4
Youth
WITH his emphatic, slightly Jaggerish cadences, his casual anecdotes involving inhuman quantities of LSD and stand-up fist fights, his effortless dropping of names like Paul McCartney and Dave Gilmour, Martin Glover – Youth – is the archetypal rock star. Even though being in bands has only been a small part of his career, the fact that, when we meet for this interview, Nik Turner ex of Hawkwind is kipping in his spare room, says it all. And of course, playing bass onstage with Killing Joke, the band he co-founded at the end of the 70s, he's still visibly the real deal. He also bears a resemblance to The Fast Show's Paul Whitehouse, which can make conversation with him slightly discombobulating when the light falls at the right angle: occasionally you may think you're talking to a Whitehouse character.
But that's not why he's included here. He's here because – as a bass player, remixer and producer – dub has been at the heart of everything he's done since his teens. Killing Joke's first experiments in the studio were as vital as anything The Clash, The Slits and PiL did around the same time, when it comes to injecting the bass, space and deep dread of Jamaican dub into post-punk. His next band Brilliant – with Jimmy Cauty, later of The KLF – were beloved on the live circuit for their heavy and virtuosic dub funk, even if their over-polished recorded output never quite captured this. Then, along with Cauty and his old schoolfriend Alex Paterson, Youth rode the acid house wave with aplomb, infecting that too with dub, as the trio embarked on the paradoxically tranquil and fractious chillout room experiments which settled out into The Orb, The KLF's Chill Out album, as well as his solo work producing pop dance hits for Coldcut, Blue Pearl, Zoë and even Bananarama, plus dubbed-out remixes for everyone from U2 to Björk to Malcolm McLaren.
Since then he's maintained multiple musical personalities, producing mega-albums from the likes of The Verve to Crowded House, while also keeping his hand in with the globalised psychedelic trance scene and maintaining creative ties with his further-out post-punk contemporaries: Mark Stewart, Current 93's David Tibet, and PiL's Jah Wobble and Keith Levene. And the soundsystem inspiration is a constant, whether that's periodically reuniting with The Orb or producing lush lovers rock for Hollie Cook (daughter of Sex Pistol Paul). And just as with his rockstar anecdotes, once he has a bifter on the go he really knows how to wax lyrical about it all.
Potted biography first. What part did music play in your upbringing?
It began in Africa. Born in Nairobi, left when I was one month old, moved to Gerrards Cross near Slough. Lived for a couple of years with my grandmother in the Midlands, a real old fashioned thing – outside toilet, mangle in the backyard, surrounded by this quite stern Welsh, working-class, chapel vibe. After that grew up around Slough, Stoke Poges, until I was starting secondary. We were quite upwardly mobile, it was quite an idyllic 60s semi-suburban kind of dream. Parents split up, moved to London, living in a little flat in Paddington with loads of step-brothers and sisters. Started going to secondary school in Kilburn, being introduced to music culture there because if you weren't good at sport, you had to be into music. Or you just had to be a good thief or you'd get beaten up. Started learning trombone. I'd get grief at the bus stops for it, but it got me into music a bit.
Then the last three years or so of school before I left at 15, my mum managed to get a grant and I was at Kingham with Alex [Paterson], which is a boarding school in North Oxfordshire. There were a lot of scholarship kids like me there, and a lot of RAF kids. It was a very Christian-based foundation, Quaker. They had a music room there, which was like a coal cellar. Me and Alex just used to play music all the time. We wired up all these Dansette record players into a bit of a soundsystem. We'd listen to whatever: Pink Floyd, T. Rex, Isaac Hayes, stuff where you could really step through into that stereo world, into the production. Prior to that I had been going out in London, I was a soulboy from the age of 14, going to Global Village, Countdown. But when I left school, it was 1976-77 and punk was just happening.
What was the soulboy scene like? What was the mix of people and clothing and stuff?
