Music
A decade after its release, The Bug's collaborators and admirers discuss the earth-shattering impact of his influential album London Zoo.
Over the years The Bug's third album London Zoo, released in the summer of 2008 via Ninja Tune, has grown into one of the most significant UK albums in recent memory. To celebrate its 10th birthday, The Bug – real name Kevin Martin – and his collaborators Flowdan, Ricky Ranking, Killa P, Hyperdub boss Kode9 and veteran bass producer Plastician discuss how the album came about.
Origins
The Bug 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 second album, Pressure. The follow-up to that, however, took a while.
Kevin Martin: 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 – 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 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 deafening at stages, like you want to run from it. But Kevin's music is 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's links with Hyperdub
Around the turn of the millennium, London's bass music scene was in flux. The grassroots garage scene was splintering and mutating into what would eventually become dubstep and grime. One of the only people covering this music was Kode9's Hyperdub website.
Kode9: I think it was just before the Pressure album [on 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 start a record label to release them myself and introduced me to a distributor. I’ve never forgiven him for this.
KM: Steve Goodman [Kode9] interviewed me just after Pressure had been released, and he suggested I come down to a club night, [legendary dubstep club] 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 me to write tunes at 140 bpm.
The influence of grime
In the early-mid 2000s, dubstep and grime were part of a fairly fluid musical landscape, but there was no mistaking the distinctive energy when the grime scene's MCs were in the building.
KM: Grime blew me away, 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 it got interesting. Then going to 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.
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?"
There was a special Mary Anne Hobbs radio 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 who'd have been chalk and cheese as far as he'd have been concerned. It was 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... oh and [The Slits'] Ari Up!
Flowdan: 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.
Dubplate culture
Grime and dubstep were the last great waves of dubplate culture. Given exclusive tracks by their friends in the scene, DJs would spend time and money having them cut to dubplate, and sets would often mainly consist of exclusive tracks. By 2006, when the first tracks for London Zoo were being recorded, these dubplate sets were the backbone of London's dubstep scene.
F: 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, did a remix and that really put Jah War on the circuit. It was more straight dubstep, but it was going off.
Warning: Music videos on this page contain explicit language.
Plastician: I remember being at [London dubstep night] 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 to 30 songs for the first time at every DMZ event back then. I didn’t know who produced it for a week or two until I got wind of Kevin being behind it.
KM: I was entrusting Kode9 and Loefah to do the groundwork for me, because they had lots of bookings and at that time I was primarily concerned with finishing my album. 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", or something. I'd just be giggling to myself because I felt totally removed from it.
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 Roger Robinson and Spaceape came into the studio asking what I'd been working on, and headbanging like nutters to those two beats.
Label trouble
All the way through 2006 and 2007, as Martin was developing his new sound, he struggled to find people in the industry that shared his uncompromising vision for the record.
KM: 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 the time ran Ninja Tune US – called and said, "I really want to meet you when I'm in town". 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 s***." Really, that's why the deal happened.
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 track full of ice-cold threats from Flowdan and Brixton MC Killa P.
Killa P: Me and Flowdan were scheduled to record two [other] songs with The Bug, but when we walked into the studio he was actually playing 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. I was like, "Gimme the headphone, gimme the mic." 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..."
KM: It ended up about 3am, and I remember Flowdan wanted to clear off. But Killa was like, "nah, nah, 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 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 on our backs laughing at the lyrics. It was the ultimate in dark humour. Which is funny given how much s*** I was given for the lyrics; I was supposedly glorifying violence and all that. 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 begins to take shape
Even with Ninja Tune's backing and Skeng doing well as a single, it took Martin untold studio hours through 2007 and into 2008 to marshal the big personalities and voices into the statement he wanted to deliver.
RR: With the song Judgement, that track sounded the way things were at that time. We were at war, in Afghanistan and Baghdad, there were terrorist threats and this and that, and when I heard that track, there's that drop that's almost delicate and it made me think about lyrics to help people understand what was going on in that time. And it's still going on.
KM: 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 it. I feel like it was Autechre meets Steely and Clevie! But nobody ever talks about that one.
KM: F***az 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 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, and it's painful to think that he's gone, way too soon, and he never got the credit he deserved. In part, I hope F***az was partially responsible for people realising what a special MC he was.
RR: We all inspired each other. Kevin Bug made sure we heard bits of other tracks, and we inspire 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.
KM: 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.
The album's legacy
London Zoo's critical reception was rapturous and it captured an uncompromising picture of the city that spawned dubstep and grime, just as they were moving towards the mainstream. But even as a snapshot of a time and place, its vision seems, if anything, even more relevant in today's Britain.
F: I already knew that what Ricky Ranking and them did was a facet of where grime came from, but I didn't really spend too much time thinking about that consciously. But hearing it all together, it made obvious sense. It definitely put me on the map, recognised as a voice and not just part of a crew or scene.
P: 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.
KP: I didn't necessarily know it would stand the test of time, but the first time I ever performed Skeng, at [London venue] Plastic People, the reaction made me realise that, rah, this is something that's definitely going well. 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 it taken so seriously and become one of the main tracks to push the album, that blew me away. I used to doubt my work, but it made me realise that what we create – our style – is valid in the wider world.
K9: 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.
RR: 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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