Reinforced Records

There’s no shortage of nostalgia in dance music, but when it comes to Reinforced Records, glassy-eyed remembrances are justified. Founded in 1989 by Marc “Marc Mac” Clair, Gus Lawrence, Dennis “Dego” McFarlane and Ian Bardouille – who had come together via London’s Strong Island pirate radio station – the label officially kicked off in 1990 with a series of singles from 4hero, the quartet’s chosen moniker. Combining elements of hip hop with the ravey house and techno sounds that were exploding in the U.K. at the time, the label quickly caught fire. During this time, genres were mutating and evolving at an almost absurd rate, which meant that house and techno quickly gave birth to hardcore, which then spawned jungle and drum and bass, and so on. Reinforced was there through it all, and eventually became one of the most important drum and bass outposts in the world. In this excerpt from their RBMA Radio Fireside Chat, Hanna Bächer speaks to the creators of this incendiary sound.

In the early days, did you have your own soundsystem?

Gus Lawrence

Yeah. I think the first name was Solarzone, back in the school days, and then we changed the name to Midnight Lovers. We thought we were a bit more serious: 15- or 16-years old, trying to attract the ladies into the dance. That was the time that Dego joined us.

Ian Bardouille

I got roped into the sound with Mark. We’d drive up and down the country, looking for different records to break in the scene. I think we had the midnight slot on a radio station called Girls FM. We used to get a lot of listeners because we played a wide variety of sounds from different places.

What sort of equipment did you have at Strong Island Radio when you started? Did you have a mixing desk?

Marc Clair

No, we just had two turntables and a mixer – a Realistic mixer. It was basic, but that’s all you needed. That radio station wasn’t just about us turning up and playing records, though. We were the station. A friend of ours from college built the transmitters, and we took the transmitters up to the blocks, into the lift-shafts, and installed the links. In those days, you had a safe house that was also the studio, so we made a link so that you could transmit from a block somewhere else.

The electronics came in handy in terms of us being able to understand what we were doing, and that led to everything we did with Reinforced. It wasn’t about just music. It was always the technology behind the music, too. We were building the speakers for our soundsystem and building the transmittors for our radio station. Then, it wasn’t just about making music. We had to run a label.

Was the first release on Reinforced the first piece of music that you ever made?

Gus Lawrence

Well, it wasn’t the first piece of music for me. When Mark introduced me to the drum machine at college, I started fiddling around, became good at programming, and then I was invited to join a hip hop group. At the same time, though, I was doing Strong Island Radio, and those guys were making jingles in my bedroom. Mark, Ian and Digga would come around, and we’d knock something up. I had around 30 instrumental productions stacked up at home, which we’d tried to get signed by Rhythm King and some other labels, but it wasn’t happening. I remember Mark sitting in the common room saying, “We need to start a record label to get the stuff out.”

You had offers from Rising Son and other labels before you put it out, though, right?

Marc Clair

I remember there being a little interest, but we weren’t trying to seek it out. I saw what Gus went through with his group and I wasn’t interested in that. Record labels would sign groups up, put them on a retainer and then shelve them, which interfered with their careers and mindsets. As far as I was concerned, that [way of working] was out. My goal was for us to do it ourselves.

Talking about the business side of things, the distribution company that you used famously went bankrupt. Do you recall the moment when you heard about that?

Gus Lawrence

Yeah. It’s a bit of a heartache thinking about that. We got a cheque for (I think) £23,000, and the bank sent it back to us saying that it had been declined. There were rumors going around, so I phoned Nigel at Pacific. He said, “Don’t worry, I’ll write you another one,” and it never came.

Ian Bardouille

We did hear rumors, because it was such a close network – you’d speak to other people who were pressing their records, and you’d even speak to record shops – that it was a cycle of nobody getting paid. Once they knew they were in trouble they stopped paying you, because they thought, “Well, if we’re going to go bust, what’s the point in paying you?” We got an official letter to come to the liquidators meeting that said that we could possibly get 2p of every pound that we were owed.

Marc Clair

On top of not being paid, we had our own pressing bill to pay. I remember that being for around £10,000.

Gus Lawrence

It was more like £15,000. In total, Pacific owed us about £33,000, and about half of that was debt.

Marc Clair

We went from being rich kids to broke kids in debt.

Gus Lawrence

I didn’t know about VAT in those days, either. I just thought it was more money. The VAT man came knocking on the door after bankruptcy and said, “Why are you asking for VAT? Are you VAT registered?” He sat me down with my dad in the front room and said, “This is very serious – the office can close you down.” They were trying to put the shakers on the young kid. So anyway, they went bust, the VAT office let us off, and then we started to do business properly.

So you really learned your lesson?

Marc Clair

We learned the hard way, man.

I know it’s a sensitive topic, but what about the subject of sample clearance?

Gus Lawrence

Sample clearance still doesn’t cross my mind, so it definitely didn’t in those days.

Ian Bardouille

At that time, it wasn’t a new thing. You had samplers, but the industry wasn’t even ready for it.

