Feature: The return of UK garage

This article originally appeared in Time Out London in February 2012.

The sound of early ’90s UKG is back on London's dancefloors…

The distinctive battle cry of UK garage is unforgettable. But, says Kate Hutchinson, it's more than just a distant dancefloor memory. Whether it's futuristic sounds or old school anthems that you'll hear in London's clubs, garage is back for good.

Dust down those Moschino shirts and polish up your loafers: UK garage – or UKG, as it is commonly known – is back in a big way. The sound that, along with jungle, defined London’s underground nightlife scene in the mid-’90s has returned to inject some smooth, high-energy and shuffly 2-step nostalgia into the capital’s clubs.

We don’t mean Dane Bowers banging out a DJ set at a cocktail bar in Uxbridge. London’s garage renaissance isn’t averse to throwing the odd cheesy pop number (think Craig David, Oxide & Neutrino and Sweet Female Attitude) into the mix but, for the most part, its new incarnation runs much deeper. The original pioneers, who shaped the sound before it was co-opted by the mainstream and came to soundtrack the likes of Daniel Bedingfield’s pigeon croons, are playing classic sets all over London. And, crucially, there is a new wave of producers who are propelling it into the present.

These two forces form the foundation of forward (and backward!)-thinking new night Heritage, the second of which is at Hidden in Vauxhall on Friday February 24, thanks to party promoters Found, Multiply and Days Like That. Unlike other garage-centric parties, which usually focus on old-school anthems and UKG’s younger relative, funky house, Heritage aims to be a ‘deeper exploration’ of the sound and its history. It will cover 2-step, a less aggressive derivative of the fast ‘speed garage’ sounds of the late ’90s, four-to-the-floor smashers and, crucially, today’s UK bass-led interpretations.

Enter UK producers and DJs like Mosca, Hackman, Jamie XX, Deadboy and Oneman. They are purveyors of, as garage heavyweight DJ EZ puts it, the ‘new east London sound’ and have been producing or spinning garage-inflected tracks and sets over the past year. It’s because of them that the sound is surging forward. Mosca’s sublime garage track ‘Bax’ has even had airtime on Fearne Cotton’s primetime Radio 1 show, a tip-off from fellow BBC-er Toddla T.

Why has it become so popular again? James Benenson, who forms the Found team with Will Patterson, and who runs youth brand and club Urban Nerds, has some ideas: ‘The 2-step garage sound is a purist antidote to much of the wobble-orientated dubstep music that’s out there now,’ he explains. ‘A new breed of producers, from labels like Hessle, Swamp81 and Numbers, have looked back to these dubstep origins for inspiration. Consequently, they’ve shown that there’s always a place for feel-good garage hype: tracks like Mosca’s ‘Bax’ are living proof of the power of UKG.’

But whatever you do, don’t call it ‘future garage’. The controversial phrase confuses producers like Mosca and co (who experiment with numerous other club sounds) with the new future garage movement, a nascent scene spearheaded by DJ Whistla. He runs the Future Garage forum, an unofficial spin-off from the nexus of all dubstep music discussion, Dubstep Forum, and its related Facebook and Soundcloud pages, amassing nearly 10,000 members.

But Mosca, and influential scene writers like Martin Clark, are quick to draw a line between their garage productions and future garage. ‘As an initial idea it’s well intentioned and not without merits: to make garage-y beats you can actually dance to (not mosh to, like dubstep circa 2012),’ explains Clark. But according to Mosca, the music that comes from it is ‘just fucking terrible. It’s all Burial rip-offs and emo-garage stuff.'

You won’t hear any such gripes at Heritage, however. Mosca will be representing the exciting new school alongside some legendary garage names like DJ EZ and Matt 'Jam' Lamont (who was one-half of Tuff Jam Records, the most influential UKG label in the ’90s, along with Karl 'Tuff Enuff' Brown), Scott Garcia and Double 99.

