The best records ever to wreck a genre part 1: Bad Company - The Nine
Plus TraTraTrax, Alice Coltrane, Dave Clarke
What are the best records ever to sink a whole genre of music? It’s a question that has been floating around my head since the start of this year, when I wrote about Robert Hood’s techno masterpiece Minimal Nation for DJ Magazine.
Hood’s debut album is, let there be no doubt, an astoundingly great record of conceptual drive, machine funk and sonic clarity. But it also wrecked techno for years, by inadvertently encouraging weakling minimal copies that clogged up the decks and dance floors.
The Nine, the 1998 debut single from British drum & bass crew Bad Company - or Bad Company UK, as they were later obliged to call themselves - had a similar impact. The Nine is a tune of jaw-dropping sonic precision and burly tech noise; but it also sent drum & bass down a path of dance-floor heavy metal that it has arguably yet to recover from, where many of the things I love about jungle / drum & bass - the genre’s rhythmical complexity and its ability to absorb different musical traits from reggae to jazz - were subsumed into the search for ever bigger bass lines and more cavernous drops.
The Nine wasn’t alone in this race for the bass: 1998 also saw the release of Ed Rush, Optical and Fierce’s Alien Girl, while Jonny L’s Piper came out in 1997 - but The Nine’s improbably huge success almost certainly had the biggest impact. And if you, like me, have ever wondered what the living hell Pendulum are up to with their dodgy arena rock stylings, then, sadly The Nine may be at least partly to blame.
Bad Company UK were a kind of drum & bass super group, who came together in 1998 when producers dBridge and Maldini (aka Future Forces Inc.) hooked up with Michael Wojcicki (aka Vegas) and Dan Stein (aka Fresh) and decided to collaborate.
Future Forces Inc. had already achieved considerable success on Renegade Hardware, while Fresh had made some impact as Absolute Zero. But, as dBridge explained to RBMA in 2005, they felt the drum & bass scene needed something of a fillip.
“At that time the scene was going through a bit of a low, we felt,” dBridge said. “We felt that there wasn’t any energy, or not as much energy as there could be. Drum & bass had stripped itself down almost too much, so it was a little bit lifeless in a lot of aspects.”
With Bad Company, the idea was to get back to the energy of the rave scene, then still a relatively recent memory. “Because the scene had changed anyway, because of the introduction of the Criminal Justice Bill, which was putting these big illegal parties out of business, the music was going into the clubs,” dBridge explained. “But it didn’t quite have the same energy. So we thought, well, maybe a musical thing needs to happen.”
The Nine was one of the first songs to emerge from the Bad Company studio sessions, which saw the band’s four members write in various combinations of personnel. Speaking to Drum & Bass Arena in 2014, Vegas said that the track was written in a day by Fresh and Maldini. “Some tunes we’d be tinkering with ideas for a few days before bringing it all together in seven or eight hours,” he explains. “The Nine, as I recall, was a very quick session.”
The track’s rather casual creation might help to explain what Bad Company weren’t particularly fussed with The Nine when they completed it. “We knew we were happy with it but we couldn’t predict anything more than that,”Vegas said. “The Nine wasn’t even a main track when it was first released. We didn’t realise the power it had until we started mixing it into other records.”
All the same, The Nine would become the first Bad Company single, released in 1998 on a twelve inch alongside the surprisingly jazzy - and utterly brilliant - The Bridge on the group’s own BC Recordings.
Bad Company themselves might not have realised the power of The Nine but other DJs did and the tune was an inescapable hit on the drum & bass scene. Andy C, in particular, was a big supporter. But The Nine was genuinely ubiquitous, wherever drum & bass was played, and remained so for a good few years.
“[The Nine is] so simplistic but it captured something that wasn’t around at the time,” Vegas told Drum & Bass Arena. “Sometimes a tune embraces the essence of what is there already; it broke it down for everybody. As soon as people like Andy C mixed it from that Reece, it just got taken in the wind. It’s just a wicked a DJ tool really.”
Listening back now, it seems amazing that anyone could ever doubt the power of The Nine, a song that mixes the simple appeal of bass-y cacophony with turbo-charged and surprisingly complex production.
The Nine is based around the interplay of two key bass lines, one grumbling sub bass that is more experienced than heard as it looms around the bottom end of the mix, flexing its muscles; and one growling, metallic attack whose occasional vacillations into melody serve as the song’s only hook.
