Low End Theory: An Interview with Join the Future Author Matt Anniss

Matt Anniss talks to Stewart Gardiner about Join the Future, his essential book on British dance music’s seminal but unsung sound: Bleep & Bass

Join the Future: Bleep Techno and the Birth of British Bass Music (Velocity Press) tells a story that needed to be told. Matt Anniss has crafted an exhaustively researched, convincingly argued narrative where his passion for and knowledge about the music is evident on every page. He makes for a trustworthy guide as he questions British dance music’s prevailing origin story (white-centric, London-focused) and allows a new narrative to emerge through the voices of the producers, DJs and record labels who were involved in Bleep & Bass. A fascinating work that successfully re-frames rave culture, Join the Future is essential reading for anyone interested in the development of electronic music.

We established bunker to bunker communications and I was able to speak with Matt about Bleep & Bass, his five-years-in-the-making book and its accompanying compilation on JD Twitch’s new Cease & Desist imprint.

Hello Matt, hope you’re doing okay. Thanks so much for taking the time to answer some questions.

My pleasure!

These are strange and scary times we find ourselves in. What’s life like for you at the moment? Any particular music that’s helping you get by?

Like everyone else I have periods during lockdown where I find it tough, but I’m trying to use the time productively and keep myself busy to stave off boredom. I’ve been digging into the record collection a lot and dusting off things I’ve not played much of late. While it’s fairly mixed musically – dub, reggae, jazz, ambient, futurist techno, boogie etc – almost all of it is sunny and positive. When times are tough I instinctively reach for positive music. ‘Hard times, soft music,’ as my fellow writer Joe Muggs would put it.

Join the Future feels like a vital book that reveals an important chapter of dance music history. At what point did you realise this was your story to tell?

The idea of it being ‘my story’ to tell is an interesting one, as I’ve always thought that all I was doing was telling other people’s stories, and the story of a vital musical movement, that needed to be told. I’ve said before that when I started researching the 2014 Resident Advisor feature about Bleep, I couldn’t believe nobody had really dug into the style and its significance, because for me it seemed obvious. You never really know as a writer whether it’s your story to tell, though by the time I came to write the bulk of the book last year I was confident that I knew more than anyone else about Bleep and the movement it spurned, primarily because I’d done so much research and spoken to so many people that I’d uncovered facts, stories and anecdotes that weren’t widely known. For whatever reason, nobody had dug into Bleep this much before or set the sound in context properly. If you’re going to make yourself an expert on something it may as well be something overlooked – that way, by documenting it you’re doing the world a service and filling in gaps in our collective musical knowledge.

Could you talk about the process of researching and writing the book? I believe you worked on it over a five-year period – it sounds like a real labour of love.

It was definitely a labour of love, driven on by a desire to find out as much as I could about the music, clubs, DJs and producers, as well as the cities in which they lived. The project began after I wrote a piece for Resident Advisor arguing that Bleep & Bass was the first fully homegrown style of British dance music. That featured quotes from some of the pioneers of the sound – Winston Hazel, Edzy from Unique 3, Gez Varley from LFO, DJ Parrot from Sweet Exorcist and Mark Gamble from Rhythmatic – as well as contemporary DJs and producers who were Bleep nerds. One of those was Optimo’s JD Twitch. We threw around the idea of taking the project further, possibly by putting together a compilation. That came to nothing, so I thought I’d just dig a bit more into aspects of the back story that interested me, such as the soul and electro all-dayers that many of the pioneers I’d spoken to attended when they were teenagers, to try and understand how and why the Bleep sound emerged. I didn’t stop my regular writing work, but I did manage to get commissions to write about some aspects of my ongoing research.

I will admit now that when I started the research process, I thought I knew the story, but within a few months I soon realised I’d barely scratched the surface. That’s why it took over five years from start to finish – gathering all of the info, making the connections and working out a way to tell the story coherently, in a way that both entertains and informs, is long-winded, but also hugely enjoyable.

