“Is this dubstep?”
There once was a time when approximately 23% of all YouTube comments were a variation of this question. Dubstep has nearly always been disputed territory, with its early principles soon obscured by its brasher descendants as it became the UK’s most influential dance export this century. But it’s also one of those rare genres that can be clearly traced back to a specific handful of people – some of them barely old enough to get into a club at the time – working between a few small rooms in one city.
That origin story is told definitively in a great new book called Aftershock: The Seismic Impact of Dubstep. Based on hundreds of hours of interviews by journalist Lauren Martin, the book started life in 2015 as a long oral history published on Vice – which until now was probably the most informative piece on dubstep in existence. A decade later she’s returned with a massively expanded version of that oral history, with input from the original squad (including Benny Ill, Skream, Hatcha, Loefah, Mala, Coki, Youngsta, Plastician, Sgt Pokes, Shackleton, Pinch, Joker and Rusko) along with stacks of flyers, ephemera and unseen photos (many provided by Orson, dubstep’s ambassador in Germany).
It was a blast going through the archives and listening to some of the best music ever made in preparation for our conversation with Lauren. We talked about Croydon in the early 2000s, the school-age crew that formed around Big Apple Records, the closed loop of creativity that allowed the nascent genre to develop in peace, the particular magic of FWD>> at Plastic People, the impact of Radio 1’s Dubstep Warz broadcast, and the competing explanations for dubstep’s demise in the 2010s, among many things.
Not all oral histories dig as deep as this one. As well as the funny stories and subtle character studies, there’s a narrative at work, with thoughtful framing from the likes of Martin Clark, Kode9 and Ammunition’s Neil Jolliffe, all brought together by Lauren’s invisible hand as interviewer and editor. This has got to be the definitive account of the genre – and just in time for the current ‘sexy dubstep’ revival.
Scroll down for the edited transcript!
Lauren will be launching the book next week with Q&As and DJ sets in the following spots:
28th July at Rubadub in Glasgow, with tunes from All Caps’ Ryan Martin
30th July at Phonica Records in central London, with a set from Kode9
31st July at Strange Brew in Bristol, with records for sale and DJs Chris Farrell and Kahn.
Before the episode’s big drop into dubstep, Tom and Chal compare notes on a very ‘Merican month in the stunned afterglow of the World Cup half-time show, UFC on the White House lawn, a pretty decent Madonna album and Tom’s trip to the sunshine state.
Thanks to everyone who came down to 180 Studios for our listening session with Shy One and Alex Nut! That video and tracklist will be out soon, and we’ll be announcing more vinyl enjoyment at the end of summer.
We always have fun making No Tags and we do it for the love of the game. But you can support the podcast in material ways by buying our latest book or subscribing to our paid tier for £5 per month.
CR: I am genuinely in love with this book. I have had the best couple of weeks just listening to some of the best music of all time. So as a Scottish person who wasn’t there at the time writing about dubstep: why you? Why now? Why this book?
Lauren Martin: I’m so glad it’s inspired you to listen to the music, because if there’s one thing I’d want the book to do, it’s that – to encourage listening to it with the sincerity that it deserves. Dubstep was very foundational for me. I grew up in Glasgow, which has a well-earned reputation as a city of electronic music, both local and imported. Rubadub in Glasgow was fantastic. It was the first record shop in the UK to stock Underground Resistance records directly from Submerge [in Detroit]. It’s always had that real love of experimental electronic music. But also, when I was a teenager in 2005 when dubstep was really breaking through, I felt that it was special.
When you’re discovering clubland in Glasgow, the palette is house and techno music. I always felt that, as much as it was this astonishingly good, powerful music, it wasn’t mine. It was for the older people in the rave, or the people that bought it at Rubadub. That was the sound they came of age with. I was drawn to dubstep because it was emerging at the same time I was truly discovering clubbing. I could experience it in real time, not as a nostalgic thing or something I had to catch up with. I think the closeness to it and my genuine affection for it is a big motivation for writing Aftershock, because I’m not trying to just fill a gap in a market. I actually really care about it.
As for not going to FWD>>, or not going to DMZ, or not being from London – you don’t necessarily have to be in the contemporary trenches of something in order to report on it, as long as you’re doing it with adequate care and curiosity. Having some physical and social distance from it allows you to approach it with a perspective that allows for better questions – questions that people might not expect, because maybe you’re not operating on the same assumptions and observations as the artists and players you’re interviewing. I think it may have oddly worked to my benefit.
TL: Was it always your plan for the book to be purely interview-based?
LM: Yes. I did want it to be an oral history because I really enjoyed the process of doing the original Vice feature. I speak about two inspirations in the introduction. One is Brian Belle-Fortune. He did this amazing oral history about the jungle scene in the late ‘90s, published in 1999, called All Crews. It’s sadly out of print, which is frustrating because it goes for hundreds of pounds on eBay right now. It really stands out because people are speaking in the colloquialisms, the slang, even the patois of how they actually spoke. It felt like they were all chatting to each other on the page.
