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What is unnerving and uncanny and which differentiates grime’s sonics from darker garage, is the sheer alien newness of the bass sound (dark bass was not invented by grime, as any junglist will tell you) and frequently off-kilter arrangements, all jolts, awkward gaps and juddering surprises. Wiley’s eskimo creations were perhaps the pinnacle of this: taken to the extreme on his ‘devil mixes’. These were remixes of tracks like ‘Eskimo’, ‘Colder’ and ‘Avalanche’ made even more sinister by stripping the drums out, inspired partly by the dub versions his dad’s reggae sound system had created, but so named because they ‘sounded evil’. As if to highlight the ungodly power they had, the devil mixes sold really well, and Wiley used the proceeds to buy a car, which he then crashed. Convinced that his creations were cursed and too powerful to control, he insisted on calling them ‘bass mixes’ after that.

Before it hardened down into the fabric, Jammer, Dizzee, Danny Weed and Wiley drew another strain of futurism into this creatively molten moment: what’s come to be known as sinogrime, a glitch of Chinese instrumentation in grime’s normally stable sonic geography (the UK and Jamaica, with a bit of US rap swagger, house from Chicago and syncopation from West Africa). Grime’s instinctive (and functional) tech-positivity is what always helped it feel like sonic futurism incarnate: rejecting the organic clutter of live instrumentation in favour of empty space, dehumanised synths and cyborg basslines. I was unlucky enough to see Roll Deep play a one-off show with a live band at the Stratford Rex in 2005, and it was all kinds of wrong – the wholesome twang of the live bass guitar the antithesis to grime’s aesthetic (let us not even deign to discuss Ed Sheeran’s strumming collaborations with grime MCs). Grime is situated in the future aesthetically, and perhaps embedded in sinogrime’s Chinese elements is a sort of intuition about where the future lies, geopolitically. In looking east beyond the blinking light of One Canada Square, sinogrime producers were offering a kind of accidental socio-political prophecy, taking grime’s acquisitive tendencies and sending them east on a journey beyond Britain’s pre-2008 bubble.

Following the history of slum clearances, Luftwaffe bombing, empty warehouses and managed decline, by the early 2000s east London had become the archetype of the post-industrial city. The future had gone to China, and grime instinctively followed. You can hear it in the delicate sino scales on Dizzee’s ‘Do It’, a minor lament, as the rough and tough drums try and put a brave face on the poignant instrumentation and deeply depressive lyrics (‘Feds don’t understand us, adults don’t understand us, no one understands us’, he mumbles, forlorn, on the intro12). On the stunning ‘I Luv U Remix’, what might be a MIDI (digitised) version of a guzheng or guqin – Chinese stringed instruments – is used to play out a light but intensely melodic bed for the MCs’ heartfelt lyrical sketches, accompanied only by the sparest, subtlest snatches of bass and drum. Wiley and Danny Weed’s ‘Blue Rizla’, Jammer’s ‘Weed Man’, and Kode9’s ‘Sinogrime Minimix’ are all in this category. Of course, there is a direct influence from the staple teenage boy’s cultural diet of Wu Tang Clan, kung-fu movies, and video games like Mortal Kombat: indeed one of Dizzee’s best teenage productions, ‘Street Fighter’, was lifted directly from the game’s theme tune.

Another pinnacle of emotive sinogrime built this connection in a more direct way. Watching a video of the 1993 Jet Li film Twin Warriors with his dad, Jammer was struck by the heartstrings-tugging theme music, in particular one ear-worm of a snippet. He was determined to sample it, and after playing around with TV leads and Scart plugs, he managed to wire the VHS to his mixing desk. ‘It came straight off the VHS,’ he told me, justifiably proud of his teenage ingenuity. ‘That’s why it sounds so grainy – but it kind of adds to the emotional power of it. Now music’s very digital and very focused, and cleaner – but in those days, that’s what you had to do, to improvise to build the sound you wanted, and it was rougher, but had a lot of heart too. Like a lot of the records I made at that time, it was emotional, orchestral stuff – when that underground sound was flourishing.’ The MCs didn’t miss an opportunity to respond to the emotional vulnerabilities in the instrumental, ‘Chinaman’, built around a beautiful, elegiac flute loop – there’s a clip from Deja Vu in 2003 of MC Stormin spitting: ‘Where do I go from here? Shed a little tear for my friend that I lost this year, back in the day we used to go everywhere/Same things that make you love make you cry, everybody that you seem to love seems to die.’13 ‘Chinaman’ became the instrumental to Sharky Major’s ‘This Ain’t A Game’ – the perfect partner for Sharky’s soul-searching lyrics. ‘I feel like I’m not as good as people say I am, I know I can spit ten times better than I’ve ever done – see me rise with the morning sun,’14 he pleads. He’s surrounded by criminals, cops and people who’ve ‘never seen a day’s work’, and the dream of ‘superstar status’ is his only possible option. He never did get there, or even very close, but he did make one of the greatest reflective grime tunes of all time.