The garage renaissance has paved the way for other innovators to come back too: look out for stalwarts like Wookie, MJ Cole, Sunship, Noodles, Artful aka Mark Hill (formerly one half of Artful Dodger) and, on the cheesier side, Oxide & Neutrino and DJ Luck & MC Neat, who have all made a return to clubland in the past year. As Clark says, if anyone can paint an accurate picture of UKG in the ’90s, it’s DJ EZ and his peers.

Still, if you do see Dane Bowers billed anywhere, you know to go running…

Feature: En vogue again

This article originally appeared in Time Out London in January 2012

A new Soul Jazz compilation and book uncovers the music and moves of New York's '80s house ballroom era, the underground nightlife scene immortalised by Madonna in her infamous single 'Vogue' this month. And, though it lives on in the Big Apple, you can find traces of this fascinating polysexual culture in London clubland too…

We've all seen it. We've tried to do the lightning speed hands, to twist our locks into the perfect Marilyn curls and to memorise the rap of glamorous celebrities 'on the cover of a magazine'. The music video for Madonna's chart-topping single 'Vogue' will forever immortalise that exaggerated style of dance in pop history, but the Harlem voguing scene from which it takes it name has since burrowed back underground.

Soul Jazz's compilation and its accompanying book, 'Voguing: Voguing and the House Ballroom Scene of New York City 89-92', however, is shining a light back on this forgotten subculture. The book comprises a series of eye-popping party snapshots and portraits by photographer Chantal Regnault, taken during the scene's 'ballroom house' heyday. Amazingly, the photos were sitting in a box untouched in her home in Haiti for 20 years, until Soul Jazz founder Stuart Baker came knocking during a trip to the country.

'The ballroom scene has a hidden history,' says Baker. '[When 'Vogue' came out] a large amount of attention was focused on it, but after the hype had died down, no one was interested in it anymore. There's Jennie Livingston's film, ['Paris Is Burning', an award-winning 1990s doc on ballroom culture] but, apart from that, it hasn't been chronicled anywhere.'

It's a wild and fascinating story.Voguing and house ballroom first emerged in the early 1970s, inspired by the queer masquerade balls that emerged in New York as far back as the late nineteeth century , and the 'throwing shade', when one queen subtly insulted another, that developed from them in the twentieth-century balls. In this new incarnation, these balls saw 'ball children' - gay and transgender black men - battle each other for the glory of their 'house, referencing a model representing a fashion house on the catwalk. These dance-offs became known as 'voguing'. They mocked social stereotypes in categories like 'realness', in which competitors would win points from the judging panel for how convincingly they played it straight or 'dragged it up'.

The balls were a crucial support network for the black gay community. 'Their houses were surrogate families for them because many of them lived on the streets and had been kicked out by their families,' explains Regnault. 'So the balls were a space where they could be totally free to express their fantasies and be appreciated for it.'

The voguing story is inevitably tinged with sadness. Out of all the people that she photographed, says Regnault, two-thirds of them had passed away when she revisited New York to interview its founders for the book in 2010. In the late '80s, as voguing was booming, so too was the Aids crisis, which destroyed many of its stars.

The Soul Jazz compilation is as visceral as the book. It stretches further back, to 1976, and rounds up the major house ballroom tracks up to 1996. You can picture the likes of Jose and Luis from the House of Xtravaganza, who appeared in Madonna's 'Vogue' video, framing their faces in time to 'Love Hangover' by Diana Ross, an early vogue icon. Or popping and spinning to Cheryl Lynn's 'Got to Be Real', which was co-opted by the scene as an anthem for 'realness'. Some of the raw, low quality beats and brash vocals, however, wouldn't sound out of place at Dalston Superstore today.

Made-for-the-ballroom house stompers by the scene's superstar DJ Junior Vasquez ('X') and Kevin Aviance (the awesomely titled 'Cunty') also feature; 'bitch tracks' like these are being increasingly sampled by today's creative house producers. Just listen to London producers Joy Orbison and Boddika's January single 'Swims', which is built around a rapid-fire bitch vocal from Tronco Traxx's '98 catwalk anthem 'Walk for Me'. Such renewed interest in house ballroom music has, in turn, inspired Vasquez, still a DJ on the gay scene in New York, to start producing in the bitchy style again.

