14
Sarah Lockhart

Yeah. Was the record shop in Ilford called Powerhouse?¹²⁵ And obviously Boogie Times in Romford. I started going raving about 1991. I went to Raindance at Jenkins Lane in Barking, which was cool. It wasn't in fields, it was in warehouses. I went to Telepathy every week, then to other things, and that was hardcore. People like Ratpack would be playing. I went to this thing called Rapido – but I'd see people outside of that that I knew from other walks of life that weren't enthusiastic about music in that way and weren't raving. They were saying, “Have you heard about jungle?” I'm like, “What's jungle?!” These were not cool, ahead people, but they'd play tunes and I'm like, “That's hardcore!” I remember where someone coined the word out of this culture I was in, the same thing, where they said, “Do you know what speed garage is?” It's like, what's speed garage? It's like, it's garage but they're just calling it speed garage. But it was just a strand of the sound within hardcore.

As it started to separate out – and you had the background going to reggae parties and hip hop – did you gravitate to the bass and breakbeats? Or the other way, into happy hardcore?

Didn't go happy hardcore. Definitely not. Wasn't ever into that. I think very quickly I went to jungle parties. I had a boyfriend at the time who was into it as well. He was DJing. When was ‘Deep Inside’?¹²⁶

1994 [googling] No, 1993!

Right, so just as that was happening, it felt to me that I went hardcore, a bit of time when it was called jungle – even though it was the same people and the same promoters essentially – and then I just got obsessive about garage. Followed that entire thing from that point and really geeked out about it. Not nerdy-obsessed, but passionate about it. I just couldn't get enough of it. Then I started going to Gas Club and Frog and Nightgown. Wherever there was anything going on, we would be there. That was the Sunday scene. That was Sunday Frog, Sunday Gas – probably the same 50-60-70 people moving around, becoming 100-200 people. Really not much happened that I wasn't at. It was that sort of thing.

And there was an overlap, people going from raving at a jungle club onto a Sunday party

Frog was interesting because it was an after-party and it had the dregs of other places, it was definitely part of the birth of where the scene started, but it wasn't great. Gas was great. Gas was exceptional, there'd be gay people, gangsters, all sorts, a big mix and the music was amazing and it was packed out. At the point it hits its stride it was packed out week in week out.

Did you want to be involved at that stage? Did you have life plans?

I was a croupier, which suited me because it was night shifts. I loved the night. When I realised I could work, I left school. I didn't do my exams, I just left. Somebody I knew had a girlfriend that was a croupier and it was good money, they trained you, so I thought, “OK, I'll do that.” And I was good at maths, you do it all in your head. It was pretty cool actually. You finish at 4am or sometimes at 9pm, but for about four years that was my shift, so I could be partying or going to work in the night.

Between raves and casinos, you had a good training how to conduct yourself around shady people

Yeah, definitely. Before that from really little I'd be in pubs with East End people, my dad was a real pub man. It was the perfect training to end up in some really mad after-party, people shooting each other. It like “Yeah OK, navigate this.” I remember the moment when I thought, “Maybe I could do a job, something to do with this.” I'd been at a day party, and I went home to the flat that I was sharing with some girls, a Sunday afternoon, and I just thought “What am I doing? I need to work with music.” I rang my house – and I'd left home when I was 16, I'm close to my parents but it wasn't a relationship where I checked things with them. Anyway I remember ringing and saying, “I've decided I'm gonna leave my job and do something in music.” They were like “Alright, OK, alright, fine.” Probably like, “What's up with her?” Around then the Truman Brewery was starting to fill up with creatives.¹²⁷ This was like mid- to late 90s, maybe 1997?

Shoreditch was kind of a wasteland at the time

It was bagels and prostitutes, that was it. And The Blue Note. A friend of a friend, this guy called Clifford, got a job in a distributor that was in the Brewery. I had this whole period of just raving to garage and knowing everything about it, buying all the tunes, I had to have the tunes.

And in that time there's the shift from 1993-94 and more or less American records getting the instrumentals getting played, then within a couple of years it was loads of British producers

Yeah. That was Grant Nelson. Actually the time I'm talking about it was only a handful of British I was buying, so maybe it was 1996. It was Nice N Ripe. Ice Cream was happening, but there wasn't lots and lots of stuff going on. It was still mostly the American sounds in the mix. Then there was a shift, and it was a UK thing. And Clifford was working at this distributor and I think it was French stuff going on then, filter house? I didn't pay any attention to that but they were doing other stuff, and I went there and they were like, “She knows her shit, there's this other thing happening, we need someone who understands this thing, let's give her a try.” I tried to get some of the labels. Probably at that time they were mainly selling themselves out of the boot of their car.

