Rewind to the UK in the mid 90’s: The clubbing scene was celebrating the end of the Thatcher era and was awash with the sound of Jungle. These beats were moving towards a harder sound, and gradually alienated a section of its previously faithful audience, who was seeking a lighter and more merciful tone. This hardness even reached the point of no return where women deserted the dancefloors, leaving the clubs to a bunch of Break-Beat hardliners.
It was at this moment when US Garage records landed on UK shores, and this import was precisely what Jungle fans looking for some relief were about to submerge themselves in. DJs started to speed up their records and soon a collection of producers commenced on a new twist of the genre which came to be defined as “Speed Garage”. Yet this faster tempo wasn’t enough of a shift in itself. Former Junglists gradually incorporated a semi-demented shuffling beat into this sound…and that’s exactly how UK Garage was born.
UK Garage is indivisible from a specific geographical scene where it reached maturity in the late 90’s, before it exploded onto the world’s stage. Until then, it had been very much of a London thing, which flourished throughout Sunday after parties. Initially UK Garage associated itself with an idea of exclusivity: the attendees were well turned out, proudly displaying their sport lux clothes and drinking Hennessy almost exclusively. This materialistic scene with its flashy accessories drew an urban crowd where a gangster lifestyle was flaunted.
Pirate radios represented a lifeline in the spread of UK Garage’s popularity, most being former Jungle stations that switched to the new genre. It didn’t take long until these fast and syncopated beats reached the neglected Jungle MCs attention, who then started to bring their flow to the music, rapping live in clubs. As the Garage scene thrived, it started to flirt with a new genre which was taking over US charts, a derivative of Soul - RnB. Following this union, Garage and RnB eventually gave way to a incongruous offspring: 2-Step. From it’s Garage roots it kept the skip in its beats, and from it’s RnB influence the abandonment of a 4x4 pulse, giving it an easy-listening laid back sound with honeyed lyrics. As a consequence, these more soulful and sexier sounds brought women back into the clubs.
What is really interesting is not the success of UK Garage per se, as many of its classic anthems have in fact failed to stand the test of time. In the end, the smooth and cheesy sound of commercial Garage didn’t endure, yet its heritage survived: UK Garage patterns opened a whole new universe of sounds for adventurous producers, and were applied to many genres, bringing along a fresh wind of vitality into Techno, Deep House and Tech House. If you listen current music productions, you might notice some doubled kicks and syncopated high-hats, which are the living proof that Garage has not entirely disappeared, but simply evolved. The recent Garage revival found in UK Bass was the incontrovertible evidence the movement isn’t dead yet, and probably still has a lot of surprises to reveal.
