STEP on
The amazing success of ‘Night’ means 21-yearold Benga is dubstep’s leading star. Now his new album is set to propel the sound into the stratosphere. Mixmag makes a house call... Words Joe Muggs Photos Andy Cotterill
BENGA
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his is not your usual superstar DJ’s gaff. Nor does it seem like the home of someone who’s made the crossover tune of the year – a track hammered everywhere from the darkest jungle nights through the coolest house clubs to Radio 1 and even Topshop – or someone, for that matter, who’s about to drop an album that’s tipped to do for dubstep what ‘Timeless’ did for jungle and ‘Kittens & Thee Glitz’ did for electroclash. Way out in the endless sprawling suburbs to the south of London, after a train ride out of West Croydon to a tiny station, then a taxi ride past innumerable seemingly pointless roundabouts and bridges and up a driveway on a very tucked-away crescent, this is very definitely a suburban family house. Neither flash nor run down, it’s simply lived-in. We’re welcomed by Beni Adejumo’s mum, who quickly bustles back to the steamed-up kitchen; a young female relative, tending to a baby in the living room, yells “BE-NNNNIII!” up the stairs, then waves for us to go up. “You’d better just go and knock,” she says. “He’s got his music on”. Upstairs, responding to a muffled “yeah, come in!”, we find Beni lying back on his bed, hands behind his head, a twostep pirate radio station bumping out of his speakers, the TV on and the heater on full. “Sorry, sorry,” he says, leaping up to turn the heating down and hurriedly clear clothes off a couple of chairs, “I didn’t forget you were coming – serious, I didn’t. I just needed to switch off for a while”. He’s just come back from recording a segment for Rob Da Bank’s Radio 1 show, he tells us as he hustles around, tidying up – and before that there was a shoot for “some fashion-y thing” and an online interview for “some man in Russia… no, no, Ukraine”. It’s surreal, frankly: this is so much like a standard young lad’s bedroom you’d expect him to be complaining about college or football, but instead he’s chuckling about the demands of keeping up with the time zones of all the different radio shows he’s asked to appear on round the world. And the face and huge afro of the laid-back young man rushing around chucking crumpled jeans into the wardrobe are familiar from an ever-proliferating array of posters and magazines, and of course from behind the 1210s at any number of key dubstep nights. But Beni – Benga, as he’s been known to the world outside his bedroom since his early teens – is not one to put up a front. Jump on a day to the FWD>> night in East London’s Plastic People
and he may be dressed up a bit more, in a smart v-necked T-shirt and strings of beads, maybe swaggering slightly and showing off his stocky footballer’s physique for the girls, but he’s exactly the same smiley, amiable fellow, noticeably devoid of an entourage or hangers-on, shaking hands and chatting with anyone who comes up to say hi as he’s taking his records over to the booth. Then, without a fuss, he flicks through his 12” vinyl and 10” dubplates and starts playing – and it’s only 11pm. Benga, arguably the biggest star within the world of dubstep, is at the club night at the centre of the genre, the night where his tunes have sent people wild over the last five or so years, and he’s playing the warm-up set – “’cos it’s nice to do that sometimes, try stuff out when it’s not so busy… and ’cos I can’t play later ’cos I’ve got to do some Japanese interview”. Though the club is barely a fifth full when he starts, he cuts and blends the constantlychanging beats with unmistakeable enthusiasm, smiling broadly as he pulls out a new track that he knows is going to hit hard, and – like the punters already moving on the floor – closing his eyes in appreciation as the waves of bass drop in from each tune.
