It's a London thing: How rare groove, acid house and jungle remapped the city (Music and Society)

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Caspar Personally, I don’t know if they were a band in the sense that were they people who played musical instruments and then added an electronic element to it, or were they producers? I don’t know that. Although, they did appear on Top of the Pops. I know A Guy Called Gerald was involved with them as well in the early days. And, of course, they had some big hits.

So the most famous element of the acid house sound, of course, is the wobbly 303. The Roland 303, which is a little bass emulator, was being used in a way not to, as it can, sound like a bass line being played, but to sound like a machine. This strange, wobbly sound, which DJ Pierre, who came up with this, says is an accident. He was just playing around, not knowing how to use this bit of kit which he had got second hand. Didn’t have the manual, didn’t have any training, and just found a sound which he thought sounded cool, sounded futuristic, and that squelchy, weird, [imitating sound] sound which underpinned that particular moment of acid house, laid over thumping digital beats which don’t sound like a drummer, and they’re not meant to. They sound like machines pulsing. Dubber We’ve talked a fair bit about DJs and dancers and venues and spaces and not a lot about the recording artists. Were there key recording artists in these genres? Caspar Well, that’s a great question, and I’m sure you’ve got as interesting an answer to this as I have, Andrew. But I think there’s a slight difference here. And I, as a lover or a consumer of, an enjoyer of, trip-hop and dubstep and broken beat, none of those genres… Those genres have been produced by a cadre of producers, really. A group of experimental producers who’ve got together, and it’s really great that they’ve done that, and they’ve worked on new musical ideas and developed a scene. And that scene did have an audience of a kind, but it wasn’t that tightly connected to an audience. It didn’t have a social being. It had a being which was in the studios, in those circuits of expertise, and therefore it wasn’t protected from the way in which fashions just move on. Simultaneously, it’s happening in Manchester. It’s got different components. It’s much more related to a switch amongst white youth taste from indie to dance music, which was happening at the Haçienda, was happening under the influence of ecstasy. Very, very significant, but those books have been written. Dave Haslam writes about that, and many others. So there’s a renaissance of the kinds of things that we saw in rare groove in terms of young people taking control of their own space and making the music, but suddenly they are technically brilliant musicians. Who can imagine seeing a group of nineteen-year-olds pogoing to a tuba solo? It’s not something I ever thought I’d see in a million years, and then it’s happening right now. Now, that level of player like Theon Cross have now gone to the next level. He famously did South by Southwest this year as a 3D avatar because he wasn’t able to go in person, and he’s selling out venues of eight/nine hundred people. Ezra Collective, Nubya Garcia, they’re going to become superstars.

Then you get new figures that the scene are based around, and within jungle, the key presence who hasn’t been there before is the MC. The vocalist. The chatter. And that is a practice which is derived from reggae sound system culture which is very strong within the sound system, although not all sound systems have chatters. Some of them don’t, but the ones that did, like Saxon, where a British reggae vocal style was developed in the early 1980s… But when house came along, that disappeared from the club scene. And, in fact, rare groove didn’t have that either. Rare groove didn’t use MCs because it was so much about the records. The musicians and the records from that period. There was a key thing I wanted to argue with, and this is why I included acid house in the book. I enjoyed raving, sure. Part of it was the drugs, sure. There’s only a certain amount of that you can do without losing it, and many people did lose it. But there’s lots of it I hated in terms of the music, and also I hated the way it was historicised. Because it became such the key moment in club culture for so many people, writers that I admire - people like Simon Reynolds. People like Jeremy Gilbert. Even Tim Lawrence, up to a point. These are people who’ve written really great stuff about this - seem to treat acid house as if it was something unique and something special outside of this continuum that I’ve been talking to you about, this Afro-diasporic continuum. I’ve been at SOAS for about eight years, and I came in to teach something called Creative and Cultural Industries. So this was SOAS recognising that while the ethnomusicology and the history of art were really important, there was a missing link, partly to do with media and cultural studies and partly to do with recognising that all of this is caught up within a set of industrial systems and processes. Obviously, the internet and the digitisation of culture which came in the 2010s was happening all around, and there was a sense that they wanted to recognise that. So they brought me in - it was partly under pressure, I think - to think more about careers.

