It's a London thing: How rare groove, acid house and jungle remapped the city (Music and Society)

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Dubber Speaking of dropping the bass and so on, are there always continuities between musical sub-genres, and particularly in dance? So I’m thinking jungle to drum and bass, dubstep, or rare groove, northern soul. Are those connections and continuities always there, or does something come along and do “Okay. No. We’re going to do something completely different now.”, and “Stand by. You haven’t heard this before.”? Then you get new figures that the scene are based around, and within jungle, the key presence who hasn’t been there before is the MC. The vocalist. The chatter. And that is a practice which is derived from reggae sound system culture which is very strong within the sound system, although not all sound systems have chatters. Some of them don’t, but the ones that did, like Saxon, where a British reggae vocal style was developed in the early 1980s… But when house came along, that disappeared from the club scene. And, in fact, rare groove didn’t have that either. Rare groove didn’t use MCs because it was so much about the records. The musicians and the records from that period. But, again, this is, for me, and I think for a lot of the people who went to this stuff… The rare groove period drove a lot of people into looking for second-hand records and rediscovering bands and the great catalogues of Roy Ayers and Donald Byrd and these characters. But, for me, from then onwards in acid and jungle, I wasn’t interested in going to buy the music. Lots of people were, and went to the specialist record stores and whatnot. I didn’t really care about that. It was just the fact that I felt once you were in the dance, you were there. It wasn’t about getting the music, listening to it at home, becoming an expert on that. It was about the experience of being in that place. And the jungle MC, one of the most common things they say is “Inside the place!”. It’s about honouring and celebrating the moment that you’re all in that place together, just before the bass really drops and everyone loses their shit. So when it came to acid house, a completely different set of questions emerged. The first thing is, this was not music that sounded anything like music of the past. There was no band. There wasn’t that setup of drum, bass, keys, guitar, vocalist that you would expect. You couldn’t hear any of that. It was clearly music made with machines. Possibly music made by machines. There was awareness at some level that the music was made by someone, but that someone wasn’t a musician, primarily. They were a quote-unquote producer. It was someone who had put the stuff together themselves. We became aware of this because we knew about hip-hop, and we knew that within hip-hop, the actual sound tech was made by someone playing around with digital technologies. With drum machines, samplers, and bits of other people’s music. But that wasn’t what was going on here because in hip-hop, you can recognise the reference points of the previous music, but here you couldn’t because the sounds were… Actually, what were foregrounded was the sound of the machine itself. Dubber I guess 808 State would have been an outlier in this because they were very much a band, weren’t they?

Dubber Yeah. And the reverse is also true because you can become very, very nostalgic about something that you were very sniffy about at the time, so you re-narrativise what your experience was. I’ve been at SOAS for about eight years, and I came in to teach something called Creative and Cultural Industries. So this was SOAS recognising that while the ethnomusicology and the history of art were really important, there was a missing link, partly to do with media and cultural studies and partly to do with recognising that all of this is caught up within a set of industrial systems and processes. Obviously, the internet and the digitisation of culture which came in the 2010s was happening all around, and there was a sense that they wanted to recognise that. So they brought me in - it was partly under pressure, I think - to think more about careers.Caspar Oh, well, absolutely right. And acid did start appearing on Top of the Pops in various guises. The first influence of acid house was the way it started to influence pop music. You’ve got bands like S’Express, Mars, who used slightly acid-y type sounds which were around in the ether but plugged them into a slightly more conventional idea of a band. S’Express weren’t really a band, but they pretended to be a band for the purposes of Top of the Pops. Or sometimes you’d get a singer, like a Kym Mazelle or one of these great Chicago vocalists would appear with a couple of dancers, but it wasn’t really clear who was the person who’d actually made the music. Caspar No, it’s a really good point. And it’s something to always bear in mind, of course. We want to be critical thinkers. The danger when you’re writing about things you love - and I say it to my students all the time - and you call it unique and you call it earth-shattering and you make all kinds of claims for it which are not substantiated… And that is a danger. I’d say two things. One is, when it comes to writing about rare groove, for example, I was taking the first baby steps. I found one other article that mentioned rare groove in academia. So in some ways, there’s a prior step to being critical, which is just to get the information out into the world. Secondly, I think the point is that these things are in motion. And there are points at which they can be emancipatory, full of possibility, and other points where they can fail to deliver on that or be captured by all kinds of other forces.

