Loefah: A producer, DJ and one of the core members of the DMZ club night and label, he also runs the Swamp81 label.
Sgt Pokes: The main MC for the DMZ club nights, Sgt Pokes has MC'd dubstep parties for over 15 years.MALA: I remember growing up and thinking that the sky was grey, the streets were grey, and the buildings were grey. On the weekends, we'd have teams play on pitches, at the back of this so-called "lake" that you could literally walk across. They called it the "country park" but the council didn't bother with the upkeep and it just became a place to set fire to old bunkers. There really wasn't much going on.LOEFAH: There's a reason it all came from Croydon. Croydon was just an incestuous town, with people just working, drinking, thieving, and getting fucked. I used to go out to hardcore raves, and then split off into jungle and drum and bass, but drum and bass became homogenized with the "liquid" sound and then suddenly, garage happened. Before the summer holidays in 1997, everyone was into jungle. After the holidays, everyone was into garage. It was that quick.
MALA: Myself, Coki and Pokes were at school together. We played at house parties in the mid 90s, and we met Loefah at around 15 years old through mutual friends. He was the junglist who was into [seminal drum and bass label] Metalheadz, just like us.SGT POKES: My dad even worked with Mala's dad, and went to school with Coki's dad. Around 2000-01, I was managing a bar in Croydon called The Black Sheep, where I was also MCing drum and bass nights. Mala was an MC, too; playing garage nights like Twice As Nice under the name Malibu. If you do the math, of who Digital Mystikz are now: Mala and Coki? One was Malibu, and the other was Coke. Mala actually made a track with an MC called Onyx Stone, who was his MC partner at Twice As Nice, called "Whadda We Like?"—which came out on Cooltempo in about 2001, I think. I think that, maybe, Mala saw a side of the music industry after that period that made him react so aversely; to be the anti-commercial vibe he's been for years, you know?LOEFAH: We all started writing bassline music at around 138BPM, then meeting up on Fridays and playing them to each other. Since we grew up around soundsystems, the sound was all about the bottom end, but we had our own vibes: Mala had his broken dub house, Coki was more ragga and dancehall, and I was trying to re-invent jungle in my head, because I just couldn't understand why it wasn't working.Are you into dance music? Check out Thump, our entire website dedicated to the stuff.
Youngsta: Widely recognized as one of dubstep's key DJs.
Kode9: Scottish-born, London-based producer and DJ, who founded and continues to run the Hyperdub label.
Oris Jay: Also known as Darqwuan, the Sheffield-based producer and DJ helped to lead the breaks element of the dubstep sound.MARTIN CLARK: Around 2000, I came across a few records that hinted at something different. As garage was disintegrating, there were people who wanted to keep it dark, and still MC-focused, but these records, they were the mongrels of garage: creative and prolific, in their own dark, weird corner. I was working at The Face at the time, and they asked me to organize a garage photo-shoot in Croydon in the Easter of 2000, so I met [producers whose music bridged the gap, chronologically and/or stylistically, between garage and dubstep] J Da Flex, Zed Bias, and El-B.
The second was dub as a methodology, which, for me, is apparent in all dance music: manipulating sound to create impossible sonic spaces using reverb, echo, and such. The third is the influence of the genre called dub. (It became a cliché actually, through sampling old Jamaican films and soundtracks, and adding vocal samples.) All of that, along with soundsystem culture, were the elemental influences of early dubstep.The sound needed a hub to grow, and that hub was Big Apple. I remember when I went into the shop for the first time. I was supposed to interview Benga, and Hatcha and Artwork and Danny from DND were hanging out the window with a catapult and rolls of wet toilet paper, firing at people in the market. They haven't changed.Click through to the next page.CHAPTER THREE: "Rahhhh, I like this, but what the fuck is it?""It's like 2-step, but it's got dub in it. It's kind of like… dubstep"
Benny Ill: DJ, engineer, and one half of seminal production and DJ duo Horsepower Productions.
Joe Nice: Baltimore, Maryland-based DJ who started the first dubstep party in America, Dub War.
Coki: One half of Digital Mystikz, along with Mala, Coki is one of the core members of the DMZ label and club night.
