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Zomby - Euphoria (Where Were U In ‘92?, Werk Discs, 2008)
Kode9 talking about the UK hardcore continuum at Red Bull Music Academy, Melbourne 2006:
“Yeah, it’s what happened when acid house in the UK collided with Afro-Carribean music culture in London in particular. So it is dub, reggae and dancehall. And when these collided in the early ‘90s you got hardcore and then, most importantly for me, jungle, ‘93, ‘94, drum ‘n’ bass, UK garage, currently grime and dubstep. So the hardcore continuum is a way of understanding that evolution of music, because they are all kind of similar in a way. All different speeds, but at the same time coming from a similar place and always using pirate radio as a media platform.”
Pirate radio, the sound for the underground.
An extract from Simon Reynolds’ Energy Flash: A Journey Through Rave Music and Dance Culture (Pan Macmillan, 1998):
“All through the Nineties, London’s ‘ardkore rave and jungle pirate stations have disrupted the decorum of the FM airwaves with their vulgar fervour and rude-boy attitude. Pirate DJ’s unleash a mad multi-generic mash-up of hip hop breakbeats, dub-reggae bass and Euro-rave synth-bombast. The MC surfs this polyrhythmic pandemonium with a freestyle Dada-doggerel of druggy buzzwords, party-hard exhortations and outlaw war-cries: sublime ‘nonsense’ that is purely invocatory, designed to bind its scattered addressees into a community, mobilise it into an army.”
Where were you in ‘92?
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Rum & Black - Fuck The Legal Stations (Fuck The Legal Stations / I’m Not In Love, Shut Up And Dance, 1990)
Shut Up & Dance’s PJ and Smiley as Rum & Black — 100% vol., without ice. Samples from Prince’s Let’s Go Crazy and Ice Cube’s Turn Off The Radio.
Philip ‘PJ’ Johnson and Carl ‘Smiley’ Hyman ran their own small North London sound system along with friend DJ Hype. Initially the music had been strictly Reggae but after Smiley had visited his mum who lived in New York in 1986, they began to drop the occasional hip-hop tune into their set. This developed further as they then started MCing in Jamaican style over the breaks. By 1988, PJ and Smiley had begun to make records as Shut Up & Dance. As avid hip-hop dancers both PJ and Smiley initially wanted to make what they called ‘fast hip-hop’, (mirroring the speed of the break in old funk tunes) so they were somewhat surprised when a friend told them that a record they had made was being played at an acid house club. It was indeed true and soon they began to hear their music being played on all the pirate radio stations. Although they never really got involved in the rave scene they started to make records for it. In their own minds they made records with ‘one-side house, one-side hip-hop’. In fact they were making proto-jungle and when they joined forces with their MC heroes from their youth, The Ragga Twins, they paved the way for the union of Rave and Reggae culture. [1]
