If you’ve followed this blog to date, you’d have read some of my personal history alongside 1990s pirate radio in London. We’ll now we’re heading to early 1992 and the legendary Rush 92.5 FM
There’s a radical change in sound from 1990/91. The beats are faster and the vibe is more urgent and aggressive.
In 1992 the whole UK was raving, The Prodigy where on Top Of The Pops and it was fucking shit. I was really starting to hate the music and culture. White gloves, cheesy novelty records, pub people (I guess now they’d be normies) the same shit that eventually plagues most scenes but 1992 really did feel like everyone was out raving and it sucked.
Then, during a typical weekend at my dad’s flat in Wapping, East London, I came across Rush FM for the first time and stuck a cassette on record. 2 Bad Mice’s Bombscare dropped with it’s militant, syncopated drums, Dub bass line and that raggo rim shot literally stabbing my eardrums, I flipped out. This was proper!
Now let’s hail up DJ Remarc, his skratching and mixing was way more creative than the average DJ. The records he played were somewhere between the darker side of techno and the ruffneck breakbeats on earlier records but way faster. There was a gnarly attitude. I was a kid entering the adult world and wanting to prove some masculinity (I wasn’t particularly good at that to be honest) but hey, that was the vibe.
I’d started messing around with turntables a couple of years previous and I was getting pretty good technically but not up with the latest tunes. There were two reasons;
1: Most of what I heard was corny.
2: I was flat broke! I mostly bought bargain basement records from Canterbury Rock for 50p and concentrated on finding gems from the Acid House period.
I was super into skratching at this point, having earlier studied DJ Hype on Fantasy FM and Melvin D on Friends FM and now there was this guy Remarc, cutting it up over these really manic beats. It was all about the speed! It was ruff!
Another time I remember going to 4 Star General in Camden, probably the most notable street ware shop in London and they were literally playing records at the wrong speed. The vibe was different. This was the beginnings of Jungle.
Back home we were speeding up our Walkmans, taking them apart and messing with the pitch potentiometer to get the fastest tapes! That’s how it started.