TRASHFUTURE - *PREVIEW* Britainology 79: UK Garage feat. Dan Hancox

Episode Date: February 19, 2024

For this month's first Britainology, we're joined by music journalist and genre aficionado Dan Hancox, the author of 'Inner City Pressure: the Story of Grime.' But we're not talking about Grime today (that'll come later!)—rather, we're talking about a genre close to Milo's heart, the Essex-born-and-raised '90s/'00s subgenre Garage. Which Nate has absolutely no point of reference for whatsoever, despite being the exact right age to have been a fan...if only he were British. Get a copy of Inner City Pressure: here https://www.waterstones.com/book/inner-city-pressure/dan-hancox/9780008257163 And check out Dan's podcast Cursed Objects here: https://cursedobjects.podbean.com Get the whole episode on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/98766879 *STREAM ALERT* Check out our Twitch stream, which airs 9-11 pm UK time every Monday and Thursday, at the following link: https://www.twitch.tv/trashfuturepodcast *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s upcoming live shows here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

I'm 39. I graduated from high school in 2003. And I guess I could have grown up here, but my mom was born here, but her family emigrated to America. So instead, I grew up in the American Midwest, where in the late 90s, early 2000s, it was kind of grim. I mean, you had like what you might call the sort of Allyson Chains backwash bands, like Three Doors Down and Stain and Disturb. You had Creed. I mean, I remember the last semester before I got my driver's license, having to ride the school bus and listen to f*****g Creed's hire every 30 minutes at a minimum, because like that would just, a song and rotation like that. They were in a sort of just a resistance-stainton-crank situation.

But I don't need to take me higher by Creed in the next video. I was excited about the second Eve 6 album, which in retrospect is terrible. I believe you were disappointed by that. I mean, yeah, it's weird. I went back and listened to it and there's one or two songs where musically I'm like, I kind of like this, but the lyrics are, it's embarrassing. Not only was I so excited about it, I found a leaked copy on Napster and downloaded it with ISDN and thought it was fast as hell because it was like seven kilobytes a second.

So that's my late 90ss early 2000s experience in America. And then like, and then I discovered MP3 forums and found out about like Interpol and my brother made me listen to the Smiths and stuff like that. But I mean, at the time, what was popular was pretty bad. And what wasn't bad was very much like college radio relegated to you. You could only get it in indie record stores. I remember encountering the new pornographers and asking the clerk at the, cause I heard the song and he's like, yeah, this is this band,

but their album is only available as an import from Canada. Like no American label has released it yet and you couldn't get it off Amazon. So like stuff was still hard to get. Music being too gay for general USA. You have to smuggle in from Canada. People forget how hard it was to get stuff if it wasn't released by a major label or if a label had just decided to not distribute it enough. And so I bring that in as preface

that like, yeah, if this was a thing that was happening that was like producing number one hits, it certainly sounds, what's the right word here, a lot more enjoyable or interesting than what was producing number one hits in America at the time. And I say that as someone who has not only seen static X and slipped not live, but actually met them, I hung out on the tour bus with static X because my school newspaper managed to get me a fucking pass to go. You know it's bad when they're given interviews to the school news. Well, granted, it was the basis was just out of the kindness of his heart was like, yeah, I'll talk to these high school kids and we got to we got to do an

interview and I learned how Wayne Static did his hair which probably means nothing to you guys unless you care about weird shitty I can't even genre wise like like a static ex was like white zombie backwash the way that like Three Doors Down was Allison Chains backwash but Wayne Static had this hair that stuck straight up like straight straight straight up he was he was a Schwartz cop sponsored athlete. I Imagine this is this is like I'm speaking a fucking foreign language right now Well, I'm hoping that we'll speak our own foreign language now And we'll have to leave as like Basil didn't a by the says

Unfortunately I'm fucking a bit eight. We're gonna have we're gonna be dressed from heads tone a for X Like I will talk a little bit about the kind of UK garage fashion fucking Napathate. We're going to be dressed from head to toe in Averex. Like I will talk a little bit about the kind of UK garage fashion, but the crucial thing to know in terms of, you know, making your Aver is that the men were like the peacocks in the scene. Like women wore like nice kind of quite pared down black dresses and heels, but like nothing showy, really. Smart and sexy as all the UK garage flyers

and the radio adverts, which are like a whole subgenre in themselves. They're all voice like this, you know, come down to Bethel to do it. And they're gone for about sort of five minutes at an incredibly fast pace, like the sort of small print at the end of an advert. For the past, you know?

I've heard stuff. Sometimes I like that, but in a garage voice. But yeah, smart and sexy is the look. For men, you're wearing like baggy, really quite expensive designer, machino, Averex, iceberg history, kind of stuff with like massive, colorful prints of like the like looney tunes characters on and stuff. It's incredibly unsussell. This is really completely no points of reference for me. I was joking with one of my my other

show co-hosts about the Tasmanian devil sportswear craze in the 90s in America, but that was mostly for kids. That's a very different thing. The idea of the sort of like like, you know, Tiny Toon Adventures X, a apes, the screen print design on a shirt. That's, yeah, that's exactly right. That's what it's like all over print. Like, because that was mid 90s in America. I was referencing something. Yeah. About recent. Yeah.

