Inner City Pressure: The Story of Grime. Dan Hancox
that was great too.’ Mason attended the UK garage committee meetings, which were hosted and coordinated by the old guard, with Norris Windross as chairman, Spoony as spokesman, and well-established DJs such as Matt Jam Lamont and MCs such as Creed on one side; positioned against them, the likes of Mason, Maxwell D, producer Jaimeson and MC Viper:
‘We went along because we wanted to give the new generation a voice,’ Mason tells me over Skype from his home in California. ‘I really liked all the guys on the other side, but at the time I butted heads with them, especially Matt Jam; I remember him having a go at us for putting a grime artist on the cover of RWD – it was one of the MCs from Hype Squad, this young crew who were on Raw Mission FM. This was still only 2001, it was a kid sitting on a bike and he was making gunfingers. And they all said, “You’re promoting violence, you shouldn’t be promoting these artists, this isn’t garage,” and I said, “Well, look: they’re playing it in garage stations and garage clubs, and they’re buying the records in garage shops, from the garage section. And I think you’re right, I think maybe this isn’t garage, and it’s becoming something else – but, we absolutely should be fucking covering it, of course it’s going to be on our front cover.”’
Oxide and Neutrino, as members of So Solid Crew and also a very successful duo in their own right, responded to the ire sent their way for their scrappy, cheeky ‘Bound 4 Da Reload’ tune with an appropriately punk follow-up, called ‘Up Middle Finger’, describing the garage scene’s jealous whining about their success, and bans in clubs and radio stations on playing their songs. ‘All they do is talk about we, something about we’re novelty, cheesy … did I mention we’re only 18?’ They had sold 250,000 copies of ‘Bound 4 Da Reload’, and ‘Up Middle Finger’ became their third Top 10 hit in a row. That record scratch was the sound of the old guard being rewound into the history books. ‘Garage didn’t really want us involved in their scene,’ as Lethal Bizzle said years later, ‘so we started making our own thing.’
That’s not to say there wasn’t some fluidity between the two camps, or some overlap in taste and affection from the kids for the old guard: just that in that intense moment, the Oedipal urge to shrug off your elders and gatekeepers requires a bit of front, if you’re going to claim the stage. Even within Pay As U Go – really the critical proto-grime crew, in terms of its personnel – there was a slight difference in aesthetics. You can see it in the video to ‘Champagne Dance’, Pay As U Go’s one proper chart single, where Wiley and the rest of the crew are dressed in tracksuits, and Maxwell D, who, following a tough upbringing, wasn’t about to let the opportunity to dress like a star pass him by:
‘I had money from the street from selling drugs, and then I went straight into music, and was living like a drug dealer, legally. That’s why I stood out a lot in the crew. That’s why when people saw me they were like, “Rah he’s dressed in all these name brand, expensive clothes.” Even in my music videos I’d say to the stylist woman, “Look, I want a fur jacket yeah? I don’t want to wear what I wear in the street.” The rest of the crew were all like, “Why are you wearing a fur jacket?” and I’m like, “Because it’s a music video! I’m going to go all out, I’m going to make myself look like a pimp.” That was the garage style thing: dress to impress.’
