Duncan Powell is the Hero of UK Garage’s Lost Years
Nathan Evans' UK garage and club music column covers the latest songs, remixes, bootlegs, mixes and albums that capture his attention. This edition dives into the lost years of UK garage with a veritable legend of the style.
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After the Champagne Pops: Discussing the Mid-2000 4x4 Lost Years with Duncan Powell
Lifelong Liverpool FC fans like myself are living the high life, and similarly UK garage is more popular than ever worldwide, with bassline-oriented garage storming the US thanks to the likes of Sammy Virji and NOTION. But, just like Liverpool, it wasn’t always this successful.
As touched upon in last month’s column and radio show, the commercialisation of the original UK garage movement in the early 2000s soured many people, and it became a laughing stock. The genre became known as the place for Moschino, Gucci dress-ups and champagne bottles in the club, but by 2003, the champagne bubbles had burst. Dubstep, broken beat, grime all responded to this by mutating it into new rhythms and philosophies, and you could be forgiven for thinking that garage was forgotten about.
However, in the hermit years of the mid-2000s, garage saw a new scene and sound that took the leftfield patchwork sampling that Todd Edwards and Dem 2 pioneered in the late 90s, and took it even further, to create a computerised and frenetic style of 4x4 that is saturated with colour and wriggling with excitement. With projects such as El-B and Karl “Tuff Enuff” Brown’s El-Tuff, as well as Club Asylum, Tuff Jam, Qualifide, MJ Cole, DJ $ki, Artifact and Mr. Bumpy, flashes of old doo-wop and soft rock vocal samples were being cut into manic tapestries of stimuli that were thrown onto your lap like hot coals. Todd Edwards was undoubtedly the nucleus of this evolution, as his tracks became more digital and quicker in tempo compared to his late-90s material.
If UK garage and Liverpool were both at a quiet point in their history in the mid-2000s, Reading-born producer Duncan Powell is the genre’s Steven Gerrard. A man who, when no-one wanted to know about garage, held the fort and created pristine examples of the 4x4 sound this era is known, or rather unknown, for. Talking about the feeling of the scene, the online communities that connected garage fans in new ways at the time or how J Dilla influenced him as much as Todd Edwards, Powell cuts a humble figure - he routinely calls himself lucky to have had opportunities. In actuality, the scene was lucky to have someone with such a great understanding of it.
Let's take it back to the beginning. Where did you grow up, and what sort of music was playing around the house?
I grew up in the outskirts of Reading, and my mum was really into music. She had a tape that we used to play in the car all the time, which had Soft Cell, David Bowie, Bob Marley, Dire Straits, that sort of thing. I remember “China Girl” by Bowie really striking a chord with me when I was little. Hearing those tracks definitely set something off in me, and as soon as I was old enough, I was trying to record stuff off the radio, manipulate VHS and tapes to try and mix things together and do things over the top.
From there, I moved onto discovering jungle and rave music, and then being carried off into happy hardcore and drum & bass up until about ‘97/98, when I was in a club in Reading that was playing trance music all night, which was the big thing at the moment, at that time. All of a sudden, the DJ changed the music completely, he played Antonio’s “Hyperfunk”. I'd never heard garage before, but I stood there thinking, ‘this is just like slowed-down drum & bass’. That was the transition for me, and all of a sudden I just got absolutely swept away with it.
When did you then take it a step further to start producing UK garage?
Probably only a few months later, my sister worked for a company called Novation, who made synthesizers. She brought one home, a Supernova, with a copy of Computer Music which had a demo of a bit of software called Cool Edit, which later became Adobe Audition. I opened this up, and it was not a sequencer as such. It just had a window where you could alter sounds, you could apply effects - reverb, echo, that sort of thing.
I combined that with the Supernova, and I'd record something to have a single sound, then I just used maths to multiply it out. So I could play it four times in a row, and if it's 140 beats per minute, you divide it to work out the milliseconds. Then I started to add drum sounds and play around with this and all of a sudden, I realized I could make an entire record by doing this, by just pasting individual sounds in place, making loops, and then pasting the loops, and it's all just done off math. So I'd never seen a sequencer as they are known now, but I used to make tracks in there, starting with bootlegs, edits, that sort of thing.
