The truth is I need both equally, which is why anytime I get too close to one side the other kicks in. Chaos is where my creativity, drive and passion lives. August is by far my most chaotic month of the year, but generally my most inspiring. Order helps to put all my ideas into practice, pay the bills and build trust. Too much order leads to conformity, sanitation and stagnation, whereas chaos is often tied up with broken promises, burnout and frustration. Also stagnation of a different kind. One based on a lack of direction rather than a lack of drive.

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I used to call myself a habitual rule breaker, but actually it’s not rules I have an issue with, it’s the pressure to conform. I tried my hardest to stay in one lane musically this summer. The plan was to “create a cohesive brand” for once. Looking back at the last month I totally failed at that. Thank f**k.

I was a little worried to play a set of ska based dance tracks and remixes at Skafield. I know there are often a number of purists at such events who might disapprove of such things, but actually the feedback was overwhelmingly positive. People of all ages and degrees of commitment to the classics were glad of a little break from the norm.

Boomtown I’ve already written about. Dregz and I went from a hip hop history set to playing (mostly) soca. Next up was Green Man. I turned up without any plan but after newcomer Ollie Cooks’ epic set to a capacity Chai Wallahs tent, I felt compelled to pull out some afro, latin, funky, tech and disco house to try and keep the 3,000 or so people dancing til curfew. Mission accomplished and credit to Si and Potter from Chai Wallahs who booked an incredible line up as ever and had the best vibe on site by far. A particular highlight was Nana Benz Du Togo.

I had a solid plan for Beautiful Days that same weekend, but scrapped it at the last minute once I realised that I’d be playing between DJ Yoda (who went in much harder than I’d expected) and Sammy Dean. I touched on some similar styles to Green Man but with more of a Hip hop twist to accommodate Skunkadelic joining me on mic duties and to try and keep a few Yoda fans.

The last time I played the festival I went in with straight 140 - 160 shellers to a packed out venue and perhaps that might have kept the kids a little longer this time. The tent thinned out after Yoda and I begun to question my choices (I could blame Madness on the main stage to soothe my ego). Skunkadelic did whisper “play some DNB” in my ear, but it would have been bad DJ etiquette as I knew that Sammy was planning to play house music afterwards. We had a lot of fun up there all the same and my sister has been sending me some lovely feedback on our set from people on social media - which I am still wilfully absent from and have no intention of returning to just yet.

Although I also played a last minute Dolly Parton tribute set (see above), Shambala had booked myself, Paul Lyons and Grandma Funk for a Headfunkt takeover so for the most part I stuck to my original plan of groove based tech house bangers, with a little UKG flurry at the end. I had to come in hard though because Paul had torn the roof off the House Party stage and proved to be a hard act to follow as ever. Here’s a little clip from his set.

I had little interest in filming myself. The good thing about not being on Instagram or TikTok is there’s no real incentive to do so. I’ve realised that most of the gigs I ]enjoy playing aren’t really booking me for my social media following. Perhaps not having a presence might stifle me in future but I’d rather find other ways around it than play the game any longer. Let’s see if I’m still singing that same tune in a few months time though.

The irony is that I’ve been having to learn the industry rules more than ever this past year due to my work with Sound Progression and the University of South Wales. It’s an interesting juxtaposition but hopefully I can teach students how to play the game and how to break the rules at the same time. Then it’s up to them to choose which path might suit them best.

We try so hard to become assimilated within the machine whilst often raging against. it at the same time. I ‘m not sure the two have to be mutually exclusive but I’m still trying to figure out my own way through. That reminds me, my favourite photo of Shambala was this one, where look like I’m in Dr Meaker’s band with Zack Polanski. I’ll leave you to work out where I am in the photo. I promise I’m in it (without a beard).

I’m looking forward to wrapping up festival season for another year, but there’s still some really exciting events to come over the next month:

Today (Bank Holiday Sunday) I’ll be playing some reggae, dancehall and maybe a little soca for Butetown Carnival from 6:30 - 8pm. I’ll also be down that way tomorrow (Monday) for a Sound Progression event at the Norwegian Church. If you want to hear the future of live music in South Wales do come by and check out the bands, it’s free to come in. Plus from there I’ll be going to watch the brilliant Fulu Muziki at the carnival main stage.

From Wednesday to Friday both Dregz and I will be up at Pitch Scotland, whuch is a conference centred on rap and MOBO music in Glasgow. I’ll be hosting an A&R panel there with representatives from Mixtape Madness and Finesse Foreva, as well as Loom Artist Agency from Paris and award winning producer Vagrant Real Estate.

On Saturday night I’ll be playing some global riddims at the Queens Head in Easton, Bristol for the Discotheque at the End Of The Universe IV. Which promises to be a lovely warm up party for Form Festival at the end of the month.

On Friday 11th September it’s Kaptin & Dregz back at the Dub Pistols’ festival Mucky Weekender down in Winchester. Always a great end to festival season, except this time I’ve got a couple more to go still.

The following day I’m up at Llangollen Fringe, playing a full Congolese set alongside the band Kasai Masai. I’ll be bringing some classic rumba, soukous, Congotronics and a few of of the DIY “recycle music” favourites such as Kokoko, Kin’Gongolo Kiniata and of course Fulu Miziki. I’ve been reading up on the various political and historical issues surrounding the DRC a lot recently and will be donating most of the fee for that to War Child. I’m grateful to have been asked to DJ though and as a huge fan of much Congolese music, I’m really looking forward to playing.

Finally from 25th to the 27 its Form Festival in the Brecon Beacons. This is a new one on the calendar and is aimed at people who love both running and music. Other DJs include Grace Sands from NYC Downlow and Mandidextrous so it should be a corker.

That said, if you were lucky you could catch evidence of a shift in content happening. Countdown (not the game show) was a Dutch music show, syndicated on cable’s Super Channel here in the UK. Watching Kool Moe Dee (one of the very few old skool New York rappers remaining relevant at the time) rapping about catching STI’s live to their studio audience is amusing, but also lays the groundwork for the misogyny in rap that was to follow in force. Of course the West Coast would lead the way in that and 1987 saw debut albums from NWA and Ice T, as well as Born To Mack from Too Short - his fourth album in total, but the first to get a major label release.

Here in the UK our first proper taste of “gangsta rap” was from Philadelphia’s Schooly D, who toured the country in 1987 alongside both the Cookie Crew and 3 Wise Men. Which leads to our first UK rap feature, when 3 Wise Men appear alongside Schooly D, Mantronix and MC Tee on this report for Channel 4’s Network 7 youth program, produced by Janet Street Porter.

1987 was the dawn of a new era for UK Hip hop. We still didn’t have any major stars but the likes of Faze One and Dizzi Heights persevered. The latter found something of a new calling, regularly rapping advice for unemployed people on BBC Radio 1, and remained the only rapper on Parlophone Records, a label that went back 90 years even then, and was most famous for signing The Beatles. The former were Morgan Khan’s prized signing to Streetwave and continued to pop up on TV due to that relationship.

An ITV documentary series called South of Watford dedicated a whole show to Khan, in which a baby faced Hugh Laurie claims London as the “Hip hop capital of the world” and follows the street smart Tory entrepreneur from the Record Shop to the Wag Club to his fancy house in the country. Along the way a host of family and peers struggle to say anything positive about him. Not that it seems to bother Morgan, who has a high enough opinion of himself already.

Whilst he comes across as both arrogant and obnoxious at times, Khan’s unshakable self confidence, along with a relentless enthusiasm for his work, is endearing and the programme, which borders on satirical, is an amusing watch with a live appearance from Faze One and an interview with Fission, who seem to have stumbled onto their rap career by mistake.

The bulk of the programme was filmed in November of ‘86 but was broadcast on February 7th. On February 9th Streetwave went into liquidation, leaving thousands of pounds worth of debts. This fall from grace was largely due to an ill-fated magazine called Street Scene, which aimed to market underground hip hop and soul music to teenagers.

Despite his troubles, Morgan bounced back with a new company, Dance Music Ltd, and a new label called Westside, releasing the debut album from Faze One and licensing New York Hip hop artists such as Boogie Down Productions, JVC Force and Cold Crush Brothers from B-Boy Records, as well as a host of House tracks from D.J. International Records - who had hit it big the previous year with Steve ’Silk’ Hurley and Farley ‘Jackmaster’ Funk. Streetsounds managed to continue trading under the new company and kept pumping out savvy compilation albums.

By now though the competition was increasing and more record labels were starting to take a chance on homegrown Hip hop. Jive Records had been an early adopter with Newtrament’s ‘London Bridge Is Falling Down’ in 1983, but despite signing some of the best US Hip hop acts, it took until 1987 before they represented the UK again, bringing us the Wee Papa Girl Rappers.

Fourth & Broadway had backed Eric B & Rakim, but they also invested in Junior Gee & The A Team and Bristol’s Wild Bunch and . London Records had done very well licensing RUN DMC from Profile, and had just acquired Salt N Pepas’s ‘Push It. However they didn’t fare quite so well with the sample heavy ‘Bad On The Mike’ (sic) from Simon Harris and the 3 Boom MC’s aka the Demon Boyz , who had been gaining a reputation after they won a rap contest on Dave Pearce’s GLR radio show, Fresh Start to the Week.

Simon Harris, who sadly passed earlier this year, opened the floodgates for the UK scene and also ushered in the Britcore era with Music of Life. As well as the Demon Boyz, his Hard As Hell compilation introduced us to: the newly crowned UK DMC champion CJ Mackintosh, who appeared alongside Einstein; MC Duke, Thrashpack, Lady Sugar Sweet, Overlord X. Demon Boyz, Derek B and Asher D & Daddy Freddy who represented the new dancehall infused “Raggamuffin Hip hop” style, that also brought us the likes of Longsy D & Cutmaster M.C. that same year.

None of these labels were strictly Hip hop. Jive’s biggest British artist was the Page 3 model Samantha Fox but even the more underground labels dabbled in a mixture of dance music such as Chicago house, Detroit techno, New York garage, Latin freestyle and even Washington go-go. A number also tested out UK artists’ interpretations of these current sounds, or supported fusion artists such as The Beatmasters signed to Rhythm King (also home to Cookie Crew and the Three Wise Men) or Coldcut on the newly formed Big Life, whose other acts were indie rock kids the Soup Dragons, and London Posse, who had released their debut self titled Tim Westwood produced track on the label.

Sadly there was very little sign of these artists on terrestrial TV or even on Cable where MTV Europe had launched a new Hip hop heavy show called Yo! - hosted by French photographer Sophie Bramly. Demon Boyz did make an appearance on MTV in 1987 but I’m not certain which program it was for - if you know for certain please do comment below.

The first proper window into this new underground scene was on August 5th when the BBC 2 series Open Space broadcast a one off special called Bad Meaning Good.

The film centres around its creator - Tim Westwood, who had become a leading figure in the scene with his regular club appearances, his Kiss FM radio show (a month later he would move from there to take over the Capital Rap Show from Mike Allen), and the Zulu Message column in Blues & Soul, which had run up until the previous year.