Yeah. Like I said, I mean, I'm really racking my brain for what was and all I can think of is it was we were still doing baggy stuff. They were doing things like Tommy Hill figure and and Calvin Klein were still really popular The baggy puffy coats um like the the the the the the fucking Oakley sunglasses stuff like that Chains pukashell necklaces stuff like that, but nothing like what you're describing. Yeah, like what you're describing sounds The only point of reference I have is I feel like I played like, like either one of the early Grand Theft Auto's or one of those other rock star games where like that character appears and it's supposed to be a point of reference but to a, you know, 14 year old in Carmel, Indiana is just sort of like, why does he talk like that? Yeah, yeah, yeah, like, like there's no actual, you know, animations of them. They're like this is painting like a drawing of them, a drawing of them in the loading screen or whatever.

Yeah, that kind of thing. So I should explain how you kick-arrows emerges, and actually there is some American roots to it. So I won't get too into the weeds of the production process, because I frankly have always prided myself as a music journalist and not really understanding that stuff too well. I don't want to be a musicologist. the culture around it's always much more interesting, right? But there is there is like within the kind of US dance canon, a series of DJs who I guess

spring off from house and I think that's where the name comes from is that this kind of like, sort of slightly daft, but all genre naming is like pretty daft is like, oh, this is like an adjunct to the genre that already exists. Or do you have an extra house? Anyway, related to like Paradise Garage and stuff like that, because that was the thing in New York. That makes sense. Maybe that's it. That's later. I want to say that's 80s, like early into early 80s into early 90s. But like when you'll, you'll hear about bands, either it was sort of like, like a venue that just

had this kind of like storied history like Le Bandouche in Paris or something like that. Like one of these places it's like was just a scene place but it like it wasn't Studio 54 caliber kind of thing but like just because a lot of bands were there but I don't know what's on about it. You certainly get you see you get DJs like Todd Edwards, Todd the God. I listened to a Todd the God, Todd the God Edward song this morning with no fucking idea. Yeah, you wouldn't expect to be to bring it up. I somehow logged into my old Spotify or my old SoundCloud and I had two liked songs and one of them was by a band on DFA Records that's American and the other was some random band

and this whole song only had a thousand plays but it was like, oh, it was a British radio station doing like over talk and the guy's like, have you got your song remixed by Todd the God? Edwards, of course we're going to play it. And I was like, who? Okay. He's such a sweet character. Like he, you know, we're going to talk about some slightly shadier characters and the like halo of like crime and violence that did unfortunately like swirl around aspects of the UK garage scene. But Todd Edwards, like, I think for garage fans will forever be pictured in his debut London show, 2003 in Romford. He's never played in the UK before. And the smile on his sweet, chubby face as he wears his Jesus loves UK garage shirt. So he's like he was a born again Christian at this point.

His two passions, God and UK garage. And Romphe could cure you of both. Fair play. Well, what happened on this occasion was so much more lovely though. So he just has no idea how big his tunes are in the UK. The internet is young. There's not really any way of finding out, right? But they are being like, enterprising UK record labels have been shipping over tunes by Todd Edwards, remixes by Todd Edwards and selling them over here. And then Todd turns up for his Davy London show in 2003, which is really the end of the garage era. Like, it's had an afterlife, a significant one. But, you know, the prime, the sort of prime period was really sort of 97 to

2003. Because Craig David born to do it is like what 2001? Yeah, I think that's right. Yeah, 2000, 2001 is the like chart moment where it's Yeah, becoming like completely mainstream. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But yeah, Todd Edwards plays this, this, the, there's this video, which I, you know, I'll give you two guys to share on the socials and stuff, because it is just beautiful.

He plays the opening song and the crowd goes absolutely nuts, calls for a rewind, which is a critical part of UK garage culture and infrastructure. I didn't want to listen to Craig David Willnard. Yeah, exactly. It's probably worth explaining for people who don't know what it is. If a track is so well received by the crowds that they are just screaming and yelling for more, the track is rewound to the beginning in a kind of way amidst a lot of cheers and then played again from the start. It comes out of sound system culture in Jamaica.

And there is like the job wheel or practically the record in the olden days. You're literally winding it back to it and to the start point. Yeah. I think, yeah, there's a t-shirt that's quite popular in the dance scene, which says like, if it's nice, we play it twice, which is, yeah. So that's, and which I think... I've seen it. I have either seen it in the wild or seen it in sort of like borrowed nostalgia marketing on Instagram that I get, because I'm just the right age for that sort of a thing. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So yeah, his chin gets rewound. He doesn't, Todd Edwards doesn't know what a rewind is.

But like, all of the UK guys. He's getting kicked off. Yeah, he's sort of grinning like, like it, you know, from ear to ear, but he's very confused as to what's happening as his record is rewound for him. And it's played again amidst this just absolutely rapturous reception. It was the beginning of a, you know, long and lasting love affair. We don't want to leave our home! We don't want to leave our home! We don't want to leave our home!

We don't want to leave our home! We don't want to leave our home! We don't want to leave our home! We don't want to leave our home! We don't want to leave our home! We don't want to leave our home! We don't want to leave our home! We don't want to leave our home!

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