There were a few significant moments along the way that are worth mentioning, specifically an email I received out of the blue in early 2016 or 2017 from three graphic design students in Leeds. They’d had an idea to create a book about Bleep as their final assessed project, but their interest was in designing it not the words inside. As I was working on the book anyway I agreed under the proviso that they’d help create a ‘proper book’ down the line (for the record, they did – one of them, Kieran Walsh, designed and typeset the finished version that was published by Velocity Press last year). While the version they created and put on display at their graduation show was fairly short – 30,000 words approximately – it had roughly the same structure as the version people can now buy and read. After that I could see what areas were weak, where I needed to learn more and the issues with the narrative that needed addressing.

It would take up an insane amount of space here to explain all the steps I took and what I learned along the way. Handily, I wrote a lengthy piece for the Join the Future website that gives more detail (you can read it here) and offers tips for anyone who wants to research and write a book about dance music. It was inspired by the “How to Document Your Culture” coda in Emma Warren’s superb book on London’s Total Refreshment Centre, Make Some Space – a title I would encourage everyone to read.

How difficult was it to track down everyone you interviewed? Were people (for the most part) happy to talk about that time in their lives?

In many cases it was easy and potential interviewees responded well, though in some instances I did need to explain in detail why I was doing it and why I thought it was important to tell their story. I managed to contact some of these people online through mutual friends, or by sending speculative emails or Facebook messages. There were some examples of people being tough to track down though.

I think the biggest example is Martin Williams AKA DJ Martin, who those who have read the book will tell you was genuinely a pivotal figure in the story of the sound’s emergence in Leeds and later Yorkshire as a whole. I knew he was important because he was mentioned a lot in interviews, but most of those I spoke to had not seen or heard from him in years, as Martin had stepped back from music in 1991 or 92. One interviewee even told me he thought he was dead.

While scouring Discogs for info, I spotted that someone calling himself DJ Homes – real name Homer Harriott – had posted some information in the ‘reviews’ section of a record featuring remixes the two of them had done of Man Machine’s “Animal”. I then spent the next hour trying to find Homer on Facebook, and by a process of elimination struck on what I was pretty sure was his account. I messaged him explaining who I was and what I was doing, then waited. About a month later Homer replied to my message, including his number. I called and a few days later drove up to Leeds from Sheffield, where I was staying for a week with my parents in order to conduct ‘in person’ interviews and met him in a café in Chapel Allerton.

Homer filled me in on his story and a little about Martin. It was one of the most enjoyable and exciting interviews I’ve ever done, primarily because I felt like I was making real progress in understanding how the Bleep scene in Leeds, which had never really been written about or documented, took shape. Eventually I plucked up the courage to ask what happened to Martin, explaining that I’d been told he had died. Homer laughed and said, “No, I spoke to him this morning! Would you like to talk to him?”

I was like a kid in a sweet shop. Martin was good enough to agree to meet me the next day in the very same space. He was – and is still – a very inspirational guy for a lot of reasons, but also very helpful. He introduced me to a number of people he worked with back in the day and put in a good word, in order to secure me more interviews. I’m so happy that I’ve managed to share his story in the book because it’s remarkable and he deserves a lot of credit – after all, he played a vital role in the making of arguably the two most perfect Bleep tunes of all, LFO’s “LFO” (he was a founder member and it was recorded in his home studio) and Ability II’s “Pressure Dub”.

Is it accurate to say that Velocity Press is the natural home for Join the Future? It’s a publisher I’m certainly excited about right now.

100%. Without Colin Steven at Velocity Press the book may never have been published, or I’d still be working on it. When he came along, explained his plans for Velocity Press and offered to publish Join the Future, I had no hesitation in signing on the dotted line. I’ve long thought there was room in the market for a specialist publisher focusing on books about electronic music and club culture, so when Colin told me that’s what he was planning I wanted to be involved. He has some brilliant titles lined up, is great to work with and really knows what he’s doing. He also backed me all the way and could see what I was trying to do from the start, which is something that can’t be said for other publishers I pitched to. They didn’t really ‘get it’ or thought that they wouldn’t sell nearly enough copies, which for a bigger publisher is naturally a worry. It was a risk for Colin to take a punt on Join the Future but he didn’t see it that way. I’ll always be thankful for that.

Optimo’s JD Twitch provides the introduction. He mentions the two of you bonding over and “out-nerding” each other about Bleep & Bass through the years. Did you chance on this shared love of Bleep and were those conversations an inspiration on what became Join the Future?