Although later chastised for not supporting UK Hip hop in the 90s and early 2000s, Westwood during this period championed many local artists and as well as covering Run DMC’s London performance, Bad Meaning Good features the full London Posse crew, DJ Fingers and MC Crazy Noddy in their early days of the Sindecut, Daddy Speedo from Leeds, Wee Papa Girl Rappers and Cookie Crew. Of course none of this excuses his later predatory and abusive behaviour towards young girls and I include him for historical context only.

Cookie Crew to me are the first real rap stars this country produced, in the sense that they became household names beyond the scene and were also recognised globally, including the US. At this time their breakout hit with The Beatmasters was still just a club favourite, but they already had BBC Radio 1 sessions with John Peel (1985) and Janice Long (1987), they played WOMAD festival that year and were popping up on TV programmes such as The Southbank Show and Music Box on Cable TV, which was no longer a whole channel, but a featured show on the new Super Channel. This clip says 1986 and it could well have been, though my instincts say very early 87. Either way, as I didn’t include it previously it seems as good a time as any to post.

Derek B is the other artist who could claim stardom around the same time. He is an early success story for Music of Life, where he was also the main A&R. His second single ‘Rock The Beat’ was already making noise in New York and troubling the lower reaches of the UK Singles Chart. TV records show that he was featured on LWT’s Night Network in November of 1987. I’m not sure exactly which program he was on, Westwood’s weekly rap show N-Sign Radio started a little later on in 1988, but we’ll definitely hear more about that (and Derek B) in the next post.

People often ask me if I miss being such a central part of Boomtown. The answer is almost always a resounding “not on your life” but there were a few moments this year, when I did, just briefly. I’m proud of what the team has achieved, against so many odds. There is no place in the world like Boomtown and the fact it exists gives me a certain amount of hope for the future.

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The Opening Ceremony at the recently revamped Lion’s Den has now reached Disneyland levels of production. The positive messaging pulled all the right heartstrings and the music still banged of course. There were dancers, rollerskaters, circus performers, colourful pyrotechnics and big visuals, but most importantly for me is the fact that Eva Lazarus and Solo Banton played the leading roles in it all. It shows that the festival still has an understanding of how to uphold traditions without being trapped in the past. Something Boomtown has (nearly) always been good at. Plus seeing the way that the inner circle of artists has grown with the festival brings me a lot of joy.

She’s Got Brass were another great addition to the proceedings. I was almost gutted to see them as after their Ballroom performance I’d had my heart set on them opening up our Love Live stage for Big Love next year. That might need a rethink, but they were perfect for the opening ceremony.

Madness were the first full band to launch the new Lion’s Den, 10 years after their last appearance. I bet it must have been a tough sell getting them to open up the stage, but it was undoubtedly the right move - except for the moment when they completely overheated.

Dressing in their usual sharp suits was perhaps the wrong move in the hot midday sun and Chrissy Boy the guitarist got pulled off first, saying afterwards that he’d just had chemotherapy. Suggs looked very wobbly on his feet and started to repeat himself, so despite protesting that he was fine, he was quickly brought a parasol, a reflective white sheet and a chair. He at least took the seat and finished the show like the true legend he is.

Delivering four of their biggest hits in a row, the packed out crowd of 25-30,000 people jumped around the bowl for House of Fun, Baggy Trousers, Our House and It Must Be Love. Suggs seemed more surprised than last time that so many young people knew and loved their material.

Not quite as surprised as Mobb Deep later that afternoon though. Big Noyd standing in for the late Prodigy seemed to be particularly gassed that the crowd of young twenty-somethings in front of them knew every tune, “Y’all motherfuckers know real hip hop!”

Even I was a little surprised to be honest. It’s hard to know exactly which acts from the 90s and Noughties will have been passed on to the next generations, and Mobb Deep are far more thugged out than most of the Hip hop acts that usually play Boomtown. I can’t think of any act previously who would have rinsed the gunshot sound effect quite as much as DJ L.E.S. did, or thrown quite as many Queens street expletives around as Havoc and Big Noyd, But the crowd (including Dregz and I) were 100% there for it.

Of course it helps that it was a very tight show and Mobb Deep have always had their hands on the cream of rugged New York boom bap beats. Thankfully the sound at the Grand Central stage did them all justice.

Despite arriving late (shout out to Feline for “filling the void” perfectly as the stage host) they went through a choice selection of their back catalogue, with zero intention of finishing on time. Only Put ‘Em In Their Place was the noticeable exclusion but even tracks from their new album (and one from the latest Big Noyd joint) got plenty of love.

It was almost the opposite of Ren’s performance on Lion’s Den, though I enjoyed them both. Emotionally open and honest, with the only machismo on display being his inward battles with it, the Welsh rapper had obviously put effort and care into building a show big enough to hold the stage. However, due to his health issues, he’s had to go from a street performer to a headline artist all too quickly, with very little opportunity to evolve his stage craft step by step. It was a worthy attempt to hold that space but felt like too much too soon. He’ll get there though I’m sure.

Kneecap are another prime example of rappers being catapulted swiftly to big festival stages but at least they’re a touch more seasoned and can also afford a bigger stage show to distract from any cracks. We only caught the end of their show but the sheer roar of a full Lion’s Den at night was something to behold and the sound from where we stood at the front of house desk was spot on.

We were late because we decided to watch the entire headline show from L’Entourloop on Grand Central. The group have picked up a much bigger following since I first booked them (somewhat prematurely) for the Lion’s Den back in 2018 but I still got the impression that most of the crowd were witnessing them for the first time. Nobody was disappointed, these guys are incredible. I’m fascinated by the fact that it takes a French duo with three MCs based across mainland Europe but with roots in Bermuda (Troy Berkley), Brazil (Flavia Coelho) and the Netherlands (BlabberMouf) to bring such a UK ‘Ragga Hip Hop’ sound back to the big stages of Boomtown.

After all that Dregz and I were ready to call it a night, but as we’d not really ventured into the depths of Downtown yet, we headed to the Hydro XL stage with Lily Webbe to catch 999999999 (or ‘not quite a billion’ as somebody called them) bang out some high grade hard techno first. I’d always considered the Italian duo to be on the serious end of the techno spectrum for some reason, but their whole set was peppered with seemingly ironic party anthem samples. It was a lot of fun and a great finale for our time at the festival.

There were some other quality acts such as: Heavy Beats Brass Band at The Ballroom, who have grown a lot since they played our wedding back in 2019 and were now jamming a mixture of blues standards, disco classics and dance anthems; also Hawkeye & Hoe at Foggers Mill, playing a rootsier take on Scrumpy & Western using makeshift instruments. But that was about all we really took in during the day’s 30,000 or so steps.

There’s so much more on offer of course. There are countless stages we hadn’t even seen and we didn’t even begin to engage with the storyline at all. For those who fully immerse themselves in that, it’s a different festival experience entirely - one based on theatre and adventure, rather than music.

My relationship with Boomtown is way more complex than I’m able to express currently and there’s a lot I’m still trying to work out with that. I’ve seen it evolve through many different eras and there is so much to celebrate in the way it has become safer, cleaner, more inclusive and with a level of artistic production and spectacle that is truly mind blowing.

With that has come more branding, a strict cashless system, bureaucracy and a host of hidden costs for traders and ticket buyers alike. Plus of course getting into bed with Live Nation, which is way too much to unpack here. Boomtown is built on the tension between ideals and ego, which undeniably makes it one of the greatest festivals in the world. We all have lines that we are willing to cross in our day to day dance with the devil and that’s not to say we shouldn’t all try and do better, but right now I’m willing to accept certain sacrifices to my personal values in order to experience all of the good that Boomtown brings.

Perhaps making concessions is how we lose what’s important to us, maybe it’s how we build a world that works better for everyone. Either way, that’s the type of existential question that has no place during a Boomtown recovery period. Ultimately I had an incredible time and so did many thousands of others. Since then I’ve been camped out in my bed like a 9 year old, watching Marvel, Mattel and Star Wars based material. That seems rather fitting after spending time in such a giant playground.

The smarter end of the scale was taking a shower at that time. Breezing straight in with zero queue felt like a miracle when people were still lining up at 2 in the morning, and removing a few layers of dust definitely lightened my soul for the day.

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Everything past that was snail paced with very little to report on the music front. In fact I can summarise it with: She’s Got Brass tore the new Ballroom stage down before our first set, with a gumption filled, punk energy melody of bangers; Hiphoppapotamus and Fizzy Gillespie were a perfect match for Tangled Roots, although we didn’t catch the whole hour their Latin section managed to get us moving despite the intense heat; we caught Hippo again with his sound system, a seriously hard act for us to follow in Hotel Paradiso; and then we stayed for Skitz and Joe Burn after we played there, a high energy end to the night with J Man from Babylon Dead putting in a fiery few minutes as a guest MC.

That was pretty much it to be honest, almost unheard of for me but actually welcome as Dregz and I spent most of the day soaking up the sights, relieving some of the pressures of the outside world, catching up with old friends and making new ones. Although I;m known for having intense viewing schedules at festivals, for me the music is mostly a soundtrack to those experiences anyway. That and creating pockets of inspiration to take into everyday life. Maybe that one will come on our final day here.

We spent most of the day in Uptown with areas such as the Tudor era themed Old Town and the prohibition era backstreet glitz of Copperwood Heights. You could easily spend the whole festival in these areas alone and still be satisfied.

Our sets in the latter were relatively low key as sound men tend to struggle with treating the DJs between bands as “proper” artists. But we know the deal there and at least we managed to get a mic and a monitor speaker by the second one where we played a game of Hip Hop musical statues with anyone left behind after the band.

Hotel Paradiso was a lot more fun. We went full on soca and despite having major issues with my USBs that cut down my selection of classics down to the bare bones, we managed to get the place jumping. Shout out to Unity and Missy G for joining us on stage for extra vibes.

It was a long day though so I was grateful for the midnight cut off time for music. We got to reserve a little bit of energy for whatever day three has to offer.

*Written in a morning haze so excuse any mistakes.

It’s just a little taster too. Since I left my position as Head of Music here in 2022, I skipped my first Boomtown ever in ‘23, did two nights the following year, nearly three days last time and now I’m aiming to last from Wednesday until Saturday morning. If you’ve never experienced this festival, it’s a lot.

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The hills, the heat, the dust, the energy, the sheer scale of the place and people, mixed with an all out assault on the senses, it’s no easy ride but something about this place still feels very much like home.

I’m better prepared than usual. I have Kaptin friendly snacks, a cool box, battery pack, speaker, electrolytes, nicotine gum, two water bottles, a selection of face masks for the dust and a bell tent booked ready.

On the other hand, summer’s already pretty hectic so as far as our sets are concerned I’ve literally just thrown a ton of tunes into a few playlists on a wing and a prayer. It’s the first time Dregz and I have played here together, despite all those years of him hosting the Hidden Woods, Lion’s Den, Town Centre and Windmill stages plus bringing Radio Platfform to the festival back when having a Kidztown area felt almost normal.

