So early raves… If you had someone come on the mic in early rave, they’d pretty much just be saying “Get on one. Let’s get radio rental.”. That sort of thing. In ’92/’93 with the emergence of hardcore, which is a… Acid house splits into multiple sub-genres. That period is usually called hardcore, or ‘ardcore, without the H. That’s what Simon Reynolds calls it. “’Ardcore. You know the score.”. Dubber Caspar, thanks so much for your time. It’s been really, really interesting. I’ve got so many things that I want to go further, and I’m aware of the constraints of people’s patience for my enthusiasms about things, so we should probably wrap it up there. 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.

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? When I first talked to my publisher, they were like “Well, do you want to do a trade book, or do you want to do an academic book?”. And, first of all, I didn’t know what a trade book was. I thought “What? Is it about building or something?”. But when I figured out what he meant, I was very keen to do it as an academic book, and I wanted to do it like that, and I didn’t find it…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. 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. Dubber Is there any discourse about “Well, that wasn’t a London thing. That was a Manchester thing.”, the acid house? 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 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.

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. Dubber The white, middle-class, middle-age male thing aside for a moment, do you think that academia benefits from employing people like us in the sense of non-traditional academics? People who have been out in the world and experienced things that can be directly passed on to students. Dubber Yeah. Particularly in graduate and post-grad research, of “I’m now going to write a forty thousand word dissertation on what’s so great about things I like.”. But is there anything that you can look at, this body of work that you’ve examined, and go “Well, that’s not very good. That’s not right. They shouldn’t have done this.”, or “This is something I should be critical about.”, rather than just celebrating the hands across the water solidarity of it all? 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. 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.But, again, this is, for me, and I think for a lot of the people who went to this stuff… The rare groove period drove a lot of people into looking for second-hand records and rediscovering bands and the great catalogues of Roy Ayers and Donald Byrd and these characters. But, for me, from then onwards in acid and jungle, I wasn’t interested in going to buy the music. Lots of people were, and went to the specialist record stores and whatnot. I didn’t really care about that. It was just the fact that I felt once you were in the dance, you were there. It wasn’t about getting the music, listening to it at home, becoming an expert on that. It was about the experience of being in that place. And the jungle MC, one of the most common things they say is “Inside the place!”. It’s about honouring and celebrating the moment that you’re all in that place together, just before the bass really drops and everyone loses their shit. Caspar It’s been so fascinating talking to you. Thanks for your questions, Andrew. I know that you and I share a lot, and being asked those pointed questions, the ones you’ve asked me, are really at the heart of the dilemmas which come with all of this. Academia, over-celebration, nostalgia for something you didn’t like in the past, all of that. So I really appreciate your questioning. Your kind but sharp questions. 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).

Dubber So, Caspar Melville, thank you so much for joining us for the MTF Podcast today. So you are, as I mentioned, a senior lecturer at SOAS. Let’s start with that. What’s SOAS?Something like a trip-hop, I think we can happily feel that that was a great moment in music that doesn’t need to return. It did its work. It pulled together two hitherto separated things. Basically, a hip-hop sensibility with a folky, ethereal female vocal vibe. Loved it. I absolutely… Portishead. It’s classical music, as far as I’m concerned, and gave Bristol its moment. Of course, Bristol has loads of drum and bass and stuff as well. So we’ll see. There, he built an empire, setting up his label Kronik Music to release his own recordings, as well as music by Shy Cookie, Timeless, Genius Cru and more. His studio saw artists including Oxide & Neutrino pass through, while So Solid Crew recorded much of their debut album there. Garcia also took over a pirate radio station called Flight FM, and ran his It’s A London Thing club night. “Every day, we were just bashing it out, man,” he smiles. “We were going hard, and making a lot of money. It was beyond all your dreams. At 19. It was a pretty wild place. At that time not everyone was operating as business-like as they are 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. Despite the legal issues, Garcia had a hit record that was doing damage in clubs and quietly establishing its early popularity as a cult hit. MTV approached Garcia as they wanted to make a video for the record, with the now famous visuals shot at Notting Hill Carnival. With the video on heavy rotation, Garcia’s manager’s phone was ringing off the hook with bookings, and Styles was touring doing PAs. “We’re doing the news,” he laughs. “I was flying everywhere, being driven around: gigs, gigs, gigs. It was just mental for about two years.”