Junglist Read online

  Published by Repeater Books

  An imprint of Watkins Media Ltd

  Unit 11 Shepperton House

  89-93 Shepperton Road

  London

  N1 3DF

  United Kingdom

  www.repeaterbooks.com

  A Repeater Books paperback original 2021

  1

  Distributed in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York.

  Copyright © Andrew Green & Eddie Otchere 2021

  Andrew Green & Eddie Otchere assert the moral right to be identified as the authors of this work.

  Introduction copyright © Sukhdev Sandhu 2021

  Typesetting and design: Frederik Jehle

  Front cover design: ptplondon.com

  ISBN: 9781913462505

  Ebook ISBN: 9781913462512

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION: THE INTENSE NOW

  BY SUKHDEV SANDHU

  JUNGLIST

  INTRODUCTION: THE INTENSE NOW

  You could see it in people, you could see it in their eyes. Those ravers were at the edge at their lives, they weren’t running ahead or falling behind, they were just right there and the tunes meant everything. — Burial

  Andrew Green and Eddie Otchere (aka Two Fingas and James T. Kirk) came of age at a strange, indeterminate time. It was the early 1990s, post-Thatcher and post-Berlin Wall — a period of fudge and inertia, of recession and housing market collapse, of Britain being forced to leave the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. The Greater London Council had been abolished in 1986 and the city still had no mayor. Tourists were in short supply; bombs — the IRA attacked the Baltic Exchange, Bishopsgate, even Downing Street — were not.

  Green and Otchere were from council estates south of the Thames in Vauxhall. The MI5 building had yet to go up in the neighbourhood and it was hard to imagine that the US embassy would one day move there. Where they lived squatters were common. The fires that often broke out would have caused even more devastation than they did if the highrise walling wasn’t so stuffed with asbestos. Turning sixteen, the two teenagers, both creative and independently minded, headed across town to Hammersmith and West London College. There they bonded over a shared love of comics, basketball, kung-fu movies. Music too.

  Green had been a hip-hop and happy hardcore fan. Increasingly he was getting into Jungle. He viewed the club nights he attended as extensions of the house parties of his youth: front rooms cleared of all furniture, huge sound systems, alcohol served in plastic cups, dim lighting, lots of motion. He found Jungle intimate and immersive — a sometimes demonized music to which young kids, in darkened spaces the size of chill-out zones, were still figuring out how to dance. It was a music that was impossibly accelerationist. Its rhythms thrillingly alien. Its darkness radiant.

  Otchere, a photographer with a keen eye for social semiotics, had noticed that “the white racist kids that I went to school with came back from their summer holidays not racist anymore. I was trying to figure out what the fuck happened.” Jungle offered a partial answer:

  The rave culture we as Black kids in south London started to experience in the Nineties began four years earlier with those white kids. We saw how much fun they were having and brought it into our own circles. By just dancing together, by mimicking each other’s body movements, by being under the same roof, listening to the same music, feeling the same high, taking the same pills: in that magic moment the moodiness was gone.

  Jungle had its own subaltern economy. White-label 12-inch records were produced on the cheap, pressed up by tiny independents, spun at clubs and by pirates, sometimes sold from the boots of cars. Cash in hand. Not a word to the taxman. DIY creativity at its most kinetic and entrepreneurial. Some of that energy was channelled into publishing. Deadmeat, a novel about a Black cyber-vigilante stalking the streets of London, was initially sold at clubs by its author “Q”. Better known is The X-Press, an imprint set up by Dotun Adebayo and Steve Pope in 1992, which published Victor Headley’s Yardie and Donald Gorgon’s Cop Killer. These books were often accused of glorifying violence and of being no-brow trash, but their hefty sales were hard to ignore.

  One individual paying particular attention was Jake Lingwood, a twenty-something editor at Allen and Unwin. He had a passion for mod and, as a teenager, had started the zine Smarter Than U, which he named after a song on the Undertones’ 1978 Teenage Kicks EP. Excited by the energy of the London club scene, he decided to commission a series of novel-length documentations that would allow outsiders to peek into social worlds they might otherwise have felt too intimidated to actually visit or join. He named it Backstreets, and was soon casting about for writers prepared to bash out vaguely workable prose in a couple of months and for an advance of a few thousand pounds.