Then there's New York native MikeQ, the DJ at new youthful ballroom club Vogue Knights, a party that Diplo brought to worldwide attention in aVanity Fair article last October. The voguing scene has always continued to exist under the radar, but MikeQ breathes new life into the soundtrack. He mixes up vintage house ballroom and samples from signature tunes like Masters at Work's 'The Ha Dance', the original of which features on the Soul Jazz compilation, with new chart R&B remixes and a stripped-back, drum-driven beat. When he played in London a fortnight ago, it wasn't at gay nights or nostalgic ballroom one-offs, but at some of the capital's most cutting-edge parties: Night Slugs and House of Trax.

Here in London, meanwhile, we can't lay claim to a house ballroom history like New York, but its high-drama and sense of community can certainly be felt. It lives in our alt.drag cabaret scene, spearheaded by Jonny Woo, whose performance incorporates voguing in homage to the era, and who started his own house, House of Egypt. And its music is alive in many an east London club night.

'Ballroom culture set the blueprint for a lot of big house records back in the early '90s, which fit perfectly for a lot of nights harking back to a more classic style today,' says Dalston Superstore's Dan Beaumont. 'They combine a lot of those classic records with new productions that reflect the sound.' So, while you won't necessarily find voguers stalking across the dancefloor - unless it's at the larger versions of Jim Warboy's SOS party, where you'll find a voguing runway down the middle - here's where to catch the voguing vibe in London.

Strike a pose, we urge you.

SOS Jim Warboy's night of wild, sweaty polysexual abandon celebrated its first birthday at East Bloc last week but its larger parties boast a catwalk and often guest dance teachers. The next SOS is at East Bloc on Feb 18. www.eastbloc.co.uk

House of Trax A new-for-2012 night with a focus on booty-shaking, inspired by retro TV dance shows like 'Soul Train' and 'Dance Energy'. The next House of Trax is on March 17, location tbc. www.houseoftrax.tv

Paris Acid Ball Every night at Dalston's premiere gay hangout, The Superstore, is prime for a spot of voguing action, but none more so than Paris Acid Ball, whose soundtrack includes jackin' acid workouts and runway classics. The next Paris Acid Ball is at Dalston Superstore, date tbc.www.dalstonsuperstore.com

Tribe One of two clubs where you can participate in 'House Dance' competitions, which, like voguing, originated with house music in the early '80s. The next Tribe is at the Brixton Club House on March 17.www.triberecordsuk.com

‘Voguing: Voguing and the House Ballroom Scene of New York City 89-92' by Chantal Regnault is out now and the compilation is out on Mon Feb 3 (both Soul Jazz). Joy Orbison plays at Mulletover on Sat Jan 28.

Andrew Weatherall: Ministry of Sound sleevenotes

In April, I had the pleasure of writing the sleevenotes for a compilation by one the country's most respected DJ and producers, Andrew Weatherall. His contribution to the 'Masterpieces' series on Ministry of Sound is out in all good record shops now. You can read the sleevenotes in full after the jump. Hope you enjoy.

“The greatest DJ of all time – he has set the blueprint for what many of us are still trying to do and not bonded himself to one style of music” – Erol Alkan

It’s a Thursday night in mid-December and we’re in one of those dive bars the size of a postage stamp, way up in northeast London. Even though it’s zero degrees outside, steam wafts up the staircase that leads inside and presses stickily against your face. It’s like a rave sauna, and a place that no club tourist would bother going to on a school night. Disco ‘anoraks’ do, however, and they shuffle in front of the decks, some with records tucked under their sleeves, others with arms flailing free like supplicants at the altar. Across the floor, girls with directional haircuts smoulder sexily, a confusion of limbs around them as the soundtrack gathers intensity.