That’s something I tried to do, I wanted it to feel like you’ve just walked into a pub and all the key players are sitting around a table having drinks and talking about their lives together. I didn’t want to inject myself into it, to come at anything with preconceptions but to ask open-ended questions so they gave me sincere answers. I wanted to bring together their stories. They might not all realise how they were perceived by others in the scene, or how they feel about each other, until it’s on the page. I’d like to think it brought unappreciated relationships to the fore. People could make connections they didn’t previously spot because I’m not putting an agenda on it. I’m literally just putting their words on the page.
TL: You specifically thank Gordon Stewart of Electric Eliminators and Mungo’s Hi Fi for bringing dubstep to Glasgow. How important were those parties as your introduction to the genre?
LM: Yes, they were. There was a running joke: ‘Were you at Electric Eliminators? No, you weren’t, because no one was at Electric Eliminators’. It was a semi-regular party in Glasgow, like our version of FWD>>, in that if you got 50 people in it was a banger. But I have to shout out Gordon Stewart and Mungo’s Hi Fi. For context, Mungo’s Hi Fi sound system is a serious, hand-built dub sound system named after the patron saint of Glasgow. Those guys are absolute legends. They hosted a lot of dubstep parties in the 2000s at the Art School, RIP. This ties into a strand in the book where there is a gentle dividing line between orthodox dub sound systems that didn’t respect dance music and the systems that did, playing dub-adjacent styles to broaden the scope of the dances they were hosting. Mungo’s Hi Fi definitely did that. They played dubstep as well as dub reggae.
The music press covers DJs and producers 95% of the time. When I wrote Aftershock, I really wanted a fair focus on the other players that build the infrastructure around a genre – people like Neil Jolliffe [Ammunition, FWD>>, Tempa], Sarah Lockhart [Ammunition, FWD>>, Rinse FM], Deapoh of [early download site] Barefiles and Ivan ‘Dubway’ of Dubstepforum. These are people who spend years of their lives devoted to growing a scene and often never get credit for it. I wanted to shout out Gordon and Mungo’s Hi Fi in that same spirit, because I would not have got to experience the sound in real time if it wasn’t for them basically burning money they probably didn’t have. I literally would not have written this book if I did not get to hear dubstep in 2006 on that system.
CR: We like to hear about these people on No Tags. So having spoken to a whole group of people who grew up in Croydon in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, what were your impressions of Croydon at that time?
LM: My impressions of Croydon in that period are, of course, secondhand. Rather than talking about the place as geography, there’s more of a mood or attitude that comes across in the characters. I feel a slight affinity with the Croydon crew because I recognise a lot of their characteristics from Glaswegians. Just like with Glasgow, it’s important to be funny and really street-smart. You can get quite far with a cheeky smile and a glint in your eye. Or if you have a slight air of menace to you, you can also get far. The way they describe Croydon at the time is that there were a lot of people there who loved music and were making music, but there wasn’t the infrastructure for it that they wanted to see. Loefah and Mala talk about this in the early section: Loefah says there was a lot of nightlife, but not the nightlife they necessarily wanted. There was a lot of street violence and the hangover of football hooliganism and the ‘beer boys’ of the ‘80s. It was more about going out to find girls than it was to listen to really experimental music.
Naturally, they had to leave Croydon to go to parties. They went all the way east to FWD>> and obviously later for DMZ they went to Brixton. Extrapolating that lack of infrastructure, or the boredom of an area, feeling disaffected, is something that comes across. The interviews show that you actually need quite a lot of room and boredom in order to be truly imaginative. They might not have seen that at the time, but being disaffected with where they were from afforded them the opportunity to sit indoors, build beats and connect about their ideas. If they’d lived in a slightly more vibey area, they might not have taken the time to do that. Being out of the public eye is often a good condition for the creation of significant art.
TL: Space is just so important. Actual, physical spaces, such as Big Apple Records, which is the central hub of that Croydon micro-scene, but also just the mental space of having the time to be bored and work on your craft. Big Apple was such an integral hub. Who was there? Who were these kids creating a scene all by themselves?
LM: The first person I want to shout out is John Kennedy. He was the co-owner of Big Apple Records in Croydon and ran it the whole time. Dubstep basically came right at the very end of Big Apple’s life as a record shop. It was open from the mid ‘90s and closed in late 2004. It was the incubator for the very start of dubstep and then closed very soon after. Tracks like Skream and Benga’s first track, ‘The Judgement’, came out in ‘03 on Big Apple, so it was really more of a launchpad than a long-term home.
One cannot underestimate the role of physical infrastructure. Record shops, vinyl cutting houses, pirate radio stations and nightclubs. I try hard to break that down in Aftershock. Part of telling the story of Big Apple is that I want a 19 or 20-year-old who largely consumes dance music through their phone to discover that it actually used to work quite differently, even if much of that physical infrastructure is not particularly relevant to them personally as a music fan or producer. At least the history is put down accurately. In terms of the vibe of Big Apple, it was kind of like a crèche in some respects.
