[porkmarras]

Well, in the sense that they were sat in the studio day after day, with a DJ coming in and saying, okay take this bit here…
Well, they weren’t even sat there. Doug Wimbish said to me… Sugarhill had two studios. They had Hugo & Luigi’s studio and had another studio, they were running back and forwards between them. Pumpkin recorded in a garage, I think. They were fantastic musicians.
Well, the MFP guys were, too.
Yeah, they were as well, that’s true. I don’t know. There’s an element of that, but it was different. They were bringing a definite style. They weren’t like hacks who could turn themselves to anything. They were, to some extent, listening to the rappers. I think there were people at Sugarhill who were like that. Jiggs Chase, who was a kind of arranger and I think they had struggles with him wanting to do things in a very slick way and the rappers kind of saying ‘do we have to do it this way?’ They were sort of functionaries, really.
We were trying to nail down with Flash exactly what role he played on those records and it’s all a bit nebulous, but one of the things he said was that he brought in records, like ‘Freedom’, for example. So I’m assuming he went in and said play this bit?
I got the sense that he began to be marginalised from day one. And that’s why ‘Adventures…’ was such an important record. It brought hip hop and what hip hop actually was back into the frame, because I think he’d been finding the breaks. He’d been the archivist, the record hunter. He was the DJ who knew what was working. He was creating all of the music in the early days and suddenly they get a record deal and I’m sure there was a tendency to say… In fact I’m sure I’ve heard it said, though I’m not sure who by so I’ll have to be careful what I say…I’m sure somebody has said to me, who was involved, ‘Well what did he do anyway?’. In a way, you could say they had a point. Once you’ve got the idea, the bit from ‘Freedom’ and learnt the chords, played it and got the vocalists in it’s like making a traditional pop record. And who’s this guy standing around? That’s what was wrong with hip hop in the early days on record.
Do you think that if sampling technology had been further down the road that he would have become their producer, in the way that DJ Premier has done?
Possibly. It’s hard to say because they were all very young and very inexperienced. They fell right into it. They got record contracts with these entrepreneurs who were very important and had many positive qualities but also were…. They didn’t know anything about this music, but they’d a lot of experience in… manipulation, let’s say. All these people, like Paul Winley, Bobby Robinson, Sylvia and Joe Robinson, that guy in Harlem, can’t remember his name… Some of these people were on the verge of criminality.
Did you read that MCA & The Mafia book? That has lots of stuff about Sugarhill and Morris Levy in it.
Yeah, the whole Mafia involvement. It’s funny… I sometimes get sent manuscripts for American university presses and they tend to be cultural studies things about hip hop, which usually claim that what a wonderful thing it was in the early days of hip hop because it was all black-owned business and you have to say, well, unfortunately, that’s not strictly true. If it was true, they tend to be criminals or semi-criminals or if they weren’t criminals themselves, then they were involved with the Mafia. So it’s a very utopian view of that period, and it’s not a good idea to get nostalgic about it because it was corrupt. It certainly did no favours for the artists.
Artistically, it did give a few favours because there was a lot of paternalism, the way they did things. There was a lot of control. They used control to manipulate people and it was even easier to do it with people in hip hop because they were so young and inexperienced and they hadn’t even had the experience of paying their dues in a funk band. They were ripe for the taking. A way of things established itself, and I think the musicians were intermediaries on a number of levels. So I think Flash, as an inquisitive and inventive person, would’ve learned to use samplers.
He was already playing around with drum machines. But I really don’t think they were given access to the technology. I mean, there were sort of samplers in those days, sampling little fragments, cos I was making a record around that time and we worked out ways of making little samples using what was around at the moment. There were Fairlights, but they were useless, and nobody had them. They were hugely expensive pieces of junk which were going in completely the wrong direction. There was AMS, a digital delay and you could capture bits of sounds and trigger them. You could do that but nobody was giving people like Flash access to the studio to experiment. You know, ‘we’re busy, we’re busy. This is how we do things.’
