Music
A decade after its release, the creators and admirers of London Zoo recall its earth-shattering impact.
The Bug's third LP London Zoo was released in the summer of 2008 via Ninja Tune, and over the years the record has been widely recognised as one of the most significant UK albums in recent memory. Below, The Bug – real name Kevin Martin – Flowdan, Ricky Ranking, Killa P, Hyperdub boss Kode9 and veteran bass producer Plastician discuss the context and explosive creative energy that created it.
London Zoo battered open a space for noisy but fun club music, and it created a climate for mutant dancehall to infiltrate new areas
Origins.
The Bug is Kevin Martin's best-known alias now, but it was originally just one among many projects. It began as a dub-centred project related to Brooklyn's “illbient” scene and Kevin's work compiling compilations like Macro Dub Infection in the '90s. But in 2002, The Bug shifted to a heavy dancehall sound with UK and Jamaican vocalists for the second album Pressure. The follow-up to Pressure, however, took a while.
Kevin Martin: In harsh black and white terms – actual recording – London Zoo took two and a half years to make, but in reality it was probably three and a half or four from when I first really started thinking about it. I was selling it to labels as something like Massive Attack's first album [Blue Lines] – not that I even really liked that album that much, but in the sense of the friction and collision of cultures, the madness I was going through, being broke in London and having to live in a studio the size of a telephone box.
Ricky Ranking: I met Kevin Bug along the way. I was just aware of a couple of things of his, then I ran into him here and there. I saw his music as like the dub music that I grew up with, but with a more hardcore touch to it. I grew up with things like Augustus Pablo, and his music's got those touches still, but he puts a whole other thing on it. More decibels obviously – it's louder – it's deafening at some stages, like you want to run from it, but Kevin's music is a wake-up music. Kevin found a way of making the edgy music come forward, of putting it in front of people so it can't be ignored, and making them hear hardcore dancehall lyrics they wouldn't hear normally.
The Bug begets Hyperdub; Hyperdub begets London Zoo
Around the turn of the millennium, London's bass music was in flux, with the grassroots garage scene splintering and mutating into what would become dubstep and grime. This got very little coverage, other than on emerging blogs like Blackdown Soundboy, Decks & The City, Gutterbreakz, Drumzofthesouth and Kode9's Hyperdub.
Kode9: I think it was just before the Pressure album [on the Aphex Twin's Rephlex label] around 2002, that I met Kevin. I quite liked what he was doing with spoken word and bass. I went to interview him for XLR8R and the Hyperdub website around then, and passed him a CD with some of my music with Spaceape. He told me to stop trying to get the tracks signed and start a record label to release them myself and introduced me to a distributor. I’ve never forgiven him for this.
Kevin Martin: Steve Goodman [Kode9] interviewed me just after Pressure had been released, and he suggested I come down to a club night... which was [club night] FWD>>. So I guess the sound I was working on, and that sound they were playing, grew in tandem. Certainly one of the biggest impacts on me and London Zoo was Kode9 hassling the shit out of me to write tunes at 140bpm.
Grime Enters the Mix
To my ears his music was a style of grime. A cold, dark, edgy grime
In the early-mid 2000s, dubstep and grime were part of a fairly mobile landscape, with some overlap and short-lived sub-genres (sublow, anyone?) – but there was no mistaking the distinctive energy when the grime scene's MCs were in the building.
Kevin Martin: The initial pre-dubstep dubstep rhythms, I felt a little bit... well, they were cool, but they didn't blow me away. What did blow me away was grime, fairly and squarely. I remember Kode 9 and I muttering and moaning at FWD>> just waiting for the MCs from Roll Deep to pile down there randomly and chaotically. That, for me, is when shit got interesting. Then going to actual early grime parties, which were like punk shows where you'd get fighting on stage, fighting off stage, and just explosions of sound and lyrics and intensity, is what really, really inspired me. That's when I realised that it had the same fire in its belly that the music that's always meant most to me has always had.
Flowdan: It felt pretty random. There was a Radio 1 show, that Mary Anne Hobbs was putting together, and basically I was just asked to be there, because The Bug was on it and he requested some guest MCs. Nobody else from the grime scene, but all reggae singers and weird stuff like that going on. And that was that. After the show he asked if I wanted to work on some music, and we started to go from there.
