Bleep It Out! The Bowelquaking Dance Music Of Late80s Yorkshire
In 1989, George Evelyn accompanied an estimated 10,000 people in a barrage of flickering lights on a caravan to the Blackburn massacre. He recalls thinking, "That was the '60s: I think we had a revolution."
Hours later, Evelyn stood outside, holding her breath as familiar voices and shouts of joy echoed through the night air. "We walked in and oh my god," he recalls. "It's the first time I've seen something like this." They performed their debut song Nightmares on Wax as Dextrous. "It was pure joy and excitement," he says. "But I'm scared too because we're only in the Leeds bubble."
It was one of many occasions between 1988 and 1991 when the blip, a sub-style of techno often filled with knee-quivering sub-bass, exploded to reset dancers' heads and guts. The genre has been largely neglected since then, says Matt Ennis, author of Join the Future: Bleep Techno and the Birth of British Bass Music. "It's being grossly neglected," he said. "There is a huge gap in the history of British dance music at a time when there should be mistakes. I want to catch up.” Join the Future was re-released this month as an expanded edition, there is a compilation of the same name and another compilation has just come out: Bleeps, Breaks + Bass Volume 2.
Bleep is part of a different lineage: all-day soul and jazz funk, the British black house parties called Blues or Shebeen, and the reggae sound system that inspired both. But it is also a series of big bang moments in which a dazzling new sonic language emerges. "Voodoo Ray" from "A Guy Named Gerald" will forever be considered a sonic boom, but another 1988 song released months later was just as explosive: "The Theme" from "Unique 3."
The record, which shook the walls of a multi-storey house in Bradford, was then sent to the record store and there was a wave of applause, heads bobbing and guts roaring. "The issues are huge," said Winston Hazell, buyer for FON Records in Sheffield, DJ Jive Turkey and soon-to-be music producer for Forgemasters. “People sang riffs in unison, like a football anthem. It was a tribal call to play the damn track again."
Parrot, aka Richard Barratt, DJ Jive Turkey, who produced Cabaret Voltaire's Sweet Exorcist with Richard H. Kirk and produced the Testone soundtrack, "Voodoo Ray and Theme filled the Chicago and Detroit records we played," the Anthem. "But it feels like they were created by people like us. It suggested a voice with a distinct Nordic accent."
Gez Varley, half of the original LFO band, was in a record shop in Leeds when Theme arrived. "We were amazed," he said. "Looks like we're going to have to come up with something. This incredible record was set by local kids. Before, I didn't think any of us could do it." That was the persuasion surrounding The Theme, with Unique 3 even attending competing dance band nights in Leeds and crossing the packed dance floor to give the DJ a copy to play with. The DJ was Kevin Harper, then half of Nightmares on Wax, and although the B-side failed, it hit so hard that it went out three times in a row.
These moments of stage harmony are rare because remnants of the culture of children growing up breakdancing means they are all tribal. In 1989, the reputation Dextrous had built around town even led to Evelyn confronting the opposing team at a barbecue and saying, "That's not your curse." Evelyn laughed as she shared the story, adding, "The best compliment one can give."
There were complaints about the new Sheffield label and the first band they wanted Warp Records on - later home to Aphex Twin, Autechre and others - was Unique 3, but they were signed to Virgin. Rob Gordon, co-founder of Warp and an incredibly talented and important producer and engineer in the bleep story, remixed Theme for the Virgin as a "bass statement" but no engineer touched it. One of them was Jeff Pesce, but to fully capture the sub-bass depth on the record, he rushed under the mixing table to remove the limiters. Virgin received a letter of complaint when a poorly designed loudspeaker was blown up and destroyed in England.
He currently composes as Forgemasters with Hazel Gordon and Sean Maher. While sound system culture and reggae are central to many bleep and bass staples along with techno, house and electro, Sheffield has other unique elements. "Sheffield's roaring," Hazel explained. “Our sound is very reminiscent of heavy industry, specifically a 15-ton hammer that can work 16-hour shifts, seven days a week. He created a ricochet that ricocheted off the hills of Sheffield. That thunderous roar literally echoed in Hazel's dream. “When I sleep, the sound becomes a constant heartbeat; this unconscious hypnotic rhythm stayed with me and started to manifest itself in the music.
Results Track With No Name became another highlight. The rhythmic drum patterns programmed into his Gordon 909 machine, the powerful synth lines and clipped sine waves for the bass lines result in raw but seamless South Yorkshire techno chop. It was Warp's first release and spawned dance classics with Nightmares on Wax, Sweet Exorcist, LFO, Tricky Disco and Tuff Little Unit.
Evelyn describes this chronology as a "call and response" approach between acts, with each trying to outdo the other. "When we were teenagers, we all competed against each other in break dancing," he says. "So it's a sequel. We don't accept this song as the club's anthem, we condemn it, we have to do something about it."
Not everyone shared Evelyn's belief in fierce competition, but revolutionary music genres emerged nonetheless. The Teststone remains perhaps the most literal example of a techno blip, as it consists of non-musical tones used to test audio equipment, resulting in stunning recordings that sound alien yet euphoric. And LFO's big LFO track transports the music made in those dingy industrial spaces, bedrooms and makeshift studios into another world.
The LFO world is so closed off that they only imagine music for one place. "It's about playing an illegal party in Chapeltown," Varley said. “We started playing muted bass to get the kids reggae dancing at local parties. At LFO we use toys, talking cars and magic spells to say 'LFO' so they know it's us - as a breakdance team you brag."
However, this move was ingenious and became a calling card in England. People flocked to the DJ booth to ask questions, and that led to people going to record stores and asking, "Do you have a track that says 'LFO'?" answering simple questions. It sold hundreds of thousands of copies and reached number 12 on the charts. "We rose to Top of the Pops out of nowhere," Varley recalls.
Like the faltering Unique 3, the LFO exploded in a variety of ways: it blew up the club system again, or it shattered the glass shelf in the bar. Along with the widespread use of ecstasy, this music has gone mad. "But it's the little speakers that make me laugh," says Barratt. “When the record started climbing the charts, most people were listening to small transistor radios that couldn't pick up the low frequencies. The sub-bass LFO will drop and there will be silence."
This flight surprised Evelyn. "We have everything, but we don't make good out of anything," he said. “The beautiful and naïve thing is that the reference point is another DJ playing your song. That is absolute, nothing more. We are all from here. There was never any question of a career.” Warp's success was so meteoric that by 1990 this small Sheffield company, starting at £2,000 a bedroom under the Company Benefits Scheme, accounted for 2% of all record sales in the country.
Bleep is often synonymous with Sheffield because of warp, but it's much broader than that. Leeds-based Ital Rockers create one of the genre's most iconic tracks with Bassic Records' Anthem, but the party they threw through their sound system was key . "That party in Leeds is as important as the Hacienda in Manchester," Varley said. Also of note was Birmingham-based Network Records, which released albums such as Forgemasters, XON and Rhythmatic.
It saved a lot of time for Sally Rogers, who was on the Bleeps compilation Breaks + Bass as a guy named Adam. "That was a short period of time where DIY could democratize and go mainstream through access to new technologies," he said. “Everything used to be bigger and more fragmented. That was a real golden moment.”
That was the thundering trajectory of early '90s dance music, the scene had grown and grown, but Ennis feels that since then, "from bassline to dubstep to grime," the beat has been lost. "Also bass-backed techno from labels like Livity Sound, Timedance and Trule."
More than 30 years later, Varley still can't let go of the endless echoes of LFO. "I'll never forget that," he laughed. "It will be played at my funeral when I die... although I'm not sure the church spokesman will handle it."
