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Rob Smith

THERE’S a bashfulness to Rob Smith that's out of kilter with his status in underground music, alongside his creative partner Ray Mighty. This is plain when he tells how the younger Bristol producer Pinch had to twist his arm to get him to make his pitch for a Smith & Mighty 30th anniversary album. He doesn't seem keen on the publicity game at all, either: he turned down the chance to record a podcast for Resident Advisor because he doesn't like hearing his voice in recordings, and in conversation he seems to regard the spectacular ups and downs of his musical career with a slightly detached bemusement. Spoken in his none-more Bristolian burr, everything becomes a succession of matter-of-fact anecdotes: this happened and this happened and so and so said this then I said that, then a quizzical chuckle at the result.

Which is not to say Smith is unaware of his achievements. He just seems devoid of any sense of stardom; like the reggae producers he fell for as a kid, his approach is essentially that of an artisan, at his happiest when he's building rhythm after rhythm and putting them out into the world. In one sense that's a shame, because it's hard not to get carried away imagining a world in which Smith & Mighty fulfilled their pop potential. Their breakthrough singles – as well as their production work on Massive Attack's first single, on Fresh 4's ‘Wishing on a Star’ and for Bristol singer Carlton – were absolute magic, a perfect distillation of the futurist electro- funk of Mantronix, the cavernous space of soundsystem dub and a special kind of understatement. Had they been a bit more savvy, or just more pushy, could they have avoided the major label and management shenanigans that tied them up in knots just as their influence was being felt most strongly?

But perhaps this is foolishness. Because once they escaped from their major label contract, back to Bristol and the underground, they blossomed again. Their connection to jungle was immediate and fruitful: it had never occurred to me before this interview (perhaps another symptom of their allergy to self promotion?), but the first More Rockers release was in fact the first jungle LP ever made. And Smith, with Mighty and in other permutations, would continue to casually excel at new soundsystem developments: in particular his RSD dubstep tracks stand up as the very best of its breakthrough period, netting him a whole new level of recognition on the international circuit. Few musicians in Britain have such a distinctive synthetic bass tone, and indeed such an instinctive understanding of how low frequency can evoke powerful feelings in listeners and dancers. Perhaps Smith & Mighty could have become successful mainstream producers, but in many respects it does seem that maybe things worked out for the best.

So you grew up in Bristol. Were you aware of something special about the local music scene?

I always felt there was, but I was looking at it very locally, I didn't have anything to compare it with. Up until punk, I felt music was something an elite set of people were allowed to do and I probably wasn't part of that. But punk's “Do what you want, think for yourself” attitude, and seeing your mates grab a guitar and start singing, it was like “Oh, alright!” That made it mentally seem possible.

What were your tastes as a fan back then?

Well, I did like punk a lot. I was a big reggae fan. Pop and guitar stuff and Jimi Hendrix, until I found reggae when I was about 11 years old – and that struck me as being more important than everything else somehow. And then when I got into it deeper and started hearing dub, that's when I really started to get excited and feel it's something that I needed to get involved with personally.

Was reggae something you heard around you?

Well, I grew up in a mainly white area in the north of Bristol, in an estate, but in my school there was quite a big black community. All my mates would play football in the lunch time, so I just wandered round the school with nothing much to do. But one lunchtime I discovered a room that older girls were allowed to use, with a portable record player. So I sneaked in, and they were playing reggae 7”s, 7” singles. What fascinated me was that they were turning them over, to the version on the other side. So that was the first time I saw about there being a deeper side to reggae. This mate was older than me and had a bit more money because he had a part-time job. He bought all the albums, and he'd play Dreadlocks Dread.⁴⁰ That had a big effect, because of the production. It was like nothing I'd ever heard before. Like punk, kind of real, quite rebellious, and not sticking to any rules I'd known before.

And what stage were you aware of the natural home of reggae being the soundsystem?