TL: Yeah, they’re so young it’s mind-boggling.
CR: How old is Hatcha when he first goes in? 10 years old?
LM: On Hatcha’s 10th birthday he gets decks as a gift. I guess there was no Nintendo Switch at the time. He actually meets John Kennedy when he’s around 10, because John owned another spot in Croydon that sold records. Hatcha was buying records before he was in secondary school. He said he walked past Big Apple and saw a shop called Big Apple with a banana peel logo and thought, ‘That doesn’t make any sense. I love it.’
It was very much a cross-generational scene. Kids like Hatcha, Benga and Skream were bunking off school, hanging around the record shop long enough that John Kennedy goes, ‘Well, if you’re just going to stand around here all day, you might as well put records away, or help me sell them.’ Hatcha really gets his start DJing because he was working in Big Apple but was a bit of a spare part. Artwork and Hatcha admit that Hatcha was absolutely brilliant, but lazy. He didn’t want to work, but he was brilliant as a DJ.
John Kennedy would make him stand behind the shop counter and DJ all the new records coming in. Kids would walk up to the counter with a fiver and just buy the record straight off the deck [as he was playing it]. That was the energy of the shop. It was basically like an afternoon rave for local kids who wanted the hot new stuff. It was their youth club as well as a place for older heads buying records to play out.
TL: There’s this amazing symbiotic relationship that develops with Hatcha, Skream and Benga, where Hatcha is almost their on-the-go A&R and sounding board in exchange for early access to their music.
LM: Skream, Benga, and Hatcha are not that far apart in age. When I first approached the book, I naturally assumed Hatcha was a good bit older than Skream. Then when I interviewed Hatcha, he was like, ‘Oh yeah, I was 17 or 18 when I was working in Big Apple and Skream was coming in when he was 15.’ They were barely apart in age. Hatcha had started DJing really young in a garage crew called Stone Cold. They were all from the same estate in Croydon and they were playing commercial garage on the circuit.
Hatcha got really good, really fast, and had a steady thing going within the garage scene. There was no financial or social reason for him to abandon that, but he was very interested in the B-sides of garage. He smokes a lot, so he wanted to listen to that kind of vibe. Going back to that twinkle in the eye of the Croydon crew, he obviously saw and heard something in Skream. He’d give him a Wookie or an El-B record and say, ‘Go home and listen to this a hundred times and come back with something that sounds like your version of it.’
It kicked off an arms race that Hatcha and Skream talk about at length. It was very mutually beneficial for the DJs and producers to form these kinds of close relationships. The DJs got exclusive material that no-one else had, and the kids producing could have their beats played out. There’s a good line in one of the chapters where Skream would give Hatcha beats and then stay up to listen to him play on Upfront FM. If he didn’t play Skream’s beats, he would come into Big Apple and be pissed off, like, ‘You didn’t play my stuff last night!’ It was this boyish competition to be better in all aspects.
TL: The other prominent youth crew in this era is Mala, Loefah, Coki and Sgt Pokes, who would form DMZ. I would just like to have a moment for Mala, who seems to be the single coolest teenager to ever live. That picture in the book of him in the bedroom with the bleach-blonde hair?! He was a garage MC, he was a teenage model, he was on Millwall’s books as a footballer… Talk us through what’s going on over on the DMZ side and how they eventually enter this ecosystem.
LM: I feel like it’s taken for granted now because he is a scene elder, but Mala carries himself in such a way that he has a very reassuring aura. He has this raw charisma that you just can’t teach. He has a sense of self and an ability to connect with crowds that is actually quite rare. There’s only a few people in any given music scene that have that gravitas. He just naturally has it.
The genesis of DMZ is that they’re all junglists, basically. Hatcha, Skream and Benga are coming at dubstep from a garage angle. Mala, Loefah, Pokes and Coki are all coming from jungle. Most of them wanted to either reconfigure what jungle sounded like because they didn’t like the direction of drum and bass around the beginning of the millennium, or they started out as MCs. I knew Mala and Coki were an MC duo at raves like Twice as Nice, but I did not know the extent to which Mala was an MC, which he talks about in the book.
Really, the DMZ genesis comes from Mala saying that jungle is his musical father, and his interest in sound system culture comes from that, rather than strictly dub. As he developed his understanding through jungle and then dubstep, he formed a closer bond with dub sound system culture proper. You can hear that in what DMZ does very overtly and in how they programmed the DMZ dances. It has this anti-violent, peaceful ethos. [When they first started clubbing] people were getting stabbed, smoking crack, and fighting in clubs over things that had nothing to do with the music. They wanted to strip that out and move in a more dub sound system direction.
