Christmas 1988. Cliff Richard held the number one spot for three weeks with ‘Mistletoe & Wine’ while Inner City, Stakker Humanoid, Bomb The Bass and Neneh Cherry lingered around the UK top 40 like beacons of hope between Bon Jovi and Bros. Meanwhile, a young man by the name of Lenworth Green had just put the finishing touches to a track he made in his flat on the Beaumont estate in Leyton, East London.
Green, AKA Lennie De Ice, was only 18 when he inadvertently laid the foundations for jungle. He’d progressed from playing electro, hip hop and rare groove records in the mid 80s to acid house after his first rave experience in a warehouse in Stratford in 1987. Soon, Green and his partner ET were performing live house sets on drum machines and synths when, one serendipitous night at the infamous Dungeons, Adamski joined the duo on stage for a jam session. “It was going off that night,” Green told Paul Terzulli in his book Who Say Reload. “I wanted to replicate the excitement of the rave and capture that feeling in a tune.”
The burgeoning producer cobbled together a home studio, splashing out a few hundred quid on a sampler and Atari ST, and began by chopping up and looping the Amen break which he lifted from ‘King Of The Beats’ by Mantronix. Spin-backs and gunshots were sourced from another staple in his hip hop box: a DJ tool on Simon Harris’ Music Of Life label. A pounding kick drum from a Roland TR505 held it all together while a speaker-shaking dub bass line loped against double-time breaks, taking it beyond the realms of hip-house as Green tapped into his reggae roots, conjuring the heady steppers of Jah Shaka and his ilk.
The final touch was a sampled voice crying out something which sounds like “we are ayeeeeeeeee” at regular intervals, though what you’re actually hearing is Algerian vocalist Mohammed “Cheb” Sahraoui singing in Arabic – the line roughly translates as “oh, my opinion” – from ‘N’Sel Fik’ by Cheb’s group Fadela.
An Algerian folk record might sound like a left of centre selection next to hip hop and electro samples, but ‘N’Sel Fik’ had been a big draw in clubs like The WAG and The Hacienda, earning a 12-inch release on Factory Records, and an LP on Island’s Mango imprint. It’s more than likely that Green had one of these in his record box, though it’s also worth noting that Bomb The Bass opened ‘On The Cut’ from their debut LP Into The Dragon with a clean sample of that exact same vocal phrase. Tim Simenon from Bomb The Bass had ‘N’Sel Fik’ in his DJ arsenal when he played at The WAG.
While contemporaries like Simenon straddled the top 10, and Shut Up & Dance ploughed a similar field of electro-driven ragga-rave anthems, Green’s groundbreaking debut would remain under wraps for another couple of years before it was finally unleashed on the world. Via the record shop De Underground in Forest Gate, Green linked up with “Long John” Aymer who took a chance on a new version of ‘We Are I.E.’ which upped the tempo from 118 to 130bpm, and slated it for release on a 4 track EP on the newly minted IE Records.
It’s first public airing was at a rave called The Living Dream next to one of the future sites of the 2012 Olympics, but in the summer of 1991 you could find 6,000 ravers losing it to the likes of Grooverider, Ragga Twins, and DJ Randall who was handed dubplates of the whole EP. He dropped ‘We Are I.E.’ early in his set, and the place went… mild. They didn’t dislike it, but thousands of people were now slowly wining and bobbing along to the halftime bassline. Green wondered if this wasn’t the standout track on the EP after all, but Randall had faith, dropping it again as his final tune as they watched the dancefloor shock-out on its second spin of the night.
Had Green been available for PAs and DJ sets, he surely would’ve reaped the benefits of his underground anthem, but a misdemeanour from a few years prior had caught up with him, landing the young producer in Brixton prison around the time ‘We Are I.E.’ hit the shops in 1991. Green’s only insight into what he’d achieved was via pirate stations which the inmates listened to in their cells after dark, banging their cups in honour of their cellmate whenever his tune got a spin.
On his release in 1993, Green discovered low-slung dub and dancehall samples mixed with double time breaks were now everywhere. He’d missed The Prodigy and SL2 nearly topping the chart with ‘Out Of Space’ and ‘On A Ragga Tip’, and tempos were steadily rising in the dance, but the Amen break was now the gold standard.
Green didn’t hesitate to get back in the game, releasing a succession of homegrown 12-inches over the next few years on his own labels Armshouse Crew Records and Do Or Die which further explored the collision between dancehall sound systems and break-driven raving. When UK reggae veteran Chris Lane got wind of how many of his productions on Fashion Records had been pilfered by junglists, rather than hiring lawyers, he enlisted these producers to make official remixes from his catalogue, and Green was top of the list delivering devastating re-licks of Top Cat, Cutty Ranks and General Levy alongside junglist contemporaries including DJ Rap and Kenny Ken.
By the turn of the 00s, Green had stepped away from the mixing desk, but ‘We Are I.E.’ hadn’t lost its appeal, finding its way into UK garage and dubstep DJ sets. It was around this time that I moved to Leyton, setting up my own home studio which looked out on a block of flats on the next street where Green first produced his junglist blueprint. The Beaumont estate was in flux, plagued by gang violence, and its looming towers boarded up and poised for demolition. A christmas tree stood discarded on a derelict balcony, waiting for maybe a year or so to perish in the rubble, but while it was there it somehow etched itself into my psyche, rendering ‘We Are I.E.’ as some kind of surreal Christmas record, a reverberating antidote to the torment of Cliff Richard’s children singing Christian rhymes all those years back.
‘We Are I.E.’ remains an anthem which spans generations, perennially remixed, reworked and reimagined with every dancefloor revolution. Some might scrutinize it as the zero point for jungle, certainly there were tracks like ‘18” Speaker’ by Ragga Twins and Shut Up & Dance before it, but as far as repurposing dub with the Amen break, it’s surely a strong contender for the title, or as Cheb Sahraoui might say, that’s my opinion.