To be honest, I can’t actually remember when it was we first talked about Bleep, though it was probably a decade ago. I was introduced to him and Optimo partner Jonnie Wilkes by a good friend in Bristol. We sat in legendary local boozer The Bell in Stokes Croft for a few hours before one of their gigs and for some reason Bleep came up. I kept in touch with Keith [JD Twitch] after that, so when I came to write the Resident Advisor piece on Bleep, he was my first port of call. After I interviewed him, we got into a lengthy discussion in which he started mentioning records and Bleep-era micro-scenes around the world I knew nothing about.

In the weeks that followed the idea of doing a Bleep compilation was mooted. We exchanged ideas and worked on this for a bit before we were turned down by the label we were in discussions with. This was 2015. In the years since we’ve spoken a lot and I’ve kept him updated about what I’d found out, the people I’d spoken to and so on. From quite early in the process I knew I wanted him to write a foreword, so when I finished writing the manuscript Keith was the second person to see it after Colin. Suffice to say he loved it, which given the role he played in encouraging me to do it was a great moment.

Twitch writes that your book “challenges some of the supposed orthodoxies of the history of the evolution of dance music in this country in the late 80s, a history many pivotal marginal voices have previously been written out of.” Was part of the reason behind writing the book to try and correct the standard London-centric narrative and allow these marginal voices to be heard?

Definitely. There’s a tendency in documented history to over-simplify narratives, focus on a handful of individuals – normally those with a high profile for whatever reason – and distil quite complex, multi-layered stories into ‘X did Y and then Z happened’. Cultural history is just the same, and the horrendously over-simplified version of the rise of house, techno and Ecstasy-fuelled dance music in the UK in the late 80s and early 90s is a particularly bad example of this in my opinion. Lots of important things happened in and around London in that period, though it’s only now, via books like Caspar Melville’s It’s a London Thing, that the real stories are being told.

The thing is, the history of London club culture and the history of UK club culture are different things, and while London had a vibrant scene during the acid house era that movement was something that initially started elsewhere – primarily the Midlands and North to begin with – and swept through the whole of Britain. There’s also a tendency to tell UK dance music history in a white-centric way, as if it only started when white people from the suburbs started taking pills, whereas there had been a crucial scene in primarily black clubs for years before that (with minimal drug use in comparison).

It’s also important to differentiate between the history of dance music and the history of the club culture in which the music was played and danced to. Hyped events happening in and around London – Shoom, Future, Clink Street, big raves etc – may have been influential to how certain types of music developed, such as breakbeat hardcore, but they had little or no impact on what people were making elsewhere in the UK, as their experiences and the blend of musical influences was different. Breakbeat hardcore – the origins of ‘rave’ and jungle music – was a very London-centric construct from the start, but many of the earliest records sound like attempted tweaks to the Yorkshire Bleep & Bass blueprint. Once you’ve acknowledged that then it’s hardly a great leap to suggest that Bleep was far more influential than we’ve previously acknowledged and that its marginalised, mostly little-known creators deserve their space in the spotlight.

You describe Bleep & Bass as a heavyweight style first forged in Bradford, Leeds and Sheffield that was as forward-thinking as the earlier sounds from Chicago and Detroit. These northern cities have more in common with their American counterparts than London, right? Was the London focus mainly down to where the music press was situated?

To a certain extent the London focus was down to where the music press was situated, but the wider media rarely looking beyond the boundaries of the M25 has long been a problem in the UK. The city and the home counties that surround it sucks in people, money, jobs and oxygen to the detriment of Britain at large. While it’s still an issue, it was even more marked in the 1980s, when the de-industrialization of the UK economy ripped the heart and soul out of vast swathes of the country – not just Yorkshire, the North West and the North East, but also South Wales, Scotland and parts of the Midlands. Youth unemployment soared and poverty was rife.

The fate of cities like Bradford, Leeds and Sheffield in particular in this period echoed what had been happening in some US cities, particularly Detroit. While the support offered by the benefits system, which was nowhere nearly as harsh as it is in 2020, did allow unemployed working-class young people to devote more of their time to creative endeavours, poverty was still rife and these cities were a shadow of their former selves. The escapism of dance music culture can help in situations like this, but Yorkshire’s cities were still depressing places to live at that time.

