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Unearthing the UK’s underground dance music revolution. a definitive guide to british underground electronic music, from Acid House & the second summer of love to UK Grime, We have it all covered inside.
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An Afternoon With Mr. C We talk to the iconic frontman of ‘ The Shamen’ “Ebeneezer Goode” It has been claimed that the single was eventually withdrawn after the band were hounded by the British tabloid press, though according to The Shamen themselves, it was deleted while at Number 1 due to its long chart run ‘messing up our release schedule’.
Having arranged to meet West at the east London studio of photographer, Sarah Ginn, who for many years has been responsible for capturing what goes down post-midnight at the weekends here in Farringdon, we were both in the highest anticipation of what would unfurl in the company of the man behind so much music history. The obvious place to start our conversation with West was with his Superfreq label, since its re-launch in March last year, has been operating at a heady pace in terms of its release schedule. “We’re releasing an EP every three weeks so there’s a lot of music coming out,” he offers, taking very little time to start enthusing
about his more than substantial roster. “There’s Stark who’s playing live with us [next weekend]. Amazing music; it’s really twisted funky techno with disco overtones. There’s Affie Yusuf who does really cool house on his own and with Trevor Loveys and we’ve had a couple of releases together as the Indigo Kids. I’ve also signed Rize to the label, they were Megalon on my Plink Plonk label it’s very interesting stuff, very deep and noodley.” “Then there’s my Mrs, Xo Chic, from Dollz at Play,” West continues, listing the more transatlantic artists that orbit his LA base. “She’s also on the label. She’s only done one EP but I’m harassing her to get back into the studio. Then I’ve got the other half of Dollz at Play, Bea Tricks - I’ve got a release from her coming out over the summer with remixes
by myself and David Scuba. There’s another British guy but he’s living in America: Pete Shaker Bones. I’ve also just put out an EP by Jay Tripwire - an amazing release and there’s Jordan Lieb from New York too.” The breadth of the label and party’s operations alone are pretty huge, but that isn’t solely where Mr. C’s pursuits begin and end. During the photoshoot he let slip that he’d been ordained and is a practicing psychoanalyst. Pressing him on how, for an individual so involved with the promotion and label game, he could find time for it he reveals: “the psychology I learned was through the method acting I studied before I left for America which is based on the teachings of
unearthing the UK’s underground dance music revolution
Constantine Stanislavski and Mikael Chekov.” Going on to touch on the capitalist and consumer driven world we live in, West nods towards how his own path in life had a troubled beginning - starting with very little and even being a victim of sexual abuse he’s created the success and the lifestyle he enjoys today. Even though these ideas were cemented during his studies it’s actually an outlook that enabled him to kick start his life in music and was even the foundation of the message that was at the core of The Shamen’s chart topping tracks. Evidently it worked out for the young upstart as within 9 months he was playing across the UK and was at the infamous acid house den Clink Street and
at the bigger clubs like Camden Palace and Astoria becoming one of London’s biggest DJ’s all within one year. The Shamen was born from the same club scene but it was truly taken to the masses when it reached the UK charts in 1992 with ‘Ebeneezer Goode’. That success brought a supply of cash to West which enabled him to go on and invest in the underground he has always cared so passionately about. For someone who has already lead a life that has seen them run of London’s most important clubs, lead one of dance music’s premier chart acts and travel the world for the last 30 years, you’d think that would be enough, but he still has dreams to further enable and share happiness. It’s the
perfect note to finish our afternoon with him, with Mr C revealing his master plan behind his aforementioned method acting training… “When I’m an A list actor - not if but when- and I’m earning millions, I’m going to put every penny into a new charity project that will be there to develop leisure culture in third world countries. I’m talking all of the arts and all of the sports and to develop that amongst the hungry because I came from a very poor family. I was hungry and my hunger is what’s fuelled me as it has for many.” First Page - Mr C Above - DJing at ‘The End’ nightclub London
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What Really Happened to Acid House The second summer of love - 1988
Who invented the smiley face? It’s largely accepted that the original version of the familiar smiley face was first created 50 years ago in Worcester, Massachusetts by the late Harvey Ross Ball, an American graphic artist and ad man.