Kevin Martin: I'd known that I wanted to work with Roll Deep MCs, I happened to know their manager at the time, I said I wanted to work with Riko Dan because he was really in your face on stage... He arranged a meeting at FWD>>, but also said "why don't you work with Flowdan too?" But on the night, Riko treated me like a total prick, to be honest, while Marc [Flowdan] was just very professional and sincere, so I thought, well fuck Riko!
It was a special Mary Anne Hobbs show, with ten or so MCs doing it live with me. Tip of the hat to Flowdan, because it was on rhythms that weren't his chosen tempo, in a freak show cast of MCs, with me, who'd have been chalk and cheese as far as he'd have been concerned. It was The Spaceape, Roger Robinson, Warrior Queen, Seany T, Stush, Ricky Ranking, Jimmy Screech who was from [Roots Manuva's] Banana Klan as well, Ras B who was my resident MC at the time and I'd asked to host the whole thing... oh and [The Slits'] Ari Up!
Plastician: I was really happy to know other people in the scene were working with grime MCs as it just always made sense to me; I was producing grime and bringing Skepta and JME through at FWD>> already. Knowing The Bug’s music through our ties with Rephlex [Plastician toured with the Rephlex crew after they put out the Grime compilation in 2004] was also a big deal as I’d always associated him with dancehall acts, and him linking with Flowdan and Killa P was such a perfect match.
Flowdan: To be honest to my ears his music was a style of grime. A cold, dark, edgy grime. It was 140 bpm, it was heavy, it was all I needed it to be, so in my head it was never anything but grime.
The Dubplate Test
Grime, and especially dubstep, were the last great waves of dubplate culture. Given exclusive tracks by their colleagues in the scene, DJs would spend considerable time and money having them cut to dubplate, and sets would often mainly consist of new, exclusive tracks. By 2006, when the first tracks for London Zoo were being recorded, these dubplate sets were the backbone of London's FWD>> and DMZ nights, and the scene they were inspiring worldwide.
Flowdan: By that time I didn't know about dubstep or FWD>> at all, but obviously that changed after working with him. The first tune was Jah War, that was big, then Loefah who was a big dubstep DJ at that time, he did a remix and that really put Jah War on the circuit, made it a more certified song. It was more straight dubstep, but it was going off, people were liking it, and that did introduce me to the scene.
Plastician: I remember being at DMZ, which was rammed as always, talking to my mate by the bar. Skeng went off and I almost fell over from people around me jumping. It got a reload and then another. It was not uncommon to hear 20-30 songs for the first time every DMZ event back then. I didn’t know who produced it for a week or two until I got wind of Kev being behind it!
Kevin Martin: I was entrusting Kode9 and Loefah to do the groundwork for me, because they had lots of bookings and at that time, number one I wasn't, and number two I was primarily concerned with finishing my album. Basically they were the ones responsible for testing the rhythms. It was hilarious, I'd be sitting in my studio working on one of the tracks and I'd get a text at maybe 4am from Kode9 saying "Yo, Poison Dart's just blown away 6,000 people at Sónar Barcelona – madness" or something. And I'd just be giggling to myself because I felt totally removed from it.
Kode9: My main memory revolved particularly around the track Poison Dart with Warrior Queen: I’ve rarely touched such a universally destructive piece of music. That track really turned venues upside down. So did Skeng and Jah War but really it was Poison Dart that truly distilled it. I remember playing it at Sónar Fest in 2007... what a mess, there were bodies everywhere.
Kevin Martin: Poison Dart was my attempt to make an answer to [Roots Manuva's] Witness (1 Hope), something that would be as instant. That and Skeng were actually the easiest and quickest rhythms to build. I didn't even realise there was something to them until one day, I remember Roger Robinson and Spaceape coming into the studio on two separate occasions, asking what I'd been working on, and each individually headbanging like nutters to those two beats. Then seeing Kode play them, seeing people go ballistic, that showed me.
Label Wrangling
For all that London Zoo sounds like a complete statement, for a long time it was anything but. All the way through 2006 and 2007, as Kevin Martin was developing the sound, he struggled to find people in the industry that shared his uncompromising vision for the record.
Kevin Martin: At various points Warp, Mute and Ninja Tune wanted to sign the album. With Ninja, I'd had a few meetings initially that just felt like we were on different planets, but then Jeff Waye – who at that time ran Ninja Tune US – had called and said "I really want to meet you when I'm in town, I heard the meetings didn't go well but can you meet me?" And I remember clearly the first words he said when he shook my hand were "Look, I dig Bounty Killer and Slayer and that's why I love your shit." Anyone who says that straight away I know I can speak to, and really that's why the deal happened.