When I was a kid, I had a nice record player, but it wasn't anything with bass speakers or anything. So at the very beginning I was more interested in the rhythm patterns, drum patterns and guitar chips. Then when I left home, I went to a place called Trinity Church in Bristol where [Jah] Shaka used to play. Now that's where Stryda does his Teachings in Dub sessions. It's always been this popular venue for soundsystems. That was one of the first times I heard big boxes. I remember thinking “Wow, my god, the room is actually shaking!” Then I realised it's my eyeballs in their sockets giving that effect. I got a job in Rolls Royce – I was like electronics engineer for four years, doing an apprenticeship, but I really hated it because it was just sitting in a factory. So I left and went grape-picking, and while I was away it occurred to me that I really needed to get involved with music. So when I came back I bought a guitar, hooked up with some people, mucked around a bit trying to make a sound – and then I joined this thing called Arts Opportunity, when the YOP schemes [i.e. Youth Opportunities Programmes] were going and you got like £23.50 a week to do training in something. This particular one involved theatre and music – the guy who put it together wrote a play, and the whole scheme was about rehearsing and performing it. It was a reggae musical called Freedom City – and I had a spot as guitarist. A guy called Leroy was playing for Talisman at the time, and he taught me how to do the chips properly [he mimics the off-beat guitar rhythm] “chick mm-chick”. I toured with [that show] for a while, and learned a hell of a lot about being in bands, about reggae, soundsystems and everything else. And then when it folded, the band stayed together and we toured for about five years as a reggae band. And shortly after that I met Ray.

What was this band called?

Restriction. We did a single with Mad Professor, which was the peak of our achievements. We did this 12-inch for Ariwa,⁴¹ which was amazing. We had Vin Gordon on trombone, who's sadly not in Bristol any more – he got deported unfortunately. But it was really good.

What about post-punk? Were you plugged into that social scene?

The Pop Group were amazing for me. Mark [Stewart]'s message was bringing across things I'd never thought about – about microwaves and all kinds of stuff. And punk bands toured with reggae bands a lot, so you'd get a really good cross-section. There was this club called The Dug Out, just a youth club-type place, but it was open every night and it was cheap. As everyone was on the dole, most people went there: punks, rastas, soul boys, jazz people, all those polymerisations in that club, people exchanging ideas. There was a lot going on in Bristol, bands would change personnel, people would switch it up and keep changing. And The Wild Bunch were starting up their thing.

The Wild Bunch and people like that were trying to do hip hop culture in a British-Caribbean soundsystem crew format? Where, other than The Dug Out? At house parties?

The first time I ever saw Grant [Marshall], Daddy G from Massive Attack, DJing was at a student party up in Clifton, in the posh part of town. There seemed to be a lot of big house parties in those days. It wasn't real soundsystems, more people grabbing whatever boxes you could find and stringing some sort of system together. That scene was really good actually.

Did you meet Ray at the Dug Out?

There was a Rock Against Racism thing in London, with all kinds of bands playing: Matumbi and The Ruts and stuff. So we got a train to that, and on the way back Ray was in one of the coaches with some of his mates. We all got really drunk and got to this pretend fight, like “Heyyyy!” “Heyyyy!” Messing and mucking around. That was the first time I was aware of him. Another time there was a blues club across where I was living in St Paul's. He just reminded me yesterday, they were filming for something, Grant was playing, other people, and Ray was behind the bar with another guy. I went to buy my drink and the other guy tried to rip me off and I went “Uhh, oh well,” and walked away. But Ray ran after me to give me the right change, I don't know why. That made a good impression. The next time was when friends asked me to join a band called Sweat, and Ray played synthesiser. When that folded we had a similar interest, stringing synths together. MIDI was new then, and we were super into it.

Did your electronic engineering time feed into that?

I guess it did. I hated the job, but I really liked mucking about with wires and that, understanding the way things are routed, this connecting to this connecting to that. We borrowed a lot of bits and pieces, people were just starting it and don't really know what to do. Ray was part of the Three Stripe soundsystem as well. And I'd be like, “Well try that into that, and that, and that,” and they'd be like “Oh! oh, right, yeah that seems to work”. We had an old reverb unit, put that on the end of the beat machine and it just sounded like, “Powwwww!” “Oh yeah, that sounds good!”

