Lines of Connection: An Interview with Bass, Mids, Tops Author Joe Muggs

Joe Muggs talks to Stewart Gardiner about his essential collection of extended interviews on soundsystem culture

Music scenes and styles do not develop in straight, continuous lines and therefore narrative interpretations pieced together after the fact can sometimes feel like an imposition upon what really went down. Bass, Mids, Tops (Strange Attractor Press) on the other hand feels as if it gets closer to the truth by not trying to present one in singular form. Joe Muggs has shrugged off the natural disposition of the oral history writer and allowed his interviewees the space to tell their own stories at length. He provides context with pre-interview profiles for each subject and the evocative portraits shot by Brian David Stevens act as visual portals into their worlds. The interviews are presented in roughly chronological order, although the narrative is necessarily unstable and time streams do cross – in Ghostbusters terms there would be a calamitous chain reaction, but it all comes together rather beautifully here.

Bass, Mids, Tops is a fascinating compendium of voices, to be taken individually or together – although I would challenge anyone not to read it cover to cover, for the cumulative effect of these stories is incredibly compelling. Joe Muggs is a passionate and knowledgeable host – these are people who shook his world and continue to do so, with “almost every one of them still working on the rave frontline”. Reading Bass, Mids, Tops feels like taking a trip to that frontline. The book is back in print after the initial run sold out earlier this year, so it felt like the right time to open lines of communication with Joe to discuss the stories behind the soundsystems.

Thanks for taking the time to answer some questions, particularly with everything that’s going on. These are weird and frightening times we’re living in. What’s life like for you at the moment? Any particular music that’s keeping you going?

Life’s OK thanks, keeping head above water at least. Anxiety is a constant, but I guess that’s just how things are now. I’m incredibly lucky to have managed to keep working; obviously everything is precarious all the time – but as an eternal freelancer, I’m used to having that worry as a given, and pushing it to the back of my head, living as if everything’s OK. “Pull the wool over your own eyes” as the Church of the SubGenius like to say. Also I live in the countryside so there’s a little bit more literal breathing space, which again I feel very privileged to have. And yeah, music helps. I alternate between the incredibly soothing ambient / neo soul / shoegaze / country stuff I put on my Soft Music for Hard Times playlists, and brutal cathartic noise. It’s always good when I can twist work into an excuse to blast a furious racket, as when I had to listen to Slayer’s whole discography on repeat for the Guardian, or doing a survey of all the old school jungle labels on Bandcamp.

Things seem to be getting worse with the world, but there are also slivers of hope creeping through as to what things could be like afterwards. What’s club culture going to look like after this? What things can be done as a community?

A wise man once said “things can always get worse”. I dunno, it’s totally possible that scorched earth capitalists will buy up all the venues for a song after they go bust, that music will become even more the province of the independently wealthy who don’t need to worry about money, that all the worst trends we’ve seen in recent years will be accelerated. But then again, it’s always incredible how grassroots culture can thrive in, and provide alternatives to, adversity. There were already positive trends too. I think even before Black Lives Matter took hold as a rallying cry there were already movements within UK music to recognise unsung Black and other ethnic minority talent, and likewise with LGBTQ+ musicians, DJs and spaces, and opportunities for women to do things on their own terms, there seems to be way more diversity of options certainly than back in the 90s. I don’t think these movements to get voices heard are going to die down, and I think things will be better for it. If some of the movements to create community-oriented music spaces that have happened increasingly keep going too, we might end up remembering that our subcultures aren’t just excuses to bounce around a few square metres of dancefloor for X amount of hours at an allotted time of the week, they’re what we are, they’re our families and our ways of being in the world.

It’s interesting that you didn’t take the usual approach of music oral histories, whereby a narrative is shaped from snippets of interviews dispersed throughout the text. Your approach places the subjects before an overarching narrative. There are however narrative arcs built into each interview and over the course of the book a larger narrative does indeed emerge. Is it fair to say this is what you were aiming for? Can you talk about your conception of Bass, Mid, Tops and how you wanted to approach it?

Thank you, it means a lot to know that all comes over: you sum up very well what we were hoping for. I was asked recently if this approach couldn’t just end up with something that could easily be a series of magazine features – and yes, it could, but it wouldn’t be the same. This could, I guess, have been serialised, but I really wanted it to be contained between two covers, for people to read it as a single thing, and for those common themes to emerge. I suppose I felt I’d read one too many books by white dude music journalists explaining how history happened, and I wanted something that’s a bit more “show don’t tell”.

The book really feels alive. It gets close to the people involved in the music and the results therefore have a uniquely human power. Is that something you were hoping to achieve?