Sarah who ran FWD>> wanted to release Skeng on her Tempa label. I said to Kode, "Sarah wants to release Skeng, what should I do, I don't even know her that well, what's the dealy-o?" And he went, "if you let her release it I will strangle you, because if anyone is going to release it, I want to." So I went to Ninja Tune and said "look, this track is going off, will you release it as a single?" and they refused. They said Skeng was of no commercial potential! But I continued to see it going off, and eventually I really hassled Jeff at Ninja, going "look, I'm seeing people going absolutely bananas from this tune, I've got offers from Hyperdub and Tempa to release this, this is perfect promotion for the album that's going to drop..." and eventually he hassled the powers that be and got them to agree that I could release it through a third party.
The Birth of Skeng
One track became the beating heart of the London Zoo project. Named after a Jamaican-derived term for a knife, it's a relentless roller full of icy cold threats from Flowdan and Brixton MC Killa P. It caused controversy for its brutal imagery, but also because, as Kevin said, “many, mainly white people, couldn't even tell there were two MCs, even though they were both in the video,” and Killa P's vital contribution was preposterously written out of many accounts.
Killa P: Me and Flowdan was scheduled to record two [other] songs with The Bug, but when we walked into the studio he was actually playing a riddim which was the Skeng riddim. We recorded the other songs that we were there to do, then as we were leaving the studio, he put that Skeng riddim back on again. I was like "Gimme the headphone, gimme the microphone." History was made from there: we didn't put pen to paper or nothing, I was actually just testing the mic, we started it from there: "penomenomenomenon one... one... one..."
Flowdan: Skeng was definitely an accident as far as I was concerned, just experimenting then going "woah that sounds good." It was the second song we'd made that day, we hadn't planned to, and I wasn't taking it that seriously, it was just about enjoying the beat, enjoying our voices, spaced out on tracks. That was the formula we found...
Kevin Martin: The irony is, Flowdan didn't want to do Skeng. He just turned up at my studio with Killa, who I didn't know too well, so that was a surprise. They recorded a different track, that ended up not being on the album either, and it ended up about 3am, and I remember Flowdan wanted to clear off – I think he had lady action planned or whatever, I dunno, but he certainly wanted to get the hell out of the studio. But Killa was like "nah nah what else you got, what else you got?" I said "well, I've got this other rhythm I'm into, it's like me doing my Wu-Tang, just dirt..." I put it on, and he flipped, but Flowdan was like "nah, nah, not feeling it" so it was all down to Killa hassling the shit out of Flowdan to get this thing done. Because we did it all that night, there was never any overdubs except what we recorded in the subsequent two hours.
We were literally on our backs laughing at the lyrics, it was the ultimate in dark humour. Which is funny in itself given how much shit I was given on dubstepforum and places for the lyrics – I was supposedly glorifying violence and all that. Such bullshit – are lyricists in the area of grime not allowed to write about upfront violence? Is it only Bob Dylan or Nick Cave that are allowed to write about noir-ish, pulp, violent realities?
The Album Takes Shape
Again, though the album sounds coherent, it took a lot of wrangling to get that way. Even with Ninja's backing and Skeng doing the business as a single, it took Kevin untold studio hours right through 2007 and into 2008 to marshal the cascade of big personalities and voices into the statement he wanted.
Ricky Ranking: With the song Judgement I heard in that track sounds of the way things were at that time. We were at war, in Afghanistan and Baghdad all these bloody places, there were the terrorist threats and this and that, and when I heard that track, there's that drop that's almost delicate [mimes a hiccuping stop] and it made me think about lyrics to help people understand what was going on in that time. And it's still going on. Right now, we're living in judgement man.
Kevin Martin: There were quite a few more tracks that never made the album. There were tracks by Ricky and Warrior that didn't make it, there was Ras B tracks and Nicolette tracks. Remember, it took nearly three years, and I wasn't in a particularly good state of mind – absolutely riddled with self-doubt for starters. Hilariously I was going to drop Angry off the album because I thought it was too poppy and wouldn't fit with the rest of the album, and I remember Jeff saying "if you don't put that on the album I will come and kill you." In the end, I decided to put it on first to get it over and done with, so that's why it's where it is.