Were you listening to other kinds of electronic music, like experimental stuff or synth-pop or American electro?

Well, reggae was the predominant sound in Bristol. There was The Pop Group – but even they were leaning towards reggae or dub. But I do remember when Kurtis Blow played, I can't remember what year it was, but people went mad for it. The very next day everybody was getting two decks wired together and cutting bits of newspaper out to make slipmats. It's like the whole city changed, literally overnight. I was sceptical, because I was still just really into reggae and a bit reluctant – but I could see people getting very excited. And there was like a lot of electro sounds. We was doing reggae but with a hip hop beat, or other stuff from a perspective of dub and reggae. So even when the Three Stripe things were housey or whatever, we always made them as if they were reggae tunes.

Were you making tracks to play out on the soundsystem?

Not at all [laughs]. We were just selfish, we just enjoyed mucking about. On the soundsystem we just played old reggae tunes. Or there was a time they bust into Glastonbury and set up somewhere in the corner of the field and that was just pure 12s, pre-release 12” singles. We didn't have the confidence to think other people might ever want to hear our stuff. One very early thing we did was a thing called ‘Brain Scan’ which Naoki [Iijima] in Tokyo pressed up on a 7” [in 2003], and a track called ‘Tumblin’. That was us saying, “OK, yeah yeah, I think we might have something that seems to be working right. We've got a balance.” Then it got to ‘Anyone who had a Heart’, and we were thinking, “Oh my God, we could put a record out!” That was literally the only ambition: “Cor, imagine having it on vinyl!”

‘Brain Scan’ doesn't have the heavy synthetic bass of your later work, but it locks into a lot of other elements of your sound – the way the echo plays off the drum pattern, prefiguring jungle. Anyway, by ‘Anyone who had a Heart’, other people were combining dub, electro, soul and so on, doing stuff with vocalists in soundsystem sets, people singing or rapping over different beats

Wild Bunch had their thing, someone else had their thing. I'd met Jackie [Jackson], the singer, as an actress in that theatre company I toured with, and we were still friends. Fast forward a few years, I met her one day and she said, “What you up to these days?” I said “Oh I've got a little studio you should come up and have a look.” So she came up and asked to have a go. I think she started doing ‘Walk On By’ first, actually. Recorded probably on some crappy little eight-track Fostex reel-to-reel. I got some random beat up sequenced onto the multitrack. She did ‘Walk On’ then ‘Anyone’ on a different track on the same beat. We ended up with two vocals on the same multitrack tape, sung to the same beat. We thought ‘Anyone’ was the one to go with, but it took us ages and ages, like seriously probably a year just changing the beat and mucking around. Then Grant heard it pretty much finished, and said “Yeah, you should put it out!” He introduced us to Lloyd Harris at Revolver Distribution. We were just discussing this yesterday, Ray and I, how it was kind of chance that it happened at all. We went to the warehouse, the other guy working there, Mike, came out and said “What is it?” We said “we've got this track”, he said “Ahh I'm not interested, go away.” “Oh, OK,” and we turned around and were about to walk out, but then Lloyd came out of the office and went “What is it? What have you got? Come in let's have a listen. OK, this is good, let's do it!” We were like “Oh wow.” Two or three minutes earlier or later and it might not have happened, I don't know how it would've gone. Lloyd was really supportive, and he just wasn't really interested in making loads of money out of us or anything. So we got the Letraset out, the photocopier, got a label designed, then 3D from Massive Attack did a logo with another guy called Ollie, and that's the label we've stuck with all these years.

And the distributor did P&D⁴² and you became Three Stripe Records. Where does the first Massive Attack single come into this – because you produced that as well, right?