In 1999 Dregz and I had the funniest most farcical day of our lives trying to get to France for the last eclipse. I’ll save the story for another time, but we never made it past London. We both had visions of similar mishaps, but we arrived in time for the main event with relative ease and it was a special moment that brought lots of people together (mostly around the one person with a pair of viewing glasses). Nothing like a rare natural wonder to start the party.

Our first stop after landing properly was the radical film tent - Reel News, in the Thrutopia area (the closest thing Boomtown has to a Green Fields area). Though the usual talks and political documentaries was being interrupted by some jump up drum n bass courtesy of Break The Code, an all female collective of MCs and DJs from across the UK that features our friend Missy G from Cardiff.

Despite the speakers struggling to deal with the shift in requirements, the ladies got the tent jumping and delivered a high energy cypher, showcasing 6 very different styles that complimented each other well.

Next we popped into the Bad Apple Bar where another old mate of ours from back home Mikee Snooze was just finishing up a Euro Trash rave in time for a Medieval themed hour. I must admit I was very tempted to stay to catch some Bardcore bangers.

Not so long ago, I would have had the longest schedule of acts to see possible but my intention is to take it steady this year, largely go with the flow and spend some time with Dregz and other friendly faces around the site. Bimbling around like I used to before festivals became a job for me.

We’d bumped into Wends, an amazing reggae singer we know from Glasgow, back at the campsite, so we went to see her perform with An Dannsa Dub at Tangled Roots, with the added bonus of seeing Vixen Sound’s set just before. I love that stage with the sand, the trees and the giant speaker stacks courtesy of Lionpulse and Sinai Sound. Last year was a lot of fun, playing the closing set there with Asbo Disco.

Despite playing a stripped back sound system set with just Tom Spirals and Euan McLaughlin and guest vocals from Wends and Italian singer Marina P, An Dannsa Dub made the woods come alive in spectacular fashion and really set the magic in motion with their “future dub from ancient Scotland”.

We left just before the end to avoid the crowds, but couldn’t seem to avoid the swarms of people trying to get into the Hidden Woods for the final set of the evening. The increased capacity this year is seriously noticeable without the bigger stages open yet to soak up the extra bodies.

Thankfully I still have some perks here and so we managed to sneak in the back way and watch Aziza Jaye, just catching the last few tunes from Manchester “pussy power” rapper OneDa who brought some serious vibes. I’d not seen Aziza with a solo show before and she was fantastic, starting with her Mungo’s Hi Fi cover of Doo Wop (That Thing) and moving through Dub, Dancehall, UK Garage and Jungle with a huge voice and presence plus warm, uplifting energy that capped the first night off perfectly and with thousands spilling out of the woods it reminded me how important Boomtown is for creating unforgettable moments of unity. I’m not saying there aren’t issues and I’m only skirting over those in the name of keeping this concise, but I still feel the heart and soul beating with strength behind the creeping mechanisations (I nearly said machinations but I don’t feel that would be fair).

Shout out to the dancers with Aziza also. Dregz was particularly taken with their lazer gloves and some time later we witnessed Mike Freear from Slamboree orchestrating a remake of Mission Impossible in a limbo style whilst wearing one of them, whilst some guy drove around on a giant glowing white snail. Just another day at Boomtown really. Let’s see what tomorrow brings. If you’re here look for Kaptin & Dregz on the app.

It was a tough year for most of us at the festival, trying to pull things together without Stu. It’s been a year since we lost him (and Joe Blow) but his presence is everywhere, especially at Big Love. The Great Scott stage was also a huge testament to the impact that Big Scott had on the festival. The whole team did them both proud.

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Not many people know but I actually gave my notice in a few weeks ago. This was due to be my last Big Love as their music programmer. It all got a bit too much without having Stu there every step of the way. He was my main reason for taking the music on in the first place and also why I decided to do it on a voluntary basis. Plus with my own health issues I have to be more careful about the amount of stress I take on.

The whole Music Office really stepped up to help make things a lot smoother and after being reminded how important the festival is to so many people, I’ve decided I have to keep going. I am looking to hand my knowledge and experience to the next generation so watch this space, but after such a special weekend, I’m certainly not planning to go anywhere anytime soon. Honestly if you weren’t at Big Love this year then nothing I can say will do it justice, but it was truly magical.

It’s finally hit home that I’m not indestructible and with so much going on something had to give and so I’ve taken a step back from Writing Trees. I still very much believe in it and they have my unwavering support but I like to give 100% to my projects and found I simply wasn’t able to do that and maintain my other missions in life. I’m still working with Sound Progression and helping young artists develop their practice is its own reward.

It’s been an intense month of social interactions but it didn’t stop there. I hosted the main stage at Feast On Bristol, where I spent 4 days eating the tastiest food that I could get my hands on, healthy diet be damned. We packed out It’s A Disco Thing at Paradise Garden in the middle of that weekend and then last Sunday I went to see David Byrne of Talking Heads and Luaka Bop fame. Genuinely one of the best gigs I’ve seen in my life, just full of joy, grief, frustration, celebration. A true master of his craft, the whole show was mind blowing and to have it at Cardiff Castle was perfect. Although I went on my own I bumped into lots of my favourite faces throughout the night and danced until I was ready to drop.

I’d seen him once before at Clockenflap in Hong Kong. We hung out briefly backstage as I was also playing there. After some warm chat, I made the mistake of singing his praises a little too highly and he slipped into ‘artist mode’. Perfectly polite still but noticeably cooler Let that be a lesson to me! I could have made a new friend. To be honest though, I’m doing alright already.

Despite the fact that I was feeling guilty for missing so many 40th and 50th birthdays this past month, when it came time for my own half a century celebrations at Big Love, all my friends and family made sure I had the best birthday party imaginable (and I am very grateful for that thank you). I felt for anyone in the crowd who didn’t know me as they had to keep hearing every act banging on about it. I am blessed to be connected to so many wonderful humans, but I’m not always the best at maintaining those relationships and that’s one thing I wish to try and do better at in my 50s. First I need to try and slow down, but maybe not in August.

I’m back hosting Aleghcia Scott’s BBC Radio Wales show this coming Thursday, an honour as always. I was last there on July 9th and think I’ve finally found my groove with it. I’m not the most natural radio host, I struggle to be social, I over think things, and much prefer writing to talking, but the feedback from the station and listeners has been overwhelmingly positive.

I’ve found that I prefer to stand for the whole 3 hours, which is quite the work out, so the music really guides the energy. Luckily my remit is ‘feel good’ reggae, soul, rnb and disco bangers. I also manage to slip in some hip hop and house to the playlist. I love radio as a format, BBC Sounds aside, it’s a rare shared moment in an increasingly fractured society, and so the chance to bring these uplifting tunes into people’s homes, cars and work places around the country is truly special.

I’m also heading out to play at a few festivals. Come and join the resistance:

Saturday 1st August - Disco Kaptin @ Summertime Groovin’ - Ogmore-By-Sea

Saturday 7th August - Special Ska Remix set @ Skafield - Peasedown St John

Thursday 13th August - Kaptin & Dregz + Kaptin Soca Set @ Boomtown - Winchester

Thursday 20th August - Kaptin @ Green Man (Chai Wallahs) - Bannau Brycheiniog

Saturday 22nd August - Kaptin & Skunkadelic @ Beautiful Days - Devon

Thursday 27th August - Headfunkt Takeover @ Shambala - Market Harborough

Friday 11th September - Kaptin & Dregz @ Mucky Weekender - Winchester

“Genuinely is the friendliest festival. Will be going again next year for sure”

“Big Love is a very special festival with a huge beating heart”

“I had the best weekend”

“A beautiful tribute to all that we seem to be losing - nature, people, respect and love”

“Thank you Big Love, amazing stuff”

“You have a lovely festival there. Everyone on the team and in the crowd was super sound”

“The band all loved it too, and I got to rave it up in the woods”

“Big Love is so lush”

“Big Love was epic!!”

“Had an amazing time”

“The whole family had the best time”

“I wasn’t feeling very well but still had the BEST time with lovely friends and amazing music”

“Best Festival in the World”

“I love a pretty site and that one def is”

“It was a special weekend with a special community of people”

“At one point I was walking through the festival and every single person I passed (hundreds!) was smiling and laughing. It’s been ages since I’ve seen that much joy everywhere. And there was barely any litter anywhere”

Here in the UK, the term Hip hop was finally embraced across the board in ’86. The number one shop for the music was Groove Records in Soho. They changed their weekly ‘Electro Funk’ chart to ‘Hip Hop’ in February and Street Sounds updated their influential ‘Electro’ series to ‘Hip Hop’ that same year.

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In the UK Pop Charts and on TV programs of the time including Top Of The Pops, The Tube, Club Mix and Solid Soul you had some old skool artists still hanging on at the start of the year such as Kurtis Blow and Lovebug Starski. There were the likes of Whistle, Mantronix and The Real Roxanne who made a big impression for a short period, essentially bridging the gap between old and new skool. I’d add Fat Boys to this category too, although they wouldn’t actually have a chart hit until the following year. Then by the end of 1986 it was all about Run DMC.

The biggest Hip hop event of the year was on July 19th at Wembley Stadium. UK Fresh, organised largely by Morgan Khan from the Street Sounds and Streetwave record labels and hosted by Mike Allen of the Capital Rap Show. The daytime and evening featured a mixture of: old skool acts like Grandmaster Flash, Lovebug Starski and Afrika Bambaata; plus Electro era favourites Captain Rock and the World Class Wreckin’ Cru (featuring Dr Dre and DJ Yella before NWA); heavy hitters of the day such as Roxanne Shante, The Real Roxanne and Mantronix, plus Steady B, Sir Mix A Lot and Just Ice who would all go on to become underground stars in the late 80s and early 90s. Here’s a news report that went out before the event.

Representation of homegrown UK hip hop artists was still limited. Here in Wales even more so, despite scenes starting to bubble up in Cardiff, Swansea and Cwmbran especially. Llwybr Llaethog, a London based crew from Blaenau Ffestiniog, released their groundbreaking Dull Di Drais EP but wouldn’t hit TV screens until a little while later. Geraint Jarman could be seen rapping in Welsh on S4C’s Drannoeth y Ffair which was recorded live at the Majestic in Caernarfon the previous October. However the track in question ‘Dim Lle i Droi’ owes more to Ian Dury and The Clash than anyone from New York and as great as it is, I’ve never seen or heard the track referred to as hip hop before.

The first real taste of what was happening in London that year was on a BBC 2 music marathon called Rock Around The Clock in September. As well as including US acts like DJ Cheese & Word of Mouth, T La Rock and Mantronix, a segment of the program called ‘Hip hop Grandmaster Class’ also featured Faze One live from the Town & Country Club. The group had appeared on Hip hop 15 in the Street Sounds series and also had some minor US attention when their track ‘Layin’ Down A Beat’ was picked up by Sutra Records in New York. The label which had been responsible for launching the Fat Boys’ career. This undoubtedly led them to be the first British rap group featured on US television.