If that doesn’t sound like much… well, it isn’t. But the bass lines are so epically, enormously, perfectly sculpted - the result of “a whole load of distortion pedals and compressors” according to Vegas - that you really don’t need much more. Even so, Bad Company exert considerable production finesse over the pacing of a track, shifting rhythmical layers bringing the listener up and down as is needed, while there is enough looming ambience floating towards the back of the track to keep the listener permanently on edge.
The Nine is also probably more complex in its programming than its reputation suggests, with the drums performing a series of snare-led rhythmical stumbles that suggest a long-distance runner only just getting over the finishing line of a particularly long race.
In fact, listening to The Nine, The Bridge and Bad Company’s 2000 debut album Inside The Machine this week, I was surprised to see how complex and even varied Bad Company’s productions were, particularly in those early years. Colonies, which opens Inside The Machine, is a proggy drum & bass number that leads with jazz cymbal taps and a Spanish guitar lines, while Silicon Dawn has a drum line that hints to broken beat and The Flood is a brooding instrumental hip hop lope.
The album’s best-known track, however, is the one that comes closest to the heavy-metal impact of The Nine: Nitrous. And that was a problem for both Bad Company and for drum & bass itself.
Nitrous is by no means the best song on the album. But it is easy to understand why it is the record’s biggest, in a scene led by club DJs. There are many ways for DJs to make an impact: having the newest tunes, mixing in the flashiest style etc. But one constant is that no one likes their music to sound feeble. And after playing The Nine, almost any other drum & bass record sounds a bit, well, weak.
It makes sense, then, that Bad Company - then busily laying waste to the drum & bass club scene - would set out to repeat the success of The Nine, on tracks like Nitrous, Son of Nitrous (ahem), Hornet and Planet Dust.
The problem is that so too did everyone else, with drum & bass devolving into what dBridge once called a “sonic arms race”, each track more vicious than the last, to the extent where drum & bass became more about the aural impact of your mix down and less about the deviousness of your drums or the innovation in your programming.
(See: Concord Dawn, Moving Fusion, Noisia and, especially, Pendulum, an Australian drum & bass act who started off decently enough with Vault before jumping into full-on rock mode with disastrous results, if not, perhaps, for their collective bank balance.)
As drum & bass got ever louder, its international influence spread, becoming a genuinely global force in a way that many British dance trends have failed to do. My interest, however, waned. I was living in London at the start of the 2000s, still the centre of the world’s drum & bass scene, and I occasionally caught drum & bass DJs at Fabric and The End. But, for me, the genre had lost a lot of what made it special in its obsession for ever more devastating bass.
Strangely enough Bad Company’s dBridge was feeling the same way. “We were doing an album called Shot Down on Safari [in 2002], which was a big album within the drum & bass scene, but for me personally wasn’t where I was at musically,” he told RBMA. “Even though it was named Bad Company too, I didn’t have nothing to do with it.”
dBridge launched his own Exit label in 2003, with the single Libra / The Bride. But he says it was a struggle to get people to accept the single’s toned-down, tuneful side. “They were expecting some kind of like rave, terror, anthem bashing [screams with hands in the air] ‘let’s have it!’ And that’s not really what I’m about,” he told RBMA. “That’s not really what I brought to BC as well. I’m a bit more chilled out. I like melodies, I like chords and also I like the grit as well. So I’m personally trying to fuse the two, just getting some soul back into it.”
Bad Company itself ceased operations about 2005, with Fresh’s Breakbeat Kaos label pushing the group’s sonic assault into ever more commercial spaces. In 2016 Bad Company reformed, releasing the Ice Station Zero album in 2018. The record performed reasonably well but by this point I was definitely off the Bad Company train.
And there, in fact, I might have remained were it not for the questions that Minimal Nation raised in my head earlier this year. In a way - a pretty childish way, at that - I blamed Bad Company for having turned drum & bass away from what I liked in the genre, leaving the path open for Pendulum to stomp their foul-smelling rock vibes all over the genre’s stinking corpse.
It followed, in my head, that if Bad Company had inspired a lot of terrible music, then their music must in itself have been terrible. But when I fired up The Nine again, one chilly February morning, I realised how stupid I had been. The Nine is tough, sure; it has a nuclear bass line and towering drop; but it is also surprisingly flexible, the drums retaining the vital edge of hardcore innovation and the production surprisingly subtle in its assault. And, yes, The Nine may have wrecked a musical genre. But boy did it feel satisfying as it did so.
