BASS is fundamental. There's nothing else in music that so firmly roots the experience in time and space, because it's so instantly, obviously physical. You can't mistake it for a cerebral experience: although you can think about it and it can alter your mind, its immediate impact is on your body. It's the first clue that you've found the party, the rave, the dance – reaching through walls and floors, propagating outwards, marking out social (and antisocial) spaces. Car boots full of subs create force fields that propagate out through cities. The idea of it having weight – as in the DMZ raves’ slogan “meditate on the bass weight” – is practical, literal: because bass soundwaves are longer, the speakers have to be bigger, the magnets that drive them bigger, the boxes that contain them heavier. You don't get it on your phone or laptop. It puts the boom into boombox: the act of carrying a huge ghetto blaster on a shoulder in the 70s and 80s wasn't just a style statement, it was a demonstration of strength and swagger. And having big speakers is a financial, physical commitment. If you own a serious soundsystem and want to put it in places that people will appreciate it, you're claiming space, staging an occupation, and showing that you have the monetary and/or literal muscle to get those boxes into place.
Those big boxes mark out that space, too. The old adage about “dancing about architecture” is a classic bit of throwaway snideness aimed at the kind of people who care more about words about music than about music. But out in the wild, all dance music is architectural, in the sense that it creates moving spaces for you, as a human body, to inhabit; bass music exponentially more so. Both the speaker stacks – altars and temples for the religions of sound – and those long, deep vibrations of air delineate an area in three dimensions, creating one of the most basic dividers between being within and without a musical experience. You're either “inside the place” – as the rave and jungle MCs would say, with that bass pulsing through you – or you're not. There's no half-measures. “If your chest ain't rattling, it ain't happening,” was the slogan of Bristol club Subloaded. ‘Can U Feel It’, the insistent chant in the acid house classic, takes on a whole other level of secret, shared meaning when you and everyone else around you can actually feel it, physically, penetrating and suffusing your bodies.
The promoter and producer Loefah, of the DMZ raves that came to epitomise the dubstep movement, once told me that at overwhelming volume, bass both triggers the fight-or-flight reflex, and gives you a sense of being in the womb: experiencing energy and heightened reflexes, and ultimate comfort and safety at the same time. My own musical life is dotted with vivid memories of bass: seeing the air shimmer like heat haze in front of bassbins; being at bleak, post-apocalyptic warehouse raves and seeing the zombie-like clientele huddle around the speakers as if the bass could provide actual warmth; feeling the churning tones binding together the barely contained chaos of flailing breaks and gunshot sounds at jungle dances; seeing the mischief on the face of Aba Shanti I's selector as, having warmed up the crowd, he pressed the big red button on his mixer to unleash the full power of his system, reducing some of the dancers near me to quite profane ecstasies.
Of course it's not just “bass music” that uses the power of bass. And it's not new. Hearing the reverberation of the 32-foot pipes of a cathedral organ through the vaulted spaces purpose built to amplify them can be a sublime experience in the most instant, visceral sense – alongside the genuine sense of awe at how perfectly the instrument design and architecture are designed to enthral and control the individual. Imagine you're a medieval peasant used only to the sights and sounds of your own land: think how vast the chamber of the cathedral and the controlled power of the organ and choir would seem, and how tiny they would make you feel; how subservient to the powers that had put it all there, as they rearrange your innards with sound. The overtone chanting and vast deep horns of Tibetan Buddhism create a similar sense of being brought into contact with something superhuman, and thus of supernatural experiences. There's now a whole emerging discipline of “acoustic archaeology” which tries to estimate what sonic experiences people might have had in ancient temples, burial chambers and cavern complexes – with more and less plausible speculation about how low vibrations, from chanting, gongs and other sources might have affected supplicants and worshippers.
But there is something much more specific that we think of as “bass music”, too. There is the boom in the “boom bap” of classic hip hop, the 808 kickdrum in electro, Miami bass and all the hybrid regional and diasporic rap beat and booty bass forms which emerged in the last 30+ years – and of course there's Caribbean soundsystem culture which put the emphasis on the low end going right back to the 1950s. More specifically still, there's the creative and social nexus where all of these things meet with disco, electronic experimentation and psychedelic bohemianism – which all happened in its most concentrated form in Britain. The low-end experimentation that took its cues from the music that came over with the Windrush generation of Caribbean immigrants and their children, injected its influence into the cultural circulatory system of the nation, and from there sent genre after new genre out into the world. Unmistakeably British, unmistakeably hybrid, an ever-growing dysfunctional family of sounds that the DJ and producer Skream once referred to as “mongrel music”.
