9.
Round One To Round Five – 1993-99, Main Street Records
Talking of Leeds and the London-Leeds link – things like Subdub, but then seeing Benny Ill and stuff at FWD>> – all of the Rhythm & Sound stuff has been important to me, but the Main Street records in particular have shaped the way I hear a lot of music.
Leeds had a big reggae and dub scene, there were lots of little sound systems and a couple of really big ones like the Iration Steppas system. We used a system called High Pressure who were good at what they did. So the Rhythm & Sound stuff immediately resonated with me because it had that stripped-down, very hypnotic, heady feel of the dubstep I was interested in, and it was definitely namechecked by people like Benny Ill and Peverelist and the Bristol guys.
This is something that really surprises me, because it’s so blatant and it’s just there for everyone to see, but I don’t hear many people talk about how Rounds One to Five link to one another, and how interesting that is – that they take it from really brash, uplifting vocal house to the deepest, most spaced out dub, and it sits together beautifully, it just makes sense when you hear it.
It feels to me as though they must have been invested in making these connections to have made it so explicit in a series like this. It was big for me, anyway, again it was like, ‘I really like reggae and dub, but I’m not interested in house music at all. But oh wait! These guys made some of my favourite music in this area, but they also made stuff like ‘New Day’ and ‘I’m Your Brother’ – how does that work?’ But then you hear it and it makes perfect sense. My reaction was to think, ‘Oh, I’ve got it wrong – what else is around?’
It’s documented on the Sub FM shows, which are still floating around the internet – my first attempts at playing house and bits of dubbed-out techno. David had been into house for ages and did a couple of radio shows on Sub FM in that vein much earlier than me, but at the time I wasn’t really into what he was playing. He was playing a lot of US stuff, which I got into later – [I was into] Main Street, and people like Convexion and stuff like that, stuff that hasn’t stuck with me in the same way but that I still quite like.
