“Certain guys can’t face the fact of what we’ve done
Sold over a quarter of a million
Casualty went straight to number one
And still they wanna cuss come on
Oh yeah about the Casualty theme?
Well no one controls the scene
So you do what you want and you do what you like and you do what you please” – Oxide and Neutrino, ‘Up Middle Finger’
There’s more than one way to make an 18 year old into a pop star. Craig David was a record industry dream – UK garage as a cradle for a new generation of international stars. Oxide and Neutrino represented a different future, one the biz had far less idea how to cope with in the long term. Though for now, and for the duo’s record label East West, the success of “Bound 4 Da Reload” was actually business as usual: find a hot sound in the clubs or on the pirates, license it, push it onto the charts. The main opposition to Oxide and Neutrino’s overnight success came from within garage – the pirates and the clubs in open disagreement. “Reload”, belligerent, snotty and unsophisticated, was a flashpoint record for the scene’s internal politics and anxieties.
So what was the problem? It was partly generational. A few months later, the duo scored another hit, their third: “Up Middle Finger” was a scornful, bitter attack on the garage tastemakers who’d disdained their debut. The people they had in mind were DJs in or near their thirties who helped nurture UK Garage into a take on dance music that balanced the soulful and the futurist. DJ Spoony of the Dreem Teem, for instance, whose recent elevation to Radio 1’s resident garage expert made him one of the most powerful individuals in the country’s pop scene – and who was not especially enamoured of what the younger MCs and posses (like Oxide and Neutrino’s sprawling So Solid Crew) were doing. Those kids – late teens, early 20s – were starting to turn turning their back on the smoother 2-step sound and pushing darker, harder-edged elements from hip-hop and rave further up in the music.
It’s possible to make too much of these internal divisions, to overplay how brutal a break productions like DJ Oxide’s represented. After all, you only have to go back a year or two – to 187 Lockdown’s thrilling “Gunman” – to find the mocking, timestretched samples, skeletal keyboard refrains and gunshot sounds of “Bound 4 Da Reload” on a Top 40 hit. But the split was real: there’s no sign of Oxide and Neutrino on early 2001 compilations from established garage brands like Pure Silk or Twice As Nice, and “Up Middle Finger” showed how keenly the snubs were felt.
Outside the context of garage beefs and generational splits, in the wider world of pop this blog explores, “Reload” is a shocking, Martian interruption, the charts’ transmitter suddenly hijacked. Again, you can overplay this angle. It’s not the fact that a couple of kids had made a white label and hit No.1 that surprises, or even that it’s kids from South and East London coming up via pirate radio. Tracks had been jumping from the pirate stations to white labels to the Top 5 for over a decade by this point. It’s harder to imagine an Oxide And Neutrino style success now than it was then, but that’s another issue.
But the explanations don’t account for the sound of this thing. Other white label successes tended to be tracks whose pop qualities were a little more overt. When SL2 or even early Prodigy – the obvious precursor to Oxide and Neutrino, as the duo’s “No Good 2 Me” made official – made it into the Top 10, their records worked as pop crossover. They were a dayglo filter on more subterranean activities. “Reload” has a massive gimmick for its hook – the theme tune from BBC hospital soap Casualty, which meshes with the production eerily well – but that’s all it concedes to pop. The rest of the track is raw in a way number ones very rarely are. Most chart music colours itself in, filling up its spaces to fill the airwaves better. Not so “Reload”, bumping along on deep bass that makes the track feel empty and jagged, its ideas and incidents splintered. A repeated sample from Lock, Stock and 2 Smoking Barrels blasts a hole in the song where its chorus should be – on the video, a bad-trip travelogue through a rave, kids bend double in agony when the sample hits, then look up and crack into a grin. The malign hilarity of the track summed up. “Reload” is – as much as a 250,000 selling record can be – hermetic, existing on its own terms not pop’s or even garage’s: you either know them, accept them, or turn away baffled.