At the time, DJ EZ was absolutely massive on Kiss FM. He was on Friday Night Kiss at this particular time, and he read out his PO Box address. I sent him a CD, and I hadn’t even thought of an artist name at this point, I’d literally been doing it for three or four months. But he played something off of it. I couldn't believe it. To get EZ to play your stuff at that time was a hard thing, and I don't know why, but he just took a shine to me. It was just a handwritten letter with my name and no DJ name or something, but seemingly after every CD I sent him, he would play something off of it, sometimes two or three things. That gave me a massive confidence to go and learn how to do this properly. Maybe I had a leg up before I had earned it, perhaps because I wasn't particularly talented or knowledgeable about what I was doing, but it just meant that I had an opportunity, and I grabbed it and went with it.
When did you sort of come onto the scene then?
So, that would have been about 2001. And then throughout 2002, I started to get a bit better, and then 2003, that’s when things happened. I discovered the Uptown Records forum, which probably stopped when Facebook came along, and I went on there because EZ had bigged up the Uptown forums crew [on his show], and then I realized there's an entire online community. This was very early days of the internet, but people who like the same music that I like were talking about it. And of course, I wondered what happened if I typed my name in, and there was loads of stuff with people going, ‘who is this guy?’ This was so strange.
I posted on there saying, ‘it's me, I'm just a guy from Reading trying to do something.’ And someone who ran a record label got in touch and said, ‘let's do some stuff’. He put out a bootleg remix of 702 that I'd done, and that sold really, really well.
Then, I started doing some original stuff, I made my first EP which came out in 2004 and then things really started to happen, because there was a lot more interest from record companies asking for remixes. In hindsight, what I should have done is start my own record label and done it all myself, but It wasn't my intention to ever get anywhere with this. It was just fun, pure hobby. So I just label hopped, and it'll be an opportunity to meet new people. I worked with anybody who messaged me.
You were probably one of the first producers who really got into UK garage in, like, a very digital way, like in the way you used software, instead of a sequencer.
Possibly. I mean, there were others around at the time who were experimenting. Mr. Bumpy was slightly ahead of me. He had some very unusual methods of producing as well, bouncing things on and off of MiniDiscs and all this kind of stuff. Qualifide was fully up and running by the time I was producing my stuff, and he was working on Cubase with actual studio equipment.
What was the vibe of what the UK garage scene was like in 2003-2004? Did it feel like at the time that the sky was falling?
When I started, it was still really popular. And then the sales were dropping drastically, and it was banned in a lot of clubs. I remember there was a night in Reading where the Heartless Crew were playing, and nothing to do with the music, but there was an incident in the crowd, which meant that there was a ban on garage music in Reading. It was my hometown, where I was being fed all the music that was out there, and all of a sudden it's nowhere. So that was a major signal. It was really hard to book clubs, and lots of clubs in London were just not playing it as well.
So there was nowhere to really hear it, and there weren’t the same online communities. YouTube didn't exist, but EZ was still going, Matt ‘Jam’ Lamont was on Kiss FM. And whilst EZ was playing to the broader audience, Matt Jam had a very specialist and niche following, and he was a real driver behind that sound, because he'd signed a lot of these people, like Artifact and Mr. Bumpy. He was really positive towards anybody who was coming in trying to make new music and gave us a real home on his show. At the same time, Karl ‘Tuff Enuff’ Brown was on Choice FM back then, and was someone who has constantly innovated new music and stayed at the cutting edge.
[Karl ‘Tuff Enuff’ Brown] was making some really cool music, particularly the El-Tuff project with El-B that he was doing that was so inspiring for me, because it was like a musical collage. Kind of like Todd Edwards, but not as extreme with the micro sampling, there were longer samples but very few that you recognized. DJ $ki was a machine at making really high-quality music, you were really excited to hear what everybody was going to come out with next. There was constantly somebody new popping up. Misty Dubs came along, and then Solution. There was somebody who took it and gave it their new angle. That was the food I needed.
I couldn't believe that nobody was buying it or enjoying this music, because to me, this was the new rave music. If you listen to some of my early records, there's lots of hardcore rave and jungle samples that I've snuck in there, because that's how I felt about it. This is a variation of what The Prodigy were doing. But nobody was really playing or supporting it. There was, like, a very, very underground base level, but it felt like the exclusive club that nobody was in.
