Hertfordshire massive, part 17

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).  (There was also Pressure FM in Luton). 

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"

A different twist on 'hardcore' - laced with porno moans

"You Know How To Love Me" is the stone classic but the rest is a very solid body of ruffige 

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Here's a whole interview with Jimmy Ryan of Ruff Kut! and Good 2Bad Hugly at Gone To A Rave

some key snippets: 

"I used to work in a youth centre in Stevenage called Bowes Lyon Centre. From the age of 11 up to 16 or 17 I was there literally every day. I’d gone to the director of the place and asked him if there was anything I could do, and he said, ‘yeah we’ve got a music project going’. The project was to produce an album using all the youth that go to the centre. This first album was called Ruff Kut.

"... There was a group of us who were really into hip hop from an early age. We were all DJs and MCs, we were into stuff like Public Enemy, Rob Base and EZ Rock, all the electro albums. Bowes was a youth club – if you imagine a youth club that every Friday had 500 kids from all over Herts and Beds. It was quite a melting pot of people. For example, we’d have crews from Luton, St Albans, Letchworth, Stevenage, North London, they’d all go to this club. If you ever watched Grange Hill, it was like that, but the music was current. 

"..... Just to give you an inkling of the heritage of the place, Rob Playford from Moving Shadow, and 2 Bad Mice used to go.

".... with what I gained knowledge wise [from doing the album], I went to Princes Trust to start a recording studio, I’d got a bug for the recording side of things. The youth leader at Bowes said, look I know you’re interested in starting up a studio, I’ll let you do it here until you get yourself going. I couldn’t believe it! I got the grant from Princes Trust, then I got approached by two… I’ll call them partners now. They said they were looking to invest in something, and they knew I had a recording studio, so they suggested we start a label." 

"before I’d created what I’d call my first rave track, a guy took me down to a rave club called Milwaukee’s. I walked in and was like, wait a minute, this is me! Hahaha… I’d gone, ‘everything I love about music is here, its getting played right now!’ And that was it. I knew that it was my music, what I wanna do. Literally coming home from Milwaukee’s, I went straight into the studio and produced my first rave track. I think that was You Know How to Love Me – although it gets a bit foggy in my memory…

On The Good 2 Bad and Hugly -

"It was supposed to be like Soul II Soul at the time, people would drop in and out – I was the main person, some people would drop in – for example, when we did PA’s there’d be 5 of us working keyboards and samples, scratching and DJing, and MCing, then we had about 15 dancers. It was all people who used to dance at Bowes, it was just a natural thing, we’d say, oh we’re going to do a rave next week, whose coming?"

Love Island as Outpost of the Nuum

Another series of Love Island  reaches its finale - and finally it's time to unfurl my "Love Island as Mainstream Outpost of the Hardcore Continuum" thesis. 

For starters, there is the theme tune.

An instrumental that lies somewhere between UKG and Deep Tech - it sounds a bit like if an Eski-era grime producer decided to make a house track. 

Then there's some of the musical guests on the show, who have either been pure Nuum - Craig David - or Nuum-adjacent (Katy B, Tinie Tempah). 

The guests chosen often seem to come from around that 2010-2011 moment - which must be when the typical contestant on the show would have been 9 or 10. Perhaps there's a sort of nostalgia appeal for the contestants, a flashback to watching Channel U or listening to your older brother or sister's music. Although quite a few of these artists would have been on the Top of the Pops. 

And then there is the fact that Chris & Kem, from the third season of  Love Island, revealed an ability to rap in the Talent Show episode of that 2017 season. 

This resulted in their recording a not-bad-at-all grime-ish single that incorporates Love Island-slang and which reached #15 in the charts. 

"Little Bit Leave It"  came out on Relentless, the UK garage label. Nuumtastic!

Stormzy also made a non-musical appearance in the 2017 season, with a video clip apologizing for a tweet about one of the prominent female contestants. He also gave tips to Kem & Chris about their MC-ing technique: "I can give you advice about the raps - you can't use the phones".

