remember listening to a Ruff Sqwad show on Rinse FM a few years later, in 2005, in which, for the first hour and 45 minutes of their two-hour set, they followed their usual formula: DJ Scholar beginning with a few US R&B and hip-hop (vocal) tracks, followed by half an hour of the biggest grime vocal tracks of the day, and then around the hour mark, switching to brand new grime dubplates and instrumentals, for the gathered MCs to spit their bars over. And then, for the final 15 minutes, the MCs, still only around the age of 20, MCs who would have been about ten when jungle was in its prime, switched up the pace for a final, hectic flurry of junglist ske-be-de-bi spitting. The overwhelming sensation you get from listening to them passing the mic to have a go is just sheer, infectious joy, as they fall about laughing.
The affection most of grime’s foundational figures have for jungle, then and now, is something to behold. Grime may have come directly from UK garage, and have mutated from it, but its creators speak of jungle like a first love, or a first high, an experience that will be refined, but in some wistful sense, never bettered. ‘Jungle,’ Wiley sighed fondly, when I interviewed him for the fifth time, in 2016. ‘That’s my favourite. You know jungle, it’s the only genre that didn’t get exploited? Because the people weren’t dumb – they just didn’t care! A few went to labels, got money, and realised, “You know what? Majors are a waste of time – I was earning more money on the white label.” They learned that trick, very early. But then it wasn’t an MC-led thing, from the point of the business. It is in the rave, but when it came to the records it wasn’t MC-led; it was more producer-controlled. So that’s why they wasn’t gassed [carried away].’ The implication is that the purity and community of the underground scene were never sullied by the ego of MCs-turned-superstars – never capitalised on unduly by the suits from the industry, or the biggest names from the scene.
For Skepta, his musical youth had been primarily ‘reggae in abundance’ – the likes of Barrington Levy, Gregory Isaacs and Half Pint – and that was followed by an instinctive and deep-rooted sense of connection, or ownership, to the frenetic ragga jungle playing out of cars and pirate radio stations in nineties Tottenham. ‘When I first heard jungle, I understood it immediately,’ he recalled in 2015, as we sat parked in his car in Palmers Green, his eyes glazing over with stoned awe. ‘To make something this bless sound this hype was just sick. I think it resonated with me because of the reggae basslines, but also because I’m British and I’m around dancey music – in Europe our ears are set towards like, high synthy sounds and fast speeds. We’re accustomed to that.’
It’s not a controversial point that deep in its spirit, jungle is grime’s true antecedent. Its aesthetics – a hard, scowling, dark side that is counterpointed by ludic, transcendent expressions of joy – were essential to the mutation of UK garage as it became grime. ‘Coming from jungle, you’re always going to be a little more into the darker stuff,’ recalled Troy ‘A Plus’ Miller, describing the garage days as a kind of stylistic interregnum. ‘Even though you like the light and the happy – you and your crew out in a rave, all the girls are here, we’re all having a nice time – you’re still going to lean towards things that are a bit darker.’
A Plus’s friend and founder of Rinse FM, Geeneus, is unequivocal about the power of that junglist passion; that passion would lead them to a collective mistake that would help change the course of British music. He told a podcast in 2016 about the influential UK garage instrumental ‘Cape Fear’, a welcome (re)turn to the dark side, which the Pay As U Go MCs could spit over with the speed and aggression of jungle lyricism. It wasn’t the way things were done in UK garage. ‘I was the last person to get involved in [UK garage], because I loved jungle so much,’ he recalled. ‘We started getting involved in it, but we was bringing along what we learned from jungle into the garage. But we got it completely wrong. And because we got it completely wrong, we ended up with grime. We thought we was making garage: getting garage beats like Cape Fear, and putting MCs on them, and they were spitting their heart out.’ On other occasions, to fit the Bow boys’ lingering passion for super-fast jungle with the contemporary 140bpm sound of 2-step, Slimzee would play Mampi Swift’s jungle track ‘Jaws’ at the wrong speed, at 33 instead of 45rpm, and the MCs would spit on it.
They had, Geeneus continued, ‘railroaded’ the UK garage scene ‘into something completely different. Where they’re bubbling along having a nice time in the party, looking nice, we’ve come in with tracksuits on, spitting lyrics everywhere, MCs everywhere, me and Slimzee just DJing for the MCs really.’11
As summaries of UK garage go, ‘bubbling along having a nice time in the party’ is pretty spot-on. The subject matter of the tunes – love, sex and relationships – narrated in smooth, soulful vocals from an even balance of male and female singers, reflected a much more grown-up, stylish swagger and refinement than had been seen in the wild days of British rave music previously, from acid house through jungle and drum ’n’ bass. It was as if, with the nineties drawing to a close, rave itself was moving beyond adolescent zeal and striving for a kind of adulthood. Garage as a form did not begin in the UK, but the US, and as Simon Reynolds records in Energy Flash, to begin with, in the mid-nineties, garage in the UK had ‘slavishly’ followed US production style. Then the junglists ‘entered the fray’, and created a ‘distinctly British hybrid strain that merged house’s slinky panache with jungle’s rude-bwoy exuberance’. The UK underground brought that edge, even as it was swapping a tracksuit for smart shoes and an ironed shirt.
Indeed, maturity was reflected in the aspirational dress codes in UK garage clubs, where shirts and shoes (no trainers!) would often be a compulsory component of the door policy, and where the narcotics of choice were champagne and cocaine – even while the music’s primary creators and ravers were from the same humble inner London backgrounds as the junglists before them, and the grime kids who would follow. No hats no hoods! Only two school children may enter the rave at any one time.
It’s a tension that was a rich seam for British underground dance music more than once: the wicked and the divine, the debonair and the scuzzy, rubbing up against one another. In the first two years of the millennium, UK garage was being stretched in two directions at once – a process which is always likely to make something break in the middle. On the one hand, the poppy, commercial end was thriving, and producing numerous hits: singer-MCs like Craig David, Ms Dynamite and Daniel Bedingfield became stars, and tunes like Sweet Female Attitude’s ‘Flowers’ and DJ Luck and MC Neat’s ‘With A Little Bit Of Luck’ were ubiquitous.
But something was pulling hard in the opposite musical direction – to the dark side. On this side of UK garage’s personality split, mostly male MCs dominated instead of crooning singers; the instrumentals conjured not a glitzy VIP area but a low-lit council estate. It was inner London’s millennial aspiration and promise versus the grim reality that persisted when those aspirations failed to materialise. Darker garage that was built around breakbeats and accompanied by jungle’s hectic lyrical energy was thriving on pirate radio, while the more established, soulful tracks dominated the charts and high-street clubs. When catchy, sample-heavy novelty records like DeeKline’s ‘I Don’t Smoke’ started to take off in the garage clubs, and the likes of Heartless Crew, So Solid Crew and Pay As U Go Cartel started to have hits themselves, the divisions deepened. For the old guard, there was a ‘last days of disco’ feel to the new millennium: the resplendent purity of one of the greatest periods in British music history having to come to terms with its own looming mortality – these were the best days of our lives, and this is how it ends? With some hyperactive teenagers chatting about guns and drug dealing, instead of a smooth, 2-step shuffle and some sweetly sung love songs? With a song that samples the Casualty theme tune and a Guy Ritchie film? No wonder they were upset.
Bizarrely, the tensions between the old guard and the new wave came to a head in the unlikely context of the UK garage committee meetings. It sounds somehow reminiscent of the kind of sit-down familiar from The Sopranos, where representatives of the mafia families would thrash out their differences, negotiate and cut deals. A similar thing had happened in the jungle scene too, when