Did it feel like a community?
Absolutely, it felt like it was a more close knit community, rather than a massive audience to play to. The people that would turn up at the few nights that were there were the people off the Uptown Forum. So a lot of the time you turn up, and you might not know everybody's face, but you know their name on the forum once they came over. There were some really good nights where you met up with all these people.
People were generating new sounds. Because if you look at what MJ Cole put out in what we'd call the ‘lost years’ - which to me, was 2003-2009 - MJ Cole was putting out incredible music that was selling 300 copies on vinyl. It's a crying shame, and it's not on the streaming services, so people can't really go back and find it. It was pre-digital, so people don’t have the digital files of these things, and that's the end of it.
It's scarce, and we're sort of relying on, good samaritans on YouTube to upload it, which thankfully a lot do, but there’s still, the odd lost track or B-side that doesn't make it to YouTube, sadly.
Let's factor in Todd Edwards to the equation. Because, to me, he sort of feels like the genesis for this mid-2000s 4x4 sound in the structure of it, and the way that he would add in a bridge that sort of feels like it inverts the beat.
Yeah, massively. When I came into all of this, I'd never heard of Todd Edwards, but I'd heard lots of his records without realising. There was a famous DJ EZ set - Halloween Garage Nation 1999 with CKP and PSG - and it's amazing. In there he plays “As I Am”, as lots of people were doing. Then he played another one: “Open Your Eyes”. I remember hearing that just thinking, ‘this is like nothing else’. From there, I discovered Todd had worked with Tuff Jam on a track called “One Day”, which is very similar to “Open Your Eyes”. Those two records are the proto of what moved on after that.
If you listen to what he was making in those lost years, it's a lot darker and deeper, with rougher drums. And like you say, the structure that he brought, it would have the main chord loop, then it'd have a flip, and then it'd have a third flip further on. And the third one was one everyone wanted to hear. That kind of structure - 30 seconds of drum, 15 seconds of chord breakdown, then the drop - lots of people copied that, I heavily copied that, trying to get the flips as good as Todd but never could. The only person I think that did get close to those flips like Todd was Solution.
Todd was the absolute center of the scene, without realising that he was. So when he came over and did Time & Envy - the famous video doing the rounds on YouTube - he was meeting the Uptown Forum lot. You look round, you can see all the faces at the front. I'm like, ‘I know him, I know him, I remember him, I remember him.” We were all there, and here was the Messiah, if you like, coming along. Plus, people didn't really play his music in clubs at that point. So it wasn't just a sign of respect for him, but it was hearing “Wishing I Was Home” playing in a club at full blast. So I think that's why everyone was enjoying it quite so much.
And then Todd went on a bit of a run after that, he had that kind of the whole Full On Volume Two project, which was fantastic.
Did you meet him during that time?
He came over for a 4by4 [club event] at Time & Envy in Romford, and I remember Wideboys, MJ Cole and Todd were playing. I went over to Todd and introduced myself, and he squeezed my hand rather hard and said, ‘that's for stealing the drums on your 702 remix’, and then smiled at me. And I just thought, ‘oh no, I've wound up my idol!’, but he was just playing with me. We then bumped into him quite a few times over the years, at various nights out.
Tell me about the process behind the Right Now EP, your debut EP and perhaps one of your most famous works.
I really like that one. At that time, I had some issues with my teeth, and I needed my wisdom teeth taken out. I ended up with some complications, which meant it took quite a long time to heal and recover afterwards. So I was a bit beaten up, couldn't really speak, couldn't eat properly, and I was just at home in my bedroom doing nothing. When you're isolated like that, you become a little bit lonely and frustrated, and that influenced the music that came out of me. Instead of trying to be uplifting and happy, and that's when “Right Now” came along, because sampled Kelis, that “I hate you so much right now” lyric that she did, and that was just, the frustration and the annoyance that I was feeling.