It’s a cult club night, alright: the dancefloor is overheating like an audio armpit yet it’s teeming with a sense of no-nonsense appreciation. People are there for the music alone and the two DJs that spin it into a mesmerising sonic web all night long. Which is no surprise, considering that one of them is maverick DJ and producer Andrew Weatherall.

“Wevvers”, as he is affectionately known, an astute rogue with over 20 years under his DJing belt, has long been revered for his unwillingness to pander to trends. His career is stuffed full with unpredictability and accidental successes: he was once nearly beaten up for the sake of a rockabilly set; his techno mixes were so ferocious that he set a bass bin on fire at a club in Germany; and he mastered the template for the crossover of indie and dance music on one of the most important albums of the ’90s.

Thus his new club night, A Love From Outer Space, was never meant to be for the clubbers at large – it’s just too small for mass consumption. Rather, it’s his own personal laboratory, his and longtime co-conspirator Sean Johnston’s “monthly experiment in interplanetary audio”, as one website put it. Its clubbers are smug in the knowledge that they are privy to something special, for ears that crave an education.

That’s because Weatherall is not only one of the best selectors this country has ever seen, he always puts the music first and within a much broader frame of reference than most ‘dance’ DJs even consider. As he says himself: “It’s pompous to expect a history lesson when you go out, but that’s what it should be.” Better still, he serves it all up with a sartorial swagger and a witty remark or three, not to mention a twiddle of his Romanov-style moustache, a turn-of-the-century working class style he has recently adopted.

Needless to say, cramming exactly why Andrew Weatherall is such a hero into a couple of tiny pages is a daunting task. Few know exactly how far his oeuvre actually extends, but truth be told, he probably barely remembers himself: in one interview, he recalled walking into a record shop and liking what he was hearing over the speakers, only to be told by the shop assistant that it was one of his own tracks.

Here’s a brief stab, though: his CV goes from helping to kickstart Britain's rave-in-a-field dance culture as part of acid house fanzine collective Boys Own to producing Primal Scream’s 1991 seminal album ‘Screamadelica’. Later, he forged a further relationship between his earliest rock ’n’ roll influences and electronic music with his Two Lone Swordsmen project, a collision between fiercely new and dusty-covered old that has come to characterise his work ever since.

And then there’s his vast remix history, which reads like a who’s who of alternative bands, including the Happy Mondays, Björk, Siouxsie Sioux, Manic Street Preachers and My Bloody Valentine. Today, he’s the first choice of beat-mangler for the new generation of electronic acts like Friendly Fires and Fuck Buttons, whose records he produced. It’s no wonder he didn’t find time to produce his own until 2009, when, with the help of current studio engineer Timothy Fairplay, he released his debut solo effort, ‘A Pox on the Pioneers’.

Such multiplicity has worked in his favour. As many of his acid house contemporaries turned into the country’s first ‘superstar DJs’, only to waft away with the spirit of ’88 and return on club bills to play ‘old-school’ sets, Weatherall has consistently remained ahead of the curve. Or rather, he’s that rare breed of DJ-producer who keeps moulding the curve as he goes along.

And so, at a time when modern dance music and the clubs that play it subscribe to a factory line of ‘harder, faster, stronger’ productions, A Love From Outer Space does the opposite and is slamming on the brakes.

It all started with a road trip. “Me and Sean would stick on music in the car on the long drive to gigs, playing each other new stuff that we’d just picked up,” says Weatherall. “We started to notice that everything we were buying, certainly the stuff that we liked the most, was sometimes even as slow as 105bpm. These records were sexier and more interesting than the latest techno releases, many of which were cold and sterile, but I wasn’t getting the outlet to play them as the main attraction at some club nights. So we started to imagine a playlist that covered the whole night at a club, starting slowly and peaking at no higher than 120bpm. Don’t get me wrong, I like a techno smash-up, but I find playing slower music more enjoyable these days.”