  By this time, Green and Otchere had figured out, as canny youngsters tend to, that the best way to get free records and tickets — swag — was by writing for magazines. They were penning film reviews for Black lifestyle journal Touch; Otchere was also taking photos for it and had contributed cover images for X-Press titles. He’d even shot something for one of the first Backstreets novels. If in retrospect it seems obvious that Lingwood would ask him to write a drum ‘n’ bass-themed volume — and that he would ring his friend to suggest they collaborate on it — initially there were some tricky issues to resolve. Neither of them were particularly interested in literary fiction (“a term I despise,” says Green today); the word-length was 50,000 (about 48,000 longer than anything either of them had ever written before); Green was now up country studying film at Northumbria University. Otchere says he’d never even read a full-length novel up to that point, preferring instead the wordplay and poetry of the sleevenotes on Sun Ra LPs.

  Still, they said yes. Green remembers thinking, “Fuck it, why not? I was eighteen or nineteen — full of young person confidence.” He had felt “a weird sense of dislocation” in Newcastle; writing about London was a chance to take stock of his upbringing and the music that had rewired him. The book would be a quota-quickie — like youthsploitation novels such as Wolf Mankowitz’s Expresso Bongo (1958) and Richard Allen’s Skinhead (1970) (the latter a key reference point for Lingwood), but also like those pulp fictions historically churned out by the comic and science-fiction writers Green adored. He could stay anonymous — like a graffer or an underground producer issuing multiple releases under different pseudonyms. He and Otchere could even use the excuse of writing it as a way to get on guestlists and jump the queues at otherwise rammed clubs. Research!

  Green and Otchere decided on a simple narrative arc: a long weekend, Friday through to Monday morning, in the lives of four south Londoners — Meth, Q, Biggie and Craig — who they based on themselves and their mates. It’s often hard to tell them apart, their voices and personalities melting into a polyphonic mix, a scattershot and bantz-heavy flow of the kind that might be heard on a pirate station. They have minor run-ins with the police as they drive across town in Q’s mum’s Cortina, but this isn’t a protest or a journalistic novel; it’s more interested in inner space than in sociological space, the psychology of urban life as it’s modulated by beats and weed.

  Otchere, in particular, liked to hammer out his chapters at 4am
after returning home from bunning it at clubs. Junglist’s prose vibrates as much as it documents. It’s been happily contaminated by the music it loves, treating rhythm as a virus it in turn can transmit to the reader. Mutant modernism is the stylistic default. It begins with an epigraph — “Jungle is a headfuck. The sound of a transformer banging its head against a wall.” It ends with a glossalic A-Z that resembles a lysergic take on Molly Bloom’s epic stream of consciousness in Ulysses: “rumblism, rupert, sade, scamming, schott, schwarzenigga, secs, sega, semesterisation…”

  Junglist isn’t polished or smooth. It’s, well, junglist rather than drum ‘n’ bassist. A recurring motif is the middle-class “false consciousness” of house music. The prose jabs and concusses, bristles with millennial tension, is galvanized by the “guerilla dance, guerilla musicality” of the scene. There’s also a lot of humour — Boy’s Own knob gags, a chapter in which Craig has strife with the Jehovah’s Witnesses at his Sunday morning front door. A scene in which Meth ruffles Q’s semi-Afro while smiling a goofy smile at him is as tear-inducingly tender as anything to be found in more vaunted Black British fictions.

  Most startling is how surreally Green and Otchere chafe against the reportage remit of the Backstreets series and push towards abstraction, evoking nocturnal London in terms of heat and colour, gravity and anti-gravity. One chapter is entitled “Craig’s Obsession: Twelve Inches of Plastic in a Quasi-Rotational Plane of Existence and a Parrot”. Another begins “Towards the sky I flew in a surge of tranquillity and found the unlimited existence in the shape of ultramarine”. This is Vauxhall kosmische, prole-art Swedenborgianism, tower-block psychedelia, the dissident spiritualism of William Blake and Thomas De Quincey transmigrating into the rhythmic matrix of Leviticus’s “Burial” and Deep Blue’s “The Helicopter Tune”.

