The standard narrative of pop tells us how, after the initial US rock’n’roll explosion of the ’50s, British musicians who’d grown up on Elvis and Chuck Berry sold the sound back to the Yanks in the ’60s, transmogrified.
Those who dug deeper (The Beatles, The Who, Clapton, Van Morrison) reached back to early blues and r’n’b and, in trying to replicate what they heard in suburban English bedrooms and cramped Northern clubs, created a sonic hybrid that boys with guitars still build on today.
There was, briefly, a moment in the early ’00s when something similar happened between the US r’n’b of Timbaland, The Neptunes, and Dallas Austin, and a coterie of British bands - all nominally ‘indie’ - who tried to emulate their productions. The potential here was dizzying, but it never sparked the revolution in British pop as I had hoped.
The Beta Band came closest, with Steve Mason’s love of US r’n’b finding full flower on ‘Hot Shots II’, where he employed C Swing to underpin the band’s psych-folk with stuttering programmed beats. Arguably, Mason was better at doing this solo, in his King Biscuit Time guise: I Walk The Earth is the blueprint for how the revolution could have sounded.
Simian were another band touting r’n’b influences at this time. When I interviewed them before the release of their second album, ‘We Are Your Friends’, they were full of awe at the futurefunk The Neptunes were conjuring for the likes of Kelis and Britney Spears. But they took a different direction - Justice came along and remixed the album’s title track, and Simian Mobile Disco was born.
I was trying to do something similar at the time, and the result of my dabbling, picked up by Wall Of Sound in 2004, was a song called Selfish Girls Stay Thin. It was my attempt - as a suburban white Brit with minimal programming knowledge - to recreate the sound of my favourite record of the time, Justin Timberlake’s Neptunes-produced Rock Your Body. As an attempt to imitate Timberlake, it fails miserably - but of course that’s the point. The process creates something new, something DIY, ramshackle, a bit silly, and obviously English.
I really hoped these bands (I don’t put myself in the same bracket, obviously!) would spark a decade of strange, idiosyncratic English indie-r’n’b in the same way it did in the ’60s. But it never quite happened, leaving a seam of pop that still needs to be mined.
Christian Ward, September 2010