Beyond its starkness, “Reload” has another weapon: its vocalist. Neutrino is not likely to feature on many lists of the great British MCs – his thick, phlegm-clotted rapping has never been especially expressive, and even within So Solid he was quickly overshadowed by other vocalists. But he’s perfect and important here, because his flow on “Reload” feels so faithful to the sound of his era’s pirate radio. Judging from surviving YouTube clips – it would be wrong to pretend I was there, listening, at the time – he has simply turned up and done exactly what he would have done over this beat, mid-show on Delight FM. It’s in the way he rolls out the MCs arsenal, from prepared bars, to scatting, to call and response, to simply marking time over the beat – “Digga digga dee, digga digga dee”. Neutrino is what turns “Reload” from a novelty into a snapshot. The only precedent I can think of for this at Number One is “The Special AKA Live!” – another short, unvarnished sketch of club music and subculture, plonked at the top of the charts with little compromise and less explanation.
And there’s something else vital about Neutrino – the fact he’s on the track at all. Oxide and Neutrino might not have been the first kids to break from Brixton bedrooms and parties into the Top Ten, but however important MCs were on radio or in the clubs during the rave era, they hardly made it onto records. With the rise of MCs on record, UK garage and its people had a voice, a host of voices. Once that door had opened it would be hard to close.
Score: 8
[Logged in users can award their own score]
Obviously I know Scottish Football Administration about this or the context of this, but man, just listen to that sound: [bound 7 da reload]
Fantastic record, still to this day. It might not have survived in terms of recurrent airplay or even in critical terms. But just as all those ‘ardkore tunes paved the way for jungle, “Bound 4 Da Reload” is essentially proto-grime. Of course a certain other bunny featuring this lot’s bruvs was even more instrumental on that respect. But a milestone is a milestone, so “Bound 4 Da Reload” it is.
Yeah, we have lots of opportunity – far more than I imagined in the early years of Popular – to talk about grime here, so I didn’t mention it in this one.
Oh, another obvious precedent- even down to the name really – “Double Barrel”. Which got the same mark as this and the Special AKA if I remember myself rightly.
Other O & N singles/tracks I can remember: “No Good 2 Me” is a bit unneccesary, “Up Middle Finger” is fantastic but SO petty, “Devil’s Nightmare” is their other early standout – awesome bit of garage goth. I don’t remember the second album single(s) at all – “Rap Dis” and another one.
You’re right, we will. It’s just that – and without wanting to give too much away – those will probably mostly be in the sense that it had to lose the grime, in order to get the hit.
This one’s new to me…and a bit of a shock I think it’s fair to say! The gunshots and general abrasiveness remind me of Dre’s ‘The Day the Niggaz Took Over’, a monster of a track that, needless to say, never bothered the top of the charts in the US or anywhere else. So this record feels like some sort of signal achievement (’90s chart-pillaging sonic blasts like ‘Setting Sun’ and ‘Firestarter’ are probably useful comparisons) – count me impressed:
7 (may go higher as I listen more to it this week)
I was confused at this by the time, not sure whether it was brilliant or ridiculous, not realising that the answer was “both.” Now it just sounds a few years ahead of the curve, though the concept of the track (using that casualty theme is a masterstroke) gives me expectations that it can never really live up to.
This is a good place to leave this article from 2002 in which Alexis Petridis accompanies Oxide & Neutrino to a gig at SxSW(!) where they are accompanied by My Vitriol(!!) and Elbow(!!!!!)
A real shock to the system this, a cold, almost disturbing sound that meant nothing to me in 2000 but now seems oddly vital and necessary. The song itself does nothing for me, but in comparison to some of the cartoonish sounds of UK Garage we’ll encounter in due course, this sounds quite stark.
Should’ve snuck a Derek Thompson cameo in the video, though.
As I said when this was covered on Which Decade… the first time I encountered B4DR was approriately absurd
While I was at a bus stop in Peckham a car fully of slightly dorky white teens pulled up, windows down, heads nodding awkwardly, absolutely blasting out this laughable…thing. All bass and Casualty and gunshots. A passing black girl took dire exception and unleashed a lecture of awsome fury at them about the inadvisability of them coming round here playing that shit. They slunk off and I was amused.
Imagine my suprise when it subsequently transpired that this bizarre thing was a) actually a proper record and b) was number one (of the two, I think a) is somehow the more surprising). It’s brilliant of course. As Weej says, ridiculous too, with the two qualities being indivisible.