Eventually, A Love From Outer Space was born, named after the dream-pop ditty by A.R. Kane, with its tongue-in-cheek manifesto of “never knowingly exceeding 122bpm”. The spacey treats and slo-mo, ‘drug-chug’ beats you’ll hear are mined from Weatherall and Johnston’s enormo-crates of post-punk, proto-house, industrial, kosmische, rare dubs and disco noir, as well as their own never-before-heard remixes and crisp new edits by their contemporaries. So it’s not unusual at ALFOS to see mobile phones bobbing in the air like spaceships as people attempt to capture each tune and decode them with their Shazam apps.

It has, however, acquired a catchall term that has flabbergasted the Wevhead. “I don’t know when someone woke up and decided to call it ‘cosmic disco’. I missed that meeting,” he jokes. Moreover, this particular strand of machine music stems from his early love of post-punk. “When I was a kid, I’d I got into glam and punk records but I was also into soul and disco. People from either of the side would question my motives and ask how I could like both types of music. A lot of the people that were making post-punk had that same dilemma, especially when all of that “disco sucks” stuff was happening in the late ’70s. It’s not a very popular theory to espouse, though, because people want punk to be a lot more political and a lot more anarchistic.” But it’s one Weatherall tested brilliantly by wearing an Anthrax T-shirt to a seaside soul weekender in 1987.

“When a lot of those early post-punk bands came along, it was a dream come true,” he continues. “A Certain Ration, 23 Skiddoo, Throbbing Gristle, Liquid Liquid and bands like that… My confusion had ended!” Later, acid house was the happy and huggy release from that post-industrial gloom, but he has since returned there for inspiration.

Weatherall’s vast eclecticism has, nonetheless, had its consequences. As a genre polymath, whose sets and mixes can vary from boshing techno to reggae and krautrock, it has become increasingly necessary to state the name of the sound after his name on club flyers. “People like to know what they're getting,” he admits. “It can lead to great excitement when they learn of a new facet to you, but it can lead to people wanting to kill you, as happened in Cork a few years ago. I turned up to an arts festival there to play rockabilly and a load of people had travelled for miles to hear me play techno. I played three records and a girl came up to me and did that fingers-across-the-throat motion right in my face. I had to sneak out the back door while the bouncer stopping people from getting at me.”

Still, his A Love From Outer Space sound is gently taking off. In its two short years, the night has built up a cult fanbase and their first birthday party, in May 2011, was a roadblock. “It’s the off-duty DJs’ night out,” says Johnston of a typical crowd. “When I look out on the dancefloor, it’s a ‘Who’s Who’ of underground London disco DJs from the last 20 years. Everyone from the Idjut Boys to Richard Sen has been down.” And it’s not just their cronies who are onboard either: the new school of cutting-edge London DJs, like Dan Avery (aka Kill Em All resident Stopmakingme) and Friendly Fires’ drummer and lead selector Jack Savidge, have been spotted on the A Love From Outer Space frontline.

Now London isn’t the only stop on Weatherall and Johnston’s interplanetary mission. They are journeying further afield – slowly, of course – and they’ve spun sets under the ALFOS banner from Brighton to Berlin and from Manchester to Milan. As this mix heads to the pressing room, so ends their residency at The Drop too, nearly two years after their first night there in May 2010. Instead, the pair are focusing on larger events and filling them with talented new DJs and live bands – perhaps, at some point, even Wevvers’ brand new project with Fairplay, The Aspho Dells, who feature on this mix.

Going larger is one thing, but A Love From Outer Space is never going to be a multiplex-style ‘superclub’ event. It’s too leftfield for that, and too much about Weatherall and Johnston following their own path, whether you like it or not. But let’s be honest: you knew that already, and that’s why you picked up this CD. “Trends go whizzing past me,” Weatherall says with a chuckle. “People will say, ‘Ah, dya see that?’. And I’ll go: ‘What was that?’ And they’ll say: ‘That was a trend!’ And I’ll say: ‘Ah, fuck it, not another one.’ If you’re never in fashion it’s difficult to be out of fashion. It’s the difference between fashion and style: why try and cram yourself into the latest pair of tight ironic trousers when another pair looks and fits you better?”

Kate Hutchinson, April 2012