Everyone is a product of their environment to some extent, and by extension art created within a certain environment will take some inspiration from it – hence the industrial sounds of Cabaret Voltaire in the 1970s and early 70s later being replaced by more skeletal Bleep & Bass techno tracks that more accurately reflect the ghostly structures of shuttered shops, closed steel mills and abandoned warehouses rather than their bustling former selves. It’s probably for this reason too that a number of interviewees told me that the music played in Sheffield clubs was ‘harder’ during the Bleep era than it was elsewhere in the UK.

Sheffield is probably the closest thing Britain has to an equivalent to Detroit. The originators of Motor City techno drew influence from the angular and industrial electronic music of Sheffield – the Cabs, early Human League and so on – during the period they were creating their earliest music. It makes perfect sense that a later generation of DJs and producers in Sheffield would draw inspiration to the far-sighted, sci-fi-influenced dance music of post-industrial Detroit and put their own spin on it – just as it makes sense that the first dancers to demand Chicago house music in the UK were working class black dancers from the post-industrial Midlands and North.

There’s a great quote in the book taken from an iD magazine article from 1990 in which Jive Turkey resident and Sweet Exorcist member DJ Parrot (now producing for Roisin Murphy under his real name, Richard Baratt) talks about the comparisons between Detroit, Chicago and Sheffield: “Detroit and Chicago are both north American towns. Chicago is a steel town. Sheffield is a northern steel city in England. Work it out for yourself.”

There’s a brilliant line where you say the importance of the Balearic scene “is arguably more cultural and social that musical.” Could you talk a little about that?

This is something that I’ll no doubt get stick for, but I genuinely don’t think that the Ibiza-influenced ‘Balearic Beat’ scene – as it was then called in the UK – was anywhere near as influential in terms of the evolution of UK dance music as some people think. This is in part because it’s a hard thing to pin down musically – Alfredo played all sorts of music at Amnesia – and every single person’s definition of what ‘Balearic’ is would be different. Yes there were some records made inspired by that sunny, baggy, looseness that I’d associate with it – Andrew Weatherall was an absolute master at this during that period and well beyond – but the records and jumbled up musical style that inspired them didn’t directly lead to genuinely revolutionary musical forms as it borrowed from a vast array of styles.

What that Balearic Beat scene did clearly provide was a kind of dress code that would become a fashion movement – dungarees, baggy paisley shirts, long-sleeve t-shirts, the famous ‘acid smiley’ logo and so on. Via media coverage that look spread and quickly became shorthand for the whole acid house/rave movement. It was therefore very important to UK club culture and wider society, but not specifically records being made outside of that London bubble. I think it’s notable that the whole ‘Madchester’ indie-dance fusion thing was tied in to the more Balearic-influenced sound championed at the Hacienda, for example, while Sheffield – a more insular place due to geography and mindset – boasted a club scene and associated house/techno sound that was much harder, sparse and weighty, and a much more limited Balearic influence (even though, somewhat ironically, there’s evidence to suggest that the earliest champions of what would become the ‘Ibiza look’ associated with Shoom etc were football hooligans from the Steel City).

As you discuss in the book, even when Bleep & Bass has been brought up, the emphasis isn’t necessarily what it should be – as in Simon Reynolds’s hardcore continuum. Do you think Reynolds’s concept could usefully be adapted to allow Bleep & Bass a more central place?

For sure. There’s some merit in Simon’s famous ‘hardcore continuum’ theory, I just disagree with him about the starting point and the emphasis he puts on certain things. He’s a fan of Bleep & Bass, but in Energy Flash he considers it as a kind of parallel form of hardcore, whereas I’d argue that it clearly pre-dates hardcore and many early hardcore records were attempted Bleep tunes with breakbeats instead of steppers reggae-influenced techno beats. The issue is, I think, is that his focus – like a lot of writers – is quite London-centric. It’s a lot easier to package an argument if you can say ‘hardcore in London led to darkcore, which led to jungle and other forms of UK bass music that were invented in and around London like UK garage, dubstep and grime’. That’s not accurate, as it discounts other reggae/soundsystem culture-influenced forms of UK music, and especially dance music, that were made elsewhere in the UK before that – Bleep, the Bristol sound etc – and fed into what became hardcore.

