Loving The UK Garage Scene From 3,460 Miles Away
A House Head’s recollection of stumbling on and falling in love with U.K. Garage and eventually Grime (part 1)
I’ve been circling around this topic for quite awhile so I figured it was high time for me to talk about it.
I’ve touched on Garage so many times because it’s impossible for me to talk about music for the majority of the early 2000s without doing so.
I wasn’t really listening to much else.
Unlike Rap and to some extent House, not experiencing a music first hand provides a different insight. By the time I came to Garage, it was a fully formed scene.
And it went against everything that I felt that I hated about music — Garage lived above 120 beats per minute and was full of remakes of popular songs. Still, I loved it.
But in order to talk about how I got there, I have to talk about my love of House…New York House in particular.
At heart, I’m a B-Boy.
I like hearing the reworking of old songs, chopped beats, the scratching of vinyl. It’s just the aesthetic that I prefer. I’m no different with House.
My favorite House songs are the ones that have some sort of sampling. (Incidentally one of those was made by a Brit, Richie Rich’s “Salsa House” — with that MJ sample).
But if you wanted to see young Maulud Sadiq open a circle, all you had to do was cue up SOHO’s “Hot Music.” SOHO was one of the many Pal Joey aliases — names he used for different styles of production — of which he had plenty.
“Hot Music” is a special song. Aside from the fact Joey had to go four minutes into a six minute song to find that one second of piano to sample, this ain’t no four to the floor House song.
After being teased by that sampled piano loop (which always induced a soul clap at Plastics), instead of the typical…
Boom Boom Boom Boom
…House beat that listeners were used to hearing, we’re smacked with:
BOOM PAP PAP PA BOOM BOOM PAP BOOM PAP PAP PA BOOM
and the crowd would erupt. I don’t have any empirical data but I would be willing to wager that if you were into House music between the years 88 and 91, “Hot Music” is one of your favorite songs.
Which is why I’m still amazed that there weren’t at least four “Hot Music” like clones, or greater, why it didn’t start a movement. A movement did start, however, in Baltimore based on a break; a break so well-known that I don’t mind saying there would be no Baltimore Club without “Sing Sing.”
When my soon-to-be-girlfriend introduced me to the music, it was in it’s infancy but it already had a star, the 6'3" drag queen Ms. Tony, Baltimore Club’s first great MC. The next summer that I spent in Columbia, MD I took in all the Club that Frank-Ski spun.
To me, it wasn’t all that different from House proper. It just was more lewd (sexual lyrics were more than common), had more bass, and Baltimore Club had them BEATS.
As I wrote here, House was loosing its mainstream appeal around this time and instead of it being played in clubs and on the radio, one had to go and seek it out.
I miss record stores.
Like bookstores, I would spend hours in them, exploring, looking at the variety of music that was out there, knowing that I would never hear it all.
Around 1998, I was looking for something new, different — something that would hold my attention. I had been listening to Jungle and a little later Drum N Bass but I wasn’t built to listen to it day in and day out.
I started looking back.
This is around the time that they were pumping out all of those Larry Levan retrospectives and I was spending hours in HMV.
You see, working in TV and Film ain’t like working other jobs. I was an Assistant Video Engineer around this time, responsible for setting up the cameras on the shoot and making sure they were connected to the control room…but once I was done doing that…I had to wait for them to be ready to shoot…which some times could take hours.
My job was at 42nd and 9th, and as long as I was fifteen minutes away, my supervisors didn’t care where I was. So I would go to HMV in Times Square.
If you aren’t old enough to remember this world, the beauty of these megastores was you could spend hours in the magazine section, in my case, reading about music, and then you could go and sample the music you were just reading about.
Listening stations weren’t a new concept, they had been around since the 50s, but to have them within a few feet of the magazines was kryptonite to my wallet.
I often say that by the time mainstream media is writing about a subject, whether it’s slang, a meme, or in this case, a music scene, that thing has been around long enough to be considered old and played out by it’s actual participants.
As I said, I was in my looking back mode, reading about The Paradise Garage and kept stumbling across this term ‘Speed Garage’ in the British magazines.
Sometimes, I threw caution to the wind, and bought CDs sight unseen, listening station be damned. That’s what I did with the first “Speed Garage” CDs.
Some of the worst shit ever committed to CD. I know you all remember how record labels would throw shit together, especially in the case of dead artist. Before there was click bait, there was these type of CDs, name bait. I fell a victim.