There wasn't any distributor putting it all together, it was bits and bobs going on all over the place – so that was version one of the distributor I worked for. I moved to another distributor but it didn't work out, so I went back into the Truman Brewery. There was a distribution company called Essential, doing all sorts of stuff, trance, hard house. Distribution just used to pop up and disappear again, but they were solid, they were nearly doing alright. I knew what was going on, I knew all the people and it was massive but the business model didn't exist. The stuff existed, the users were there, the audience, the buyers, the scene, but it was like the mechanism to just fuel the record-buying public wasn't there.

And it was national, by that point. The parties weren't huge but they were everywhere. Essential had cash, which means people will jump to you: “I'll pay you now, give me a thousand, I'll pay you cash in hand.” So you can get them to leave their current distributor. They're living on sale or return, and on lower unit price, and we'd manufacture sometimes too. I was like, “These people are solid. I need to go there, I need to do that.” And somebody said to me, “Oh you know Chris from the Brewery, it's Chris, he owns it.” I imagined this person called Chris and I thought “Oh I know Chris.” I remember going in the loo and looking in the mirror going, “You've got to get this, you've got to do this,” sort of prepping myself. Knock on the door, this guy opens the door and I'm like, “Uh can I see Chris?” He was like, “I am Chris.” It completely threw me because this isn't the person who I thought it was. I didn't know Chris. I knew someone much lower down.

But I was like, “You need to be doing garage. You're trying, you're not doing it very well, you don't know what you're doing, I know everything about it and I can definitely do it.” He was like [laughs]. If someone did that now with me, I would say “Come in!” because you think there are lots of people trying that to get a job, but there isn't! It's unusual for somebody to be that pushy! So he said, “Yeah, give me your number.” I just walked out thinking “Oh fuck.” But he called me in a couple of weeks and said “Someone's left, do you want to come and try?” So I went in at the bottom of the ladder: no London shops, you had to sell to shops on the phone, all the best shops had gone. You're the last one in line. I had to create shops for myself – but the national thing was happening, and my shops were shops that existed, like Tempest in Birmingham, they just didn't know what to buy. I had probably 50 shops that I would literally say, “How much do you want to spend this week?” And I would make them a box because I knew more than them. There's no point me paying them for them to go, “Oh I'll have two of them, I'll have three of them” because I was the enthusiast in the mix that was going to the parties all the time. I knew what was working in the parties really early on, from dubplate.

So I was like, “This is going to be a big one, you need this and this.” And sometimes they'd be like, “You've given me a dud” and I'd be like “Hang on, wait a minute, it's not got to you yet.” Then a week later, it was that, “Fuck, I need another 100 of them!” It was so cool. I remember buying thousands of ‘Bump N’ Grind’, £4 a unit upfront, my bosses would be saying, “Are you sure about this one?” ¹²⁸ Dean – who became the person that was D&D, then he started 360 management company, managed Deadmau5 – they'd go out with the tunes, and be like, “Nah, not sure about this one!” I'd be like “Just wait a minute!” Because they weren't in that thing. And then we sold shit loads of them. It was such a good time. I was working for hardly any money, but it was so fulfilling to get it all moving. People would say, “Fucking hell you must make loads of money.” I think I was on £80 a week, I would work till midnight. I wasn't making much, but I took so much pride in it.

And when you're young and immersed and get guestlist to the place you want to be at, then you don't need that much money. Certainly not then. Obviously London's different nowadays

It's true. What I was becoming was an A&R, and getting demos. It went from getting the finished tunes to being able to influence what people were making. “See that tune, finish that one, don't finish this one!” Because I was then going to buy it and distribute it. I was like A&Ring for 20 record labels, even though I didn't know that's what it was called. We had all the labels in the end, it was really really great. Then the guy that worked for EMI publishing at the time – who is now the main person there – he recognised something's going on, “Who's picking the tunes over there because they're eventually going in the top ten?” Literally “Who's the buyer?” And that's how I met him. And I also just discovered Ms Dynamite, so I was in the mix with her. So there was like a double thing – to get me, plus got me in the relationship with her. “Why don't you come and do music publishing?” I was like, “Fuck.” For ages they'd all been ringing us up asking, “What do you think of this tune and that tune?” I was really like, “Arseholes!” I was fiercely independent and hated them.