Marc Clair

You’re right. The Akai S-950 was a new bit of kit at that time. I think there were some samplers on keyboards that Stevie Wonder used to demo before that, but they were 1-1.5-second samplers.

I don’t think that was even a mindset – that it could be seen as robbery of sorts.

Ian Bardouille

Yeah, but it was such an underground scene. It wasn’t until the records started to become popular that artists realized that they could be making a lot of money from going after people [who had sampled them].

Gus Lawrence

It was hip hop-driven. You’ve got DJs cutting up records left, right and center: big DJs, on camera, in giant parks and festival halls. Nobody thought they were doing anything illegal. We saw chopping up samples in our bedroom as the same thing as hip hop DJing – playing with another person’s piece of music. Then there comes a point when you realize, “I’m pressing a record and making money from it, but DJs play records and make money from that, and nobody is on them saying they’re doing something illegal.”

Marc Clair

We’re at a stage now where people sample us, and we’re not running down anybody for sampling Reinforced.

Was there a point when you opened it up to people and you realized that you had a label that wasn’t just for you, but for everyone with good material?

Gus Lawrence

I think that point was when we started to get lots of demos sent in, and then the fact that releasing Manix paid off the debt. It was Tek 9, 4hero and Manix, and after Manix sold 30,000 copies we actually got paid. I went to the pressing plant and gave them their £5,000 in £5 notes in a black suitcase, wearing dark glasses. I thought I was the don.

Marc Clair

Prior to that, though, we were doing everything ourselves, and it was getting thin on the ground. We needed more people and the label had built up a good foundation. It wasn’t like we’d take someone on and say “Oh, we might not be able to sell your record.”

Gus Lawrence

The debt put us into overdrive, production-wise. Because we had to make records to pay off our debt that we had to the pressing plant, we were knocking them out left, right and center. By the time we got to record number nine, we’d paid it off and had developed a following.

In 1991 you released an album as 4hero, In Rough Territory, which was a major step because many people defined you as a “band.” Did you ever feel like 4hero was a band?

Gus Lawrence

We were thinking about the money that we could sell the album for in order to pay off our debts quickly. That’s all it boiled down to in 1991.

Marc Clair

I don’t know if that’s what I was saying, but that’s what you were saying.

Gus Lawrence

Yeah – I was always thinking that way.

Marc Clair

I was still trying to make some music, ha. But seriously, having grown up collecting records, you know that the next stage as an artist is to make an album. I can’t think of any jungle artists at the time who were making albums.

Did you invest the label money in equipment, and do you recall how the equipment changed over the first two or three years?

Ian Bardouille

When we first moved into Dollis Hill, we raised eyebrows because we moved our equipment in and made it a rehearsal studio. There were others there who’d been in the business a long time and had some serious equipment, so people would peep into our little loft space and walk off with a grin on their face, thinking, ‘What are these guys up to?” It was all about experimentation, but once we started upgrading our equipment people in the building took us more seriously.

What did you use back then?

Gus Lawrence

We had an S-950, a Fostex four-track, a SY-22 keyboard, a Jamo amp, a VST-Creator to run things on, and an Atari 1040 computer.

Ian Bardouille

We also probably had some soundsystem equipment that shouldn’t have been in the studio.

Gus Lawrence

Oh, and the drum machines: 808, 909 and 606.

Did you realize what an impact your tracks were having in the clubs?

Ian Bardouille

That was an interesting time. There weren’t as many clubs and big raves back then. It was more like youth centers and halls, where people would put on parties. A lot of the soundsystems were reggae soundsystems, so we were playing this new music and some of them were hearing it for the first time, they were like, “Okay, you can hire our soundsystem but we’ll control it. Just give us the records and all our DJs will play whatever they’re going to play,” and then they’d hear the bassline of “Mr. Kirk’s Nightmare.” It blew all the fuses inside the hall because the bass was so heavy. We were looking for notes that would shake the bedroom.

Gus Lawrence

Exactly. On the SY-22 there was this “vector bass” thing. It’s a dial that you tweak through all the frequencies within the bass. That’s why the attack and structure of the bassline changed so much during the track. I wanted to shake the windows out.

You had an in-depth way of working on A&R and producing with the artists. Tell us about that process.

Gus Lawrence

Some artists would produce themselves and give us a finished product. Goldie was an ideas man. He was very futuristic, and would push us as engineers and producers. He’d say, “I need the break to sound like the door was opening and closing,” or, “Can you make the keys sound like flowers blooming?” I’d sit there thinking, “What are we going to do?” It was sound design before we even knew what it was, and we were doing it for Goldie. We’d make loads of different sounds, layering them all on the table, and then compile them into a track. I think it was a really good learning curve for us – and for Goldie, because he was another one who wouldn’t touch any equipment. It was Dego and I doing the engineering and co-producing.

Could you think of a musical idea of his, or a specific way that he thought, that influenced your own music?

