Dance music stimulated my imagination without the lyrical direction or structure of a conventional story. Steve ‘Silk’ Hurley, S’Express and M.A.R.R.S opened up my sense of what you could do without (guitars, a drum kit, vocalist) in music, but ‘Beat Dis’ was like listening to a vast comic book, another of my great passions, that filled the interregnum between The Wizard of Oz and The Catcher In The Rye. The building and unravelling rhythm on the track felt as if it was a fractured storyboard, not of Judge Dredd or The ABC Warriors, but of the walls, streets, and tow paths of West London as I knew them, but in musical captions and with aural graphics. Bizarrely I had already gleaned from The Jesus And Mary Chain’s ‘Something’s Wrong’ that a sound (the do do doo’s it starts with) can be worth a thousand words, and that noise has an equal explanatory power to explaining yourself patiently; so ‘Beat Dis’ was my first experience of how seemingly dissimilar music can conform to a governing idea (thus making the question “what kind of music are you into?” impossible to answer for the rest of my life).
Listening to it again, the track still, and will always, convey the thrilling sense that life is an unfolding drama, or that at least that I believed mine was, feeding the self-mythologising tendencies that I hope I have safely locked into writing, and that however pretentious and arrogant, I could not have written without.
