Cast A-Z: 

Betty Boo (singer on The Beatmasters’ ‘Hey DJ!’)

Dave Dorrell: (M/A/R/R/S)

Debbie ‘Cookie’ Pryce (Cookie Crew, collaborated with The Beatmasters on ‘Rok da House’)

Jonathan More (Coldcut)

Mark Moore (S’Express)

Paul Carter (The Beatmasters)

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Not all revolutions are stylish, glamorous, or pored over constantly in countless tomes retreading familiar stories. Some revolutions happen in ordinary towns on Thursday nights when the indescribable sound of a brand-new music is beamed into living rooms across the land. Such was the case in the UK in the late-80s. While metropolitan club kids were having their minds switched on in the likes of The Haçienda, Shoom, The Trip et al, many teenagers’ first experience of house and/or acid house came via ‘Top of the Pops’. 

A slew of club hits crossing over into the pop charts – think M/A/R/R/S’ ‘Pump Up the Volume’, Coldcut’s ‘Doctorin’ the House’, The Beatmasters’ ‘Rok da House’, S’Express’ ‘Theme From S-Express’ and Bomb The Bass’ ‘Beat Dis’ – pointed the way to a (b)rave new world. This was a time before the demarcations between house, acid house, techno, hardcore and so on, were rigidly drawn. It was also a time when the cut’n’paste, musical collage aesthetic of hip hop cast a magical spell over producers like Mark Moore, Tim Simenon, Coldcut and co. 

So, as Coldcut asked on their first hit: ‘Say Kids What Time Is It?’ It’s time to go back to the future…

Mark: “In the early days of house there wasn’t a scene per se. We – me and Colin Faver and Ian Loveday (Eon) – that was a scene, but it was before you would say this was a house club. It hadn’t quite arrived yet. The people that were supporting house music, believe it or not, were the established record labels. The record labels wanted it to happen so badly. They were the ones getting house mixes and signing stuff. ‘Love Can’t Turn Around’ got in the charts. ‘Jack Your Body’ went to number one. So, everyone thought it was going to explode. And then nothing happened. So, it seemed like a blip. The mainstream record labels who were pushing it and pushing it, they dropped it. They just thought: ‘OK, it’s dead. Let’s forget about it.’ Which was great because it meant we could develop an underground scene away from all that. Away from the media.”

Jonathan: “I think the 87-89 explosion was quite a slow burn, even though it didn’t look like that on paper. I started DJing in 1979-80. 1984-85 is when things started happening. I bought my first house record, for example: The Browns’ ‘What’s That’.”

Mark: “We all knew each other. M/A/R/R/S, Bomb The Bass – Tim Simenon was DJing here and there. I knew Coldcut. I knew Jazzie B. We’d visit each other’s clubs. There was a lot of camaraderie. There was this kind of unwritten thing of who’s going to drop the first British record from all this stuff that we were playing and loved. There was like a race to be first. The first was Coldcut with ‘Say Kids What Time Is It?’ which mixed ‘The Jungle Book’ with the break from ‘Funky Drummer’. And then M/A/R/R/S got in the charts. I remember being sent the white label, playing it and everyone going crazy. Suddenly it shot up the charts and got to number one. So, everyone was like: ‘OK, we need to work harder; we need to move faster.’”

Dave: “Before Shoom there was RAW. RAW was a legendary club in Soho on a Saturday night started by the famous foodie Oliver Peyton, his partner Kate, myself and my son’s mother, Sophia. It was a kind of West End collective. I don’t think there was anything quite like it at the time. It took its inspiration more from New York clubs.”

Jonathan: “I was DJing doing warehouse parties. As was Jay Strongman, Norman Jay, various other London bods… Jazzie B, and anything went. I was massively into go-go and soul and funk, but also house and some, you know, post-punk and new wave stuff got a look in. Rockabilly was a big thing. Jay was particularly into rockabilly. There was a real, off-the-radar scene – warehouse before rave, but very much the same spirit. I was teaching a couple of days a week and working in Reckless Records. And that’s where I met Matt (Black). He’d been doing the same, DJing parties and I suppose ‘Say Kids…’ was the culmination of that experience.”