Acid house was Britain’s biggest youth revolution since the 60s, and its legacy has changed the country’s cultural landscape forever. A quarter of a century on, its impact can be felt in everything from fashion to film, to interior design. It redefined our notion of a night out. It even changed the law of the land. Talking to the protagonists for a new book on those halcyon days, many talked about how revolutionary acid house felt when it first exploded in the UK but many also talked about how quickly something that felt so ground-breaking became commercialised. The roots of the revolution had been laid since the early 80s, but when it really began to talk hold in late 1987, it took little more than six
months for the scene to go from a few pockets of clued-up clubbers, to a nationwide explosion. Warehouse parties were holding 20,000 ravers by the summer of 1988. For a while, the weak became heroes, and everybody felt love. Every generation is desperate for something to call their own something their parents don’t understand - but was is inevitable that the early euphoric scene would get dragged into the mainstream? It’s hard to recall just how desperate nightclubs often were in Britain before acid house. With the odd dutiful exception, they were places where people went to get drunk, and nights ended in either fighting or fucking. The music wasn’t even secondary. But the combination of acid house and ecstasy
turned many of the country’s nightclubs back into what they were suppose to be places to dance. Haçienda DJ and author Dave Haslam, “but no one knew how to dress. People were thinking, ‘Do The DJs became stars over night. Fiona Allen, who went on to be the writer and star of the comedy sketch show Smack The Pony, worked on the door at the Haçienda and saw this transformation happen almost overnight. “It was funny how the DJs became gods to people so quickly,” she remember. “Literally, people started treating them like absolute gods for playing records. I suppose part of it was because there were only a few of them back then that were any good.” In London, pioneering DJs like Maurice and Noel
unearthing the UK’s underground dance music revolution
Watson at Delirium, Colin Faver and Eddie Evil Richards at Camden Palace, Jay Strongman and Mark Moore at Heaven and Dave Dorrell at RAW were the first to start playing house music, but it was only with the arrival of ecstasy in late 87/ early 88 that things began to explode. A new generation of clubs like Danny Rampling’s Shoom, Nicky Holloway’s The Trip and Paul Oakenfold’s Spectrum formed the nucleus of the scene in the capital, along with Manchester’s Hacienda and Sheffield’s Jive Turkey up north, but for a short while it still felt like the best kept secret. “It was so new, and so different to anything you had experienced,” explains Paul Roberts from K-Klass. “You wanted to tell a couple of
close friends about it and let them into this secret world, but apart from that you wanted to keep it secret and special.” With hindsight, most of those early devotees recognise the idealistic naivety of thinking they could keep a lid on what was happening. In May 1988, both i-D and The Face ran features on the emerging scene and as that summer hit, broadsheets and tabloids alike picked up on the parties. The speed of which acid house exploded over the summer of 1988 took everyone by surprise. At first, it was fuelled by word of mouth. The early devotees in London, Manchester and Sheffield were so evangelical about the scene that they were desperate to share, and
so week by week the numbers grew. You started to recognise devotees outside the clubs, on the bus, on the street. You could tell by the way they dressed, their haircuts, the glint in the eye. Groups of friends would be split between those who had experienced their own epiphany, and those who had not yet be converted - but increasingly, the former outweighed the latter. The tabloid interest just poured fuel on acid house’s bonfire. The established industry had no idea what to make of acid house, and those who couldn’t keep pace with the changing times sounded like dinosaurs. “It’s the closest thing to mass organised zombie-dom,” and “I really don’t think it should go any further.”
BBC DJ Peter Powell First Page Ravers in 1988 Above Rave flyers
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Ibiza’s Acid House Movement The push for UK dance music in Ibiza’s prominent clubs
Mr C on Ibiza ‘‘Ibiza is a very magical island with very powerful lay lines so there’s a lot of magic there. The beaches are great, the restaurants are amazing, the people are amazing. My only gripe is the greed, everything is way to expensive, especially in the club scene apart from clubs like DC10 & Sankey’s who have reasonable prices & a more cutting edge attitude’’
In late August 1987, four London music heads boarded a plane for a week-long holiday in Ibiza. There they discovered a littleknown club called Amnesia and a DJ called Alfredo and instead of coming back with a few out-of-focus snaps, Paul Oakenfold, Johnny Walker, Danny Rampling and Nicky Holloway returned home exhausted but burning with a missionary zeal. Paul Oakenfold: In 1987, two friends of mine, Ian St Paul and Trevor Fung, were working out in Ibiza, so I decided to have my 24th birthday
there and invite some other friends - Danny Rampling, Nicky Holloway and Johnny Walker. We were all DJing or running clubs in London at the time. I’d been to Ibiza once before, for work, because I was working with Divine, in my capacity as a club promotions man, and she was playing Ku [now Privilege], the biggest club there. But this was my first trip. Nicky Holloway: We hired a villa near San Antonio, near the bay. We were only kids and thought it would be a cool, flash thing to do. We’d been going to Ibiza since 1982,
but mainly wandering around San An, going to the Cafe Del Mar in the afternoon and [nightclub] Es Paradis at night. On the first night of the holiday we bumped into Trevor Fung, a London DJ working out in Ibiza, who told us about Amnesia and this new drug called ecstasy. Johnny Walker: We were under the stars, in the warm summer air, hearing this amazing mixture Alfredo was playing. In the middle of the open air dancefloor was a mirrored pyramid, then around the edges were bars and chill out areas with cushions,
unearthing the UK’s underground dance music revolution
and Mediterranean and tropical plants. It was high walled, like being in a tropical garden. Alfredo Fiorito :In the summer of 1987 I was playing Thrashing Doves’ ‘Jesus on the Payroll’, Elkin and Nelson’s ‘Jibaro’, Joao Gilberto, Talking Heads, Prince, Bob Marley, the Woodentops. Early in the evening I’d play Manuel Göttsching’s ‘E2-E4’ or Art of Noise’s ‘Moments in Love’. I was playing music from South America, Europe, different places. It was the time of the Berlin Wall, glasnost, and there was a feeling of unity among Europeans.
