117. Caspar Melville – It’s A London Thing

Transcript

Dubber      Hi, I’m Andrew Dubber. I’m Director of MTF Labs, and this is the MTF Podcast. Now, some years ago, I was a professor in a media and cultural studies department at a UK university, teaching, among other things, on a music industries degree course. And when that’s your focus, you tend to cross paths with other professors in media and cultural studies departments at UK universities who teach, among other things, on music industries degree courses. It’s not an enormous subset of the academic world. And so as a result of this selective professional socialising and collaboration, I know and work with Caspar Melville. Caspar’s a senior lecturer in Global Creative and Cultural Studies at SOAS, which we’ll talk about and unpack, but what I really want to discuss with him is his recent book, ‘It's a London Thing: How Rare Groove, Acid House and Jungle Remapped the City’.

Dubber      So, Caspar Melville, thank you so much for joining us for the MTF Podcast today. So you are, as I mentioned, a senior lecturer at SOAS. Let’s start with that. What’s SOAS?

Caspar       Well, SOAS is a part of the University of London. The acronym SOAS stands for School of Oriental and African Studies. Now, we call ourselves SOAS now because we’re all very uncomfortable with the term oriental. And, of course, there’s an inbuilt discomfort with the whole thing about SOAS because SOAS, which originates in the early twentieth century, was a school for training civil servants of the empire, or sometimes known as a school for spies. It was the place where the British government sent their civil servants to learn local languages of the places that they were going to go out and administer in Africa and in the Far East and the Near East and Malaya and Singapore. Places like that. So that’s the history of the institution.

It has been affiliated with the University of London for I’m not quite sure how long, and now it’s a university. It’s in Bloomsbury, right near the UCL and the Institute of Education, which has actually been absorbed into UCL now. So it’s in the university intellectual part of London, around Russell Square, Bloomsbury area.

Dubber      Right. But you’re not teaching spies how to speak Mandarin.

Caspar       I don’t think I am, no. I’m in the School of Arts. I’m a slightly square peg in a round hole in the sense that the School of Arts at SOAS… It wasn’t originally an arts and humanities based institution. So the core of it, after it had been training imperial civil servants, was politics, development. Those kinds of questions. Specialists in water. Languages, very important. Out of this developed an art stream. So people who were particularly… They were ‘Africanists’ – African specialists, but they had a particular interest in music. There were people in Korean studies, in what they call area studies. This is not a discipline, but you study a particular area. They banded together and they set up a music department, and then there was a history of art department. Similarly, local area expertise. China, Korea, Africa. Usually older forms. Traditions, you might call it. And this banded together in the School of Arts, which was formed maybe ten years ago.

I’ve been at SOAS for about eight years, and I came in to teach something called Creative and Cultural Industries. So this was SOAS recognising that while the ethnomusicology and the history of art were really important, there was a missing link, partly to do with media and cultural studies and partly to do with recognising that all of this is caught up within a set of industrial systems and processes. Obviously, the internet and the digitisation of culture which came in the 2010s was happening all around, and there was a sense that they wanted to recognise that. So they brought me in – it was partly under pressure, I think – to think more about careers.

As you know, having been an academic, this idea of “Well, what am I going to do when I finish my course? What job does it lead to?” is quite a big component of the academic market, and they wanted to answer that question a little bit more straightforwardly by suggesting that the kind of course that I teach, which is actually called Global Creative and Cultural Industries, is for postgraduate students, many of whom are already working somewhere in the arts – maybe in arts management, in arts policy, or they are a musician or an artist of some kind – and they want to think about how they can build a career, and that’s part of the kind of thing that I teach. And there’s certain skills components. So I teach a class in podcasting. I do a work internship programme which allows students either to go and work for a short period of time, do a placement somewhere, or develop their own entrepreneurial project – a website, an event, record an album – and think reflectively about themselves as a cultural worker. So it’s that kind of element.

I’m part of something now called the Centre for Creative Industries, Media and Screen Studies, which is a slightly expanded unit. I work with a professor who is a professor of film studies, but who has similarly moved from thinking about film only as an aesthetic object – she’s an African film expert – to thinking about film as part of a global information market. How is it distributed? How does it get made? How can you make a living doing it? Can you make a living doing it? All of these kinds of questions. So that’s where I sit, rather… I quite like being uncomfortable. Having been trained in cultural studies, it’s built in that you’re always going to be somewhat not fully within one discipline. You’re going to work in an interdisciplinary way, which is both exciting but can also feel somewhat unanchored.