Skream: Croydon-born producer and DJ who was picked up as the so-called teenage poster boy of the dubstep scene.
Chef: A dub cutter and engineer at Croydon's Transition Studios, he was also one of the early core DJs of the dubstep scene, joining Skream and Benga's Smooth Criminals crew as a teenager.
CHEF: I used to hear about this boy called Benga. People were like, "Yeah, this kid Benga, he's the boy wonder. He's 13-years-old and he mixes like EZ." I was like; "I'll see it when I believe it." My mate had a UKG crew that I DJ'd with, and he said that I should do a clash with Smooth Criminals, which was Benga and Skream. I bumped into them at a house party and Artwork came up to me and said, "I've heard about you, Chef. A lot of people are rating you." I was young, and gassed, so I rolled up to a party on my moped with my tunes one night when I was 16, and went back to back with Benga—and we fucking smashed it up. We ended up playing together everywhere—in snooker clubs, house parties—after that.SKREAM: We'd just turn up and take over at these parties, like fucking bass vigilantes. They'd book one of us, and 15 of us would turn up. There was a place called Bar Rendezvous, and I made a bootleg of Cleptomaniac's "All I Do" for a party there. It was a cover of the Stevie Wonder tune, but I made a bootleg of the flip, the Bump N Flex Dub; with this long intro on it, with me talking all pitched down on it. I'll never forget that.Click through to the next page.CHAPTER FOUR: "Bottom line: dubplates keep you in the room.""I was young, and gassed, so I rolled up to a party on my moped with my tunes one night when I was 16-years-old, and went back-to-back with Benga—and we fucking smashed it up." – Chef
Joe Nice: Baltimore, Maryland-based DJ who started the first dubstep party in America, Dub War.
Chef: A dub cutter and engineer at Croydon's Transition Studios, he was also one of the early core DJs of the dubstep scene, joining Skream and Benga's Smooth Criminals crew as a teenager.
Mala: One of the founding members of the London-based DMZ club night and label, he's also one half of the production duo Digital Mystikz, along with Coki, as well as a solo DJ and producer.
Jason Goslin, AKA Jason Goz: The master engineer and dub cutter at Croydon's Transition Studios, Jason is regarded as essential to the creation of the dubstep sound.
Sgt Pokes: The main MC for the DMZ club nights, Sgt Pokes has MC'd dubstep parties for over 15 years.LOEFAH: Transition is a cutting house based in Forest Hill, near where we lived in south London. We heard that's where Grooverider got his dubs cut, and that was enough for us, frankly, so I started going there in probably 2003. There were rules: you only paid for your own dubs if you wanted them for yourself. If Hatcha wanted one of my tracks to play out, he'd have to pay to get it cut to dub, and then that was his copy. It all depended on what rate you were on, too. I was on 25 quid for two sides of a 10-inch, 30 quid for a 12-inch. They swapped from 10-inch to 12-inch 'cause they "ran out" of 10-inch, around 2005-06, but that was a step up. Going back to 10-inch might have made us look cheap, y'know?
Towards the end of the peak of garage, I was cutting for people like Hatcha—when he was in a crew called Stonecold GX Crew, I believe—and he started bringing me this new stuff which he just referred to as "more tribal." He'd cut a few garage pieces with me and then slip that Something Else in, until gradually the focus became more and more about this Something Else. He was without a doubt the first person to bring dubstep to Transition.There were times when I'd go out to a club, hear a track that I'd cut, then ring up the producer on the Monday and say, "I've cut it for you again." They'd be shocked—"What? Why?" "I didn't like the way it sounded," I'd tell them—and I wouldn't charge them for it again, either. If that dub is leaving Transition with my name on it, it has to be perfect. I've had so many arguments with sound engineers in nightclubs, and with other producers, too: people asking me to re-create Mala, Loefah, Coki. When DMZ blew up, it nearly gave me a nervous breakdown. I'd be getting 15, 20 calls a day while pulling a 70-hour week.Because of that, at the time, I was always aware of the fact that if this sound got really big, I couldn't cut every dubstep record that came out—so I held the levels back. I didn't cut them too loud. I didn't make the music too un-dynamic because, physically, it needed somewhere to go. A lot of current pop is really loud, so for a given level on your hi-fi, it screams at you. An old Bob Marley track isn't as loud, though. It's dynamic: peaks and troughs, loud parts and quiet parts. That's what I mean when I say I held back, because there's only a certain point before it's no longer listenable.Want to read more about dubstep and other dance music? Lucky you, we've got a whole website dedicated to it.
