Nightclubbing: Metalheadz at Blue Note
The Metalheadz night at Blue Note was a party that will go down in history as one of drum & bass’ most important. Alongside Rage and Speed, it’s the one that is most frequently cited by the genre’s luminaries in spreading the sound worldwide. Like most nights that eventually take on a historical significance, its success is a combination of factors. Drum & bass was in its beginning stages and Metalheadz, the label, had gathered together some of its finest, young producers. It was held on a Sunday, a day that lured out the rave-shy beatmakers. And heading it all up was this irrepressible character, Goldie, a producer who was just about ready to take the whole thing global.
There are other, vitally important things to mention. A lack of traditional MCs. A fierce dubplate rivalry. A DJ who put together one of the best DJ sets ever – after not spinning records in public for more than a year. But instead of listing all of them, we’ll simply let the people that were there tell the story. Over the past few months we interviewed a majority of the night’s major players. Here is their take on Metalheadz at Blue Note.
We were very much in the minority in drum & bass in ’94. This was around the time that the ragga jungle scene was really big.
To be honest, we all hated the ragga jungle sound at the time.
There was a lot of mainstream stuff that was getting the attention.
Doc Scott
I had some horrendous times playing out as a DJ earlier that year.
Loxy
There was other stuff out there that was more experimental. I was playing on the same radio station as Kemistry and Storm.
We started to get a hold of the producers making that kind of music and we said, “Look, your music’s not being played on the dancefloors.” So we got hold of Photek, Source Direct, Digital, Wax Doctor, Alex Reece… those kinds of people that were making the stuff at the time and we all formed a friendship from that.
I wanted a place where the music makers could listen to music.
Storm
Kemistry and myself had started running the label in early ’95. Goldie had gotten signed, and he was just too busy. Our dream had always been to have a club. So we were looking, and Blue Note approached us. They had a five-week trial slot on a Sunday night.
I thought, “Sunday, isn’t that a bit weird?”
Storm
Kemistry and I, when we were first raving, our m.o. was that we’d go to Rage on a Thursday, then on Friday we’d go up to Coventry to Amnesia House, we’d take the night off on Saturday and then we’d have this last little bump on Sunday at a club called Solaris on Gray’s Inn Road.
I thought that a Sunday club was a bit risky because, well, everyone’s got work the next day.
There was a bit of fear about what might happen. I remember there not being a lot of people the first ten times or so. Goldie was breakdancing on the floor, and he had the room to be able to do that.
I popped in and there were, like, five people there. [laughs]
Goldie
The first 12, 15 sessions were empty. There was hardly anyone there. Then you think, “Oh, we’ve made the wrong decision.”
Storm
We nearly killed Fabio on the first night. There was this pipe above the DJ booth, and we didn’t understand how sweaty it was going to get. There was so much water on the decks it was ridiculous. After that first week we covered up the pipe. We didn’t want to kill Fabio, would’ve been a terrible shame! [laughs]
It was a bit of a shithole really. [laughs] It leaked, it had cracks in the wall. You felt like you were in a cave.
DJ Lee
I’m surprised I didn’t get sick more after I played at Blue Note.
Fabio
You used to get so much sweat on your records that at times it became quite difficult to DJ.
Ink
The infamous sweat pipe. That was one of the most annoying things. It was almost like having a shower when you were on the decks.
Fabio
I had started a night called Speed about four months prior to Metalheadz doing their first night. The two clubs couldn’t be more different. Speed was a cross between a West End club and a drum & bass night, whereas Blue Note was in Hoxton. It was grimy, underground. The lighting was gloomy, oppressive. In Speed it was bright. They were completely different things.
At the time Hoxton was a really run down part of London. Someone recently ran a feature saying how posh that area is now and used a photo of me and Goldie trying to illustrate what it used to be like. [laughs]
I had never heard of Hoxton Square until Metalheadz. [laughs]
Ink
This was way before the Shoreditch upsurge.
Goldie
It was fucking desolate there. Blue Note, the square, there's nothing really there. It was a club in the middle of fucking nowhere. But there was just something about it. There was just something about the feel of it.