Shortly after ‘Anyone’, Grant came around with Carlton and maybe Tricky, I'm not sure. And he said, “Yeah, we're going to do this track, could you record it for us?” “OK, how's it go?” So Grant literally went [semi beatboxes] “Shewww shewww shew- shew.” He said “That's the beat,” and Carlton started singing ‘Any Love’, we started mucking around, I got a beat together. I remember saying “Shall I put a tambourine on?” and Grant going “No, no tambourine!”, then I did one anyway and he went “Yeah, put the tambourine on!” Then Carlton started singing, I thought “Yeah this is alright,” locked it down, then Tricky came in and did the last couple of bars at the end. That was that.

So there was no sense that any of this was going anywhere?

Not at all! [laughs]. I was just completely in my element, the fact that you can record these things on one track and drums on another. Just wow, it was all my Christmases at once, and Ray too. We'd just got a record out and a friend of ours, a guy called Dizzy from City Rockers, he'd been to London for the weekend, he came back, came in the studio and he's just got this shocked expression and he's like “You know what's happening?” We went “What?” He went “Oh my god, oh my god, I've been to this party and they played ‘Anyone who had a Heart’! Oh my god, it tore the place up, oh my god, oh my god!” We looked at each other like, “What? What's he on about?” We had no idea.

This is the beginning of acid house breaking, Warehouse parties, things starting to go crazy?

We were doing bits of house as well, of course, the b-side was a house thing as well. But people didn't pick up on that, they were just locked into the slow stuff.

So did you get bigger label interest straight away?

No, no, we were just happy how things were going, so we did ‘Walk On’ as well. That was towards the end of that year, and in between we did the R&R thing, ‘Acid off a Way’. That came purely from hearing stuff and thinking “How do we do that? How do we get that gated effect on the vocal?” You try this, you try that, you trigger something with a hi-hat, put a vocal through it, and it's “Yeaaaah!” Lloyd says “Yeah, let's put that out.” Then he was interested in ‘Walk On By’.

Did you go to any of the early acid house raves?

A lot of them actually [laughs]. We went to this one, I couldn't tell you where, London's a mystery to me, it was by a market. Halfway through this amazing party, all this kind of 120, 130bpm music they just drop ‘Wishing on a Star’. Oh my God! Just a really slow tune in the middle of a rave, and people were going “Wooooo, wooooo!” That was really nice.

But you just kept working, with no particular aim?

We had a lot of singers queuing up, like Carlton, Jackie and her friends, Kelz and Krissy Kriss, the 3PM guys. We were getting a bit overwhelmed, actually! Everything had to be set up on a mixing desk: you couldn't leave it and then do another tune and then come back to it. Now you can just leave the track, save it, and come back to it any time. Then you had to work on a track at least to a nearly finished stage. Everything took quite a while! And we weren't really interested in having a record deal, we were very very wary, we'd heard a lot of stories. But in the end, we thought OK, we've got to accommodate all the stuff going on properly. That's what clinched it in the end, forcing us to do it properly with a label. Yeah [long pause], probably the biggest mistake we could have made at the time, looking back.

What was the crux of the problem? Did it become apparent quickly?

It was all like champagne and “Rayyy!” – we were really happy with the sound we had in Bristol, but then as we were submitting the stuff for Carlton's record, the manager we were dealing with saw things on a much broader picture. He was placing us among the artists that he was involved in, and he persuaded us we needed to be recording in London – which we really didn't need to do at all. It was stupid money, plus it turns out he was sliding his own artists in for studio time as well, lots of dodgy wheeling and dealing going on. The plan was, first the Carlton album, then a Smith & Mighty album, then the 3PM one – like, the rap album. And we thought, “No problem, we can roll all that out”. But as we submitted the Carlton tracks, it was “No, make it more like this,” or “No, it needs to sound like that.” It was kind of “Oh, OK, this is how it works is it? Why did they even sign us, if they don't like our sound?” And it all went downhill from then.

What were they trying to make you sound like? American soul?