I bought a few bum-ass Speed Garage CDs…brought them shits back the next day. (Another joy of chain record stores — their return policy). I knew that these CDs couldn’t be a representation of this “exciting” scene that these magazines were writing about…so I kept trying.
The Made in Britain — 20 UK Garage Anthems, was the first compilation that I actually kept. It was decent. Nothing to write home about. It would be a year before I bought the CD that turned me full on FAN.
It’s good that I stumbled on the music the way that I did — through trial and error and towards the latter stage of the music’s development, otherwise I may have been dismissive.
The early years of what became known as UK Garage, the tunes that Dominic Spreadlove played at the Gass Club between 95–97, weren’t that different from what we were listening to over in NYC at the Body & Soul parties. It was Soulful House…a little faster, 120bpm must be like slow music to the Brits…but the music wasn’t different enough to warrant “a label.”
I can concede that many of the Tuff Jam productions differed from American House in the way that the bassline lived separate of the other elements of the song, taking on a drum beat-like pattern.
2-Step changed all that.
“Like House music but with half the kick drums missing out of it” is how Grant Nelson, super producer, described 2-Step after he heard a remixed version of Tina Moore’s “Never Gonna Let You Go.” Considered to be the first 2-Step song, it inspired Nelson to make his own version. He based his song on an earlier remix he made for Indo’s “R U Sleeping.”
That 2 Step remix, like “Never Gonna Let You Go” became an anthem and the 2-Step revolution took off. Groove Chronicles, Steve Gurley, MJ Cole, and countless others began throwing out their own “broken beat” songs and the latter part of 97 began a full on shift away from US sounding songs. This shift would take over the British charts and capture the imagination of the people. Unlike all the other underground scenes that stayed underground, UK Garage became mainstream which brought the record labels trying to cash in…
CUT TO
Me buying all those trash ass CDs.
I think the reason so many of those compilation CDs sucked is because hearing a UK Garage song outside of a mix is like driving a Huracan Spyder to pick up milk at your local King Soopers. Sure it’s fun to be behind the wheel of $300,000 car but you can’t get the real feel of it unless you can get that baby open. To get the real feel of a UK Garage song one has to hear it in a mix.
Yeah, a few of those garbage CDs were mixed…but it was like they were mixed by machines or something (Hell, many of them had no credited DJ as the provider of the mix).
I bought that Pure Garage, first, because it wasn’t titled “Speed” Garage. Nothing good came of any CD labeled as such. Secondly, I chose it because it was a 2 CD set —and it was advertised as “Mixed Live by DJ EZ.”
And what a mix.
Unlike when they heard Jungle & Drum n Bass, my friends and family weren’t angered to the point of violence when they heard Pure Garage. They would patiently sit through the DJ EZ intro nodding a bit but that, “what the hell” squint would instantly appear at the 2 Step of Glamma Kid’s “Why?” From that moment on, they were a captive audience.
The mix is a good blend between Four to the Floor songs and 2 Step and I finally GOT IT. No wonder people love this music. I certainly did. So much so that when Warners Music released Pure Garage II and III…both in 2000 (The first is still my fave tho). I bought them. From listening to…correction…living with these CDs, I had a slight idea on what songs were popular enough to be anthems. I wasn’t fooled into thinking that these were cutting edge songs — but I was comfortable knowing that I had an idea of what cuts might drive a crowd bonkers.
I could also hear that there was a change taking place.
The reason why that first Pure Garage mix was so popular among family and friends and the reason it remains my favorite is because that music encompasses the first years of 2 Step leading up to 2000. Those songs were soulful, sped-up R&B-like songs; songs that people could sing to if they so desired.
Them other Pure Garage mixes were less that. They reflected the change in the music. That change according to many people can be traced to one song — DJ Zinc's “138 Trek.”
Up until the end of 1999, UK Garage kept evolving into a more soulful version of 2 Step. This is a world where Wookie’s production and the songwriting of TJ Cases dominated; the world that produced people like Craig David. This world made the major labels salivate.
The world that came after “138 Trek” on the other hand brought something completely different.
People love to make the comparison between Grime and Hip-Hop. Some go as far as saying that Grime is an offshoot of Hip-Hop. It’s not. Grime is totally a British invention that has more in common with Dancehall than Rap. But most importantly, it is a direct descendant of UK Garage. You want to trace the origins of Grime, one only has to look at the direction that the music took after “138 Trek.”
