I’m counting down my 100 favourite songs of all time. To keep this from becoming a Bob Dylan / Tom Waits love-in, only one track per artist is allowed.
Go to 80: California Soul by Marlena Shaw
Go to 82: Bump by Spank Rock
When the Empire Windrush docked at London’s Tilbury port in 1948 and unloaded its cargo of Caribbean immigrants, the new arrivals, including a Trinidadian musician known as Lord Kitchener, were met by a Pathé news crew. The self-styled king of calypso was filmed singing a song he’d recently written called London Is The Place For Me and the footage, along with regular live performances and appearances on BBC Radio, helped Kitchener introduce a new style of music to the UK capital.
Caribbean music’s popularity was further cemented in 1951 when the Trinidad All-Steel Percussion Orchestra played at the Festival of Britain and in the following year, when the man who brought the orchestra to the UK, Edric Connor, recorded an album of Jamaican folk music. By the end of the decade, Connor and his fellow Trinidadian, Claudia Jones, held the first Caribbean Carnival in St Pancras—a precursor to the world-famous Notting Hill Carnival. That is a taste of London’s music scene in the 50s.
The following decade saw more Caribbean flavors added to the melting pot as Island Records head Chris Blackwell began building a UK audience for the ska music he was recording in Jamaica. Selling records directly to stores in London earned Blackwell enough money to continue financing the label’s activity back in Jamaica, while also bringing popular artists to London for live shows.
Meanwhile the capital became the UK’s home of the swinging sixties with a dynamic fashion, film and art scene built around the iconic music of bands like The Rolling Stones, The Kinks, The Who and Pink Floyd. It's safe to say that the 1960s was a good time to be a music fan living in London.
During the following decade, the city reveled in the glam rock scene led by David Bowie, Marc Bolan and Roxy Music before punk took over. In 1976 The Ramones played shows at Camden Town venues, The Roundhouse and Dingwalls. The Clash shot an album cover near the newly opened Camden Market and released London Calling, an album that even went south of the river on Guns of Brixton. The Sex Pistols sailed through the heart of the city ahead of the Silver Jubilee Thames parade to promote their single, God Save the Queen.
Despite recent revisionist attempts to resurrect the reputation of the 1980s, we can write off a lot of what happened. Yet whatever you think of the New Romantics and London-based bands like Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet, it was a strong and recognisable music scene. And by the end of the decade, DJs Paul Oakenfold and Danny Rampling were bringing Balearic dance music to less sunny locations in Southwark and Charing Cross.
The 1990s saw dance music continue to grow in popularity with an explosion of secret raves at disused industrial sites across London and at outdoor country locations near the M25 ring road that surrounded the capital. The city also spawned a unique mix of electronic music, dancehall and hip-hop in the jungle and drum’n’bass scene. Even London’s indie rock kids were not left out should they choose to take Blur’s side on the great north-south Britpop divide.
All in all, the second half of the 20th century was a great time be a music fan in London. Unfortunately, I lived there from 2001-2009.
That’s not to say no great music came out during the 2000s. It was an exciting decade but all the great artists were American, French, Icelandic, Scottish or Radiohead. New York was celebrated (or not) by LCD Soundsystem (New York, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down), Jay Z (Empire State of Mind) and The Strokes (New York City Cops). The world’s other great cosmopolitan metropolis got Lily Allen’s LDN.
While NYC thrilled as the home of DFA Records, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, TV on the Radio and Animal Collective, London was in thrall to the druggy charlatan posturing of The Libertines or hoping to see (as I once did) a shambolic Amy Winehouse stumble towards her favorite Camden hangout. And let’s not even mention Coldplay, who once stood a round for the entire Chalk Farm Road pub I was drinking in so you’d think I’d have some residue of goodwill for them…but then again.
Over the course of an entire decade, this supposed cultural capital scores very badly in terms of homegrown musical output. If you think that’s harsh, remember nu rave? To be fair, let’s give London credit for Dizzee Rascal, M.I.A. and, if we’re pushing the definition of origin, The Streets.