This is what this book is about. Broadly speaking it's a story of that Caribbean influence as it's created new forms, starting in the late 1970s with lovers rock and post-punk – two very different styles of music that nonetheless were both very British, and both underpinned by that deep soundsystem bass – and going all the way through to the sounds of the 2010s emerging in the wake of grime, dubstep, new wave house, Afrobeats and UK rap. This isn't intended as a definitive history, though. Quite the opposite, in fact: it's deliberately partial, arbitrary and conversational, not trying to impose any grand theory or narrative onto its subject matter. Underground music, club music, soundsystem music are by their natures hyper-social – formed from interlocking networks of crews and movements, each one comprised of individuals whose cultural perspective is formed from thousands upon thousands of hours immersed in crowds, sounds, words and bass. Information, style, knowledge, innovation are all transferred through this seething network, via meandering late-night chat, MCs’ catchphrases, rumours, babble and jokes. Moving at the speed of life. The artistic moment – if “art” is even sufficient as a term for something so ingrained into life – is extended through hours, nights, weekends, summers, something new always being added to the mix just as you think you have a handle on it. Understanding comes not from explanation but from life-long experience, from meeting the people that make up this mass.
And that's why this book is how it is: a series of more or less interlinked portraits. This is a response to my frustration with music journalism obsessed with pinning down historical moments, presenting instead an attempt to look at multiple interwoven continua: life stories, genre stories, sound stories, all happening all at once. Each of the people you will meet here has had a role in rewiring the cultural networks of this country, connecting their own musical backgrounds and obsessions to those of their friends, neighbours and beyond. Some have created entirely new genres in the process, some have set the groundwork for others to do so, and some are just one-offs: creating unique concoctions, demonstrating the possibilities that bass culture has to offer. Because this book is first of all about bass – rather than the many other musical aspects that weave through soundsystem culture – the majority of the people here are producers: the people who actually made those speakers move, who made that bass. But there are also promoters, singers, DJs, radio impresarios – including some, inevitably, who are several of these things.
Each chapter of the story is a Q&A, covering the subject's musical career, but also their life story – because bass culture is the life stories of everyone involved. The book rewards close reading and just dipping in. You can read straight through treating the conversations as conversations, or you can pick apart the history, and see how different scenes, sounds and personnel are viewed from different angles, via the footnotes that tell stories about relevant songs and other details. As the story progresses, the same names and places recur, in different contexts and time periods, a reflection of the tangled and networked nature of scenes and sounds. Mad Professor, Massive Attack, Jazzie B, Paul “Trouble” Anderson, Neneh Cherry, Gilles Peterson, Goldie, Dillinja, Chimpo and the Levelz crew, Plastic People, Big Apple, Ammunition, the wise Germans at !K7, all rear their heads over and over again at multiple points through the book, not just as cultural reference points but participants.
Similarly, what we've been taught to think of as cultural events – the emergence of punk, or acid house, or dubstep, for example – are here seen from different angles, revealed gradually as forms rising up from the stories themselves. You'll see the same questions taking different forms and answered in different ways, and sometimes of course my own obsessions creep in too. Some of the participants have worked with one another, influenced one another, or passed sounds and knowledge down that are inherited further down the line. Places have changed: the Four Aces became Labyrinth then closed, Global Village became Heaven. The landscape shifts. Indeed, by the time we get to the post-rave generation that started making music in the late 1990s, these participants are the children of the peers, colleagues and friends of the earlier interviewees. A generation has passed, another has arrived. Bass culture is folk culture, and the experiences of children around their parents’ and even grandparents’ soundsystems are a vital part of how it is transmitted.
And who am I to be writing this? After all, I grew up in rural middle England, seemingly as far from soundsystem culture as you could imagine: my town is known not for blues parties and speaker boxes, but for having a John Betjeman poem written about it, for being on a TV documentary about “cider louts”, and for a ritual involving pint glasses and bottles being hurled at people as they climbed a statue of King Alfred. But even here the reverberations found their way to us, and so my story is woven into this fabric too. When I was a young kid in the early 80s, my father worked in the DHSS in Reading, and he and his workmates had a Sunday league cricket team (“The Ageing Hippie All Stars”). Though the music played at home was more likely to be Dire Straits, Fairport Convention and Bob Dylan, he had a walloping hi-fi – one of those early 80s brushed steel Sony jobs with speakers as tall as I was at five – and I think the first time I ever heard reggae played really loud was when some of his cricketing mates came to sit out on our lawn smoking. My aunt and cousins lived in South London, too, and when we visited I'd sneak a radio to bed, utterly fascinated by the way you only needed to nudge the tuning dial half a millimetre and you'd hear five different varieties of pirate radio – and five different varieties of dub and dancehall.