Youngsta: Widely recognized as one of dubstep's key DJs.
Loefah: A producer, DJ and one of the core members of the DMZ club night and label, he also runs the Swamp81 label.
Martin Clark: A London-based journalist and DJ who has worked for a variety of UK publications and now runs the Keysound label and club night.ORIS JAY: The culture of sharing tracks in the early days was a very special one. If you were in the Ammunition crew, you'd go through Sarah Lockhart. You have to imagine her as the early version of the internet for us: our "Soulja." Sarah would say, "I'm only going to give this tune to you and three other people, but I'll take your tune to this DJ and that DJ to play out." I'd give her a DAT tape, she'd take it down to the cutting house, and tell them who can get what depending on where and when they're playing.If I wanted a Skream tune, I'd have to go from Sheffield to London, then to Croydon to meet Skream, where he'd give me a DAT tape. I'd take that tape to the cutting house, wait in the queue, and cut the dub without knowing what it'd sound like. You don't even know if it'll sound right till you played it: on the radio was cool, but it was how it sounded in FWD>>, on that soundsystem, that mattered most. Even if the dub costs 40 quid, I've probably spent double that trying to get to London, the cutting house, and back again, but you told yourself it was worth doing because when you played that dub out that night, you could be certain that no one else in the world had it.
YOUNGSTA: Loefah took it to the point where he changed the structure of the drums. Not straight syncopated 4/4. Not 2-step garage. It was about taking a break out and having as much space as possible, while still maintaining a groove. Some of it was so atmospheric that it was like a soundscape, but we didn't take it that far and that's what made it a winner. Me, I'm weird. I like things a certain way, and that was how you could make a whole new track out of a blend of two of Loefah's beats. Even if two beats are perfectly in key with each other—which they always should be, beat-matching aside—it's about the pin-point precision timing of mixing together two or three beats that are so perfectly in key, and so stripped back, that they have elements in each that the other doesn't; that when put together, they create a whole new tune."For a time, there were maybe 50 dubstep tracks in the whole world. If five of them are mine, I'm not just going to chuck them out there." – Loefah
Loefah: A producer, DJ and one of the core members of the DMZ club night and label, he also runs the Swamp81 label.
El-B: A key producer and DJ in the transitional period between garage and dubstep, formerly part of garage duo Groove Chronicles.
Kode9: Scottish-born, London-based producer and DJ, who founded and continues to run the Hyperdub label.
Oris Jay: Also known as Darqwuan, the Sheffield-based producer and DJ helped to lead the breaks element of the dubstep sound.
Martin Clark: A London-based journalist and DJ who has worked for a variety of UK publications and now runs the Keysound label and club night.
Skream: Croydon-born producer and DJ who was picked up as the so-called teenage poster boy of the dubstep scene.