Storm
It had a very intimate feel. It had this very low ceiling, so the bass travelled really well and didn’t escape very far, so you were completely hit by it.
Doc Scott
When Goldie would have his batshit moments where he’d jump up and down, he’d almost hit the ceiling.
DJ Lee
The DJ booth was so small. Especially when Groove[rider] came in with 16 record boxes. There was no room to move. The crowd was literally on you.
Storm
You could touch the DJ and you could stand right next to the MC.
Everything was on the same level.
Storm
There was no “Oh, I’m a DJ.” You could literally just come up to me in the club and say, “Oh, hi, you’re Storm, right?” We were accessible to everybody. We were just trying to create a vibe that people felt very comfortable in.
Bailey
But it was never abused. There were never any lunatics leaning over to get rewinds.
Photek
Goldie would reach over the decks and rewind tunes, regardless of what the DJ was trying to do. [laughs] I think half the people that came through came just to see that happen.
Fabio
It ended up being a massive coup to do it on a Sunday. It started early and ended early.
Loxy
The approach was to have it be a Sunday night wind-down. If you can call it a wind-down. It started at 7 and finished up by midnight. There was nothing going on of that nature on Sunday. It was always considered a family thing for like-minded people.
Fabio
You don’t really get random ravers when you do a Sunday night thing. You get people that really love music.
Doc Scott
There was no external pressure to tone down your set, which you might feel on a Friday or a Saturday when you were playing somewhere else in the UK.
DJ Lee
It would start on the Thursday with Speed, then Fridays and Saturdays we would play four or five gigs. So by the time it got to Sunday, we would have played five or six gigs and it’d be so natural for us to want to play all the things that we hadn’t – or couldn’t – at other parties. You could really delve in.
Cleveland Watkiss
I used to call it a church session.
Fabio
It feels like going to church.
DJ Lee
When I wasn’t playing, I’d come pretty much every week anyway. They had really great Jamaican food.
The food was great for people who had been out all day on Saturday and Sunday.
Storm
Goldie brought in a guy to make West Indian food.
Justyce
Sunday is a yard food day if you’re Jamaican.
Storm
Curry, goat, rice and peas.
Goldie
And we had board games upstairs – chess, backgammon.
Storm
When he said it, we were like, “Oh come on, Goldie! People from drum & bass are not going to play games!” But they really did! And then, of course, if you wanted to go inside, you would go downstairs.
Doc Scott
I think one of my most special memories of Metalheadz at Blue Note, from a DJ point of view, was hearing Grooverider be reborn. I don’t think it’s any secret that he’d lost his way – at least from our perspective. We had all looked up to him so much, and he’d gone down the road of playing some more commercial stuff. When he played his first set at the Blue Note, it was a really big deal.
Grooverider
The first time that I played was pretty special.
Doc Scott
I’m sure he was enjoying what he was doing at the time but to hear him play, to me, a proper set of drum & bass and find himself again…
DJ Lee
Grooverider’s first set at Blue Note was unbelievable. I had some of those tunes, but the way that he put them together…
Fabio
It was Groove’s house.
Photek
Grooverider was like the Prime Minister, presiding over everything.
Doc Scott
He played some of the best sets that I’ve ever heard him play at the Blue Note.
Fabio
We were all bit-part players, really. Groove used to own that place. He would smash it every week.
Doc Scott
I remember vividly when Grooverider came in and he had “Metropolis” by Adam F. He had this look on his face. I knew he had something special.
Fabio
The night that Groove played “Metropolis” for the first time…
Doc Scott
He played it as his first tune and it got rewound maybe seven or eight times.
Bailey
You always knew it was going to be a good night when Doc Scott and Grooverider were on the same bill. You knew they’d try to outdo one another. They’d really start pulling tunes.
Fabio
Everyone played for Goldie, to impress him. You couldn’t go in there without the freshest music. You couldn’t fuck up. The crowd would let you know.
