by Craig Taylor
LAETITIA SADIER
Singer
On Regent Street, on our way to a coffee shop, she stops briefly and admires the clothes in the Barbour shop. She is wearing a scarf, a vestigial piece of Frenchness. Inside, we can still hear a road crew drilling outside, a droning, repetitive rhythm. She walks to the windows and closes them carefully. A lifetime spent in recording studios means a lifetime of minimizing sound.
I first came to London as an au pair in 1988. But, okay, my intention was to find musicians. I knew music was happening in London and not in Paris, where people’s egos are much too big to allow for action. There it’s all about talking and judging but no action. I’m sorry, but if you want to do an artistic endeavour, you have to do it and get the amps and get the practice in. Here it seemed part of the reality was doing it rather than just talking about it. So I was very attracted to London.
I wanted to do music and that’s it. It was music, music, music, music. Music was my only friend, my only raison d’être. I ended up going to the Bay 63 a lot, which is somewhere like Notting Hill, Ladbroke Grove, and I went on Saturday nights so it was kind of reggae, rocksteady evenings. I knew I was looking for something, I just didn’t know exactly what. I found it really hard to make friends because I’m French and the French are rude, you know? They just tell it like it is and they don’t use little nice words, you know. I had absolutely no refinement and I know it shocked the hell out of everybody. So I had to learn how to have the right words and be much more polite than I was. And also here it’s very coded. You don’t say straight what you think. You say the contrary for the same effect, you know? But finally I found this man from the Sperm Whales and we went out for a while and that was kind of my introduction into this world. There were little clubs, little indie clubs – indie in the sense of not indie music, necessarily, but the DIY mentality was out there. It was kicking and it was vibrant, alive and visible. It was just not some super underground thing.
I met Tim at a concert in France and basically said, okay, wait for a year. I don’t want to go back to London to be an au pair. I earned money temping in France for six months, then I moved in at his parents in Barking for three months and then we came to South London, to Brixton, and I’ve lived ever since around that area: Camberwell, Peckham, Brixton. London was kind of hostile, you know. It wasn’t the romantic London any more. It was like, this is where I live and this is what I have to deal with. And, you know, we were starting Stereolab. We signed on the dole, and it was the beginning of the adventure. Practically every night we went to gigs. Our number one venue was the White Horse in Hampstead, Belsize Park, because they had the Sausage Machine there. The Sausage Machine brought bands over and it was £2 or £3 to get in. I remember seeing Gumball. Every week Th’ Faith Healers would play. Lots of American bands came through. Bikini Kill came and the girls who played, what were they called? They had a record called To Mother and they had a blonde girl and she was kind of a really strange person. Do you remember them at all?
But that whole scene, you know, around the time of Nirvana, you had all these kind of, not subgroups, because they were very very excellent groups for the most part, but from this movement, from the early Nineties and throughout the Nineties. We used to go to The Venue in New Cross, or The Falcon in Camden. The Falcon was a big pub, you know, pub music with the pub on one side and the venue on the other side. My Bloody Valentine played around then and where else did we go a lot? Then places in Camden like The Underworld opened, but it’s not the same, it was more like a professional venue. It was not the pub atmosphere. But yeah, we went to Kentish Town, Town & Country, at the time when it was the Town & Country, to see bigger bands. We were always going to gigs.
And at the same time we were starting our band slowly, recording, you know, and although we didn’t have any money somehow things just started happening. We grew from being a really tiny little thing and had some reviews and single of the week in the NME or Melody Maker, I can’t remember which. We supported Wedding Present. That was our first gig and that was a thousand people there.
We used to go to a studio near Borough, it was in a church called All Hallows Church. It was called Black Queen Studios and we were there at some point, six months a year, recording. When I’d get cabin fever I would borrow a bicycle and cycle around and up on that strip of the river, around Waterloo Bridge, the South Bank complex. That part of the South Bank, you know. There was no Tate Modern at the time, it was just kind of invisible, a phantomatic building.
At the time you could not see it somehow. It was just a shadow of itself. Now it’s illuminated. It’s Tate Modern. You really see that because it’s busy. You didn’t really notice it before, but I got to notice the building one night. I had stopped in front of it and I was looking at the water and I felt a presence in my back, and I thought, that’s strange? What’s that in my back? And I turned round and I’d never noticed that building before and it really sent shivers down my spine. I was nearly in tears. It’s you, I thought. Getting that from a building is kind of bizarre. But it really hit me. I really liked all that area, which at the time had nothing to do with what it’s become now. It’s much more commercialized, but still I like the energy there and the culture that comes out of that place is pretty amazing.
There is a freedom here. I can be myself much more than in France. I’ve had people tell me that to them I am an embodiment of what it is to be French. I’m a kind of ambassadorisse of France. Little do they know that I am almost in exile here – voluntary exile.
RINSE
Rapper
In North London when I was coming up, a lot of the MCs were really technical. It was all scientific, with really developed flows and everything. But in East London they were actually talking about what was happening around them. I suppose there was more happening in East London.
