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Baker's Dozen

Burnt Ends: Slackk's Favourite Albums
Oli Marlow , October 2nd, 2014 13:46

The Liverpool-via-London grime producer and Boxed co-founder released his debut album, Palm Tree Fire, last month. Now, he talks Oli Marlow through his favourite records, taking in LPs, mixtapes, pirate radio sets and magazine cover-mounts. Slackk photograph courtesy of Mehdi Lacoste

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27/10/10, Petchy ft. Topsee & DPO on Live FM
This Petchy era was amazing. I never actually saw them do it live. As far as I was aware it was only at very limited raves and it was quite far east that these actually happened. And I was never gonna be able to coax mates out to them and I'm not turning up to some random funky rave in a bar on my own to see Petchy and Topsee and all that at two in the morning. A bald, overweight scouser standing in the corner is gonna stick out like a sore thumb so it was like 'no, too awkward, not happening" [laughs]. But, this period of Petchy on Live FM with all the MCs was one of the pinnacles of pirate music to me. Obviously I've got a bad fascination with pirate music but for about a year these Petchy sets, and to a lesser extent the Marcus Nasty sets; the Marcus sets were great although it didn't feel like he had the same up-tempo mental energy cause Petchy had everything pitched-up to 135 and was tearing through the tunes, so it was almost like funky done in a grime context.

I do feel that the best London pirate radio sets are all the same sort of thing, like half-finished, rough beats, up-tempo MCs with a bit of banter (God I hate that word) and energy and spontaneity in the studio and I think this was really representative of it. This is also around the time where I first started getting tunes played and playing out and before the funky thing started dying off and becoming something that I wasn't really interested in.

It ticks a lot of boxes for me in terms of a specific period in time and I just fucking love the energy on these sets, they were just so much fun to listen to.

Listen here.