Dubber      Yeah. There’s always a long answer to “What is it that you do?”, I find…

Caspar       Well, it’s like “The long or the short one? I’m not sure. Probably the long one.”.

Dubber      Well, yeah. It’s not a one-word job description like lawyer or a doctor, is it?

Caspar       No. Or a sociologist or a… Hence these incredibly long titles for these classes and a lot of students writing in saying “That sounds really interesting. Can you explain what it actually is? What will I be? What will be on my certificate when I come out of here?”. And these are all slightly difficult to answer questions, which I think indicate a big change in the university sector but also in the job sector, which is there is no one job you’re going to go and get.

Dubber      Exactly.

Caspar       It’s not about applying for one job. It’s really, as you know very well, given the nature of your career – what do they call it? Portfolio, career – with precarity somewhere in the background but also with the freedom to follow your interests.

Dubber      Yeah. I think it’s actually more foreground, generally speaking.

Caspar       Well, yeah.

Dubber      But the entrepreneurial aspect of this is interesting because I used to say to my students “Anybody who aspires to a job in the music industry lacks ambition.”. It’s one of those things where most people who do these sorts of courses, they go out and start things for themselves. They don’t tend to end up in the mailroom sending out CDs to newspapers. They start projects that are important to them. Like you say, they record albums. They start podcasts. They build websites. They make things that are very self-starting. To what extent is that sustainable, do you think?

Caspar       Oh, well, to go alongside your advice about “You’re lacking ambition if you just want to work in the music industry.”, I tend to fall back on telling my story. And I wanted to encourage students who realise that this is not the first time in history where it’s been difficult to get a job coming out of university. I’m a child of the eighties. Margaret Thatcher, what she did to Britain… There were no jobs in the early eighties when I was coming out of school. But also, similarly, we didn’t aspire to have jobs. There was a very strong sense that you could go and make your own culture. Obviously, I was surrounded by club culture, which was a paradigm of the idea of young people doing things for themselves, managing to make a living.

Is it sustainable? What I say to the students and what I actually believe is that you need to be realistic about your desire to make money doing exactly what you want and balance that with… I know these days they call it a side hustle or something like that, but I waited tables for fifteen years while I was a music journalist. I never made money as a music journalist or a radio DJ or even a club DJ. Not proper money, enough to pay the rent, so I waited tables. I worked as a barman.

Not only do I think that’s a wise thing to do, is to have a job which pays you like that, I think it’s good for you. I think it’s a good thing to do. And in the life that I’ve led in the media – I’ve been a magazine editor. I’ve been on boards. I’ve been in the upper-class/middle-class world. In academia, as well – you can really tell the difference between people who’ve had those kinds of jobs and people who haven’t. The kind of things that you learn from doing a job you don’t particularly like, particularly in the service industries or – I don’t know – delivery driver, whatever it is, it puts you on a level par with everyone else in the world who have to work for a living, teaches you some really important things, and keeps you humble. No matter how creative you are, how brilliant you think you are, the world does not owe you a living and nor does it have to pay you to be an artist. You have to earn that.

Dubber      But the end of the lesson is “But you can end up being a respectable professor in a…”.

Caspar       Well, I’m very lucky to have a full-time job, a permanent job, in academia, and it is quite rare and getting rarer. Academia has done a good job of turning out people with lots of skills but not providing the infrastructure. It’s not provided the support, the jobs for those people. And academia is increasingly reliant on temporary, precarious work. SOAS as an institution and I think many others are trying to address that. It’s really moved quite high up the agenda not to rely on temporary teachers and non-permanent staff to do a lot of the teaching load, but there are economic reasons why that’s the case.

So I am lucky in that way, and I should connect this to some of the great work which is being done on the creative industries at the moment by people like Dave O'Brien. There’s a book that’s just come out called ‘Culture is Bad for You’ which is based on some research with hundreds of workers in the cultural sector, and one of the narratives that comes out from the generally white, middle-class men who run the show is “Oh, I’ve been so lucky. Look at me. I’ve just been so lucky. I’ve never been that ambitious, but look where I am.”, and I have to acknowledge that that’s also true of myself in that sense.

