> was dedicated to new ideas and supporting dubstep as a concept. Dave, one of its original deejays, reckons that she was driven first and foremost by her deep love for the music, an affection that could frequently get the better of her:
‘The night started off in the Velvet Rooms in Charing Cross Road, which had the deejay booth in the middle of the dancefloor, just off to one side. It was surrounded by this screen, and every time I dropped a big tune Soulja would run down and start slapping the Perspex until the needle jumped off the record and I’d have to start it again. She was proper rowdy, that one!’
Club FWD>>, a club night, quite literally, designed for the dubstep.
FWD>> offered exactly the nurturing environment the new sound required, as it was small enough to set itself up as a music club, ensuring a crowd that was equally serious rather than simply out to rave. This forged a circle of musical evolution: producers would showcase concepts, audiences embraced their edginess as a genuinely alternative, and the enthusiasm of the producers grew. Dave is convinced it was vital:
‘FWD>> needed to happen when it did, because there was a little gang of garage deejays ad producers – myself, El-B, Oris Jay and DJ Injector – who hated about eighty percent of the vocals that were going on, and were playing the dub mixes that were on the B-side of most garage twelves. Some of these were dubs of the pop hits – MJ Cole’s “Crazy Love” had a great dub, “Crazy Dub”. The way I would play them would be religiously breakdown to a big bass drop, so there’s no beats, just a bit of atmosphere, then a big bass drop and everything else would come in minus the vocals, so what you were getting was the bassline and the beats. That little group gravitated towards each other, and thr darker tunes were, the more we would play them. We could see we were getting the better reactions off the dark stuff and the rolling breakbeats, and we were all digesting those reactions, so the scene was feeding off itself. FWD>> meant we could all see the same reactions.
Ravers have queued for five hours or more to get into that other cradle of dubstep, a DMZ club night in Brixton. Sharper-eyed readers of more advanced years will spot the irony of this line snaking its way past the Fridge, once the coolest club in town.
‘It didn’t start off big at Velvet Rooms, a few dozen people used to turn up to hear the latest dubplates we were making and they were either refugees from the garage scene or they’d been coerced into being there [he sniggers]. And there’d be Japanese tourists who wandered in off the streets because, it being that area, there was always tourists looking for cool clubs.
‘It all started off very humble and only took off when we moved it to Plastic People on Curtain Road in Shoreditch. There I saw it go from the awkward fifty-people-through-the-door stage, to being too experimental and people not getting it, to really finding its feet. Plastic People had an incredible sound system, and we all grasped onto that as producers, because when you’ve got such a powerful system to play you can really fine-tune your mixdowns. A lot of us ended up making tunes specifically for FWD>>.
‘This totally shaped how the music was sounding, because we knew what was heavy and what would work on the dancefloor, but it was also a listening place as well – it was quite a skunked-out crowd down at FWD>> so they’d go to listen as well. It set a trend for playing instrumentals and dub mixes because that sort of framework allows you to do pretty much anything. I, for instance, was making jazzy instrumentals that were still heavy enough to drop on the dancefloor, and others – Zinc, Horsepower, El-B, Oris Jay – were bringing a different vibe to the instrumentals.
‘Once this scene found its feet it divided the garage scene. By making the statement with FWD>> we were saying “Look, a lot of this is cheesy bollocks, quite basically, we’re not up for it, we want the beats, the basslines … put a few film samples over it and we’re happy.” It worked too, because as we grew, before FWD>> became trendy, it was leading the way with a generation of kids like Hatcha and Youngsta, who is Sarah Lockhart’s younger brother, cutting their teeth there. Dubstep was spreading all over the place, but FWD>> was at the centre of it.’