The birth of multiculturalism, before punk, really. Still mid 70s, but in London very multicultural. In my school in Kilburn, being white you were definitely in the minority of a class of 32 kids, I was about one of six white kids. Rest were Asian or West Indian. So you're exposed to multicultural music cultures early on in London. The scene as a young teenager was going out to soulboy clubs: soul and funk, Fatback Band, the British-based ones like Hi-Tension, James Brown of course, but also disco and the northern soul hangover. Disco was rapidly taking over, and it was great because you'd have a big mix of people, lots of people dancing. Like Saturday Night Fever, but with a South London casual twist, you know? Actually when Saturday Night Fever came out, everyone was like, “Oh yeah [laughs], that's what we're doing, but we're all a bit embarrassed by this”. That killed it, really [laughs]. But it wasn't far off, the same way That'll Be The Day and Stardust are pretty accurate for rock bands.
Did you have first-hand experience of soundsystem culture at that point?
No. And to be fair I'd not heard of them either. This was 1974-75, they must've been going on, but I wasn't aware of them. There was a kind of soundsystem culture around the discos and the DJs, the soul ones, but it wasn't really about soundsystems, it was about the music. Then you had the soulboy all-dayers at Purley and around – coaches from all over the countries would come, like 5,000-6,000 kids all dancing. You'd meet loads of people, it was a good gathering.
For most of us it was about meeting girls just going out and having a dance. In the London clubs like Countdown and Global Village, it was hot, sweaty, and some of the dancers there were amazing, dancing up the walls and doing flips. It became a thing as how much someone could show off individually. And also the look: for a while it'd be a military look, then it'd be more jelly sandals, Bowie look. Then suddenly it was punk. And with punk came dub and reggae. Predominantly because Don Letts was playing it at the Roxy, I think. So every other DJ that came after that would play dub.
The story he tells is that they needed someone to play between bands and there weren't any punk records at that point
That's right. But why dub and not disco or whatever? Because I'd say predominantly most of the people [were] coming from a soul-boy thing. That was their introduction to dub – not all but most. By 1977 I was squatting in Ladbroke Grove, I was quite exposed to the dub soundsystem culture that had emerged in the previous two years. And that was quite a revelation, where you'd have shebeens or blueses in some private house in the basement until four-five am, sometimes later. You'd pay a fiver on the door, couple of quid even, and it was just wall-to-wall, you could hardly move. You'd have a little bar at the back and the place would just be full of smoke. And wall-to-wall speakers, so the whole house would shake. The physical bones in your body would shake in there, and you'd be compressed up with everyone else.
The journalist Vivien Goldman introduced me to the first ones I went. She lived on Ladbroke Grove, she used to come round the squat. I met her at John Lydon's, I'd already been working with his brother [in the 4” be 2”s]. Don Letts was going out with Jeannette at the time, before Keith Levene, who later joined PiL. They were a face couple, you know? And dub was always playing. I originally got to know Vivien when I was living up the road in Earl's Court with Alex in a bedsit. But then later I moved to Ladbroke Grove and started seeing her a lot more. She took me to see incoming reggae acts that I hadn't heard of like Prince Lincoln and stuff. And she took us to shebeens, me and John as well. And it was never any hassle for him, even though he was living in a siege mentality in [his house in] Gunter Grove. He couldn't go out there without being attacked for being a Sex Pistol, or an ex-Sex Pistol at that point. Going to a shebeen no one would give a fuck. There were so few white people there. Often me and him would be the only white guys, lots of white women [laughs] but very few white guys. Jaz Coleman swears the first time he ever saw me was a shebeen in Ladbroke Grove before I joined the band.
And there were always some Asian cats there. So even in that black-centric world, it was already multicultural. It wasn't segregated. When I was going to New York for the first time in the late 70s, I was shocked how segregated the communities were – not just geographically, but they wouldn't socially hang out. That wasn't the case in London. The way the city was spread, there's no specifically rich or poor areas. There's council estates next to expensive areas, or right in the middle of them. It just mixed it all up. And of course with immigration, Ladbroke Grove, Holland Park had been a des res kind of modern development that hadn't sold 20 years previously, so had become run down, and cheap for incoming immigrants of the time, which were West Indians. As had Brixton, you know, which 50 years earlier been very chi chi.