That made me identify with other people that might be feeling isolated and struggling, and how that impacted their sound. Perhaps that links back to the wider question of the scene falling around you. How do you react to that? You come up with darker sounds, if you like, or deeper sounds. So the mood was largely influenced by that in early 2003. You listen to a lot of records from there, and they all kind of have that similar vibe of it all disappearing. Then there was a bit of optimism, and things started to change, not through an improvement of the position, but just more people coming in and making music, which inspired some people, and you can hear some of the stuff kind of start to pick up later. In 2004 there's a bit more optimism in the sound. TJ cases came back, Wookie came back, and he did a remix of Jill Scott’s “Golden” which broke out of this little scene. You can hear the change in MJ Cole’s “Never Say Never”, but if you go back to the release before that, Talkbox / Dawn, it's a bit darker. You hear it going from this kind of collective depression state, to a more optimistic view of, ‘we can bring it back!’ Of course, it didn't come back. [laughs]
It seemed as producers went into this very digital 4x4 sound, the tempo raised from just a couple years ago.
Yes, it did. I think what happened is the people that came along, started making the music at the tempo we’re used to hearing the DJs playing it at. EZ used to like spin at 138-140bpm, so I started making garage at 140 because that's the speed that he plays at. And because at the time, there were no CDJs, if I wanted to play a set on radio, I was playing off a MiniDisc and you can't adjust the speed on that, so you'd have to make it at the speed that you're going to do your whole setup, right?
People started making it faster, and over time, those tempos dropped off. But there was a time where you'd even hear DJs playing 140-144bpm of this 4x4 stuff, which kind of harks back to my rave comment. It felt like the pace has jumped up, and it's changed from the musicality of the sort of the early noughties popular garage. It's got no full vocals anymore, and it's all gone dubby. It felt like another iteration.
The trouble that this era hit was that while grime and dubstep was so well documented, so much of this era is lost to time.
It felt like those that were there remember, but it felt like that was only a couple hundred people. So, it's surprising now, when anybody says they remember it. It was completely overshadowed, because you had grime, which was incredibly exciting at that early period, and dubstep as well, just took something off in a different direction. And rightly so, these era have become well-documented and talked-about. But yes, nobody seems to talk about this forgotten 4x4 era. And it's a crying shame, really.
There were some really, really talented people, some of whom went on to do other projects with different pseudonyms and were more successful. Will Phillips, who went on to become Tourist. And there was another guy, called Jelly Beats that I wanted to mention, who made three or four records that are really hard to track down but were just amazing with real musicianship.
Where were you picking your samples from? Because sometimes it would be from quite obscure places.
It's been the same process for me from the start: if I hear something I like, the first thing I want to do is go and sample and play around with it. I've always really liked R&B and hip-hop. J Dilla was a massive influence to me. At the time, some of the stuff he was making… at the same time I was going back and buying old Todd records, I was going back and looking for old J Dilla.
I’m so happy you said J Dilla, because I had a hunch. On your track “Something Wrong”, you slowed down to the original sample and then brought it back up, like J Dilla used to do on tracks like “Don’t Cry”.
That was earlier than “Don't Cry”, but I’ve sampled the track that he made “Don’t Cry” out of since. When Donuts came out, there's a little choppy section where he's gone all Todd Edwards in the middle of it. And I heard that, and just had to go and find The Escorts’ “I Can't Stand (To See You Cry)”, to have a go and sample it and play around with it.
But back to “Something Wrong” was hearing Todd make “Wishing I Were Home”. My mum used to be into Northern Soul music, and at the time somebody gave me a Northern Soul compilation, and there was a record on there, Audrey Matthews' "I Have No Choice". I absolutely loved it and thought, ‘how can I play this in a set?’ That's what ‘Something Wrong” was, me just wanting to DJ it.
I suppose the link between Todd Edwards and J Dilla is how they both chop up vocals to piece together something and make new phrases and sentences to communicate their feelings. Did you also do that in your work?
I wish I was as good as them, but yeah, I'm influenced by them. Sometimes I think if a word says something but I want it to say another, I'll just go and find an S from somewhere else and paste it over the top, for example. Not to the level that they were doing, they were absolutely out of this world at it, and I was just doing my own little variation of it.
I interviewed Jeremy Sylvester last year, and he told me when he worked for Nice ‘n’ Ripe, he would go to the record shop and look through the R&B sections because they always used to put the acapellas on the B side. You sort of did the same thing, but you didn't have the luxury of acapellas, I presume.
It was the same sort of thing, because at the time, you couldn't just go and stem strip them or anything like you can do these days, so you had to go and buy the American import R&B vinyl, which is what I used to do. I recorded acapellas straight off the vinyl.