It was certainly spreading south of the river, where, in the early 2000s, an unassuming record shop in the unassuming suburb of Croydon was kick-starting the genre’s next generation. Big Apple Records had shifted from general dance music to specialising in dubstep, and had become a focal point for the music – where to buy it, where to get your records noticed, and where to hang out with other dubsteppers. Dave, El-B, Ben and Lev from Horsepower and Kode9 were regulars, Hatcha and Skream worked in there, and Artwork had his studio upstairs. It was also a hangout for two local lads, Mala and Coki, also known as dubstep duo Digital Mystikz, or DMZ for short. They were at the forefront of moving the music away from its garage roots with spacier, slower rhythms in their own records – “Haunted” – as well as tunes by the likes of Loefah and Kode9, all on their DMZ label. As significantly, they started the Brixton club night of the same name, which is talked about in hushed tones as being, with FWD>>. one of the two high churches of dubstep.
It’s around now, the middle of the noughties, that dubstep became omnipresent. Championed on the wireless by John Peel, Mary Anne Hobbs and Gilles Peterson, the style was strong enough to build anything on top of it – artists from Eminem to Radiohead commissioned dubstep mixes of their work. It was sufficiently varied within itself to appeal to the underground through labels like Leofah’s Swamp 81 or Ramadanman’s Hessle Audio, and still get the mainstream moving with its more dance-music-ey end. And it went international with apparent ease.
The second time I meet up with Dave, he has just come back from a 21-city tour of the US, where the music has a longstanding fanbase that grew out of college radio and their garage scene. He tells me all the big London dubstep deejays tour the US, and Skrillex won a Grammy in 2013; Mala has recorded an album in Cuba; and the Europeans have taken to it as another branch of electronic pop. The ‘Glastonbury of dubstep’ is the Outlook Festival, which takes place every year in Croatia.
Even if dubstep is a massive global concern, with hardly any racial barriers between artists or crowds, it has been usurped in the UK by a style that was practically a carbon copy of the original immigrant sound-system way of doing things. While dubstep was wowing the world, the juggernaut that is grime was gearing up to redefine British pop music for the twenty-first century.
Mala, one half of DMZ, sorts through his records before going out to play a gig.
‘WHEN I INITIALLY STARTED PRODUCING, I started grabbing reggae influences, hip-hop influences, mixing it with my own London flava, then you got the MCs on top of it and everything. I saw a vision. I thought ‘Right, this is it! This something new, this is fresh! This can work.’ Now, ten years down the line, you’ve got Dizzee Rascal selling millions of records, you’ve got people like Tinchy Stryder … and you’ve got people like Chipmunk, who was growing up listening to people like myself and Dizzee, who has now come forward with an album and made a career. There’s actually a scene.
‘It’s a scene that’s wide open, because of the way we’ve changed the music and had a touch on everyone growing up. The people that I was performing to six or seven years ago ain’t the people I’m performing to now. They still listen to us and they will still buy the albums, and still support the records, but now they might rave to us once or twice a year like when they go to Ibiza or a resort or somewhere – because we’re the headline acts on those type of bills. But everyone underneath that scale grew up with us, take the general raving culture from about 23 down and then from under-15 raves as well, all those people represent a new fanbase that wasn’t there when we started but has grown up on this music and they’re into it because that’s all they know. So this is what London is.’
Grime producer, artist and entrepreneur Jammer is reflecting on the progress the genre has made since it first bubbled up at the very end of the 1990s. In that time grime has turned characters like Dizzee Rascal and Tinie Tempah into superstars – the former won the 2003 Mercury Prize with hi
s Boy In Da Corner album – and seen MCs such as Wretch 32 and Tinchy Stryder become regulars on TV quiz shows. Original grime collective Roll Deep were invited by the Tate Modern to write a track inspired by one of the gallery’s sculptures – Ishi’s Light by Anish Kapoor, since you ask – and found artists from P Diddy to Pixie Lott keen to collaborate.
Not your typical grime leisurewear, but then Jammer is not your typical grime producer.
Jammer’s right about London, too, because in all this time the music as a creative force has seldom strayed far from the city, which has continued to drive it in a relatively narrow, self-serving direction. That parochialism has played a huge part in enabling grime to prioritise serving its original community without excluding the rest of the world. Thus in 2012 the MC JME, a member of Jammer’s Boy Better Know collective, was able to have a top forty hit with a single with the no-nonsense title “96 Fuckries”.