Mike Skinner was born in Hertfordshire and raised in Birmingham, but from the towering inferno of Islington's Kestral House that stares squarely out from the cover of his debut album, Original Pirate Material, to lyrics about an “underground train run[ing] from Mile End to Ealing, from Brixton to Bounds Green”, The Streets are always of London.
The Streets are also associated with the London-based music genre that was briefly popular in the 2000s: UK garage, a tempo-shifting mash-up of house, jungle, soul and more that gradually evolved—with the removal of half the beats—to a 2-step sound. It flirted with the mainstream via hits by Artful Dodger and So Solid Crew and Skinner seemed set to follow with his brilliantly 2-stepping first single Has It Come to This? Yet that song is one of The Streets’ only true garage tracks. His next single would be more 2 Tone than 2-step.
From the stabbing Hammond organ that kickstarts Let’s Push Things Forward to the melancholy mariachi trumpet, it’s immediately apparent that Skinner’s references are not confined to the genre label he’d been assigned. It’s 2-step but so much more and he uses his lyrics to further distance himself from the scene’s popular performers: “I make bangers not anthems, I leave that to the Artful Dodger.”
Skinner admits that as easy as it would have been to build his entire sound around UK garage, his taste was too eclectic, his ambition too great to “conform to formulas”. At a time when the UK’s music charts were beginning to be dominated by talent show winners singing cover versions, The Streets made a push for originality, most notably on Let’s Push Things Forward.
The song’s glorious hook is sung by London soul singer, Kevin Mark Trail, who said of The Streets, “I hadn’t heard anything like it before”. More than his music, Skinner’s vocals broke new ground. He once accused UK hip-hop of being “someone from Reading pretending to be Biggie or Q-Tip”. While the intricacies of his in-line rhyming are reminiscent of Notorious B.I.G. ( “Critics ready with your pot shots, the plot thickens / Put on your mittens for these sub-zero conditions”) Skinner also believed that “to be like your idol, you shouldn't sound like them, you should be like them—original.”
At a time when most other UK MCs aped the style of their American heroes, Skinner reveled in his Englishness. On Let’s Push Things Forward, even the typical hip-hop misogyny is given a homegrown twist: “Round here we say birds not bitches”. Physically and lyrically, Skinner was firmly rooted in his adopted hometown (“As London Bridge burns down, Brixton’s burning up”) but musically he was already leaving the capital’s obsession with UK garage and heading back to the Midlands where he grew up. Let’s Push Things Forward's connection to The Specials, another Midlands band who did much to blend the UK’s black and white music worlds, was confirmed at a live performance I caught at Brixton Academy in 2003 when Skinner merged their Ghost Town with his own 2 Tone track.
On The Streets' follow-up record—2004’s A Grand Don’t Come for Free—Skinner had completely detached his sound from UK garage. By 2009, when I left London, the genre had diluted into evermore sub-genres including grime, which was beginning its subtle rise to popularity.
Elsewhere British music was overrun by reality TV wannabes and nostalgic reunion tours. The capital’s most successful exports were Adele and Florence Welch, whose anthems of love and loss are global expressions that transcend the origins of their singers, summed up by the contrast between Adele’s singing and speaking voice.
So how does a culturally vibrant and historically dominant city like London fail to produce an enduring music scene over the course of a decade? Part of the answer lies in the way digital technology has changed how music is made and consumed. The same advances that allowed Mike Skinner to record an entire album from his flat has transformed music into a less parochial and more global phenomenon.
The exchanges of ideas, influences and chord changes that were once dependent on physical proximity now happen online. Regional scenes based around similar tastes in music are less likely to happen when it’s so easy to look beyond the other music makers in your area for influence or the tastes of your town for an audience.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that the idea of a geographical music scene is dead. Hyper-local hip-hop genres like trap and crunk are popular in the nightclubs of the American South, while even in London, grime has ceased its relentless shapeshifting to become an identifiable style that is finally defining the city’s music scene.
But most mainstream and alternative music is now part of a global scene where origin is no guide to style or barrier to success. As much as certain generations of young people may value the sense of belonging and tribalism that traditional music scenes afforded or, like me, wonder where my tribe was, we should not regret its absence. Without the pressure to conform to the formulas of their immediate environment that Mike Skinner so expertly resisted, there’s no excuses for not pursuing originality. The best music makers will be afforded more space to create sounds that express their own identities and continue to push things forward.