Goldie
I'd phone the DJs up, I'd wind 'em all up. I'm going, “I better hear some fucking good shit,” you know? I’d phone them and play them 16 bars of something and people would go, “What the fuck’s going on?” And you’d put the phone down, and they’re like... “Are you playing fucking games again?” I’m like “Wait ’til fucking Sunday!” “Have you spoke to Scotty?” “No.” “Have you spoke to Lee?” “Nah, nah, he's got something dangerous.” “Really? What's going on? Tell me more!” “Nah, nah, nah. Wait ’til fucking Sunday!” I heard so many tunes in that place my brain nearly exploded.
Storm
We would always have a little bet between us and the DJs: “Who would play the weirdest track tonight? Who would play the track that everybody would just rush over to the DJ and ask, ‘Who is it? Who is it?’”
The night got so successful that you’d have to get there earlier and earlier to get in.
Storm
The club was pretty much full by 7:15 or 7:30, and we opened at 7.
DJ Lee
Because ragga jungle was so big, we’d be headlining these second rooms. So to get to Blue Note with a crowd that was so receptive... I mean, they were all like internet nerds are today. I still don’t know how half of the people knew about these tunes. I was like, “Either you’ve been hacking my phone and listening to my conversations with Ed Rush or...” They were so educated that they’d know by the 30-second intro who had produced it.
Goldie
You’d be in a conversation, talking to Photek about a certain snare in a kung-fu film, and then you’d a hear tune coming in and you'd just fucking stop mid-conversation. But it wasn’t deemed as rude. It was like, “Yep, that’s it. Just gotta hear it.”
Grooverider
It was a completely different vibe from Speed or Rage. Don’t get me wrong about those places, there was always music appreciation. But they didn’t hit the heights that Metalheadz hit. The whole night was about music. It wasn’t about any one person. It was about music.
Marley Marl
People from all around the world would come to Metalheadz. Internationally, they thought it was some enormous rave. They thought it was 3000 people or something.
Grooverider
It only held 200 people, maximum.
Dillinja
It was a long, narrow room basically. 15 meters wide? 50 meters deep? It wasn’t big at all.
Marley Marl
The amount of bodies in there and the low ceilings made for a really compact sound. That was very important: The music was quite technical, so you needed to hear it properly.
Loxy
It was a wall of sound. Eskimo Noise did the system. You couldn’t get better sound at the time.
Cleveland Watkiss
As someone who came up in the sound system era in the ’70s when it was all about the science of sound, it was the closest I had ever heard to that. The dimensions of the place were perfect for the system.
Bailey
From the outset it was an experimental thing. That was Goldie bringing in the heritage, sound-wise, of Reinforced Records into Metalheadz. That was what was so special about the crowd. They were very attentive. Any little change to the music, they’d hear it and roar for it. It was a great listening crowd. It wasn’t about the biggest drop. It was about building a really deep soundscape.
Dillinja
There also weren’t many MCs, just strictly music. Which was brilliant. There were millions of MCs at all of the other events, smothering the music all night.
DJ Lee
That was always the problem: You’d get some idiot MC chatting while you were trying to mix.
Dillinja
When there was an MC, he’d complement the music. Cleveland Watkiss used to do a bit of singing.
Cleveland Watkiss
About a half-hour into the first night I said to Goldie, “Look, I have my microphone in my car if you want me to get it.” And he said, “Nah, nah.” So then an hour went by, and he said, “Go and get your mic.” And the rest was history. [laughs]
Grooverider
It was a different style of MCing. They were more hosting. They weren’t firing off a million and one lyrics. The focus was more on the music.
Storm
It was funny because Cleveland was a bit wary, he was like, “Well, I don’t know what to say, I’ve never done this kind of thing.” So I suppose it was Cleveland developing his style. He just wore a head mic, so he was standing in the crowd. You could just talk to Cleveland, he was there right in front of you. He told stories, he made little jokes.
Justyce
Cleveland was different. He came on a singing tip, a totally different angle than anyone else.
Loxy
Cleveland was a jazz singer, and so you had never really heard someone like him on those beats.