Certain contestants over the years have actually been performers in "urban"  bands as singers or backing dancers (e.g. Cach, from the winning couple this year). 

Well, Marcel - who's been in it twice, through being in an All Stars season - was in Blazin' Squad, a British rap group who scored a bunch of hits. They started out as a garage rap group: their debut release "Standard Flow" came with remixes from DND and Ras Kwarme and Horsepower, on the label Weighty Plates.  You can't get much more Nuum Nuum Nuummy than that. 

And how about this with rrrrrrrginal junglists Origin Unknown?

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How about that season finale then? 

They should really have bent the rules and allowed two girls to count as a couple, given that Toni and Shakira were clearly the stars of the season and theirs is the true love story here. 

Toni has the best tone and cadence since Liza Minelli.

In another era, some impresario would have spotted Shakira's incandescence and whisked her off to Elstree - or more likely, given her gumption, she'd have made her own way to Hollywood, like Cary Grant and other Brits did did. There she'd have been screen-tested and put through the studio system finishing school (what a shame though for elocution to override that delicious accent) and emerged as a star. 

If she can half-way act, it could still happen. 

More likely, in this day and age, she'll be famous for being herself, a public personality. 

With any luck, she'll drift from entertainment into politics and sort out all our problems.

Special Request (Labello pt 2 - the samplige)

Ooh Macka Brown sampling the Pirates Anthem

4 Meg Soundboy with some nifty usage of "Can't turn me away" by Sylvia Striplin

Then there's Smokey Joe with a famous vocal lick

The "Special Request" vocal licks are sampled from Shut Up and Dance's "Rest In Peace" - but where did they get them from? 

Another iteration of that vocals lick - as well as another, different "special request" -  in this Reinforced tune 

Those reggae vocal licks from Smokey Joe's "Special Request" et al recur -  alongside JVC Force "Strong Island" riffs - in DJ Double G's UKG classic "Special Request" 

Ah (bit nuum nummy this) DJ Double G turns out to be DJ Gunshot as in No U Turn, making the same shift as No U Turn becoming Turn U On, but not sticking with the label

Real name Gordon Gummer, a veteran deejay on Don FM and Flex FM

a different "special request" occurs in this track - and the "special" recurs passim

A title-becomes-artist-name homage 

More Smokey Joe

big up the Originals raving cru

A while ago Spiro alerted me to this great mix of amapiano from a few year back, this outdoor festival in London called The Originals. He pointed out that while the music didn't have any real connection to the Nuum, the peripherals - the MC-ing - were soaked in the London vibe. And it's true - there are points where the MC chants "oi oi!" just like his ancestors would at the Labrynth in '92. 

There's one at 36 mins 55 or so, where the MC asks the crowd "who's a true raver?" and then leads a call-and-response of "oggy oggy oggy, oi oi oi".

Listening again, I noticed another nuumological flicker - it occurs at 31.15 or thereabouts, the MC goes into this chant that sounds like "E come E come alive E come alive" (it might actually be "you come alive you come alive you come alive")

"E come E come alive E come alive" is a nigh-on thirty-year-old catchphrase from this Xenophobia tune "Rushing The House" that was big in '92. I associate it with Spiral Tribe, on account of the Spiral-connected MC Scallywag being on the record. But it was produced by Grant Nelson aka Wishdokta aka the G in N'n'G aka Bump & Flex aka dozens of aliases up and down the length of the nuum from ardkore to 2step.

It recurs again in the Supa D amapiano mix at about 37.15 reworded as "you come alive, I come alive, you come alive, I come alive". Just before, the MC talks about how he feeds off  the buzz from the audience and then gives it back to them. The chant "you come alive, I come alive, you come alive, I come alive" crystalizes the feedback-loop between crowd and MC+DJ beautifully.