You bring up Jeremy Deller’s Everybody in the Place documentary (which I adore) and it got me thinking that Join the Future is another essential recent work that engages with rave culture, re-contextualises it. I’d also include Richard King’s The Lark Ascending and Bass, Mids, Tops by Joe Muggs. Do you feel part of something larger in this regard?

In some ways yes, though while I was working on the book I was only aware of one of those projects being in the works – Joe’s book, which is very different to Join the Future but as you say excellent and well worth reading. Everybody in the Place dropped about a month before I finished writing the book, and I was delighted to see that Jeremy had made some similar arguments and cited the role played by serious dancers and soundsystem culture, as well as the fact that the UK acid house movement had its roots outside London.

What his documentary and the recent spate of books is reflective of is the fact that we’ve previously been spoon-fed a very narrow narrative around rave culture in Britain. While there are some terrific books that were written about it in the late 1990s, most mention some things that we can now see as being important in passing, with little detail. Dance music culture is old enough now, with a wider level of interest within society, for more people to be digging and trying to tell different aspects of the story or analyse it differently. This is undoubtedly a good thing and makes a change from books that re-tread the same old ground. I won’t name names!

If Join the Future has a central figure, then it would have to be Robert Gordon. Could you talk a little about him, how important he is to dance music?

Robert Gordon is as you say a pivotal figure. If you study how scenes develop, you quite often find DJs or producers who play a key role by connecting a number of different people within a city and in some way working with most of them. DJ Martin was that person in Leeds, and Robert was that person in Sheffield. What made Robert different to Martin was that he wasn’t a DJ, but rather a lauded professional producer who had started out as a soundsystem builder. In the years leading up to Bleep and throughout the period, he worked at the FON studio in Sheffield alongside future Moloko member Mark Brydon, getting to a point in 1988-89 when the two of them were producing quite high profile acts such as Pop Will Eat Itself and The Fall (Robert was one of the few people who got on with Mark E Smith).

Robert had connections within the Sheffield reggae soundsystem scene and was friends with Winston Hazel, who was at that point arguably Sheffield’s leading club DJ. Robert really disliked house music but enjoyed techno, so the idea of fusing elements of steppers reggae, techno and electro – three important ingredients of early Bleep tunes – excited him, as did making music that would appeal to both his black and white friends.

Alongside Hazel and his former school friend Sean Maher, Robert started the Forgemasters project and was integral in launching Warp Records with local record shop owners Steve Beckett and Rob Mitchell. He was responsible for signing many of the label’s early acts and was Warp’s in-house producer, engineer and mixer. It’s because of him that all of those early singles on the label sound incredible – few others have quite as good ‘ears’, or Robert’s ability to get extremely deep bass. He was also obsessed with getting a ‘high tech’ sound, wanting everything he worked on to sound futuristic.

Due to his work with Warp and of course his reputation at FON, he also became the go-to remixer during the Bleep era. He re-built Unique 3’s “The Theme”, delivering arguably the most bass-heavy Bleep cut of all bar LFO’s “LFO”, and did plenty of reworks for Network Records. He also worked with Cabaret Voltaire’s Richard H Kirk as XON – an absolute dream team – and produced a number of remixes for major labels that for some reason never got released.

Robert has become a cult figure in the years since Bleep, in part because he rarely does interviews, but mainly because the music he released in the 1990s is by and large superb. It took me years to persuade him to speak to me for the book, but since then he’s been very open and I’ve been round to hang out with him a lot. He re-mastered everything that appears on the Join the Future compilation and hopefully we’ll soon hear some of his unreleased music and remixes – there’s tons there, it’s just working out how to get it out there.

It was a thrill reading about the early days of Warp. But the way Robert Gordon was ousted – along with Steve Beckett’s refusal to speak with you – doesn’t necessarily paint Warp in the best light. Yet you navigate this part of the narrative calmly and objectively. I wonder whether it was difficult to strike the right tone here? What are your feelings about Warp these days?