ORIS JAY: There was a period around 2002-03 where the music started to split into distinct strands: the darker side of garage—where [dubstep] came from—then into breaks, broken beat, and grime. None of the scenes were big, but all of them had a unique sound, and everyone's influences determined which direction the sound was going to go in. Take DJ Zinc's "138 Trek": even though it was classed as garage, even though the dubstep guys were playing it, it had a break-beat in it. The grime guys were different to the breaks mentality, because they wanted a beat that would give them space to rap in and around. Broken beat had vocals, but it was still underground. It was all at the same tempo, being played at the same place—but getting more, minutely specific."Pre-2000, you were in garage raves with Arsenal and Chelsea players. After 2000, it was grunge-ass stoners and students." – El-B
MARTIN CLARK: Everyone at FWD>> brought their own sounds, so there was a dynamic tension between everyone having enough of their own space and identity, and being connected enough to be related: the bare minimum things in common in order to make it coherent enough, and have space to explore.This doesn't get stressed enough in this conversation, though: the fact that grime had a major influence on the evolution of dubstep. [DJ and co-founder of Rinse FM] Geeneus in particular saw the possibilities of dubstep: forming a relationship with Sarah [Lockhart], bringing Ammunition and Rinse together, then coming to FWD>> with [Rinse FM co-founder and influential DJ] Slimzee standing at the back. People would turn around and go, "Fuck, Slimzee's here."Grime and dubstep were like family, and family doesn't always get on. Grime rode the wave of the garage club infrastructure, but when the police shut much of that down, they lost the money and access that came with it. I can sympathize with grime. They wanted more, right? It's an MC-focused culture. They wanted to be stars. Grime went into a lull after [Dizzee Rascal's debut album] Boy in da Corner when they realized there wasn't another quick Dizzee—or [that] the industry wouldn't accept another, more like. Wiley's Treddin' on Thin Ice wasn't the smash that he and others wanted it to be. The scene couldn't deliver commercially on its own hype, and that was the period of dubstep starting to develop properly."Grime and dubstep were like family, and family doesn't always get along." – Martin Clark
Skream: Croydon-born producer and DJ who was picked up as the so-called teenage poster boy of the dubstep scene.
Sgt Pokes: The main MC for the DMZ club nights, Sgt Pokes has MC'd dubstep parties for over 15 years.
Loefah: A producer, DJ and one of the core members of the DMZ club night and label, he also runs the Swamp81 label.
Chef: A dub cutter and engineer at Croydon's Transition Studios, he was also one of the early core DJs of the dubstep scene, joining Skream and Benga's Smooth Criminals crew as a teenager.SGT POKES: FWD>> was definitely the first proper place to go and listen to dubstep, but there were other parties going on, too. Warp [Records] was doing a night called Rebel Bass at Electrowerkz [in Angel], booking people like Mala and myself, as well as some of the more industrial sounds, like Slaughter Mob and Vex'd. Then Plastician and his mate Filthy Dave, Dave Carlisle, started a night called Filthy Dub at the end of 2003; the first was a proper Croydon cheese club called One92One, but that club wasn't ready for the sound. At The Black Sheep we tried to do a night called Dub Session while I was still working there in 2004-05. We'd bring someone in to play nice traditional reggae and dub at 7PM, then, at around 10 or 11PM, as the standard customers would leave, we'd introduce an hour or two of dubstep.LOEFAH: Yeah, Pokes and I worked behind the bar at The Black Sheep. It was the one bar in Croydon where you didn't have to wear a shirt and shoes. It ended up as a Sunday night upstairs in the Old Blue Last [in Shoreditch], called Pub Sessions: a crate of Red Stripe, £25 [$40] each, playing old dub 7-inches, and then dubstep later in the night, mashing up the windows. That lasted six months or so, in around 2004.
Joe Nice: Baltimore, Maryland-based DJ who started the first dubstep party in America, Dub War.
Pinch: A Bristol-based producer and DJ who founded and continues to run the Tectonic label.MALA: We did our first ever [DMZ] dance in the January of 2005. The owner of the venue was like, "You are all mad. Why are you putting a party on? Last weekend was New Year's Eve, no one's going to come." My mentality was: "You can only hear this music in this one club in the whole world," so I felt confident. That night, there was a new record attendance. Then it spiraled; Mary Anne Hobbs' Dubstep Warz Breezeblock broadcast was on January 10, 2006, and the DMZ first birthday was Saturday, March 4.JOE NICE: I remember this vividly: Mala and I drove over to Mass in Brixton together, and I asked him, "Yo, any tunes I should look out for tonight, brother?" Mala looks at me and says, "Joe [Coki] played this new bit for me and I started laughing when it dropped. I couldn't believe it. Trust me, bruv—it's gonna be the one." Going into Mass was astonishing. For a guy like me, from the US, we didn't have rigs with no limiters, in a room with 30ft ceilings, pummeling you with bass like this. The queue was around the block and down the hill. I'd never been to a party with that many people turning up for one genre of music. 'Something good has to come from this,' I remember thinking.
Mala: One of the founding members of the London-based DMZ club night and label, he's also one half of the production duo Digital Mystikz, as well as a solo DJ and producer.