It's noticeable also that most of the MC-ing is Jamaican flavored in slang and accent - "big up", "pon" etc. And in this next Originals set, lots of "my selector" "wanna reload?", etc 

.

Also at 37.57 or so, there's a shout-out to the four quadrants of the city - "North London, South London, West London, East London", flashing back to the opening interpellation in Gant's "Soundbwoy Burial (187 Lockdown Dancehall Mix)"

Echoes of jungle and UKG, in 2023-  a quarter-century later. And the whole thing representing yet another of those only-in-London recombinations of the Caribbean, the Black American, and now the African. 

Looking up the Originals festival online, I see the slogan: It's A London Thing.

Nuumology and Nameology

For quite a while now, my thinking about the Nuum is that it doesn't really exist anymore, at least as a generative culture-engine....  The new formations stopped coming a while back. Probably the last full-blown paradigm was Funky (although there's some who would say Deep Tech). Many factors here, but the main one would be the eroding away of the infrastructure that supported the heyday succession of sounds - pirate radio, vinyl, record shops. Nowadays music propagates itself immaterially, through internet and social media channels, and the audio is ever more wedded to the video (making it pop, in potential at least, rather than underground). 

What remains of the Nuum is: 

1/ musicians who came up through earlier phases and are still actively making music informed by that phase and/or drawing on other heyday phases.

2/ Nuum as a site of nostalgia and memorialisation (producers making jungle-replica tracks, auntological ardkore etc.... Back to 92 or Back to 2003 events.... this blog, even!) 

3/ half-life traces of Nuum rhythmic patterns or other sonic hallmarks (some argue you can detect these echoes in 2010s-onwards London street sounds like UK drill)

Having been thinking along these lines for approaching a decade now, how surprising it was to see this  sign from the window of a bus in London last month!

What struck me was how utterly Nuumy most of these names are:

Supa D, Coldsteps, Loyal Squad, Dezy B, Wigman, Spidey G.... 

These could easily be UK Garage era names from 25 years ago. 

I looked it up online and the lineup for this Notting Hill Carnival after-party appears to be largely Afrobeats. 

Which would be one place where the "road" audience went in the 2010s.... another would be drill... . 

I don't hear Nuum-traces in Afrobeats particularly, on a sonic or rhythmic level...  

Yet clearly, in terms of  "vibe", there is a continuity, a persistence....  

Assumed names of artists; track titles;  the names of clubs and raves and record labels.... On the face of it, these would seem to be peripheral elements...  yet for me they feel essential and archetypal 

I smiled with recognition, seeing that sign. 

Despite all the infrastructural shifts, the influx of new sonic influences, the sheer passage of time... something is perpetuating itself.... 

2 Tone and the Nuum (slight return)

 

An earlier post on this subject

interviews x 2 - Grime Blog Oral History + Réflexions sur le Nuum

I'm among those interviewed for this Complex UK oral history of the Grime Blogs Era, shepherded into existence by Joseph JP Patterson, and also including the voices of Chantelle Fiddy, Martin "Blackdown" Clark, and Elijah, among others. It's an interesting read, although from my perspective the original dons of grime blogging have to include figures like Heronbone, Silverdollarcircle, and Woebot. But it seems that there was a whole other circuit of grime bloggeration going on - and going on longer. 

Time for me to  pull out my creased, dog-eared with over-use jest about it's time for you to pull out your Harraps French to English Dictionary - for here I am, en Francais, chatting about le Hardcore Continuum, with Adrien Durand of Manifesto-21 magazine.  The occasion being the recent publication by Audimat of Hardcore, a collection of my writings about touts les choses nuumologiques.  

I say "en Francais" but of course I did not conduct the interview in French - never was fluent enough to do much more than order a meal in a restaurant. However I was able to more or less read and understand this colloquy with Adrien (at one point I could read En Attendant Godot and L'Ancien Regime in the original). Mind you, I have a head start in so far as c'est moi qui parle. Here is a bit from it in French followed by the Google-garbled rendering of it.  