Well, yeah I think so, a bit. No one's ever come out and said, but afterwards we wondered, “Maybe they thought they'd signed another Soul II Soul?” Ray had these big locks flying everywhere! But they clearly want something more polished, more commercial. Then Pete Tong said “Why don't you do some house music?” It was clear that this is a bad marriage, stuck in it and can't do anything else.

But the music that we got to hear was amazing! The Carlton album is regularly mentioned as a lost classic, the house stuff on there sounds really great

But that was a struggle. It took much longer than we anticipated because they just kept rejecting stuff. And then we fell out with Carlton. Then it got a really bad review in Echoes and it stiffed! Now people say it's great, which is nice. I heard it back not too long ago, and I thought “What's the problem? I can't see anything wrong with this! It's quite exciting.” But it was painful at the time.

Tell me about Fresh 4. Krust and Suv came from a hip hop/breakbeat/breakdance background, right?

Those guys were brilliant. They were always trying to do something different – bikes, skateboarding, music, DJing – and they really worked hard trying to make all that work for themselves. They even had a bike courier service, although I think that was too much like hard work in the end. So the first rave I ever went to, way before the marquees in the field and all that, was something they did, out where there was like four or five houses in Bedminster in Bristol. Like a little bit of a community and they shared the back garden. They'd taken down the fences and made an open space and the guys put up a marquee and got a soundsystem in there. This must've been 1986, they were playing that really early sound, ‘This Brutal House’, mixed up with hip hop and everything. That was definitely one of the first warehousey raves, though we didn't know what to call it at the time. So we got in with those guys and one day Flora of Flynn & Flora said, “Yeah, we've got this idea for a tune.” They'd given it thought, picked the breaks they wanted to use – and we just thought, “Yeah, that's a great idea,” so we did it and we were all really really pleased with it. And that's where [laughs] our dodgy manager comes in. We played it to him and he obviously could hear something immediately, and kind of incorporated it into his way of scheming things. Apparently he phoned up Virgin records when he knew there'd be an answer machine, played a bit of the record down the phone and then just said “If you want to learn more about this tune, give me a call” Next thing they were signed. Before we were signed to FFRR. That was his way of showing us, “Here, look what I can do.”

So did you get paid off that record?

Oh, yeah. Proper paid off it. You don't get things like that these days!

Then not long after Massive Attack ‘Unfinished Sympathy’ comes out, and the spotlight turns on Bristol. Did that add to the pressure?

Yeah [rueful laugh]. It really did. But fair play, you can't argue with that first album. They deserved that success. I prefer the early stuff. I thought Blue Lines was great though.

The releases started drying up through 1991 – there's just Carlton stuff, no Smith & Mighty – then suddenly in 1992 there's Stepper's Delight EP, which was a really influential underground record. Rave DJs were picking it up, it captured that moment when rave breakbeats were turning into something else, which would eventually become jungle

The Smith & Mighty album we were really struggling with. A lot of the things we were submitting was being rejected, and what we were ending up with was much more compromised. It was a real struggle, but in-between we were in Bristol, in our own studio, and we just put some other stuff together and not exactly forget about it but just start enjoying it again. A bit of fun with stuff which wasn't album- related. Someone came down from the label and said “You should put that out in the meantime.”

Was that one directly inspired by raves as well? It definitely taps into the sound of the time

Like I say, we're still trying to do reggae. To us, house music was like steppers’ music, steppers’ reggae. We just said, “Let's do some four-to-the-floor reggae” – but then the ravey feeling came naturally. We were still really into breaks just from listening to hip hop. It was sticking with what we liked! Not reggae really, but hopefully reggae-ravey. I dunno!

One influence I always heard in Smith & Mighty, particularly early on, was Mantronix

Definitely! Blatantly, the beat patterns in Mantronix were just fascinating for me. And he was a good example of moving with the technology. If you made a chart of tracks with when the gear came out – Roland gear, samplers, whatever – you'd see it clearly. Mantronix was coming out the same time as we discovered we could link up these boxes and make one trigger another. A lot of time in Mantronix you can hear he's using the beat pattern to trigger the vocal samples or whatever – and yeah we were very much into that! But with Stepper's Delight, we were still after that driving, boomy, stepping sound. Obviously it was a joke playing on ‘Rapper's Delight’, the name shows where we were coming from.

