Sounds Like London Quotes

“Even if dubstep is a massive global concern, with hardly any racial barriers between artists or crowds, it has been usurped in the UK by a style that was practically a carbon copy of the original immigrant sound-system way of doing things.”
― Lloyd Bradley, Sounds Like London: 100 Years of Black Music in the Capital

“It might be wishful thinking, but the very name ‘jungle’ seemed to reflect a wry left-field humour. Ask half a dozen people how the name came about, though, and you’ll get six different answers – and they’ll all be true.”
― Lloyd Bradley, Sounds Like London: 100 Years of Black Music in the Capital

“this Londonised a Caribbean tradition of story telling and use of language that had previously been the preserve of reggae. While that was to prove pivotal in the evolution of jungle, more immediately it was an important step for young black London in general.”
― Lloyd Bradley, Sounds Like London: 100 Years of Black Music in the Capital

“for many youngsters ‘back home’ was what they saw out of the window; anything else was just an interesting holiday. The capital’s constantly evolving street slang provides the best illustration: Jamaican patois remained its foundation, but it included at least as many hip-hop reference points and a grab bag of longstanding Londonisms – you could visit three different time zones within the space of a sentence.”
― Lloyd Bradley, Sounds Like London: 100 Years of Black Music in the Capital

“Jungle came about because there were so many of us out there who loved reggae, loved hip hop and were on the edges of the rave scene and liked a lot of it. But moving forward into what became jungle and drum’n’bass, it was a sound-system thing, because in that situation what separates you from the next man is your beats and how you lay them down – you’ve got to know when to shift.”
― Lloyd Bradley, Sounds Like London: 100 Years of Black Music in the Capital

“By remaining true to itself, grime and its immediate family of jungle, UK garage, dubstep and so on had taken up where Soul II Soul left off, and plugged in to how many youngsters really thought about their lives and their music.”
― Lloyd Bradley, Sounds Like London: 100 Years of Black Music in the Capital

“Jazzie now has an OBE, and Trevor and Norman an MBE each, but their most vital legacy today is on the streets of London, among the next generation of sound systems, who automatically plugged into how it all worked from a British rather than Jamaican point of view. Most importantly, they could see how far it could go. The coming waves of London black music – latter-day ‘collectives’ like the So Solid Crew, Roll Deep and so on – benefited hugely from this template, using pirate radio, the internet, club nights and dances to operate as self-contained, self-supporting sound systems.”
― Lloyd Bradley, Sounds Like London: 100 Years of Black Music in the Capital

“– there was a whole load of inner-London kids just like us, who wanted to go out.’ That state of affairs was perfect for sound systems: business opportunity meets social exclusion meets musical potential. Forced to forget about West End clubs or plush suburban discos, London’s black soul scene became self-contained, vaguely outlaw, community-based, ever-innovative, and in complete empathy with its crowds.”
― Lloyd Bradley, Sounds Like London: 100 Years of Black Music in the Capital

“Kitch and fellow Trinidadian calypsonian Lord Beginner made the decision to pay the £28.10s passage on the Windrush precisely because they knew there was a healthy African-Caribbean music scene in London, and they could find a relatively wealthy black audience. As a symbol of specifically musical immigration into the UK, however, Kitch’s quayside concert is priceless. For a calypso so vividly to reference the capital was a defining moment. This wasn’t simply music performed and consumed in Britain, on a strictly insular level, by immigrants and reverent aficionados; it was music that while remaining faithful to the Caribbean was adapted to fit its new setting, and found itself in a creative environment that was prepared to make efforts to accommodate it.”
― Lloyd Bradley, Sounds Like London: 100 Years of Black Music in the Capital