En vous trouvant confronté à ce nouveau mouvement, en particulier dans des contextes live, étiez-vous déjà dans une démarche analytique ?

J’étais sous ecstasy la plupart du temps (rires). J’avais eu l’idée un soir de faire une review collective et j’avais donc confié à mes amis des carnets de notes. Bien sûr quand je suis rentré chez moi le matin suivant, tout ce qui avait été écrit était illisible. Mais j’observais beaucoup la foule, le moment où elle ne fait plus qu’un, formant un gigantesque organisme. La façon dont les danseur·euses s’imitent les uns les autres également. C’est de cette façon que j’ai appris à danser. J’analysais les choses même en étant en train de danser dans un état second. Je sortais le week-end et la semaine j’écoutais cette musique sur les radios pirates. A cette époque, j’écrivais Sex Revolts avec ma femme, j’écoutais Can, j’allais en rave, tout cela se connectait dans mon esprit. Alors oui, j’analysais déjà des choses, mais je n’étais pas dans une posture analytique froide !

As you confront this new movement, especially in live contexts, has it ever told you in an analytical way?

I was on ecstasy most of the time (laughs). I had the idea one evening of doing a collective review and so I sent my friends notebooks. Of course when I got home the next morning, everything that had been written was illegible. But I watched the crowd a lot, the moment when it became one, forming a gigantic organism. The way the dancers imitate each other too. This is how I learned to dance. I analyze things even while dancing in a trance. I went out on weekends and during the week I listened to this music on pirate radio stations. At that time, I was writing Sex Revolts with my wife, listening to Can, going to raves, it all connected in my mind. So yes, I was already analyzing things, but I was not in a cold analytical posture!

(This anecdote got a bit garbled in transcription - it's about being at a particular rave (more like a multi-act gig in fact) and being there to review it for Melody Maker and - as we're all coming up - the bright idea hits me that the review should be a collective review -  my crew as a single reviewing organism (had been reading Deleuze for the first time) - so it's a single notebook, the one I brought to the event to do my job with, that there and then gets passed around. But in fact hardly anything got scribbled down and what was scribbled proved later to be largely illegible, because scribbled while dancing. So the review ended up being just me plus a couple of images and observations from my friends. And of course  - so much for collectivism! - push comes to shove it's me that gets the byline and receives the paltry pittance IPC pays for a 400 word review (barely enough to cover my X-penses that night!). 

 

The Boy on Pinkpantheress's Nuumpop... and hyperpop x 2

Here's a piece by Kieran Press-Reynolds about Pinkpantheress and her delicious way with layering a pop song of her own writing and singing over a groove chassis derived from classic jungle, UKG etc anthems - and on the wider interest among Generation Z diy types in that era of '90s UK post-rave

Check out also his recent piece on hyperpop maven Quinn

And this overview of hyperpop for Omni  (yes that Omni, the sci-fi magazine - now revivied by Adidas)

Hardcore Continuum Exhibition

Catch is, you have to go to the Nuum's own Ibiza to see it

From the Cyprus Mail, Eleni Philippou reports

"A two-week exhibition comprising of a time-based performance and installation by Emiddio Vasquez is coming to Limassol’s The Island Club and will present a sonic and conceptual experience.

"Hardcore Continuum’s point of departure is a recorded factual encounter between grime music producer Skepta, his young Cypriot cellmate George and a policeman at the Ayia Napa police station. During the conversation, George is asked to say something into a snuck-in voice recorder for Skepta’s future album release, to which he replies “I don’t understand”. This recording made it into the track, Ayia Napa Skit, which was released on Skepta’s debut album, Greatest Hits, in 2006.

"In the first week of Hardcore Continuum Vasquez will speculate on George’s position and train himself on producing UK garage and grime music. Streams and references from music production and pirate radio subcultures, as well as the UK rave culture, will unravel and connect during the week. The performance will be documented on tapes and parts of it will be live-streamed from The Island Club’s Instagram account.