(Incidentally, I’d always assumed the girl’s beef was that the blokes were idiots pretending to be hard [insert Guy Ritchie reference) or something, but reading Tom’s excellent write up, perhaps it was actually the Garage Schism in action).
And finally, while mockney gangster films were clearly a massive pox (still are! Jeff from Coupling was in one on Film 4 last night) I have to say that “look, can everyone stop getting shot” is a great line.
#9 Yes this sample is basically the only good thing to come out of the entire woeful trend!
I’d defend just “Lock, Stock…”. A friend at the time described it as Wodehouse with guns which I still think holds well (substitute a cow-shaped creamer jug in place of guns)
i reckon this is within the purlieus of mash-up country too
This is probably the place to mention my obsession with music from “the year 2000”, a date that seemed like an unimaginable future all the way through my childhood and teenage years.
Bound 4 Da Reload is the Popular entry that probably comes closest to what would have sounded unimaginable in, say, 1966. It’s so raw, unnerving and (as people have already pointed out) hilarious.
I completely missed it at the time, so airplay must have been fleeting. My first reaction on hearing B4DR a few years back was ‘what the hell is that’? After several listens I couldn’t work out if it was awful or amazing – which is usually the sign that it’s a record I will absolutely love on the tenth play (see also Adventures on the Wheels of Steel, J&MC’s Upside Down).
Great comments here – a new and confusing listen to me too, ridiculous and possibly even brilliant. The sample in lieu of chorus sounds utterly fresh in our Popular context, but perhaps I’ve missed a parallel somewhere. It’s the last 30-40 seconds that swung me on first listen, swing batter batter bound bound for da reload… no firm score from me yet while I think about it, but could be a 7.
#14 It’s always the way, though, you wait 47 years for a Number One to arrive that confidently breaks its momentum with a spoken-word film reference and then two come along at once…
I don’t really get this. But it’s got it. If you know what I mean.
A high 6.
When DJs in their late 20s are the boring old farts I suspect that this music is way beyond my ken. It doesn’t speak to me at all but I wonder if somebody might give me a handle on it and its signifiers so I can read it.
For what it’s worth:
neutrino: an insubstantial thing of no discernible mass which interacts only minimally with its environment and is believed on occasions to travel backwards in time.
oxide: rust.
As postscript to my previous comment, it’s a very male kind of music, isn’t it! Bordering on the misogynist I should think. There are female faces in the video only being passive on the dancefloor (and there’s not much vertical expression of a horizontal desire going on) As a woman I find something deeply unpleasant in there. Is that intended?
#18 Yes – it’s very much in that Stonesy line of male conflicts and braggadocio – though actually in O&N’s case less about dominating or possessing women, all the internecine conflict and bragging is about being the biggest dog in the yard: it’s a very masculine, institutionalised world, quite sour and blokey. And this is definitely a dimension in the split within garage – the older DJs were mostly family men by this point, the fact UK Garage got women into the clubs was a point of pride after the (again quite masculine) world of rave.
I think I should say that when I’m describing the schism I’m not taking sides exactly – “Reload” is great, the music that eventually developed from all this is often amazing, but something was definitely lost along the way. The more aspirational/upmarket garage stuff, and its poppy end, is (I reckon) wonderful pop music. The rejection of that in favour of grittier no-girls-allowed stuff is something you see again and again and again in music history from the 60s to now, so much so it’s probably inevitable. But whatever good comes of it it’s always also a regressive step.
It’s a great shame that I don’t get to cover Mis-Teeq or Sweet Female Attitude, basically, who would both be a good counterpoint to this.
Hated at first. The timestretching and the Lock Stock samples (let alone the Casualty theme) all felt immediately dated and charmless (as Tom says earlier Garage-and-related tracks had absorbed elements of Jungle’s primary palette already to strong effect) and something I’d been letting go of as the 90s played out.
The idea of it being ‘Charly’ for people ten years younger occurred to me but although that seems reasonable in terms of its function I found its form comparatively lacking (despite the increased vocal element it felt more cynical and less inspired).