Dave: “The original DJs at RAW were me and Rob Milton, one of the co-founders of the Dirt Box parties – legendary parties that brought together a diverse tribe of psychobillies, soul boys, punks and post-new romantic… what would become club kids. We were very much in the rare groove and hip hop world. Those records were hugely informative for all London DJs. We looked in awe at Jay Strongman who was the DJ du jour of London’s nightlife scene. He had the original cut of Double D & Steinski’s ‘Lesson 1’ and then ‘Lesson 2’. No one could get these.”

Paul: “We (Carter, Manda Glanfield and Richard Walmsley) all went clubbing prior to this period. We worked for a company that made TV commercial jingles. That’s how we met. So, we had a recording studio at our disposal.”

Cookie: “The fanbase was very experimental. They were into British hip hop, into house music, dance music or the rave scene. We all came together under one roof. It was a very important time for music, obviously at the time none of us realised that. We were just living in the moment, absorbing the energy and just excited about everything. It was just one big fun happiness of music.”

Paul: “One day after work, we just said: ‘Why don’t we have a go at this?’ We thought it would be great to hear our own tune in a club. This was early 1986. So, we made ‘Rok da House’. We thought it needed vocals because a lot of these early house tunes had vocals. It was a lot more song-based than it grew to be. We didn’t really know any singers, we knew PP Arnold, who was a soul legend and used to sing on adverts at the time. But at that point we didn’t really feel we could ask her. We were recommended these rappers from west London called Cookie Crew – we were thinking it would be a combination of house and hip hop.” 

Cookie: “We went to meet them. Liked them. They had this track which became ‘Rok da House’. They asked us if we could write something to rap over it. We were like: ‘We can rap over anything.’”

Dave: “One night after RAW I was approached by an American chap, Jon Klein. He was opening up MTV Europe and asked if I’d be interested in doing some musical idents. He had enjoyed my musical selection. It was 4am and I didn’t really understand what he was talking about. But I took his card and got in touch. Within a couple of weeks he’d given me a budget – which was quite substantial – some animations to write to and a deadline. I was managing a band called Nasty Rox Inc at the time. The singer, Dan Fox, was best friends with Martyn Young of Colourbox who were on 4AD. I’d become friends with Martyn so I called him up and told him I had a studio booked and explained what I wanted to do. He came down, I brought a box of records and we started to splice tiny things together – a horn stab, a drum roll… things we liked. We put those together and MTV loved them, and they were broadcast as part of the first month or first year probably of MTV’s run.”

Paul: “We got six acetates cut. They got handed around. We got thoroughly rejected by every record company in town. Eventually, we more or less gave up. And to be honest, it felt a bit wrong anyway. You know: ‘Who do we think we are?’ All the labels wanted was for you to sound like someone else in the charts. They’d say: ‘Can you make it sound more like Bronski Beat?’ One guy definitely said that.”

Mark: “I was hanging out at Rhythm King. I’d be going in saying this record is amazing. I told them about Taffy’s ‘I Love My Radio’ which they were playing at Leigh Bowery’s club. Jeffrey Hinton was playing it. I told Rhythm King that everyone’s going crazy, sign it. They signed it and got their first Top 10 hit. I then said: ‘I’ve got this acetate from Tim Westwood – the Beatmasters and the Cookie Crew’s ‘Rok Da House’. He can’t play it because it’s too house, but I’ve been playing it and everyone’s been going nuts. Sign it.’ They signed it, eventually it went Top 10.”

Paul: “It came out first of all in 1987. So, it was already a year old. It didn’t do much. It got a very good response from the north of England, up in Scotland. From Manchester northwards it did really well.  It didn’t do anything in the south. London especially was in the grip of rare groove at that time. That was a very entrenched scene.”