Goldie
When jungle came in, it revived reggae and revived all this stuff, but it was still MC-driven. So it was all about giving the MCs a platform. And I'm like, “Eh, whoa, whoa, whoa. This music has its own body and soul. It doesn't need an MC to fucking tell us what it is. It speaks for itself.”
He always complemented the music, never got in the way.
Cleveland Watkiss
Justyce was also a brilliant MC with his own style. He would often do the early session and I would do the later one.
Photek
It wasn’t like we all hated MCs. It was just that there had to be one place that were no MCs. I mean, everyone was listening so close to the music. We didn’t need hyping up or [someone] to tell us what was going on. It was the sanctuary for producers to hear their music played by the best DJs.
Justyce
The music was so good that I wanted to get hit by it as well.
Cleveland Watkiss
I loved that surprise, that moment where I didn’t know what was happening.
Justyce
The night was never about MCs. It was about the music.
Dillinja
The whole place was full of producers, people that wanted to hear the cutting edge of drum & bass. Source Direct were in there.
Goldie
Oh fuckin' hell, yeah. Source Direct. They'd always be there, in some corner, lurking.
Dillinja
Photek is one of my favourite producers of all time.
Fabio
Photek was the scientist, a genius at building breaks.
Doc Scott
I was inspired to go back to the studio and work on stuff after going to Blue Note. I figured people could maybe get a tune from Photek, but if I made something only I would have it. That was part of the inspiration behind “Shadow Boxing.”
Photek
I think the first time that someone used a filter on a breakbeat was witnessed down there. I think it was Dillinja. It was mindblowing to hear a lowpass filter on a breakbeat. There were several key moments in the history of electronic music that happened in that nightclub.
Justyce
Dillinja was probably the most talked about. Lemon D. Photek. But I feel like Dillinja had the edge. He had that sound, he made them speakers move. He had that bass. Nobody came close to the bass that he brought.
Ink
Dillinja was making beats that would tear your head off.
Doc Scott
There was no greater feeling than having a new Dillinja tune and knowing that the audience wanted to hear it.
Dillinja
I’d make tunes all week, give them to Grooverider and Fabio and I’d go down and listen to them. And I’d hear other people’s tunes and get inspiration. It was like a battle. I liked the competition. It was brilliant.
Photek
We knew each other’s music so well that if there was a slightly different edit of someone’s stuff, you’d catch it.
Peshay
If you wanted to hear the darkest, the baddest, the funkiest tunes, you heard [them] there first.
Loxy
It turned into a place to break tunes. All the early Prototype, early Virus, Good Looking. Everything you wanted to hear from that deeper, more experimental side of things you heard it there first.
Goldie
You could smell acetate in that place. They should have made it a fucking fragrance. [in a French accent] “Ah Blue Note. Ze fragrance of acetate.” [laughs]
Ink
If you’re going to talk about cutting dubs at that time, there’s only one place to talk about, and that’s Music House.
Randall
It was like a local for DJs, people would come from all over. We would hang out, chat about music, get our dubs cut, hear new music.
Ink
It was the central nervous system of the scene.
Fabio
The Holy Grail of cutting.
Grooverider
Music House was the ultimate meeting place. It was like a social club. There were people there just to be there. You’d get ravers turning up just to see DJs.
Photek
There’d be a line out the door of all these producers at Music House. If you were a fan from the scene, it’d be like the Grammys.
Bailey
A typical scenario would be you’d wait ages for someone to give you a tune. You’d get the DAT and go to Music House where these other DJs that might have more stature would overhear it, and they’d call the producer and say, “Why are you cutting this plate?” And the next thing you know they’d be running a plate of it too.
Ink
There’d be people constantly on their phones as the music was playing, trying to get a piece of it.
Storm
I always got to Music House early, which no other people did! [laughs] When there are two of you, Kemistry and Storm, you can keep somebody outside talking while the other one’s cutting. So we played a very careful game with that. [laughs]
Doc Scott
I remember asking Paul at Music House to cut something right at the end of the day after everyone had gone. I’d tell him to do it last, and I’d come down the next morning and pick it up, just so no one else would hear it. [laughs] We were so childish.