And that mashup created an interesting musical culture, and ultimately multiculturalism. And that was great to see that emerging as a kid, because I remember in the 60s being in Birmingham and my grandmother being like, “Don't talk to the people next door, they're Irish,” I'm like, “Well, we're Welsh, so what?” [laughs in disbelief]. ‘“Oh, they're Irish!” Then when the first Indian couples came in the street, they were still quite divided and racist, and ingrained in a very working- class way. And there was elements of that in London, especially North London. But in some parts it had begun to dissolve and dissipate, and people were making new communities out of all those communities.
And subculture always chips away at that anyway, because people on all sides are hungry for music and drugs and interaction
That's right. But honestly, those early soundsystems were a revelation, never heard bass like that in my life.
This was when you were first picking up the bass guitar, and also learning to be a producer
That's right. As a band with Killing Joke – our little workers’ collective – we had a rehearsal room in Frestonia, the free people's state in Latimer Road up the road from our squat, which was an amazing social experiment where they tried to create a free state out of a squatting community. Almost got away with it, applied to the UN for autonomy status and almost got it. This was John Hopkins, Hoppy – he had started UFO Club in the 60s, the first psychedelic club, and put on Pink Floyd at the Tabernacle in Ladbroke Grove, with the light show. Then he started the London Free School and The Arts Lab, and he was a very community-based activist of the counterculture. Amazing photographer, amazing promoter. He started a free college for immigrants and people with no money who wanted to get educated – got some of the greatest minds of his generation in the area to do free classes. Still a massive inspiration. We all bow our heads in shame for we haven't done, compared to him. A great inspiration.
So they had this free peoples’ hall where you could rehearse, but it had been appropriated by this guy Phil who had a pet fox that stank the place out. So he only let three bands in basically. The Clash had the first floor, that was their base of operations – it was right next to the Westway, so perfect for them. And we shared a room with Motörhead, and that was it. We could leave our gear set up, it was only us and Motörhead who used it. My ambition then was just, “I want to be louder than Lemmy” [laughs] because they were the loudest band I'd ever heard of that at that time. And Lemmy had the loudest bass rig. Even though his bass sounds more like a guitar than it does a bass, it was still really loud.
And at the same time I was going to these blueses and shebeens round the corner, and listening to dub nonstop – and just loving the space between the bass and the drums. And I'd only being playing bass myself a couple of years, and it wasn't an intentional thing. I saw an ad for a bass player for a punk band. I thought, “I could do that.” I thought, “I want to get in a band, I don't know if I'd get away with it as a guitarist.” I was suddenly really being drawn by the bass, it kind of chose me, and gave me this education with soundsystem culture. And it was like, “How can I replicate that with the band?” We were doing very dub-influenced early singles, stuff like Turn to Red.24
So I had a deal with this bass company called Trace Elliot, they also made PAs. I kept blowing up their speakers. I'd go down to their warehouse, and they go, “You can't blow these speakers up, we just gave two of these to Led Zeppelin and they don't blow them up.” And I'm like, “Look, I'm rehearsing with Lemmy from Motörhead. I'm having to listen to him play afterwards. He's louder than Led Zeppelin and I want the extra bass.” I kept bringing back these blown speakers, still under warranty, so they'd have to fix them. These days I'm sure they'd find a way of getting out of that, but those days they prided themselves on making bass rigs that didn't blow up. So if you blow them up, they'd try to fix them. And I saw this half of a PA rig – this massive bassbin and a 2x1225 on top, a big old thing – so I said, “What's that?” They said, “Oh, that's a £10k PA rig.” I said, “Can't I have that for my bass speakers for my rig? Let me hear that.” I plugged into that and I was like, “Yeah, that's it”. All our roadies and techs cursed me from that day because it took four people to lift the bass thing.
Then I got it into the studio where we were with Motörhead. I thought, “Lemmy's going to be really pissed off now” [laughs]. We're waiting outside their studio and he comes out and I said, “Oh, did you see the new bass rig?”, he goes, “Oh, I thought that was the new PA,” I said, “No, that's the bass rig,” he goes, “Oh” [grunt]. Just shrugged and walked off. But the week after, they were waiting for us to come out and he heard it playing, he was going, “Bloody hell!” He was impressed with it. And of course everyone in the band loved it except for the singer. And at that point I started taking a lot of LSD. I bought a fretless bass so I could sort of slide the notes, and they'd be slightly out of tune, which would give you this sort of bass wobble resonance. If you hit the note you get that resonant standing wave. If you don't hit the note, instead of going “Wommmmwommmmwommmm”, it goes [much faster] “WOMWOMWOMWOM…” If you're by a big system like that, it'll literally shake you around.
