3.
Various – Street Beats: Femme Fatale & B-Live / Slimzee & God’s Gift
This was the next thing. In fact, it might have been [this CD] that really sealed the deal. Femme Fatale’s CD is really cool, and I come back to it more now I’m a bit older and appreciate it a bit more. Hers was just on the crossover, she’s playing grimey stuff but it was ‘Are You Really From The Ends’ and stuff like that, where it was still coming from producers from the garage or even broken beat scene who were starting to do the darker stuff. Slimzee’s was to an extent too, but it was obviously also the whole dark, Dump Valve, almost that early dubstep sound that was starting to emerge, but still with these totally off-the-wall beats. That Eastwood beat on there called ‘Elastik’, it’s a square bass and it just goes [sings] "u-u-uppp – and – dowwwwnnn", and it was like ‘Wow! What is this?’ It sounded like brutalism to me straight away. I could see concrete blocks and unfinished surfaces with that shell print on them, you know. It was really visceral for me.
I did go to a few of those nights [garage/grime raves]. But to be honest most of my hearing grime in the club actually happened at FWD>>, I feel so blessed to have caught that era of it. Now that I’m a bit older and I can reference those experiences of going to a grime night or a garage night and then going to FWD>>, I actually do prefer the FWD>> experience. This might actually tell you about what kind of person I am. [laughs] I mean, I like a party, and it’s cool to have everyone, and I love that whole thing of a new track every five seconds, and a ton of energy, and an MC hyping up, and all that kind of stuff – it’s obviously amazing, it’s what makes UK rave so spectacularly different to the rest of the world.
But what you got at FWD, I liked that it was almost divorced from that context, and you could just appreciate it as beats. It was just a beats at 140bpm night at one point, it wasn’t a dubstep night [then], and having that openness of being able to go down there and hear an early Plasticman/Plastician set, and maybe Geeneus, Slimzee, Bossman. Being able to hear those kind of beats in the context of what was going to become dubstep was really cool, because it was celebrating the beats aspect of it, and how they functioned in the space. Getting so, so deep in them – being in old school Plastic [People], being surrounded by them, bass up to your head! Being swallowed up by something so powerful – it was just a crazy experience.
Street Beats comes closest to capturing that experience on record, for me. It’s sick. And Gift kills it as well, that is definitely the golden era of God’s Gift – he’s just coming out of Pay As U Go, kind of moving into Roll Deep era, and he just sounds sick. He sounds so powerful, and him and Slimzee are just a perfect combination, they go so hard.