Mala speaks beautifully about how he would go to Jah Shaka dances and watch the bassline physically move through the crowd. He wanted to have that same feeling in a DMZ dance. The dance is not a detachment from reality, it’s not ignoring life outside, but allowing you to actually live. You can be peaceful in the dance and take that peace out into the world with you. That really comes from him and how he grew up.
CR: He is the philosopher-king of the book. It’s easy to look back and think about a hardcore continuum as naturally moving forwards, but in Aftershock you can see that these are artists trying to get somewhere, or escape something else. It’s striking how many voices, especially the older ones, say they gave up on jungle and drum and bass circa 2000. They had to let it go. In those early years, you could say this is the purist moment, there’s a sense that they were actively trying to make something new. What is your perception of this? What are they competing to achieve?
LM: What really motivated them? A few things. Dissatisfaction with the contemporary state of jungle and drum and bass, and being fed up with extreme drug use and violence. That was the DMZ point. Also, the commercialisation of garage – the surface-level focus, the materialism, and less interesting music once it hit the pop charts.
One thing that brought them together was using dub as a production methodology. Using dub as a way to manipulate sound through reverb and layering. Using silence and sparseness as an instrument and part of the sonic impact. Mala described the DMZ sound as a three-chord melody, it’s ‘just the bones’. They use language like that. They were tapping into a sound system culture that jungle and commercial garage were getting away from.
Something I didn’t appreciate until I was rereading the book was that it was also the creation of a genre that was, for the most part, devoid of overtly capitalistic or individualistic aims. People talk about sharing music in ways that basically did not benefit them financially at all. I wanted to put this across because so much of contemporary platform capitalism affects how somebody starts out today. If you’re starting out now you think: ‘What’s my bottom line? How do I promote my brand? How do I frame it on socials?’ They didn’t have to bother with any of that and could just enjoy the pure creation and having everybody in the room.
Going back to the sound system thing, something specific to dubstep and Black British innovative music is that it was Black and white kids mixing together in working-class neighbourhoods. It was white kids who grew up at Notting Hill Carnival, at raves and around sound systems. Black and white kids in Croydon or Romford have much more in common with each other than they do with white kids in Richmond. I wanted to put that multiculturalism across.
CR: We haven’t mentioned Youngsta yet, but his relationship with Loefah was similar to Hatcha’s relationship with Skream, in that Youngsta was approving Loefah tunes to be cut on dubplate. There’s this amazing quote that’s weirdly chilling where Youngsta says, after they’d developed their sound: ‘The garage had been purged and Hatcha and I were the gatekeepers.’ It’s a pure reputational win. Have I made loads of money? Not necessarily. Do a lot of people know? Possibly not. But it’s this aesthetic win. This idea of getting rid of the garage is interesting, I’d never thought of that as a micro-challenge.
LM: Youngsta was one of my favorite interviews. Everybody was so incredibly generous with their storytelling though. I have to say, the memories of some lifelong stoners... I don’t even remember what I had for breakfast, but they were painting vivid pictures of their lives 20 or 25 years ago. Some of it genuinely moved me.
On the garage thing, the purging and gatekeeper aspect is interesting. They both talk about being fed up with the state of garage. Loefah is the one who says we had a decade of loud breaks, busy music, and un-dynamic, over-compressed tracks – everything but the kitchen sink. They didn’t like where it was going. Garage was getting too commercial and a bit tacky. It was for the footballers to go out to the rave, it wasn’t interesting and dark anymore.
[On Youngsta deciding which Loefah tunes would be cut on dubplate] This appeals to me as a writer and editor. Every single time I have edited a piece, it has improved. Nothing I’ve written on its own has ever gone straight out unedited and that’s a good thing.
CR: As someone who’s been edited by you, I approve of this message.
LM: I feel like they are purging and editing what they do not like. They are physically editing the surface noise and the nonsense out of the music until it reaches a state where they connect with it again. They strip these genres for parts until they can hold the parts and go, ‘This is good enough on its own.’ That’s what Youngsta and Loefah were doing. Some of the stuff they made was very odd and spooky. They speak at length about how people were turned off by what they were doing for the first year or so. People said you couldn’t dance to it, that it was taking it way too far. Purging is a great way to think about music. Mala talks about this too. You can add to culture by subtracting the things you don’t like in order to reveal the things you do.
CR: I’ve heard Jeff Mills talk about DJing in that way as well, that it’s all about subtraction. In fact, Hatcha mentions in the book that Jeff Mills on four decks was a huge influence, which you wouldn’t necessarily expect.
I want to get to FWD>>, particularly its Plastic People heyday. Everyone who listens to this podcast has heard about Plastic People – its reputation precedes it. But it can be hard to pinpoint why FWD>> at Plastic People was special if you weren’t there. This book brings out that it wasn’t just a fantastic room with a system where you could smoke – it’s also that there were really only about four rooms where this music was happening. They’d built a closed loop. Could you tell us a bit more about this system and if there’s anything new you learned about this era?