Some listening
TraTraTrax, the Colombian label run by Defuse, Nyksan and Verraco, is the most exciting label in dance music right now and no pare, sigue sigue 2 is the sound of innovation in flight. TraTraTrax specialises in UK bass filth put through the Latin American wrangler, a sound whose myriad possibilities are rinsed in the compilation’s 18 tracks, which run from the reggaeton / tech / funky of LWS’s sickeningly exciting Snips to Wost’s jungle-ish kuduro to Doctor Jeep’s baile funk / electro / breakbeat rumble. The artists who feature here range from TraTraTrax mainstays (Doctor Jeep) to Mexican underground legends (Siete Catorce), to Belgian cult nutters (Maoupa Mazzocchetti) to a host of utterly unknown names (to me, anyway, but I can’t find anything about them online either), like Surusinghe, Entrañas and Atrice. The standard is amazingly high throughout and it is thrilling to see the fabulous shapes that emerge from the combinations of dance culture, as familiar elements - bass purge, Art of Noise “Hey”s, clattering breaks - are moulded into teeth-shattering new shapes, with more what-the-hell? moments in the album’s 77 minutes than in most two-day dance festivals. (What on earth is Henzo up to, for example, on the aquatic, time-shifting two-step dembow of Glisten?)
There’s something simultaneously sad and uplifting about coral reef, as it flutters around under the sea, almost too beautiful to have a future. Miraculously, Olof Dreijer’s new track manages to perfectly capture this exotic happy / sad feeling, in eight and a half minutes of marine synth squirts and loose percussive roll.
As soon as I saw the name of this song, all I wanted was a Henry Hoover to appear on the cover. And lo and behold, my dream became reality. THEN all I wanted was for the song to ride some awesome early 90s hoover sound vibes. Which it doesn’t do, sadly. But the song, Sherelle’s first in almost two years, is awesome enough in its Amen beat, prowling sub and evil synth glory to make it all OK. If you’re going to revive something, it might as well be something as sweet as this.
Alice Coltrane - Shiva-Loka Live
An Alice Coltrane live album captured in the months after the release of Journey in Satchidananda? You would be mad to say no. Throw Pharoah Sanders in on saxophone and the forthcoming The Carnegie Hall Concert album tips over from warmly awaited into feverishly expected. This 14-minute version of Satchidananda track Shiva-Loka is hypnotic, serpentine, engrossing and fabulously atemporal, the work of a composer who became years ahead of her time by looking backwards into the mystical past.
55 seconds of Little Simz rhyming over a beat that sits somewhere between jungle and trap - going trap just when you expect it to go fully jungle and vice versa - has more power and flex than most musicians manage to two hours. Totally addictive.
Beth Gibbons - Floating on a Moment
I don’t have a great deal to add about this wonderful new song from Beth Gibbons, given that Philip Sherburne’s “Dummy unplugged” take pretty much nailed it. So let’s just say that Floating On A Moment is my favourite Beth Gibbons moment since she got tipsy at Glastonbury 1998 and started getting rowdy with the crowd, in a very bawdy, hugely amusing and very unlikely star turn. She still nailed the songs, obviously.
Things I’ve Done
Dave Clarke was one of my favourite DJs and producers when I first started listening to techno. His early records are still remarkable too - the Red series is scorching and Southside the best Thomas Bangalter track that never was. Anyway, it was a total pleasure to interview him for Line Noise and it even turned out quite emotional: we talked about everything from big kick drums to experiencing homelessness, hardcore to hip hop, passing by Daft Punk, journalism and Mark Lanegan. Listen on Soundcloud here; and Spotify here.
The playlists
Go long. Or go short. Either way you’re getting my pick of the best new music, which includes all the songs above plus new tracks from Caroline Polachek and Weyes Blood; and Sloe Noon.
I can't point to a single record (though that's possibly more reflective of a more scattered culture than it is my memory) but there's a lot of that arms race in the pop edits phenomenon too, just with "filthiest bass" replaced by "goofiest non-sequitur." The first huge proliferation of those I remember seeing was either pando-era hyperpop like dariacore and some of the 909 Worldwide-sphere's output OR donk edit-type stuff like STRIPE N CO and even HMT Hard Cru. Of course that also begs the question, who's the Pendulum of uptempo pop edits?