The legend is that DJs like Grooverider were playing it at the wrong speed in the raves

Oh yes [laughs]. I think I was at the rave when it first happened! I was outside and someone came running up and went “Rob! Rob! Rob!” I went and heard the tune going really fast and everyone was going completely crazy, jumping up and down. I thought “Wow!”

So going back to Krust and those guys, you all moved towards jungle together. When did you realise this breakbeat rave stuff was more suited to your way of doing things than what you were trying to make for the Smith & Mighty album?

So the story I always tell is about Krust and Die. We had this big seven-seater Citroen which they named The Ravemobile, we'd pile in it and go off to Oxford or wherever these free parties were happening. This is before any of us were anyone really. And I was wandering round with Die at one of these outdoor parties, and he was going “You notice, some of these beats are flat beats, right, but some of them are jungle beats!” And I was going “Yeah, yeah, totally!” At the time you had Frankie Bones and all that kind of stuff, people doing house music with breaks in. Then ‘We are IE’ came out and it was “Oh fuuuuuuck off! Oh shit, here we go, here we go!” We were raving a lot – pretty much every weekend – and you could really see the difference. Some parties were only playing this kind of jungle, though it wasn't known as that, and others were playing the four-to-the-floor kind of thing.

This was the crusty / traveller / DiY / Circus Warp-type parties you were going to?

Not at first. First it was the £25-to-get-in ones. That's when all that Frankie Bones type stuff was really popular, but I'm guessing it was more like when you got to the free raves, the travellers’ kind of things when the music started getting more jungly. Then you had ‘We are IE’ and ‘Radio Babylon’.

Those tunes – and ‘Satin Storm’ – were when the breakbeats started getting edited off the beat

When you cut up a hip hop break you'd start from the snare, not on the bass drum, because it's easier to trim a sample or break from the snare, because it's got that sharper attack. So you play your break from the snare just to improve your tightness, and I think that just started off a lot of the way jungle edited the breaks, purely from that technique. It grew out of hip hop ways of working.

But hip hop wasn't cutting the beats into those intricate patterns that ended up turning into hardcore, then jungle, right?

No, sure, not at all. Not at all. But you ultimately got stuff by mucking about in the studio. We had a competition one time – the winner would get to record a tune in our studio – and this girl Glenda won it. She was really nice, great voice in fact, and we did this track with her and we had the sampler laid out playing the breaks on the middle C, then I start putting it on the next C up – an octave up – at the same time. She was just like, “Oh my god, what is that? What is that?” Just mucking about on a keyboard you discover you suddenly can get this sound.

So this was helping you escape the nonsense round the album?

Yeah. To be blunt the whole thing was getting boring. Not Smith & Mighty as such, but the London Records thing was so tedious. Ray and I would look at each other and be “Oh my god, this is just like any other job!” Talking to Ray the other day, we were remembering going up to London, going in the studio for a late one, back to this house we were renting, up again at the crack of dawn – my god, it was a real slog. A lot of time doing the album and getting nowhere. It wasn't until we got dropped by the label and got into the More Rockers thing that we started taking it more seriously again.

How did that come about?

Well, poor old Jackie. We got told she wasn't good enough and we'd have to get someone else in. Against our wishes really, but we tried out different singers and got to this very compromised album's-worth of tracks, which everybody decided we were going to go with. Well, we did a track called ‘Come Fly Away’, but a week before the release date we got a call saying the Radio 1 placings weren't good enough and they were shelving the album. Then the second call was the manager, saying “That's it guys, bye” – and he just chipped off like a rat leaving a sinking ship. We were shellshocked for a bit, like “Oh fuck” – then we just thought, “Let's go back to doing it the way we've always done it.”