LM: I only went to Plastic People in its final days. I didn’t move to London until 2013, and it was after they had changed the configuration of the room, so I didn’t get to see it in its original configuration. It just didn’t feel like what had been promised when I went. I arrived at the tailend of its influence.
I tried my best not to approach this with fawning anecdotes, because everyone knows them already. I wanted to find out what I personally did not know. This is where the oral history and my nosiness play to my advantage. If I know a few surface-level facts, I fold them into my questioning. I would say, ‘I know you could smoke and the system was great, I know there were only 50 people there, but tell me something you loved that I wouldn’t know.’ I tried to tease those things out. Martin Clark spoke beautifully about how FWD>> was incredibly varied sonically, because it started in July, 2001 – it ran for four full years before the first DMZ. People think of dubstep as synonymous with the DMZ half-step dread sound, but there was a four-year incubation period where it was anything but that. It was breaks, bass, jungle, broken beat and dark garage – and the early flavours of grime, which crosses over a lot in the book and at FWD>>. There’s a whole chapter in the book about that.
What struck me most was the bartering system with tracks. DJs and producers would come down to stand on the dance floor and hand out burned CDs of their tracks. They would trade beats. Then, if they liked the beats on their CD player at home, they’d call and say which ones they wanted. And if a DJ liked a track enough to play it in their next set, they would pay to have it cut onto a dubplate. That system of bartering was unique to FWD>>. It was quite literally the marketplace of ideas. Sorry, Mark Fisher.
TL: The marketplace of IDs.
LM: In tandem with that, Hatcha was absolutely critical to the power of FWD>> in those early days. Even though he was only one of many resident DJs, he really accelerated the arms race of playing dubplates. At other garage parties before FWD>>, people were playing specials or VIP versions, or test pressings of future tracks due for commercial release. But Hatcha said, ‘Not only am I only going to play music that I exclusively have, I’m going to do it in such a way that makes it gauche to play a test pressing.’ What do you mean this is going to be a record that other people can get? He only played stuff that he owned and nobody else could have.
This created a competitiveness where you had to work closely with producers to hone a sound. The DJs functioned as the A&R, the engineer and almost as an executive producer. Youngsta and Loefah had this and Skream had this with both of them. Skream could give his harder, grimier stuff to Youngsta and his dubbier, swung stuff to Hatcha. Exclusivity was a big thing.
Beyond that, the darkness of the room, the iconic red light and the weed smoke absolutely contributed to the atmosphere. The atmosphere engendered a way for the crowd to respond in the darkness to new music, which in turn decided what tunes got released. Producers talk about how they would play a track and, depending on how it went off in that dark room, that dictated whether to keep it on dubplate or if it was good enough to put out as a final release. The room itself was an A&R. That’s the closed loop you’re talking about.
TL: Going back to your point about people making decisions that aren’t to do with finances, there’s also a peer accountability thing going. When you’re playing to between ten and 40 of your peers in a room, combined with a natural boyish competitiveness, the external influences are just expunged. I always thought that was cool. We need to talk about Neil Jolliffe and Sarah Lockhart, who were instrumental in expanding the sound’s presence on radio, promoting it to the press, forming a distribution network and obviously running FWD>>. How different do you think the story would be without the infrastructure they provided?
LM: The genre would not exist. I don’t say that lightly. There’s a good quote from El-B in the book where he says if Mary Anne Hobbs had not put them on Radio 1 and if Sarah Lockhart had not devoted a decade to building an infrastructure, they [would have been] just a bunch of stoner boys making beats. Without Sarah, none of it would have happened.
I write about music, but I’ve never made it and I don’t DJ. I’ve never tried to be an artist myself, so I feel an affinity with people who devote themselves to music but don’t feel the need to step into that artist space. They are happy to work in a supporting and innovative role. Loefah and Youngsta can build beats in a room, but who’s going to run the party and the distribution network? Who’s going to get the DAT tape from a producer in Sheffield to the DJ in London? It’s going to be someone like Sarah Lockhart. They’re absolutely critical. I wanted them to have the same space on the page as the artists because the conditions in which they came up were extremely niche. Not having them would have been a massive disservice.
TL: I’m presuming you tried to get Sarah for the book.
LM: Yes, she is incredible. We spoke privately a few times, but she just does not do interviews.
TL: Yeah, she seems to have no interest in them. There’s only like three interviews with her online, it’s bonkers.
LM: Sarah Lockhart is Youngsta’s older sister. She’s single-handedly responsible in many respects for Youngsta’s career, which he talks about affectionately. He even says, ‘I don’t know why she didn’t become a DJ because she was my selector when I was on pirate radio.’ When he was 13, she got him all the records he played and connected him with people. She’s just a behind-the-scenes person, she’s always been like that. When I interviewed him, he half-jokingly said, ‘Dubstep is the Lockhart family business. I’m the artist and Sarah runs it.’ The benefit of the oral history format is that she’s not left out of the story. The way other people talk about her in such detail and with such respect really comes across on the page. Even if she was not interviewed herself, her story is told fairly.