I had always loved electronic sound manipulation, too. Even before I discovered any kind of pop culture, I'd been so immersed in repeatedly listening to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy on headphones that the first album I ever bought was a BBC Radiophonic Workshop collection, of sound effects from Hitchhiker's, Dr. Who and Blake's 7. I loved Eurythmics, Yazoo and Depeche Mode from first hearing, too. By 14 I was listening by night to John Peel under the bedclothes, hearing industrial and acid house records among his blends, and by day, wide-eyed, to schoolmates’ older siblings’ stories of missions across the country to find raves, in fields, in Bristol, in London. All of which felt impossibly exotic, like the most thrilling adventure stories unfolding just on the cusp of reality and fantasy – perhaps because that's how it felt to some of them too…
Locally the closest we had to genuine subculture was being a stop-off on the new age traveller circuit. As I reached mid-teens, going to score on the traveller site became part of my and my friends’ ritual – and there we'd hear dub, ska, plus all the gnarled, punked-up and tripped-out crusty variants thereof. By 15 – as well as the mish-mash of indie, goth, metal, rap and pop that anyone of my age with a developed sense of curiosity would naturally be into – I was buying records by Dub Syndicate, Radical Dance Faction, Culture Shock, The Specials, The Orb. I even tried to incorporate the odd dub bassline into the sketchy Hendrix cover versions attempted by my bong-addled school band Gobi Aloo (yes we were named after cauliflower and potato, a name we picked at random from the menu in the town's one curry house – where Jason, our drummer, worked as potwash boy). The closest we ever came to a legitimate gig was a micro-festival up on the Ridgeway, plugged into some hippie's generator.
And then came rave. And specifically 1990's “bleep” rave tunes at the birth of hardcore, with their huge, pure, subsonic bass tones. The early WARP Records output from Yorkshire were the archetype: ‘Track With no Name’, ‘Dextrous’, ‘LFO’, ‘Yeah You’. But also there were tracks from London by 4 Hero, Moody Boys and Bang The Party, and even white labels pushed into my hands at the local record shops from our local traveller-affiliated acid house heroes. DJ Kieran from Oxford's Prism club, where I had my rave baptism that year, was making fusions of electro, dub, rave and dreamy psychedelia as BAMN that turned my head inside out. That same year, aged 16, I took acid for the first time, went to Prism for the first time, had the bass of ‘Dextrous’ pass through my body like a double decker bus through mist, and – at a random after-club gathering in some strangers’ house – heard The Moody Boys’ remix of The KLF's ‘What Time is Love’. With its echo-location bleeps, its King Tubby bassline scampering up and down like an alien creature, and its Misty In Roots sample (“music of our ’eart is roots music… music which tells about the future and the judgement which is to come”), this rewired my brain. All the electronic experimentation, all the dub and reggae I'd heard, plus funk via hip hop, plus more, was all here – and this was OUR music, happening NOW.
Since that moment everything for me has orbited that distinctive British bass and electronic space manipulation. Like those forlorn wreckhead warehouse ravers seeking warmth, I've constantly homed in on the bassbins. The attractor that the interviewees here tend to orbit is the canonical lineage of rave-hardcore- jungle-garage-dubstep/grime – which has given me untold glorious moments and thousands of pounds and hours spent tracking down records. But there's very much also the backroom drug-dub of Andrew Weatherall remixes, Meat Beat Manifesto, Renegade Soundwave, Depth Charge, a thousand Megadog-adjacent hippie dub acts, and all that followed from that. Plus the warehouse techno and electro of people like Neil Landstrumm that stayed true to the soundsystem-shaking impact of LFO and co. And the narcotic “dub house disco” of early Underworld and Leftfield, Guerilla Records, Full Circle, Cowboy, Shave Yer Tongue – which we still hear echoed through neo-disco, neo-Balearic and Bicep records. Or the intricacies of broken beat and the way dubwise bass flowed from that into the “Gilles Peterson world” of British soul/jazz. Not forgetting the industrial dub fury of Kevin “The Bug” Martin, his Macro Dub Infection compilations and his own records right through to today. The “purple” sound of Joker, Gemmy, Guido, and later Swindle: rude funk synths riding the rhythms and bass tones of grime. The party energy of UK funky, which I saw first-hand – as a south London pub DJ around 2010 – could turn the moodiest of crowds into a joyous throng. And on it goes and goes, on and on, a constant cascade of mutant forms, of one-offs, of new genres, more expressive of the ever-changing Britain that I know and believe in than any gang of boys with guitars ever was.