I'd met Holger Czukay in Cologne with Jah Wobble, who I knew from John Lydon's house. Wobble had just left PiL, or was just about to. I was still only 18, he was 21 – but he was out there doing an album with Holger and Jaki Liebezeit from Can. I thought, “Fucking hell, he's only been playing the bass six months longer than me and he's already doing an album with one of the world's greatest drummers. I better catch up!” And he was such a good bass player as well.
Holger was bass player in Can – and he'd built the world's biggest bass guitar. He took us out to this wooden barn, and he'd made this bass guitar out of it, where the barn was the sound box. He connected it all up, and he'd used telegraph wires as cables with these pulleys and wires, and you'd pull this lever and it'd make the note change, and these other things for plucking it because it was so big. You'd pluck it and the whole thing would fill with huge booming bass. We were like, “Wow, this is as far as anyone's gone with bass. No one's gone further than this.” They were making an album, and I said, “Is this on the album?” and Holger goes, “No, there's a flaw in my plan. The bass is so big, there's not a microphone invented that can record it.” They just couldn't get those tones.
How involved were you with the drum machines and electronic stuff in Killing Joke?
A little bit. Paul would do the programming. But he had a little clap track, he was as into dub as I was. And we're all trying to get an authentic sound. We'd gone to a studio John and Wobble had recommended – Gooseberry, with this young engineer Mark Lusardi, who'd trained up with Dennis Bovell. He and Neil – Mad Professor – were the two serious studio dub heads operational at the time. I thought we'd just produce it, because I wanted to be Lee Perry, you know. But I didn't have the knowhow. Dennis was busy, so we went for Mark, who was incredible.
We did the first Killing Joke EP there, Turn to Red, which had dub elements. Two tracks were totally dubbed out. We did the next single [‘Requiem’] there as well, but it didn't work out so well, so we went to Marquee Studios to do the album, which was more of a rock-based thing. We used Phil Harding, who was in-house engineer then. He became a big dance-disco producer in the 80s, and mixer. He understood a bit about dub and disco, and he could get the qualities we were looking for, mixing it with big post-punk loud shredding guitars, as well as rock drums and shouted vocals. That's more straightforward song-mixing though. The next album we went to Townhouse with Nick Launay and a big producer who'd only done The Police and ‘In The Air Tonight’, Hugh Padgham. And we got this great drum sound that was like Kate Bush. I was experimenting with the fretless and the bigger sound rig, and the basslines got dubbier and heavier. I mixed that album on LSD, and on the mix we'd take a lot of stuff out and dub it up, and leave big reverbs on the drums. You can really hear the dub influence coming through.
At the same time I was starting to do productions for other people, working with Mark Lusardi again. For the next ten years I did lots of stuff with Dave Harrow, and [Adrian] Sherwood and loads of stuff. I did sessions for them just playing bass for the experience, plus Alien Sex Fiend. Then when samplers came out, in the mid 80s, I could have a bedroom studio, and start writing and programming. And that's when I reconnected with Alex. He moved into the Coach House and we started making British dance music records, indie dance, which had a lot of disco, electro, New York and dub influence.
I just want to pause on that mid-80s period before dance in the modern sense kicks off. What filled the gap between post-punk and the arrival of hip hop, dance, house?
Well, it is a funny climate there because there were few tangents coming out of punk and post-punk. One was new romantic, where a big underlying element was club culture which became underground warehouse parties, and a big part of acid house – including the Wag Club, Blue Rondo à la Turk, Spike and Neville, they were all part of Blitz, Billy's new romantic Bowie scene, you know? The other side you had the Batcave a little after, the same guys, same crowd, but it brought in a more gay, S&M fetish crowd. And also a punk crowd, which became goth. It was phenomenally successful. Everyone was there, you know, Boy George, everyone. Everyone at Rusty's Blitz gigs would be at the Batcave as well. Rusty too. So there was a lot of cross-fertilisation of scenes.
