Milo Johnson on The Wild Bunch
Musically, they dealt in hip-hop, electro, soul, funk and reggae; their recorded output was small, but ‘The Look of Love’ in 1987 pioneered the very British style known as lovers’ hip-hop.
Milo Johnson went on to establish himself as a house producer under the name DJ Nature, but in this interview, he talks about the origins of the Wild Bunch, the early Bristol scene and the influential Dug Out club, as well as how the crew made the record that opened up new horizons for UK underground music.
How did you get into all this in the first place? Hip-hop in particular.
I think, for me, the beginnings were the first things I heard on John Peel, maybe ‘Planet Rock’ and something else he played? And I just thought, wow, because I liked Kraftwerk already by that time. And so this was like another take. And he said it was coming from The Bronx in New York. That was my introduction to it. He may have played those Enjoy, Sugar Hill-type early records too.
And the DJing, scratching and breakdancing, did you get into that part of it as well?
Oh, yeah, for sure. I used to work in Kensington Market [in London] in the eighties. And there were a couple of tapes going around and one of them was this Afrika Islam [early US hip-hop DJ] tape. I don't think [1983 hip-hop film] ‘Wild Style’ had hit quite yet. But these tapes were filtering from New York, basically from people who'd go over there and tape radio shows. There was WKCR, which was basically a New Jersey radio station, where Afrika Islam would play once a week, I believe. And I got a couple of the tapes.
We'd already understood we were going to be a DJ crew, Grant [Marshall, aka Daddy G] and Nellee [Hooper] and myself at that time. And these tapes came on the scene and only a few people had them, just the people who knew. And I'd got a copy of these tapes from this girl when I used to work in Kensington Market. They were just full of beats and underground NY hip-hop.
Afrika Islam used to play all the really small label stuff, pretty much. And he also played breakbeats as well. Those tapes were almost like our library of breaks. Later there was the ‘Wild Style’ tour, just after the film came out.
This would have been around about 83. I'd gone to Japan around about the same time. And I know that the ‘Wild Style’ tour had already been in Japan before it had been to England. I was given a copy of the video of them performing and hanging out, by either Kudo or Tycoon Tosh, who would later form [Japanese hip-hop crew] Major Force. I don't know what the exact dates were, but I was shocked the ‘Wild Style’ tour happened in Japan before it happened in England. So I basically walked into a place where they already had a massive amount of import hip-hop records. More so than what was happening in England at the time.
The places we used to go to buy tunes, Bluebird, Groove records in Soho, London and Revolver in Bristol, were relatively limited, I’m guessing because it was like a new genre and risky to go all out importing something so different and new, but in Japan, they were totally invested, they had every release on every label it seemed. For me, it was just mind-blowing. That's where I got a lot of the better records for the crew, was over there.
The people who took me to Japan were Ray Petri’s Buffalo [fashion house] crew through Neneh Cherry, who I’m guessing was connected to them. And so she knew us lot in Bristol, through her band Rip Rig & Panic, and Mark Stewart, he was another one who was really a big influence. He used to bring some tapes over I think from when he was on tour in New York. I’m sure he gave us some really good WBLS or Kiss FM radio tapes. That really helped us get some knowledge into what was happening in New York music-wise.
Buffalo was definitely part of the scene in terms of fashion. Nellee was into the fashion, I was into fashion, as far as I could be, you know, with a limited amount of money. I'm not saying we adopted it completely, but it was just something that we admired and looked to and thought, yeah, there's someone on the same wavelength as us - not completely immersing ourselves in the hip-hop world - we used to mix and match basically, we had gone through the punk era and kept some of the clothing and records and stuff from that era, going into new wave. And then going into the hip-hop and onwards.
So how did it actually become a crew, the Wild Bunch? How did that actually coalesce?
I can only speak for myself because the more I reflect, I don't know what other people were thinking, you know, but from my point of view, it was like a pretty organic thing. It was just like three mates hanging out on a Saturday night or a Friday night.