Everybody was just packing their lyrics full of slang and there was no content that way. Like ‘ming’, which meant wicked. Like, oh that’s ming or nang, that’s nang or whatever. They faded out really quickly because people wanted to get new words to put in lyrics, they changed and changed and changed. I think a lot of it was taken from Jamaican and then they’d just put a little bit of a twinge on it, change it around. Or old words even, really old words that haven’t been used before, like ‘swag’. Swag is a swag bag, isn’t it? To steal or something like that, but people would use that as a word for crap. So you’re swag. You’re crap. They’d just completely change the context of the words and the meaning of words. Using ‘bad’ as a good thing. Eventually people got better and started introducing actual vocabulary into the lyrics, which developed into grime. It’s hiphop but we have our own way of delivering, rather than sounding like Americans. There’s no denying, grime has evolved into a form of rap. It’s just I think it had to start from scratch in order for us to evolve it to a stage where it was our own and it wouldn’t sound uncomfy.
Myself, it took me ages to even think about finding something to say. At the time I was into comics and animation and sci-fi books and things like that, so I would kick all these lyrics … I mean, I wasn’t talking about guns and things like that. I was talking about crazy ways to metaphorically speak about murdering someone on a beat and all this sort of stuff. It was cool, and people used to always be impressed by it, the flow and everything, but that can only take it so far. I didn’t have anything to say and everyone else had something to say, like, they were living a hard life and all this stuff. I didn’t really feel like doing that. I just decided to use the nerd thing. I thought, I’m into this stuff, so why not just go with it completely?
There was actually a real phase when everyone was like, I’m from London where this happens or that happens. People would start to glorify, you know the way they do in America. You’re starting to say London and take pride in it. It developed here first, the whole grime thing, and it’s like we’ve got to stay ahead and we’ve got to let them know this is ours. Like Manchester guys, Birmingham guys, also quite skilled, but i
t was here where it was happening, so it was like London, London, London. East London, North London and South London. As far as I’m concerned they’re the same, just some areas are worse than others.
So I would just kind of draw it in, like one song called ‘Main Road’. Down here, ‘road’ is the word for gangster. It’s like, I’m road, innit. It means I’m streetwise. So I’ve got one where I’ve taken every cliché of that life and flipped it over. I am a snitch, I will snitch on you. If I see a knife I will run a hundred miles. Completely opposite to it. Find the funny side of it. But it’s the truth, because if you see a guy with a knife, you’re not going to want to hang around. Throw your ego away, let’s be honest. Your average guy who goes to work 9–5 every day, he doesn’t want to come across drugs. He doesn’t want to come across prostitution. He doesn’t want to come across violent crime. He just wants to get from A to B. I’ve just taken that and inserted it into my music. It’s just humour.
Of course, you have guys who want to glorify the postcode where they’re from. Or the street name where they’re from. Or the estate where they’re from. It makes them feel safe, and it’s only natural that people will pick on people they don’t know. And people make themselves feel safe by coming into gangs. It’s human nature, isn’t it? Bring yourselves together and make yourself feel safe, you belong to a sect which means if other people know you belong to a sect they know that you have people who represent you and will back you up or whatever. Indirectly, it’s not just that we’re a gang, but you know I’m from this area. This is an area where this guy shot this person or this is an area where these guys sell drugs which adds credibility. People want to take pride in that area.
It just depends on where you’re at in your life. A lot of people grew out of it. I mean, I remember there was some guy from Tottenham, he used to be into his stuff. I was performing a poem in the new Louis Vuitton store the other day and he was security there. I was talking to him and he was like, yeah, you know, this one’s gone to prison and that one’s gone to prison. No one wants to get involved in that, he was smart and doing his thing. He just wants to work and get on with his life. As people get older they start to realize it’s a short road. You end up in prison. You end up seriously hurt or someone you love gets hurt and then that just leads to a cycle, doesn’t it? Sometimes it’s quite hard to get out of it.
The music at one point, it did glorify this whole London life. Like, you know, when you have other MCs who are saying, it’s bad, it’s bad, my area’s this bad. If you come to my area, if you walk around my manor you’ll get stabbed up. If you walk round my manor you’ll get shot. So it’s a big competition who can glorify their area the most. What happened is you’d have people who weren’t saying these lyrics, people who weren’t spitting these lyrics, they were just listening to them and it was someone from his area who was doing this, so he’s representing our area, so we’re going to do the same. So they’d see someone else they’ve heard of from another area representing their area and it’d be like, these guys have nothing to do with each other, you know, but basically he’s the competition of the person who’s representing our area so they’ll probably rush him. So you can just be spitting lyrics, walking through some area to meet a girl, as you do, and these guys would see you and hate on you straightaway. It’d just be like, there’s that guy who said he’s from this area and he’s in our area.