If you like this, try:
Has It Come To This?
Turn The Page
Weak Become Heroes
Dry Your Eyes
Ghost Town - The Specials
Follow me on Twitter
Go to 80: California Soul by Marlena Shaw
Go to 82: Bump by Spank Rock
Go to 80: California Soul by Marlena Shaw
Go to 82: Bump by Spank Rock
When the Empire Windrush docked at London’s Tilbury port in 1948 and unloaded its cargo of Caribbean immigrants, the new arrivals, including a Trinidadian musician known as Lord Kitchener, were met by a Pathé news crew. The self-styled king of calypso was filmed singing a song he’d recently written called London Is The Place For Me and the footage, along with regular live performances and appearances on BBC Radio, helped Kitchener introduce a new style of music to the UK capital.
Caribbean music’s popularity was further cemented in 1951 when the Trinidad All-Steel Percussion Orchestra played at the Festival of Britain and in the following year, when the man who brought the orchestra to the UK, Edric Connor, recorded an album of Jamaican folk music. By the end of the decade, Connor and his fellow Trinidadian, Claudia Jones, held the first Caribbean Carnival in St Pancras—a precursor to the world-famous Notting Hill Carnival. That is a taste of London’s music scene in the 50s.
The following decade saw more Caribbean flavors added to the melting pot as Island Records head Chris Blackwell began building a UK audience for the ska music he was recording in Jamaica. Selling records directly to stores in London earned Blackwell enough money to continue financing the label’s activity back in Jamaica, while also bringing popular artists to London for live shows.
Meanwhile the capital became the UK’s home of the swinging sixties with a dynamic fashion, film and art scene built around the iconic music of bands like The Rolling Stones, The Kinks, The Who and Pink Floyd. It's safe to say that the 1960s was a good time to be a music fan living in London.
Despite recent revisionist attempts to resurrect the reputation of the 1980s, we can write off a lot of what happened. Yet whatever you think of the New Romantics and London-based bands like Duran Duran and Spandau Ballet, it was a strong and recognisable music scene. And by the end of the decade, DJs Paul Oakenfold and Danny Rampling were bringing Balearic dance music to less sunny locations in Southwark and Charing Cross.
The 1990s saw dance music continue to grow in popularity with an explosion of secret raves at disused industrial sites across London and at outdoor country locations near the M25 ring road that surrounded the capital. The city also spawned a unique mix of electronic music, dancehall and hip-hop in the jungle and drum’n’bass scene. Even London’s indie rock kids were not left out should they choose to take Blur’s side on the great north-south Britpop divide.
All in all, the second half of the 20th century was a great time be a music fan in London. Unfortunately, I lived there from 2001-2009.
That’s not to say no great music came out during the 2000s. It was an exciting decade but all the great artists were American, French, Icelandic, Scottish or Radiohead. New York was celebrated (or not) by LCD Soundsystem (New York, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down), Jay Z (Empire State of Mind) and The Strokes (New York City Cops). The world’s other great cosmopolitan metropolis got Lily Allen’s LDN.
While NYC thrilled as the home of DFA Records, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, TV on the Radio and Animal Collective, London was in thrall to the druggy charlatan posturing of The Libertines or hoping to see (as I once did) a shambolic Amy Winehouse stumble towards her favorite Camden hangout. And let’s not even mention Coldplay, who once stood a round for the entire Chalk Farm Road pub I was drinking in so you’d think I’d have some residue of goodwill for them…but then again.
Over the course of an entire decade, this supposed cultural capital scores very badly in terms of homegrown musical output. If you think that’s harsh, remember nu rave? To be fair, let’s give London credit for Dizzee Rascal, M.I.A. and, if we’re pushing the definition of origin, The Streets.
Mike Skinner was born in Hertfordshire and raised in Birmingham, but from the towering inferno of Islington's Kestral House that stares squarely out from the cover of his debut album, Original Pirate Material, to lyrics about an “underground train run[ing] from Mile End to Ealing, from Brixton to Bounds Green”, The Streets are always of London.