And there was always a cross-fertilisation between goth and industrial as well
Industrial was just beginning. I'd just started working with Portion Control and Executive Slacks, and doing remixes of 23 Skidoo, 400 Blows, Tony Thorpe's early project. Round a Chelsea-based label called Illuminated. They pioneered a kind of industrial goth arthouse post-punk thing.
Funk-influenced as well?
Yes, a big part of post-punk was funk. When I left Killing Joke in about 1982, I started Brilliant with Jimmy Cauty, which was a kind of post-punk funk collective. Punk funk, really. We had two drummers, two bass players. We were attempting to play what I was hearing on the radio in New York, Shep Pettibone-style mashups: electric hip hop, pre acid house techno elements. Two other bands that were trying to do that then – but they were more or less the same people, Rip Rig & Panic and Float Up CP. I was mates with Sean Oliver, we were coming from the same place, we would do gigs together. And Neneh Cherry was their singer. Sean also worked with The Slits, actually, and they had a bit of a disco influence. But none of us could play that well. Probably Brilliant were the best musicians, but [Float Up CP] had the drummer, Bruce Smith. He'd been in The Slits and he's still in Public Image now. So there's a lot of entanglement there – a family tree.
Not just funk but jazz-funk
We were all based in West London. The third band from that little scene was Funkapolitan, who prefigured Jamiroquai. In a way Jamiroquai was the popularisation of that West London soundsystem-meets-funk culture. Soundsystem culture was Soul II Soul, Camden, North London. The West London scene was Float Up CP, Brilliant and Funkapolitan – and that had a different edge. It's the same ingredients – dub, funk, disco – but I think the West London scene had a more post-punk attitude. 23 Skidoo, that was West London as well. Very funk-based, but ultimately a much more white scene. And there were other West London soundsystems emerging, like Manasseh, coming from a white middle-class angle and doing the business at parties and stuff. I was then living next door to The Mangrove at the time, on the front line, on All Saints Road. By that time we'd stopped squatting, but me and Jaz Coleman had a little basement flat. His girlfriend at the time was a bit of a dealer, she had a deal with a couple of guys in The Mangrove. It got quite heavy. He'd have guys with guns coming in there cutting up the hash to sell next door. And if you were white in that area, the police had a policy to pull you on sus, because the only reason you were there, they argued, was to buy drugs. So eventually enough residents made a fuss and you could get a resident's card from the police station to say that you lived there, with your address on, and they wouldn't search you. But as soon as The Mangrove gangsters found out I had one, they want me to do their bloody runs for them. They're going, “You can take this bag up the road for us.” That's when I thought, “It's time to move out, it's getting too heavy.”
And there were soundsystems left, right and centre there. We used to go to them all the time. I never had a heavy vibe from any of the black kids, even when I was the only white kid. I did look a bit dishevelled and stuff, but it was always really cool. There was a lot of muggings at the time, but it wasn't just black on black or black on white, it was all mixed up. A very poor area, a lot of squats, but generally it was pretty cool. And then by the late 80s that had just gone. It was in and out really quick. By that time I'd moved round here [Wandsworth], and by 1984-85 I'd got a sampler, I had a bedroom set-up, and I was using all of that to make music. That became the first label we did with Alex – WAU! Mr. Modo – which also had big soundsystem/dub influences.
There were a few cats who bridge divides between scenes. Between 1985 and acid house, the predominant scene was the rare funk warehouse scene: Spike and Neville, Norman Jay, lots of West End, North London-based stuff. Sade had parties in her house in Islington. Coldcut – Jon More and Matt Black – did parties in Southeast London. My mate Spencer and a couple of other promoters pulled in a few different scenes, even Philip Salon's Mud club, though that had been around for years. Spencer was part of Delirium, the first house club here. He was the first person to bring Todd Terry over, they'd be at Brixton Academy or the Astoria – really big gigs – but they'd bring in the warehouse crowd, the Titanic, Funkapolitan crowd who were more arty West London. They'd bring in people who were about to become the acid house crowd. It all moved so fast. a scene like this might exist for a year, then it was utterly changed again! Alex and I lived in this council flat in Battersea, and upstairs I had Andrew Weatherall, a young DJ from Windsor doing the Boy's Own thing.26
OK so now we're getting to 1987-88
That's right. And it all starts changing. Weatherall's upstairs, I've got Nancy Noise, who's a receptionist at a studio. Everyone's talking about Shoom. This must be 1988, but we've already made a lot of tracks for what became WAU!, which we'd started in 1986-87.