Coki: The other half of Digital Mystikz, Coki is one of the core members of the DMZ label and club night.MARTIN CLARK: The appeal of DMZ as a club night, a label and with Digital Mystikz was the opposition to how drum and bass had developed. Drum and bass suffered from people who thought the engineering was more important than the music. There's nothing wrong with having great sonic value, but engineering a track to be as impactful as possible means generating a physical and emotional response. With that idea in dubstep, you cannot underestimate how much the Mystikz made that the standard.COKI: The style was very minimal, so it was open to atmospheric sounds to come through, with vocals that enhanced certain vibrations. My style was taken from scales. There might be a dub track with a scale played in E sharp, and I'm like, "I don't know that scale, I'm just used to C," so I started on a different melodic sound that I felt was coming from the same root as dub. A lot of the time, dub uses minor scales, and I just used major, so that's what created a different aura to the Mystikz' sound. I guess I tried to get it out of dub, but it didn't come out how I wanted it to.
Coki: One half of Digital Mystikz, along with Mala, Coki is one of the core members of the DMZ label and club night.
Sgt Pokes: The main MC for the DMZ club nights, Sgt Pokes has MC'd dubstep parties for over 15 years.
Loefah: A producer, DJ and one of the core members of the DMZ club night and label, he also runs the Swamp81 label.
El-B: A key producer and DJ in the transitional period between garage and dubstep, formerly part of garage duo Groove Chronicles.
Oris Jay: Also known as Darqwuan, the Sheffield-based producer and DJ helped to lead the breaks element of the dubstep sound.
Mala: One of the founding members of the London-based DMZ club night and label, he's also one half of the production duo Digital Mystikz, along with Coki, as well as a solo DJ and producer.
Coki: The other half of Digital Mystikz, Coki is one of the core members of the DMZ label and club night.MARTIN CLARK: Digital Mystikz were an incredible production duo, but they also established a center of power with DMZ. There were people whose careers ended there. [London producer and DJ] J Da Flex was supposed to play the first DMZ and he was given the final slot, which was considered a great honor. He said, "I'm not playing last"—and he never played DMZ again. He's not a big influence in dubstep any more for various reasons. As DMZ as a vehicle grew, J Da Flex became a vocal agitator for the breaks side of it all—"this other stuff is too dead, it's too quiet, it's too minimal, too weird"—but that side of things got lost.What people think of as dubstep now is only half of what the dubstep scene really was. The other side was a much smaller, but still intense, group of people who wanted to take the percussive patterns of garage and make them more break-focused, essentially building on from "138 Trek>" Those camps in the beginning were harmonious but, by 2004-05, once half-step became a blueprint, they started to really not get on.People like Caspa, Search and Destroy, Oris Jay, and to an extent with labels like Hotflush, were all in it together. Because it was all evolving on the fly, a few people straddled both camps and they all got booked for the same clubs, but in the way that the Plasticman sound is distinct from, say, Digital Mystikz, Search and Destroy's was distinct from Loefah. There was a huge amount of infighting.What ended up happening was that not only did the group that became known widely as "dubstep" get the dubstep moniker, but they also focused around DMZ: booking and not booking certain people, playing and not playing certain records, releasing and not releasing certain records. When you look at DMZ line-ups, you don't see many people that were from the other side of the camp. Although when we say "the other side," they were all still partying in the same room together at FWD>>.Breaks were borderline [derogatory name for a type of dubstep-influenced music created by the likes of Caspa, Rusko, and Skrillex that is listened to predominantly by lairy, musclebound university-age pissheads] brostep at the time, but it became even more distorted, overdriven, and over-compressed. Long before this shift, I was asking [London superclub] Fabric in 2002-03 to do a Hatcha CD, which would have been seminal, but instead we did Dubstep Allstars. Looking at it now, there is no touching that series, but you can't underestimate the effect the Caspa and Rusko Fabriclive mix had on the progression of the sound—and not in a good way.SGT POKES: To be fair to Caspa and Rusko, the story with their Fabriclive mix CD goes is that [Parisian house duo] Justice were asked to do that mix, and Justice turned in this weird French music. Then, Fabric are phoning around, going, "This has to get done really, really soon," and apparently they asked a lot of the dubstep people to do it, but nobody wanted it. Apart from Caspa and Rusko. They took a lot of stick for that release. They got a lot of the blame for the direction of the sound. The majority of the tunes in that mix are good tunes, but it just wasn't a fair representation of what it was to be in a dubstep party. They were highlight tunes that you wanted to hear peppered through sets, not back-to-back for over an hour. It was like a rave mega-mix.LOEFAH: That Fabriclive mix CD got offered to a load of us in the scene but we were like, "Nah"—and then some lads who weren't from Croydon jumped on it. I have two sides to this. Pragmatically, I think, 'Fuck it, they did their thing just like we did ours. They came at it independently and smashed it.' But when someone who'd been DJing and making dubstep tracks for less time than you were all of a sudden playing Fabric, that was when we thought, Fuck, we're not in control of this any more. It was coming from producers who weren't from Croydon. We were like, "You don't get it. We've never talked with you lot." People say that tracks like "Spongebob" and "Haunted" changed it all, but they at least have genuinely interesting beat patterns. When Caspa and Rusko came along, I started to lose interest.