So after all the work you'd put in, you couldn't do anything with the album?

Until it leaked out. I got this call from a guy I knew in Australia, he'd heard this album, Bass is Eternal – not Bass is Maternal, as we'd always intended it to be. We'd show them the cover we wanted with the small boy, and the response was always “What you on about?” They just didn't get it. So we went back to work in our studio in Bristol. And back in the day, Simon Gough was quite a fan of ours. He wrote for Echoes at the time, a column called Gough Mixture. Any time we did anything he was all over it. So we give him a call, and he said, “All right, what's happened, OK, I see.” He came round, put sticking plasters on our wounds, said “Play me some stuff, play me some stuff.” We played what we had, and he went “Well, what's wrong with that?”, and we went “I dunno, they just don't like it”, and he went “Honestly what's wrong with that? I don't see the problem, there's an album there.” So we started the More Rockers label, realised what we were doing was fine, we were happy! Eventually we re-did the album, called it Bass is Maternal as we'd always intended, suddenly it was just “Phew!” [mops brow]. I was about to give up music, honestly, go and get a job in an office. So meeting Gough was probably the best thing that we could possibly have done.

More Rockers ended up putting out a variety of stuff, but when you started it was the height of jungle. Was it conscious that this would be part of it?

We kind of played it by ear. The very first More Rockers single, the first 12”, was ‘How can a Man’, again a steppers-y reggae thing really, with Andy Scholes from Two Kings singing on top of it.⁴³ Then the first jungle release was when Peter Rose and I did one together, ‘The Dream’.

Plus street soul, rap, quite a few different things. Did you still see it all as essentially reggae?

It's dance music from a reggae perspective, a British perspective. The styles are constantly changing, but that's still the heart. Way back when I was trying to experiment, even before I met Ray, when I had a four-track cassette thing, I was just listening to King Tubby and unpicking it and piecing it together. That's how I learned, and everything since has come from that angle.

Was your stuff accepted by the wider jungle scene? Obviously you had Roni and Krust on the remixes – but did you feel part of the British scene, or was it still essentially Bristol-centred?

[Laughs] We went to cut a dubplate once, and we were hanging round – and one of the big jungle DJs was there, I can't remember who… and Peter come in, he knew him, we're chit-chatting away. We mention we're cutting our tune and ask if he wants one. It was just [super gruff ] “Nah.” We thought “Oh fuck, OK, hmm.” But we cut our plate anyway. But we realised we had this other thing going on, more of a reggae-based roots sort of jungle. Really the only other people on the same kind of thing was Congo Natty. I knew him from a long time before because he did a remix in a mate's studio. Not to brag, but everybody talks about Goldie's album being the first jungle album – but our Selection 1 came out way before.⁴⁴ Just thought I'd throw that one in. It's not as good as Goldie's album, but y’know.

More Rockers takes you through the mid/late 90s. Could you make this your career untethered from the big label?

I became a single parent and a few years later so did Ray. A variety of different dramas, not something I want to go into here – but with one thing and another, we ended up with a few kids between us! Looking back it was really, really tough. I'd have to get the kids up, get them to school, get an hour's kip, get them back, get them to bed, in the studio all night doing remixes. Before that period we were functioning quite well, putting a lot of stuff out, fending for ourselves, doing shows here and there. Then things got a bit more stressful, but fortunately we got signed to !K7, because Pete Tong asked us to do an essential mix. I think about 80% of it was Bristol tracks. !K7 heard it and said, “Yeah, we're doing a series called DJ-Kicks, similar to this.” So we did that and we got on really well. They really sorted us out, !K7.

They have a strong record with individualist artists – including British ones that weren't fitting in, Tricky, Nicolette. Horst the boss ended up managing Tricky?

Yeah, Horst is cool. But it was the other guy – Stefan Strüver – that we worked with. He was a real music lover. He knew what we were about and what we were trying to do and was 100% supportive. They didn't question anything. Honestly, it was really great.

Towards the late 90s, garage was happening. Were you keeping track of it?