He was like, “No this is publishing, this is different, you're working with the writer, you're working with the creative, it's a different thing.” I've still got the letter that he wrote me, saying “You should come and work here.” At that point I was doing buying for Black Market also. It was such a great insight. I had the connection to the talent, the artists, the labels, the distribution, the record shops up and down the country, the promoters, the parties and then standing in the record shop talking to the punter. Like the big 360° understanding of what was going on. And EMI published Stevie Wonder, so I was like “Alright I'll take the job then. You've got the whole Stevie Wonder catalogue, alright, I'll come here then.” Somehow there's some method to the madness.

So garage burst so big, and ‘Bump N’ Grind’ is an interesting milestone because that's already where it was like something else, like bassline garage. 2-step was separating and going darker, So Solid was starting to happen, so all of the things that became dubstep and grime were happening. But at this point, garage itself seemed like it could become a new formula for pop music. Yet it completely dissipated after another two-three years – so what went wrong?

Culturally everything seemed like end-of-cycle to me. I published So Solid, I remember when they had the drama at Astoria, so they were in the papers the same week that their album was out.¹²⁹ I don't think it was more trouble in the parties, it just became more mainstream visible because of the lyrics. Then it becomes a liability, and culturally for the authorities, you've got to clean up.

Terror Danjah told me he saw worse in 90s jungle raves than he ever did in garage or grime raves

Yeah, definitely. I mean it was serious things going on, but it was underground. The Gray's Inn Road after-party we used to go to, that went on for years and there was all sorts going on. One of the partners was Old Bill, it was an underworld thing in that entire structure, that foundation is built from backhanders and the police, but it knows where it sits, it stays in its right place within the fabric. Then West End started getting cleaned up a bit – before then you've got these mad raves with people pouring out into the street in the morning. That just doesn't happen any more. The way people were being in Dalston now, and Dalston's getting a bit of a clean up too. If you think about the current generation, Dalston, say, and Shoreditch before that, that's how I remember the West End. It was pretty lax. There was Buckingham Palace and you didn't fuck around near there, but you know, Leicester Square and Soho…

There were dive bars everywhere

Yeah, but then it felt like there was kind of a cultural clean up in that period. Plus there was no infrastructure within the independent record business in garage. A handful of labels were key, but they all licensed and partnered with majors, they didn't stay independent, whether it was Locked On or Public Demand, they're the consistent ones I can think of. So by the time dubstep came, it seemed to go really nice into the D&B infrastructure, of independent record labels and distribution globally staying independent. But the garage scene didn't go into that, it went into the major.

Because it had that pop potential

It had the pop potential, and also turn of the millennium there was a bit of a “D&B is dead” moment, even though it wasn't. So it was rebuilding itself. And then download and MP3s. Napster had started. It was a big mixture of things at once but because of the pop sensibility, everybody got a deal. They'd already sold 25-30,000 at a time through me for 18 months, then they went and got a £60,000 single deal and it kept going. It had the whole nation behind it, it is an important British genre. When you hear it now, that pattern, you realise this is properly embedded.

And it's played at festivals and the kids love Craig David

The kids heard their mum playing it, or her mum.

And Artful Dodger and Miss Teeq are played on local radio or Heart FM or whatever in a way that rave-era chart hits aren't so much

That's down to songs, isn't it?

True. But it helps keep the affinity for the beat alive. I was really struck by that new Zed Bias album, he's got MCs who probably weren't born when ‘Neighbourhood’ ¹³⁰ came out and they naturally rap over it, the rhythm is natural to them.¹³¹

It is a thing isn't it? It's there in our culture. It was a huge success but it didn't create industry for itself.

It had Ayia Napa

Yeah, that's true, it did create Ayia Napa. It had a good run up, then really cashed in, and then it died. Nowadays the cycle seems shorter on the emerging kind of moment. Perhaps nowadays an independent or underground scene is looking for mainstream, and then it's trying to gather longevity from that point – because you can stream and have the long tail of streaming, and once you're up you can live forever on streaming. Whereas with this you had to find the way to repress your vinyl, you had to keep fuelling it. It's a different thing, shifting from physical to what it is nowadays. But it's complicated – I don't know why it crashed so badly, because in some ways I think it had potential [shakes head]. But then everybody was out for themselves as well. I've got this other letter as well, Norris Windross called a meeting ¹³² somewhere on the river, we all had to go and agree that we weren't going to play ‘Smoke The Reefer’.¹³³ I got the letter, it was so funny and Jason Kaye was shaking his head, bless him, and they were talking about basslines and I was thinking, “Fuck I just put out ‘138 Trek’.¹³⁴ Are they gonna turn on me?” That was where it was going, the breakbeat thing and the bassline thing. It needed to happen, it was welcomed, it was something different, really energetic, huge rooms full of ravers. In the beginning it was 2-300 people who could get down to more intricate musical things, headsy people, off their nut. Now you're talking about younger, bigger…