Nicky Holloway: We all tried ecstasy for the first time together, and then the whole thing made sense. Alfredo was playing [Chicago house label imprints] Trax and DJ International next to Kate Bush and Queen, all the white English acts we’d turn our noses up at. But on E, it all made sense. Half an hour or so after you necked a pill you would suddenly feel this euphoric wave go through you, like shooom! - hence the name of Danny’s club. Danny Rampling: I’ll bring something different to the table here. I felt there was something deeper,
spiritually, running through the whole experience. I discovered something recently, through my own research. In August 1987, there was an event called the Harmonic Convergence, a global shift in unity consciousness through dance rituals, which is part of the Maya calendar teachings. Paul Oakenfold: Before Ibiza I was playing LL Cool J and Run DMC but when we came back I was playing acid house and Cyndi Lauper. We had baggy trousers and were dancing like maniacs and everyone was like, ‘What the fuck are you lot doing?’ I
started Spectrum on a Monday, which was all acid, and Future on a Friday night, which was indie mixed with dance. That’s how I ended up remixing Happy Mondays, the Cure, the Stone Roses, and touring with U2. First page - ‘Kevin & Perry Go Large’ Above - Amnesia, Ibiza
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The King’s of Grime JME gives us his take on the scene in 2015
Above - JME MC, producer, graphic designer, entrepreneur and Skepta’s younger brother. JME’s creation of the Boy Better Know label (and clothing line, crew and, briefly, mobile phone sim card company) has been grime’s greatest DIY success. His latest selfreleased album, Integrity, charted at No 12.
Until recently, you might have been forgiven for assuming grime – the scene born in the bowels of Bow in east London around 2002 – was all but extinct. For years, little been heard about or from the 140bpm-based sound that drew from the UK garage scene that preceded it, from the dub and reggae soundsystems of a previous generation, from the DIY attitude of punk. It had been a visceral, exhilarating, peculiarly local, genre. When it emerged, it was slated to be the next big thing. In fact, grime is doing quite well away from
the spotlight. There are plenty of regular nights; Jammer’s Lord of the Mics DVD series, in which popular MCs clash with each other, does well the iTunes chart with little traditional promotion. DJ Target, a member of the original grime crew Roll Deep, was recently promoted from Radio 1Xtra to a slot on Radio 1. Ghetts, Frisco and Footsie all released albums in March. And one of this spring’s urban anthems, German Whip by Meridian Dan featuring Big H and JME, is spearheading grime’s return to prominence. “Grime ain’t dead, are you mad?” splutters
Ghetts, who comes from Plaistow in grime’s east London heartland. “I will rep grime until I’m in my grave. It should be on my tombstone: here lies grime.” All well and good, but what about the scene’s big stars, who have upped and left to live in Miami (Dizzee Rascal) or Canada (Wiley, albeit temporarily)? “We all need to work together more and be proud of our culture,” Ghetts says. It’s a matter of respect, says Skepta, one of the scene’s most enduring and enigmatic MCs and producers. Britain, simply, does not value the music it produces enough. “They respect rappers in the US but in
unearthing the UK’s underground dance music revolution
England, it’s the Queen’s country. She’ll forever be putting out the message on these BBC networks that there’s no hood, it’s tea and red phoneboxes. Hip-hop is celebrated in the US; Obama talks about having Ludacris on his iPod. But in the UK, there are a lot of obstacles in our way,” he says. There certainly appears to be a renewed interest in grime in 2014. In recent years, many grime producers have become influenced by trap, originally a style of southern US hiphop; for grime purists this was a disaster, but for a new generation raised on funky house, bassline and deep
house, it offered a totally new experience: it put grime in a position where it could be considered seriously as a member of the dance family, but did so without the music losing its essence. “The way grime is now, today, influences people without them even realising,” Skepta says. “Beyoncé’s Bow Down, to me, that could be a grime tune. If it’s electronic and 140-ish bpm and people go crazy to it, to me that’s grime. The lines are so blurred right now.” Grime matters because it’s a timely metaphor for our mixed wrace society, taking influences from many
cultures yet managing to sound utterly, resolutely, determinedly British. It is an important part of the British experience, one of the few genuinely working-class music scenes to have emerged in recent years, and one whose influence is written through pop’s mainstream, in the form of people such as Tinie Tempah and SBTV’s Jamal Edwards. Just as scenes like punk have been celebrated and nurtured, so this new wave of grime deserves the same treatment. For all its Britishness, though, Skepta believes looking beyond the UK will be the key to grime’s
continuing success. “Soul II Soul brought house to America and we can do the same. There’s a whole new generation coming through who are the voice of London and of the UK, so it can’t stop. Grime will always churn out new talent, thoughts and ideas. It’s up to us to discover where it’s possible for this scene to go.” Above - Skepta Initially a DJ and producer, the north Londoner picked up the mic at Wiley’s suggestion in 2005 and has never looked back.
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