Dave: “A few weeks after the MTV thing, Martyn called me up and asked me if I wanted to come down to the studio. The boss of 4AD, Ivo Watt-Russell, had come up with this genius idea of putting two bands together, his top two selling acts at the time, AR Kane and Colourbox. His thinking was if he put them together, their combined audiences would get him in the Top 40. That was his entire mission. But it wasn’t working in the studio. AR Kane were just working on their stuff. Martyn was saying it’s not Colourbox so what is it? He wanted to do what we’d done on the MTV idents, build up that sampling thing. We pieced it together – using the ‘Pump Up the Volume’ sample on Eric B & Rakim’s ‘I Know You Got Soul’, the trumpet from Tom Browne’s ‘Funkin’ for Jamaica’, the Ofra Haza part, a bit of ‘Roadblock’, you know Stock Aitken Waterman’s deep fake rare groove track… the genius bit was getting CJ Mackintosh to scratch over the top. Next thing I’ve got a test pressing, and I take it out and play it at RAW. It went down well. That was it, we didn’t think too much about it, but a few weeks later ‘Pump Up the Volume’ was in the Top 40, then the Top 20, before finally knocking Rick Astley off number one.”

Mark: “I got Rhythm King Renegade Soundwave; I got them Baby Ford. I was taking all this stuff in. I wasn’t even working for them. I was just taking it in for them, just for the hell of it. Eventually they said: ‘Can we give you some money?’ Then they asked if there was anything else they could do? And I was like: ‘I’ve got these ideas running around in my head, put me in the studio.’ That was in ’87. They knew I hadn’t been in the studio before so they said I’d need someone to show me around. They hooked me up with Pascal Gabriel. Me and Pascal hung out. We got on like a house on fire. We both loved things like Yello, old electronic stuff. New Order, Soft Cell. And we went in the studio. I had all my ideas. I had all the samples I wanted [for ‘Theme From S-Express’]. I knew I wanted the Rose Royce break; I just loved it; it didn’t go on long enough for me. Lots of my ideas were based on hip hop. I wanted to bring in the house music and Detroit techno, but I didn’t want to copy it.”

Dave: “As soon as samplers could handle something more than a few seconds the possibilities grew.”

Jonathan: “We were all committed to doing what we were doing. But we didn’t really know what we were doing either. The arrival of cheap equipment as well. You know, we bought an RZ1 Casio drum machine, which we bought with some of the proceeds from ‘Say Kids…’. That funded a lot of the next record.”

Mark: “I wanted to do it properly. I wanted to be a cult band for four or five years and then become huge. I loved pop music and I loved all the underground stuff. We didn’t even call it underground. It was just the stuff that no-one else liked - outside of the mainstream. I could see the music business for what it was. I was happy to take my time. But ‘Theme From S-Express’ ruined my plans by getting to number one.”

Dave: “I don’t think we thought we were making a house record. I really don’t think that there was any point at which anybody sat in the studio… CJ, Martyn, Steve or me and really blatantly referenced house.”

Paul: “There were a lot of DJs who wouldn’t play house, you know, I mean there was one particular DJ on Kiss who said I wouldn’t play house music if you paid me to. Within two years he was playing nothing else. Actually, it was a pair of DJs that worked as a team.”

Dave: “I don’t know about the influence of ‘Pump Up the Volume’ on everyone else. You’re probably best asking Mark, Tim and whoever. Partly because I feel that they all happened in such quick succession, you suspect, and this is one of those stories you know like the idea of morphic resonance where you’ve got 100 monkeys smashing coconuts on rocks on one island and somehow on the next island a monkey starts smashing a coconut on a rock. How does it leap across the islands? Fuck knows.”

At first, these exciting new records were ignored by the mainstream. But the groundswell of support coming from clubs up and down the country meant they couldn’t be disregarded for long…

Mark: “The only reason ‘Theme From S-Express’ got in the charts was because of clubland. It went in the charts at 28 or something. Radio 1 wouldn’t touch it. Then the next week it went up to number three. Clubland. Radio 1 thought they’d look stupid if this got to number one, so they played it. They played it and it got to number one.”

Jonathan: “Clubs were the lifeblood of what we were doing. Just going and playing records really, really loud with lots of people going bonkers. It’s just life affirming, and it made us want to go back and make another record that would make them do that.

