Soundsystem Past and Future Perfect Vision: An Interview with State of Bass Author Martin James

Martin James takes us on a breakbeat era tour as he discusses the updated edition of his drum & bass origin story

Arriving in medias res, Martin James’s 1997 State of Bass took the pulse of jungle and drum & bass up to that point. Living through the thrills of hardcore history is one thing, but attempting to shape a narrative then and there without the benefit of hindsight posed unique challenges. Martin was nevertheless able to reflect on the breakbeat story-so-far in compelling fashion, while understanding that this most forward-thinking of genres would continue to lean into the future. What he didn’t anticipate was that right after he finished the book, Roni Size & Reprazent would win the Mercury Music Prize with New Forms, an ideal opportunity to round-off his story therefore missed. With the revised 2020 edition from Velocity Press, Martin folds that game-changing moment into the text, as well as bringing other aspects up to date and adding further theoretical discussion. State of Bass tells an important part of the rave story and with the culture currently getting the critical reappraisal it so deserves, the time was right time to get this title back in print.

Unable to converse beneath a monolithic speaker stack in the current climate, I had a safe and distanced electronic conversation with Martin about his return to a state of bass.

These are strange times. How are you dealing with things and what’s life like for you at the moment? What music is keeping you going?

I’ve been insanely busy throughout the lockdown period and beyond so it’s brought with it work stress as well as the health and mortality stresses. It’s also been awful watching friends in the entertainment industry face financial ruin without any support. In my day job I’m a university professor and we’ve been busy putting a year’s worth of teaching and teaching materials online so that students are fully supported if we (when?) we go into another lockdown. In my downtime, well I’ve been doing a few things to promote the book. Although I’m really sad we had to cancel the launch tour I was blown away by the insane numbers who tuned in to the live stream discussion with me, Nicky Blackmarket, Bryan G and expertly chaired by the brilliant Jenna G (whose Uncut album is still in my top 20 after all these years!).

As a researcher I’ve written a number of academic papers on grime, post-9/11 hip-hop, the Prodigy’s Russian fandom and a couple about Velvet Underground. They should be out later in the year.

Beyond that I’ve also been making music with a project going under the admittedly ridiculous name Nostalgia Deathstar. It’s not drum & bass… more an exploration of the pre-electro electronic music that inspired techno. We’ve been putting out a song a month since January. I also recorded an album with some friends during lockdown… it’s kind of jazzy, dubby, trip hoppy and quite dark. A bit Tricky at times. We’re waiting to mix that one…. So yeah, I’ve never been busier. But I’m missing nightlife beyond words!

As for the music that’s kept me going. I’ve been listening to Russian grime, Afro-beat, new jazz, the new Chicago jazz scene, old punk records, lots of post-punk… I think my favourite album of the lockdown was Coldcut’s Keleketla! project.

What do you think club culture is going to look like afterwards? Do you have any ideas about how dance music communities can evolve to cope with changed conditions?

I really have no idea. The return to illegal raves was inevitable and actually provides an experience that you can’t have in a club. I’d imagine that limited finances will have an impact on the costly design of the clubs that survive… maybe we’ll go back to the days of a good soundsystem and creative, immersive design. The thing is the club economy was in decline pre-Covid, mainly because underground clubbers want a more personalised or ever evolving experience that the vast majority of venues can’t provide. So those spaces had pretty much moved away from the original post-acid house club ethos and were going for the lowest common denominator – nice design, lots of lager and pop EDM. Basically the Ritzy’s model in the late-80s before the rave explosion. I think the Boomtown model will have an impact on club culture – there will be an even larger divide between the good clubs supporting underground cultures and the mainstream churning out pop. So I think the evolution will be about a return to the roots and a rediscovery of grassroots talent rather than the over priced, over marketed, deeply branded mockery of club culture that had become the norm… Obviously a lot of venues will go under but while there is a will to dance there will be investment. Just as long as it’s not at the expense of fruit markets in Brixton!!!

State of Bass was originally written and published in 1997, which, as you say in the introduction to the new edition, was early to be writing a historical account of drum & bass, but you felt the backstory was rich enough. Did writing about living history pose any challenges when trying to shape a narrative?

First off it’s important to understand that the readers I had in mind were those people who had accidentally stumbled on a Goldie tune, listened to drum & bass for the first time and knew nothing about the history. Next I was aiming at the regular clubbers who saw everything about the sound as being brand new and didn’t really acknowledge the pre-history which is so rich that you really need a series of books to do it justice. I barely touched on the rare groove scene or the jazz dance scene! There were things that I just skipped past.

