Inner City Pressure: The Story of Grime. Dan Hancox
point that deep in its spirit, jungle is grime’s true antecedent. Its aesthetics – a hard, scowling, dark side that is counterpointed by ludic, transcendent expressions of joy – were essential to the mutation of UK garage as it became grime. ‘Coming from jungle, you’re always going to be a little more into the darker stuff,’ recalled Troy ‘A Plus’ Miller, describing the garage days as a kind of stylistic interregnum. ‘Even though you like the light and the happy – you and your crew out in a rave, all the girls are here, we’re all having a nice time – you’re still going to lean towards things that are a bit darker.’
A Plus’s friend and founder of Rinse FM, Geeneus, is unequivocal about the power of that junglist passion; that passion would lead them to a collective mistake that would help change the course of British music. He told a podcast in 2016 about the influential UK garage instrumental ‘Cape Fear’, a welcome (re)turn to the dark side, which the Pay As U Go MCs could spit over with the speed and aggression of jungle lyricism. It wasn’t the way things were done in UK garage. ‘I was the last person to get involved in [UK garage], because I loved jungle so much,’ he recalled. ‘We started getting involved in it, but we was bringing along what we learned from jungle into the garage. But we got it completely wrong. And because we got it completely wrong, we ended up with grime. We thought we was making garage: getting garage beats like Cape Fear, and putting MCs on them, and they were spitting their heart out.’ On other occasions, to fit the Bow boys’ lingering passion for super-fast jungle with the contemporary 140bpm sound of 2-step, Slimzee would play Mampi Swift’s jungle track ‘Jaws’ at the wrong speed, at 33 instead of 45rpm, and the MCs would spit on it.
They had, Geeneus continued, ‘railroaded’ the UK garage scene ‘into something completely different. Where they’re bubbling along having a nice time in the party, looking nice, we’ve come in with tracksuits on, spitting lyrics everywhere, MCs everywhere, me and Slimzee just DJing for the MCs really.’11
As summaries of UK garage go, ‘bubbling along having a nice time in the party’ is pretty spot-on. The subject matter of the tunes – love, sex and relationships – narrated in smooth, soulful vocals from an even balance of male and female singers, reflected a much more grown-up, stylish swagger and refinement than had been seen in the wild days of British rave music previously, from acid house through jungle and drum ’n’ bass. It was as if, with the nineties drawing to a close, rave itself was moving beyond adolescent zeal and striving for a kind of adulthood. Garage as a form did not begin in the UK, but the US, and as Simon Reynolds records in Energy Flash, to begin with, in the mid-nineties, garage in the UK had ‘slavishly’ followed US production style. Then the junglists ‘entered the fray’, and created a ‘distinctly British hybrid strain that merged house’s slinky panache with jungle’s rude-bwoy exuberance’. The UK underground brought that edge, even as it was swapping a tracksuit for smart shoes and an ironed shirt.
Indeed, maturity was reflected in the aspirational dress codes in UK garage clubs, where shirts and shoes (no trainers!) would often be a compulsory component of the door policy, and where the narcotics of choice were champagne and cocaine – even while the music’s primary creators and ravers were from the same humble inner London backgrounds as the junglists before them, and the grime kids who would follow. No hats no hoods! Only two school children may enter the rave at any one time.
It’s a tension that was a rich seam for British underground dance music more than once: the wicked and the divine, the debonair and the scuzzy, rubbing up against one another. In the first two years of the millennium, UK garage was being stretched in two directions at once – a process which is always likely to make something break in the middle. On the one hand, the poppy, commercial end was thriving, and producing numerous hits: singer-MCs like Craig David, Ms Dynamite and Daniel Bedingfield became stars, and tunes like Sweet Female Attitude’s ‘Flowers’ and DJ Luck and MC Neat’s ‘With A Little Bit Of Luck’ were ubiquitous.