The Streets are also associated with the London-based music genre that was briefly popular in the 2000s: UK garage, a tempo-shifting mash-up of house, jungle, soul and more that gradually evolved—with the removal of half the beats—to a 2-step sound. It flirted with the mainstream via hits by Artful Dodger and So Solid Crew and Skinner seemed set to follow with his brilliantly 2-stepping first single Has It Come to This? Yet that song is one of The Streets’ only true garage tracks. His next single would be more 2 Tone than 2-step.
This ain’t your typical garage joint
From the stabbing Hammond organ that kickstarts Let’s Push Things Forward to the melancholy mariachi trumpet, it’s immediately apparent that Skinner’s references are not confined to the genre label he’d been assigned. It’s 2-step but so much more and he uses his lyrics to further distance himself from the scene’s popular performers: “I make bangers not anthems, I leave that to the Artful Dodger.”
Skinner admits that as easy as it would have been to build his entire sound around UK garage, his taste was too eclectic, his ambition too great to “conform to formulas”. At a time when the UK’s music charts were beginning to be dominated by talent show winners singing cover versions, The Streets made a push for originality, most notably on Let’s Push Things Forward.
“They say that everything sounds the same then you go buy them. There’s no excuses my friend. Let’s push things forward.”
The song’s glorious hook is sung by London soul singer, Kevin Mark Trail, who said of The Streets, “I hadn’t heard anything like it before”. More than his music, Skinner’s vocals broke new ground. He once accused UK hip-hop of being “someone from Reading pretending to be Biggie or Q-Tip”. While the intricacies of his in-line rhyming are reminiscent of Notorious B.I.G. ( “Critics ready with your pot shots, the plot thickens / Put on your mittens for these sub-zero conditions”) Skinner also believed that “to be like your idol, you shouldn't sound like them, you should be like them—original.”
At a time when most other UK MCs aped the style of their American heroes, Skinner reveled in his Englishness. On Let’s Push Things Forward, even the typical hip-hop misogyny is given a homegrown twist: “Round here we say birds not bitches”. Physically and lyrically, Skinner was firmly rooted in his adopted hometown (“As London Bridge burns down, Brixton’s burning up”) but musically he was already leaving the capital’s obsession with UK garage and heading back to the Midlands where he grew up. Let’s Push Things Forward's connection to The Specials, another Midlands band who did much to blend the UK’s black and white music worlds, was confirmed at a live performance I caught at Brixton Academy in 2003 when Skinner merged their Ghost Town with his own 2 Tone track.
Elsewhere British music was overrun by reality TV wannabes and nostalgic reunion tours. The capital’s most successful exports were Adele and Florence Welch, whose anthems of love and loss are global expressions that transcend the origins of their singers, summed up by the contrast between Adele’s singing and speaking voice.
So how does a culturally vibrant and historically dominant city like London fail to produce an enduring music scene over the course of a decade? Part of the answer lies in the way digital technology has changed how music is made and consumed. The same advances that allowed Mike Skinner to record an entire album from his flat has transformed music into a less parochial and more global phenomenon.
The exchanges of ideas, influences and chord changes that were once dependent on physical proximity now happen online. Regional scenes based around similar tastes in music are less likely to happen when it’s so easy to look beyond the other music makers in your area for influence or the tastes of your town for an audience.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that the idea of a geographical music scene is dead. Hyper-local hip-hop genres like trap and crunk are popular in the nightclubs of the American South, while even in London, grime has ceased its relentless shapeshifting to become an identifiable style that is finally defining the city’s music scene.
But most mainstream and alternative music is now part of a global scene where origin is no guide to style or barrier to success. As much as certain generations of young people may value the sense of belonging and tribalism that traditional music scenes afforded or, like me, wonder where my tribe was, we should not regret its absence. Without the pressure to conform to the formulas of their immediate environment that Mike Skinner so expertly resisted, there’s no excuses for not pursuing originality. The best music makers will be afforded more space to create sounds that express their own identities and continue to push things forward.
If you like this, try:
Has It Come To This?
Turn The Page
Weak Become Heroes
Dry Your Eyes
Ghost Town - The Specials
Follow me on Twitter
Go to 80: California Soul by Marlena Shaw
Go to 82: Bump by Spank Rock
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