During their brief time in the limelight signed to Sony, Pay As U Go were given the major-label rigmarole to promote ‘Champagne Dance’. Wiley was given the surprisingly high-profile job of remixing Ludacris’s ‘Roll Off’; they appeared on CBBC with Reggie Yates, and on Channel 4’s Faking It programme, advising the lawyer-turned-UK-garage-MC George on how to be less of a ‘Bounty’ (black on the outside, white on the inside), and get a bit of street cool. The most unlikely of these promotional activities was a tour of school assemblies around London and beyond, in Birmingham and Reading too; Flow Dan and Maxwell D took the helm, and the other MCs, including Wiley and Dizzee, would join them too. On one occasion, the disjunction between urban stars in the hood and a pop-friendly, public-facing crew reached a nadir. ‘Sony made them go out on a schools tour,’ Ross Allen told Emma Warren. ‘I was like, “Nick [Denton, their manager], how’s the tour going?” He was like, “I just had Wiley on the phone and they’re well fucked off,” and I was like, “Why?” They’d been sent to this school and they were playing to five-year-olds – they’re on the mic and these little kids are doing forward rolls in front of them.’12
There was a baton being passed, and in spite of the £100,000 advance the crew received from Sony, and ‘Champagne Dance’ reaching number 13, Maxwell D was in a minority with his inclination for a fur coat. ‘I wouldn’t ever have said, “Take that Nokia!”’ Maxwell reflects, referencing the Dizzee lyric, as emblematic of the new generation’s hunger, ‘because I could already buy five Nokias if I wanted – it wouldn’t have made sense. But Dizzee, he’d just come off the street, he had that mentality.’ And of course, if you’re a 15-year-old, especially a poor 15-year-old, there’s no financial barrier to becoming an MC – you’ve seen Pay As U Go, Heartless and So Solid do it and become stars, why not do the same? The same was not true of DJing: several hundred pounds on a pair of Technics, a couple of hundred more on a mixer, more on some decent headphones, and then, after that, all the records: £5–10 for each new 12 inch, and about £25 to cut a dubplate. DJing isn’t cheap. MCing is free. ‘Everybody wants to be an MC, there’s no balance,’ as Wiley’s Pay As U Go-era bars observed. The posing, luxury brands and pimped-out stylings of the UK garage scene were being replaced by something much less aspirational, more raw, more hungry. In his autobiography, Wiley describes some of the few, frosty meetings in this transitional period between his rising east London crew, and south London’s reigning kings of UK garage:
‘Imagine seeing So Solid with all that fame, all that money, and then these bruk-pocket half-yardie geezers from east turn up with an even colder sound. There was no champs, no profiling, no beautiful people. Just us raggo East End lads in trackies and hoods, hanging out in some shithole white-man pub on Old Kent Road. We were realer in a way. We were just about spitting and making beats, that’s it. South must have thought we were on some Crackney shit.’13
Those bruk-pocket geezers from east would change everything. ‘I do sometimes wish more people respected what Pay As U Go did for grime,’ Maxwell D says. ‘Because Pay As U Go, that’s the grime supergroup. That’s like a grime atom bomb, exploding into all those little molecules.’ You can see what he means. Even though their album was never released, and ‘Champagne Dance’ was their sole official release, the personnel involved would go on to transform British music. Geeneus made piles of stunning instrumentals (under his own name and as Wizzbit) and was the chief architect of UK underground super-pirate Rinse FM, stewarding sibling genres dubstep and UK funky along with grime, signing Katy B and creating an ever-expanding collection of related businesses. Slimzee would become grime’s biggest and most respected DJ, the dubplate don par excellence. Maxwell himself would go on to join East Connection and later Muskateers. Target would make a number of sterling instrumentals for Roll Deep, and become an influential DJ on BBC 1Xtra. And then there was Wiley, the godfather of grime, who sprang from the short-lived excitement and disappointment of Pay As U Go to start Roll Deep, bring through Dizzee Rascal, Tinchy Stryder, Chipmunk, Skepta and create his ‘Eskimo sound’, perhaps the sonic palette most identified with the genre.
‘Don’t get me wrong, we weren’t there in isolation,’ Maxwell continued. ‘So Solid Crew were a big part of influencing the grime culture, but they were already superstars, and they were garage superstars. And Heartless Crew, they were doing garage and sound-system stuff, playing a bit of ragga, a bit of darker stuff – but for me, Heartless were always happy, they were about love and peace, whereas we always used to bring a lot more street lyrics. And underneath us, you’ve got all of east London immediately turning over to grime music. Because after us, who was next? East Connection, More Fire Crew, Nasty Crew, Boyz in da Hood, SLK. All these crews started emerging.
‘After Pay As U Go, that was when it all went dark,’ he smirks. ‘We turned out the lights.’