The following month a programme called Chasing Rainbows on Channel 4 covered Southall’s Circuit Crew. Although the episode was largely about the Bhangra scene, it included the young collective of rappers, DJs and breakers bringing Hip hop to the wider South Asian community. Hip hop would go on to become a big influence on the Bhangra music of the late 80s and 90s (the clip below says 1987 but the program was broadcast on 11th October 1986.

In November The Tube did a whole feature on British Hip hop that included Faze One and Hardrock Soul Movement aka Max & Dave who started out with the pioneering soul, rnb and hip hop sound system Mastermind Roadshow and went on to host the Kiss FM Rap Show. In ‘86 they released tunes on Andy Sojaka’s Elite label and Morgan Khan’s Streetwave.

It also included Sanny X & Mr P who I know very little about, except that Sanny X came over from Sweden to enter the DMC Championships in 1984 and was invited to stay in the UK by Tony Prince, signing to the DMC label and recording a number of remixes for them, as well as releasing the track ‘Golden Rules’ with Mr P, who was a rapper from Newcastle.

1986 also saw the launch of the 24 hour Music Box channel on cable TV, which was simultaneously broadcast on Yorkshire TV during the nighttime. Nobody I knew had cable or satellite TV growing up so I couldn’t tell you how much rap was played on it. I doubt much at all from the UK, except for a group of their own presenters (including Timmy Mallett) called The Rap Pack, who are best forgotten.

Music Box’s show Boogie Box did include this quick section featuring Max LX from Hardrock Soul Movement and Howie G (or maybe D?) from the short lived rap duo Fission. It also has a competition to win a copy of Street Sounds’ Hip hop 15.

There’s no doubt that the UK acts featured here haven’t aged particularly well, and in keeping with the time period they all rap with American accents, or at least a heavy twang. But this still doesn’t excuse the fact that they frequently get left out of the history of UK rap.

The only group from this period who do still get some recognition in UK rap history are London Posse. This is largely due to the fact that Rodney P remained a central figure in Hip hop throughout the late 90s and 2000s, presenting a BBC 1Xtra show with Skitz between 2002 and 2007 and taking hold of his own narrative in many cases.

The group were also influential in shifting the window of authenticity from rapping like you were a New Yorker to UK rappers embracing their own accents and dialect (although some Welsh rappers had embraced their own accents and language even earlier). It’s interesting to note Bionic from London Posse’s comments about accents in this clip from the Irish TV show Megamix. Alongside him is Sipho (RIP), one of the founding members of the group and one of the UK’s most influential beatboxers, although he was originally from Kerry, which is likely how they ended up on Irish TV.

This post follows on from UK Rap on TV - Early to Mid 80s. Coming up next time, 1987.

I want to cover a few of these bands in this ‘Field Music’ series, along with some of the programmers that have helped to support their growth and inspired me over the years. I don’t want to make this too formal so much of it will be through my own personal lens. I promised to tell you about one of my favourite bands that I caught performing at a secret set after last Saturday’s St Paul’s Carnival, so what better place to start.

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I first met Babyhead in 2004 when Dregz and I performed on the Dance stage at Glastonbury with the band Dark Chunk. That same year we also performed in the Theatre & Circus tent, with a contemporary dance group called Re:Form. We’d been brought in as guest vocalists by our friend Hannah from Cardiff but there was a local Glastonbury town connection through another dancer in the group, Josie George, our brazen and beautiful sister who heart breakingly left this life back in 2022.

We met many wonderful souls through Re:form and it was lovely to see a number of them, either in person or streaming in through people’s phones, at The Plough for Bobby Newman’s 50th Birthday. He’s a very close friend of Babyhead’s and had been at nearly every gig of theirs from the beginning until they finally called it a day in 2016. They’d agreed to get back together one last time as a special surprise for him and it was a beautiful, tear filled moment when he realised what was happening.

The band started under the name Geek in the mid 90s. They were all family and friends from Glastonbury and the clues to their early sound are in the first gig they played, supporting ska punk rebels Citizen Fish and Alex Gordon’s somewhat dubbier project Bender.

Turns out the name Geek was already taken so Babyhead were born around the same time that they all moved to Bristol together. They’d already been putting on shows in the city, creating the Monsterpiece Productions promotional collective alongside another Glastonbury band called Think. Then in 1999 they signed with Continental Drifts, the pioneering festival agency spearheaded by Chris Tofu, that had scooped up many of the country’s most exciting ska, swing, polka, cowpunk and cabaret aligned bands such as Los Albertos, Baghdaddies, Top Cats, Pronghorn, Tragic Roundabout, Tarantism, Headmix Collective and the 2 Tone group The Beat. I’ll definitely be covering a number of these bands in this series, along with Chris Tofu himself.

Babyhead’s first gig with Continental Drifts was the ill fated Total Eclipse Festival, a 6 day affair in Devon, put together to mark a rare eclipse of the sun that happened at 11:11am on the 11th August 1999.Not the most auspicious of occasions it turned out, as only a third of the expected attendees turned up causing the main organisers Megadog, Essential Festival and Harvey Goldsmith to put it into receivership. Still the stage that Babyhead played, programmed largely by Tofu, was put together by an even more colourful character by the name of Roy Gurvitz, under the banner of Lost Vagueness.

I’ve never actually known Roy personally and remarkably I don’t remember ever making it to the Lost Vagueness area of Glastonbury (though my memories of 2004 and 2005 are incredibly hazy), but their impact on Boomtown and my own personal journey through the festival world cannot be understated.

I will cover this breeding ground of anarchic, ironic mischief (in smart evening wear) another time but the “naughty corner” of Glastonbury in the early 2000s perfectly matched Babyhead’s sense of rebellion and playfulness, as well as their theatrical undertones. Both began to spread their influence into the rest of the festival world, playing the first few Secret Gardens and then pretty much any worth the price of a ticket.

Babyhead also began to make moves across the rest of Glastonbury, playing multiple stages and opening the Jazz World stage (now West Holts) on at least one occasion. I remember seeing them at least 4 times one year. Their music further embraced the sounds around them in Bristol. Keith Allen once called them, the”bastard child of Ian Dury and Iggy Pop” but you could hear ska, reggae (Toots Hibbert also gave them a nod of appreciation) and hip hop especially. Bristol in turn embraced them further and they had incredible packed out shows at St Paul’s Carnival and the main stage of Ashton Court Festival. Their energy on stage was through the roof and Mancub on vocals held the crowd masterfully in his hand.

After a couple of initial 4 track EPs, they released their first album The Geek Show in 2004, followed by Babyboomtown in 2007 which featured local collaborators such as Jakes, Stepchild, Bubber Lucifer from Aspects, Zen Hussies and Lou Drezla. The title track inspired the organisers of the Recydrate The West festival in their next venture - Boomtown.

If I remember rightly there wasn’t one year that Babyhead didn’t grace the Town Centre stage at Boomtown until they eventually split in 2016 (check the video above from 5:03 for a taste). We tried everything to convince them to come back and there was at least one year they played as a side project Babydub in the Hidden Woods, but their time had eventually drawn to a close. I did manage to get them back together for my wedding in 2019, which Mancub also so perfectly officiated, but that was it until last Saturday night. It really was a special occasion, made more so by the fact it was in The Plough, which Mancub is also now the co-publican of.

For various reasons it felt like dancing with the ghosts of my past lives and it was only the sheer power of the band and Mancub’s impassioned rants against corporate, military and political abuse of power that kept me present. Babyhead did leave a couple more great albums in their wake which you should definitely go and check out, but their main legacy for me is tied up in the memories of their countless live shows and the festival fields that will always carry the memory of them, even when their name begins to fade and new generations of revellers grow up without experiencing what we were once so lucky to be a part of.

I have been fortunate enough to hear a fantastic forthcoming project from Mancub, now under his everyday name Tom Quarrelle. But I’ll tell you all about that when it’s finally ready to drop. If there’s any groups you would especially like me to cover in this ‘Field Music’ series then please do leave their names below.

I had made the mistake of accepting the official SPC statement that the 2025 Carnival wouldn’t be happening. Then after seeing videos online of streets packed with people and sound systems I had major FOMO. I wasn’t going to make the same mistake again.

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I have every respect for the committee in charge of organising the Carnival. They have a tough job and are woefully underfunded to deliver the event as responsibly as they are required to, so when they announced that there would not be an official Carnival again this year, I understood.

But it was never going to stop Carnival from going ahead anyway. Of course the mas parade was missed. I’ve played on the floats a couple of times and it’s a great part of the day usually. I’ve also seen some great acts on the official main stages, such as Frankie Paul and Macka B (I also programmed acts for their online event during covid). But for most attendees the main focus is the sound systems, the food stalls, the atmosphere and of course the people. All of those were very much still happening.

Yesterday I heard the phrase “the People’s Carnival” on a number of occasions. It showed the tension that exists when the community feels overly regulated and it highlights the fact that all good carnivals are laced with a rebellious spirit, carrying the strength of unity at their heart. It’s no wonder Carnivals all over the world increasingly feel sanitised and commercialised but St Paul’s have always resisted that. Yesterday even more so and you could feel that energy in the air.

The police presence was relatively moderate and hands off. They obviously recognise that the wrong approach could spark a response too big for them to handle. To be honest though I didn’t see one scrap of trouble all day and I haven’t heard of any incidents since.

I headed down just after midday with Fernquest after picking him up from Newport. He was supposed to be MCing on Brute Force Audio’s 45K sound system but along with a few other rigs they’d been shut down early. Thankfully they were a small minority and as we got to the edge of St Paul’s we could hear and feel the collision of a few dozen sound systems at full volume. Some might find that kind of loud chaotic noise intense but we both felt instantly at home as waves of nostalgia hit me along with the smell of the smoke from the jerk chicken stalls.

I’ve mentioned before on here but my very earliest memory is the sounds and smells of Notting Hill Carnival so perhaps that’s why I get such a sense of belonging in these spaces. Add to that the many great memories of previous years here and the fact that I’ve been missing Bristol a lot recently and you can understand why it felt like coming home for Christmas. I’ve spent around 13 years of my life living in the city and it’s a big part of my history and identity.

So it was a pleasure to walk around and see that Bristol was out in force. Of course you had the St Pauls’ community, rooted heavily in the Windrush generation of Caribbean people who settled in the area between the late 1940s and early 70s. But then you also had a wide representation of underground and alternative cultures from across the city. Generations ago you might have been able to define them as new (and some original) travellers, hippies, bohemians, punks, ravers, rastas, rudeboys and rudegirls, but nowadays all the lines are blurred and nobody’s policing the boundaries.

The music was as varied as the people and as we walked the streets we heard: heavy dub; old school lovers rock, dancehall and roots; amapiano and afro house; modern bashment; UK funky; UK garage; jungle and drum n bass; acid techno; hardcore tekno; soca and more. The Carnival committee had advised everyone to put in Temporary Event Notices (TENS) for their sound systems and pop up bars. Not all of them were successful but a few had taken their chances anyway.