Again thank you! The other thing about putting these portraits together in one book is to try and draw the reader into thinking about how lives overlap. I spent two years doing a Creative & Life Writing masters degree quite a few years back, and most of that was wrangling with how you can depict scenes that are hypersocial by nature. How can you do justice to something that involves so many bodies and lives and voices and their interactions when you are just one person with one viewpoint? I don’t think I ever really got any answers back then when I was studying, but it left me with nagging questions that eventually led me to this book. The extended interview is about letting each voice breathe and show itself, so it merges with Brian’s photos to give a 3D portrait – but it’s also about the conversation, because music scenes and social groups are constructed out of endless, endless conversations as much as they are out of events, or artefacts, or abstract ideas. The rambling conversation is the flesh and blood of subculture, and having multiple conversations with their overlapping threads start to feel like you’re in the thick of it. And it kind of let me put myself in there in an honest way too, I’m not pretending to be some all-seeing fount of neutral knowledge, I’m another person in the mix with my biases and quirks and stories like the others!

How long did the book take to put together and what were the challenges in doing so? You had interviewed many of the subjects at different points over the years, but nevertheless the logistics alone must have been a mammoth task.

It’s really hard to put a time on it, it fell together very gradually. Brian and I had worked on a website together starting in 2010 that used the theme of lengthy interviews and his pictures – and indeed some of the relationships with interviewees in the book started right then – but it was such an open ended thing that it was hard to keep momentum with. As Duke Ellington supposedly said, “I don’t need inspiration, I need deadlines!” So it went through various iterations – I tried pitching a BBC4 series, doing extended articles on UK bass history etc etc etc, then one publisher picked us up for what would have been a much slimmer, more pamphletty affair, and Sonos Studios (as was) offered to host an exhibition, so we started work in earnest at that point. Unfortunately Sonos Studios closed, and the publisher’s accountants said they couldn’t do it… but then I remembered I was Facebook friends with Mark Pilkington of Strange Attractor after having been to some of his events, so I got in contact and he basically said “I don’t really know this subject matter but you sound like you know what you’re talking about, go for it!” I think that was early 2016 and we got the book out at the end of last year… I have to shout out my transcriber Joe Gamp here, as he did many many hours on this, then I had untold time checking names, footnoting, cross referencing etc etc. There was a six month period round Xmas 2018 when I was doing a three day a week copywriting job, but other than that, literally every waking moment except for weekends was spent down the Bass, Mids, Tops rabbit hole. It was a trip.

I imagine it was difficult deciding who to feature in the book! How did you choose?

Picking Dennis Bovell as the starting point was one of the moments when it all fell together. Thinking of him as the original intersection between Caribbean music (playing straight reggae with Matumbi and his Sufferer Sound system), uniquely British versions thereof (as one of the inventors of lovers’ rock), and alternative / underground / dance music (producing The Pop Group, The Slits, Orange Juice, Ryuichi Sakamoto and various boogie/funk classics) drew together all the threads that I saw running through jungle, dubstep and on to the present day. Certain people I knew already (Terror Danjah, Zed Bias, Noodles, Sarah Lockhart, Youth, Shy One) and knew the combination of being connected and creative with their conversation style would be perfect. Then it started being a pragmatic process of filling in the gaps historically, geographically, making sure we had enough women’s voices, and so on. There were people who we almost got, but slipped through our fingers – Daddy G from Massive Attack, James Blake, Ms Dynamite and Neneh Cherry spring to mind. But it worked out, I think.

The first three sections feature progenitors Dennis Bovell, Norman Jay and Adrian Sherwood, which grounds the narrative and provides context for what follows. Considering how bass music is constantly moving forwards, splintering into diverse genres, it’s a thrill to know that figures such as these remain not only active but vital. Your book successfully fuses past, present and future – was that something you were keen to illustrate? How important was it to start with these figures?

Yeah as I say, Dennis was the keystone. He made the whole concept make sense. Sherwood I had to have as discovering Dub Syndicate, Bim Sherman and Prince Far I at the same time as his work with industrial / electro stuff like Tackhead, Nine Inch Nails and Depeche Mode as a 15 year old was foundational for me and made me understand the conduits between these different areas. Norman Jay… is Norman Jay! A scholar of club culture and an emblem of the kind of Britishness I wanted to talk about. But then we can’t talk about that older generation in the book without mentioning Tony Thorpe and Youth too. Both I discovered as a young raver through their work with The KLF and The Orb (among many other things), and only later traced back to what they’d each done in the postpunk era, so again they helped me understand the lines of connection…

I started reading Bass, Mids, Tops not long after Andrew Weatherall died. His name kept coming up and he emerges as an important figure in the background. By piecing these mentions together I could almost imagine a Weatherall section in an alternate version of the book. Did you ever consider featuring him? How important was he in piecing together disparate sounds and scenes?

Oh fucking hell yes. Brian actually pushed quite hard for it, and I vetoed it for reasons I can’t quite work out now, but something vaguely to do with not wanting to slant the book too much towards the white techno / alternative dance music world. It doesn’t really make much sense in retrospect and I kick myself frequently it didn’t happen. The grim irony is I’d got to know Weatherall quite well in the time we were piecing together the book, interviewed him and hung out a fair bit… Worse still, after the Bass, Mids, Tops launch, Brian and I were talking about a follow-up and how we could theme it, and the one thing we agreed was that Weatherall would be central to it. That was about two weeks before he died. As to his influence, don’t get me started. I’ve been a full-bore fan for his whole career – two thirds of my life – and I could talk about his importance for as long. It’s still very raw to be honest, but rather than go off on one, perhaps I could direct you to a mailout I did collecting tributes to him, and to the tribute event I took part in in March?