"In its second week, the exhibition will carry on without Vasquez’s presence, transitioning into an installation with the material and sonic leftovers from the artist’s performance. The show will conclude with an event featuring Vasquez’s DJ partner Veronica Georgiou taking place at The Island Club on Saturday, November 6.

"The title of the exhibition is borrowed from Simon Reynolds, who employs the term ‘hardcore continuum’ to delineate what he takes to be the continuous development of UK dance music genres – hardcore, jungle, UK garage and grime – in the 1990s and 2000s. UK garage, in particular, reached its apex in, and due to, the exoticised and mythologised environment of Ayia Napa, but the latter also served as a turning point in the genre’s darker and grimier developments.

"Hardcore Continuum reflects on that turning point by directing the academic term towards the history of radio in Cyprus. In the 1950s, radio transmitted by foreign political actors in Cyprus helped shape ideologies in the Middle East and North Africa, arguably leading to the Suez crisis and complexifying the island’s role in the Levant. Today, radio transmission in Cyprus is closely associated with the ongoing presence of foreign military infrastructures.

"Through a series of sonic and conceptual deconstructions of radio (featuring bat recordings, online videos, ELF radio recordings from Lady’s Mile and Troodos and field recordings from the empty alleys of Ayia Napa in the 2020 summer lockdown), the exhibition tests the notion of a historical ‘continuum’ against the continuously permeative material properties of radio – properties also expressed by the forces of capital, extractivism, and colonialism.

"Exhibition-installation by Emiddio Vasquez. October 23-November 6. The Island Club, Limassol. Opening hours: October23 – 29: 12pm–8pm, October 30 and November 1 – 5: 12pm-6pm, November 6: 12pm-9pm. Tel: 25-252010"

voodoonuum

 

A 1994 tune. If sampling is ancestor worship and citation is a procedure within "the invention of tradition", this dates the ignition point of Nuum to 1988 - which is when the very first UK house and techno tunes emerge that are not pale copies of the real thing, that have a tinge of only-in-UK about them. Only a tiny few at that point (the real flood starts in '89-90 with early bleep and SUAD breakbeat house), among them Gerald and estranged cohorts 808 State. 

rufige

sometimes think this is the greatest hardcore track of all time - dark, blissy, dubby, delirious



knew one of its sources was this excellent Sweet Exorcist album track



did not know another was this





also seems unlikely there is an EP that's better than that Rufige 4-tracker










mind you the Metalheads EP with "Terminator", "Knowledge", "Sinister" and "Kemistry" is pretty fucking stunning

the best three in a row in all of H-core? Darkrider EP, Terminator EP, Angel

the only ones close are Foul Play (Vol. 2, Finest Illusion, Vol.3) and Omni (Mystic Stepper, Renegade Snares, Vol. 4)

watch ya bass bins

sometimes i think this crazy archival (ardkival, even) culture of ours has gone a bit far, stripping the mystery a little as the frontiers of non-knowledge get pushed back further and further, everything documented and annotated and mapped -  tidied up



but then on t'other hand,  it is kinda cool that someone at The Ransom Note has dug up the story behind the voice that goes "watch ya bass bins i'm tellin ya" on Altern-8's "Infiltrate 202"

Turns out they they it sampled from a Sheffield pirate radio station - not necessarily this particular show, but this station - SRC aka Sheffield community Radio, which then became Fantasy FM - and this deejay duo, Astrix & Space



i went a-lookin' on account of this wikkid UKG tune that Cardrossmaniac2 dropped earlier this week



which doesn't as far as i can tell actually feature the vocal bit from  Chris Duckenfield  (aka Astrix - he also worked for Warp in the shop and various other functions)

just a folk memory allusion, maybe, or simply a perennially applicable warning! (you got bass bins, you better watch 'em)

the oil-slick noxious B-line on the G.O.D. tune made me think of another Sheffield connection - a later temple of bass boom - Niche



see, it's all connected...  there's these threads...  there's a word for it, it's on the tip of my tongue...






