Back for the First Time: The Unexpected UK Garage Union

UK Garage never went away. It's influence has seeped into both underground dance music – in everything from bassline to deep tech – and the mainstream. It's seen as a perfectly captured moment in time and as a thriving, living thing.

Congregating in the shabby chic confines of an East London boozer, disquietingly small in the sober light of day, I witness something that seemed like an impossibility all those years ago: So Solid Crew's Megaman, Pay As U Go Cartel's Maxwell D, and Heartless Crew's Bushkin, sat together in apparent harmony. Three representatives of three legendary groups with long-held rivalries coming together to celebrate a mutual love: UK Garage. Next month sees them reunite on stage to perform at the UKG Gold event at the Indigo O2. It will be a chance for fans young and old, scene regulars and internet appreciators to come together and see something that once seemed like a distant hope.

During the course of our chat, Megaman quietly establishes himself as the driving force behind the reunion. When Radio 1Xtra presenter Mistajam tried, and failed, to get all the members of So Solid into the studio for a UK Garage retrospective, Megaman tried a different approach. "Instead we got several crews to appear on the show. I holla'd at Maxwell, at Bushkin, some other UKG people. We got the lads together. We haven't been in one building like that for so long. As soon as we finished MCing, [So Solid MC] Harvey whispered in my ear 'We need to do this again'. So we all had a meeting, signed the deal, made it happen." Megaman has a head for business and admits that if that side of things wasn't "handled correctly" the show wouldn't be happening.

The excitement amongst the trio is evident. "Outsiders might think that once upon a time these were guys in competition with each other, so to see everyone together in harmony, that's a big thing. People haven't seen us like that in a long time. We've got Mega smiling with Bush, Bush smiling with me. That's special in itself," Maxwell says. But it goes beyond the unlikely friendships that have formed. The night is intended as a celebration of something that was, and is, a genuine cultural movement and moment. Garage, Megaman tells me, with complete, unerring, straight-faced confidence "is the biggest thing in the UK." Bushkin, despite broadly agreeing, has some reservations about that. "The thing that's changed is that back then, everyone was into garage. There was a culture, a vibe, dress codes, right haircuts. Now it's segregated. At that time it was all under one roof. We had garage dances. Certain words we used. It was a scene. Now you have a small grime scene, then a house scene that's three or four smaller scenes, then there's a bashment scene. We had the garage scene. And everyone was in it."

The sense of harmony that flows through the room comes from the knowledge that things once weren't like this. Venturing into the potentially risky waters of dredging up the past, I asked if the rivalries between crews had actually been as prevalent as the media reported, if it really was necessary for the police to effectively silence So Solid in the way they did? "We hated each other's guts," Megaman says. Why? "We were headstrong individuals," Maxwell D reasons. It wasn't just musical differences that kept them separated. "Things were very postcode orientated," Mega Man begins, "You wouldn't see So Solid fans in east London, wouldn't see them in north. At holiday resorts you couldn't get us near each other. We'd all be in different clubs, different hotels, different beaches…" "We had Cypriots fighting with each other," Maxwell remembers.

Bushkin is more forthright on this matter. "What happened with those kind of rivalries, those separations, was the result of street culture, gang culture. Certain people are affiliated with certain areas. That happens. The media just blows it out of proportion though. They get involved and things escalate. We could have got on individually. We did. Me and Maxwell were friends, even then."

How, I wondered, does it feel to be actively involved in something, call it a scene, a culture, that's been removed from the area it germinated in and has been re-contextualized? UK Garage has become something that's as likely to appear in fashion magazine photo shoots nowadays. The trio were in agreement that it's a positive thing. Maxwell D argued that, "there needs to be more of it. Kids are gonna see how to perform like Bushkin, how to handle business like Mega. That can only be a good thing." Megaman noted that "We're the blueprint for your Wileys, your Skeptas. We were there before 1Xtra. I wish smart phones had been around back in the day. Think of how much more of that kind of stuff would be out there."

The documentation of the scene stretches beyond spreads in Dazed or late night Channel 4 nostalgia. At events like this, the fans expect certain tunes, certain trips down memory lane. This is the one point in which the trio hesitantly diverge from a consensus. Megaman tells me that on a European tour with Christina Aguilera, just after the release of their second album 2nd Verse, he refused to perform So Solid's signature tune, the era-defining "21 Seconds". "I was stubborn," he says, "and I regret it. If people want that song now, I do it." The idea of having to hark back to the past sits slightly uneasily with the Heartless Crew man. "I don't like being associated with the past too much. When people only know things from ten years ago, I think, well that's what I did then, and I can replicate certain things but it has to be fresh. I don't want to forget what I've done, what we've done, but I want to do new things. Heartless Crew are no longer together. This is a good reason to get people together. But at the back of my mind, I'm like, I want to do new stuff."

However they play it, however many concessions they make to the spectres of the past, one thing, for Megaman at least, is certain: "This event is going to remind you of when we shut down the whole underground. We took over everything. This is us taking it back." "Everyone is going to be there. Everyone," adds Maxwell, grinning.

You can buy tickets for the event here

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