But by ‘Devil’s Nightmare’ (Gothstep indeed, and what a great title) I was relenting and by the time Grime itself emerged as a thing I felt fewer reasons to actively dislike it/them.
It also might be one of the first ‘The Box’ #1’s – getting lots of play on that channel through viewer requests. The Box was also the first time I heard/saw So Solid (loved ‘Oh No (Sentimental Things)’, hated ’21 Seconds’ – go figure) and Genius Cru’s also fun ‘Boom Selection’ – in the days before Channel U a good heads up on what (London) teens were into.
it’s always a delight for me when the UK public pushes a dark, dystopic song to the number 1 spot and this (for me anyway) fits into a lineage that includes ‘Paint it Black’, ‘Ghost Town’, ‘Two Tribes’, ‘Killer’ and ‘Firestarter’.
This tune benefits from its lo-fi production values – a Cubist collage of contemporary references held together with a rattling rhythm, pulsing bass and chattering rhymes – punctured with (what sounds to me like) First Person Shooter style gunfire and the sample from ‘Lock, Stock, etc.’
I was thinking that B4DR is very dark and oppressive. A lot of the more chart-friendly UKG was basically relationships and partying, and along comes Oxide & Neutrino with Casualty and Lock Stock samples, and it was as far removed from “Sweet Like Chocolate” as you could get. It works excellently in conveying what a bad trip feels like.(8)
Makes me think of a slightly grittier relation of what Shut Up And Dance records might have put out 15 years earlier – the sound of pirate stations in inner London (West London for this lot; East London for that lot.). A very welcome no 1.
(7)
Completely missed me. I had no idea this one existed until reading a website around 2003/4 called ‘Poptastic’, a brilliant chart review site long disappeared from the web but can be viewed on Web Archive ( http://web.archive.org/web/20040414172056/http://www.hogweed.org/poptastic/comm2000.html – spoilers for the rest of the year! ) . As he listed all the #1s of 2000 and reviewed them, this was one of the ones that made me go “Wait, what?”.
But back in 2000 eleven year old me would have completely hated this anyway. 2-step garage is, to this day, one of my least favourite dance trends of the last 25 years although the mid-2000s ‘loop an 80s sample for three minutes’ era was definitely the genre’s lowest point in the charts. It’s got a fun novelty to it but it’s not something I’d listen to often, given all the trance anthems released on almost a weekly basis through 2000 there’s much, much stronger than this around.
The story at #9 reminds me of a very infamous summer 2004 bunny that was being played at my cousin’s house in Birmingham that I assumed was just some local kids messing around on pirate radio for a laugh. When I found out that the bloody thing was number 1 I was absolutely astonished.
#21 – If I coud search to find a “Charly”/”B4DR” equivalent in more recent music, I’d wager Skrillex’s “Bangarang” would probably be it.
#26 – Wiki says that Christgau called it a “garden-variety good record” and gave it A-! (“Bangarang”, that is, not “Bound”.) I agree in the sense that it is DULLY CONVENTIONAL BAH HUMBUG (but also good).
I probably would have hated this at the time – too violent, disjointed, etc. – but now I find myself liking it. It’s actually quite catchy: I’ll give it 7/10.
Probably not of much interest to others here, but the geogeek in me has to note that this would’ve been #1 the week that GPS selective availability was turned off, ushering in the modern era of navigational devices and digital mapping. Thus it was also #1 when the first geocache was placed.
The Hot 100 at the time was in the midst of another Santana marathon: “Maria Maria” featuring The Product G & B.
Possibly useful listening – a chapter from my Ultramix series focussing on 2 Step/UKG stuff from the time featuring a decent contrast of its dark and light sides and some of my personal populist favourites in Zed Bias ‘Neighbourhood’ (search also Zed’s ‘Sound Of The Pirates’ mix from 2000), B-15 Project’s ‘Girls Like Us’ and Wookie’s ‘Scrappy’: https://www.mixcloud.com/ghostfood/ghost-food-ultramix-0004/
@8 A good Derek Thompson link might have been a sample from the (far superior IMHO) The Long Good Friday. N’est-ce pas?