Astrix & Space i.e. Duckenfield and partner Richard Benson pop up here actually remixing "Infiltrate 202" !





other remixes, one by an illustrious name but not really lustrous






Ah Duckenfield and Benson it seems were RAC, a Warp act whose name rings a faint bell (stands for Richard And Chris)



That would qualify as late bleep maybe -  from 92

And this is arguably very late bleep  - from 1994





The sound getting a bit clean and fiddly by this point - not a great need to be keeping a watchful eye on those bass bins anymore



Yeah bleep to bassline via UKG - that would be the better line to follow

pirates RIP (so sez NYT)

A piece at the New York Times reports that London's terrestial-broadcast pirate radio stations are on the way out, killed by a/ the internet, and b/ legalisation (or at least the issuing of licenses to those prepared to go through all the bureaucratic hoops)

Well, that's a bit old-news in this parish, I'm sure, but still - cool that the Paper of Record would, er, record their having once been vital, albeit not at the actual time they were vital (although they probably get a passing mention in the jungle feature i did for them backintheday now I think about it)  

In all honesty I am surprised that there are even fifty of them still left. 

The writer Annalisa Quinn notes:

"Now that Rinse is a licensed station, the contrast with Kool, a former competitor, is stark. Kool operates out of a grim warehouse with flickering bulbs and patchy black paint, but Rinse has leather couches, its own record label, and corporate partners like Smirnoff"

The Nuum was not built on leather couches and vodka sponsorships, that's for sure! 

I tried listening to Rinse online the other month.. but found it completely dispiriting...  literally, all the energy and interest in my bodymind seemed to just drain away as I clicked through the site, checking in on this, looking in on that...   The format, or platform, or site structure, or user-interface - whatever the right word is, I'm not sure -  so so enervating. And the shows themselves: vibeless... airless.  Even Uncle Dugs doing the old vintage hardcore, playing classic anthem after classic anthem, doing his best to make it hype -  it  just seemed to be going out into the void. The nonspace of the net.  And when I put on the Mark Radford show it felt like I had become that void. 

Here's a comment on an old thread at Dissensus (an Autopsy for the Hardcore Continuum) where I get into some structural analysis of how the pirates worked and what got lost when they started to fade:

"f there was a single pulse that you could track as the life-line, the vital sign [for the flourishing of the hardcore nuum] , i'd argue that it's the vibrancy and the essential role of the pirates

there is something about real-time terrestrial broadcast to a geographically restricted audience that creates community and a sense of synchronisation - everyone within the same forward-surging temporality

as soon as it became about the internet and netradio, you are leaving behind analogue culture - you are into geographically scattered audiences whose identity is primarily through identification with genre (whereas with jungle, UKG, grime et al - the identity came from the genre-identification but also a host of social and racial factors). 

you are also into desynchronisation - the ability to listen to shows when you feel like, when it's convenient, as podcasts or archived shows

this is just my experience, but living in NYC and then in LA i could never bring myself to listen to netradio of nuum-type music - it just felt wrong - i was listening too far away from the source, and at the wrong time of day

i think hardcore continuum is fundamentally an analogue-era culture - you can see that with the way it stuck with vinyl and with the dubplate long after other kinds of music had abandoned those for digital modes (there were still really shitty-sounding bassline 12 inches you could buy in 2008 - a phenomenon of persistence completely different from the vinyl revival going on elsewhere, which was the musical equivalent of artisanal cheese - almost literally, given that you could buy 40 dollar vinyl albums in Whole Foods here)

also feel like the broadcast nature of pirates contributed to a certain (delusional?) grandiosity - the DJs and MCs could actually say and feel, "this one goes out to the London massive" or whatever - the music is addressed to a whole city and its population (in potential, at least) - a lot more people were aware of the pirates than actually liked them (indeed they found them a nuisance)