CR: You mentioned Mary Anne Hobbs. The Dubstep Warz show on Radio 1 was in January 2006. That is clearly a pivotal point. I wonder how much that show seemed pivotal at the time? In hindsight, we can see how influential it was in spreading dubstep way beyond its limited environs. Did you get an impression of how the artists and DJs felt about that show and how it affected them at the time?
LM: I really like your point about whether something was important at the time or only in hindsight. I try to keep that at the front of my mind. I didn’t want to come with preconceptions. You have to rethink your assumptions of what makes a radio event important from a listener’s or writer’s perspective, versus what actually matters to the artists. Having said that, the Dubstep Warz broadcast was extremely important in real time. Up until this point, you could only listen to dubstep in a few rooms in London, maybe two rooms in Bristol at a push, and on pirate radio: Rinse FM, Sub FM, and others. Rinse FM was the big one that dominated.
CR: And for very niche online people who were early, you could have downloaded a set elsewhere in the world, but that would require already being tapped in.
LM: Exactly. The 2006 period is the chapter I titled ‘Seismic Impact’ because that year things just absolutely blew apart. The Dubstep Warz broadcast was important because of the liveness. It went out from 1 til 3AM in the UK. Only fans of Mary Anne Hobbs or The Breezeblock were up listening that late in the UK, but with time zones, it went out live in the US in the evening. It was the first time a lot of Americans heard it. Unlike pirate radio, which was broadcast and then went into the ether, Dubstep Warz was ripped from the BBC and put on early platforms like YouTube, which had only just launched. The broadcast was readily available immediately after the fact.
On something like Dubstepforum, you could share the link and upload it again and again. It spread like wildfire. Even people like Pinch talk about how they were throwing parties in 2004 and 2005, and 100 people was a great success. Then in 2006, one party was so busy that there were 500 people and mounted police were trying to control the crowd. He said it was no coincidence that it was a couple of months after the Dubstep Warz show.
CR: It’d be worth taking a brief detour to Bristol, a city that took dubstep to its heart and then quickly changed it, putting new energy back in. What are the key elements Bristol added to the pot?
LM: I have a fond memory of going to a Pinch night at the Black Swan. We were handed a tiny neon yellow flyer that functioned as a warning because the sound system was going to be so powerful. It was effectively a waiver. They had notes about how the sound system was measured in decibels and hertz, saying, ‘We will go below a frequency that is typically felt comfortably by the human ear. If you start to feel physically unwell or your eyesight gets blurry, we recommend you leave and take a break.’
CR: And you’re like, ‘I love this city.’
LM: I don’t think I left that room once, even while literally hallucinating from it. Bristol takes dubstep systems very seriously. They had an affinity with the DMZ end of things, that impactfulness in the dance. Bristol also has people that spoke well about the scene, particularly Appleblim. I didn’t appreciate how much he was across dubstep until I interviewed him for this book. He brought up massive sonic variation, a core drum and bass influence and a great sense of humour – people weren’t too stush to dance [in Bristol]. People were really giving it big licks in the club, which impacts the tracks selected. There was also a lot of experimentalism beyond the half-step that was dominating in the mid-2000s. They didn’t feel beholden to an emerging orthodoxy. Bristol’s so crusty, too. There was a real free party energy to it. It was not a cool London thing, it was a crusty raver thing, which brings a different energy.
CR: Shackleton and Appleblim are a total breath of fresh air in the book. They just come in sideways with a different set of moods and references, like Throbbing Gristle and punk and squatting. It overturns some of the purism and injects new ideas.
TL: And new energy as well, because they’re so uninterested in looking cool. There’s a great bit in the book where Pokes is like ‘Who are these two nutters that turn up to DMZ and dance like lunatics while everyone else is nodding their heads smoking spliffs?’
CR: You can also see a link with techno and things happening outside the UK in their production choices. I don’t think I was tuned into that until I came back to the book and listened to tracks like ‘Qawwali’, thinking about how it’s more like techno. I can see how that fusion was waiting to happen.
But we should fast-forward. The beginning of the end appears several times in the book. At several points, there’s a sense of something going too far: it’s gone too big, too loud, or there’s too much wub-wub. Having spoken to so many people, what’s your take on the factors that resulted in, if not the demise of dubstep, but certainly a drastic mutation?
LM: I think you’re right that demise would be the wrong framing. Things just change. Some people were magnanimous about those changes, with the benefit of hindsight. At the time, there was a lot of disruption going into 2008, 2009 and 2010 that really upset people. I talk about this in the epilogue. The book essentially cuts off in 2011 because most interviewees didn’t care enough for the later years, beyond the post-dubstep people who were merging house and techno. People like the Hessle Audio guys, Martyn or James Blake who were trying to create subtle evolutions.
