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Music

Leeds Garage

If you’re a teenager living in a council estate anywhere north of Grimsby, you won’t be spending your weekends at home practicing WCW wrestling moves on your terrified cat, smoking weed, and listening to Ghetto’s new mixtape. No, instead the chances...

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If you’re a teenager living in a council estate anywhere north of Grimsby, you won’t be spending your weekends at home practicing WCW wrestling moves on your terrified cat, smoking weed, and listening to Ghetto’s new mixtape. No, instead the chances are you’ll be riding in your 1992 Ford Fiesta down to the local nightclub with your Rockport loafers, fake D&G shirt and enough diamante-encrusted jewellery to choke a murder of crows to listen to some banging bassline house. If you didn’t know, bassline house is the biggest thing up north since coal. The records all sound like stuff producers such as DJ Narrows, Sirus and Wire were putting out in 2002 but that hasn’t stopped everyone going insane for it. The scene is being led by 19-year-old Leeds producer T2. He was homeless until last year, but after topping every garage chart and being the most requested song on Kiss, Choice and 1Xtra, his song “Heartbroken” has been signed to a major. It’s now being played by Jo Whiley and Edith Bowman on daytime Radio 1, and it looks like it will go Top 10. All of this off the back of a scene which sounds like a slightly updated version of speed garage? Honestly, Todd Edwards would be turning in his grave (if he were actually dead). Vice: Where did your name come from? T2: I was in love with a movie called Terminator 2: Judgement Day. I liked the big guns. It was fascinating for a little kid—that big ting that he had. Like when he was fighting all them police, that was sick, bro. There was this enemy—the guy they was running away from when they rescued the yoot—and he could turn to liquid. He could turn into a police officer, he could turn into a woman, he could run fast and he could just turn his hands into metal. That was sick. Did you ever wish you could time travel like the Terminator? Nah, it was just sick though, the fact he could do that. I rated him, innit. Man came from the future, boy, and just landed like a beam. Phhhfffwwwooosssshhhhh. The first time I couldn’t even watch it, yeah. My mum wouldn’t let me, you get me? It was a bit late. I must’ve seen like 10 minutes into it and I got told to go to bed. Why do people have such a love/hate relationship with Terminator? Well, when you think of it now, he’s just the dumbest guy, Arnold Schwarzenegger. But when you’re a little kid it’s fascinating—all the action and that. A lot of people think it’s dumb. It’s just like cartoons—it worked for kids but it might not work for adults. If art is an imitation of life, and life of art, how do you reconcile the problem of unblemished reality in your work? That is to say, in reflecting reality, when you make music are you being T2, or are you doing T2? It’s a bit of both, really. I live music, bro. I live it, I breathe it. My whole life revolves around it. PRANCEHALL
“Heartbroken” is out now on All Around The World/2NV Records/Universal. myspace.com/t2musicbassline