The narrative came quite naturally. I decided not to be totally chronological because I really wanted to bring out the idea that it wasn’t as simple as the first tune, jungle versus drum & bass etc. The histories are actually very mixed up; there is no clear line apart from moments where certain sounds, DJs, clubs etc became popular. History doesn’t move in a straight line so the book couldn’t either.  I also decided to build the post-rave narrative of the book around the mediation of the culture because that in itself told a number of stories.

On the other hand, there must have been benefits covering fresh sounds as they were happening and with key players presumably on hand?

That was a nightmare… I could have written endless, gushing descriptions of these amazing tunes that were dropping constantly in the clubs. I could have gone on endlessly about the samples, which in themselves presented a pre and present history. In the end I just decided to do playlists after the chapters. I even had to limit these because they could have gone on for page after page. Loads of people contacted me to complain about what I’d missed! But playlists are personal really, so I’d have to say to them that I knew the tune and loved it but I had to limit thing to MY top tunes. There was a Japanese edition that had a playlist at the back that went on for pages and pages! Looked nice, but went on too long.

Did you encounter any reluctance from potential interviewees? I mean, you talk about DJs and producers being uninterested in talking to the media, while MCs grabbed the spotlight.

It was really hard to get support from some people in the scene at the time because I wasn’t part of it in the same way as Brian Belle-Fortune so they simply didn’t trust me. I did quite a few interviews with people who then demanded I didn’t directly reference them – especially around the committee. I’ve remained true to that request in the new version. But then there were others like Rap, Dave Stone, Kemi and Storm who gave up loads of their time. When the book came out and people realised it was a highly respectful text written with a lived understanding of the pre-history, all of the old junglists suddenly asked why I didn’t interview them. I was like, ‘you ignored my requests!’. Loads of managers and promoters got really sniffy about it but often it was them blocking the request. But that was the time we were living in!

I did receive a really nice letter from Paul Ibiza and his friend/agent who said how much they’d loved the book and apologised for not giving interview time. They also acknowledged how much hard work it must have been and that it was clearly written from the position of love for the music. Writing that letter took a lot of humility. I respect that and love Paul for it and for what he did for the music.

When Roni Size/Reprazent won the Mercury Music Prize, did you think even then that that would have provided the perfect ending for your book? If only you were writing about the scene slightly later…. 

Oh god yes. After I delivered the book to the publisher there was a six-month turnaround before it came out and so much happened. When Roni won that prize I was like ‘damn, that should have been where the story ended, not finishing with “Goldie working on a new album!!”’.

At what point did you feel it was the right time to revisit State of Bass? Was it an idea you had that you then pitched to publishers?

I’d approached publishers to do a tenth anniversary update edition but there was no interest. Then I pitched a version called ‘State of Bass – the Breakbeat Era’ which was a story of the evolution of breakbeat musics, but I didn’t get any bites for that either. I was planning on doing a self-publishing job on it but that is really time consuming and my day job made that really difficult. I actually self-published a Prodigy book a couple of years back – that nearly killed me!

How did Velocity Press come into the picture? It’s early days, but they’re already carving out a unique space within publishing, with a series of titles that not only don’t play it safe, but feel like vital additions to the conversation around dance music. What’s your experience been like working with them?

Colin Steven had been behind Knowledge/KMag and we already knew of each other. I was a huge fan of the magazine and used to scour every issue. Around the time I was pitching the anniversary update he briefly set up an urban fiction publishing house and asked me to contribute a short story to a collection they were working on. Sadly it never came out, but I was really impressed by the marketing work he’d done in the pre-publishing phase. Then he got in touch with me last year to see if he could publish a State of Bass update. To be honest I was kind of blown away because I was a such fan of Knowledge!

He’s been great to work with – upfront, honest and really motivated. Although I think I should have pre-warned him that I’m dyslexic because that came with its own headaches!

Could you talk about the process of revisiting State of Bass? How did you approach any changes and additions? Was it odd looking through the eyes of your younger self again?

It was so hard putting myself back in that space that I eventually decided to approach it from who I am now. The scene has grown up, and so have I. So I introduced quite a bit more theoretical discussion and also changed some parts that were too 1990s dance music press in their style. I also changed a few bits that made me cringe at the naivety of my younger self… especially around identity. I wanted to extend the story to the Mercury Award so that became the lynchpin of the new narrative but I was also able to get into some of the more obscure offshoots, briefly touch on the concept of the Breakbeat Continuum which is a nicely branded name for an old history theory now applied to music rather than kings and queens! It was also good to get some of the missing interviewees into the story – although quite a few were disinterested again.

I do wish I’d done more on women in the scene though… the more I look into this the more it is a truly hidden story of the era. Women are continually left out of the story.