It’s not just luck. It’s structural luck that I could blag myself into… I didn’t come out of academia. I got this job at SOAS having been a magazine editor and a journalist. I had done a PhD fifteen years prior. Didn’t have any teaching experience. Didn’t have any publications. So in some ways, it was a bit of a punt that I applied for the job, and there are elements of why I got it that I fit. And SOAS, no matter its aspirations to be very, very multicultural and forward-looking, is still… There’s a high concentration of white, middle-class people teaching there, just like me. So that’s something I’m aware of and I recognise.

Dubber      The white, middle-class, middle-age male thing aside for a moment, do you think that academia benefits from employing people like us in the sense of non-traditional academics? People who have been out in the world and experienced things that can be directly passed on to students.

Caspar       Oh, yeah. I do. I really do. And I think that’s one of the reasons why I’ve hung onto my job. We’ve gone through various painful restructurings and things like that. The simple fact is, the courses I teach – and it’s not just down to me being a brilliant teacher – are popular among students. They want that kind of information. They want that kind of advice. They want to see people who have worked outside the academy, and I think the academy could do a much better job of being more flexible and allowing people who aren’t lifetime academics into the institution. This would also mean those people who are lifetime academics being prepared to step out of that space and do other things. And there’s not as much fluidity there as I think there should be or could be because I’m very keen to break that clear distinction between what is often called the ivory tower and the real world. What academics call the real world as if they’re not part of it. So, yeah, I think it’s of huge value to the institution.

However, there are built-in processes of publication, of track record, of having become institutionalised, all the way from undergraduate to MA to PhD to postdoc, where you haven’t had a chance to be outside in the world. And if you did that, it’s a bit like the way women get punished for taking time off to have children and other things like that. You’ve got a break in your CV, and you have to account for it in some way. It’s not deliberate, but just the way that things are set up tends to replicate the system, which I think is not a great system.

Dubber      One of the things that the system encourages is, as you say, publication, and you’ve managed to tick that box a little bit by putting out a book quite recently. Is it the kind of book that universities are quite happy to have you tick that box with, or have you gone off-piste a little bit?

Caspar       Well, that’s a really good question. I don’t know. But REF, the Research Excellence Framework, which is this six yearly spasm that the universities go through where everyone has to submit work which goes to a committee, which is then adjudicated on, and then that decides how much money flows to the university – so it’s very serious – my book has just gone into that process. So I’ve no idea what people think of it at that level, and there’s something about it… It doesn’t sound like an academic book. ‘It's a London Thing: How Rare Groove, Acid House and Jungle Remapped the City’. I’ve got references in it. I did publish it as an academic book, but it’s about things which might not be considered to be legitimate subjects, I suppose, by some people.

Dubber      Well, worse than that, you committed the same crime that I committed with my ‘Radio in the Digital Age’ book, which also went through the REF process last time around, which was it’s readable.

Caspar       I know. It’s funny that. I was trained as an academic, doing a PhD. And in doing a PhD, I did that typical thing where I arrived at the university and I thought “Okay. I’ve got to read everything.”. And I tried to read everything. And it was the high point of post-structuralism. It was Foucault. It was Baudrillard. There was postmodernism. It was Fredric Jameson. It was Spivak, and it was Homi Bhabha. And it was some very exciting theoretical work, some of which is incredibly difficult and some of which is very poorly written. And I then churned out a PhD which was – surprise, surprise – poorly written, incoherent in places, and was actually a lot worse of a piece of work that I might have produced outside the academy. It didn’t really fit either way. I had very nice examiners. I scraped through with changes and whatnot.

I then went a did something else. I did online journalism, and I became an editor for openDemocracy, which was this online discussion forum/newspaper thing, and then became a magazine editor, and that’s when I learned to write properly. Editing other people’s work. Thinking about an audience. Thinking about a readership.

And having come back into academia, one of the first things I did was write a book review of a book which was called… Oh, god. I can’t remember who wrote it now. But it was a book about why sociologists write so badly, basically. And his argument, which absolutely I think I agreed with, was that it’s not a coincidence. It’s that they’re trained to write badly. There’s something about the process, particularly journal articles and that whole… What you will know as well, Andrew, which is basically a scam where academics don’t get paid to write things which they don’t really want to write because they have to put all their credentials into this piece of work and spend ages getting to the point, which are then published in journals that basically very, very few people read, which cost universities a vast amount of money. A total scam, but, anyway. I wrote that piece…

Dubber      Well, not only that, but it’s peer reviewed. So the people who have to review it, which also contributes to their CV, in inverted commas, is also unpaid labour.

