8 Tracks: A Baptism in Bass with Joe Muggs

Just an absolute beast. The way those subs unceremoniously hit at 30 seconds. The devil-may-care sample pile-up. The way the beat somehow sounds out of breath but furiously determined. At 16 I was a pretty rubbish raver compared to some of my schoolmates, certainly not out every weekend or anything close, but this – and everything Shut Up & Dance (for it is they) did – was everything to me. The familiar samples (De La Soul! WHITESNAKE!) gave anchor points, as did my basic understanding of rave and techno (the flipside to this, “This is the Way” was the perfect mid point between UK bass and Underground Resistance), but it was clear, too, that this was something new being born. What I didn’t realise at the time was how much the breakbeat and bass science was rooted in deep, pre-rave UK soundsystem history.

This one always makes me think of my schoolmate Tim Maughan. It would, really, as I had his copy of it for many months. Tim and I were, it’s fair to say, grebos. It was the default position for anyone not a “townie” at our little rural comprehensive. We had floppy hair shaved at the sides, alternated between army boots and Converse, and loved comics, cyberpunk, Gaye Bykers on Acid, Jesus Jones and Pop Will Eat Itself, to the point where I painstakingly painted a whole PWEI album cover on Tim’s jacket. PWEI were a gateway drug to many things, including Renegade Soundwave, who they of course namechecked in “Can U Dig It” along with The Fall, Alan Moore, Ciccone Youth and other good things. Renegade Soundwave in turn were a gateway drug too: gimlet eyed in their Cockney crime and cocaine obsessions and fearsome in their borderline industrial dub production, they, along with the likes of Tackhead, Nitzer Ebb, Front 242, Meat Beat Manifesto and co, appealed to the punky side of grebos, but took us down a rabbithole towards more entirely electronic music. Tim, impressively, is now a (really excellent) post-cyberpunk author, and the last time we met up, we almost collapsed with the hilarity of the fact that we’re still continuing the same geeky conversations about William Gibson, Detroit techno and dub some thirty years later, and have both somehow made professions of it.

It wasn’t just rave and grubby grebo imperatives that drew us in to soundystem music, though. Other, more sophisticated sounds came in, including, amazingly street soul and Acid Jazz, which for some reason our local big chain newsagent John Menzies used to get loads of 50p promos of. Gilles Peterson’s Talkin’ Loud releases were a mainstay on that shelf, as were various Soul II Soul adjacent or otherwise soulful major label acts. I had no clue what names like IG Culture and Louie Vega really meant when I picked up a record like Ronny Jordan “Get to Grips” – but it grabbed me. And likewise I didn’t really grasp who Howie B, Dobie and Diane Charlemagne were when the pink and white sleeve of “Candy Mountain” jumped out of the 50p shelf – I just liked the sample collage, breakbeat cutup and dubwise space in it – but like the Ronny Jordan, it would prove an nexus point to all the broken beat, soulful jungle and suchlike that would come, but also back into the UK rare groove and hip hop history that I’m only now, thanks to the research for Bass, Mids, Tops starting to appreciate.

I still don’t know much about this crew – except that the rapper was at school with JD Twitch from Optimo. They were an Edinburgh collective, essentially hip hop at heart but with live instruments and singing, and an unmistakeably soundsystem-influenced bottom end, one of many, many acts to get hoovered up by major labels searching for the next Soul II Soul or Massive Attack, only to be dropped after one album. (see also: Smith & Mighty, whose trajectory through this territory is detailed in Bass, Mids, Tops) Lots of Sugar Bullet’s stuff is very good, a kind of high energy proto trip hop that’s weathered very well. But this b-side from ’91 is just extraordinary. Massive Belgian rave stabs, crowd noise, proper b-boy electro, Yorkshire sonar bleeps, breaks, eyeball-wobbling bass: it’s all there, rolled out in an absolutely epic structure. Proper DJ secret weapon tackle, still hugely playable now.

This hookup tickled us – because Meat Beat Manifesto were from Swindon, 30 miles west of our little market town, and Andrew Weatherall was from Windsor, 40-odd miles to the east. Although Boys Own parties were definitiely something that kids a couple of years older than us went to, and felt Big and Sophisticated, we absolutely manilined Weatherall productions from “Loaded” onwards, and they were one of the fattest conduits for dub basslines into our lives. But MBM too made sense to us. The one real alternative culture we had locally was traveller sites, and if the crusties weren’t playing prog guitar noodle or anarcho punk, they pumped out weird, grubby industrial dub – Revolutionary Dub Warriors, Terminal Cheesecake, Radical Dance Faction – and MBM weren’t 100 miles removed from that world. We’d watched them, along with allies like The Shamen (originally a fully guitar oriented Scottish psyche band) get drawn month by month towards acid house, so when tracks like “Psyche Out” and of course the epochal “Radio Babylon” arrived in 1990, it felt like it was already kind of “our” thing… the sense of proximity making the world smaller.

Just a banger. A stone cold, straight down the line banger for the ages. And it perfectly illustrates how close everything was together then too: it’s fundamentally a breakbeat hardcore tune, but it came out on Leftfield’s Hard Hands label. A year later, everything would be splintered, but in ’92 it was still all swirling around the same pot. Along with earlier tunes like “Radio Babylon”, “We are IE”, “Rockin’ Down the House”. “Dancehall Dangerous”, it was setting the scene for jungle, and “Who’s the Badman” would end up echoing through other scenes too: 187 Lockdown’s 1998 speed garage remix is a thing of brutal brilliance, and the original got a spin just last month in Bass, Mids, Tops interviewee Barely Legal’s Essential Mix. As a lovely illustration of the themes in the book of soundystem values being passed down generation, she included it because it’s her mum’s favourite tune! And again, back in ’92, this led us back too, to deeper, older cultural touchstones: I had no idea what an Apache break was, or what a movie The Harder They Come was, but this planted seeds.

And I certainly didn’t know who or what Roy Ayers was, but here was Gerald to force him into my ears in the most psychedelic possible way, with bass, breaks and ragga all in tow. I’d followed Gerald avidly from “Voodoo Ray” and Newbuild through Automanikk and at every step he was the one person who connected Britain right into the heart of Chicago acid and Detroit techno, showing it could be done just as well over here. But with his own Juicebox label, he really started going out on a limb, taking every step of hardcore, breakbeat and jungle, and taking it that little bit further out. Not necessarily in a predictive way all the time – his sonic instincts were always too weird and too speculative to match the way the stream was flowing – but even so, in ’92 when this came out, only he, Goldie and 4 Hero were really understanding how complex and rolling jungle would be a couple of years later.

There was one other thing brewing in ’91: progressive house. And for a very short while, that had some magic. For a year or two, there were a lot of gorgeous records, on Cowboy and Guerilla, that caught the levitational illegal party sunrise moment just so. But at its best, it wasn’t washed out and wafty, it was heavyweight stuff, with understanding of roots and culture wired in. Birmingham crew Original Rockers – later Rockers’ Hifi – had this in buckets. They were tightly aligned with the city’s chillout club Oscillate, and made some of the most remarkable ambient dub of anyone in the game at the time. But they also knew how to put those soundsystem values into house music, and this remix – by Hacienda resident Jon DaSilva – in particular was shot through with the crispness, sparseness and modernity of New York, New Jersey and Chicago, but at the same time it was Caribbean-influenced British through and through. That radiated from it then, and it does now. It was a perfect connection point.