Our first proper stop was in a garden behind Jerk King, where Out The Box had set up a rig and Dave Cridge was playing a mixture of old skool hardcore and jungle, with a number of modern dnb remixes of the two. It was just the kick start we needed and although I’m tee-total these days we set off to find Fernquest some Wray & Nephews. Always a solid choice for these occasions but sadly way over priced with the “Carnival price” increases.

I get adding on a little. In tough times it’s a chance for residents to make a quick raise. Hell we even saw a fox out in the blazing afternoon sun, trying to get a little extra from the influx of visitors. However £22 for a pocket sized bottle of rum is too much.

The fruitless quest to find a better price did take us down side streets we might have missed otherwise. We caught two kids around 8 or 9 years old playing some serious dub. Turns out one was the daughter of Sam Stryda from Dubkasm and Teachings in Dub, whilst the other was the son of the sound system’s owner. They both knew exactly what they were doing and had great taste in tunes. We stayed there for a little while and saw Ray Keith walk into the house next door, but we didn’t manage to find out where or when he was playing.

I missed a lot of great artists who were down for the day. I bumped into Brixton reggae singer Shumba Youth who told me that Prince Fatty was on somewhere. I know Rampage were playing too. They were always my favourites at Notting Hill as a teenager. In fact I couldn’t tell you who half of the DJs and MCs we did see were.

We definitely caught Guire from local reggae band The Golden Guild. He was hosting a jungle set from a DJ called Heavy D, and was joined on the mic by a clean cut white kid who’s name I didn’t catch, but who had a similar conscious roots reggae flow. We heard Docta Flex dropping some Carnival classics and also passed through Crazy and Rising Son’s hip hop set.

My favourite spot was over at Jonesy Wales and Stormy J’s house where we danced to Dub Boy, Rukus and a couple of other amazing DJs who’s names I didn’t manage to catch. The music policy there was globally minded, with plenty of dancehall and soca still but also chutney, classic reggaeton and shatta in there as well. Jus Now played there, with Keshav fresh off the plane from Trinidad to spend festival season in the UK.

It was a good place to hang out as the music was perfect for me, but it was also tucked down a small side street so it wasn’t anywhere near as hectic as the other sounds. I still managed to bump into a ton of people there that I know from Bristol and Cardiff.

There was: my old house (and band) mate Tom Swindell, now best known for his filmmaking; Tommy Popcorn and Gemsski from Ujima Radio; the alternative Cardiff rap duo Skyn; Charlie Stoic from Terrain; Bristol graffiti pioneer Inkie and his partner Vicki who programmes stages at Boomtown and WOMAD, as well as various venues in Bristol; Atki2 - super producer and DJ plus another of my Super Soca Show family; Coreysan, the Bristol based Trinidadian who as well as producing his own music, plays bass for the legendary Calypso Rose; Carly Heath who has just stepped down as Bristol’s Night Time Economy Advisor but remains active and important in the scene; Tom Gutteridge from Bermuda. I’m not sure what Tom’s up to these days to be honest. I didn’t get enough of a chance to chat to him properly but my point here is that in a very small corner of Carnival I bumped into so many inspiring and creative people that it’s no wonder the place fills my soul.

I lost Fernquest thanks to the lack of phone signal there, but thankfully he made it home safely with Mace The Great. I grabbed some Jerk Jackfruit and watched a little bit of Milo at the Star & Garter. One of the original Wild Bunch members, Milo is a great DJ and had his own fascinating adventures when the others went off to form Massive Attack.

I left St Paul’s around 8pm and finished the night at The Plough pub in Easton watching a secret reunion gig from one of my all time favourite bands. But I’ll tell you all about that next time.

Shout out to everyone else I saw throughout the day. Too many to mention but I will give a nod to Elro, ManLikeVision and Vibe Chemistry who were down there filming some promo for their new tune that came out this week. If you don’t mind your raps a little x-rated then have a listen.

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Actually there was a week’s holiday in Portugal at the tail end of our relationship. That had some lovely moments and I have fond memories of the food and scenery, but my lasting impressions are, seriously spraining my ankle whilst storming off like a child mid-argument and prepping for a job interview with Museum Wales, that I had to have over Zoom from the Air BNB. That was all over 4 years ago now though.

Sadly there are no night classes on ‘How to Spend the Day On a Beach Doing Nothing’ but just being aware that it would be a good skill to have is a start. With that in mind, I wouldn’t class my trip up North at the start of June as a holiday, but it was a welcome 2 weeks out of the confines of my own 4 walls. Working from home is convenient but occasionally stifling and to be honest I was going a little stir crazy.

It was just the dogs and I in my dad’s co-housing community by the river. My dad and Alison were away, though in such a close community I saw a number of folks I know and was invited to join one of the communal dinners that are a regular occurrence there. I’ve always prized community and put it at the heart of everything I do, but honestly, I rarely even speak to my neighbours and I’m not sure how suited I would be to this way of living. Perhaps that’s just decades of inner city programming though. As an ideal I can see the appeal.

I was still working but with some breathing space I also managed to do some writing which was a relief. I got some fantastic walks in, with plenty of rivers, beaches and waterfalls. I spent hours watching the blue tits, robins, blackbirds and woodpeckers on the bird feeder. Plus the occasional squirrel trying their luck. It was all very wholesome to be honest, and very necessary. The dogs loved it too, despite the fact that it pretty much rained the entire time we were there.

On the final weekend my dad returned home and my uncle kindly came up to look after the dogs so that we could go on a grief ritual together. I could probably write a whole post on that alone but the feelings are still a little too raw and it feels too private and personal to share right now. Powerful stuff though and well worth looking into.

All the above gave me just enough space to tackle the next two weeks of trying to do two full time jobs on top of Big Love, writing and prepping for DJ shows. As well as the Writing Trees business which kicked into full gear and is close to launching (check out our Substack), I started a project with Sound Progression, helping young music makers to take the next steps in their careers.

I’ve really enjoyed working from their base in Grassroots and some of the music coming out of there is amazing. Of course there are a number of different levels to what they do and some young people simply want to learn how to better express themselves through music. That’s just as inspiring to me. Music and musicianship doesn’t always have to be turned into a career or commodity but for those who do want help with building an audience, I’m there to just make sure they are taking the right steps and ticking the right boxes as they go. Somewhere between a mentor, a manager and a youth worker really.

Paul Lyons is the charity’s founder and so I’m amongst friends and family. We had a good little mission to SouthernSunDown festival at the 3 Cups in Ogmore where I also had a lovely catch up with headliners, Beans On Toast and Mr Bruce.

A few of the Sound Progression artists were performing as part of a Windrush Day celebration and Izzy & The Aristocats played as well. They’re a fantastic young neo soul band who you can catch at Big Love in a couple of weeks (Beans On Toast also)! Things are obviously hectic with last minute preparations for that.

We’ve been working on re-launching Paul’s record labels, Soul Good and Headfunkt after the passing of co-founder John Khan last year. Lots of great music in store but we also took a crew to SMK Live at Milton Keynes Stadium for a takeover. Because of the train chaos during the heatwave it took Paul, Farra and The Tribe of ViBE 10 hours to get there from Cardiff. I had only stayed behind because my dog Marley got heat stroke so I wanted to make sure he was okay.

I drove Luna Amani and Dregz up in the morning after our own train and two hire cars got cancelled. Sadly I missed my set but luckily Farra was around to jump in and the rest all smashed it. We managed to catch a few of the other acts too. Basement Jaxx being the highlight but Clean Bandit were actually decent, Katy B was great, Sigma brought out Barry Town emcee Comma Dee and both Groove Armada’ and Jax Jones played as well.

Dregz and I stayed over another night to hang out with his brother MG and play on the Sunday but missed most of the other acts such as Black Eyed Peas because Marley had ended up in the hospital with another round of heat stroke and I wanted to get back to him as quickly as possible. He’s fine now thankfully but we have to be really careful if it gets back up to 35 degrees again. Even with numerous cool fans going, plenty of water and keeping his feet as cool as possible in the shower and on a wet towel it was too hot for him.

As well as Big Love coming up, there’s St Paul’s Carnival this weekend, Weekend Rumble where Paul, Grandma Funk and a couple of the Sound Progression acts are performing. I’ll be back hosting Aleighcia Scott’s BBC Radio Wales show on Thursday July 9th, we have It’s A Disco Thing on the 25th July and I’ve got tickets for Hamish Stewart from Average White Band, David Byrne and T-Rev’s album launch party. Look out for a small feature on that from yours truly.

Of course this is not just a simplification of the story, it’s a criminally lazy revision of the facts. Those of us old enough to know better find it frustrating, but for the artists who actually paved the way for today’s rap stars it must feel downright disrespectful.

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For the moment let’s put aside all of the many missing pieces in this story from the 90s until now and let’s go back to the 80s. The main omission from the story of course is hip hop (or Hip hop when we talk about the culture as a whole). Written off by too many would-be historians as a side note at best, or at worst a uniquely American affair, for us ageing b-boys, 80s British hip hop is where the real foundation begins.

That’s not taking anything away from the reggae sound system crews. They are still essential to everything, no question about that. I’m not trying to exclude Saxon Sound, or Sir Coxsone Outernational, or Unity High Power or any of the others. But their story is at least partly represented by plenty of other writers, researchers, directors and curators already. That said it’s worth looking up clips from shows such as Rockers Roadshow, Ebony or Black on Black to see some of the MCs (DJs, Toasters) in action.

I’m just a little fed up with hip hop being left out of the party, so I wanted to readdress the balance. I’ve compiled a selection of TV appearances from the early years of UK rap and hip hop. Hopefully this will make things easier the next time somebody is telling the story.

The first UK rappers to find their voice after the likes of Sugarhill Gang, Kurtis Blow, Spoonie Gee and Grandmaster Flash & The Furious 5 first hit our shores tended to be novelty acts such as Allen & Hewitt and Barnsley Bill, or punks tuned into hip hop’s crossover with New York’s downtown arts scene. Acts like The Clash or The Slits put out some great records in 1980 but there are very few people who would include these acts in the hip hop canon.

The most credible British rap track from that period would probably be Bo Kool’s ‘(Money) No Love’ track, which was a favourite on the New York disco scene, with plays at seminal venues The Loft and Paradise Garage (shout out to Wrongtom for schooling me on that a while back).

Then as punks became pop stars you had raps from Adam & The Ants and Captain Sensible. Even Wales gets a look in as Scritti Politti’s Welsh front man Green Gartside raps on their 1982 track’ Jacques Derrida'. An honourable mention to Wham for ‘Wham Rap!’ the same year, though they were never punks of course. There’s also Ian Dury & The Blockheads, which is a whole other story (and timeline). Perhaps I can save them for a future post.

Many of these tracks were included on TV and I’m sure some were influential to later rappers, but they’re not Hip hop in the cultural sense. They were just dabbling and if you had seen any of the above at a Hip hop jam, it would have been as observers rather than participants.

The earliest sign on British TV that there was a new shift happening culturally was on the Oxford Road Show in February 1982. This BBC2 music programme was neither a roadshow or anything to do with Oxford, but it was largely broadcast from the Oxford Road studio in Manchester. They covered a lot of new wave and post-punk artists but in the below segment their reporter Jackie Spreckley visits The Gargoyle Cub in Soho, at the iconic 69 Dean Street venue.