As well as an interview, each subject is given a short profile and is photographed by Brian David Stevens. It’s an evocative combination that really sets the scene. Can you talk a little about Brian’s involvement and what his photographs bring to the text?

I’ve known Brian for, oh jeez, about 20 years now. And he’s incredible at what he does. His photos of WWII veterans are mind-blowing, if you ever get the chance to see them full size and up close, it’s one of the most intense experiences you can have with photography. They really showed me how much a photo can show the stories in a face. So having worked with him on a couple of projects, his approach really was vital to the gradual (no pun intended) coming into focus of the book. It was always conceived with the photographs and text working together. Again, it’s about coming as close as possible to actually “meeting” the people, instead of having us tell you about them, if that makes any sense.

I’m very fond of the DJ Storm section – it’s particularly inspiring when she relates the Kemistry & Storm origin story. Were there any breakthrough moments during the interviews where you felt the book was really coming together?

Yeah that was certainly one. Sometimes when you’re conducting an interview you have no idea how good it actually is, because you’re focusing on the moment, but editing that one, it absolutely sizzled off the page. Same with the T Williams one, because not only do you get his character from the off, and not only is he super erudite about the minutiae of generations of soundsystem music that he was involved with from childhood on, but his articulacy in spelling out the way structural racism shows itself in the relationship between music scenes absolutely bowled me over. I didn’t realise it in the moment – like the Storm interview that one was done over the phone on a crackly line from my garage at home – but reading it back, it was a definite “oh yes this is the shit” moment.

The interviews document changing times. For example, at one point Dego of 4 Hero talks about how they used to send out 300 promo records, but nowadays that’s a release. Was documenting these changes important to you?

Absolutely, but through those small details rather than talking about world shaking events. The little details of recording pirate radio on C90 cassettes, or having to wait at home for a phonecall, or growing up in what Barely Legal called “the Limewire years” of early music downloading all add up to show social and technological change happening without having to spell it out.

There are a number of essential recent works that engage with rave culture and re-contextualise it, not least by highlighting the importance of soundsystems. As well as Bass, Mids, Tops, I’m thinking of Matt Anniss’s Join the Future (which I spoke to him about) and Jeremy Deller’s Everybody in the Place documentary. Is Bass, Mids, Tops part of something larger in this regard? Do you feel a responsibility to help correct prevailing narratives about UK dance music’s origin story?

Yeah I hope it’s part of something! Just from the last couple of years I’d add the Saatchi acid house exhibition which had some surprisingly good stuff in, especially about the Spiral Tribe type traveller-rave axis, Caspar Mellville’s It’s a London Thing, the Dub London thing that the Museum of London are doing, Joy White’s work on grime and drill, loads of rave / jungle guys like Jumpin Jack Frost and Uncle Dugs doing their memoirs, Emma Warren’s Make Some Space, Mykaell Riley’s Bass Culture research project at the University of Westminster, and before all of this the work of Lloyd Bradley in Sounds Like London and Bass Culture and Dan Hancox’s Inner City Pressure – there’s certainly a growing interest in club/underground/soundsystem culture that is more than just the turning of the generational wheel, and I hope continues. I’ve actually interviewed Deller about this, twice in fact – and I’ve talked at some length to Anniss about it too… Obviously that’s a lot of dudes involved, many of us white dudes, and what I hope is that the number and type of voices in this conversation multiplies massively – which is in some senses hard given the hard times that culture journalism is fallen on these days, but we all need to work hard on amplifying the maximum number of voices.

I was drawn to Bass, Mids, Tops because of some of the music I’ve followed over the years – hip hop, the Bristol sound, Mo’ Wax, drum & bass, house, techno – and wanting to dig deeper into its roots in soundsystem culture. Your book certainly delivers in this regard. But it also really spoke to me where you’re dealing with musical paths I didn’t follow – such as UK garage, dubstep, grime. By adding personal, insider narratives to Simon Reynolds’s “hardcore continuum”, you really pulled the pieces together for me. I imagine you would have been aware that readers would approach Bass, Mids, Tops with different sets of musical interests and might well dip into the sections that aligned with their interests. Was that ever a concern or is it, by design, a book that people can read in different ways?

It’s definitely meant to be read however you want. Keep it by the bog and dip into it. Go through it with a highlighter pen and follow every footnote. Try and listen to every track mentioned in it as you read (I’ve made a nine hour playlist of related tracks, but it doesn’t map exactly to the book). Leave it on a bus. Do anything you like, I’m just happy if you pay money for it really. But yeah, the hope is always that whatever your interest it’ll draw you back and forwards into those other areas and start to see the longer, deeper threads that make this culture something to really cherish and want to keep alive.

Order Bass, Mids, Tops from Strange Attractor