Everyone knows about Moving Shadow coming from Stevenage
But I hadn't realized that Ruff Kut! Records was from there
As in The Good 2Bad & Hugly
Variously spelled - sometimes there's a comma, sometimes it'se "The Good", sometimes it's Hugly and sometimes the Hugly, and sometimes there's an ampersand and sometimes nothing at all
Like The Criminal Minds, the ruff-cut origins are in Britrap
Those are all from Ruff Kut!'s debut release from 1991, which wasn't a single but an album - a sort of scene sampler, mixing MC tracks, street soul, fast breakbeat instrumentals that aren't quite jungle yet, and some bleepy acid-y tunes
On Discogs it says the LP came out of a youth project - "thanks to Prince of Wales Trust"!
Now I think about it - actually I did know Ruff Kut! was from Stevenage. Because that's the label that put out Gappa G and Hyper Hypa's "The Information Centre" - and I discovered not so long ago that GG and HH played on a Hertfordshire pirate, Perception FM, whose existence I couldn't have imagined back in the day (on visits to my hometown to see the family, it would never occurred to me turn on the radio). But then again Stevenage was an London overflow town, like Hemel and Hatfield - and in that sense a kind of outpost of nuum demographics. In fact it was the U.K.'s very first New Town - albeit having existed in much smaller form for centuries before it.
However I hadn't realized that Good 2 Bad Hugly was the main driving force behind the label
At a certain point Good 2Bad Hugly reactivated and has been churning out nu-jungle releases including New Town Sound Boy, Vol. 1.
That record features the track "Never Give In"
https://good2badandhugly.bandcamp.com/track/never-give-in
on which the man behind the alias - Jimmy Ryan - muses on what jungle meant to him back in the day...
Also powerful is "Brush Dem Off"
Never give in, never give up, indeed - still hurling out EPs, with New Town Sound Boy, Vol 3 out just this January
There's also been a bunch of reissues, including Ruff Kut Reissue, Vol. 3, whose cover shows a famous pair of modernist landmarks in Stevenage - the Joyride statue and Clock Tower in the town centre.
There's some similar but not quite as impressive statues in the New Hemel bit of Hemel Hempstead as it happens
Previous posts on the Hertscore Continuum
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Back in the day
G2BH did a track called "Wuthering Heights', sampling you-guessed-it the twittertastic vocals of Home Counties girl Katy B
Well in recent years G2BH went back to the Bush source for "Running Up The Road"
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