changed everything,” he says. “It was like hearing the room you were in coming back out of the sound system at you. A sonic/kinetic feedback loop. Feet to speakers to ears to feet to speakers.” Parrot’s DJ partner recalls first playing the record to their crowd: “‘Voodoo Ray’ was massive. We used to have a cassette player in Jive Turkey, and I think we had it on tape first,” says Hazel. “I was also doing my radio show on [the pirate station] SCR, and I remember the response when I first played it on there.” Parrot, Hazel, and their Sheffield contemporaries were soon to hatch their own plans for a raw electronic sound that could only have come from the North of England. The seeds were sown in another former industrial town in the North by a group of bass-obsessed friends who heard their calling in those seminal releases by A Guy Called Gerald and his fellow Manchester electronic pioneers 808 State. Armed with secondhand TR-808 and TR-909 drum machines and cheap AKAI samplers and synths, Bradford’s Unique 3 are widely regarded as the founding fathers of what became known as “bleep and bass” or “bleep techno.” With roots in the break-dancing scene and reggae sound- system culture, Unique 3’s “The Theme” (the B-side to its earlier prototype “Only the Beginning) is to bleep what Bambaataa’s “Planet Rock” was to electro or Rhythim Is Rhythim’s “Nude Photo” was to Detroit techno. Originally released in 1988 and then in 1989 with a “Unique Mix” by Robert Gordon, this raw and sparse U.K. acid house warehouse party anthem was in the words of Matt Anniss, “every bit as alien and otherworldly as ‘Voodoo Ray’ [but] crucially nowhere near as polished… sounding like nothing that had come before.” Hazel was working at FON Records when these homegrown records started to arrive on DIY tape. “It was mind-blowing, and when that U.K. Northern sound started to permeate the scene in Sheffield through the club and radio, the climate changed completely,” he recalls. Like “Voodoo Ray,” “The Theme” immediately became an anthem at Jive Turkey. “The thing that sticks in my mind about Unique 3 is the crowd singing along to the refrain and bass line. You could flick the fader down on the record and everybody would be going ‘boo bu bu boo,’ says Barratt. “It got to the stage where they’d invite you to play it by starting the chant over other records, then it’d periodically keep appearing through the rest of the night.” With cheaper electronic home studio gear readily available, it was now time for Sheffield to respond with its own DIY sound in what would become the bleep and bass movement the city became famous for. “There was this real feeling at the time that all of sudden, rather than looking to the States, we started to think, ‘We could do that.’ So you had this whole new DIY bedroom vibe coming through in the music,” says Hazel. “You now had these electronic producer geeks like Rob Gordon, a dub-wise reggae head who really wasn’t into clubbing at all, experimenting on all this new electronic equipment and
finding a voice in this new emerging culture.” While working at FON Studios, Robert Gordon had started to earn decent money, thanks to producing some big- name pop dance artists. With the cash he bought an Atari ST computer, Roland MC-202 sequencer, AKAI S1000 sampler, a Korg M1 synthesizer, and a cheap mixer. Hearing of his new purchases, his friend Hazel turned up at Gordon’s house above the Park Hill estate that looks down from a hillside onto Sheffield city centre. “He invited me around to have a look at this programming suite he had set up,” recalls Hazel. “We had a little mess around, and I was loving it, especially what you could do with the sampler. So he said come around next week and bring a tune and we’ll see what we can do.” The record Hazel took with him was a bona fide Jive Turkey favorite, the 12-inch of Manu Dibango’s 1984 electro- funk bomb “Abele Dance.” “We sampled it up and started to build the track around it,” recalls Hazel, who was joined at Gordon’s by school friend Sean Maher. “Rob really was a master of rhythm,” Hazel continues. “His snare and drums were really unique to him. Once we put them on, it sounded absolutely incredible. It also had this pure, almost sine wave subsonic bass that hadn’t really been used until then. In four hours, we had a cassette to play on the pirate station next day.” Hazel remembers the response when he dropped it on SCR: “It was off the scale, just really crazy. At the time, the transmitter was quite powerful, so if the wind was blowing in the right direction, you could hear it in parts of Leeds. So we had people calling in from all over and it quickly got us noticed.” The track was laid down so quickly, the pair hadn’t even had time to think of a name. “I think we announced it something like: ‘This was recorded in the early hours of the morning, we haven’t got a name for it, so for now we’ll call it the ‘Track With No Name.’” With a sound rooted in post-industrial North of England, Hazel, Gordon, and Maher then came up with the name Forgemasters after the heavy engineering works that they had grown up around. When Hazel returned to his job at the FON record shop the next day, he played his colleagues the track. Everyone was blown away including employee Steve Beckett, who subsequently described the track as “an evocation of the nocturnal energy of an industrial city in decline, whose empty, industrial spaces were being turned into illegal and autonomous party zones.” Hearing the “Track With No Name” gave the FON owners the push they needed to set up a label as a platform for this new Northern sound. “As soon as I took the record to the shop, they said, ‘We need to put this out,’” recalls Hazel. Plans were hatched to press up an initial five hundred copies and distribute them through the shop’s existing network. Financing its first release with a Government Enterprise Allowance Grant, Warp Records (“We Are Reasonable People”) was founded in 1989 by Steve Beckett, Robert Gordon, and Rob Mitchell, who
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