UK Garage always had MCs, many of whom came from Jungle. If one had to make a comparison to Hip-Hop, it can be said that a pioneer like MC Creed was to Dominic Spreadlove and other DJs what Coke La Rock was to Kool Herc. MCs like PSG, CKP, & MC DT learned from Creed and added their own variation on what Creed did — filling out the space between songs, hyping the crowd, giving shot outs, etc. The DJ was the draw.
My main thing was I wasn’t trying to let the crowd know there was an MC. I wasn’t trying to take the spotlight from the DJ. I was just trying to blend in with the music, just spit on the bits where there was room to spit. MC Creed
Despite that, along the same lines as Hip-Hop, the MC soon did become the center of attention and after “138 Trek” the music catered to the MC.
And this is why the subsequent Pure Garage albums didn’t resonate with me — they were intended for an MC to rhyme over. A good example was Lonyo’s “Summer Of Love.” When MC Onyx bursts into the track, it’s not the typical hype-the-party-up business. Sounds like what we now call “bars.”
The last song on Pure Garage II was the kicker. Oxide and Neutrino’s “Bound 4 Da Reload,” whatever that was… “when I say, you say, we say, you say, make some noise…” I wanted more of that — R&B typed Garage be damned. That was like the first hit of heroin or something…and none of the online versions sound anything like the one played at the end of Pure Garage II disc 1.
On Pure Garage II disc 2, So Solid’s “Dilemma” stood out. After I found out that Oxide and Neutrino was a part of So Solid. That became my point of curiosity. Who the hell was So Solid?
The first time I heard “Oh No” I knew that Garage was taking a new direction. (I hated that breakdown…can’t love everything). That was verified when I heard Sticky ft Ms. Dynamite’s “Booo.” This was a different time though. Want to find more music like this? Oh well.
So Solid Crew ruled the summer of 01 in England. Their hit “21 Seconds” was a bonafide hit. And the “Crew?” Whenever asked how many members there were in the group, the numbers grew. I think the last count was 30 — Wu Tang on European steroids. So Solid was the first megastars of Garage…no, I’m not counting Craig David, damnit…I already mentioned him.
And So Solid would soon get an early Wu Tang like reputation as well…more on that later.
Remember that soon-to-be-girlfriend mentioned above? At this point she was my wife and she and I had planned a two week trip to London at the end of August/beginning of September.
Once in England, I bought a one speaker cassette player, scanned the FM Dial, popped in a 90 minute cassette, and hit record while we were out for the next two weeks. I have to ask Isma’il Latif, he’s probably the last to see them, but I think I recorded at least six tapes of music.
After that, I would never buy another Pure Garage CD or any compilations for that matter. I learned a better way to find music.
That screen is responsible for more viruses than the Great London Plague.
I was told about Limewire the Fall of 2001. I was told that it could solve all my UK Garage problems. And it did. It also had me rebooting my computer on a weekly basis.
Once you knew the name of an artist, a radio show, a song, you would type that word into the search engine on the left and watch your options appear right before your eyes.
Many people used the site to download music that they could otherwise buy…and I may have on occasion (allegedly) but what I used it for mostly — what I filled the computer up with — DJ sets — DJ EZ at Garage Nation, Dream Team at Radio 1, So Solid LIVE (that’s how it would be written). These files would be 2001-version huge.
For perspective, let’s say you wanted a Muddy Waters song — “I Can’t Be Satisfied.” That song is probably three minutes and some change, if that. If you typed in that song, and it had “sources” (people who were trying to share it) that song could easily take an HOUR to download. Imagine the disappointment when the song was finished downloading, you clicked on it, and it was the Rolling Stones.
What I was trying to download was 45 minutes to an Hour unto itself. Those files would take all day to download. That translated into keeping the computer up and online. Luckily we were early adopters of ethernet hook ups otherwise the dial-up bill would have been through the roof.
As soon as those files would download, I would burn them to a disc and delete them off the computer…and I had tons of discs. I became a fan in 2000. By 2001 I was obsessed.
These files are how I learned of Pay as You Go Cartel and Heartless Crew. This is also how I learned of Dizzee Rascal via his hit “I Luv U” which led me to Wiley and subsequently Grime…
More on that in part 2…in the meantime, I love the innerwebs, something that would take days to download, more to research is here for you with one click:
