- guardian.co.uk, Sunday July 2 2000 00.02 BST
- The Observer, Sunday July 2 2000
Saturday night, Sunday morning. It's 1.30am and we're weaving off London's Old Kent Road, down dark, lonely side streets, past abandoned warehouses, over shattered glass. We round a corner and - watch out! - almost smack into a Mercedes SLK doing a three-point turn. We wait, then slope slowly on down the street, past a scene unimaginable from only a couple of roads away, a scene familiar and gratifying to anyone who's ever been to a nightclub on the basis of a scrawled address, the hallelujah welcome sign that says you've made it. Well: you've found it.
People. Hundreds and hundreds of people. Groups of girls clack past, screeching into mobiles, showing off, looking for friends. Boys spill up from round the corner, neatly dressed and coiffed, to eye the enormous queue - three people wide, 200 yards long - that hems the blank brick wall of the club, before pitching up at its end. Some march to the front of the line, but are swiftly disaffected of their delusions of superior status by the bouncers, who aren't so much heavy-handed as just heavy. Still, a spot of sweet talk and we queue-hop. Through a metal detector, on to a clothes-bag-and-body-search that would shame Heathrow, and in. Three vast rooms, each progressively darker, both in lighting and sounds. The darkest is the most popular: we arrive just in time for the PA from Colour Girl, who performs her latest single, 'Joyrider'. Once she's off, the DJ slams on some moodier, harder music. The crowd goes bananas.
It's fantastic to see. A group of perfectly turned out, seemingly aloof young men, who'd been standing around as though training for cool school, suddenly and simultaneously throw some joyful, eye-popping moves. They continue to do so for as long as the DJ plays the tunes they like: often not very long, given his habit of letting each track last all of a minute and a half. Low-attention-span clubbing. On the stage, a gaggle of lads argy-bargy as to who gets to chat over the records.
There are more girls in the other rooms. And what girls they are. Of all shapes, ages, colours, they are united in their rejection of unnecessary clothing. The skimpiest of skirts and hankiest of tops are uniform, as are glamour heels. Their hair is twisted into works of art. In many clubs, this could lead to snooty attitudes towards other women: here, the toilets chatter with compliments - 'Lookin' good, girl!' The good humour stands in contrast to the hassle getting in. The friendliness of the clubbers goes against long-held assumptions about this area of south-east London and, in particular, about the kind of people that are into the skippy drums, cut-up vocals and hard basslines of the music now known as UK garage.
You might not think you know about UK garage, but you do. It's what pours from every car, thumps out of every window, clogs up the compilation racks in Our Price and HMV. It packs out Under-18 nights and goes on student-union tours. It's what you hear when you flip across your radio on a Saturday night. It's 'Re-Rewind', 'Sweet Like Chocolate', 'Little Bit Of Luck', 'Never Gonna Let You Go', 'Girls Like Us', 'Thong Song', 'Buggin". It beats Steps into third place in the Top 20, after Craig David's 'Fill Me In' and Sweet Female Attitude's 'Flowers'. It's all those pop songs with those light 'n' frisky drums.
Forget Ibiza Uncovered and, these days, Overexposed . Take a summer trip to Cyprus instead, to the once sleepy town of Ayia Napa. You'll meet Radio 1 there, and MTV. Or talk to the punters at Twice As Nice, the packed-to-the-rafters Sunday night UK garage club held at central London's The End. Ask Sarah, who's 32, a dressed-to-the-99s sales accountant who sometimes spends £200 on going out over the weekend. She used to go to 'field raves' in the early 90s, but then didn't bother clubbing until UK garage became big.
'Yeah, it made me start going out again,' she says. 'I like the vibe, I like the music. I love soul, too, but soul to me isn't for coming out. But with garage, I can dance to it and that's the main attraction. I like the people, too, because a lot of the girls are nice, they're trendy. And there's no attitude at all. Everyone comes out to enjoy themselves. They don't stand around, you know, just looking bored.'
'Everyone's coming out for this atmosphere now,' says Vanessa, who's 21 and works in advertising. 'It's nice to be in a club and to see loads of different people, new people every week. It shows that it's alive.'
Keep talking and you'll find out that - blimey! - even the boys are positive. Peter, who's a security guard at the Old Bailey, is happy to explain the appeal. 'I like the vibe, the people, the music, the chicks,' he grins. 'The chicks are more sophisticated, sexy. It's not like any other club... I met my wife here a year ago. I was a little bit tipsy and she came up to me and rescued me and took me home. When we have kids, I'll get my mum to look after them and we'll both come to Twice as Nice.'