As that little list suggests, there are easily many dozens more names who could have fitted into this book, and paths the book could have taken. To avoid losing focus, I've concentrated on music that – in terms of crowds, personnel and technique – occupies a position equidistant between reggae/dancehall and the club culture of its time, not straying far into the club mainstream, into purist Afro-Caribbean music scenes or hippie bohemianism or nerdy experimentation. It's about tracing a particular cultural interface that I perceive, from experience, to exist. But it is merely based on my own tastes and contacts: on who's blown my mind at raves, on who I've come to know and feel comfortable in conversation with as a punter, writer and occasional DJ, or just on who I've always wanted to interview. And as a result it tells a very particular story – with other inclusions it could very easily have told a very different one. And this is kind of the point: because (again) this culture is ultra-social, ultra-networked, ultra-multiple. There are thousands of stories. There is no one route through it, no one line around it, no one grand theory that can encapsulate it. It is too big, too various, too unruly. It spills out from whatever container you try to put it in.
You could survey the same ground in British culture – literally the same, the same clubs and pavements and shops – by tracing connections in pirate radio or psychedelic-industrial squats, or b-boy or jazz musician or skating connections, or even football. You could pick musicians who help you make a very specific political point, or rave tracks that illustrate your chosen crypto-Lacanian-post- pomo-contra-Frankfurt fashion in cultural criticism. Each way would shine a different light on it. But this version is about ordinary lives above all, including my own, shaken and transformed by extraordinary bass: bass rattling through pubs and clubs and house parties in Leeds, Bristol, Sheffield, Manchester, High Wycombe, Cardiff, Northampton, Milton Keynes, Pula, Berlin – and of course London. And it incorporates all of the generational clashes and continuities, all the dunderheaded race-hate and cross-cultural learning that characterises British life, all of the shifting barriers, prejudices, idiocies and quirks that make up music culture and the industry as both shift and change. As Alexis Petridis summed it up to me when I first began on this project way back at the start of the decade, it is “occult social history.” I can't claim peer-reviewed rigour, but I'm proud of what has emerged. About halfway-through, as we looked at the pictures, Brian said, “This is the England I recognise.” And he was right, it is.
It's been a long time in the making. The idea behind this book started coming together around 2010 when I started putting together a website with friends, photographer Brian David Stevens and designer Ben Bashford. (A former roadie, Brian had an intimate understanding of speaker boxes and had produced gorgeous pictures of Notting Hill soundsystems; Ben is a sometime drum’n’bass producer, with whom I've had many long, late nights discussing low frequencies.) The aim was to document underground music culture in a very broad sense, and to do the kind of interviews I all too rarely get the opportunity to do: verbatim conversations can roam freely, because they're not about someone selling a particular product or release. With its lack of space limitations, the internet has made the free-ranging Q&A more plausible as a format, and I was doing more and more of them for sites like theartsdesk.com and FACT mag. (The transcripts in this book are edited and abridged for clarity on the page, we hope without muffling the essential voices, rhythms and stories.)
But the website was too open-ended a project, and it was hard to maintain momentum with all the other demands of freelance life. Duke Ellington has a motto attributed to him: “I don't need inspiration, I need deadlines.” Brian and I set about trying to find a publisher who'd give us just that. And once found, Strange Attractor also gave us the leeway to work at our own pace too – it's taken us well over three years to get here. But that's all good. This is about slow flowing undercurrents more than any revelatory hype, and the people we're documenting are lifers. If some of these interviews are older than others, the life stories remain life stories, and their relevance only grows with time.
So here they are, for you to meet. The cranky idealists, the twisted scientists, the battle-scarred troupers, the bass disciples, almost every one of them still working on the rave frontline – if not shelling down the dance four nights a week, then at least putting records together, booking the radio shows or organising the parties. These people shook my world – and in fact still do. They made me a bass fundamentalist. I hope they will do the same to you.