Caspar       Exactly, which is something I found out recently. I think most people in the world… Well, the people I’ve told can’t believe it. “What? You put that amount of effort…”. To write an academic journal article might take you three, six, eight months. A year. It’s that level of labour, and it goes through lots of iterations as well. And it can be very painful, and it can be rejected and all of that, and there’s no money in it. And for the reviewers, there’s no money in it. There’s prestige and reputation. Or, if you’re a really great academic like my friend Les Back at Goldsmiths who is so much my academic model, he does it out of the love of ideas, out of care, out of concern for the truth and for parity and things like that. It’s not just people bigging themselves up in that process. But there’s something fundamentally broken about it, which is partly why – not partly – I wrote the book.

I’ve only got one academic article to my name at the moment. I’ve got some book chapters, which are sniffed at in academia. REF apparently don’t like book chapters. I don’t know why. So I’ve got the one academic article, and then I thought “Well, I could sit down and write three or four more articles, but maybe what I should do is write a book, and then at least it goes to REF.”. So I’ve ticked the box which says it’s gone, and I don’t know what they’re going to do with it.

But, actually, the whole reason I got into academia or I went back to academia… I did my undergraduate degree, and then I went to America, and I lived in America for seven or eight years. I was a DJ. I did radio. I was a magazine journalist. Steeped in music, which is what is my love. But I went back to university to do an MA with the aim that I wanted to write a book, but it’s taken me twenty years to complete that cycle and to get the confidence and, I think, the writing skills that I felt I needed to write something that is clear and explicable and isn’t indigestible so that it can be read by people who aren’t academics.

And even though I wanted to publish it as an academic book… Not just for REF, but also because I want academia to know this stuff as well. I want to force them to reckon with the importance of popular art and popular culture as a valid thing to write about and a valid thing to have on the shelf. It was a dangerous dance, potentially, and some people have raised their eyebrow at me or suggested… Particularly the bits… In the book, I do throw in a few first-person stories – slightly disguised as ethnographic notes, but really they’re my memories of particular music scenes that I have experienced – as a way to try and bring it to life a little bit.

Dubber      Yeah. It’s interesting how much of a parallel there is. In my radio book that I wrote, I did exactly the same thing. I did some first-person narrative recollection of listening to radio as a kid in the car with my parents and blah, blah, blah, and that sort of thing outside of ethnography is, like you say, sniffed at. But in a sense, what I was trying to do was write the book that I wanted to while still ticking the REF box a little bit. I don’t want to speak for you, but, for me, the book ended up not being the book that I wanted it to be because it wasn’t, in inverted commas, journalistic enough. It was much too academic, and it didn’t feel authentic or representative of what I wanted to communicate. Did you have the same problem, or were you just very much comfortable with one foot in both worlds?

Caspar       I don’t know where you were in your career or your age at that point, but it took me… I’m fifty-four now. So I am quite old, and I came back into academia quite old, so I felt less intimidated and less anxious. And as I got my foot into teaching – something I knew nothing about, really – and enjoyed it and bedded myself in, I thought “Okay. Well, now I’ve got the opportunity to do this.”. I’ve actually written a book that I do like, and I do think that it works. It is what I wanted to say.

And partly, it’s because I am not only an academic, but I like theory. I like ideas. I find them exciting. My life has been formed partly by ideas that I’ve picked up from Stuart Hall or Paul Gilroy or even Foucault which I think are useful tools for helping to understand the world. Power/knowledge, or the nature of diaspora, or the fact that identity is a journey, not a destination, and we’re always trying to decide who we want to be and who we are, we present… Erving Goffman. The way you present yourself to the world. These, to me, are core ideas or ideas with philosophical weight that help us to peek behind the veil of the world and defamiliarize a lot of the garbage that we get thrown at us. If it’s real. Gramsci’s notion here that, basically, we’re in a struggle for the truth with ideology or with hegemonic ideas we’ve inherited. They’re so deep in our bones and our minds that we need some tools to unpick them and get behind them, and that’s what I think those academic ideas are. So I was happy writing it as an academic work.