The problem I have with this track are the samples; the Casualty one causes it to steer close to being a novelty track while the other sample (I’ve never seen the film so obviously don’t know the context) gets on my nerves. It doesn’t help that the non sampled bits feel like add ons.
In a parrallel universe where all other things were the same except no Toca’s Miracle this would have dethroned Craig David after a three week run and made an interesting contrast both at the time and now. Obviously these were the two faces of 2000 hip hop but in 2015 Craig David appears to be more of a forerunner of Ed Sheeran/ Sam Smith et all while Bound 4 Da Reload has more in common with what the youth of 2015 are buying. However while Fill Me In has aged surprisingly well Bound 4 Da Reload sounded horribly dated when I revisited it last night.
Perhaps more frustratingly the samples disguised the fact that this was the first UK chart topper to reflect an underground culture that middle class rock fans (such as myself) not only did not understand but could not understand. Gang culture had visited the top spot before (Gangsta’s Paradise and Ice Ice Baby) but these were American records. Bound 4 Da Reload was British born and bred. Bound 4 Da Reload didn’t feel important at the time but it sure does now.
#31 “in 2015 Craig David appears to be more of a forerunner of Ed Sheeran/ Sam Smith et all while Bound 4 Da Reload has more in common with what the youth of 2015 are buying”
Plz to insert my standard caution about not assuming that just because old people are uncool* does not mean young people are cool! Maybe it’s a poptimist thing but ‘the youth’ are not always bellwether arbiters of exciting newness in pop, they can be just as swayed by faux-sophistication and people looking like they’re doing things Properly as anyone else. tl;dr these two categories are in no way mutually exclusive! tr;dl do you really think 30-year-olds drive the singles charts? rl;td why are The Brits? dr;lt remember Pink Champale’s schoolgirl yelling that this was JUST ‘ORRIBLE NOISE ld;tr when your uncle first got into Pink Floyd he wasn’t your uncle’s age**
*which I don’t dispute
**I am my own uncle due to time-travel circumstances but due to an injunction I cannot reveal any more than that
#31 I’d agree with that. In fact, on relistening to this the samples to me sounded so clumsy that I was actually reminded of their overly dominant use on Justified Ancient of Mu Mu’s “1987 What The Fuck Is Going On?”
“High praise!” you might say, but actually it’s my least favourite KLF related LP for those very reasons. Things don’t quite gel as they should, and while some people may love that basic, stripped down, DIY stickle-brick approach (and indeed, half the point of “1987” is to make the samples a heavy, deeply invasive feature) I find it too jarring to appreciate.
Plus, the use of the “Casualty” theme feels almost too much like a back-of-the-beermat idea being acted on. A friend used to live next door to a teenage bedroom DJ not long after this period, and he would combine garage sounds with television themes in absurd late-night mixing frenzies, regardless of how well they fitted. So I suppose it reminds me too much of staying over there and hearing the “Eastenders” theme colliding with intense beats at three in the morning.
At the time, I suppose my friend and I were too old for all this, despite only being in our mid-twenties. I’ve only ever really lived in cheap, slightly scuzzy bits of London, and during the early noughties garage followed me around, always uninvited. It either blasted out of people’s cars, or occasionally interrupted FM radio listening as a pirate signal leaked in around the edges. If forced to admit it, I suppose it felt like there was always another loud party going on which I couldn’t understand and wouldn’t have been welcome at – a constant tap on my shoulder and whisper in my ear of “You’re getting older… you’re getting older…”
Obviously I’m less self-conscious about that kind of thing now, but I can still only shrug and say “I don’t get it – sorry”.
#32 Yes, Sheeran in particular built a massive fanbase among young listeners. And last year at least I saw a lot of people who I’d have pegged as student-age trying for the Sam Smith look – that stylised 50s thing – not so much this year. Not that I’m a terribly good observer of that stuff.
But I’d say we’re not living in a moment when there’s a particularly huge generation gap in listening. The generation gaps that matter, incidentally, are nothing to do with well- or ill-meaning olds like me – they’re ones like the split described in this entry, between (say) a 16 year old and a 28 year old, two groups that might still feel a sense of ownership over pop. Those are the ones that shift things.