We had a festival every year, St Paul's Carnival – it's a big thing for Bristol. And Ray's mum's house is right on one of the main streets, Campbell Street. So every year you go around, hang around outside Ray's mum's house, sit on the wall, drink Red Stripe, and soundsystems are going off. Then one year – I don't remember which – I was really puzzled, I heard this tune, and I just didn't understand what it was. I couldn't make out the tempo. I was like “What's all this?” And one of the younger guys went [dopey voice] “oh yeah garage, mate, 2-step mate,” Well, fuuuuucking hell. I liked the sound of those beats. By this time I was sick of the same house four-to- the-floor rhythms. It was so nice to hear something fresh at those tempos .

So straight away you had a go at it

I probably did ‘B-Line Fi Blow’ ⁴⁵ not that long after that. Then a couple of years later Niji was looking for something to voiceover, so I give him that and gave it a mix up. He's a funny guy Niji, he'll phone at five in the morning and go “No no put the phone down!” – so you put the phone down and he'll do some mad bars on the answer machine then hang up. So ‘B-Line Fi Blow’, some of that is from the studio, some of the lines are taken off the answer machine.

That came out early 2000s. Were you aware of how garage was starting to break into dubstep?

Not at all! I knew the popular chart garage tracks, but I wasn't in touch with the London scene at all. We were obviously going out less and we couldn't get out to raves, with bringing kids up. We were touring and that, but mostly in Germany. We did a couple of US tours with !K7, some European tours. And in-between I did a solo deal with Grand Central Records, so I was focusing on that. And then I met Pinch. I was shopping in Rooted records which Tom [i.e. Peverelist] used to run. I was still into jungle, I think I heard some Horsepower and stuff like that. I really liked it – I didn't know it was anything that these Bristol guys were involved with though. Toasty's ‘The Knowledge’,⁴⁶ that just killed me. The b-side as well. It really excited me. Then I was doing some tracks and Flynn came round and went, “Oh how long have you been into dubstep then?” I was like, “What you on about?” To me I was just doing the music I'd always been doing, reggae bassline, loads of echo [laughs]. Then Tom said “Pinch would like if you'd go along to one of his nights.” He'd been doing Subloaded – three people turning up on a Wednesday night – and stuck at it and it was starting to happen. Then Tayo asked if I'd like to play at fabric with his Acid Rockers thing. I'd done some remixes for him. I was on before Mala and Digital Mystikz. I'd heard of them but I didn't know what it was about. At the end of my set I saw more people running down the front, and Mala and Coki jumped on, and I was just, “Woaaaah fuck, oh shit, oh lord have mercy!” [laughs]. Then I was talking to Mala afterwards and he said “Oh yeah, you know Pinch?” And I was all [embarrassed] “Oh, uh, no not really.”

So you hadn't even done the RSD stuff at that point?

I'd started doing the Blue & Red thing off the back of Grand Central, the Rob Smith album. I'd gone back to remixes I'd done under the name Blue & Red, for the Dubhead compilations with Iration Steppas and people like that. Flynn said, “You should call yourself RS Dub. No, you should call yourself RSD.” So I did, and it worked out well. People didn't connect it with Smith & Mighty or anything, so it was on a fresh footing. The music had the chance to breathe in its own right.

Have you been fairly steadily working since the dubstep breakthrough?

I have. For the last couple years I've been really involved with this AMJ Project, oddly enough it’s with the bass player and a drummer from my very first band, Restriction. And another guy called John who is very connected with Colombian and Brazilian artists. A kind of a world reggae thing. He knows people at Real World [Peter Gabriel's label and studio], gave me a bunch of things that hadn't been recorded to a click track and I sorted them out. That came out in 2016 as AMJ Meets RSD.⁴⁷

Smith & Mighty celebrated their thirtieth anniversary with a tour, and the release of Ashley Road Sessions (1988-1994), a special one-off double-label partnership between Pinch's Tectonic and Peverelist's Punch Drunk.