But something was pulling hard in the opposite musical direction – to the dark side. On this side of UK garage’s personality split, mostly male MCs dominated instead of crooning singers; the instrumentals conjured not a glitzy VIP area but a low-lit council estate. It was inner London’s millennial aspiration and promise versus the grim reality that persisted when those aspirations failed to materialise. Darker garage that was built around breakbeats and accompanied by jungle’s hectic lyrical energy was thriving on pirate radio, while the more established, soulful tracks dominated the charts and high-street clubs. When catchy, sample-heavy novelty records like DeeKline’s ‘I Don’t Smoke’ started to take off in the garage clubs, and the likes of Heartless Crew, So Solid Crew and Pay As U Go Cartel started to have hits themselves, the divisions deepened. For the old guard, there was a ‘last days of disco’ feel to the new millennium: the resplendent purity of one of the greatest periods in British music history having to come to terms with its own looming mortality – these were the best days of our lives, and this is how it ends? With some hyperactive teenagers chatting about guns and drug dealing, instead of a smooth, 2-step shuffle and some sweetly sung love songs? With a song that samples the Casualty theme tune and a Guy Ritchie film? No wonder they were upset.
Bizarrely, the tensions between the old guard and the new wave came to a head in the unlikely context of the UK garage committee meetings. It sounds somehow reminiscent of the kind of sit-down familiar from The Sopranos, where representatives of the mafia families would thrash out their differences, negotiate and cut deals. A similar thing had happened in the jungle scene too, when prominent figures had attempted – in some cases, successfully – to blacklist General Levy’s raucous party-starting anthem ‘Incredible’, after he had claimed to be ‘runnin’ jungle’. The substance of the tension at the turn of the millennium was that the new guard were sullying garage’s grown-up reputation, both musically and in terms of the rebellious gangster pose they sometimes presented to the world; they didn’t like the chat about gats and violence, and they didn’t like the exuberant use of novelty samples either. The straw that broke the camel’s back was Oxide and Neutrino’s ‘Bound 4 Da Reload’ going to number one in May 2000, and ‘I Don’t Smoke’ following it in to number 11, after months as an underground smash. Prominent gatekeeper DJs like Norris ‘Da Boss’ Windross and Radio 1’s The Dreem Team refused to play either record. ‘I don’t like many of those records of that style,’ DJ Spoony from the Dreem Team told the Guardian at the time. ‘I like music with more soul and groove in it.’ When So Solid Crew appeared on their Radio 1 show that winter, the atmosphere was frosty to say the least: ‘Give the youth of nowadays a chance to bust through that barrier,’ Romeo told them, ‘cos you lot have been there for so long, and it’s our time now.’
In the meetings, there was some discussion of whether the darker, ‘breakbeat’ garage would also attract more undesirable elements to the clubs. ‘I was always bearing the brunt of it,’ recalls Maxwell D. ‘“Who’s this crew, Pay As U Go, talking all this gangster stuff? We don’t want them in the dances, they’re thugs, they’re this, they’re that …” They really didn’t want to give us the mic.’ (Unfortunately for him, Maxwell found himself on the sharp end of exactly this kind of condescension and obstruction again, years later, when he made a light-hearted funky house tune about his mobile phone called ‘Blackberry Hype’ – the kids loved it, the grown-ups, less so.)
For Matt Mason, editor of RWD magazine from 2000–05, who also DJed on garage station Freek FM, the combative, transitional period was exciting, even if the end result was inevitable: ‘There was a real sense the new guys were doing something different, that a chasm was opening up in garage. It’s interesting because it really crept up. First there was just some really weird records, I think from about 1999. There was the Groove Chronicles tunes first, like okay, that’s different, and some MJ Cole records, like … all right, some different thoughts have gone into this. And then there was a record by Dem 2, under the alias US Alliance, called “All I Know”, and “Da Grunge” remix of it was this fucking mutated thing, that had mutated out of garage, and I remember hearing it at Twice as Nice and just thinking, “What the fuck is that? That’s not garage.”
‘At first I really didn’t want to see garage splinter, because