… and more room for MCs as well

MCs and rave tools. It was perfect, the Zinc period, and Wookie as well was really important. That was where it was going, and then there was this meeting and Jason was like, “Nah man, I'm gonna play it if it does that to the crowd” because he come from jungle in the first place. He's like “Nah nah, I'm not having that. Because we're all going to agree in here, but when you're playing before me, you're gonna play it when I'm not there and smash the dance, then I've got to pick up.” And everyone's saying “Nah I'm not playing it, I'm not playing it.” It was really a funny time. That was the only solidarity I ever experienced. Like with any of these scenes, there are friends, genuine friendships, it was birthed off the back of those friendships – but the friendships and the infrastructure that it created from that point, there wasn't anything. If they'd have made a bigger association of garage people, maybe it could have been a bit of a thinktank and thought, “What do we do with this because this is a big thing that we've created?” But that shit just doesn't happen and majors get involved and milk it.

So where did FWD>> fit into that? Because that goes straight down the middle between intricate rhythms and heavy bass

I was really, really bored because I knew everything that was happening in the scene. Literally everywhere you looked, every DJ was going out with the same box of records. You could guarantee the tunes they were going to play. Retrospectively, you can see, it was like a Yates bar. If you're playing a Yates, you wouldn't start digging, you'd play a Calvin Harris tune. But these were people who had come through a headsy situation, and now they're getting paid and they've got to make sure everyone likes it – and these kids are 19, they were almost dancing to pop music. Somewhere in the corners, certain DJs – EZ, you've got to hold it up to him in that period – were keen on playing new music. But the majority were not gonna risk deading the crowd, and they just wanted to cash in.

I was spending time in after-parties where people like Funky Smith, Andy B, they were playing dubplates. It wasn't fully formed. It wasn't music you'd recognise as particularly good outside of that environment, you had to be there to feel it. Interesting, weird prototype shit kicking around. But that was my saviour. Kind of interested in D&B a little bit again, and then you had Lewis. Ghost were playing around with that idea. Zed Bias had been in the garage scene anyway, his interest in it was different. Oris Jay was kicking around, and Zinc and these kind of things. Everybody was interested in making and playing a new tune. I had this idea – it was influenced by Blue Note a little bit, not any particular sound, only in the sense that it created a strand within a thing. Like Metalheadz within drum’n’bass, it's a strand within a thing that had its identity. It felt to me there needed to be something protective, to allow the space that was anti all that stuff. I was business partners with Neil Joliffe and we had started this download site, dubplate.net. There was music enough kicking around, and I said I wanted to do a party.

I had the nickname Soulja. For a long time I put stickers on test pressings with Soulja on it, so you know it came from me. The logo design of Soulja worked for FWD>>, we just jiggled that text and that was what FWD>> was. And we started FWD>> in the Velvet Rooms. Then I was just, “You've got to play either music you've made or it's got to be new.” I tried to maintain that throughout the years we did it. I remember booking Martin Larner randomly, and I had to say “Look, I know that promoters say, ‘Play fresh stuff’ but when their party's not going so well they shit themselves and they just want you to play ‘Something In Your Eyes’.¹³⁵ But I'm serious, I'm not having it. You've got to do new.” I was so desperate to be like, “What the fuck is this?” Because you can play something, you can tell, “That's Steve Gurley, and that must be Steve Gurley and someone else.” Otherwise you go into the parties and it's like, “There's not one tune that I haven't heard played to death, that's newer than 18 months.” So it was out of desperation but also interest in what's next. And little by little, it became that. I never realised that it became what I wanted it to until now. It's only hearing other people's reviews back to me, I'm like, “It worked.” It was one of the most important things I've done.

When were you aware that the East London production thing, Jammer and Wiley, were creating a sound – and also the South London Croydon boys were making something

They all seemed really young. I tried to stay quiet at that stage. I could have been like, “I've been in the garage scene and before that the whatever scene, and I understand.” But I tried to stay quiet, reserved, what was unfolding. It was really nice to be able to sign records and point people in the right direction.