Marc Clair

When I first met him, I thought that he was thinking too fast. You had to control him in the studio. I saw that as a benefit when I was making music, though, because I started to think about how I could make one part of a record move to another. With Manix, we developed these quick changes instead of rolling out a groove for a long time, because Goldie had a hyper-speed way of thinking.

One production technique that you used a lot was time-stretching. Do you think that you were the first ones to do that on vocals?

Marc Clair

As far as I’m concerned, time-stretching and pitch-shifting are two different things. The first time that I ever heard pitch-shifting was from Goldie. He phoned me up about 3 AM when I was in bed and said, “Listen to this, listen to this!” down the phone, with “Terminator” playing in the background. I was like, “What is going on? Am I dreaming?” That was pitch-shifting done though a device called a H-3000 Harmonizer, which musicians would use for harmonizing vocals, guitars and other stuff. Goldie was putting stuff that wasn’t supposed to go through there, like drums, and came out with this effect. We used to call it “the parameters.”

Time-stretching came about when me and Dego sat down one day with a 950 sampler, and we needed to check every single page of the manual: editing, this, editing that, and so on. On the last page there was something on time-stretching and we thought, “What the hell is that about? Let’s try to figure it out.” We started to experiment with it and heard how it made the breaks sound funny.

Then, we thought that if we sample the same break five or six times with a different pitch and put it back together, but made sure that the break stayed the same length, it should stay in time but the sound would change. That was the first time I remember anybody doing time-stretching. The first record we used it on was a 4Hero track, “Journey From The Light,” but I also think that it was on a Manix record, “The X Factor.”

You made a track with Diane Charlemagne as 4hero, “Better Place.” Tell us about that track.

Marc Clair

We knew Diane by name, not by face. We collected the soul records that she made as 52nd Street. We were in love with her voice before we had anything to do with drum and bass. Goldie told us that he was going to do a session with Diane and we were like, “Diane who?” He and Dego went to record the vocals in another studio, and when I heard them back I just knew right away it was Diane Charlemagne.

There was a DAT tape with 15-20 minutes of her vocals on it. Dego and Goldie would get her to sing different hooks and patterns, which we’d then work with much in the same way that people work with sample libraries now. For “Better Place,” we would take it slightly out of context and move the vocal around in the sampler until we could get a song out of it. Those were the early days working with Diane. Later, she’d come to the studio.

And you kept on working with her for years, didn’t you?

Marc Clair

I’d say that she was the main voice for Goldie’s Timeless era, the stuff on Synthetic, and what we were doing with Internal Affairs (which started at Reinforced), which was me, Goldie and Dego. She was more the main voice for the early Goldie years, and the mid-period before he was signed.

Did you stay in touch with Diane?

Marc Clair

No, I lost contact with her for quite a while. When we moved studios, it was only due to Facebook, Instagram and Twitter that we reconnected. I found an old photo of her wearing a Reinforced t-shirt. As it was the label’s 25th year anniversary, I was posting photos of people wearing the t-shirts from the archive, it did the rounds on the net and she got in touch. I didn’t know that she was ill, but there must’ve been a reason why we picked that picture out at that point in time. We wanted to reach out to her spiritually.

I find it very positive that you were always very open about re-releasing older tracks. What was the motivation behind not keeping that material to yourselves?

Ian Bardouille

It was a conscious decision at the time. There was a point where Reinforced was almost nonexistent, to be honest. The new generation didn’t know about it, so it was important to keep that legacy of the old stuff alive and one of the ways of doing so was via the digital domain.

It wasn’t done from a financial point of view. It was about having it in a place where the new communities could access it. There were limited releases that were pressed on picture disc, though, which were considered rare, which we chose not to release digitally. We wanted people to hold their piece of vinyl dear to them.

Maybe I’m speculating, but part of what makes it fascinating for younger people to hear old Reinforced material is that was so experimental.

Marc Clair

Exactly. The new music forgot about all those techniques: the vocals, the keyboard stabs, messing with synths, time-stretching, flanging and EQ sweeps. All of that stuff that was bulked into 1990-95 and somehow disappeared when things became more DJ orientated: a “Let’s keep the beat, and just roll the whole set out” kind of thing. A lot of the newer DJs are frightened of playing the old school material because of the tempo changes. Sometimes, we weren’t even looping the breaks properly. I can listen back to that and laugh now. It is what it was.

Ian Bardouille

It scares the new DJs because they’re worried about clanging a few breaks.

Gus Lawrence

There were bits of equipment coming out in the ’00s that made it easy to do things that would have taken us days to figure out in the early ’90s, but there are still things that you can do with the 950 sampler that you can’t do with the 3000. I remember when the 3000 sampler came out, and thinking, “Why does everything sound so hard?”

The sound became harder, the speeds were getting faster, and – although I don’t want to start talking about drugs – it was like everyone wanted to run faster, too. There was a point where we were subliminally putting messages in the music: that we need to just slow down, and pull it back to the days of making music skillfully.