And you'd done Heavy Duty Breaks27 even before that?
Before you had a sampler?
Very much so. We did that with a guy who had a sampler, I didn't have one. We were playing around with a sampler with Brilliant as well, a Greengate.28 I used that on Heavy Duty Breaks, I think. Eddie Richards knows, he has got an IBM-type memorybank of a filing system for his memory. He knows all the dates, everything. He even sent me a digitised copy of some of the KISS FM cassettes we were collecting and swapping at the time. But in the mid-80s we were just making bedroom dance music, 12”s and stuff for WAU! A lot of that was coming out in 1987, and naturally coinciding with what was happening with acid house. Weatherall was already playing our records a lot, and we started going down to the Shoom and stuff, like, “Oh wow”!
The first ecstasy I took was in 1986 with my then girlfriend Josie Jones – RIP now. She'd been in Pete Wylie's band, and she was a real mover and groover in London. She took me to a party at Paul Rutherford [of Frankie Goes To Hollywood]'s flat in Canary Wharf and she said, “We're going to try this new drug, ecstasy, and we're going to lie down. He's got a magic carpet, it's going to be great.” So we lay down. All these cats there taking it for the first time, half of Frankie, George Michael, June from Brilliant was with Josie – they ended up bodypainting my leg while I was blissed out. The Wapping printing strike was going on, the strike blockade was round the corner. You could hear them with riot police while this weird party was going on, it was a real juxtaposition.
So when acid house kicked in and Nancy said, “Everyone takes E and dances and gets on one,” I'm like, “You can't, you have to lie down and have soft music playing and it's really beautiful.” She's like, “No, no, it's not like that at all.” And it wasn't. And that changed the whole musical culture immediately. Very, very open music policy, the Balearic aesthetic included funky dub, indie, acoustic and world music. It was the beginning of so much, but it also really reflected that multicultural thing, I think. Acid house was going on too, but it was more specific: beats, bleeps, techno.
Shoom was Balearic, or – ?
Both, both, both, both. But certainly the Balearic thing had a big impact.
And Weatherall was playing the darker side of Balearic, closer to industrial?
He'd change his set. Sometimes it'd be dubby, sometimes more techno. Now when he does sets he has a techno set, a dub set, whatever – but then he'd mix it up a bit. But still mind-warping, especially on fresh new psychoactives. And that was also the demise of the tribes: the MDMA explosion completely dissolved North/South/ East/West London, football divisions or anything. Everybody's just, you know, distilled down. And very quickly that emerged into the rave scene and festivals, which then suddenly had more of a soundsystem influence, because there were soundsystems there, not just club systems.
And very quickly that became part of festival culture. Interestingly at Glastonbury, from 1982-85, 86-87, the only all-night dancing tents were soundsystems. And there were two – one was Saxon, one was Shaka – and they were always there. That was the only music you could go dance to all night long that wasn't acoustic around a bonfire. And that was enough to glue everyone together. Everyone got it. I think that embedded dub into our national DNA those few years.
The reverence people in the club world of a certain age will speak of Shaka – even if they're not the kind of person who'd have gone to reggae dances – may well be partly to do with Glastonbury!
Right! But now Glastonbury at night is a whole city of different niche genre-based dance music, isn't it? Interesting to think that then it was just one or two tents.
And you jumped on it and really very quickly made your name as a producer, with stuff that crossed over massively: Coldcut and Blue Pearl
There was this feeling that there was nothing stopping this underground culture being pop at the same time. Big underground records would become Top 10 hits
That's right. And a lot of the records we were hearing in the clubs, like Marshall Jefferson, his production for Ten City, and things like with strong vocals, or definite obvious radio singles. But it was already leading up to that. Prior to acid house you'd have a couple of Chicago-based dance records that were house, which would blow up in the charts and had a strong vocal.
‘Love Can't Turn Around’, being 12 and seeing Darryl Pandy on Top of the Pops was a mind-blowing experience. There was nowhere to mentally file that performance!