I suppose it goes back to ownership of the means of production!
It does! It does. All that’s completely changed now. In those days, music was made in studios, apart from things like Paul Winley’s Bambaataa thing, which was a live gig. And chaotically and badly recorded as it is, thank God it exists. And there were the bootlegs. I’ve got one or two, Live At The Convention.
Do you think if Flash hadn’t thought of it, someone else would have? You know, Walter Gibbons was sort of doing what Flash was doing.
Yeah, well disco was experimenting with it.
There are these strange and largely hidden links between hip and disco, after all. So do you think they would have?
I think they already had. Disco, as you know, had its own peculiar transformations and translations going on because there’s a commercial view of disco, a mainstream view of disco. But, you know, for me disco, the very early history of it, has very strong similarities with hip hop, in the sense that disco didn’t exist any more than hip hop didn’t exist. And people in little underground parties were playing lots of records that seemed appropriate to their scene. Like Barrabas records or African records or rock records. And that mix, is very very similar, in a way, to the mix of the early hip hop records. And then, of course, the industry caught on in the same way and gradually there became a thing called disco music and people started making disco records. But nobody was making disco records, because they didn’t exist when it first started.
I think it was to do with when hip hop started to emerge which was – I don’t know when it was really – ’75 or ’76? And at that period disco was starting to become a real commercial proposition. People were starting to make real disco records and it felt very different to the R&B tradition, and so there was a resistance which is why people like Bobby Robinson got involved in hip hop, because they couldn’t relate to that since they were so deeply embedded in the R&B tradition. I suppose the European disco records – I’m not totally sure on my history here – but I suppose the European disco records were starting to come out then.
They started to come out earlier, but the more motorised ones were about ’76 onwards, I guess.
Yeah, which would roughly coincide with hip hop establishing itself. I can imagine them thinking, a) this is gay music, b) it just hasn’t got anything we can relate to. But, at the same time, there were really strong connections. ‘Trans Europe Express’ was a big record on every scene, disco, rock, I dunno, hip hop scene.
‘The Mexican’ is another cross genre hit…
Yeah, and there’s a disco version of it, too.
The Bombers thing on West End?
Yeah, that was a big record. You could probably pull out a lot of records that were attributable to both scenes. I think the main thing was the difference of the beat. It’s interesting about Walter Gibbons with ‘Set It Off’. That was like a hip hop record, really. It was like a hip hop break record. But then it was like a disco record as well. Walter Gibbons was mixing all kiinds of breaks, which Flash was doing. And the idea of extending using breaks, Tom Moulton had done that. So in a way they had very similar histories, but the culture that surrounded them was very different. The aspirations were also different. In the end, I think disco was quite materialistic in many ways and it was about pure pleasure in many respects and escapism. I think hip hop was kind of escapism, but it had a kind of strong social aspirations, it was about a whole kind of culture.
Do you think it had many aspirations beyond let’s have a party? In the beginning, at least.
From what I can gather about the Kool Herc days it was ‘let’s have a party’. He was a DJ playing for parties. He was playing James Brown stuff and the MCs were shouting nonsense over the mic. I can’t see that there was any more to it than that. A style developed, you know, a style of clothes and dancing. Graffiti already existed anyway, that was another thing. At some point, the same people in the same scene developed this secret society and they all came to mean something. Certain people with big ideas came along, like Bambaataa, and saw links between what was happening socially, what people were doing with dance, graffiti, the kind of records that were being played, the way people behaved. He had a kind of distance from it. He could look at what was going on and analyse it. He could say, this is what I would like to do with this movement. Then, of course, people started to write it up and as soon as a history comes into being it creates a kind of shape and logic. It’s one history. It’s not the history, the sole history. Unfortunately, with old school hip hop not many people wrote about it. It’s quite hard now, because people have died and disappeared