My personal opinion, which is stated in the book, is that Warp should be seen as two different labels: one when Robert was involved (1989-90) and then the Steve Beckett/Rob Mitchell version (1991-present – Rob Mitchell died early in the century but his spirit lives on). There’s no doubt that Robert feels like he was elbowed out and treated badly, and maybe he was, but it needs pointing out that he can be very argumentative and tricky to work with. He’s always been great with me, but it’s important to point this out, as I did in the book.

Striking the balance was difficult, particularly since Steve Beckett simply wouldn’t agree to an interview for whatever reason. Towards the end of the research and writing process I tried one last time, explaining to Warp’s PR people that I wanted to allow him to answer some of Robert’s accusations (only a few of which were included in the book for legal reasons), but again he said no – which of course is his prerogative. I have a lot of admiration for what he and Rob Mitchell achieved and was a big fan of Warp throughout the 90s and even into the early 2000s. The label still puts out some incredible music, but it’s a completely different beast to what it was. That’s why I think we should look at it as two labels: the one that helped revolutionise UK dance music in 1989 and 1990, and the one that has since become one of the leading independent labels in the world.

The Bleepography at the back of the book is a most welcome addition. I really like how these are personal recommendations rather than just an index. Feels like talking to a friend who is an expert and also provides a hard-copy resource to refer to. Was that what you were aiming for?

In a word, yes! The original idea was to put together an exhaustive list of every Bleep-related track ever released, but then I quickly realised this would be hard to do even with my research and knowledge. In the end, I thought it would be much more useful to provide lists of records, with notes, for each chapter, as a sort of accompaniment to the main book. It made more sense because I could also include non-Bleep records and tracks that help provide context or explain where some elements of the sound come from. One day when I have time I may put together YouTube playlists for each chapter based on the Bleepography in the book – that way people can listen along while they read.

You’ve also been expanding the Bleepography online with daily entries. What should readers expect to find in these?

The online Bleepography articles on the Join the Future website are kind of like analytical sleeve notes for tracks, EPs or albums, based on the research for the book. Each one looks at a different release, tells the story behind it – sometimes with quotes from the producers or remixers involved – and offers analysis. There’s lots of stuff I found out while I was researching the book that for various reasons didn’t make the finished manuscript, so there’s plenty of trivia in there to please the nerds – and I say this as a self-confessed nerd! If people want to check these articles out, they can find them online at www.jointhefuture.net.

There’s now an accompanying compilation, Join the Future: UK Bleep & Bass 1988-91 that JD Twitch has put out on his new label Cease & Desist. Yours is one of those rare music books that gets its own record – you must be feeling good about that. How did the comp come together?

Funnily enough the idea of doing a Bleep & Bass compilation came before the book, way back in 2014. JD Twitch and I pitched it to a sizeable independent label in 2014 and although there was interest it got turned down. It was at that point that I refocused on researching and writing a book, which was the correct decision. There were a few false starts over the years, and then in April 2019 when the book publication deal was confirmed JD Twitch offered me the chance to finally do the compilation. I’ll always be grateful to him for backing it as it has long been a dream to put together a compilation.

I’m really proud of the finished product. I thought long and hard about exactly what blend of tracks to put on there and tried to represent some of the key people in the book – and therefore the overall Bleep story – in some way, as well as chucking in some personal favourites and secret weapons. From the start I wanted to steer clear of most of the really big tunes as they’re by and large easy to get hold of and everyone knows them. Yes, the heads will know almost all of the tracks on there – bar the two unreleased cuts – but most people don’t. We also got Robert Gordon to re-master everything. He took his time, but it was worth the wait – in typical fashion he’s made everything sound incredible!

I was playing the album the other day and my kids (aged six and ten) came into the living room and were clearly feeling the music. There was body moving and family lockdown dancing followed. What is it about Bleep & Bass that cuts through everything and speaks so directly to people?

Fundamentally Bleep & Bass includes all of the key ingredients of what would become the UK bass music template: rich, deep, weighty bass, sparse but addictive melodic elements, and skeletal but insanely heavy rhythms with an infectious, dancefloor-friendly shuffle. What’s not to like?

Join the Future at Velocity Press

Cease & Desist Bandcamp

Matt’s Join the Future website