State of Bass carefully charts the distinction between jungle and drum & bass. There would appear to be slightly different takes on this, depending who you speak to. How would you summarise your view on the two forms? 

Wow, that is really hard to do. It really concerns me that the distinction has become increasingly defined only by race and ethnicity. The problem is though a lot of the USA developments of the scene in recent years have been more closely associated with EDM, which has the effect of stripping the blackness from the scene. Just watch the recent documentary that came out! Whitewashing at its worst. Similarly it’s far too simplistic to say this music is purely derived from post-Windrush soundsystem culture because that view ignores the foundational influence of Detroit Techno. And to ignore that also denies then influential role of European electronic musicians like Kraftwerk from the 1970s and people like Gary Numan in the late 70s and 1980s.

However, I do think the difference between jungle and drum & bass comes through the application and emphasis of soundsystem culture. It is more clearly stated in jungle’s basslines and the lyrical style of the MCs, even if most of the breaks come from old funk, jazz funk, soul and rock albums. Drum & bass drew more heavily on the atmospheres of jazz, soul, rare groove and ambient techno. But even that is far too simplistic.

You talk about the early jungle innovators coming from hip-hop backgrounds, with b-boys drawn to the rave scene which itself drew on reggae’s soundsystem culture. The origin story of rave culture in the UK seems to be getting reassessed in terms of race and class through a number of essential works, including Matt Anniss’s Join the Future, Joe Muggs’s Bass, Mids, Tops and Jeremy Deller’s Everybody in the Place documentary. State of Bass feels like it fits into this shift towards reappraisal, although it was originally written much earlier. Would you agree? Do you feel part of something wider?

There has definitely been a shift towards the uncovering of identity issues in these scenes. I think the 90s mainstream press was dominated by a middle-class gang of white graduates who understood music through their own experience. Not all were bad… Carl Loben at DJ always presented working class scenes as racially diverse. Push at Electronic Sound (formally founding editor of Muzik) was excellent too. There were others too. But generally only a narrow, dominant narrative was mediated.

This shift in perspective has been in the air for a long time to be honest. Once we got through the obsession with superstar DJs and Ibiza’s ’avin’ it culture we started to look deeper into the hidden and lost histories that are richer in substance than the mainstream ‘official’, or dominant histories.  This work has been going on in academia for about twenty years now and it’s finally coming into the mainstream. I received my PhD in 2007 for the work I did on State of Bass and another book I wrote on French electronic music through which I really tried to go behind the dominant histories (for what it’s worth I left school without any qualifications and went back to study in 2004). So I would say that the original State of Bass was already part of this approach.

The books you mention are all brilliant in that they are taking a deep delve into the hidden histories of these musics. They’re all really academic in that respect but it’s really exciting that the books are getting noticed in the mainstream. Even if they’re only supported by small independent or academic publishers. I would also add the brilliant It’s a London Thing by Caspar Melville to those books by the way.  

It is true that many dance music histories became whitewashed and class was rarely addressed, but I do worry that coverage of dance music cultures could become in some way essentialist about class and ethnicity. It would be wrong to entirely present jungle and drum & bass as purely a working class movement, similarly it would be wrong to present it as only being by black artists and DJs. It is a black music, it does have a lot of roots in the working and underclasses, but the roots and routes of jungle and drum & bass are tangled and knotty. A deliberately essentialist approach would be as bad as the approaches of a lot of the 90s media. Matt’s Join the Future really gets to grips with the confused and tangled roots of Bleep, it would have been a shame if he’d located purely within the frameworks of class or ethnicity because it would have skewed a lot of his work.

You quote Kodwo Eshun in the book: “Jungle, so this racist myth goes, is what killed Smiley, turned every raver’s little Woodstock into an Altamont with bassbins.” Was drum & bass sidelined in the prevailing narrative in favour of a more white-centric history of rave?

Not consciously but yes, the music that was coming out of white, middle class suburbia did eventually get a lot more coverage than the music that emerged from black, inner city environments. A Guy Called Gerald should have been a cover star long before Madchester was noticed! I recall people’s shock and concern that I was going to jungle raves or AWOL because they were ‘edgy’, which was code for ‘black’. But I preferred that kind of edginess than the fake attitude of an Oasis gig. Generally a lot of white people were (and are) scared of young black men who were/are demonised for everything that’s bad in society.