“At 15 I wanted to act like a star, but I knew to keep it down, not to behave like an idiot”
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here was never a time when Beni didn’t listen to rave music of one sort or another. He soaked up pop, indie and rap, but with two older brothers at home, pirate radio was on constantly, and the earliest really clear musical memory he has is of his eldest brother MCing to the classic dark d’n’b sound of ‘Warhead’ by DJ Krust; Beni was nine at the time. The basslines of jungle and then garage were ever-present as he went through school, taking piano lessons and wondering if he’d make it as a pro footballer, but then he heard the moody, jazzy garage sounds of Wookie. “That was it, man, that was it,” he says; “that was when I knew that dark music was what I was into, and I knew it was what I was going to do”. Tinkering with the Music 2000 game on his PlayStation, then with more serious PC software, Beni began to make dark garage tunes, at first imitating Wookie but quickly mutating the sound into something sparser and stranger. Soon he ran into Ollie Jones, who was at a school down the road and was also trying his hand at making beats. Ollie – better known by his tag ‘Skream’ – and Beni shared an interest in drinking, writing graffiti in Croydon’s many train yards and sneaking into raves, and the two became fast friends, playing each other their beats and kicking off a friendly rivalry that continues to this day. april 2008 073
BENGA
The two could so easily have just been messing about without purpose, though, had it not been for one vital piece of the puzzle: the Big Apple record shop in Croydon. Behind the counter were Arthur ‘Artwork’ Smith, a veteran of infamous 90s London techno nights like Final Frontier and Lost, and DJ Hatcha, who was making his name in the garage scene as resident at the new FWD>> night. “They guided us,” says Beni. “They told us what tunes they liked, and when they were good, Hatcha would cut a dubplate and play it”. As important as the exposure they got was the advice that Smith provided. “He’d been through scenes before,” Beni continues, “so he told us what would happen: ‘you’ll have a few people into it, then suddenly it’ll blow up and everyone will want to know you, but you mustn’t get carried away by that.’ So even at school when I was 15, though I wanted to run in with my first vinyl and act like a star, I knew to keep it down, not act like an idiot”. Arthur Smith didn’t only give Benga his first release (‘Skank’/‘Dose’ on Big
“If Skream’s tune is big, I’ll want to make one bigger” Apple) and help him keep his feet on the ground, he also helped him make a living while dubstep still wasn’t making money. Using his plentiful dance world connections, he and the teenage Benga honed their production skills on loads of “really mainstream house” remixes for pop stars under assumed names. Beni laughs about it now, but won’t reveal what the tracks were “because people dig them up and won’t shut up about them”; he’ll only go so far as to say they were for “Jennifer Lopez, people like that”. He’s grateful for it, though. “I wouldn’t be where I am now if it wasn’t for that,” he admits; “I’d have just got some day job, got pissed every weekend, woken up and found that I’d let it all slip away.” He didn’t piss it away, though, and dubstep – as the sound that Skream, Benga, Hatcha, Artwork and “maybe 10 or 15 people who hung out at Big Apple” were creating became known around 2002 – grew exactly as Arthur had predicted. For a long while it was just a few Croydon folks playing tracks to each other and travelling up to FWD>> to dance to them, but by 2006, when Skream’s bubbling ‘Midnight Request Line’ broke into the international dance mainstream 074 april 2008
through DJs like Villalobos and Gilles Peterson, they were all ready for bigger things. “We’re in competition,” says Beni, “but not like I want to have more fans than Skream – just if he makes a big tune, I want to make one bigger than his, you know? Not bigger in sales, just one that’ll kill it in the rave”. And so far Benga’s out in front. ‘Midnight Request Line’ might have taken their sound into wider clubland, but Benga’s ‘Night’, made with fellow Croydonite Coki of Digital Mystikz, is the track that has bust dubstep wide open. Its instantly recognisable descending bleep riff – yes, you know it: “b-b-b-b-b-boo-boo-boo-booooo” – can be heard whistled by postmen, sung by schoolkids and playlisted by Radio 1. It’s a tune that crosses over between club scenes in the same way as timeless classics like ‘Higher State Of Consciousness’ or ‘Doom’s Night’. And it – and Benga’s equally hookfilled ‘Diary Of An Afro Warrior’ album, tipped as dubstep’s big mainstream crossover – have come exactly as dubstep DJs are starting to match their predecessors in other dance subgenres in worldwide booking. And just as, predictably perhaps, people in the dubstep scene are starting to predict the genre’s demise. Beni’s not fazed. “Everyone who says things are going to go wrong,” he laughs, “they’re just thinking about the future, imagining things! Dubstep now sounds fine, I still love it, I still hear tunes every day that make me go…” lost for words, he bangs his fist on his chest, in the place where the dubstep bass hits first. “And me and Skream are the same as when we were kids. We don’t see each other every day any more, we might be off on the other side of the world, but we speak every day, we hold up the phone to the speaker and go ‘listen to this, man!’ – ‘no, listen to this!”. With plans to get a setup with live musicians, after hearing Brighton jazz crew Nostalgia 77 cover his tracks, and experiments with electrohouse-dubstep fusion brewing (“listen to this!” he says, firing up his PC, “you’re the first to hear it!”), Beni is still very much that teenager trying to outdo his mates with new beats and new bass sounds. And as he pushes off across the dancefloor of FWD>> – one of the coolest clubs in the country, if not the world – on his way to a Japanese interview, Beni Adejumo, globally-known DJ and producer though he might be, leaves an echo of the same excitement he does talking about music in his bedroom: not even teenage excitement, but that of a suburban kid fired up after hearing his brother rap over a drum ’n’ bass mixtape all those years ago. tell us what you think at mixmag.net www.mixmag.net