Grant was working but me and Nellee weren't working and we’d get our dole money and we'd spend it on records, basically, records or clothing. We used to take the records that we had and go round to G's on a Friday night and just play what we had and G had a really big reggae collection at that time.
Gradually more friends would come round and we'd just be sitting down chatting and playing music, you know, and it kind of grew to be too many people for an apartment. G came up with the idea to rent the back of pub that had a room with dance floor and old record playing set up you know. Initially the vibe was the same, it wasn’t about doing a party so to speak, at least from my perspective, it was just an extension of what was happening in the flat.
Eventually it changed from just hanging out to dancing though. Then it got to being house parties in the Clifton and Redland area, which is kind of like the upper middle-class area of Bristol. And after that we got a residency in this club called The Dug Out, and we did the St Paul's Carnival and things like that.
The Dug Out was quite well-known at the time wasn't it?
I don't know about outside of Bristol, but inside of Bristol, it was very well-known. The Dug Out was quite grimy and dirty, but the music and the cross-section of people was great and it worked perfectly. It was like a club for misfits, very eclectic - down the road is the biggest hospital in Bristol so you used to get some of the staff nurses and doctors going there after their shift, you'd get artists and actors, punks, all the old-school Bristol musicians like the Pop Group, Pigbag, Maximum Joy, then you had the black community in St. Paul's too.
People also used come down from London who were affiliated with Mark Stewart - Neneh Cherry and Sean Oliver and so on. So it was it was an incredible cross-section.
Was anyone on the mic at that point or were you just playing records?
Initially, there was nobody on the mic then. Except for G, he'd get on the mic, and then later on, we had Willie Wee and 3D join us. And Tricky used to get on the mic sometimes as well.
He was younger than you lot, right?
Oh yeah. He was a lot younger, I knew Tricky when he was seven years old through his family. So when he started writing rhymes it was natural thing to include him in what we were doing when he felt like it.
Did you have decks between you and stuff like that? Or did you just use equipment wherever you were playing?
I think with the little bit of money that we were making in The Dug Out, we saved as much as we could to get the Technics 1200s together. By the mid-eighties, we'd got a couple of Technics.
What you're describing sounds like a sound system, but without a sound system.
Right, right. We were like a sound system as collective but without the hardware, other than an amp and turntables so to speak. We pieced stuff together bit by bit, but we never really anything that could do live events with but enough to do a little house party with.
Did any of you have a background in that sound system tradition?
Well, I grew up in the black community. So for me, it was almost like a part of life, because if you grew up in the sixties in England, at that time we had to make our own sources of entertainment.
We had our little youth club that we had on our little bomb site/adventure playground, and the adults used to go to Ajax or Tarzan’s blues dances and to the Bamboo Club. Basically everything was inside the community, pretty much.
I know my stepdad and some of his friends used to go outside of there to go to clubs in the city. But most black people in St. Paul's, they didn't need to go outside of the neighbourhood for their entertainment. I think I went to a blues very early, not to hang out, but out of curiosity and just to ask my stepdad for some money for a bag of chips or something. And that was like an introduction to something.
Everybody pretty much had a record player in their house but when you go to a shebeen for the first time and hear music played with that much weight it was another world. And as a nine- or ten-year-old, the first thing that came to my mind was, I wish I could play my T Rex record on that. I used to go inside briefly but then they used to shoo you out after a while. But yeah, so that was my connection to that culture of sound systems.
Did that in some way kind feed into the Wild Bunch way of thinking about sound?
Yes, for sure. For sure. Not just the weight of the sound but also playing a different selection, our music, funk, disco, punk, new wave, Kraftwerk etc through that vehicle.
How did you get to the point of making your first record ‘Tearin’ Down the Avenue’.
Actually, we made a couple of electro dub plates in '83. I've got them here. I found them the other day. We sent a tape I believe to the [Tim] Westwood radio [on London pirate station LWR] show, then we did a kind of DJ or a crew battle in the Wag Club [in London] that he put together.