Then there was a website called Acapellas4u, which came along a little bit later, and people used to upload them so you could sort of share them. This is in the lawless days of the internet, people used to try and make their own acapellas, which was something that I was into as well. I enjoyed the limitation of only being able to sample the master, and that came up with a special result because you would sample around the drums. You miss the kick, you miss the snare, and you take the bit that's in the middle.
I discovered that you can invert the instrumental and play it over the top of the original, and it deletes the instrumental. By trade, I'm an acoustician, and I was doing a diploma in acoustics, and they talked about this. If you stand a certain distance away from somebody on a wet grass field, the direct sound that comes straight from you to their ear is matched by the sound that bounces off the grass, and it's inverted by wet grass, so you won't hear a single thing they say. So I went straight home, and I got the kick drum inverted. It pasted it over where the kick drum was, and it disappeared.So I went off on one trying to create my own acapellas. I did a remix of “Re-Rewind” by Artful Dodger, and one of the guys from Public Demand Records called me up and said, ‘where did you get my acapella from? I've never released it.’ And I said, ‘well, I made it myself’. And he's like, ‘it's very creative’ and slams the phone
Who bootlegged your Omar remix back in the early 2000s?
Honestly, I don't know. I have no idea who pressed it at the time, I don't think anybody had the Wav file. Whoever it was sold quite a lot of records, which is a little bit frustrating, but at the same time, it didn't bother me because by putting that out, it raised my profile massively.
Was that a regular occurrence back then?
DJ EZ did a remix of Sonique’s “Feels So Good”, which was very famously bootlegged without him. And I remember the story going around at the time that someone found a CD on the back seat of a taxi, and they went and pressed it up. People were bootlegging Todd back then, you could go and buy a Todd four-track, or a white label with four of his tracks put on it.
The only thing that was annoying is that we were in discussion with Omar's people, and there was a potential for it to come out properly. And I seem to remember there was an advert with Bacardi when they'd released a new variant of Bacardi Breezer. And they even came up with a tagline, “The original, but remixed”, and they were going to use my Omar remix as part of the advertising campaign, but it fell apart at the same time as the bootleg vinyl came out. It felt like the vinyl coming out stopped it from happening but it probably didn't.
When would you say is your career peak? What year?
That's quite a tricky question to answer, because I feel like it was downhill from the word go. If you look at any measure of success, they were all falling down. But personally, the music was getting better and better throughout that time. The stuff that I was most proud of was probably towards the very end of my first tenure, if you like, in 2008-09.
Do you see any young artists today that you hear a little bit of you in their music?
No, I never have. There's some artists that I listen to now and love what they’ve done. They’ve taken the bit that I was interested in, and turned it into something else and brought it to a much higher level. People like Higgo, MPH, Sammy Virji.
You posted a photo of you in 2006 in Denmark with JME, Tinchy Stryder and Plastician. Can you remember that session?
Yes, very clearly. We were in Copenhagen. I was over there because a group I was involved with, True Tiger, were performing at the Roskilde festival. I'd written a song which was going to be performed by a live band on the stage, and so I got to go out.
We got there a little bit early, and then there was this studio that somebody related to the festival arranged for True Tiger to go and record in. I remember sitting there and looking around all these people. At that time, JME was quite well known, but he wasn't at the heights that came a couple of years later. Skepta and MC Purple were there as well. So I'm sat on this sofa in this room full of future grime legends sort of thing, and the track played, and I remember them all nodding and going, ‘who made this?’ And I sort of put my hand up, and I remember Plastician slapping me on the back, saying, ‘this is sick’. When someone who's achieved something that I would never have dreamed of, that was a massive thing for me.
What's life been like for you since you took a break from producing full time?
I’m a family man and working hard on my career and that sort of thing. But then after a while, I sort of realised that you can't suppress a hobby. You never should. So I'd given up music completely and didn't listen to it for years, and then Karl Brown, who I never lost touch with throughout all those years, just kind of inspired me to get going again. And we revived some of the early stuff that we had been working on but never quite finished, and we put out a couple of tracks together. And I thought, I'm going to give it a go and see if I can remember. It was nine years without opening anything, but now I feel like what I'm doing right now is the best stuff I've ever made.