Pirate Radio: Jungle
[Artforum, 1996]
Built in a clay basin, London promotes claustrophobia as a way of life: but then, something can happen that lets the air in, that makes you see the city in a new way. It happened to me just before Christmas: flipping the FM dial on the car radio, I was hit by a minimal, psychedelic jungle rhythm, over which the DJ was improvising, Jamaican dancehall style, on the old Shirley Ellis “Name Game” routine – ‘doggie doggie bodoggie, banana nana bonana’. This went on, in ever more baroque variations, for at least thirty minutes: instantly hooked, I felt as though I was in Jean Cocteau’s “Orphee” – listening to a transmission from the other side.
Beaming out from Friday to Sunday night in a seamless jungle mix – not so much a show but an environment – Pressure FM is among the dozens of London pirate radio stations to flout airwave restrictions. Like all other broadcast media in the UK, radio is carved up between the BBC and commercial interests – in the latter case, regulated by the Radio Authority, which, as a sop to a multitude of voices claiming access, has been issuing 28 day trial FM licences (which are rarely, if ever, renewed). Faced with institutional stasis, many pop culture producers prefer to duck and dive within the interstices of legality.
What you get is a kind of freedom: raw, unsullied by the pathetic ‘professionalism’ so beloved of commercial radio. Transmitting from, at a guess, somewhere in Hackney or Dalston, Pressure FM has a very sure sense of who it is playing to: the constantly modulating rhythms are peppered by adverts for clubs (Telepathy), and local bakeries (‘the munchies crew’), and catchphrases like ‘junglists’, ‘rave’,'intelligent drum and bass’, ‘intellicore’. Listening for hours at a stretch – which is easy: once you lock into the beat, it takes over your neural system – you can hear, not only where jungle is coming from, but what it’s saying.
Jungle is Afro-Caribbean at core. It begins with Jamaican Rude Boys – the original gangsters popularised by Desmond Dekker’s classic “007″ – and takes its shape from Dub: the mid 70′s reggae variant which specialised in drop out, that moment where everything strips away, leaving a vertiginous gap before the bass and drums storm back in (a trick which, picked up by House DJ’s in the early 80′s, has passed into the dance mainstream). On Pressure FM, everything hangs around the filthy, distorted dub bass, which plays at half speed against the skittering breakbeat percussion and tears through your perception like time warping: as JB exclaims,’Oh my gosh! Oh my gosh! With the bassline rush!’
In its layer upon layer of pitch bent sound, its insistence on the pleasures and possibilities of technology, Pressure FM is also a child of rave culture, where anything can be looped over the grid of the beat, where everything is fair game provided it melts your brain. This is a highly intentional black futurism, signalled by catchphrases like ‘dreams and imagination’ dropped into the maelstrom: on top, DJ’s like JB deliver a stream of consciousness in the dizzying verbal mix of Jamaican patois, local accents (here, deep Cockney), mocking Queen’s English and American rap – quite literally, shape-shifting for survival.
Heard among London’s intricate layering of century upon century, the Pressure FM crew sound impossibly, deliriously alive. They reaffirm the metropolis as Techno City: a place where the map is always being redrawn, where identities can be changed at will, where everything is up for grabs. In this, they provide the perfect antidote to the historical fantasies pumped out by the mainstream – in a jump cut from the past to the present and the future. This, not Britpop with its whitebread sixties fetish, is ‘the sound rockin’ London town’: the sound of the excluded, growing in confidence as they demand to be heard.