Photek
It was a secret society. It was a serious business. There was this illuminati consensus about who was allowed... appropriate... to participate. No one was rubbish. [laughs]
Fabio
Music House became a place where DJs would go not to cut things, but to poach things basically. So the trick was that people would come late at night when no one was around. People would go down there at 3 AM.
Photek
Everyone that was producing music was trying to cut a plate at Music House, so everyone would hear everyone else’s music. I pretty quickly started cutting at Metropolis where I could drop the DATs off and Stuart Hawkes would do the cut and you’d pick them up. Or if you had a lot of stuff, you’d stay there, but you’d have a room to yourself. You’d pay for the privilege, but it was worth it.
Goldie
I'd go to Metropolis with Stuart and cut at really odd times.
Fabio
We found out who the engineers were at Copymasters, the house that was doing all the pop tunes of the day, and we gave them money to do late-night cutting sessions. They were doing it late at night, off the books. It was absolutely crazy.
Doc Scott
I’m pretty sure when Groove had “Metropolis,” it was cut at Masterpiece or Copymasters or something. I remember when he put it on the decks thinking to myself, “Oh, it’s one of those ones.”
Grooverider
It’s part of the job, innit? You gotta put your hours in.
Justyce
The Peshay return night was ridiculous.
Photek
Peshay was ill for a long time.
Peshay
I was laid up for about a year-and-a-half in total, but towards ’95 I got better and Goldie asked me if I wanted to do a comeback set.
Fabio
The night that Peshay came back was incredible.
Peshay
At the time I was speaking to Photek quite a lot, and we became quite good friends. He made about eight tunes in two weeks and they were all bloody fantastic.
Photek
Everyone did a special track for him.
Fabio
Peshay had been away for a long time, and he was coming into the cauldron that was Metalheadz. Groove’s house. And he came down there and had a whole bunch of dubs from Photek and other people that weren’t as well known. At that time it was pretty hard to play an hour-and-a-half of stuff that no one knew. Groove could do it, but that was expected of him.
Doc Scott
That night was a special one.
DJ Lee
The night that Peshay came back everybody came out. Everybody.
Photek
It was the most incredible DJ set I’ve ever heard.
Fabio
One of the best sets I’ve ever heard. One of the best sets anyone had ever heard. We all went away thinking, “Wow, we need to reassess our game.” I think that was the moment that everyone thought, “Right, we’re not going to let anyone know what we’re doing. We’re going to go find different places to cut stuff.”
Ink
There was also the night that Loxy ended up playing the entire night.
DJ Lee
There were three, maybe four tiers of DJs at the night. There were the warm-up DJs like Loxy...
Ink
We were considered the new breed, and we had set slots at the beginning usually. Occasionally we would be rewarded with a middle set. [laughs]
Loxy
I went down there and played an opening set and every DJ was either ill or couldn’t make it, so I think I’m the only one that ever played Blue Note the entire night.
Storm
I think, for me, the really special night was when Goldie got his gold discs for Timeless. He got one made for me and Kemi and Doc Scott and Grooverider and he gave them out to us. That was really special for me because, you know, our boy had arrived.
Fabio
Goldie, at that time, was the rising star of dance music. Everyone on the underground knew that he was a star.
Photek
It was at a point when drum & bass was very en vogue, and so there were people there from all over the world. I remember meeting Carl Craig there for the first time. Renaat from R&S Records. Real founders of the electronic music scene. And then you’d have Björk and David Bowie.
Cleveland Watkiss:
There were celebrities down there like you wouldn’t believe.
Loxy
Lauryn Hill.
Fabio
Boy George.
Loxy
Kate Moss.
Grooverider
Robbie Williams.
Doc Scott
Noel Gallagher.
Bailey
Scary Spice.
Grooverider
I was playing and looked up and saw Mel B shocking out.
Storm
Obviously Goldie was seeing Björk, and she’d come down and have her dinner and then enjoy the club.
Goldie
It wasn't a celebrity thing. But at a certain point you did get people coming down there. But they just looked like they were normalized when they came there. People would look at them like, "Yeah? And?"