When I first talked to my publisher, they were like “Well, do you want to do a trade book, or do you want to do an academic book?”. And, first of all, I didn’t know what a trade book was. I thought “What? Is it about building or something?”. But when I figured out what he meant, I was very keen to do it as an academic book, and I wanted to do it like that, and I didn’t find it…

One of the terrible reviews I got on Amazon was from someone who said “This reads like a really bad university thesis that would have got a D.”. And there is an element where you’ve got to wade through, I suppose, for some readers. There’s lots of names in brackets, and there is some conceptual ideas at the beginning when I frame it. But, actually, partly what I wanted was to give people who weren’t academics access to those ideas to see that they were relevant, because you can write about music by just saying “We’ll listen to this banging beat. We’ll tell the biographical stories of the people involved.”, and that’s important as well, but, actually, I wanted some conceptual tools like the idea of diaspora.

What is happening in music in one particular place in the world is linked at a deep level to what’s happening in other places, and there are reasons why that linkage happens. This is where Paul Gilroy’s idea about the black Atlantic, this interconnected African diasporic culture where ideas and people and musical forms circulate, that’s a key idea because that stops us from thinking just within the national frame or just in a narrow sense of “Oh, well, let’s look at what’s happening in London because it’s somehow natural that it would happen there.”. There’s nothing natural about it. It comes through a series of political and social processes and movements.

Dubber      Right. Well, let’s talk about the content of the book to a larger sense. So we’re talking about rare groove, acid house, and jungle, primarily, and their situatedness – if you like – in London. There’s a whole lot to unpack there, obviously, and you’ve spent a whole book doing that. But what is special about London? Is it, as some people say, a different country?

Caspar       It’s certainly felt like that over the past few years if you think about the whole narrative of Brexit and the whole idea of Britain wanting to get great again and sever its ties with Johnny Foreigner, and it really felt like London was different. And you could tell that in the narrative because London was often put up as this elite space which gets all the funding, and the Westminster Bubble or the Islington bubble. All of that kind of stuff. And there was an element of truth to that. We’ve got a left-wing mayor. We did have Boris Johnson as mayor, but, generally, we have more left-wing politics. We have a more welcoming attitude to strangers because it’s a city full of people who aren’t from here, frankly, and that gives it a special character. So I do think there’s something quite special about the character of London.

In the book, I do trace this back to empire because London was the biggest beneficiary, and you can see that all around you, of empire and has also been the place which has therefore then received migration from the empire, which has brought the empire right into the western city in a way that wasn’t the case in London in the earlier periods. Although, different waves of immigration – Huguenots and Irish and Italians and Maltese – have always characterised what’s going on in London as well.

So one of the books that I quote says “London is not about Londoners, necessarily. You can become a Londoner.”. I think there’s a really interesting character of London. I don’t know if you’ve ever lived in London, Andrew, but you can become a Londoner much more easily than you can become British or English. In some sense, you can never become English if you’re not from England, but you can become a Londoner after about three or four months.

And the first thing you realise is it’s grim, it’s cold, it’s dirty, and people aren’t very friendly. So there’s the first set of experiences. And then you realise that, actually, under that grim surface there’s a common culture because we all have to wait for the busses together, use the same grimy tube stations and corner shops, so there’s a sort of “We’re all in it together.” thing. And then under the surface again is this incredible, slightly hidden away, slightly… You might say elitist, but it’s not quite elitist, but it’s not that easy to find. But once you do find it… You go down a grimy set of stairs and you open a door, and then you step into an amazing cultural ferment. And I’m describing club culture here, but there are all kinds of… There’s the Soho boho seedy culture. There are interesting things going on in very uninteresting looking places in a very, very large city.

Dubber      Interesting. So let’s just really, really quickly… So that we know what we’re talking about, what is rare groove? What is acid house? What is jungle?

Caspar       I think the way I should do it is tell it backwards. Jungle is a musical genre which emerges in London in the mid-1990s. It’s electronic music. It’s related to, and some people even argue an offshoot of, house music, which is this digitised, funky, soulful thing which was going on in New York and in Chicago and in Detroit and then brought over to the UK. But the distinct nature of jungle is that jungle also is strongly influenced by reggae. So it’s got these deep reggae basslines, and then it’s got these very fast breakbeats which refer to a tradition of hip-hop and then, beyond that, to funk, but they’re sped up digitally. So it’s digital music, it’s dance music, and it’s got this strange fusion of African American forms like house music and hip-hop and reggae and with some other elements to it as well. It’s got a scary horror soundtrack type of vibe to it as well. Quite intense music.