I think he played that competition afterwards on his radio show. From that I think that's what got us on Island Records, [Island subsidiary label] 4th and Broadway, you know.
‘Tearin’ Down the Avenue’ is much more of a hip-hop record [than Massive Attack later became], isn't it?
Yes. The big sound at the time was the Def Jam sound with the really heavy kick for the bottom end rather than a regular bass guitar or synth. So we really wanted to make a tune that had that sound. We went in there with the intent of making a straight-up hip-hop record, I kind of really wanted to do that but I also wanted to do something a little bit different, which was ‘The Look of Love’.
It was almost like a harkening back to those old reggae records when they used to do versions of popular mainstream or soul songs. The plan was to do a hip-hop track with singer on it, using a classic breakbeat by Graham Central Station called ‘The Jam’. I think Island were already scared at that time using the samples, so we rewrote the beat on drum machine using that 808 tom transposed down to make that heavy kick.
But it was the same Graham Central Station beat that would go on to be used on Soul II Soul’s [Nellee Hooper-produced hits] ‘Keep On Movin’’ and ‘Back To Life’. The formula of using Bacharach and David songs on a hiphop beat would be used by other in Bristol acts after that also.
It was more lovers’ hip-hop, wasn't it
Yes it was that and a culture clash on record, fusing two completely different vibes, rough with the smooth.
It's really interesting that was done for the first time in Britain, because the innovation at that point was coming out of the states, with Def Jam and stuff like that. And then the other innovation was coming out of Jamaica, in terms of sonic science or whatever you want to call it, playing with sound, and then you've got this which is coming out of Britain for the first time.
It was a very natural thing and in hindsight a pretty obvious path. For us, Nellee, Gee and myself we didn’t have the cultural constraints of those before us. We listened to a lot of different types of music. It wasn’t just reggae or soul for me personally, there was folk and rock from an early age.
So the transition to say punk and new wave was easier to receive as a listener, as soul and reggae gave me natural connection to hip-hop and disco. Dionne Warwick was my mother’s favourite so that used to be playing all the time in our house, which would subconsciously show up in this way. It just didn’t make sense to me to just copy what was coming out of America without adding something of our own and that would be ‘The Look of Love’.
It's all part of part of a bigger history as well because then it's going back to Larry Graham, Graham Central Station, which goes back to Sly Stone, so you're connected back to the Family Stone as well. Music is amazing.
Music is so amazing, man, I tell you. Unfortunately Island/4th & Broadway records didn't know how to market us - we were the first ‘hip-hop’ crew to sign to a major label. Newtrament had done something earlier with ‘London Bridge [is Falling Down]’ on Jive.
But Island just didn't know how to market us. They wanted to turn me into a singer. And I was like, you've got to be kidding. And I got really disillusioned personally with the music industry in England at that time. That's when I lost faith in it, personally.
And that's the point where you went to [work in] Japan [and split from the Wild Bunch, who then became Massive Attack]?
Not really, I was going to back and forth to Japan around '83, '84 and I'd come back to the UK, told the [Wild Bunch] guys that I think we could do a small tour over there. We came back, we got the deal in '86 with Island, did the records. The guys would organise gigs in the UK and I'd head back to do them.
In '87, '88, I had a [DJ] residency in Japan. So I was doing this, doing that. I wanted to do independent music. I mean, I wanted to put music out independently and I knew it could be done in New York. Because I'd been working with the Major Force guys in Japan by this time. And I'd done some records with them. And they showed me how to use the equipment it just opened up that creative route where I didn’t have to rely on studio engineers and technicians in order to make basic tracks.
It was at the point where what I was putting together was way too rough to be accepted anywhere else but NYC’s independent market, so I moved to NY and set up an exporting business in shipping records and clothes from the US to Japan. That enabled me to have the freedom to start my own, very small label where I put out raw house tracks [under the names Nature Boy and later as DJ Nature].
Interview by Matthew Collin for ‘Dream Machines’, January 11, 2023.
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