At the time Gargoyles was home to The Comedy Store, which launched the careers of Alexei Sayle, Rik Mayall, Adrian Edmondson, French & Saunders, Paul Merton, Ben Elton and Keith Allen amongst many others. Downstairs in the basement was a club called Gossips where Gaz’s Rockin’ Blues were on a Thursday, a young Tim Westwood was playing jazz-funk on a Friday and David Rodigan had the Saturday nights.

The name of the rap night is not mentioned in this clip but it was called Language Lab and I’ve seen its launch in 1981 credited to various people depending on the source: Tom Dixon and Nick Jones from the band Funkapolitan, who appear in the video. I’m fairly certain they were the resident band; Simon Oakes who is also in the video; and celebrated fashionista James Lebon. It’s likely that all played some part in its inception at least.

Although primarily a Britfunk band, Funkapolitan and their rappers, Cyberman and Man Friday in particular, helped to lay down the foundation for the UK hip hop scene and Language Lab was a space that both centralised and legitimised rapping as an artform. Cyberman was later down with the 3 Wize Men, who provided some of John Peel’s early UK hip hop sessions (his first being from Junior Gee And The Capital Boys in October 1984).

Man Friday’s career is harder to follow but he had a great single called ‘Picking Up Sounds’ with fellow London based rapper Jive Junior in 1983. The single was produced by Queen bassist John Deacon and Wham! guitarist Robert Ahwai but is a decent attempt to capture what was happening in New York.

Jive Junior was the next rapper on our TV screens. In March 1982 he featured on a BBC 2 program called Riverside, a magazine program broadcast from the Riverside Studios. Sadly I haven’t been able to find any footage of that one but Jive Junior was part of the Cosmic Rockers crew with his brothers Superintendant, Mixer Al Capone and Sir Skull. He popped up in the media again in 1985 as joint winner of the Radio London rapping contest (alongside a rapper from Brixton called Little Red Rapping Hood).

In December 1982, controversial British punk svengali Malcolm McClaren released the video to his track Buffalo Gals. Not a rap track as such and I’m reluctant to call it UK hip hop in any way, but it was a revolutionary video featuring breakers, graffiti and turntablists from New York and New Jersey, inspiring the first significant wave of Hip hop culture across Europe more than anything else. Adding to the impact was this Jools Holland interview with Malcolm on the BBC2 music programme The Tube.

After a short incubation period, we get the full “Breakdance” era and a number of breaking crews feature on our TV screens, especially Manchester’s Broken Glass. However this seems to overshadow the UK rap scene and there’s very little on screen representation from rappers, despite a handful of decent releases from the likes of Dizzi Heights, Family Quest, Junior Gee and Newtrament.

Hip hop is still bubbling away on the streets. In 1984 dedicated radio shows appear from Mike Allen (Capital FM) and Tim Westwood (LWR). Westwood starts his Zulu Message column in Blues & Soul Magazine and features at a big GLC Hip hop Jam on London’s South Bank. Films such as Wildstyle and Beat Street give more insight into the culture and BBC2 screens an Arena special called Beat This: A Hip Hop History in July 1984, but fails to cover anyone on the growing UK scene (Malcolm McClaren excluded). The biggest British rap tune of the year is a dancehall track from Saxon Sound’s Smiley Culture. In ‘Police Officer’ he flips from Jamaican patois to cockney chat, arguably laying down a style that would be incredibly influential on the future of UK hip hop.

By 1985, with little television coverage happening, artists and promoters began producing their own videos. Nellee Hooper from Bristol crew The Wild Bunch hired film makers Steve Haley and Julian Monaghan to create a promo video for them and the Electro Rock documentary, filmed at an event called Hip hop at the Hippodrome, becomes the best snapshot of what was happening in Britain at the time, with performances by various breaking crews, a number of US acts and British rappers such as Dizzi Heights, City Limits Crew, Junior Gee and Family Quest. Sadly neither of these videos make it on to television, but Electro Rock does get an official video release.

As far as the wider world is considered Hip hop has already had its day in 1985, though there is a performance from City Limits & the Mutant Rockers on BBC2’s Ebony programme in April (sadly I’ve not been able to hunt this down - also noted that producer Ricky Rennalls of the Hip hop Alliance and Mutant Rockers remembers City Limits causing trouble at BBC2’s Pebble Mill studios for a programme called Black On Black, however that was a Channel 4 programme so whilst they may have appeared on that programme also, it’s likely he’s thinking about Ebony). In November that year Simon Says claims that “Hip hop died when Ollie & Jerry entered the charts and the little kids started breaking” in the Barry & District news but 1986 would prove everybody wrong. I’ll cover that next time.

Note: There are a number of men mentioned above who’s behaviour is documented as being questionable at best and abusive at worst. I mention the likes of Tim Westwood, Malcolm McClaren and John Peel here strictly for historical purposes and not because I endorse their behaviour.

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Of course nobody quite warns you how badly your body will start turning against you but I’m not ready to stand in the Post Office queue and complain about my hip giving me jip just yet. I’m grateful to have made it this far, relatively unscathed, but with my birthday falling on the Sunday of Big Love weekend, my close friend and festival founder Stu is on my mind more than ever. He would have just beaten me to 50 last October but sadly he never got to finish the race.

“You’re going to have to make the next Big Love a special one” he whispered to me from his mobile scooter at last year’s festival. He had a rare aggressive form of cancer that had made him too frail to walk or talk properly within a matter of weeks. It’s a strange feeling to start grieving for somebody before they’ve gone. Stu hated the idea of anybody grieving him. He didn’t want to bring people down. After all he’d spent his whole life creating the best parties he could. He was all about the good times.

Big Love will be a giant celebration. A celebration of Stu, my 50th, the festival’s 10th Anniversary and of life itself, but it’s been a struggle without him this year. The team is amazing, full of genuine lovely and creative souls who have pulled things together through hard times. Stu was always my closest connection to the festival though. I tried to quit events for good after Boomtown but he managed to keep me on board and I refused to take any money until he paid himself, which he never did. People are often surprised that such a successful festival struggles to break even but costs have tripled since lockdown and they keep rising. There’s no way to adjust the ticket price to allow for that, so independent festivals are hit harder than anyone else.

Stu always believed we just had to soldier on and things would improve. Maybe he was right, that’s yet to be proven or disputed. One thing’s for certain, all the work will be worth it anyway. Every year I marvel at how beautiful everything is. How warm, sparkly and friendly the crowd are that Big Love manages to attract. I guess it’s all in the name but it’s mostly in the people that build it. The crew, the artists, the traders and other performers. The atmosphere radiates out from all the above and embraces the rest of the festival like an almighty cwtch.

But all credit to both Stu and Badger. They have built up one of the best festivals it’s been my pleasure to work on, a small gathering with a big heart, and I look forward to being back there in a month’s time. Who knows what the future holds. If this last year has taught me anything it’s not to take anything or anyone for granted, but I do know that I will take Stu at his word and we will most certainly make this a special one.

Things kicked into gear when I met up with Osamagbe Izevbigie at the start of the month. I originally met Osama through his work with the Black Welsh Music Awards, but he has been putting on events here for a while through his companies - OTID (Our Turn Up Is Different) and Afrowales. He’s got a lot of passion and has been putting in the work to try and change things for the better here in Wales.

Back in March he launched the Amplify Wales Charter with the rest of his team. Focussing on four main issues, the charter seeks to take a number of important conversations that have been going round for a while, and turn them into action. Not just at a grassroots level, but aiming at Welsh political policy, to change things at a structural level. I will examine this in greater detail another time, but it’s a solid list of demands and our discussion gave me a lot to think about this month.

The conversation continued at FOCUS Wales, especially within the Black Music Export in Wales panel discussion. FOCUS is one of my favourite weekends of the year and I wrote a diary each day that you can check out starting here. My only issue is it comes at the start of the summer season and it can be hard to maintain these conversations throughout this busy period.

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I’m sure May never used to feel like summer, but it’s definitely the start of festival season now and we often have the weather to back that up. My FOMO kicked in a number of times as my feed filled up with a bunch of Shindig videos in particular, plus footage of Magugu with Mungo’s Hi Fi, Wends and Tom Spirals at Knockengorroch.

Love Saves The Day in Bristol also looked epic. I saw some incredible footage from that one. I worry I might be a little too old and sober to go there these days, but they’re obviously still focussed on creating cultural moments rather than just chucking a few DJs into a field and hoping for the best. I did have tickets to In It Together festival but the jury is still out on that one.

I was at a very different festival to all of the above on Bank Holiday weekend. For the second year in a row I closed the Saturday night of HowTheLightGetsIn with my Big Lovely Disco. Also for the second year in a row I had a bigger crowd than their infinitely more expensive headline DJs in the main tents (just saying).

There is some great music at HowTheLightGetsIn and it was a pleasure to catch up with Mr Tea & The Minions, DJ Ikamba and his sister Liz Ikamba while I was there. But the bands and DJs are secondary to the talks and panel discussions they hold there. My highlights of the day were: the journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown talking about the problem we have of prizing loyalty above ethics; and a chat between Jeremy Corbyn and Faiza Shaheen about the Future of the Left. It was more of a rallying cry and further exploration of the problems than a road map for the future, but it’s important to at least carry on these conversations until a solution presents itself. Certainly there’s a lot to be said for Faiza’s ‘Tax Justice’ campaign.

I wish more of these conversations were making their way into the communities that are most affected by the outcomes. I meet a lot of people when I’m out and about. It’s incredible how quickly a complete stranger will turn the conversation to the problems of “immigration” yet it’s rare that I’ll hear anyone saying “tax the rich” even within my relatively progressive circles. I did see a few people I knew outside of the performers. Osama and a few of his team were there to check the talks, and the rapper and community activist ValleyBoyZero was up there as well.

The only other festival I went to in May was Feast On Cardiff, a food festival in Bute Park. I was asked to host the main music stage there and was pleasantly surprised at the quality of acts. Some of the stand outs were Bristol reggae crew The Golden Guild, Razzomo who are a two piece from the Mr Tea & The Minions family, Cardiff “rage folk” group Ophelia’s Beard (who are also playing at Big Love this year) and a Latin funk boogaloo band called the Shingalings.

It was a long weekend, with a couple of DJ sets thrown in for good measure, followed by a 9 hour drive up North in the rain that should have only taken 4. I am now typing this from a hideaway by the river and intend to stay here for a couple of weeks so I can get my head down.

Now that I have some direction it’s time for action. Plus there’s still Big Love loose ends to tie up, a compilation album I’ve been commissioned to curate needs finishing. I’ve finally found a publisher for a book that I’m writing, so that’s a constant in the background and it’s also time to charge full steam ahead with Writing Trees, the new project I’ve been working on recently with my friend Michelle and a lovely small group of creatives. We’ve just started a Substack for that so please do give us a follow.

Aside from all of the above, I’ll be working as artist manager for Sound Progression over the next few months. I’ll tell you more about that once I’m settled in but being this busy means no extra DJ sets are going in the diary.