I was not in London when this emerged. I was in San Francisco, and I heard this music and I thought “What the hell is going on?”. It’s really quite shocking when you hear it. It’s going so fast. It’s so intense. But on the other hand, it’s quite familiar, and the familiarity, for me, was the reggae element. Reggae is really important musically, especially in London, but had been pushed aside by house music and rave music at the end of the 1980s, but it re-emerged in jungle. So, to me, it was like “Who’s making this music? What’s going on?”, and “I really want to get back to London because I want to experience this.”. So I moved back in 1997, partly to try and figure out what jungle was all about. That pushed me back to think about acid house.

Acid house was something that I had been… I was in London when it took off in London in 1987/1988. It was a profound moment of youth culture. It was a change in the music. You’ll know the music. Most people will. This very much Chicago influenced digital music, again, but which was very different from soul and funk and reggae and jazz. A new arrangement of musical elements digitally, alongside, of course, other kinds of technologies like drug technologies. Obviously, ecstasy was a huge part of that. So I wanted to tease out the relationship between reggae and acid house, and then that pushed me further back in time into rare groove.

Now, rare groove was something that, again, it happened really only in London in the UK. Only in London. In the mid-1980s was a period of time when a group of DJs, most of whom were black, but not all, DJs an older generation than the audience who knew a lot about music and had great record collections which spanned from the late 1960s all the way up to the eighties, taking in soul, funk, even African influenced music and also ska and reggae and rocksteady… And during the mid-1980s when London was rapidly deindustrialising, it was the height of Thatcherism and there was high unemployment, there were a lot of empty buildings around in London. And those empty buildings were repurposed by this group of young people who not only had the records, but they had the tech, as well, because they had access to sound systems, i.e. massive hi-fis. They knew about sound systems because of the tradition of the reggae sound system which had taken root in London in 1958 and then rapidly spread. There were hundreds of sound systems. It was carried largely through black London. Jamaican influence very strong, though not everyone involved was Jamaican. Fathers, brothers, cousins all collaborating to build their own sound systems using old wardrobes and planks and whatnot and using engineering skills.

Dubber      It was very hackathon-y, wasn’t it?

Caspar       Absolutely. It was absolutely hackathon, and it was sophisticated. It was so interesting. Many people were involved in the sound systems. Some of them were trained as engineers in the army and would come and lend their skills. One of them who worked with Coxsone, which was one of the great sound systems, he was an engineer at Heathrow Airport who’d put together the air traffic control system. So it was a community-based collaborative effort, primarily because black Londoners, through the period of migration from the Caribbean which starts in 1948, so-called Windrush generation, are excluded from clubs and pubs and football and the other places and spaces and rituals of British life, and British working-class life, in particular, because these black migrants were mainly working-class or didn’t have access to the middle-class world anyway, either economically or because of structural racism.

So the sound systems are really… The best way to think about them is that they’re a way of creating space and building your own mobile nightclubs. And what you then need when you’ve got a sound system, you’ve got the records, is somewhere to do them. Now, the sound systems in Jamaica in Kingston, they’re outdoors, often, because they’ve got the weather. Well, London doesn’t have that weather, so where are you going to do them? You’ll do them in all of these empty factories, old cinemas, old storehouses, old bus garages. This was the period in the mid-1980s in London where rare groove was the dominant musical form. And rare groove really isn’t a genre. It’s just a way of saying “Black music from the recent past, from the last twenty-odd years, that you probably are not familiar…”.

Dubber      And deep cuts, particularly.

Caspar       Deep cuts. That’s the rare bit, because this music often was not released in the UK. It didn’t make the charts in the UK. Had to come in via other routes – second-hand record stores – and then put them into these buildings, the so-called warehouse parties.

So what it seemed to me in putting all of this story together… Because I had some familiarity with rare groove. My life started, my education happened… DJs like Norman Jay and Jazzie B from Soul II Soul, who were older than me and had the tunes, educated a whole generation of Londoners – black Londoners and white Londoners – at a point when although racialised space and the riots had happened in London in 1981 – Brixton riots – and again in 1985, there was sus going on, all of these forms of over-policing which were infuriating the black community who weren’t given their rights, at the same time, this multi-culture was emerging because we’d all been to school together.

I went to a comprehensive school. Two thousand kids. Basically about half white and half black. A few Asian kids. And we had to get along, or not get along, and there was a lot of fighting and there was a lot of tension. But for those of us who wanted to seek something different or who were animated… Speaking as a white person, I was animated by a strong commitment to anti-racism. It was pick a side time in London, and I wasn’t going to pick the side of the racist skinheads at my school, obviously, and I was going to align with my black friends, and music provided a way to do that.

