Dubber And academia is a great place to respectively indulge the enthusiasms of your youth. To what extent is that why we do this? The injunction stopped Garcia releasing music under his own name for a time, including a follow-up called ‘4 The Ladies’, which was eventually released as part of a limited vinyl run in 2020, before landing on Garcia’s album, ‘XXV’, in December. But, far from a one-hit wonder, he went on to work under a number of different aliases. Through arguably the most well-known, Corrupted Cru with Mike Kenny, he would help popularise the 2-step sound that acted as a precursor to grime and dubstep. By 1999, he’d bought a studio in Wandsworth Workshops, where he had recorded his early releases, using an advance from a publishing deal. 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. 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.

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. 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.” 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. Caspar It’s certainly felt like that over the past few years if you think about the whole narrative of Brexit and the whole idea of Britain wanting to get great again and sever its ties with Johnny Foreigner, and it really felt like London was different. And you could tell that in the narrative because London was often put up as this elite space which gets all the funding, and the Westminster Bubble or the Islington bubble. All of that kind of stuff. And there was an element of truth to that. We’ve got a left-wing mayor. We did have Boris Johnson as mayor, but, generally, we have more left-wing politics. We have a more welcoming attitude to strangers because it’s a city full of people who aren’t from here, frankly, and that gives it a special character. So I do think there’s something quite special about the character of London. Dubber That’s a healthy relationship with contemporary music. But I’m interested in the… Because you mentioned a couple of key maybe even trigger words, which are ‘democratising’ and ‘emancipatory nature’ basically of stuff that I like, which is the cultural studies default position of…

Garcia started going to clubs like Club UK in Wandsworth and Garage City at Satellite Club — which would eventually become The Colosseum, home to legendary UK garage night Twice As Nice. “There was no such thing as UK garage then,” he continues. “Garage was US garage... It was really vocal, gospel almost, and very, very soulful. The stuff I was gravitating towards in the shop was a bit more dubby, and it would be the B-side of big gospel records that would have a little chopped-up vocal. But you’d speed them up, because they naturally sounded better [that way].”

Caspar No. Or a sociologist or a… Hence these incredibly long titles for these classes and a lot of students writing in saying “That sounds really interesting. Can you explain what it actually is? What will I be? What will be on my certificate when I come out of here?”. And these are all slightly difficult to answer questions, which I think indicate a big change in the university sector but also in the job sector, which is there is no one job you’re going to go and get. Is it sustainable? What I say to the students and what I actually believe is that you need to be realistic about your desire to make money doing exactly what you want and balance that with… I know these days they call it a side hustle or something like that, but I waited tables for fifteen years while I was a music journalist. I never made money as a music journalist or a radio DJ or even a club DJ. Not proper money, enough to pay the rent, so I waited tables. I worked as a barman. Caspar Absolutely. And I still feel the lure of credentialising, and everyone… I feel this for UK jazz at the moment. I’m really worried about UK jazz because of the way in which people can jump on it, lay claim to it. There’s talk at the moment about “Should UK jazz acts ally with brands?”, because this is a big thing that happens in the music scape, isn’t it? And some people are saying “No. That’s selling out.”, and other people are saying “No, no. The problem is that there is no sustainable economy within UK jazz outside of the public funding it’s received. But that’s a success story for a certain kind of public funding over the last ten or fifteen years, but it’s very vulnerable. How is it going to achieve autonomy? Maybe allying with Nike or some designer is the way to go.”.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). And the first thing you realise is it’s grim, it’s cold, it’s dirty, and people aren’t very friendly. So there’s the first set of experiences. And then you realise that, actually, under that grim surface there’s a common culture because we all have to wait for the busses together, use the same grimy tube stations and corner shops, so there’s a sort of “We’re all in it together.” thing. And then under the surface again is this incredible, slightly hidden away, slightly… You might say elitist, but it’s not quite elitist, but it’s not that easy to find. But once you do find it… You go down a grimy set of stairs and you open a door, and then you step into an amazing cultural ferment. And I’m describing club culture here, but there are all kinds of… There’s the Soho boho seedy culture. There are interesting things going on in very uninteresting looking places in a very, very large city. 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 you’ve got figures like James Brown within rare groove, who’s absolutely pivotal. He’s a key songwriter. He’s a key producer. He’s a key band leader. He’s a key rhythmic genius who instils these ideas into his band who then go off… They go and work in lots of other genres. One generation of his band leaves because they’re pissed off not getting well paid, so he brings in Bootsy and Catfish and reinvents the J.B.’s. So there’s a story there. Stevie Wonder. A whole series of great artists.