Sometimes it will literally be a street versus a street. My lot have gone into another estate and someone’s got beaten up and stabbed, and then someone’s come into our estate and stabbed and beaten someone up. So you do something else and then it just cycles. There’s a whole lot of people getting pissed off. There’s family members, close friends, family of those close friends and that’s when it all gets crazy. And then it literally doesn’t stop for years. It’s almost like Romeo and Juliet. Even if there’s not a girl involved.
I just like to say I’m from London, I don’t have any specific area I represent. I’m not representing for a small group of people. I’d like everybody to be able to relate to a nerd, because everybody’s a bit nerdy. I’m more interested in that than where they’re from. I’m more interested in what people do.
DARREN FLOOK
Art gallerist
I was born in 1971, in the industrial countryside outside of Newcastle, a coalmining area. So I grew up at a time when youth culture magazines were suddenly everywhere, youth TV was everywhere, and everyone talked about London the entire time. It was like you’d go to a crappy newsagent’s in your mining village and flick through The Face and ID, and then you’d watch the burgeoning Channel 4, and it was all telling you about London. It was sending out a signal to the entire country saying: leave your shitty villages and come and live here in wonderful media-land and you’ll have a life of never-ending clubbing and glamour and wonderfulness.
We sit in the back of Hotel, the gallery he runs in Whitechapel with his partner and which started in their home and relocated to the shop space beneath the flat in Bethnal Green, before migrating here. They are between shows and occasionally he pushes his long hair away from his eyes to survey the newly painted walls.
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In the Eighties, the village I grew up in just ceased to exist. I don’t want to paint too rosy a picture, but it went from a place where people would scrub their doorsteps and leave their front doors unlocked, to a place that had 75 per cent unemployment and houses with no value. I remember my grandfather took me down a mine when I was little to tell me that if you don’t work hard at school this is where you’ll be going. There’s nothing more fucking terrifying than going down a mine. In the Eighties that all ended. I guess people with my background now work in call centres or whatever.
If you grow up in a small town like that you very quickly work out whether you’re the type of person who stays or you’re the kind of person who leaves. And if you decide you’re the kind of person who leaves it’s like, right, okay, how do I get out of here? I can’t play a musical instrument. I’m useless at football. Art was a thing that I liked from the youngest age and I knew it happened elsewhere. It happened in Paris, it happened in New York, it happened in London, which were almost interchangeable in my mind. They were all places where Gene Kelly lived and there would be a Gershwin soundtrack and people would chatter and girls would be beautiful and people seemed to be drinking wine all the time without ever picking up a bar bill. The art world is out there. The art world doesn’t happen in villages.
Be as snobbish about it as you like, but as an art gallerist what you sell is not very cheap and you don’t sell a lot of it, you’re not selling cars, you’re not selling 100,000 units, you’re selling two or even just one. I still find it amazing that people would love something enough, that is not necessarily pretty, not useful, not easy to look after, stuff that falls apart, stuff that you’re going to have to take the windows out to get it into your apartment, stuff that you might actually never be able to show in your actual apartment because you’re going to have to store it for the next twenty years and you’re willing to spend lots of money on it. It’s an incredible thing that people have that love – or if it’s not love, they have a belief that it’s going to be worth more money, a belief in its multicultural value or a belief that they’re helping.
Happily, the art galleries in London are run by people who are closer to the artists than they are to the collectors. The accountants haven’t taken over, thank god. We’ve got the world’s biggest auction houses in town, they can deal with that bit. When you go to the openings, they’re full of artists and art students, and to see a collector, especially in East London, is a rare thing. It’s very much in that vein rather than the gallery as a salesroom. The galleries here are also very collegiate. It’s an amazing thing but if you walk into The Approach or Maureen Paley or Sadie Coles and ask what good shows are on in town, the person behind the desk wouldn’t think twice about telling you how the other commercial gallery down the street has a really good show on that you should
n’t miss. In New York, it’s hilarious. You can go to a gallery that’s as shit as hell that’s next door to a brilliant gallery that’s got an amazing show on and you say to them, what is good in town? They’ll look at you and say, you should go to the Museum of Modern Art. They will never tell you to go and look at another commercial gallery. I think it’s because it’s a business, in the same way that a stockbroker wouldn’t say, well, you know what, Merrill Lynch also have some amazing investments that you should check out. It’s like you’d be fired on the spot! I think if in an American gallery you’re found telling a potential punter that one of your so-called competitors has an amazing show on then you’ll be hung, drawn and quartered and shipped off back to New Jersey or wherever it is you came from.
When I was first going to galleries in East London it felt that London must end here. It cannot go on any further, surely? I’ve been on the Tube for fucking ages and I’m at a bit where I think, where am I? Is this part of the UK or what is it? I remember going to the Blue Nightclub in Hoxton Square when that was running and Hoxton Square felt like, you know, ‘beyond here there be dragons’. The English Channel must be just over the next street. It felt like you were right on the edge and now it’s, god, those multimillion-pound property areas with free wi-fi and everything.