You know, a lot of major labels had drum & bass imprints whose entire rosters were non-black. Or if they were black artists they were acceptable because of their long involvement in rave culture, people like Grooverider. The press simply didn’t pick up on this back then… actually I’m only really starting to see this more clearly now! That’s another history of dnb that needs to be explored. I would also add that the queer histories of jungle / drum & bass / rave are begging to be explored, as are the representations of disability, gender, woman and race within the narratives of the scene’s own main players. This scene is about people, it is deep and rich and needs excavation from every perspective but its early mediation was largely from the perspective of educated, straight, white, able-bodied, middle-class men. Which is why the straight androcentric values of Daft Punk dressed as robots were put on covers and not the challenging faces of gay black artists like Derrick Carter – who once pointed out that “Something that started as gay black/Latino club music is now sold, shuffled and packaged as having very little to do with either.”

Simon Reynolds’s hardcore continuum is discussed. It’s a concept that, as you say, comes down to personal taste on the part of Reynolds, but you at least find the idea of a networked flow compelling. Unlike, you argue, Rickey Vincent’s “dynasties of funk, it doesn’t reach back to the antecedents or reach forward to the global descendants.” I’m not familiar with Vincent’s text, although I’ve since bought a copy. Could you talk a little about Vincent’s dynasties, how that stacks up against the hardcore continuum and how it informs your thinking about drum & bass?

Vincent’s dynasties model allows for artists to be active in a range of styles associated with funk, it allows for the situation where white people playing funk are still playing black music, it recognises the full range of subgenres and also places the antecedents as central to the story. He talks of histories plural rather than history singular. I find Nuum to be far less fluid and far too narrow in its concept.

New Forms, you write, “was the first drum & bass album to take up the genre’s soundsystem past and future perfect vision and attempt to walk forward with them in one thoroughly cohesive whole.” In other words, the drum & bass story represented through the music itself. Looking back from the vantage point of 2020, just how important an album is New Forms? Does it get the recognition it deserves? It seems odd that it isn’t readily available on vinyl at the moment alongside the likes of Massive Attack. Despite emerging from an always-evolving scene, New Forms explores multiple genres and has a timelessness about it that seems a natural fit for today’s open underground music policies.

I still stand by my assessment of New Forms… it drew on everything from Charlie Parker to Joey Beltram and placed the breakbeat sound in a timeless context. I also wrote that the whole idea of the album in jungle / drum & bass goes against the ethos of the scene. It was future focussed and defined on the dancefloor six months before the music was released. When the tracks came out officially the scene had already moved on. This music was all about defining the moment. Not disposable but on a perpetual move forward through history. The album, which aims to be a standalone statement, works in a different way. Not many managed to create a truly strong album but New Forms managed to capture the forward focussed but in-the-moment ethos of the dancefloor and create it as a timeless statement unto itself. It’s a classic.

I think its lack of vinyl release is due to Talkin’ Loud, the label it was on. Since it closed I’m not aware of any of its product getting the reissue treatment. New Forms was re-released as a newly recorded version a few years back but it was really expensive. The original has never been reissued which suggests there’s a problem with the Talking’ Loud arrangement with the parent label Mercury Records. This would also explain why other classics from 4Hero as well as amazing albums by Young Disciples and Terry Callier, to say nothing of DJ Krust, Cleveland Watkiss, Galliano, Elisabeth Troy, Incognito, Cinematc Orchestra and Femi Kuti don’t appear to have resurfaced.

What’s your take on the current drum & bass scene? Where’s bass music going next?  

I have to be honest and say I find a lot of contemporary drum & bass quite frustrating. The tracks are less of a journey than being a direct statement. There are fewer twists and turns and drops… and what happened to the elongated intro? I sometimes find the music tries too hard to fit into expectations of a subgenre. Liquid felt really formulaic to me in comparison to Liquid Funk. But, I listen with older ears and don’t feel the same rush as you feel when you’re young – so I can’t criticise modern sounds. My son loves drum & bass and plays it constantly. He loves it in the way people in their early 20s should. But I find it fascinating that the tunes he always plays out loud, the ones his mates go crazy to, are the old classics. “Original Nuttah” is still getting rewinds after all of these years. It a true classic that transcends generations. As for where it’s going… I really hope producers really get into creating something out of nothing. I know quite a few have gone to analogue equipment but that’s just the quickest way to get rid of your money. I’m looking for creativity that goes beyond the latest bit of kit and extends concepts of genre. I’d like to see the jazz element really explored in a far deeper way – in the way that Kamaal Williams uses jazz to really take broken beats and R&B to a deeper space. I guess I’d like that because I mainly listen to jazz right now and people like Moses Boyd and Nubya Garcia excite me in a way that reminds me of those early jungle raves. Raw, skilful, surprising, rule breaking, sweaty, home-grown beat magnificence.

State of Bass at Velocity Press