EL-B: When Noodles [Steven Jude, the other half of the production duo Groove Chronicles with El-B] and I split around 2000-01, he gave me a call. He could have been spiteful, but he said: "You and your dubstep scene, it's a small pond. The sound has no dynamic." When I came back in 2006, and brought the Ghost [Recordings, El-B's label] crew with me to the dubstep clubs, they were all pissed off that every single DJ was trying to be as hard as they bloody could: all the groove had gone, and had been replaced by just, noise. A groove isn't always necessary, but variety is. Me, Oris Jay, Zed Bias: our sound got left out. It had only been three or four years, but we had to contend with a new generation of fans that had never heard of us.ORIS JAY: As soon as you had money, and status, then it's got to change. It was like King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table: we all had our parts to play. Then Arthur started making money, the exclusivity gets tighter and DJs became stars. Not on purpose, but Mary Anne Hobbs was our King Arthur. Everyone was on the same level and, like most, stumbled on dubstep by beautiful accident—and then got it played on Radio 1.When you think about the context of the time: the most you're going to get out of a track before that is on Rinse at 3 AM, or in one or two basement clubs in London. All of a sudden, it's getting aired on the BBC. The Dubstep Warz Breezeblock show aired 2-4 AM here, so during the day or early evening in the US, and that made the Americans pay attention. Basically: it made it big in America, which made it big in the UK. Within 18 months, everyone who was featured on that show got status, straight away.And another important thing that doesn't get talked about as much as it should: when I look at the scene as a whole, there were hardly any women, but if it weren't for Sarah Lockhart and Mary Anne Hobbs, there wouldn't be any of this. The boys were running around, but these two women brought it all together. This was a whole ecosystem of music that no one knew about, and they decided to tell the whole world about it. None of us would be where we are without Sarah, and the exposure would never have happened without Mary Anne.SGT POKES: Look, the way I see it is this: drum and bass lost its dynamic because of the way it was produced, but dubstep lost much of its dynamic by the late 2000s because of the way it was played. If Mala played "Thief in the Night" and "Hunter" and then "Spongebob," that's like Tyson walking into the club and knocking you the fuck out. If you play "Spongebob," then "Tree Trunk," then "Sea Sick," it's tear-out without the dynamic range.By then, there was also a lot of tunnel vision: people leaning over, covering up their work—the paranoid years. There was a lot more drug-taking then, too. We really noticed it at DMZ and FWD>>, particularly after the smoking ban. It's sad to say that it's a crucial part of it, but if you're a smoker, you get used to it. And when it's taken away, it changes how you act. There were more class-As going around the ravers, and then the artists dramatically ravaged it.LOEFAH: It changed the rave because all of a sudden, there was no weed, and it was all class-As. If you're on coke and pills, you're not up for the space. You're there to go mental. It became a uniform sound after that. It was a soul-destroying period for me. I stopped writing so many tunes, and I started playing tunes at raves that I didn't even like. That's why I started [the label] Swamp81: I needed something new—again.MALA: I think the smoking ban did have an impact on the sound and the dances. For a crew with hard smokers, what happens with a smoking ban is that you have an audience that aren't focused for the whole session. You're getting people coming in and going out, and that was disruptive to the dances because it had the effect of shortening people's attention spans; high impact and quick tunes get the quick response.But, look. We can pick apart what happened with dubstep, but the strength of it has been incredible. I think that the quality of sound being the focus—not the fashion, not the magazines that were writing about us—captured the imagination of people who were on the fringes. I don't want to say that was what the dubstep