But it's not just the clubbers who are enjoying themselves. UK garage has started to give the British music industry the shake-up it's needed for the past five years. Dave Norton is a PR for Four Liberty Records, an Eastender whose first musical influences were Chuck Berry and Little Richard (he's 43). He is over the moon about UK garage. 'I'm someone who's always been totally in love with black music,' he enthuses. 'Through the 70s, with James Brown, through the 80s with the jazz funk and soul, into the 90s... UK garage is a continuation of this wonderful legacy. Plus, it's British, it's our version.
There's so many influences that have been added into the stew. If you look at current American black music, essentially it's just a version of early soul and disco. With UK garage, there are those influences, but there's also dancehall reggae, drum and bass, even hardcore in there, too. It's a broad church and it's bringing everyone in. If you held up a mirror to what's going on culturally in the UK today, then UK garage would look back at you. It's going to dominate the charts.'
Or meet Nigel Blunt, who manages Oracabessa, a Birmingham-based record label set up by Ali Campbell from UB40. Nigel's a laidback man whose CV includes band, label and club management from as far back as the New Romantic era. Nigel is not usually moved to over-enthusiasm, but even he's bubbling. 'You can press 1,000 copies of your single, get it rinsing in a disco, and within weeks it can be dropping on national radio, if The Dreem Teem pick up on it,' he grins. 'The music scene has never had so few rules. It's like the Wild West out there, I tell you. The last time I saw excitement like this was punk. It's just black people this time.'
Sensational prospects for a music that began so humbly. Here's the story. In 1993, in a grotty south London pub called the Elephant and Castle, a clever promoter called Timmy Ram Jam decided to try and catch the late-night clubbers stumbling out of the Ministry of Sound. He started his club at 6am. Now-established UK garage DJs like Matt Jam Lamont and Mickey Simms played tuneful American house music: but, crucially, played the records a bit too fast. This was for two reasons. First: British crowds - for some long-acknowledged but inexplicable reason - have always liked their music faster-tempoed than Americans. Second: the clubbers had been up all night. The DJs wanted to keep them awake.
From there, the club moved to the big- ger, but no more salubrious, Frog and Nightgown on the Old Kent Road, then the Arches in Southwark, and finally, to the Colliseum at Vauxhall. It picked up DJs, MCs, pirate radio coverage and plenty of punters along the way. Twice As Nice every Sunday night at the Colliseum started in 1997. Within weeks, it had legendary status, boasting DJs such as EZ (now on Kiss FM) and The Dreem Teem - producers and DJs Spoony, Timmi Magic and Mikee B, now on Radio 1.
I went to Twice As Nice in 1998. It was rammed. There were so many people spilling out of the club on to the road that they literally stopped the traffic. Inside, the atmosphere was uplifting and full of energy: plenty of posing, but even more dancing, breaking loose, proper night-of-your-lifetime clubbing. Everything about the club seemed completely new to me. It had its own sound: skippy drums, boot-shuddering bass and uplifting vocals. It had its own look: dressy, exclusive, designer-labelled - the boys in head-to-toe Moschino and Versace, the girls likewise, though not so warmly wrapped. It had its own tipple: champagne. Far from wanting to drop a pill and veg out, the new crew wanted to keep their cool, dance well, look great. And it had its own ambience: it was racially mixed (very unusual in clubland) and inclusively friendly (unusual in an underground club). It was inevitable that the press would pick up on it.
Unfortunately, when it did, it got things slightly wrong. The media concentrated on the champagne-BMW-designer-label lifestyle, as opposed to the music. Then, because the flourishing club scene didn't immediately translate into chart-hit records, the press turned away, talking flash-in-the-pan, leaving those involved in the scene smarting and irritated.
Richard Benson was one of the first journalists outside the music press to champion the UK garage scene. He says: 'Everyone who went to garage clubs three or four years ago could see what was happening, because the music made sense there,' he says, 'but it took a long time to replicate the excitement of the clubs on vinyl. The Next Big Thing was actually jumping up and down and asking for support for years, but the media chose to ignore or misrepresent it.'
In those years, when UK garage was filling the clubs, but not being played on mainstream radio, the role of pirate radio was fundamental. Benson visited Ice FM, one of London's most popular pirates, which broadcasted from ex-fireman Ricky D's kitchen. He recalls Technics decks on the worktops, memos to DJs Blu-tacked on the fridge, empty champagne bottles in one corner, boxes of 12in vinyl singles in all the others, and, sitting on the windowsill, the 'horn'. The horn, like a 6in mini-loudhailer, is a cheap piece of broadcasting equipment that beams the music to a transmitter atop another block of flats.