And then the warehouse came along and said “This can be your space.”, because you couldn’t get into clubs in Soho very easily. Groups of boys couldn’t get in. Groups of black boys definitely couldn’t get in. It was always tricky negotiating the forms of regulation of those spaces. Suddenly, none of that mattered. The bouncer was your own age. If you could find the place… And London was full of this empty space. It’s not like that anymore. If you go and visit London now, if you’re at the Tate Modern and you just walk a bit east, you will pass Shakespeare’s Globe, this historic theatre. Neither of those were there. There was no lighting. They were just empty dock spaces. Nobody even knew where they were, even though it’s not that far from places you’re familiar with. It was this empty space. This is where Foucault’s idea of the heterotopia, a space which isn’t really a space… It’s not really on a map. Nobody knows who runs it. And because of that, it afforded this generation, the rare groove or warehouse party generation, a chance to really build their own culture. And that was such a clear influence on rave that I felt that was part of the story as well.

And one of the reasons I included acid house in the story is because I feel very ambivalent about acid house. I went to raves. I loved raving up to a point, but I had criticisms about it. Point one – and we can get onto those – musically, aesthetically, anything that’s completely based on drug-taking is bound to end up in a bad trip. But also the priority that rave was given in the story of club culture, as if raves were the first time people got together in unlicensed space to listen to loud music, and that clearly wasn’t the case. Rave didn’t create club culture. It gave it a huge boost, and one of the obvious things it did was it got white men onto the dance floor where hitherto they had been very reluctant to go. But that is not true of black men or black women. And it was a moment, but it was a moment that I felt really needed to be connected and contextualised alongside these other musical scenes.

Dubber      Is there any discourse about “Well, that wasn’t a London thing. That was a Manchester thing.”, the acid house?

Caspar       Oh, no. There’s a massive discourse about that, and I sort of allude to it in the book. There’s a funny debate which goes on amongst ravers where… Between the Manchester… The northerners, let’s say, the mardy northerners and the Cockneys. They call us the Cockneys. And there’s this dispute about “Well, who did it first?”.

I do tell and retell the story – which I call a myth, although it’s true – of these four white London geezer DJs, these working-class boys, who’d gone out to Ibiza, who went to Amnesia. DJ Alfredo hipped them to having a wider musical mix than they were used to and blending together pop music and Balearic alongside Chicago house music, and taking ecstasy all at the same time in this warm weather. And then they came back to London, and they each started a club, and it was very influential. That’s all true.

Simultaneously, it’s happening in Manchester. It’s got different components. It’s much more related to a switch amongst white youth taste from indie to dance music, which was happening at the Haçienda, was happening under the influence of ecstasy. Very, very significant, but those books have been written. Dave Haslam writes about that, and many others.

So I’m not trying to give London priority. What I do want to say is that there’s a context for understanding it in London. It wasn’t the first time, like I said, dancing to loud music was happening in the city. House music was coming into London in all kinds of routes before the acid house moment that I’ve just described. Often played by black sound systems where the music was put in the larger context of hip-hop, electro, and other forms of electronic black avant-garde music, which wasn’t defined by taking ecstasy and was part of the overall way in which these genres develop and change and shift, and many people were happy with that.

There’s nothing wrong with this. It’s a good idea to allow popular music to change. Particularly, one of the reasons it needs to change is to evade capture by the market. Although, it’s obviously within the market as well, and we shouldn’t romanticise it as being something pristine and outside capitalism, but there is a tendency for the music industry and the market to grab hold of key genres and suck the life out of them. But that’s okay because the club genre has already shifted somewhere else.

Dubber      We’ve talked a fair bit about DJs and dancers and venues and spaces and not a lot about the recording artists. Were there key recording artists in these genres?

Caspar       Oh, god, yeah. I think it’s different with each of them, which is fascinating to me. So taking rare groove. You’ll be familiar with the idea of rockism in pop music writing, and the music industry in general, which imagines the key issue is the band, and the band who have a career, who are possibly geniuses like The Beatles. They exist over time. They do live shows. They produce albums. That’s the model. That model can be applied to rare groove, up to a point.