This month is quiet on that front but you can catch me at SMK Live in Milton Keynes. On Saturday 27th June I’ll be doing a secret guest appearance with the SoulGood takeover alongside Paul Lyons, The Tribe of ViBE and Grandma Funk. We’ll be on Stage 2 supporting main stage acts such as Basement Jaxx, Groove Armada, Clean Bandit, Katy B, Moonchild Sanelly and more. Then on Sunday 28th we’ll be doing a Kaptin & Dregz set before Black Eyed Peas, Maverick Sabre, Jalen Ngonda, Jaguar Skills and others. You can grab tickets for that here.

I think summer is just about gritting my teeth and getting s**t done. I can reassess everything else when we get to September but hopefully all of the above is taking me in the right direction at least.

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The final day of a festival can go two ways for me. I either need mellow, gentle sounds to soothe my bruised soul or something that bangs hard enough to keep me trooping along. At first I thought it would be the former and I was certainly off to a good start with Peach, who you might remember I saw performing with Amanda Whiting at Brick Lane Jazz Festival. Jazzy and soulful was definitely the order of the day, though her lyrics had a smart sharpness to them which gave her show some bite.

I was half expecting Jasmine Power to be along similar lines. After all she’s definitely got her jazz credentials intact having come up with Ezra Collective, and performing with her own band that has included the likes of Moses Boyd, Joe Armon-Jones and Daniel Casimir previously. Gilles Peterson and Jamie Cullum have both expressed their admiration in the past, she’s jazz right? Well yes, no question, but so much more as well. Her songs were often stadium sized cinematic bangers that caught me a little off-guard and really hit me in the feels.

Jasmine is clearly an impressive songwriter and we had a good chat before the show as I know a couple of members from her team really well. She spent time living in Nashville, the songwriting capital of the world and even Sir Paul McCartney has said that, ‘her songs are very good and she sings them wonderfully’. Definitely an artist to keep an eye on.

From there I ran over to see my friend Ben drumming with a new singer from Norfolk called Lfay. I really enjoyed their set as well, especially the live drum n bass numbers which helped to keep me going. Ben runs Wild Paths festival and is also a programmer for Shambala so he knows good music and this is a project with a lot of promise.

There was no going back now though. I needed beats. I’m a big fan of Cerys Hafana and they were performing at St Giles Church which is just the perfect stage for them but I couldn’t settle in long enough to fully appreciate their performance properly this time. I had the same issue with Mared, which is no reflection on either artist at all. Both are fantastic, I was just starting to run on empty.

KyoYoko from China was exactly what I needed. I’d had them recommended to me a few times over the past couple of days so I knew I had to check them out. If you get the chance, then go see them. I’ve literally never seen a FOCUS Wales crowd so swept up in a performance. I guess you could call them techno punk but with a definitely slice of twisted cabaret. It ticked all the right boxes for what I needed right then.

Nothing else quite hit home after that, though I did enjoy watching Isle of Hip Hop (K-Saulz, KJ and Mr Milosevic) in a sunny beer garden, winning over a crowd of mostly Wrexham locals with their cheeky boom bap numbers but even though I still had a few more acts on my list, I decided to call it a night early.

I haven’t even mentioned about the panels and talks, but all 3 from that day were running around my head, especially the one from the UK’s new black music export organisation, Blacmex. It was entitled ‘Black Music Export In Wales’ and sparked a lively conversation in the crowd. I also had a good catch up with co-founders Kwame and Audrey who left me with a lot to think about. I’ll save talking about that for another day though, I’m still very much digesting everything at the moment and Monday left me little time to think with a grand to-do list that had been building up while I was away. I also need to follow up on tons of interesting chats I’ve had at FOCUS Wales this year. It really is one of my favourite weekends of the year, I just wish I had a couple of days to recover afterwards.

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The only panel I managed to catch yesterday was pretty bleak. It was discussing the current landscape for venues, festivals and artists. Ultimately it was a great overview and there was a faint glimmer of a silver lining, though perhaps too faint to save the scene as we know it. I’ll cover some of the main points another time as it’s a subject that hits close to home, but at the moment I’m still trying to get my head around everything.

The daytime was mostly spent rolling from networking mixer to networking mixer, trying to kick start my social battery enough to mingle, whilst stuffing my face with the food they give out at these type of gatherings. My mum raised me to always avail of a free buffet and so it’s hard to say no, even when my body is crying out for some green vegetables to go with the carb heavy offerings.

My favourites are the Montreal mixers where you’re almost guaranteed some poutine, Canada’s unofficial national dish and essentially Quebec’s take on chips cheese and gravy (which also happens to be Newports national dish). Though this year Scotland took the lead with some tasty vegan haggis, together with neeps and tatties. Oh and a fried mars bar which was far tastier than it should have been and nowhere near as wrong sounding as the crispy silkworm pupae and bamboo caterpillar that I ate at the Axean festival mixer.

I caught snippets of music throughout the day but my mind was on our Kaptin & Dregz showcase in the evening. I’d sent emails to everyone along with follow up reminders and whatsapp messages. You never know if that’s going to do the job though, so I went out on a last minute poster mission around the town as well.

Thankfully everyone had a decent turn out for their shows, starting with Courtney Scotto who I first saw perform here a couple of years ago. This time she came with a band who were seriously tight. Courtney’ has a classic rnb style with a strong vocal range. Not only did she pull off an impressive rendition of ‘Ex Factor’ by Lauryn Hill but her own songs show serious promise.

Next up were two artists from PITCH Scotland who got somewhat incorporated into our takeover as well. Conscious Route is an artist that Dregz and I first put on back in the Higher Learning days, with his band Fugazi Rum. Now based in Edinburgh and laying down roots in the scene with his new group The Collective. They played a solid hip hop and dnb set, living up to the ‘conscious’ name with thoughtful and uplifting lyrics but also bringing some serious energy.

The levels were taken up to 11 with guest vocals from WENDS, who also performed afterwards with her own reggae set. There’s something in the Scottish water when it comes to reggae, and WENDS very much lived up to the standards set by the likes of Mungo’s Hi Fi, Soom T, Escape Roots, Tom Spirals and An Dannsa Dub (also wasn’t Finlay Quaye from Edinburgh?). She brought Conscious Route back on to perform their new dnb tune ‘High & Mighty’ which I’ve had on repeat recently.

Dynesti I mentioned yesterday. Dregz saw her at PITCH Scotland last year and instantly knew she had to be at our takeover. Even though I’d just seen her the day before she totally blew me away again. I really hope she manages to build a reputation and following over here because I’d love to see her keep coming back.

She was followed by two legends of our own hip hop scene, Mr Phormula and Skunkadelic. If you follow this Substack there’s a strong likelihood you might know them already but it was a pleasure to introduce them to some new people yesterday and both played outstanding sets as always.

We closed the night with our customary open mic cypher. Last year we lost the crowd for a while by putting it after a band but this time we went straight in after Skunkadelic and it really helped to boost the energy from the start.

I was a little worried as many of the artists who’d agreed to jump up started to leave early. As FOCUS grows, taxis have been an issue for everyone having to stay outside of town plus many were wiped out after long days of performing and networking.

This left space for some of the younger, hungrier MCs and singers. Many of them weren’t performing at the festival but were either local or here with Cardiff youth music organisations like Sound Progression and Platfform.

There were also a few artists such as Lily Webbe and Skyn from the Lock Off takeover downstairs. It was such a great mixture of styles and voices and the support in the room was overwhelming. We even had a random wedding party come in straight from the ceremony who loved every minute.

Special shout out to Replay who barely left the stage the whole time and Dill The Giant from Canada who popped up with a freestyle near the end. We really wanted to create a unique moment and I think we managed that.

I didn’t last long afterward but did catch some of Yard, an EBM sounding act from Ireland. A great end to a fantastic day all round. I’m posting this very late though so you might need to wait to see what the last day brings.

This spreadsheet has been invaluable to me but when you’re in the middle of a conference with hundreds of people around you, it isn’t always going to save you. I sat in front of it this morning trying to remember the dozens of conversations I had yesterday and all of the new people I met from around the world. It’s certainly a workout for the brain and body being here. I’ve heard many people joke about the number of ‘steps’ they’ve got in already, but I’m taking things relatively steady this year. This means missing out on tons of acts I really wanted to see yesterday, but I caught my fair share still.

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I spent most of the day in Old No. 7 watching The Larynx Entertainment and Tan Cerdd showcases. Everybody represented incredibly well but Luvly at the end was my highlight. I’ve only ever seen him pop up a couple of times back in Cardiff but the Nigerian born, London raised artist has a unique style that brings in a number of influences from Fela Kuti to Anderson Pak. With just keys for accompaniment, his rap-sing style pours out of his mouth like milk with cascading rhythms that really catch the ear.

I finally managed to catch Fat Dog after missing them so many times. They were definitely worth the wait and sounded more Brixton than ever, though my highlights were Kimmortal - a queer Filipino-Canadian rapper from Vancouver, and Dynesti, a half Jamaican and half Trini artist, also from Canada, who mixed up rnb, neo soul, hip hop, dancehall and gospel into a tight performance with her DJ, Chanl Marshl. They’re playing on our takeover at Penny Black later and I couldn’t be more excited for that now.

Another great rapper from Spain called Kawak had a crisp early 2000s hip hop feel to his music, Sage Todz was on point with his new live band and I caught a little bit of Papaya Noon who have just been signed to First Word Records. I also saw a couple of crazy uncategorisable bands from Montreal called Hawa B and Boutique Feelings that were definitely an experience.

The folk and roots selection at FOCUS Wales is exceptional so I made sure I caught a little at least. Scottish harpist Esther Swift was stunning at the serene and glorious St Giles Church venue, and I saw esteemed Welsh fiddle players Angharad Jenkins and Patrick Rimes at the Trac Cymru showcase and Canadian banjo player Kaia Kater, who was on the same Misfit showcase as Kimmortal. She gave me my favourite quote of the day, “When life gives you demons make demonade”.

There was a really high standard all round and I haven’t even had a chance to tell you about the panels, the mixers and the speed meetings. It’s a lot to take in but honestly the only way to experience these things is to jump right in feet first. I’m always baffled by artists who just turn up, perform and then disappear. There are opportunities to learn, connect, feel and be inspired around every corner of this conference so why not make the most of it? I’m already looking forward to what today has in store.

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Then there’s the geographical divide. The M4 may be a convenient link across the bottom of the country, however as beautiful as the drive through Wales is, there’s still no such connection between North and South and it shows.

Larynx Entertainment have been doing their best to bridge that gap, but it’s rare to see MOBO artists from North Wales in our part of the land and those from the South can only really be found in the other half once a year, at FOCUS Wales.

After the 4.5 hour journey to Wrexham I understand it. I too am only really here once a year, but I love it each and every time. Many are surprised to hear it, but FOCUS Wales is by far my favourite music conference.

