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Bleep candy9/19/2023 Evelyn laughs retelling the story, adding, “best compliment you could have.” By 1989, the reputation that Dextrous was brewing around town even led Evelyn to be confronted by a rival crew in a kebab shop, proclaiming “there’s no way that’s your fucking tune”. This moment of scene harmony was rare, because a leftover attitude from the culture of kids who all grew up competing in break dancing crews meant things were tribal. Photograph: PYMCA/Avalon/Universal Images Group/Getty Images The DJ was Kevin Harper, then one-half of Nightmares on Wax, and despite playing the B-side by mistake, it went off so much it got played three times in a row. Before that, I’d never believe that was something one of us could do.” Such was the conviction around The Theme, Unique 3 even went to a rival dance crew’s night in Leeds and marched through a packed dancefloor to hand the DJ a copy to play. It was local lads that made this great record. “It was like, right, we’ve got to get something out now. Gez Varley, one half of the original LFO lineup, was in a Leeds record shop when The Theme landed. It heralded a sound with a distinctively northern accent.” “But they sounded like they had been made by people like us. “Voodoo Ray and The Theme fit in with the Chicago and Detroit records we were playing,” says Richard Barratt, AKA Parrot, DJ at Jive Turkey who formed Sweet Exorcist with Cabaret Voltaire’s Richard H Kirk and released the bleep anthem Testone. It was a tribal call to play that fucking track again.” “People would sing the bleep riff in unison, like a football chant. “The Theme was immense,” says Winston Hazel, who in Sheffield was a buyer for FON Records, DJ at Jive Turkey and soon to be making music in Forgemasters. Sketched out in a terrace house in Bradford, literally making the walls shake, the track was later hand-delivered to record shops, and a wave of admiration, popped heads and rumbled guts followed. A Guy Called Gerald’s Voodoo Ray will for ever, and correctly, be considered the blasting cap for the sound, but another 1988 tune released within a few months of it was also explosive: Unique 3’s The Theme. Yet it is also a series of big-bang moments where dazzling new sonic languages were forged. I wanted to correct that.” Join the Future has been rereleased as an expanded edition this month, there’s an accompanying compilation under the same name, and also just out is another compilation: Bleeps, Breaks + Bass Volume 2.īleep is part of a clear lineage: all-dayer soul and jazz-funk dos, Black British house parties called blues or shebeens, and the reggae sound system culture that inspired both. “There was this big, gaping hole in the history of UK dance music during the period where bleep should be. “It’s been criminally overlooked,” he says. But the genre has often been skipped over since, says Matt Anniss, author of Join the Future: Bleep Techno and the Birth of British Bass Music. It was one of many instances between 19 where bleep, a sub-style of techno often loaded with knee-shaking sub bass, erupted to rearrange dancers’ heads and innards.
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