Storm
I remember the first time Dillinja came down this guy got on the floor and started bowing to him and, you know, Karl was just like, “Listen, man. Get up.” [laughs] And I remember David Bowie’s people were like, “Oh, we can’t let David go into the crowd,” and we were like, “Nobody’s bothered about David Bowie.” People will most probably say, “Yeah, I was dancing next to Bowie last night,” but now if Dillinja walked in, they would be like, “Oh my God, it’s Dillinja!” or “Oh my God, it’s Photek!” We had our own stars.
Bailey
It was the epitome of UK underground music. There was nothing like it. It was incomparable. It was the edgiest music, the most experimental.
Fabio
If you look at Metalheadz’s back catalogue, all of the tracks that made the label what it is come from that Blue Note era.
Cleveland Watkiss
All of the elements came together. The right club, the fact that drum & bass was defining itself, you had these DJs that were becoming quite popular.
Fabio
It felt new. You can’t underestimate how exciting that is – coming across something that had never been done or heard before.
Photek
There are clubs where people come and play their new tracks and it’s a community. In LA, you have SMOG or Low End Theory and that’s a hotbed of creativity. But it’s harder to come up with something new today than it was then. We were really breaking some new ground. It was a good balance of the technology being advanced, but the barrier of entry was high enough that it kept a standard of creativity. I don’t know how that will happen again. I’m sure it will. But I can’t picture what that will look like.
Goldie
My biggest problems in my life have always been about being misunderstood – abandonment issues and being misunderstood. And I think Blue Note, for me, was about a family, first and foremost, that I wanted to see every week.
Storm
You’re just standing there smiling every week, thinking, “Wow, look what we’ve done, this is amazing. It’s becoming this awesome family that Goldie wanted.”
Fabio
It was very intense, probably the most intense club I’ve ever played at in my 27 years of DJing. You came out of there at 12 AM and you felt like the world had ended. Battered, bruised.
Storm
It just… you didn’t want it to end.
Goldie
At a certain point Eddie Piller, the owner of Blue Note, had to sell the place. He said that the council was shutting it down. We didn't really have an option to fight.
DJ Lee
It was probably for the best. If it had kept going there, it probably would have petered out a bit. You couldn’t have kept that intensity going for that much longer. That’s what made it legendary.
Storm
I just think it was the most phenomenal feeling you’ll ever get. I mean, we’ve obviously recreated that kind of thing in other places, and we kept the night going for years in London, but it was never quite the same. I think it was the first time that Kemi and I really shed a little tear, you know what I mean?
Justyce
When you listen to the tapes, you can catch a certain part of it, but not all of it. You just had to be there.
DJ Lee
I hate the cliché, but it is one of those things where you just had to be there.
Goldie
You know, I smell that place sometimes. I can actually fucking smell it. It's like a salty blue, like cobalt. It's almost like a singed wood. You know what I mean? [laughs] Like a slightly burned wood.
Doc Scott
Blue Note was one of the main reasons that drum & bass went international. So many people went there from overseas, from Europe, America, Japan. Some of these people may have never heard drum & bass before that, but they heard that this was the club to go to. To this day I meet people in my travels that say either they went there or went to a night that was inspired by it.
Storm
I still travel around the world and people will say, “Oh my god, I came to Blue Note.”
Marley Marl
I went all over the world because of that night.
Doc Scott
I was booked by so many people from San Diego or Auckland or wherever that went to Blue Note. It exposed drum & bass to so many different people. Along with other nights, of course, it helped to make drum & bass not just a London or UK thing.
Goldie
You know, when I was there, I’d think, “What’s it gonna be like in 20 years, someone looking back on this?” Sometimes the room would go completely quiet, and the sound would go “ssssshhhhppp.” And I’d think, “What’s it gonna be like when you’re lookin’ back on it?” I’d always think that. It was almost like a parallax. Does that make any sense? I’d have these parallax thoughts of being here now, talking about what this place was like.
Header image: Gus Coral
Header image © Gus Coral