Mark: “Radio just didn’t want to know. ‘Jack Your Body’ and all that had come and gone. They thought: ‘Thank goodness. It’s not real music.’ To them real music was Kylie and Jason. A verse and a chorus. They could understand that. They knew who was in the band. With these things you didn’t know who was in the band. A lot of the mainstream music industry did not want it to happen. Apart from the record labels obviously. But the record labels were caught off guard because they’d tried to push it a couple of years earlier and had eventually given up on it. So, they weren’t touching it with a barge pole at this point in time.”

Paul: By the time we were having hits clubland was full of fantastic underground records. They just didn’t get in the charts. You had ‘Move Your Body’ (Marshall Jefferson), absolutely seminal. It was everywhere. The only place it wasn’t, was in the charts. There was ‘House Arrest’ (Krush) and there was T-Coy’s ‘Cariño’. I don’t think that hit the charts. Maybe it did take records by us and the other artists on Rhythm King to wake the radio stations up.” 

Jonathan: “‘Doctorin’ the House’ started as a kind of joke between Matt and me. We loved Adonis’ ‘We’re Rocking Down The House’. So, we started singing: ‘We’re doctors in the house’ and changed the melody a little bit. Then we were introduced to Yazz by her husband Jazz Summers and it kind of just came together. She changed the melody a bit more from where we changed it and she messed about with it.”

Paul: “In late-87, Rhythm King said we’re not going to let this – ‘Rok da House’ – go. This is too good. So, we did a remix, someone in New York did a remix and we put it out again in late-87, coming into January 1988. And it had some club action – again up north. But it just turned into a massive hit and went to number five. Pretty good for a first tune. We were totally gobsmacked by it. Because our real intention was to just have our own tune maybe played in nightclubs. That’s really as far as our ambition went.”

After the success of ‘Pump Up the Volume’ the floodgates opened. Coldcut had Top 20 hits with ‘Doctorin’ the House’ (with Yazz) and ‘People Hold On’ (featuring Lisa Stansfield). The Beatmasters scored four Top 20 hits between 1987-89: ‘Rok da House’; ‘Burn it Up’ (with PP Arnold)’; ‘Who’s in the House’ (with Merlin) and ‘Hey DJ!’ (featuring Betty Boo). S’Express struck gold with ‘Theme from S-Express’, ‘Superfly Guy’ and ‘Hey Music Lover’. ‘Top of the Pops’ beckoned…

Jonathan: “Doing ‘Top of the Pops’ was crazy. It was like going back to school in some respects. The BBC was still quite austere at that time. You know, men in white coats with pencils in their jacket pockets to a certain extent. Then there was the realisation that actually there’s only about 20 screaming kids in the audience that have been hyped on sugar all day and are kind of hustled around by this massive crew of people. And then certain DJs being quite creepy. I won’t go into details, but there was certainly a whiff of that which I picked up on and so did Matt in relation to Yazz. It was all a bit weird. And then, you know, we were miming. That was pretty weird. But it was also a lot of fun and quite exciting. I got Barry Manilow’s signature for my mum. So that was an important moment.” 

Dave: “We turned down ‘Top of the Pops’ because we thought we were punk. Simple as that. Even though there’s ten years between ‘Pump Up the Volume’ going to number one and the Sex Pistols going to number one, it didn’t feel 10 years to us.”

Paul: “We were kind of rather reluctant pop stars, you know. It became pop completely by accident. We didn’t set out to make pop music. But everything we did turned out quite poppy. We were still doing our day jobs. We were still there when we appeared on ‘Top of the Pops’. I went from the office to ‘Top of the Pops’ on the bus.”

Dave: “I think success really freaked Martyn out to some degree. And that’s probably best judged by what Martyn did next. Which was, with the exception of a remix or two – a fantastic remix of Mory Kanté’s ‘Yeke Yeke’, and I think something for Wolfgang Press or somebody – nothing, he just stopped. Literally seemed to stop producing. I don’t think there’s another Colourbox record as such. It kind of froze and eventually killed our friendship, which is a shame. I have my own thoughts on that which I’m not gonna make public.”

Mark: “Hip hop was so important. Obviously the essence of house music and techno is in there, but so are lots of other things. Philip Glass, Yello and Soft Cell. But the main thing is hip hop. One of the main influences was Double D and Steinski’s ‘Lessons 1, 2 and 3’. That was how I approached it. But doing it with disco. Of course, hip hop had sampled disco and funk records, but they didn’t sound like disco after the sample. I wanted to do a hip hop record that sounded like a disco record. And it was still a dirty word at that time. You weren’t allowed to like disco at that time.”