Many of the reasons for that seem to be by design. The founders Andy and Neal do a great job of inviting delegates who genuinely love music. That may sound like a given but you’d be surprised. Secondly, although there’s certainly a strong drinking culture, I’ve never once noticed any harder drugs amongst the delegates here and that’s really refreshing. If for no other reason than it makes for far more interesting conversations than the 15 minute coked up name dropping sessions that you can experience at some conferences.

Musically it’s not over reliant on buzz bands so you can get to see most acts without a horrendous queue, including many that you won’t get a chance to see anywhere else. This year alone there’s acts from New Zealand, Australia, South Korea, China, Japan, Indonesia, The Philippines, Malaysia, South Africa, all over the UK and Ireland, USA and Canada. Oh so many Canadians.

The delegates are just as equally spread across the globe, and I know because I’ve emailed all of them personally to invite them to our Kaptin & Dregz showcase. This takes a few days but I’ve learned not to leave any stone unturned when it comes to trying to fill a venue. Plus I’m really interested in what everybody actually does and what brought them here in the first place. I’ve made lifelong friends at FOCUS Wales over the years and many of those come from very different music scenes to the ones I’m used to. I’ve also learned so much about the industry and how things work outside of my own bubble.

Last night I met new people from Vienna, Germany and Canada at the opening BBQ. Networking does not come naturally to me but everyone here is open and interesting, so it’s made a lot easier. I did slip away for a little while to watch the football and catch up with Dregz and a few other friends. As well as being a great opportunity to connect with the industry, it’s also a time for our own scene to hang out and spend some time together. FOCUS Wales is the biggest gathering of MOBO artists in Wales and so it’s a perfect time to see how each of the artists are progressing, and to plot and scheme for the future, or simply put the world to rights. I’m pretty sure it’s also the biggest gathering of folk and roots artists in Wales and maybe even Welsh language artists. There’s a lot of artists playing in a relatively small area and the whole city centre comes alive because of it.

If you happen to be here as well then do make sure you check out some of the MOBO artists. There’s a number of showcases dedicated especially to it such as Larynx, Lock Off, Starving Artists and Tân Cerdd. Plus on Friday we have the Kaptin & Dregz evening upstairs at Penny Black with: Courtney Scotto, a young Cardiff rnb singer with gospel influences and an incredible voice; neo-soul and hip hop influenced Canadian act Dynesti; bilingual Welsh rap pioneer and scene stalwart Mr Phormula; Afro Cluster lead vocalist and our very own baritone rap king Skunkadelic; and also two artists presented by PITCH Scotland - there’s Conscious Route and the Collective, rooted in hip hop but exploring various sounds, and reggae vocalist WENDS, who is also known to jump genres. Add to these our Open Mic at the end which always gives some golden moments and it should be a great night.

If you’re not here then don’t worry, I’ll tell you all about it in a couple of days. I’d better head off though, my first networking event is at 9:15am. It’s going to be a long day.

The BBC let me back on the airwaves to cover Aleighcia Scott’s show again! If you need a mega dose of feel good classics then the whole 3 hour show is still available on BBC Sounds.

Dregz and I went up to the Roundhouse in Camden to watch his daughter Tia-Zakura claim second place in their national Poetry Slam contest. The standard of the poets was incredible with Takunda Muzondiwa taking the title, but Tia definitely represented well for Wales. Which was made even more impressive by the fact that back in Cardiff it was the opening night of her play Girl-Coded. She still managed to get a full standing ovation for that though and we all went to watch it the following night. Although still a work in progress it’s a fantastic play and an incredible achievement for a 21 year old. Hopefully she gets to develop it further and take it around the country as it deserves.

Earlier in the evening there was another play on the same stage. This time it was Fight, Flight, Survive, a production from the Next Up Academy which supports young people to make Hip hop theatre in the Wales Millennium Centre. It’s part of their Platfform initiative that Dregz’ first started 10 years ago and I was lucky enough to help out a little on this one. It’s truly amazing what the groups from Peckham, Cardiff and the Valleys pulled together in a relatively short space of time. All respects due to the team who facilitated it all as well, everyone put in 100% and it really paid off. Hearing the young people’s testimonials about the project at the end and how much they’d gained from it personally was emotional.

I’ve been taking it easy on the DJ front, saving myself for a busy summer. However I did manage to get out to Bristol to play The Attic with the excellent Afro Cluster and one of my favourite DJs from the city, Ru Robinson. We even managed to have a little back to back for the first time. If you don’t know Ru he’s a regular on the festival circuit, a programmer for Shambala festival and one of the main brains behind the Jam Jar - which has easily become my favourite venue recently. I’m yet to visit their new 3,000 capacity venture Sawmills but it looks impressive so far.

/old-school-kwaito

I’ve started Grief Counselling which I recommend to anyone who has lost loved ones, but that goes double if you’re as good at suppressing your emotions as I am. I signed up with a local organisation called Platfform Wellbeing and they’ve been great. Although I had to wait a little while, I got six sessions for free. I never know how much I need it until I step into the room each week.

I’ve already written about my time at Brixton Jazz Festival with my Dad, but as we were staying out at Seven Kings and had to travel on the Elizabeth Line each day we decided to stop by the brand new V&A East in Stratford. I’m going to tell you all about that another day but you should definitely go and see their exhibition The Music Is Black despite their distinct lack of Welsh representation (aside from our Shirley of course and a cursory nod to the Deniz Brothers). I’m going to wait until I’ve finished their accompanying book before I write a post about the exhibition but at least they did have Mace The Great perform on their opening night so that’s something. Make sure you book in advance if you do go as they were sold out when we got there and we were incredibly lucky that they eventually let us in.

I really need to do a post about Skindred soon but for now I just want to acknowledge that they got their first Number 1 album in the UK Charts last week. Well deserved and a win for Welsh music in general.

I took some much needed time out and rediscovered TV, which has been brilliant. I’ve binged Season 2 of both A Thousand Blows and Paradise, and I’m currently watching the latest Daredevil: Born Again and The Boys whilst dipping into This Fool as well. How did I manage to starve myself of any telly for all those months?!

Although I’ve had to skip a couple, our weekly Cinema Club has given such highlights as: Exit 8 - a Japanese film which is essentially just a dude stuck in a subway corridor for 90 minutes, but it manages to be a solid buddhist meditation on guilt and atonement; They Will Kill You - which is silly mindless fun that looks great so long as you ignore any promises of a Tarantino like affair; and the new Super Mario film in 3D. Well we had to have a family friendly one at some point. If anyone in the Cardiff area is interested in joining up then let me know. You can dip in and out as you wish of course.

I did my first Speed Awareness Course this month. I’m always fascinated when I have to step outside my social bubble into the real world and I have no idea how some of the folks in the room got a driving license in the first place, but I actually found it really helpful. In particular how little difference driving 80 miles an hour makes in overall time than simply going 70, but also how much more damage you can do hitting someone at 30 miles an hour than 20. Mark Drakeford may have been incredibly clumsy in his implementation of the speeding change here but there’s no denying that it’s saved a number of lives.

Speaking of politics it’s our Senedd Elections on Thursday so let’s all hope for the best of a bad bunch at least. Make sure you go out and vote, just don’t vote for any fascists or racists please.

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I keep promising to tell you more about this secret project I’ve started with my friend Michelle and a great little team of legends. I will but for now we’re just celebrating the fact that we’ve been accepted on Business Wales’ Start Up Accelerator programme which is a huge win for us.

This week you can catch me up at FOCUS Wales with our Kaptin & Dregz takeover at Penny Black on Friday night. We’ll be upstairs from 6:45pm until Midnight with artists from Wales, Scotland and Canada. We’ll also be hosting an Open Mic cypher at the end if anyone wants to join in.

Later in the month I’ll be back at How The Light Gets In festival in Haye On Wye on Saturday 23rd May and hosting the music stage at Feast On Cardiff the following weekend. I’ll also be joining Paul Lyons to play two very different nights in Cardiff on Saturday May 30th.

First is the Toucan Club reunion at Porters. If you don’t know the Toucan Club it’s one of the best venues that Cardiff ever had, plus they gave me my first ever DJ residency and allowed us to put on our Higher Learning nights for years. It was like a peaceful dress code free oasis in a sea of violent shoes and shirts venues, and a hub of creativity whose regulars included Super Furry Animals, Sian from Kosheen, Amy Wadge and so many others from the local scene. We’ll be staying true to their weekend recipe of funk and soul for the evening plus their house band will be reforming with Dregz and Dionne Bennet on vocals.

The second night is joining The Tribe of Vibe and Paul Lyons on the tech house tip at Bar 105, a great underground basement venue in Cathays. I last went there for Cardiff Dub Club and it had the best sound in the city. I’m itching to play some new music out for that as well. Tickets for that are here.

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It was great to get out of the house, catch up with my Dad for a few days and experience something that would wrap me up in warm, healing jazz sounds. This trip has also given my inspiration a necessary boost, but I’m glad it’s time to go home now. I’ll keep this post short and sweet but I couldn’t just leave you hanging, so here’s the Sunday highlights.

Amanda Whiting

I bumped into a number of young Welsh rappers, singers, musicians and producers whilst I was at the festival and I was surprised at how few knew the only Welsh artist on the line up, especially somebody as established as this talented composer and harpist, who has not only worked with the likes of Matthew Halsall, Alice Russell, Chip Wickham, DJ Yoda, Rebecca Vasmant and Don Leisure, but is also the Jazz harp specialist at both Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama and Royal Birmingham Conservatoire.

I was raised on a diet of Gilles Peterson and Straight No Chaser magazine, so Amanda’s albums on Jazzman, Albert’s Favourites and First Word are right up my street. Her music is a warm and textured fusion of soulful grooves and stripped back spiritual jazz that really does soothe the soul, perfect to start our Sunday with. Guest vocalist Peach is also a talent to look out for in future.

Zena

In keeping with the tastes of young jazz listeners at the moment, there’s a lot of mellow music at this festival and I was worried that I might not actually have the patience for any more of it, but for all their laid back charm, Zena have a really exciting mix of sounds and the Brownswood signed duo brought along Alex Cosmo Blake on guitar and Zoe Pascal on drums to form a seriously tight and talented quartet.

On a mission to bring out the sexiness in Ethiopian music, Zeno certainly smooth out the edges while keeping a lot of the rhythms, melodies and tones of their homeland intact. There’s plenty of other influences to help with that from rnb and neo soul to Dr Dre style g-funk. It all makes for a really satisfying blend.

Joe Armon-Jones

I’ve seen and also booked Joe a number of times either with his solo project or as keys player with Ezra Collective and Nubya Garcia. Perhaps even with Binker and Moses but that’s going back a decade so I couldn’t swear to that. I’m a fan for sure but Dad and I were getting impatient after sitting through an underwhelming act before and I was really starting to feel wiped out from the weekend. I’m meant to be recovering from stress related fatigue and had already pushed things a little too far . We left half way through and headed back to the hotel but what we did catch was fantastic as always. As jazzed out as I was, I found it especially tricky to leave when Asheber was back on the mic for some of their reggae collaborations. Still, it’s important to live to jazz another day. I’m sure I’ll be back here again next year. I highly recommend you check it out also.