So early raves… If you had someone come on the mic in early rave, they’d pretty much just be saying “Get on one. Let’s get radio rental.”. That sort of thing. In ’92/’93 with the emergence of hardcore, which is a… Acid house splits into multiple sub-genres. That period is usually called hardcore, or ‘ardcore, without the H. That’s what Simon Reynolds calls it. “’Ardcore. You know the score.”. Dubber We’ve talked a fair bit about DJs and dancers and venues and spaces and not a lot about the recording artists. Were there key recording artists in these genres? Caspar I can’t imagine a better scenario for myself, and I want to advocate to other people that academia is a good place to pursue this kind of thing if you want to because… When I decided to stop being a journalist and do academia, it was because I wanted to spend the majority of my time thinking about the same set of things and learning and researching things which fascinated me. The reason I wanted to be a music journalist was because I wanted to meet and talk to people I admired who did things I was in awe of, and that remains the case now. Caspar It’s certainly felt like that over the past few years if you think about the whole narrative of Brexit and the whole idea of Britain wanting to get great again and sever its ties with Johnny Foreigner, and it really felt like London was different. And you could tell that in the narrative because London was often put up as this elite space which gets all the funding, and the Westminster Bubble or the Islington bubble. All of that kind of stuff. And there was an element of truth to that. We’ve got a left-wing mayor. We did have Boris Johnson as mayor, but, generally, we have more left-wing politics. We have a more welcoming attitude to strangers because it’s a city full of people who aren’t from here, frankly, and that gives it a special character. So I do think there’s something quite special about the character of London. Caspar Absolutely. And I still feel the lure of credentialising, and everyone… I feel this for UK jazz at the moment. I’m really worried about UK jazz because of the way in which people can jump on it, lay claim to it. There’s talk at the moment about “Should UK jazz acts ally with brands?”, because this is a big thing that happens in the music scape, isn’t it? And some people are saying “No. That’s selling out.”, and other people are saying “No, no. The problem is that there is no sustainable economy within UK jazz outside of the public funding it’s received. But that’s a success story for a certain kind of public funding over the last ten or fifteen years, but it’s very vulnerable. How is it going to achieve autonomy? Maybe allying with Nike or some designer is the way to go.”.Dubber Caspar, thanks so much for your time. It’s been really, really interesting. I’ve got so many things that I want to go further, and I’m aware of the constraints of people’s patience for my enthusiasms about things, so we should probably wrap it up there. Dubber Yeah. Particularly in graduate and post-grad research, of “I’m now going to write a forty thousand word dissertation on what’s so great about things I like.”. But is there anything that you can look at, this body of work that you’ve examined, and go “Well, that’s not very good. That’s not right. They shouldn’t have done this.”, or “This is something I should be critical about.”, rather than just celebrating the hands across the water solidarity of it all?

There, he built an empire, setting up his label Kronik Music to release his own recordings, as well as music by Shy Cookie, Timeless, Genius Cru and more. His studio saw artists including Oxide & Neutrino pass through, while So Solid Crew recorded much of their debut album there. Garcia also took over a pirate radio station called Flight FM, and ran his It’s A London Thing club night. “Every day, we were just bashing it out, man,” he smiles. “We were going hard, and making a lot of money. It was beyond all your dreams. At 19. It was a pretty wild place. At that time not everyone was operating as business-like as they are now.” I have a bit in the book about what happened to rare groove, and the point was rare groove ran its course. It relied on scarcity, and it relied on the fact that the audience were being exposed to something that they actually didn’t know anything about, and it was incredibly exciting. And, of course, when you actually scratch the surface of what that stuff is it reveals the wonderful geniuses behind that music as well. But after a few years, it becomes an enclosed system with a certain canon, just like all kinds of things do. It becomes boring. It becomes predictable. It becomes elitist. It becomes conservative. Will Straw says this about all music scenes, which I think is a really important thing to remember. They’re inherently conservative. Look at northern soul. Conservative to the point where you’ll almost get shot if you play a record which is outside of the defined limits of the canon or had been too commercially successful or has got a synthesiser in it. I talked to DJ Bob Jones about this. It’s fascinating. So there’s inherent conservatism, which I think is important to remember so it’s not just all happy-clappy.Dubber Yeah. I was going to ask you to what extent are you across the most contemporary of music scenes to the extent that you can find parallels, but ‘sufficiently’ is what it sounds like. Garcia started going to clubs like Club UK in Wandsworth and Garage City at Satellite Club — which would eventually become The Colosseum, home to legendary UK garage night Twice As Nice. “There was no such thing as UK garage then,” he continues. “Garage was US garage... It was really vocal, gospel almost, and very, very soulful. The stuff I was gravitating towards in the shop was a bit more dubby, and it would be the B-side of big gospel records that would have a little chopped-up vocal. But you’d speed them up, because they naturally sounded better [that way].” So one of the books that I quote says “London is not about Londoners, necessarily. You can become a Londoner.”. I think there’s a really interesting character of London. I don’t know if you’ve ever lived in London, Andrew, but you can become a Londoner much more easily than you can become British or English. In some sense, you can never become English if you’re not from England, but you can become a Londoner after about three or four months. Simultaneously, it’s happening in Manchester. It’s got different components. It’s much more related to a switch amongst white youth taste from indie to dance music, which was happening at the Haçienda, was happening under the influence of ecstasy. Very, very significant, but those books have been written. Dave Haslam writes about that, and many others.