A misconception people have about this period is they go, ‘Well, it’s the Americans’ fault, the Skrillexes and 12th Planets.’ They point to loud, aggressive, mid-range tracks made by producers who hadn’t grown up with the swagger of a Black British sound system, carnival, or a garage rave. They were coming at it from the perspective of seeing a DJ at a local sports stadium. But this predates EDM. That is a misconception in terms of the timeline. Americans are not responsible for the fact that Rusko or Coki made loud tracks. A lot was changing within British culture that engendered this. There were plenty of British producers, like Flux Pavilion or Doctor P, making loud, aggressive, busy tracks. It wasn’t just Americans.
I’m not letting Americans off the hook, but it’s not entirely their fault. In order for dubstep to carry on in rooms that were not just FWD>> and DMZ, they had to play up and down the country as interest spread. Most of the time that was the student union circuit. I wanted to get this story in because it might not be the sexiest topic, but you cannot overestimate the impact of British student union rave culture. Coki’s ‘Spongebob’ came out in 2007. If you’re 18 in 2007 and you go to a student union night in Sheffield or Leicester and hear ‘Spongebob,’ that is what you think dubstep is. If you want to make dubstep, you’re making stuff that sounds like ‘Spongebob,’ not ‘Anti War Dub.’ That is a huge element that led to the transformation of the sound.
CR: There are a couple of other things you mention that I hadn’t thought of. One is the gradual and then fast switch over to CDJs. If you cast your mind back, people were not really using CDJs that often then. It took a while for that technology to trickle down. But with CDJs, if you’ve got a burned CD in your pocket, you can just play it. You don’t have to cut a dubplate. Loefah points out in the book that this took away the entire A&R structure that they’d created, because you can just play whatever. Uploading and downloading is also faster. A deluge of tracks that haven’t been road-tested might have contributed [to the demise].
TL: You could also mix so much quicker on CDJs. I have a distinct memory of seeing Skream at FWD>> after he’d switched to CDJs. He’d always played raucous music, but I remember him mixing every 45 seconds and feeling like this was a new level of onslaught. The pace was a lot.
CR: What do you make of the claim that the smoking ban had something to do with it?
LM: It feels like an easy way out, but when I spoke to everyone, they spoke about it at length and with personal vitriol. If you are used to a dub dance, not being able to smoke forced you to go outside. Hatcha spoke about this well – not only could you not smoke weed in the dance, you couldn’t smoke it outside because of bouncers. If you smoke a joint outside, you get chucked out. You lose the concentration of the crowd because they’re going out for cigarette breaks that become 45 minutes. You miss most of a set, so the journey of a set can’t be as subtle. In order to keep people in the room, you have to mix faster and pick impactful drops. It becomes a hooky experience. That did not really impact dubstep in larger raves. If you have 150 people in Plastic People and 50 are wandering in and out, you notice it. But if you’re at a student union of 1,500 people and 200 are going in and out, you don’t notice. Naturally, that bigger sound for bigger rooms started to dominate.
TL: It also changes the drug dynamic. Pills or coke are more appealing if you can’t smoke inside – and that changes the feel of a room.
Even though many of the book’s subjects are still successful, some more successful than ever, there is a feeling of melancholy that rears its head. I’m thinking of Artwork talking about Big Apple closing, the reflections on FWD>> pre- and post-smoking ban, the Chef line about people being left behind when dubstep exploded. Did you pick up on that too?
LM: I felt that when I was interviewing people. I was careful not to frame it as an ‘old man yells at cloud’ thing because that was not their intention. I feel like the melancholy comes from the fact that they felt the rug was pulled out from under them in terms of the wider culture. They worked hard, often in isolation and to quite a lot of mockery in the early days, on a sound they were absolutely devoted to, often to the detriment of their finances, family time and sleep. Everything about their lives orbited around the physical infrastructure of dubstep. It was their whole lives. Then 2006 and 2007 happened in such quick succession it must have been whiplash.
You can put sets on YouTube. The Caspa and Rusko FabricLive.37 mix comes out and transforms how people see mixing. Record shops are closing, people are bypassing record labels and just putting stuff on the internet, people are producing tracks for CDs and playing them off CDJs. They bypassed the physical infrastructure. They have every right to feel melancholy because it was no longer their community. There’s a nice quote from the Dubstep Warz broadcast, where Loefah says that what they loved about dubstep was that at any point they could look around the room and be surrounded by childhood friends. I was touched by that. But then they would walk into Fabric, or a big student rave and not only not recognise the sound, but not recognise anyone there. I can understand how that would have cut into their souls. I’m glad it comes across as melancholy, rather than bitterness.
CR: We’ve been waiting at least ten years for the dubstep revival, which seems to now be in full swing. It’s a bit late, behind the indie sleaze revival, but I am excited. There’s the classicism of stuff like North London Dub Club, and on the other hand, what I think of as sexy dubstep, with lots of women and femme-identifying people making and DJing it with a different sensuality – there was that great Livwutang mix of femme vocal dubstep. I’m interested in what you think. Are you into it? What’s changed?