  Junglist was written before White Teeth, before Brick Lane, before literary publishers made a concerted push to foreground “minority” voices. It predates the rise of psychogeography, whose studied melancholia it has little interest in. It captures Jungle in the intense now, as a way of being — not merely as a musical subculture, or as an edgy scene to be snapped, tagged and circulated on social media. Much of its first run had to be pulped after MC 5ive-0 threatened to sue because he’d not given permission for a photo of him to appear on the front cover. It didn’t sell a lot and got scant reviews. The Backstreets series itself fizzled out. At one point, Junglist was reputed to be the most stolen book in the London prison system.

  Green went on to work in television, Otchere focused on photography. For decades neither of them picked up or reread the novel. Now, in decelerated, socially distanced times, there’s a palpable nostalgia for the music and momentum of the rave era, its innovations and futureshock, its ability to make mayhem and magic in downturn Britain. Junglist — time-shifting, between genres, tonally wrong-stepping — may finally have found its moment. It’s such an avant-pulp anomaly though that I wouldn’t bet on it.

  SUKHDEV SANDHU, APRIL 2021

  JUNGLIST

  FRIDAY

  THE A-SIDE

  “Jungle is a headfuck. The sound of a transformer banging its head against a wall.”

  I was in it from the beginning. Just a yout back then but that don’t mean shit now. Back when Jungle was still Break-Beat House or whatever the fuck you wanted to call it before it metamorphosed into Jungle. The one and only. Ragga Tekno, Jungle Techno, Ragga Jungle, Hardcore, Darkcore, The Dark Stuff, Ambient Jungle. All just labels to try and describe a feeling that transcends labels. Jungle is just something else. More than the sum of its myriad parts. It is the lifeblood of the city, an attitude, a way of life, a people. Jungle is and always will be a multicultural thing, but it is also about a Black identity, Black attitude, Black style, outlook. It’s about giving a voice to the urban generation left to rot in council estates, ghettoized neighbourhoods that ain’t providing an education for shit. Jungle kickin’ ass and taking names. It run things, seen.

  WORRIES IN THE DANCE

  In the heart of the city’s darkness, on the tarmac flyways and backways of London, crews from all sides, north, south, east, west, come correct for the gathering. They come ready and willing off the Black streets to “Sarf” London, Elephant and Castle, looking for the future, searching for the riddim, the champion dub sound. Man-a-man is geared up: Versace, Moschino, Ralphie, Armani, Paul Smith, name brands, cause the yout works hard for the money so now comes time to show and prove. Rudeboys burn hard; sparking up and passing it around, constructing the herb, ‘cause man don’t smoke solids.

  As the one car cruises through the city streets, under city lights from its pick-up point, the Jungle builds up and gets louder, the bass speakers pop in the rush —

  Check it, check it, the bwoy can’t tek it.

  It’s a whole new world under the cover of darkness, hiding from the beast, tuning up in anticipation of the dance. With the flow of sound hanging thick in the air, crowding in and out of your lungs, becoming the oxygen you breathe, you realise that the youts in this for real. Red-eyed and blunted, nappyheaded and dreaded, like the conquering lion of Judah, they be sinking deeper into the night ahead. Pulling up outside the Ministry, the crews make their way to the gate. Giving a nod to the security, the promoter, the queue, they breeze through. In this time, man’s paid his dues and as such people learn to free up with the freeness:

  It’s the way… a’right

  Nothing is said as they move from house to car, from car to street, from street to Jungle, a nod, a shifty grin, a gesture of gratitude and a passing of the spliff. With what’s to come, neither mind nor mouth is prepared. People work and rest, but never sleep, ‘cause sleep is the cousin of death. They split as they enter the VIP lounge, kinetically sensing each other’s movements and whereabouts as Craig and Biggie head for the bar as Q and Mr Meth move to the main arena, slowly drifting into darkness. Craig carries the Moët while Biggie handles the brandy, all the while surveying the heavilylabelled crowd where nothing worn is cheap. As they walk like two mirrored dark-arse panthers, paralleling each other’s movements, acknowledging the tunes and showing respect, they find a corner, away from the lights, where all the eye can see is mist and a sea of people, all the body can feel is the roll of the freight-weight bass.