Indeed. So house music had been around in America for a while, but in a fairly niche-based scene, big in Chicago, and New York maybe, but not nationally. But how it was appropriated by young British kids opened it up into something else. Plus the whole Todd Terry side of it, with early sample, house-based tunes. Which was more the sort of the sound of Boys Own and Shoom as well. And of course what came with that was the emergence of the chill-out room and ambient house, which was again very dub-centric, with deep booming subs, but much more on an ambient level. Of course if you listen to Tangerine Dream on a big system, it sounds as big and vast as King Tubby. Maybe without the beats, but the synths, wow!
So we were enjoying experimenting with that, that whole German-kosmische- krautrock-electronic influence of the 70s, coming back again via ambient music into dance music culture. And that's what Jimmy, Alex and I were doing in the Land Of Oz chillout room, which would become The Orb. Soul II Soul were blowing up, Nellee Hooper had moved up from Bristol, Cameron McVey, all in London now, hanging out with Neneh and the West London crew, all taking Massive [Attack] into another area and bringing a Bristol perspective on bass dub culture – which Londoners just adored and really, really went for very quickly.
I was working with Jon Baker at Gee Street Recordings in 1987-88. He was distributing some of our early WAU! Records, he was one of the first UK-based hip hop labels, he was working with the Stereo MCs and DJ Cesare – and he first brought in Jungle Brothers, De La Soul, and that whole emerging psychedelic hip hop culture – hip house and all that. This was more of an East-South London-based scene, and Soul II Soul were more North London. And all coexisting along with the Bristol-based guys. Smith & Mighty had a great version of ‘Walk On By’, and at the same time Gee Street had their phenomenal version, by what became Stereo MCs. Those two tunes were massive at the time. The Smith & Mighty certainly exemplified Bristol bass culture, as a fusion of white with black subculture, and again it had that pop element.
At exactly the same time there was Fresh 4 ‘Wishing on a Star’, which was Smith & Mighty plus Krust and Suv, who would go on to be part of Roni Size's crew. Pop records but with all these underground elements of hip hop and dub and so on –
And of course Massive Attack and Portishead exemplified that in the 90s. Real songs but underground sound. It wasn't until the mid 90s really that all that was firmly placed in our collective unconscious, as “There's a whole new music scene.” That stuff with breakbeats and dub was also the emergence of jungle and drum’n’bass, the beginnings of bass culture, what we see today with grime and trap, and hundreds of sub-genres with that.
And you were launching into very mainstream production work, plus The Orb
The Orb was essentially Alex working with dozens of different people – different ideas in different studios, running between them like some mad scientist checking on his projects. Before Alex and Jimmy fell out, we had the Land Of Oz chillout room: the White Room. And the KLF had Trancentral studio, with people doing god knows what musically for days on end. Alex continued all that ethos on into The Orb, so that was very fertile to say the least [laughs].
Then not long after you had your trance label running through into the early and mid 90s. How much did you stay in touch with jungle and developments like that?
Jungle I struggle with, because I had two experiences of it. Rage was the legendary jungle club at Heaven, which was on at the same night as Nancy Noise's little Balearic club Future, which was in the back room. And [Future] was always fluffed-up Balearic hippies having a bop. Then you'd go into Rage and it was, like, intense, man. It was [wide eyes], and predominantly male. You didn't feel like you could look anyone in the eye there or you'd get beaten up. It was really hardcore. The music seemed really aggressive and I was, like, “Ooh…”
Then there was a Glastonbury where one of the travellers had set up a soundsystem, which was the first time I'd heard jungle at an outdoor rave-type situation. Everyone was on the sloping field, and they all had their hands up in the air. Like a scene out of Quatermass. It was like zombies, they weren't really dancing, just moving a little bit, and the music was really fast [imitates maniacal scrabbling sound]. So I said to my mates, “What's everyone taking here?”, and they went, “Oh, it's this new drug ketamine.” And I was like, “What the fuck's that?” I just thought it's a real dancefloor killer. But it seemed to work with the speeded-up beats and vocals. And that speeding up became happy hardcore.
