sound systems and hip-hop,” he says. “There was that bravado and competitive side with dubplates and versions in the sound systems, and it was the same in hip-hop. Also, in those times, it didn’t matter how good your dubplate was, or how good your sound [system] was, if you didn’t have a community.And the same with hip-hop.” Soon, all the Northern towns had crews of young breakers and poppers, who would come together to compete on lino laid down outside shopping centers and inside youth clubs. “For most of those involved in the formative stages of the bleep and bass movement, their chosen release was dancing, and their tribe one of the many organized crews that were popping up across the Midlands and the North of England,” Matt Annis wrote in his erudite 2019 book Join The Future: Bleep Techno and the Birth of British Bass Music. “We’d all seen Jeffrey Daniel [of Shalamar] body popping on Top of the Pops and other bits on programs like [Channel 4 music showcase] The Tube , but ‘Buffalo Gals’ showed us what b-boying was all about,” says Evelyn.“All of a sudden, this thing that was so distant was right close to us now. That shattered everything. Sound-system culture had given us a voice, but this was ours now. Anybody could do it with minimal means. We could all express ourselves through breaking and popping with our little crews.” - BREAKER’S REVENGE - It was a rift with friends at age thirteen—over the very same Echo45 speaker box referenced in the title of Nightmares on Wax’s latest project—that led the young Evelyn to connect with what would become his own breaking crew. “When I started to get this idea for [ Echo45 Sound System ], I started thinking about this box, and all these emotions came out of the thirteen-year-old me,” he explains. “When my friends stopped talking to me, I was really lost. My sister saw this so [she] introduced me to her boyfriend’s cousin, who was a breakdancer and popper. He invited me over [to Bradford], and I met [early Nightmares on Wax partner] Kevin Harper. So I was like,‘If it wasn’t for this speaker, my life would have been completely different.’” A contemporary of crews like Broken Glass in Manchester, Rock City in Nottingham, and SMAC 19 in Sheffield, Bradford’s Solar City Rockers were formed by Kevin “Boy Wonder” Harper and future members of the DJ collective Unique 3, who, a few years later, would go on to pioneer the bleep and bass movement with records like “The Theme.” While b-boying with Solar City Rockers, Evelyn and Harper became obsessed with the sonic vibrations of early electro.“We really connected with these electro records because of the bass.The lineage was there with the sound systems, but it was also the whole futuristic thing around it,” says Evelyn.“As kids, we really did believe we were
living in the future.You would hear records by Cybotron, and you couldn’t even explain what it was. But if you are body poppin’ and doing these robotic dances, it made total sense.” Electro opened new portals for music discovery beyond the records themselves, thanks to the samples and DJ scratching that factored into the sound. “These records would be coming out like ‘Break Dance-Electric Boogie’ by West Street Mob, ‘Two, Three, Break’ by the B Boys, and ‘Rockit’ by Herbie Hancock with [Grand Mixer D.ST],” Evelyn recalls.“I’d be like,‘What is it they are scratching?’ So you would try and find that record. And you would discover James Brown. So, through cutting and scratching, I really started digging and becoming a collector. I was about fifteen years old, going to flea markets and record fairs.” The next revelation for Evelyn would be learning how these records were cut up. “I have to give a huge shout to ‘Boy Wonder’ Kevin Harper, because he was the first person I would see scratching on his mum’s hi-fi,” he says. “I was like, ‘You have to show me how to do that.’ He taught me.That really got us looking for the cuts, then hearing the breaks of the hip-hop tracks we loved. It was like,‘Oh my God, that’s where they got that from.’” Around this time, Evelyn was introduced to a fellow digger from Leeds named John Halnon, who had two turntables, a reel-to- reel tape recorder, and a double cassette deck.Together they created pause-button mixes, sampling records they had been c,ollecting, and mixing them with film dialogue and other audio snippets. One day, John turned to his friend and said,“This stuff sounds like your worst nightmare.” To which George replied,“Yeah, it’s a nightmare on wax.” The two soon went on their own paths, but Evelyn returned to this name when he and Kevin Harper began creating music together—initially on account of free studio time they were given by a local youth worker. “Because we had come from the whole turntablism thing, with all these Steinski things and [Herbie the Mastermind, mixer of the Street Sounds Electro series] mixes coming out, we wanted to do our own megamixes,” he recalls. Already spinning together at Solar City Rockers parties at venues like Checkpoint in Bradford, Evelyn and Harper began mixing together on pirate radio shows and at student house parties while rooming together in Leeds. In need of an alias of his own to go on with Harper’s Boy Wonder, Evelyn took on the moniker DJ E.A.S.E—as in Experience a Sample Expert—for his mixing gigs. “At one of these parties was Rob Wheeler, who ran a student night in town,” recalls Evelyn. “He said he was going to be away in a few weeks and [asked] would we fill in.We completely smashed it.That night turned out to be Downbeat at Ricky’s, where we became co- promoters.”
- BASS. BREAKS. AND BLEEPS
WaxPoetics 65
( opposite ) George Evelyn (in front) with Solar City Rockers crewmates Darren Pascal, Jonny Bell, Patrick Cargill, and Steve Watty, at Bradford’s Checkpoint club in 1984.
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