The pirates broke and still break those independent label records that suddenly and rudely gate-crash the top 10. They pick up on tracks that go down well in clubs, and the listeners tape the shows, then take the tapes to record shops to get the vinyl. Between 1997 and 2000, with the mainstream media so shy of the culture, the pirates cleaned up: their number in London alone has almost quadrupled since 1996.
Four years on, and the UK garage hits are coming thick and fast. DJs Mark Hill and Pete Devereux, alias Artful Dodger, who gave us 'Re-Rewind' (which launched teen- age lover-crooner Craig David), 'Movin' Too Fast', and now 'Woman Trouble' have already sold in excess of 1 million records. Producers such as Truesteppers, Wookie and Zed Bias are in ouch-that's- hot demand. And, after a couple of years in which most vocals seemed to be supplied by American r'n'b artists (producers would take the a cappella version of a single by Whitney Houston, Brandy, Destiny's Child and do a bootleg remix), British vocalists are coming through.
We all know about 'making love on a Tuesday, Wednesday, etc, etc' Craig David; now there's Alan Shearer-in-a-suit Robbie Craig, Stockport bargirls Sweet Female Attitude, potential pop queen Colour Girl, even Neneh Cherry, whose career got a shot in the arm with The Dreem Teem's remix of Buddy X. And it's not just British performers who are benefiting from UK garage's Midas touch. Oracabessa is mining a rich seam of talent from Jamaica, and has already had hits with Mr Vegas's 'Heads High' and B15 Projects' 'Girls Like Us'.
UK garage, because it was given time to develop at its own pace, away from press glare and major label cherry-picking, is now throwing up more talent than any other pop genre. 'I think the reason why UK garage works is that you can throw in anything, it'll go in the mix,' says writer and singer Colour Girl, real name Becky, an Essex girl with a two-year-old son. 'A screaming diva vocal, something haunting, like Wookie, or Witchidam, for the reggae.'
Colour Girl herself came from house music, but now finds UK garage more fulfilling. 'I don't often feel proud about being British, but I do with UK garage. For years, we were left behind by America. They had the best hip-hop, r'n'b, soul, house music. Now we've come up with our own unique music. Let's just hope it's got enough legs to trot over the Atlantic and kick some arse.'
Writer-singers like Colour Girl, Craig David and the amazingly soulful Robbie Craig are to be f ted in an industry that has relied for many years on boy/girl/combination-bands that sing, dance, look pretty, but don't pen tunes. UK garage producers can write, too. Artful Dodger are classically trained. Another who looks as though he could become a star - though not, perhaps, in the hold-the-front-page mould - is 27-year-old polite-as-you-like Wookie. Wookie (real name Jason Chue: Chue-Chewbacca-Wookie-geddit?) has an LP coming out later this year: 'There'll be tracks of the same speed as UK garage, but the mood will be lower, you wouldn't play them out.' He's self-taught - he wrote all his first tunes on a £1,100 keyboard - and part of Jazzie B's Soul II Soul crew. (They met six years ago when Wookie was renting a flat from Jazzie's barber.) Wookie's already remixed Gabrielle, Whitney Houston, Brandy, Angie Stone and is an example of what The Dreem Teem's Timmi Magic calls the 'depth' of the UK garage scene. 'It isn't just bedroom producers,' says Timmi. 'There are legitimate songwriters, like Wookie, and K Warren, Dubaholics, TJ Cases_ they're another reason why this scene will last. They can write.'
Sunday afternoon at Radio 1. The Dreem Teem have just come off air from their 10am-1pm show. All three have been up all night DJing at clubs, and now, though their stint is over, they can't stop. They have to discuss and approve a TV ad for their mix LP (part of the INcredible series), and go through what will happen for a telly programme to be made around their Ayia Napa trip. They'll be there, with Radio 1, on 21-23 July. They munch chocolate bars and crisps to keep up their energy.
The Dreem Teem are possibly the most well known DJs of the UK garage scene, mostly because of their Radio 1 show. (Other DJs, like EZ and Artful Dodger, have prime-time Kiss slots, but Kiss only broadcasts in London.) They met in 1996 through working on the same pirate radio station: Spoony played US garage; Timmi Magic came from acid house; Mikee B was into drum and bass and hardcore - et voilà, the essential ingredients of UK garage. Since then, they've become a respected production team as well as building on their club and radio DJing.