And gabber
Yeah, which I still struggle with. But it's funny, isn't it? Some of those early sort of jungle records – like peak-moment main-dancefloor full-on things – you can now only play in a chill-out room [laughs]. Things have changed so much in a weird way. But I must admit I struggled with jungle and drum’n’bass. I found it so male and aggressive. Even though I'd come out of Killing Joke and stuff, this was different, there was this aggressive complexity. Some of that jungle, I thought it was quite jazz. At the time I was quite anti-that, now I like it a lot more – because I'm more into jazz, I suppose [laughs]. But then I found it too clever or something. I really liked the simplicity of house music. It's got the simplicity of dub. All of that was Zen for me. It wasn't about how many notes you played, it was about how many you didn't play. About the space between the notes, about grazing the rockface of the now, and how tight you can lock that bassline into a drum.
What about when dubstep came out ten years later? That was really stripping everything back
I thought that was interesting initially. I still do. You'd have the jungle element where it'd go double time in full-on, I like that. I like how these things have a kind of conversation with Jamaican dancehall. And it's dramatic and it's big. But a lot of it is just noise as well, I suppose [like] any kind of music. That was certainly a great appropriation of heavy sound by a younger generation. I've got teenage kids, and they're right on dubstep straight away. They were quite happy it was their thing and not mine, and they can hijack the car stereo and put their booming – OK, what I love about it is that it's a booming bass. I mean, dubstep has changed the way people make PAs now. I recently went down to Tony Andrews, a legendary speaker designer from Funktion-One, Turbo. He's designing a new rig, and one of the first tunes he put on to demonstrate it was a dubstep tune. And you can really hear the difference in bass.
I was in a new mix suite in Elephant and Castle last week and they had these behemoth new large speakers. I forget the name of them, but it's become the premier mix-room in London because of these speakers – and it's particularly good for hip hop. Kids can just put in their laptop and “BOOM!” You hear things on those speakers in the bass that you never hear on any other speakers. And that's why people make records today. Ironically, most kids listen to music on their iPhone where there's no bass [laughs]. Maybe you have to mix bass so that you can hear it on an iPhone today, I don't know [laughs]. But definitely our ears and our sensibility have changed through the influence of dub in our culture.
Definitely. And for you, the one constant from the acid house period on has been ambient dub. From stuff you've done with Paul McCartney, your own remix tracks, your Malcolm McLaren remix, The Orb of course, through to everything you're doing with Jah Wobble and Dub Trees
That's an interesting term for it, I've never tried to define it in that way. It is ambient dub – but it's also representative of my journey. I mean, it's very Balearic. That Balearic sensibility as a DJ – where you can go from one genre to the next seamlessly – is very much part of my make-up of musical soundscapes, you know? Quite happy to throw in a bit of loud guitar dubbed up over something mellow, to juxtapose styles a bit. But the one continuing style – which seems to be a good medium for me – is the more chilled-out electronic world-fusion dub-based tune [laughs]. I just keep coming back to it. But that's already expanding into a sort of ambient jazz label, and ambient post-rock and all these other genres. I spent 35 years trying to break out of being pigeon-holed by a very limited colour palette: descriptions like rock, indie rock, dance. And now I'm in a culture where everyone understands that they can calibrate their preferences in a new way. Artists, musicians and producers are making genre-less music that covers so many different boundaries.
And I think that's the underlying political message of dub and underground musical cultures: to dissolve these boundaries of difference, which we somehow perceive, that aren't really there. And celebrate the diversity of them, and enjoy that as well. As a result, the Britain we live in is one of the most progressive countries in the world – it has some of the most tolerant, compassionate people, and a multicultural community and make-up that's the envy of the rest of the world. For all that there's plenty of bad and injustice, we've achieved a lot of harmony too. And I think that can be directly put down to having shared diverse musical cultures and celebrated and lived as communities together.
So I think it's a beautiful thing. We can enjoy the fruits of that through the diversity of music that's available, from Djrum all the way back down to King Tubby and Joe Gibbs, the pioneers of it. And of course Lee Perry. If I really think about it, that's what music is capable of isn't it? It can bind people tightly together around a single identity – can reinforce your prejudices like a nationalistic anthem – but if you play with the boundaries around these identities, you can do some really powerful things.
