Category Archives: Drum’n’bass

‘Music dug up from under the earth’: how trip-hop never stopped

Posted on by

Fused from jungle, rave and soul, trip-hop filled the coffee tables of the 90s, and is now inspiring Billie Eilish’s generation. So why is the term so despised by many?

Nobody really wanted to be trip-hop. The stoner beats of Nightmares on Wax’s 1995 Smokers Delight album were era defining, but it carried the prominent legend: “THIS IS NOT TRIP HOP”. James Lavelle’s Mo’ Wax label flirted with the term after it was coined by Mixmag in 1994, but quickly switched to displaying it ostentatiously crossed out on their sleeves. Ninja Tune did print the phrase “triphoptimism” on a king size rolling paper packet in 1996, but only as a joke about escaping categories.

“I always disliked the term,” says Lou Rhodes of Lamb, “and I would always make a point in interviews of challenging its use in regard to Lamb.” Mark Rae of Rae & Christian similarly says: “I would give a score of 9/10 on the lazy journalist scale to anyone who placed us in the trip-hop camp.” And Geoff Barrow’s ferocious hatred of the term – let alone its application to Portishead – has become the stuff of social media legend.

Continue reading...

DJ-producer Sherelle: ‘I feed off people’s unexplained anger’

Posted on by

Black artists pioneered dance music, but the scene remains white-dominated. UK rising star Sherelle is dodging the trolls and trying to make change with her platform Beautiful

Wearing a fleece jacket covered in black and white acid smilies, Sherelle is a walking embodiment of dance music when I meet her. The 27-year-old north Londoner and self-professed “bocat” – a Jamaican slang term used in a derogatory manner to describe someone who enjoys giving cunnilingus, now proudly reappropriated by her on her T-shirts – is one of the UK’s most purely enjoyable new DJs. By blending various global forms of dance music, she is a catalyst for unrestrained raving who has stormed her way into the limelight at 160 beats per minute.

She grew up on dancehall booming out of her mum’s hi-fi system, and hip-hop and R&B music videos on cable TV. “In my house we had cable illegally, because we couldn’t afford to pay for it,” says Sherelle, whose younger self would cringe at her mother and older sister. “Whatever they were watching, they would dance to. I have a graphic image of Beenie Man’s Who Am I, around the time the tune came out, and my mum and sister having the greatest time. I was mortified.”

Continue reading...

Steve McQueen: ‘It’s rebel music that moves me’

Posted on by

The director on the reggae-fuelled house parties he witnessed as a child - lovingly recreated in his new film, Lovers Rock – and how their raw energy shaped his taste in music

Reggae music is the beating heart of Steve McQueen’s Small Axe series, which traces Black British experience from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. In the 1970s, when the characteristically defiant Bob Marley song that gives the series its title was released, McQueen’s aunt, Molly, used to regularly sneak out of her family house in Shepherd’s Bush, west London, on weekend nights to go to “blues parties” – all-nighters usually held in someone’s house.

Back then, the blues party was a staple of West Indian immigrant life in England, a makeshift club-cum-shebeen, usually held in someone’s front room or basement, where, as the night progressed, the sweet smell of ganja merged with the lingering aromas of West Indian home cooking. As an escape from her strict, religious upbringing, Molly would dance until dawn to roots reggae, sweet-sounding “lovers rock” and floor-shaking dub instrumentals.

Continue reading...