The Dreem Teem came to Radio 1 via shows on Kiss and on Galaxy, a station which broadcasts almost everywhere in the UK, except London - thus disproving the UK garage 'is a London thing' theory. They're very different characters: Timmi, who oversees their production work, is the most naturally lively and jokey; Mikee is laid-back and only contributes to conversations when he has to; Spoony is the spokesman, a man who can argue his corner and who is keen to represent UK garage in what he feels is its correct light.
'When people write about the house scene, they don't write about sweaty people with their tops off any more,' he points out. 'So why do they always write about the champagne and the suits? It's too easy. For the record, only one of us three has a BMW. And one of us doesn't even drink champagne.'
The Dreem Teem believe that UK garage will stick around because it's strong in so many areas. It has a healthy clubscene that's now spread nationally, a thriving and long-established pirate radio stage; plus, now, mainstream chart hits, mainstream radio play, and telly-friendly Ayia Napa for those who want a holiday. All backed up by talented writers, producers, singers and MCs: 'MCs are our rappers,' says Timmi. 'Instead of Mel C featuring Left Eye, soon it'll be Baby Spice featuring PSG.'
Friday afternoon at Uptown Records on D'Arblay Street in London's Soho. The basement is mobbed: there are queues at the desk and at the turntables at the back of the shop, where customers can try out the wares. Check that the record they're listening to is the one they want. 'We get a lot of people coming in and singing to us,' smiles 28-year-old Huckleberry Finn, who's in charge of the underground music section. 'People play tapes down the phone of stuff they've heard on pirates. I've had kids come up and go: You got the song with the bass? I'm going: Well, is it a soft bass? A hard bass? Does it go woooooooh?'
Huckleberry has an ear for hits: he bought in the very first white-label copies of 'Flowers', 'Little Bit Of Luck', 'Buggin", 'Girls Like Us'. He tells me that the next track to look out for will be 'Can I Get Your Number' by Obi: 'That's my top tip.' His tips have started to pay off: several major record labels are sniffing about, offering him A&R consultancy deals, because 'they miss so much they shouldn't. There's a lot of homegrown talent that's going unspotted.'
Huckleberry, like The Dreem Teem, came up through the pirates, via soul, rave and hardcore. And, like The Dreem Teem, he's concerned with spreading the message: in his case, worldwide, developing contacts with Japan, America, Switzerland. 'The whole scene happened naturally,' he says. 'It was an accident, there was no bandwagon to be jumped on. We all know each other and we plodded along, doing our thing, helping each other out, you know - you do a mix for me and I'll do one for you - there's been no money involved.'
But now, of course, there is. And it alters things. 'There's no extra people involved,' says Huckleberry. 'It's not like we're finding new fans under the carpet. They're coming into our scene from other ones, like we did. So, if that scene is trance, or house, and if over the last year you've lost 15 per cent of your trance or house fans to UK garage, then that's a problem for some people.'
He means the long-established, multi-millionaire house and trance DJs that still dominate Radio 1's prime Friday and Saturday night slots. Pete Tong, Judge Jules, Danny Rampling: they all came out of the acid house scene of the late 80s and they are unlikely to give up their top-boy positions easily. One wonders why The Dreem Teem aren't given an early night Friday slot, where they could break out of the daytime playlist and DJ as they did on Kiss or Galaxy or just be free to play their own choice of records.
It seems that 2000 could be UK garage's year. Admittedly, there are many people who can't stand the skippety drums and mucked-up vocals, but to stand in the way of a genuinely multiracial, thoroughly friendly, utterly new-sounding, exciting, innovative, fresh British music is just plain churlish. Its variations are vast, from the Jamaican connection with Oracabessa to the pop- tastic 'Flowers' girls; from the sweet nu soul vocals of Lain, who sings with Wookie, through the sample gimmick of 'I Don't Smoke Da Reefer' (taken from comedian Marcus Brigstocke, not Jim Davidson, as has been reported) all the way to the growl of MC Neat. It's the soundtrack to the suburbs, the beat of the street. It's aiming for America and it's as mainstream as we want it to be. And just how mainstream is that? Well: Posh Spice, bless her, is studio-bound for her first solo LP. Her first single, 'Out Of Your Mind', is a duet with Dane from Another Level, produced by those 'Buggin" Truesteppers. Come in, Judge Jules, your time is up.