So you’ve got figures like James Brown within rare groove, who’s absolutely pivotal. He’s a key songwriter. He’s a key producer. He’s a key band leader. He’s a key rhythmic genius who instils these ideas into his band who then go off… They go and work in lots of other genres. One generation of his band leaves because they’re pissed off not getting well paid, so he brings in Bootsy and Catfish and reinvents the J.B.'s. So there’s a story there. Stevie Wonder. A whole series of great artists.

But the other thing about rare groove is what matters to rare groove is the danceability of the track, not specifically the band or the album. These units matter much less because, in the end, it’s the DJ playing something off a record to an audience. You don’t know who the band is. And a lot of the rare groove canon is music that was underrated or forgotten or generically was too… Didn’t fit easily within the way in which the American music industry is divided up racially, between soul and folk music, for example. If you mess with those generic boundaries, you might fail. And then that music was rediscovered in a new context.

And I would say that if you went to a rare groove party, eighty percent of what you hear, you wouldn’t know who it was by. And when you did find out, you’d be like “Oh. That’s the African Music Machine. That’s The Mighty Ryeders.”, so it’s like you’ve… There’s just hundreds and hundreds of bands who were great that no one’s ever heard of until they start being recovered first by DJs and then by the labels who were employing DJs to put together compilations. And that whole world of the reissue and the looking back and the Awesome Tapes From Africa and that whole world emerges out of that curatorial aspect of rare groove. So in that sense, of course the producers, the…

When you buy the record, you can pour over who’s playing the bass, who’s playing the drums, who produced the record. Key figures like Charles Stepney emerge or Gamble and Huff or… Some of these key… You start getting a picture of the incredible depth and creativity of the black American recording industry of that period, some of which was successful, some of which was completely forgotten and not loved in America.

So when it came to acid house, a completely different set of questions emerged. The first thing is, this was not music that sounded anything like music of the past. There was no band. There wasn’t that setup of drum, bass, keys, guitar, vocalist that you would expect. You couldn’t hear any of that. It was clearly music made with machines. Possibly music made by machines. There was awareness at some level that the music was made by someone, but that someone wasn’t a musician, primarily. They were a quote-unquote producer. It was someone who had put the stuff together themselves. We became aware of this because we knew about hip-hop, and we knew that within hip-hop, the actual sound tech was made by someone playing around with digital technologies. With drum machines, samplers, and bits of other people’s music. But that wasn’t what was going on here because in hip-hop, you can recognise the reference points of the previous music, but here you couldn’t because the sounds were… Actually, what were foregrounded was the sound of the machine itself.

So the most famous element of the acid house sound, of course, is the wobbly 303. The Roland 303, which is a little bass emulator, was being used in a way not to, as it can, sound like a bass line being played, but to sound like a machine. This strange, wobbly sound, which DJ Pierre, who came up with this, says is an accident. He was just playing around, not knowing how to use this bit of kit which he had got second hand. Didn’t have the manual, didn’t have any training, and just found a sound which he thought sounded cool, sounded futuristic, and that squelchy, weird, [imitating sound] sound which underpinned that particular moment of acid house, laid over thumping digital beats which don’t sound like a drummer, and they’re not meant to. They sound like machines pulsing.

So this threw into disarray any kind of idea of a band or a musician. When you’re in the acid house moment in the club, you can’t tell the difference between one track and the next. They’re mixed together by DJs who are deliberately blending these things together, so you actually are not aware of even a track. The whole thing becomes some kind of large, ongoing soundscape. Plus, you’re very disoriented by dry ice, often strobe lights, and whatever you’ve taken to go along with your acid house experience. And for a very large proportion of the crowd, that was ecstasy, which deranges you in lots of other ways. So it completely broke that fandom connection. That “Oh, I love this tune.” connection. That kind of familiarity thing which drives pop clubs and often discos and things like that.

And then even if you drilled into it a little bit, like maybe you sidled up to the DJ and had a look over their shoulder to have a look at the label, chances are you’d either find a white label there, which is an unreleased piece of music with something scribbled on it, or even if it was a commercial label, what would it say? Bam Bam. The Night Writers. Just a bunch of new words which didn’t seem to relate directly to any particular person or anyone. You didn’t have a sense of the person behind the music, and it’s only with investigation that I’ve done that I’ve been able to figure out there are actually real people behind this. There’s Frankie Knuckles, and there’s The Belleville Three making the techno. There are real people, but they very deliberately hid themselves. They were not involved in the global record industry in terms of marketing. You didn’t see their pictures on record sleeves. There wasn’t a great sense of who these people are. It took the media a long time to catch