This generation, which includes Wiley, Kano and Skepta, pulled off such a coup not by adapting to the mainstream, but by dragging it along with them, and were able to do so because they virtually ignored it. When Jammer talks about changing music, it’s as much about changing the business of music, because, thanks to the steady evolution of London’s black underground, grime was able to rewrite those rules. Lovers’ rock … jazz/funk … jungle … funk … each had a great deal going for it, but each fell short of achieving sustained impact for varying reasons. By the time grime rumbled out of the tower blocks of Bow and Stepney, it had learned from all that went before. These new players had business savvy, a thorough grasp of London’s repositioned racial demographics, readily available recording technology, and the internet. As Marc Williams puts it, ‘The industry had nothing to offer these boys, no carrot to dangle in front of them.’ Jammer’s early experiences are a case in point:
‘Back in 1999 I produced a track named “Army”, and in those days you couldn’t really just phone a record label, so I put it on pirate [radio]. It was on Déjà, everyone’s into it, really loving it. I got D Double E to do a vocal, we had a big set on there, and we were just smashing it, the tune was getting loads of love. I got a meeting with a label called Locked On Records [a garage/dubstep-centric subsidiary of XL]. I went there, played them the music and showed him the material and the guy was like “It’s really good, man, it’s interesting, but I don’t how to market it or who to sell it to … I haven’t got anywhere to fit this in.” What he was really telling me was “We don’t know the buying public”. I was like, “Cool … Whatever.” and left the meeting.
‘I carried on striving, doing my own thing, still pressing up records, still putting them out, and I got a call a year later from Locked On. They were telling me about this really big tune that everyone’s talking about and they want to sign it, but they don’t know what it’s called. They say they’ve got all the feedback from the pirates and they’ve got a tape of it. So I went in to see what it was, and they played me the same tune I took them a year before. Only now they want to offer me a deal for twenty grand! I’m like “I showed you this tune a year ago, and you didn’t know if there was a buying public or where they were. Now you phone me back a year later telling me there’s this great big buzz on the tune that I showed you a year ago, and you want to offer me twenty grand?” I just told them No, because I was sure somebody would come along and offer me triple that. And then that didn’t happen, so I carried on selling that record for about three years.’
Jammer was seventeen at the time of that first meeting, but had grown up around his dad’s sound system and roots reggae band, which explains his precocious behaviour. As we’re sitting in the front room of his mum and dad’s house in the leafy suburb of Leytonstone, where Jammer grew up but no longer lives, his dad drifts in and joins in the conversation, making some particularly pertinent comparisons between grime and the capital’s vintage reggae scene. While it’s true that the methodology and community service of grime is a throwback to the self-sufficiency of men like Dennis Bovell and Lloydie Coxsone, by this point that’s become an entirely natural way to get things done – almost subconscious. What distinguishes grime from so much of what went before is that it’s more the result of a micro-evolution that began with jungle. That style’s relative success combined with London’s street-level social integration to give the city’s black music genuine respect, and it meant that the next wave saw chart success as a right rather than a privilege. The London underground of jungle and garage raves, radio stations and record shops was so pervasive that for many it was the mainstream, and the new kids coming up focussed on it exclusively. It’s a mark of the speed at which styles turn over in the sound-system world that this next generation arrived so quickly. Grime grew up almost parallel to dubstep, and like that style was a reaction to where garage had gone, with the simple difference that it was a far more instinctive and anarchic reaction, with hardly any calming, sophisticating influences to separate it from its audience or make it more widely palatable. Which is why, presumably, Locked On Records didn’t have the first clue.