LM: I’m so happy dubstep is getting its due airing. A huge motivating factor in writing Aftershock is that I’ve always worked in electronic music writing – Red Bull Music Academy, DJ Mag, etc. There have been waves of interest in different scenes giving innovators their flowers. There was a long period of people going back to original house and techno and saying, ‘This is not white German music, this is Black music from Detroit and Chicago. You need to learn this.’ Then there was another wave, around the pandemic, of giving Black femme, trans, and non-binary innovators their due. I say that with the ironic awareness that every single person in Aftershock is a guy!
In the last five years, there has been thoughtful writing around Black British sound system music. Drill was taken seriously. There’s been amazing writing about grime. Jungle is being rethought with sincerity. Artists like Nia Archives, Sherelle, Tim Reaper, Mantra and Double O have not only made the case that we should care about the original jungle sound, but developed a new sound that is contemporary and aware of its roots.
I watched this happen and kept thinking: nobody is talking about dubstep. It’s not just adjacent, it was happening at the same time. What happened in that early to late 2010s period, that melancholy we talked about, sullied dubstep in the public eye as a truly innovative, thoughtful, beautifully engineered sound. All of that got scrubbed from the public consciousness because of a bunch of noise. A dubstep remix of Girls Aloud, or a Fabric mix that people didn’t like – suddenly nobody’s approaching dubstep with the sincerity it deserves. That’s why I did this book. I hope anybody listening to cool young artists like Beatrice M., Mia Koden, or Lou Nour – all wicked artists – checks this out. I love Introspekt, I have to shout her out. She’s from L.A. I love what she does. If you are a 19-year-old going out for the first time to a Mia Koden set, I would love for you to listen to her and read this book to see how they relate.
This is an instructive moment for young ravers who were too young to go out in the 2010s. I talk about the recent Fred Again.. residency at Alexandra Palace in the epilogue. Whether you care for his music or not, he is the most popular dance star in the UK. Bringing out Skream, Mala, Coki and Benga to play old and new material is transformatively important. They brought out grime MCs like D Double E and JME to spit over tracks like ‘Night’ and ‘Skeng.’ That is a gateway experience for young people, to check out a tune like ‘Skeng’, or the new Mala tune ‘Militant Don.’
As I say in the introduction, I was shown interesting house and techno by the Rubadub crew when I was listening to absolute rubbish. They did it without judgement. If you like the new stuff, you can find out about the old stuff. I feel that support between generations. It’s not a sense of not liking the new scene. I see Mala and Coki supporting the young DJs, which is heartening.
CR: ‘Rumble’ is a gateway drug.
LM: It’s a great gateway drug. Also, think of where Skrillex has gone in the last 15 years. He’s making grimy dubstep sound system tracks with Flowdan. The culture has moved back round to the original sentiments of the scene.
CR: Our ulterior motive for this interview is that it’s another brick in the wall to eventually get Skrillex on this pod. We have to show our underground credentials to Skrillex before he’ll come on.
LM: He is a very misunderstood artist and apparently an absolute sweetheart. In the same way that if you saw the Daft Punk Alive 2007 tour and found out about Drexciya via that, then have at it with Skrillex and discovering DMZ. Everything is a gateway. If you approach it like that, you end up energised by the potential of what’s next.
TL: Totally agree. Lauren, we have two very important closing questions. First, what’s your favorite dubstep tune?
LM: I love Kromestar’s ‘Kalawanji’, it is such a banger. I tend to gravitate more toward the DMZ side of things. I love Mala’s ‘Lean Forward.’ Going back to something sounding like techno on a revised listen, when Mala first went to Leeds and played on the Iration Steppas sound, Mark Iration told him, ‘I don’t know why you call your stuff dubstep. It sounds like techno to me. I don’t hear any dub in it.’ Ricardo Villalobos used to play ‘Lean Forward’ in his sets. Anything that has that broken beat, Theo Parrish, percussive house energy that Mala has, I love. So anything like ‘Lean Forward’, or ‘Bury Da Bwoy,’ I’m all over it. I think it has to be Mala.
CR: Final question, always the same: what film can you recommend to us and our listeners?
LM: In the spirit of a conversation about dub sound system culture, I would highly recommend the film Babylon. It came out in 1980 or 1981. It’s essentially the story of a young man involved in a dub sound system, in the vein of a Jah Shaka or Aba Shanti-I dance. It is a proper dub reggae sound system. It’s about him navigating city life, the racism he faces and what living in Britain was like as a young Black guy at that time. It has some of the best sequences on film of what it actually felt like to be in a dub dance. I don’t know how they mixed the sound, so if anyone is a big Babylon stan, tell me more. If you read this book and you never got to see Jah Shaka, watch this film and you’ll get it. It’s an amazing snapshot of the actual setup of that kind of sound system, what it looks like and what the controls are. It’s very different from how we would set up a DJ sound system now. To see it captured in its traditional form is amazing.
