Mumdance x Riko

Following up another excellent showing from Lewisham youngsters Vision Crew on Rinse this Saturday, Mumdance chimed in with a one-hour Hardcore and Jungle special, featuring the veteran MC Riko Dan on mic duties. The set is all kinds of nostalgia, with lots of great moments, including Riko getting excited on Rude Bwoy Monty's Warp 10, the faces/hand gestures I was pulling on my own to Original Ses (particularly the John Holt sample), and the great speech from Riko just after (49:48 to be precise). There are some great references and shouts in there as well, some you probably wouldn't have heard back in the day, like references to Pressure FM, and Eastman (leading Kool FM 'guvnor') who would have been a direct competitor against Rinse in the 90s, who didn't let Riko on the station for having "too many gun lyrics". Albeit only an hour long, this is a decent little set, and made me realise how much I still love old school, despite not being from that time. (sidenote: did anyone stay locked to the 'dark techno' set afterwards? Probably the first and last time I'll ever hear Faithless' Insomnia on the station, although we all know there's a far better mix.)

"If you don't know about this music, you should be ashamed of yourself"

I wish I had the same knowledge of the Hardcore/Jungle eras as I do Grime, even Acid to some extent. There's so much golden music from that period, but little means of identifying it, a lot of records I've accumulated from that branch of this massive tree of Dance music that we continue to grow have been guess work, with probably 90 percent of them being belters, thankfully. Buying compilations to pick out tunes from was one of the better methods of building any sort of collection, then I'd check the remixes, spam-buy like 3 or 4 records from the artist and end up with a good portion of quality tunes. Using Discogs to look-up artists and then listen to the embedded YouTube videos is cheating in my book - the feeling of flicking through crates is still a thrill to this day.

A photo posted by Frankie Mines (@frankos9191) on Aug 20, 2016 at 11:00am PDT

Dreamscape!

A photo posted by Frankie Mines (@frankos9191) on Jun 26, 2016 at 6:20am PDT

Some other bits played that I particularity like:





Talking of which, if you've listened to Jammz' Underdog Season download earlier in the year, then you'd remember him taking on Remarc's Jungle classic from above, and it's gun-fingers-galore when Mumdance drops it in the above set.

Looking for some of the classic ragga-jungle samples recently, Discogs pointed me in the direction of a 1994 soundclash in Bermuda between King Addies of Brooklyn, and legends from my manor, Saxon. I can't find the sample Remarc used specifically, but this is definitely worth a listen, if not only for the amazing dubs but also BabyFace's blistering commentary - click here for the Soundcloud. I'll hope my interest in sound clashing is reinvigorated long enough for me to check out the 1994 world cup which gets a (bitter) mention at the start of the clash, after Saxon took victory at Sanctuary, Milton Keynes - later this club became the home of Sidewinder: one of Grime's biggest raves.

Riko also shouts a couple of names that you should know if you're one of the #RunComeFollowFriday crew. For all the reading massive out there, both Uncle Dugs and Billy Bunter have books available for pre-order over on the Music Mondays website, Billy's entitled 'The Love Dove Generation' and Dugs' 'Rave Diaries and Tower Block Tales, both of which essential reading for anyone with an ounce of interest in those scenes - try and jump on the orders quick-time for Dugs' book as you get an 8GB memory stick with all of the #RCFF interviews on there, pretty much pivotal listening for everyone with interests similar to mine.

More old-school and vinyl themed posts due very soon.

Uncle Dugs x DJ Slimzee

Post-depression diagnosis, I have noticed this place being a great source of random outpouring. My writing's now going out to other places, after a long, tedious hiatus away from it all. That leaves this space open for anything really; musings a fair distance from the grime scene are possible but likely few and far between. I'll probably cover what vinyls I pick up out and about and try my utmost not to mix in anything political. I'm still around regardless. Send it out to JP, keeping me busy elsewhere, generously.

The highlights of the past week both feature Slimzee. Tuesday nights show with Blacks (and Fuda Guy toward the tail end) is worth a revisit - once again an incredible dub-after-dub assault. Friday saw the legendary DJ guesting on Uncle Dugs' regular Rinse show and the brief interview was pretty compelling.

Dugs's Rinse show is one I've followed from the absolute start. I can't confess to knowing much about him prior to his immensely popular 'RunComeFollowFriday' slot besides the fact he once ran the station - think Dagenham days, the latter days of Pay As You Go and the early days of Raskit. I caught his show by accident and like most shows I enjoy it turned out to be ritual-like listening for a while. I was at college, enrolled for painting and decorating - a stop-gap course, albeit necessary  underpinning for my current career - the show would wind the clock down unbelievably. Mainly, however, the show helped me put names to some of the classics I'd heard growing up with a young mother who adored everything '88 to '92 and my (later to be) estranged father who would also dabble in Jungle. I'd collected Acid and Chicago records, so identifying them was easy, but Dugs put a name to the records I'd never really bothered to browse through -  a couple of examples below.

Thankfully I'm eternally indebted to my actual father for giving me Garage. As written previously, it was the gateway to pirate radio for me, aged around 11/12. Besides So Solid on Freeze and Delight, anything Slimzee, tape packs included, was probably what I listened to most frequently.




Dugs' quick chat with the man himself wasn't as in-depth as he might go with his normal guests (mostly people who were in and around the hardcore/jungle scene) but it was brilliant all the same. It's more of a chat between two old mates, really. Some highlights:

• Slim drives round to Madonna. He doesn't reveal which ones, but I'd like to think it's 'Lucky Star'. (Only because it seemed to be on a loop recently on a holiday to Benalmadena, of which I spent most of my time not remembering where on earth I was).
• Wiley used to wander aimlessly around Southend. 
• Rinse has been located nearly everywhere in East London: Whitechapel, Cable Street, Tower Hamlets, Dagenham - possibly three flats (Crossways Estate) as well?
• DJ names evolve: Bogroll - Slimfast - Slimzee.
• You can be booted off of radio for being too good.
• we've both got 'I'm Raving I'm Raving' on white label.
• A Plus started off playing Garage, which prompts me to go back and search for sets, as I don't recall that. Maybe I just completely missed him, until Practice Hours, obviously.

There's a lot more but I'll let you listen for yourselves, it starts roughly around the hour and half mark. The interview concludes with Slim running down ten of his favourite rave anthems, the first of which is also one of my absolute all time classics via Ragga Twins. For more in-depth and less fanboy-style Slimzee focus, have a look here and here. Big up Uncle Dugs!