Caspar No, it’s a really good point. And it’s something to always bear in mind, of course. We want to be critical thinkers. The danger when you’re writing about things you love - and I say it to my students all the time - and you call it unique and you call it earth-shattering and you make all kinds of claims for it which are not substantiated… And that is a danger. I’d say two things. One is, when it comes to writing about rare groove, for example, I was taking the first baby steps. I found one other article that mentioned rare groove in academia. So in some ways, there’s a prior step to being critical, which is just to get the information out into the world. Secondly, I think the point is that these things are in motion. And there are points at which they can be emancipatory, full of possibility, and other points where they can fail to deliver on that or be captured by all kinds of other forces.Caspar No. Or a sociologist or a… Hence these incredibly long titles for these classes and a lot of students writing in saying “That sounds really interesting. Can you explain what it actually is? What will I be? What will be on my certificate when I come out of here?”. And these are all slightly difficult to answer questions, which I think indicate a big change in the university sector but also in the job sector, which is there is no one job you’re going to go and get. Caspar I can’t imagine a better scenario for myself, and I want to advocate to other people that academia is a good place to pursue this kind of thing if you want to because… When I decided to stop being a journalist and do academia, it was because I wanted to spend the majority of my time thinking about the same set of things and learning and researching things which fascinated me. The reason I wanted to be a music journalist was because I wanted to meet and talk to people I admired who did things I was in awe of, and that remains the case now. At the moment, it’s jazz that’s running the show. But if you go to a jazz show in London, you’re going to hear broken beat, you’re going to hear dubstep influences, you’re going to hear funk, you’re going to hear ravey references, but you’re also going to hear saxophone and tuba solos. So it’s all there. It’s just put together in a slightly different format. But they found an audience. They’ve built a young audience for it, and that’s what’s going to keep it alive in a way that these other genres, as the people who love them reach middle age, just fade away a little bit. And I think we should let them fade away.

So within the jungle scene, you’ve got the re-emergence, because of reggae sound systems, of this British vocalist, this vocal style, who was there to orchestrate the dance. To interact between the producer who’s made the music, the DJ who’s playing it, the dancing crowd, in this call and response type of activity. And those figures, like MC Det and Skibadee and Shabba and the Ragga Twins, most of whom got their initial music training in sound system culture, emerged strongly in the jungle scene. When Scott Garcia's ‘A London Thing’ was released in November 1997, it shot an arrow through the heart of a generation of clubbers in the midst of falling in love with UK garage. Built around dusty, distorted, shuffling drums, a warped, dropping bassline, bouncing organ stabs and the chopped-up vocals of MC Styles — which claimed the sound as London’s own — it also gave unlikely birth to an artist that would have a long-lasting impact on what the UK garage scene sounded like over the following half-decade (and beyond).Caspar Oh, yeah. I do. I really do. And I think that’s one of the reasons why I’ve hung onto my job. We’ve gone through various painful restructurings and things like that. The simple fact is, the courses I teach - and it’s not just down to me being a brilliant teacher - are popular among students. They want that kind of information. They want that kind of advice. They want to see people who have worked outside the academy, and I think the academy could do a much better job of being more flexible and allowing people who aren’t lifetime academics into the institution. This would also mean those people who are lifetime academics being prepared to step out of that space and do other things. And there’s not as much fluidity there as I think there should be or could be because I’m very keen to break that clear distinction between what is often called the ivory tower and the real world. What academics call the real world as if they’re not part of it. So, yeah, I think it’s of huge value to the institution. Caspar Well, that’s a really good question. I don’t know. But REF, the Research Excellence Framework, which is this six yearly spasm that the universities go through where everyone has to submit work which goes to a committee, which is then adjudicated on, and then that decides how much money flows to the university - so it’s very serious - my book has just gone into that process. So I’ve no idea what people think of it at that level, and there’s something about it… It doesn’t sound like an academic book. ‘It’s a London Thing: How Rare Groove, Acid House and Jungle Remapped the City’. I’ve got references in it. I did publish it as an academic book, but it’s about things which might not be considered to be legitimate subjects, I suppose, by some people. Caspar Absolutely. And I still feel the lure of credentialising, and everyone… I feel this for UK jazz at the moment. I’m really worried about UK jazz because of the way in which people can jump on it, lay claim to it. There’s talk at the moment about “Should UK jazz acts ally with brands?”, because this is a big thing that happens in the music scape, isn’t it? And some people are saying “No. That’s selling out.”, and other people are saying “No, no. The problem is that there is no sustainable economy within UK jazz outside of the public funding it’s received. But that’s a success story for a certain kind of public funding over the last ten or fifteen years, but it’s very vulnerable. How is it going to achieve autonomy? Maybe allying with Nike or some designer is the way to go.”.