#31 “an underground culture that middle class rock fans (such as myself) not only did not understand but could not understand”
I see where you’re coming from with this but I’m not sure I agree. First off, the job, or at least side effect, of music is to communicate – it may be naive and touristic of me, but while I don’t think the understanding we form of scenes and subcultures through their music is at all full, it’s not nothing.
Second, in this particular case, “Bound 4 Da Reload” is not, and I don’t think is trying to be, an especially hardcore record. There is a lot of lairy atmosphere but the actual touchstones here are Casualty, Lock Stock and the kind of stock gun noises that were all over rave music – great call by whoever mentioned first-person shooters too. Those things – Casualty, Lock Stock and computer games – would have been stuff any 18 year old guy in 2000 knew about and recognised. A lot of middle class rock fans included. I don’t think “Bound 4 Da Reload” is taking itself much more seriously than any of its sources.
That’s not to say Oxide and Neutrino didn’t have a lot more first-hand experience of ‘gang culture’ than you or I ever will, but that doesn’t mean any record they made necessarily reflected, or even aspired to reflect, that experience. (Or no more than hit rock’n’roll records, even at their meanest, directly reflected the sharks, criminals and mobsters at large in the 50s record biz.)
#34 Your generation gap analysis is definitely true I think. While Popular’s been going through the period 1995-2000 (roughly my mid-to-late 20’s), I’ve found myself re-evaluating music from that time that I originally disliked or even hated. I wonder if some people’s engagement with pop music goes roughly like this:
Age 16: “Pop music is cool!”
Age 28: “I can’t believe the crap kids are listening to these days! It was so much better when I was a kid.”
Age 42: “Some pop music today is pretty good. And actually some of the stuff when I was 28 wasn’t bad either. And not everything from when I was 16 was that great.”
This could also be connected with the cycle of decade re-evaluation discussed on previous threads.
Somebody said that 26 is the age at which you reach peak pop hate (can’t remember who, or where – I started this site at 26 so obviously I wasn’t quite as sick of it all)
I think that was Danny Baker. His theory was that everyone thinks that something terrible happened to pop music when they turned 26
Though in his case it had to be said that despite being a transcendent genius as a broadcaster, he has literally the worst music taste of anyone in the world these days
#35 “I don’t think “Bound 4 Da Reload” is taking itself much more seriously than any of its sources.” and I think a recurring theme in et al on this thread (especially Pink Champale’s schoolgirl*) – how *shudder* authentic actually is this song? People have used the word ‘novelty’ – is it a record that was actually being bought by youths in the scene or was it being bought by PC’s white dorks? How cool were the pirates that played it? Again I ask these questions from the standpoint of a complete ignoramus so plz excuse if they are stupid questions. And the level of hate some people have for it suggests it can’t really have been a crossover record – but its construction makes it feel as if, in some sense, it must have been one.
*I hope she turns out to have the twitter account @No1NotOxideAndFuckingNeutrino
flahr @32 just because old people are uncool* […] *which I don’t dispute
Well you’re not coming to any of my wild parties then!
Flippin’ kids…
Wild parties are so passé, Rosie. For today’s youth it’s all about sitting quietly in rooms reading newspapers. 😉
Another one from the 6th form common room stereo, this. I can’t claim to have been into garage at all but 90% of my peers were – Thursday lunchtime was Xfm day and the room cleared out compared to the rest of the week (Monday, Wednesday and Friday lunchtimes was Capital FM, Kiss FM on Tuesday). There was a ‘quiet study’ room adjoining which was anything but, and I definitely heard ‘the stupid Casualty song’ drifting in. I don’t know how much pre-release airplay Kiss gave it, but it seemed to hang around for ages before getting to #1?
Although I didn’t like B4DR then, I LOVED Lock Stock and had sneaked into the cinema to see it underage a couple of years previous (accompanied by 1 of 7, who was very tall). I had the poster in my bedroom for ages.
#39 A question that occurred to me – and someone reading this might know, or it might be something we talk about in the 2001 entries – is how closely O & N were actually part of So Solid (who did have a degree of credibility). They aren’t on “21 Bunnies”, I dunno how much they’re on the album – whether they were peripheral anyhow, or whether their pop moves tarnished their cred, or whether they were just too busy, I simply don’t know. Members of the bigger crew are on some of their other singles.
