The Wire 300: Simon Reynolds on the Hardcore Continuum Series #6: Two-Step Garage (1999)

If you live in London, perhaps you’ve scanned the FM spectrum and come to a halt at a pirate station whose sound you can’t quite finger or figure. It’s got House music’s slinky panache, but the rhythm’s wrong – too fitful and funked-up, and besides, there’s an MC jabbering over the top, Jungle-style. Maybe it’s Jungle, then – but then again, maybe not: too slow, too sexy. Sometimes it’s a bit like American R&B – except it sounds druggy, the wrong kind of druggy: like Timbaland on E.

So what is it, this genre-without-a-name? It’s the latest in a series of mutations spawned from London’s multiracial rave scene, the next evolutionary stage beyond Speed Garage (itself a swerve sideways from Jungle). And the new style does have a name, albeit an unsatisfactorily dry, technical one: ‘two-step’, increasingly a general rubric for all kinds of jittery, irregular rhythms that don’t conform to Garage’s traditional 4-to-the-floor pulse. Somebody really should coin a more attractive name, though, one that captures two-step’s lip smacking lusciousness. Because all the juice squeezed out of Jungle by the post-techstep school of scientific drum ’n’ bass has oozed back in the succulent form of two-step.
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“Truthfully, Jungle stemmed from House music. It has a reggae influence, but it’s still House,” MC Navigator from Jungle pirate Kool FM insisted back in 1994. Three years later, Jungle returned to the source, when its rude bwoy spirit and rhythmic science violently possessed the body of Garage (the most soulful and songful form of House), in the process creating a new London scene, ‘Speed Garage’.

Jungle’s relationship with Garage actually went back some way. Instead of Techno clubs’ Ambient chill-out rooms, the second room at Jungle clubs usually bumped to US Garage; pirate radio stations often programmed Garage shows for mellow moments in the weekend (Saturday morning, Sunday afternoons). It was on these pirate shows that DJs started pitching up their Garage imports (artists like Masters At Work, Kerri Chandler, Todd Edwards) to 130 bpm, giving them the extra ‘oomph’ required by the London Jungle audience. DJs favoured the dub versions of the US tracks, says Spoony of DJ collective The Dreem Teem, because “not having much vocal element, you could play the dubs faster without them sounding odd”; these near-instrumentals also left gaps for the MCs to do their stuff. Soon the DJs started making homegrown Garage tracks that sounded like their pirate shows – faster than the US sound, with junglistic sub-bass, dub-wise FX, and ragga chants timestretched so that the vocal fissured and buckled like the wings of a metal-fatigued Boeing 707.