Flowdan: None of the stuff I was doing was done with an album in mind – from my point of view anyway. I wasn't aware Kevin was working towards an album, I was just enjoying working with a different producer's instrumental, I wasn't aware of where it was going to go, at all. Kevin would say "do your thing", then sometimes listening back to the song he might say, change the lyrics there, or come at it from a different angle, or else he might just say this is perfect. He was definitely tuned in to the grime scene fully, and into what made it credible and real.
Kevin Martin: I wish Too Much Pain got more credit, that's one of my favourites. I've always had it in my mind that I wanted to develop a new sonic vocabulary for dancehall, and I feel that was. I feel like it was Autechre meets Steely and Cleevie! But nobody ever talks about that one.
Ricky Ranking: Murder We is what London is. You see people sometimes and they want to rob you, or sometimes you see one person and they're nice one moment then the next they're horrible. The police are just infiltrators, they can rob you or kill you too. Murder We is about the state of our minds in that way of life that we're forced into.
Kevin Martin: Fuckas was another one I really love. It was essentially a remix of Murder We but with Stephen [Spaceape] on absolute fire on the mic. I'd already heard his version with Kode9, and they were cool enough to let me re-version it with Stephen on my album. One of the things that has been hardest about looking back on London Zoo has been thinking about Stephen, he was a really close friend to me, and it's painful to think that he's gone, way too soon and never got the credit he deserves. In part, I hope Fuckaz was partially responsible for people realising what a special MC he was.
Killa P: When I heard the finished product, when I heard Warrior Queen and Ricky Ranking and my voice, I thought, "OK I understand, all of this makes sense". I wasn't sure of what the project was when I was recording, but hearing the songs as it progressed, I understood wha' gwan. I understood that there was a genre out there that was embracing the reggae influences but in a whole new style, something I'd never heard before. I was blown away by the finished product.
Ricking Ranking: We all inspirate each other. Kevin Bug made sure we heard bits of other tracks, and we inspirate each other because we understand each other, we come from the same walks of life. Same walk, same pavement, same bus, same train, same school the kids go to. You probably buy your car the same place I do. And that's what London Zoo is – same streets, you can understand it.
Killa P: I knew Ricky Ranking from the ‘80s coming up, he was like a big brother to me in Brixton when I was a youth. We used to go to and practice our craft – a couple of mutual friends we just called The Twins, they had a soundsystem in their house, and people would be there all the time
Kevin Martin: I always wanted London Zoo to be a political record. Ninja Tune really wanted me to release the instrumentals and I flatly refused, because I said it would remove the integral component - I wanted the lyrics to be in people's faces.
Legacy
It made me realise that what we create – our style – is valid in the wider world
There are plenty of reasons we still want to know about London Zoo in 2018. Its critical and audience reception was rapturous, with Wire magazine making it their album of the year. As dubstep and grime moved towards the mainstream, it captured an uncompromising picture of the city that had spawned them – but even though it was intended as a snapshot of a time, in Austerity Britain its vision seems if anything even more relevant.
Flowdan: I already knew that what Ricky Ranking and them did was a facet of where grime came from, I didn't really spend too much time thinking about that consciously before, but hearing it all together that made obvious sense. And it definitely put me on the map on an international scale, and recognised as a voice, not just part of a crew or scene.
Plastician: I knew it was going to be a big one, albums within our movement were still quite a new thing around that time so given the already huge rotation of Skeng and Poison Dart you just knew it was going to be massive. I just think back then we still didn’t ever know how big dubstep would become on a global scale, so when dubstep scaled, the success of London Zoo scaled with it and I’m absolutely not surprised we’re sat here discussing it ten years on!
Killa P: I didn't necessarily know it would stand the test of time, but the first time I ever performed Skeng, in Plastic People [the venue for FWD>>], the reaction of that crowd made me realise that, rah, this something that's definitely going well, that's bigger than how I thought it would would be. It was something that was so simple to me – just a quick freestyle, nothing that I put any effort into, something that I would do anyway in my spare time. To hear that that was taken so seriously and become one of the main tracks to push the album, that blew me away. It made me think more seriously about me! Because I realised my creativity was greater. I used to doubt my work, but it made me realise that what we create – our style – is valid in the wider world.
Kode9: Long before it was fashionable, I think it battered open a space for noisy but fun club music, and it also created a climate for mutant dancehall to infiltrate areas it might otherwise have remained outside.
Ricky Ranking: The Bug is another chapter in dub music. First couple of times I did a Bug stage show I'd do my bit then run and hide, but eventually I got used to it. But it's high quality music. It's for the grown-ups. If you've got strong will to listen to powerful music, Kevin Martin is your man.
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