Jonathan: Hip hop was just grist to the mill. Or, as we said at the time: ‘You’ve got to pick a pocket or two.’ I can’t remember if it was me or Matt that said that, but there was that English sense of humour in some respects. It’s in Tim Simenon’s Bomb The Bass, it’s in his record and my not-DJ-cousin Mark Moore as well. There was a kind of sly nod in the use of that. A wink and a nod towards a kind of humour and a knowingness about the samples that were taken. None of those records were easy to make to be honest. There was a lot of blood, sweat and pain.”

Mark: “I found a 1988 diary of mine. And what was interesting is we weren’t just doing the Shooms and the Spectrums. I think we all went up to DJ at the Haçienda at one point. I do remember in the diary going to see Ice T in Brixton. So hip hop was still a big part of my life at that point.”

Dave: “The sonics of hip hop were super important.”

Paul: “Everyone was mad about hip hop at the time. That’s why we got Cookie Crew in. Rap was very important. As was funk and soul.”

Mark: “Everything was up for grabs. It didn’t have to sound like a genre. It didn’t have to fit into a genre. I remember in the early days, me and Tim did a TV show together and the presenter was asking about this new style of music – house – and both of us said it wasn’t really house music. It’s influenced by it, but people didn’t know what to call it. It was really original. But within a few months it became very generic – not all the records, but a lot of them.”

Jonathan: “It felt like you could do anything. And the fact that you were doing it in a kind of semi-illegal way because most of the time you couldn’t do it in commercial clubs at that point… it had that outsider pirate vibe which is always exciting and often quite important to a lot of music scenes. I’m moving all my records at the moment, which is a bit of a nightmare, and I found some old paperwork in the studio and in this envelope were four hand-typed charts from 1985. It’s fascinating to see the range of music.”

Dave: “People were making things up and across a very short period of time all of this information explodes. It’s like the beginning of the universe. There’s a micro moment and suddenly everything suddenly expands from there. Galaxies are formed, stars, black holes are shot out… and that’s what happened. If you look back on the timeline, it’s a matter of months. Genres appear one after another. We played everything and the important thing here is The Wag gave me the offer of a night. And we partnered up to create Love. RAW came to an end and that era came to an end in a funny way. Rare groove carried on, but this sound that was pushing through was this new thing. By the spring of the next year, I was doing a whole new thing. There were 1,000 people in the line and they’re all wearing pastel-coloured Wallabees, dungarees and droopy shirts. It was Tony Wilson, I think, who noticed that this was a massive shift from the square shoulders of the Jean Paul Gaultier-wearing elite classes of London to a much more mass wardrobe of soft shoulders. Follow the drugs, you know. From the right angles of cocaine to the kind of wavy lines of ecstasy.”

Mark: “It was dance music. To me S’Express were following in the footsteps of Devo or something like that. Or Yello. There was something arty about it. I was involved in all the videos. I was involved in everything. To me it was a kind of art band.”

The explosion in clubland was transformational…

Mark: “We were all so E’d up and loved up we thought it wasn’t just the music scene we were changing, we thought we were going to change the world. Change the world for the better. There were going to be no more wars. No more poverty. Everyone was going to support each other and love each other. It was that deep. That’s how much we were into it.”

Dave: “Suddenly it felt like the floodgates opened. Suddenly it was like dang-dang-dang-dang: number ones coming thick and fast. Radio 1 got behind it and of course it also caught that huge wave that was coming through from suburban London and warehouse parties in Manchester and elsewhere around the country, which was house. And acid house. And what would become Balearic.”

Betty: “It felt like a whole generation came out of it. A scene that was crossing over and appealing to people up and down the country. And this was a time when there were dance records that were all over ‘Top of the Pops’. It was like an uprising… like, we’ve had enough of PWL and that kind of thing.”