IT WASN’T THAT GRIME had an open-door policy, it simply didn’t have any doors to start off with. Or walls. Or constraints of any kind. Technology had put backing-track construction within reach of anyone who owned a rudimentary computer or Sony PlayStation, which seemed like everybody in east London under the age of twenty. Among them was Dylan Kwabena Mills, who introduced himself on the mic on pirate radio and at raves as Dizzee Rascal. A teenager who’d grown up in Bow, he’d raved to drum’n’bass before getting swept up in a youthful movement that, via pirate radio, was kicking against a status quo that was as much social as musical:
‘Once upon a time, jungle and drum’n’bass was the dominant thing on pirate radio. Then garage came in, and that was closer to that whole suits-an-champagne thing. It became a scene, and I was the kid who couldn’t get into those raves because I had my hat and my hood and my trainers. There was a lot of kids shut out of those raves, especially the younger kids, but at the same time there wasn’t really that much there they could relate to. I was of a generation that watched people like Heartless Crew, So Solid and Ms Dynamite, and we were coming up underneath them as kids.
‘The scene separated as it started off a whole next side of things, it was much more street, grimier – that’s why they called it grime! It was a lot rougher, a more hostile environment, but the younger kids preferred it because it was more about them. The big raves were the under-18-ers and the under-21 raves, and those garage people wanted to shut it out completely, but that’s what grime was in the beginning: under-18 and under-21.’
A very young Tynchy Stryder gives substance to grime’s claim that it’s music ‘by the kids for the kids’.
The garage/grime connection can be traced to the Pay As You Go Cartel, whose members included Wiley, Flowdan, Geeneus, Target and Slimzee. In their early days, they would play at Milton Keynes raves that also featured a fourteen-year-old Tinchy Stryder. Despite these links between grime and garage, the creative split grew up on east London’s illegal airwaves, an initially unwitting creative cauldron, fired by the fact that these pirates had no desire whatsoever to become legal. In fact they revelled in a lack of Ofcom parental control:
‘It was a situation that was r-r-ruff. No rules, really, kind of anything goes. People MCing on radio that can say what they want when they want, and as far as sound, people were just using what they’ve got. They used module basslines and whatever, simple products like Fruity Loops [a rudimentary digital music system for Windows], which has got beats and some bits of music on and you can put them together – people make some amazing stuff on that, I’ve made some stuff on that. People even use their PlayStations to make music … they’ve found out there’s no one clear way to make music.
‘People were using a lot of different sounds – games-console sounds, lines from TV, traffic noises, sirens. Sounds which other people might not have considered to be music, but, like I said, there was no rules so there was no reason why those
sounds shouldn’t be used. People used to say we didn’t know how music should be made, but it wasn’t that we didn’t know, we didn’t care. We understood music more than just sonically, how it’s about feeling any sound – if I can get that desired feeling out of any sound then I’ll use it.
‘When I first started off I started mixing drum’n’bass, that had a big influence on me. I couldn’t quite get my head around the garage scene because I got into it late. I never really accepted it, so I had to just move on, and what I did then was make garage-tempo beats but weren’t garage, were other things. I couldn’t just sit there and try to make a drum’n’bass beat or a garage beat or a hip-hop beat, they were too limited with the sounds, so I had to work out a way to make something. That’s the attitude I took into a proper studio with me, as I wasn’t fussed about what sort of equipment I was using, it was “What was I going to do with that sound?” or “How am I going to make this into this, then spit on top of it?”
The glamour of the London pirate radio scene, where broadcasting might have to stop if there’s washing-up to be done.
‘That was how the scene worked – pirate radio was a scene in general, everybody did something slightly different, because on pirate radio you could do anything.’
That off-the-cuff approach didn’t always meet with unconditional love from existing producers who were more finicky about sounds and musicality – Dave’s reaction, for instance, sums up the dubstep party line:
‘The kids making what they were calling eight bar or sub-low were using simple software where they wouldn’t know what swing setting to give the beats, so it wouldn’t have any shuffle, it would just have straight drum-machine programming – no groove. The sound was like galloping horses when you got it into the mix!’
Sounds Like London Page 34