something more readily accessible. She used her skill set to provide situations in which artists, producers and deejays could develop in an environment that gave them the best opportunities. Her record label Tempa released an eclectic mix of music that was never less than quality, while her Ammunition Promotions was an umbrella organisation that gave real clout to individuals’ tiny labels such as Dave’s Sidestepper, Oris Jay’s Texture, Artwork’s Big Apple and DJ Zinc’s Bingo Beats. She managed the likes of Skream, Benga and Geeneus, and negotiated deals for affiliated producers with EMI Publishing. She would take charge of London’s premier pirate, Geeneus’s Rinse FM, and it was her remorseless five-year campaign that won the station a licence to broadcast legally in 2010. Now her Club FWD>