in that sense it was a public culture

internet is narrowcast


Bonus bit - a piece by Ben Murphy for Red Bull on the best pirate radio documentaries on YouTube etc

nuum nuum nuum - the Matos pirate radio deejay set selection 1989 - 2008

almost every set mentioned in Michaelangelo Matos's Wire Primer on pirate tape recordings from April 2018 issue - UPDATE - MISSING MIXES NOW PROVIDED BY MATOS!!!!

https://www.thepiratearchive.net/kiss-ldn/

Danny Rampling, Kiss FM, London (December 25, 1988)—labeled simply as 1988 (39 min.)

https://www.mixcloud.com/Radionecks/pressure-fm-1004-london-dj-target-mcs-wiley-riko-buckie-1st-february-1998/

  

https://www.mixcloud.com/Radionecks/mission-fm-906-london-the-heartless-crew-may-1998-side-b/

Heartless Crew, Mission FM 90.6, London, part two (May 1988)

Rave FM Nottingham

Michaelangelo Matos alerts me to the fact that The Pirate Archive have recently uploaded a heap of vintage 91-92 sets from Rave FM,  the Nottingham pirate station. And furthermore Matos has helpfully sifted out the killer six sets out of the 20 available

DJ Senator & DJ Sy (1991; 89 min)

DJ Senator, Nov 1991 (37 min)

DJ Mayhem, Dec 1991 (42 min) 

DJ Mayhem, 1992 (46 min) 

DJ Rich’s February 1992 (93 min)

DJ Mayhem, May 1992 (95 min)

a banging selection

lots of tunes unfamiliar to me

particularly enjoyed the long Mayhem and DJ Rich sets of early '92

and in all of the sets, but especially those two, there's a distinct techno-y feel

which accords with the general principle that the further North you went, the less breakbeaty and the more 4/4 was the hardcore

frinstance, what a surprise to hear "Nightflight (Nonstop to Kaos)" by The Mover towards the end of that long Mayhem set - not something you'd have heard on a London pirate at that time I don't think


Oh yes forgot that Matos also recommendeds this Pirate Archive set for nutty MC chat -

MC Sharkey & DJ Wizard, Sense FM, 104.3, Woking, UK, https://www.thepiratearchive.net/south-misc/

playin' Footsie

Man like Kristian of Braindead Entertainment gets in touch about these CD compilations of early grimestrumentals made by Footsie of the Newham Generals - mostly tracks that were played on pirate radio but never released. The retrospectives are entitled King Original Vol 1 (came out last year, covers 2004-2006) and King Original Vol 2 (just out now) and they are both really excellent.

You can buy Vol 1 here http://braindeadentuk.bigcartel.com/product/footsie-king-original-vol-1-cd
and Vol 2 here http://braindeadentuk.bigcartel.com/product/footsie-king-original-vol-2-cd-preorder


Now Man Like Kristian says this music is actually heard at its utmost in the mix, and directed me to these mixes. The first, by Spooky, works with Vol 1, and was done for his Deja FM show. The second, by DJ Tempo, works with Vol 2 + some new Footsie beats, and was done for Big Dada





King Original, incidentally,  was the name of Footsie's father's reggae soundsystem, which prompted in me the thought that, for all the flak I got / get over the Nuum, it really is not just a genreological continuity but in quite a few cases, a genealogical lineage. Father to son, uncle to nephew... many crews that contain brothers or cousins.  Mostly male-to-male: a fratriarchy, yes. But not always. One good counter-example I came across was Mz Bratt, the female MC whose dad was MC Scallywag (as in Spiral Tribe, as in the voice on that 1992 harcore tune by Grant Nelson under the name Xenophobia, "Rush in the House")

Here's a Youtube interview Footsie talks about his dad's influence on him.