movement's biggest contribution was, but the whole term "bass music"? That certainly didn't exist before dubstep.The sound reminded people that music is about freedom, about not having to conform to the norms and standards of the day. Mediocrity is inevitable, because it gets saturated, but it also serves its own purpose: people are going to come up with something else because they'll get sick and tired again, too.COKI: Dubstep put people on a different level—come in and smoke with us, in this vast atmosphere. That's why our dances were de-militarized zones. It felt like you were vibing underwater. What dubstep was becoming by the late 2000s just… it was never that type of party for me. Speaking to Skream, Benga, and Hatcha, and Artwork too, about the levels that they were trying to get to… I knew in myself I couldn't cope with that.Click through to the next page.CHAPTER FOURTEEN: "Dubstep did everything right that it possibly could have done.""If it weren't for Sarah Lockhart and Mary Anne Hobbs, there wouldn't be any of this. The boys were running around, but these two women brought it all together." – Oris Jay
Skream: Croydon-born producer and DJ who was picked up as the so-called teenage poster boy of the dubstep scene.ARTWORK: It took the better part of ten years for drum and bass to go around the world, from small club to small club, but dubstep exploded because it was the first time that the internet and music really came together for us. I remember going round to my mate's house and he said, "I've got this thing over here where you can look at anything in the world." I was like, "Fuck off." "No, look," he said, "the CIA has a website." I didn't understand. I watched it go from sending emails, to within a few years seeing people rip records and put them on [central dubstep message board] dubstepforum.net. It was the death of Big Apple, frankly: you go from selling 2000 records to 200 records, because who the fuck wants to buy a record when you can get it for free?I'm completely averse to saying, "You can't do this, you can't do that," in music, because music moves incredibly fast. And thank fuck it does, otherwise we'd be bored shitless. You can't stop it, or police it, and anyone who tries to is an idiot. When grime started to come out, the older guys in the garage scene had a fucking meeting in the East End about stopping grime: telling record shops not to stock it, because it was ruining garage. I pissed myself laughing. I was like, "That is the most stupid fucking thing I've ever heard in my life." From that moment on, I told myself that I would never act like that. And that's why I loved what we did with Magnetic Man [the "dubstep supergroup featuring Artwork, Skream, and Benga].After we did our first Magnetic Man show at FWD>>, Sarah Soulja hooked us up with £10,000 [$15,000] from the arts council because they were looking to invest in "new live music" or something. We bought three laptops, hired a van and a tour manager, and did a ten-date UK tour. It got to the point where, a year later, we were doing festivals, and Sony saw a video of us and said, "What is this music? And why are these people playing to 15,000 people?"When they said, "Go and make the record," it was around the time that dubstep started to get very aggressive but also very pop: with big, formulaic drops. We told Sony that we didn't want to make the record in London, so they hired a massive mansion in Cornwall for us—off-season, from January to March. This was when a record company would say, "Who do you want on this track?" We'd say, "Uhhhh—John Legend?!"—and they'd come back with John Legend. We were like, "Fucking hell," so we took the piss.We wanted a mansion with a swimming pool, and we want it heated so that Benga could learn how to swim. While we were there, there were lorries turning up once a week. I thought, 'What the fuck are these for?' Turns out, it was oil for heating the pool. Sony spent £9,000 [$14,000] on fuel for this fucking pool. This pool had steam coming off it for two months. We were wrapped up in all of it, to be honest. We didn't give a shit about what was going on with dubstep at the time, either: the sound had turned into a lowest common denominator race for loudness, and we just wanted to write songs for the radio.