One of the most enjoyable and memorable experiences of writing this dissertation was the opportunity to connect with and speak directly to some of my personal musical influences and heroes from the UK Hip-Hop scene. It would not have been possible without them, and I wanted to base my paper on original ideas and material taken from the sources themselves, rather than yet another Hip-Hop paper quoting yet again the same published sources. Anyway, there aren't too many published sources out there that focus on UK Hip-Hop. I hope to become one in the end.
I want to give a massive shout out to the Ninja Tunes crew Matt Black, Jon More (Coldcut), Kevin Foakes (DJ Food) and Ollie Teeba (The Herbaliser), and Grand Master of Grand Central Mark Rae, It was a pleasure to speak to all of these people. Always friendly, engaging, fascinating and more than willing to help. I sincerely hope that they all feel my work reflects their work, and if this paper makes any impact on the history of UK electronic music culture, and documents the importance of these artists, then I will feel I have done my job.
Mark Rae (Owner of Grand Central Records, one half of Rae & Christian, and the skills behind other monikers such as Aim and First Priority) was the subject of my first interview for this research. Mark is eloquent and thoughtful, the way he talks about making music with samplers just exudes his deep affinity with vinyl records, and the sensibilities of Hip-Hop and sampling culture. Mark is currently working on his debut novel 'The Caterpillar Club' for which he has composed and produced an accompanying music soundtrack. Catch up with his creative activities past and present at
Matt & Jon were more than gracious, not only giving me their time for one interview, but Matt sent me another video message with some further memories that had occurred to him later in the day, and I then contacted them both again after a few weeks mulling over the first interview content with some more nuanced questions and got more messages from Matt & a second video chat with Jon. Thanks guys! These gentlemen of London musical heritage have such a deep understanding of turntables, sampling and the entire culture of British electronic music I could have talked to them for hours and still only gotten a minute slice of their encyclopedic knowledge. Having given (probably) hundreds of interviews over their illustrious careers I still managed to glen details about UK Hip-Hop culture that I had never heard before. Jon is still DJing from his expansive knowledge of all things vinyl on radio stations such as Soho Radio and Solid Steel
While you can regularly see Matt playing about with the amazing Ninja Tune app 'Jamm Pro' on his multiple social media accounts. If you have an interest in manipulating samples then go check it out, there is endless fun to be had filtering, chopping, splicing and mixing!
Kevin Foakes (DJ Food) was the first of my Ninja interviewees. What a lovely and fascinating fella he is too! Not only did we talk about all things Hip-Hop and Trip-Hop, but Kevin shared some of his thoughts on design, on record collecting and how his later work as DJ Food has grown into a more avant-garde approach to sample-based music making. He even talked about his crazy invention of a turntable with 4 playing arms that will play 4 bits of a recod simultaneously!! I can't pretend I understood that but, but I can't wait to hear the results.
I spoke to Ollie Teeba at the start of 2021 when we were all back in lockdown again, and what an uplifting and often hilarious chat we had. Ollie is a proper Hip-Hop head, I'm not even sure he would agree with my proposal that Trip-Hop is a better genre term for his music. A true B-Boy at heart, he told me about his early days break-dancing on Chelsea Road in London, starting his DJ career by learning to scratch, coupled with his enduring love for movie soundtrack albums, many of which formed the basis of Herbaliser tracks (although he can't quite remember which ones, probably too many Herbaliser cigarettes!)