  Q’s stocky frame shifts to the corner, giving a nod to Craig: it’s on. Following close behind were the Irish boyz. Tonight was simple, good times for all, a nod, the touch, the common greetings were exchanged and out came a matchbox. Craig took the box and, in turn, gave them a box of B and H. Each surveyed their contents and again, a nod, the touch, the gesture of gratitude. Biggie took the box, carefully unwrapped the contents, rubbed it on the gum. The crew anticipated his reaction, the Irish boyz feared his reaction, his eyes scanned the crowd and he began to smile: tings a gwan neatly. The Irish boyz took the smile as a cue to leave and all was done. If God had made a better drug he kept it to himself, cocaine and weed would make most people’s eyes bleed but these niggas came up hard, this was the way.

  105.3 FM

  I sit here in the sky high above the clouds. Riding the microphone, lettin’ it all hang out. My arse swingin’ in the breeze. But you wouldn’t know it, not in this leaky fucker of a skyscraper. Fuckin’ Sixties architects taking too much LSD and listening to the Beatles. Free love, free sex, tune in, turn off, drop out. Sixties revolutionary bollocks, rebelling against nothing. All sound and noise signifying nothing. Middle-class white trash copying America.

  South London. It’s my home. South London, where the estates grow lush and prominent, where the immigrants flow through. Now it’s the Portuguese and the Somalians; who it was before, fuck knows, they’ve gone and all signs of them have gone with ‘em. Pouring through and spreading out. Finding their niche in my ecosystem. The South London ecosystem. Streatham, Brixton, Dulwich, Lewisham, Battersea, Peckham, Herne Hill, New Cross, Kennington, Putney, Croydon, Vauxhall, Elephant and Castle, Tulse Hill, Crystal Palace, Sydenham, Stockwell, Clapham, Balham,
Tooting Bec. The names, the places roll off my tongue, the memories spill forth as they slide smooth into conscious being. So I give it loads and shout ‘em all out.

  This estate: whoever thought to put communities in these needles in the sky? These prisons of concrete and steel. These estates that were designed for vandalism, for holding your neighbours in contempt. That conduct sound. The doors that keep out no one. The windows that let in light but let out heat. The heating that doesn’t work. The intense stink coming from every corner of piss, staining each wall, marking territory. The ragged markings on the wall of the juvenile taggers, leaving their mark. Trying to give themselves a voice, an identity that is denied them by those who hold them in contempt. Waiting till it’s dark so they can stand under lights, smokin’, talkin’, bonding…

  They wait like predators, waiting, watching. Young and fierce. This is their time, their territory. The night belongs to them. It always has as soon as they built these concrete monsters, these goliaths that split people, communities down the centre. Nowhere to play, nowhere to meet. Just live and survive.

  But the estates are my home, where else can I go?

  Look across, see Revolver hunched over the decks. Spliff hanging limply from between tight lips. End glowing. See his rolling equipment lying next to his stack of 12”s, white labels, dub plates, old, new and future imperfect. Headphone gripped between cheek and shoulder as his hands gently pull back, twist and turn over the Technics.

  Pull the Marlboro light out of its cellophane wrapping. Just like popping a virgin, opening a new pack of smokes. That knowledge that no one but you has opened this packet. That the first inhalation will be yours. I light the cancer stick with my Clipper. The good old Clipper, where would I be without you? Inhale, strong drag, suck it in, hold it down, let it run along my lungs through those minute oxygen catchers. Let non-smokers rot in hell. Exhale, inhale, pretend I’m blowing smoke in Roy Castle’s face. Long stream of cool, grey, white vapour. Hold that lighted death-dealer in my fingers, let the nicotine rush light up my neck and head, take another quick drag. Push up my levels and give the night its answer.