Mark: “It felt transformative. i-D magazine did a shoot with all the DJs who were coming through. People like Coldcut, Tim Simenon, me, Jay Strongman, Jazzie B, Graeme Park and Mike Pickering. There were no girls in there whatsoever. Shocking. No girls. And it was mainly white. You knew something was bubbling under. These were the main people on the underground scene. So, yeah, there was something in the air and there was this expectation that we would make records.”

Betty: “It was inspiring because I thought I can do that. I’ve got a good knowledge of music, beats, old records and things that I want to sample, and I want to experiment myself, but I don’t want to audition my ideas to anybody. I just wanted to audition them to myself and see if they’re good. And when it’s good I’ll play it to somebody. I didn’t necessarily want to be a pop star. Because I think you get people that are, you know, they might have gone to stage school and all this sort of stuff. And they’ve got stars in their eyes. Those weren’t my dreams. My dream was to just make something, because I wasn’t… I was told, like loads of kids growing up in the 80s in an inner city, that you’ve got no hope under Thatcher’s rule. It was like there was no hope for working class kids. There’s no future. So, I thought I needed to make a future for myself. And that was it really. A lot of my friends were like that. I was friends with Mark Moore and Tim Simenon. And this is a weird thing. I’m half-Scottish and half-Malaysian. Tim’s half-Scottish, half-Malaysian. Mark is half-Korean and half-English. So, you know, we were Eurasian people. Nobody had really heard the expression Eurasian before. So, it’s quite weird, it’s quite a coincidence, isn’t it? We were sort of from the same area and influenced by the same things. In fact, I was in Bomb The Bass for a short while. I was working with Tim.”

Mark: “You had all these kids suddenly getting obsessed with S’Express and turning to Smash Hits and me talking about clubbing. I still get people now telling me that I got them into clubbing, that I changed their lives. It definitely felt part of that. It felt like a clarion call for that.”

By the end of 1989, however, and as the 90s loomed, things were moving so fast that not everyone could keep up. Even if they wanted to. But while it lasted, it was magical…

Jonathan: “When the shutters came down, when the divisions started to solidify... it was weird because we wanted to play what we wanted to play. I remember a moment where we got invited to DJ somewhere and we were going to do our thing and we went and the woman said: ‘Oh, you’re in the main room.’ ‘All right, great, thanks.’ And then they said they were really looking forward to our house set. Matt and I looked at each other… we managed to survive that one but when we were starting to be told what we were supposed to be playing that was not a moment that was comfortable at all.”

Paul: “It splintered very, very quickly. Once it got into the early-90s, it just sort of exploded in so many different directions. I can’t tell you the difference between hardcore techno and all the various other versions of house. Everything was coming so quickly. It was just house to me. You had deep house and deep, soulful house. Everything split and people started only wanting to go to certain types of nights and clubs. It was so new and so fresh. People were hungry for it. It only took a couple of months for there to be so many records out there that suddenly there was an enormous amount of competition. I think S’Express, us… we all shot our bolts… The Beatmasters split up as a trio during the making of our second ‘difficult’ album.”

Jonathan: “We just ploughed our own furrow. It was conscious in a subconscious way. For us to survive we had to do something that we were comfortable with. Both Matt and I had seen this whole superstar DJ beginning to manifest itself. It was something that we weren’t comfortable with. And then, you know, hitting quite a lot of legal problems with the record company that had quite a significant effect as well. That pushed us in to wanting to start our own record label. And that also meant that we couldn’t put any music out under the Coldcut name for a certain period of time. We made a conscious decision to sit out our contract and do Ninja Tune.”

Mark: “Before it all got siloed it was so exciting. You couldn’t wait to get into the record shops to see what they had. It was like that for a while. From hip hop onwards in the 80s.”

Paul: “It was like a wonderland. We all went on various little tours – the Rhythm King family. Not world tours! They were either PAs or television appearances. A lot of it actually was us and S’Express. And Tim sometimes. Neneh Cherry too. She came along. It was a laugh. Baby Ford was there as well. I became great mates with Peter Ford. I mean, you can imagine it - a group of chancers really. Altogether, all expenses paid, knocking about Europe together. It was an incredible time.”  

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This article first appeared in issue four of Disco Pogo.

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