All Things Remembered (eBook)

A6. The Dorian Gray of Fucking Breakbeat

So where am I? Going to the 2017 NME Awards at Brixton Academy, that’s where; thinking back over some of the gigs that have happened there, right through the whole history of British music. Like the time I was DJing as a support act for the Sex Pistols’ reunion tour in 2008. I collected £38 in 2p and 10p coins, and even the odd £1 (which must have come from people with more money than sense), thrown by a crowd of disgruntled punk fans who didn’t like fucking drum ’n’ bass music.

When you’re catching coins in your baseball cap while another one whistles past your ear, you can’t help thinking, ‘Come on, sunshine, you guys seem to have forgotten what punk’s all about: it’s meant to be about setting the fucking cat among the pigeons, isn’t it?’ That’s what drum ’n’ bass was, too – a different way of channelling the same impulse to give the system the middle finger. But drum ’n’ bass was punk without the voice, so the resonance of the sound itself was doing the work, and the way that conveyed the emotion of how we felt was almost like fucking Braille.

Part of me realised that one reason John Lydon and the guys had said, ‘Goldie, we want you to come and support the tour,’ was because they knew their crowd were going to be very, very angry about it – ‘We want them to be upset before we come onstage.’ ‘Job done, thank you very much.’ Next time they should just play ‘(Is This the Way to) Amarillo’ – they might get an even better result.

Another part of me was never going to just lie down and take it. I thought, ‘I’ll tell you what, I want to fucking stick the knife in: I’m going to play Public Image Ltd – John Lydon’s solo project, which all Pistols fans fucking hate – because this is pissing me off now.’ So while everyone was throwing coins at me waiting for the Pistols to come onstage, I was playing them PIL, which had been the end of the story the first time around. That’s what I call being a proper fucking upstart!

Anyway, the point of going back to the NME Awards and doing the red carpet for the first time in ages is to announce that I have a new album – The Journey Man – ready to be released later in the year. It’s good, after being away from the UK in Thailand for a while, to see how people still look at me, as if I put them on edge a bit when I talk to them.

Someone says, ‘Fuck me! You don’t age.’

‘Yeah, I know. I’m Benjamin fucking Button. I’m also the Dorian Gray of fucking breakbeat: I keep a very grotesque fucking portrait of me locked away in chains in a fucking room, and every time I bring one EDM motherfucker down to his knees, the picture gets a little bit more beautiful!’

Technically, I’m there to hand out an award for Best Female Artist, where twenty years before I was being given a BRAT Award for Best Dance Act. Twenty years ago! Go figure that: I’m still here now, as ruthless as ever with my viewpoints, and even more clear about how I feel about the industry. So I go out onstage and I say, ‘Listen, guys – twenty fucking years ago I was given this award ...’ and the NME Awards at that time, you have to remember, were almost a piss-take of what was going on in the overground, in terms of them saying, ‘We’re going to have our own fucking awards, because you lot ain’t listening to what’s going on in the real underground ...’ Obviously, part of that was just their way of defining their own position, but it worked out well, so God fucking bless you, NME. I still have that award today; it’s a middle finger sticking up.

So this time around I say to the crowd, ‘Look, I want you guys out there to give it the fucking middle finger – show me your fucking middle finger like a junglist would show you the fucking lighter in a club,’ and half of them start putting their fingers up, but the others are a little too conservative and would really rather not.

Now it’s grime that they’re saying is the new punk. The NME always have to say things are ‘the new punk’ – it’s the only way they can feel like they understand them, and I get that. It makes more sense with grime, too, because the angry voices are there, so in a way the echo is clearer to pick up than it was with drum ’n’ bass. But let’s not forget where we’ve come from. It’s an evolution, the same way poster art is an evolution from graffiti. But you can’t understand the later one without understanding the earlier one.

At the peak of graffiti in New York, when the best subway art was being made, if you look at great pieces like Children of the Grave by Dondi, and some of the stuff Seen did, do you know why those pieces happened? Because they had two weeks – even three weeks – in the yards, because the New York subway system at the peak of summer was on strike, in a fight with New York’s council and the mayor’s office. The unions stopped the trains, so all the cats and the blues brothers and the fucking beautiful people in the Bronx, and the kids whose moms were on fucking angel dust and whose dads were on fucking crack, so their mothers and fathers have fallen away and the streets were now their parents – the gangs and the crack and violence became the father, and the art became the mother – they went in there and they painted those fucking trains. Because they wanted to voice their opinions.

And do you know what? They weren’t even saying, ‘Put up our wages,’ or ‘Stop the fucking bomb.’ All they were saying was, ‘I have a fucking name’ – ‘My name’s Dondi’, ‘My name’s Seen’, ‘My name’s fucking Lee’, ‘My name’s fucking NOC 167’, ‘My name’s fucking Style Wars’. All these guys wanted was to just say their names, because that’s the only thing they’d fucking got – like dogs pissing on a lamppost. Except this lamppost was moving – put your name on the right train and it would carry your identity all the way through the tunnels from the Bronx to Queens. It was like the first internet.

Anyway, those guys had all the time in the world in those train yards. Because people didn’t associate car paint with graffiti, they could steal the stuff by the shit-load, racking up cans and cans and cans. But flash forward a few years, and all that’s changed. Big Brother’s got the upper hand and CCTV cameras are watching you. At that point you saw what’s beautiful about the way culture adapts, because people who’d been getting advertising shoved down their throat 24/7 in the city their whole lives started thinking, ‘We can advertise art in another way – cut and paste, poster art, do it graphically, prepare it on a computer, cut it out on a stencil, take it there, job done.’ That’s where someone like Banksy’s been very fucking clever, because you go there with your stencil, bam, put it away and you’re out of there.

The analogy works another way, too, because I think drum ’n’ bass music did for electronic dance music in Britain what graffiti did for the art world in general. We kicked the fucking doors off and changed the fucking system completely. So when people are talking about ‘grime this’ and ‘grime that’, they are really talking about drum ’n’ bass too, even if they don’t know it. The people making the music know it – Dizzee (for me he stands alone, way ahead of everyone else), Kano, Skepta (who I’ve done a track with), and let’s not forget the godfather of grime, Wiley. Me and Wiley have got a lot in common, and not just the fact that we’re both a bit nuts.

I’m standing there talking to him and he tells me, ‘Yeah, man, you’re our godfather. You, Nicky Blackmarket, Ray Keith, you brought us in.’ DJ Target from Roll Deep is standing next to him going, ‘G, you know this,’ and so he should be, because he was a fucking intern at Metalheadz, and now he’s interviewing me on Radio 1. That’s what I love about music – if you stay in the game long enough, some of the seeds you planted will start to come through.

You can’t plant seeds on a candy road – the soil’s got to be ploughed up for them to germinate, and that’s why you need bad times as well as good times. It’s got to be underground as well as overground. That’s why grime is going to last – because it’s been under the surface long enough. It came up on the back of garage and then it went back under the surface after the initial wave. And now you’ve got people like Stormzy and Skepta taking it on.

If you look at how grime grew out of the speed-garage thing – which in turn came out of drum ’n’ bass and good UK soul – it’s beautiful how that evolution happens. That UK garage vibe was like the lover’s rock of grime, just slightly out of time, slightly out of sync – all those guys at fucking Twice as Nice on a Sunday night. Then next thing you know, bam! The more underground side of the garage raves turned into So Solid Crew getting to number one with ‘21 Seconds’ and turning the music industry on its head by...