From distribution, you must have known the key record shops, so a lot of the people involved: Slimzee and Arthur…

Jammer was work experience at Essential distribution, so I knew him. He was like the intern, so I knew him from when he was really little. Wiley used to sell records to us. Wiley and Target are a generation younger than me, then Skream was younger. It was almost like grime was bigger, dubstep was zero, grime was bigger and then dubstep kind of solidified. And then it was like, “What's grime and what's dubstep and who is making what?” And then eventually dubstep had that notch up, the Mary Anne Hobbs thing.

Then Gilles Peterson's interest. ‘Request Line’ ¹³⁶ kicked off, then ‘Night’.¹³⁷ They was both on our label. It was really different to garage, because you're talking about a different landscape. I know that that's always the case as far as the audience goes – but the complexities to the digital era unfolding at the same time was interesting. Vinyl was the thing that sold shitloads – and then it stopped.

And also dubstep grew off blogs, Kode9 and Blackdown and Melissa and Georgie, all spreading the news. Which helped send it to these weird little outposts – Bristol obviously, Amsterdam, Prague for some reason

This is what I mean when I'm saying about it being closer to D&B, or a mixture of electronic music. But to simplify, we distributed for SRD, and SRD had been the True Playaz distributor. I think they had the majority of the D&B labels coming from the similar bass culture, London and UK cities, kind of working-class, mixed with students. So there was a similarity in that structure, and then dubstep – certainly Tempa and a bunch of other labels, Pinch's label – they slotted into the SRD thing. They were like, “We know what to do with this, this can work in this environment that we can already see.” Garage couldn't have done that. Garage was going to the charts. It separated off. So even though dubstep was a new thing, it could build on work that had happened. I could be being ignorant because there's techno and other electronic British music, like WARP.

Techno's definitely relevant because Arthur was part of Lost and that was vital. Hatcha said Arthur took him when he was 13 to Lost, and he was like, “Right, this is what a rave is.” And dubstep was heavily instrumental and quite dark, a lot of the experimental electronic people picked up on dubstep early where they never did with garage. Almost nobody at the time tried making experimental garage, it's mad

No one was interested. Everyone was snobby about it because it was champagne and getting dressed up, and it was intimidating. It was not embraced by the electronic community. Perhaps it was out of necessity it had to hit the majors. It's like “Fuck that, I'm not having that lot coming over here.” It's an interesting thing because, yeah, it was sort of shunned. I don't know, sort of snobby.

I think it cut both ways. For me in 1997-98-99 I was very much a scruffbag – free parties, warehouse raves, squat raves, weirdo arty type events – so I didn't feel particularly welcome at garage nights. But I was buying garage records left right and centre, and trying to persuade my mates in bands or the electronica scene that these are the beats you should be making. And they were a bit like [screws up face]. Not entirely a class divide, partly that, but really a complete culture clash. It's amazing how separate these scenes really were. But with dubstep, people could be like, “It's alright, I recognise this, it's a dark room with heavy bass and weird noises.”

Yeah but I think I was really keen to make sure that the girls came back into it. What do I do about that? I didn't like that it was just boys, I wanted it to be mixed. I didn't see that as success if it was a room full of men. Which FWD>> definitely was. Over cycles of its life, it evened out.

Without wanting to do the stereotype thing, if you make something about a collectors mentality and who's got the newest thing, it's competitive in that way, that does tend to become a boy culture. Obviously you're a notable exception!

I said this when we did the Egypt thing at the Barbican.¹³⁸ I'm not knowledgeable enough about the complexities of living in a patriarchal society and what impact that has on everything – except for my own experience, I've had frustrations, definitely during motherhood, about the workplace and all that shit. But I always said that girls didn't come into Black Market asking for tunes very often. The door was open, but it was intimidating to anyone who wanted to come in there, intimidating to boys and girls – but maybe girls feel more intimidated because of the bullshit we've been through. For me, I went straight in and said, “I need to hear this music, I've got to find out what is this, what else is happening here?” That was because I was like either that collector mentality, or just hungry for it. And I really wanted my friends in, too. It was an open door. My logic was, “Girls aren't that interested in this nerdy thing, but girls are interested in songs and they are interested in raving! And if you get the girls, you get the boys”. I'd always partied with a big bunch of girls, so I had personal interest. My friends would be like, “Are you doing that thing again? Is it gonna be like the same as before?” I'd be like “No it's changed a little bit.” “Do we have to come?” I'm like “Please come!”