Reading around the history of the Crew, it seems that Oxide and Neutrino were on a pirate called Supreme FM, which some So Solid members also played on, and then when So Solid decamped en masse to a residency on Delight FM, Oxide and Neutrino basically tagged along.
Re. the lines between novelty and authentic – the younger end of the scene had an authentic appetite for novelty, probably. One of the pieces I read talked about DJ Dee Kline’s ganja-themed “I Don’t Smoke Da Reefah”, another track which cause the older garage heads to despair but which apparently would get the biggest responses at any party that played it.
@37 Tom, that’s spot on with me. Though I did turn 26 in 2011, often ranked alongside 1961, 1976, 1986 and 2004 as pop’s nadir. I can’t even remember any ’11 #1s enough to wake the bunny!
I have no memory at all about whether I liked this or found it a little crass at the time. Sounds OK to me now – nice and skeletal, and with ears that are probably still tuned in a 1985 mode, I quite like samples that literally sound dropped in.
(‘Could everyone stop getting shot?’ is a good line. I wouldn’t have recognised it because I’ve never managed to watch the whole of a Guy Ritchie film – they just feel (and look) like bad ads to me. Reportedly he was once annoyed at being described in The Guardian (by me) as ‘risible’ – I quite enjoyed that).
Hmm, I was 26 in 2001. Was listening mostly to Morcheeba and Francoise Hardy, as I recall, finding very little else on the pop scene of the time of interest. Although 2002 was worse (although that year’s Morcheeba album, which I picked up in Pisa, was better than the previous one)
Much easier to see as proto-grime than garage. It has an enjoyably sparse production with some good and some bad ideas, and its pleasing enough when I do hear it, but it’s not a tune I’d actively seek out. A low 7.
Bound 4 Da Reload is one of two garage No.1 hits in 2000 which had varying degrees of issues with copyright wrangles over samples.
In this case it looked very much as if the single was going to have to come out with the central sample of the Casualty theme replayed and indeed a non-BBC worrying version had been prepared and was ready to be mastered. Virtually at the last moment the clearance came through and the single was able to be issued in the same form that had been circulating as a white label since the end of 1999.
This is in direct contrast to a single we’ll run into later in the summer which had been promoed and was receiving extensive airplay in its original form but which at the last moment had to be issued with its core vocal re-sung by a soundalike as it had proved impossible to clear the original.
#43 again – the borderline between novelty and authentic also brings to mind those glorious days of the Shut Up and Dance label. “£20 to get in.” “Nah mate, it was £10”, “Nah, it’s `ad a remix”. The combination of killer riff (from Prince’s “Lets Go Crazy”) and crass vocal sample (“turn off that motherfucking radio!”) really strongly recalls Rum and Black’s “Fuck The Legal Stations” (with an AA side that did something similar with Joan Armatrading’s “Love And Affection”) [the Ragga Twins were better still, of course, but just about stayed the straight side of gimmicky, as a rule] – truly it is fascinating to see a later generation of the London underground than that with which I was familiar as an East London yoof bubble up to the surface with ideas and sounds that seem rather related. Obviously back in 1990 that stuff (with acts, like Oxide and Neutrino here, with enough substance to put out albums) was just scratching the top 75, at best….
44 – Agreed with most of those years, but I won’t see my beloved 2011 included in that! I can understand the reasons (the top 40 consisting of 39 EDM-influenced pop-club bangers and Adele, week in week out) but if you’re 22 years old and living an extremely party-heavy, alcohol swigging life, it all becomes the greatest music in the world. And I was *so* tired of noughties indie-pop by then so to hear actual synths not just back in fashion, but all over the chart, was (then) a fantastic feeling. It culminated in seeing Example live in Hyde Park that summer, watching the crowd reaction to Bunny The Way You Bunnied Me and feeling like a golden age of music was back.
I turned 26 in September 2014, but any pretence of me still being in that golden age had long-fizzled out. Two extremely overrated summer 2013 bunnies probably spelt the end of my pop imperial phase.