Swept up in the creative ferment of the early millennium, other young producers who had grown up on jungle and UK garage started making music that sounded nothing like them. Skepta’s first release, more than a year before he ever picked up the mic, was a reworking of ‘Pulse X’ and ‘Eskimo’, released in 2002 on Wiley’s label as ‘Pulse Eskimo’. It’s an utterly ferocious instrumental track, and accompanied by an appropriately grimy conception story. It was built with Music 2000 on the PlayStation One (at this stage Skepta and his brother Jme were even making beats using the game Mario Paint) – and before Wiley signed it up, Skepta was playing it on his show on a pirate-radio station in Tottenham, Heat 96.6 FM. ‘I gave it to a few DJs in the hope they’d start playing it,’ Skepta recalled, ‘and one of them, I don’t know if it was Mac 10 from Nasty Crew, or Karnage from Roll Deep, well they played it at Sidewinder, and when they played it, on the drop, someone started letting off gunshots in the dance.’ Chaos ensued, mercifully no one was injured – and ever since, the tune has been known by the nickname Gunshot Riddim. It’s an appropriate testament to the sheer power of a grime instrumental.

While these new creations were honed by more experienced former junglists like Wiley and Geeneus, a younger generation, still in their mid-teens, were just starting out with making music, developing the new sound and their mic skills in schools and youth clubs. Grime as a genre, and a scene, was built on an astonishing level of youthful autonomy and self-sufficiency – but for all its entrepreneurial, DIY vigour and self-starting rhetoric, the state played a little-noticed role in some of its earliest developments. For one thing, there was the youth clubs. Dizzee describes an informal circuit of them as his apprenticeship on the mic, ‘going from youth club to youth club, it started there’ – they would travel to youth clubs in Canning Town (east London), Deptford (south-east) and further east to Beckton, Kano’s local. It was at Lincoln Arches youth club in Bow (long since closed down), part of the Lincoln North Estate, where Wiley, Dizzee, Nasty Crew and Ruff Sqwad among others would hang out, play table tennis and pool, and then sometimes be allowed to have raves, where they’d practise spitting over garage and proto-grime. ‘Friday night after school you’d think, “Yes, I need to go to the Linc, I need to go clubbing, I need to impress everyone and the girls there,”’ Tinchy Stryder recalled a few years later.

Another youth club, across the other side of Canary Wharf in the Isle of Dogs, was responsible for financing Ruff Sqwad’s first ever release, the squalling, punky ‘Tings In Boots’. ‘Obviously you needed money to put out a song, and we were still in school. Jeff and Jo, who ran that youth club on the Isle of Dogs, they were sort of the unsung heroes of grime,’ Rapid said. ‘They saw our talents, they sort of managed us, they thought yeah we’ll put a couple of hundred quid into actually bringing this out.’ Other times they’d pool their dinner money to fund their early vinyl releases. And the elders on the nascent local scene were always there to help them too, with advice, practical hands-on tips and financial support: ‘When we got further down the line with our productions, we used to go down to Jammer’s basement and give him the parts, I remember he was like, “Raps, Dirt, your tunes are banging, but you have to get mixdowns,” and we were like, “What’s that?” We didn’t know what that was! We were like “What do you do?” – by then he was already well into making grime and releasing records. From people like Jammer and Wiley we got a lot of energy around then.’

And then there was school, as a meeting point for practice, socialising and developing musical skills. Shystie’s transformative experience, taking her from hobbyist MC with a 9–5 job she hated, was the decision to study sound engineering at FE College, ‘[where] I realised: I could really do this!’ – after a whirlwind year, she signed to Polydor, and didn’t go back for the second year of the course. The most famous example of the importance of school comes from Dizzee Rascal’s teacher Tim Smith, who garnered some press attention after Boy in da Corner won the Mercury Prize in 2003; the story resonated as a redemptive one, of the singular faith of a mentor who refused to abandon hope – Dizzee had been expelled from two secondary schools already, and was placed at Langdon Park in Poplar, where Tim Smith was Head of Arts; he gave him the space to get on with his music, even after he had been expelled from all his other classes. Sent home from school one day for misbehaviour, angry and frustrated, Dizzee wrote some of his most well-known rave bars: ‘lyrical tank, box an MC like my name was Frank/going on dirty, going on stank.’15 ‘You could vent, I think that’s why I loved MCing,’ he told Radio 1 recently. The school was, like most state comprehensives, chronically short of resources, and the music department’s PCs had been donated by Morgan Stanley, and some of the other major banking corporations in Canary Wharf – via the LDDC, in fact.

On Dizzee’s first day, Smith left him to his own devices, sitting at a PC playing with Cubase. ‘After about 20 minutes, one of the pair of teachers said, “You’ve got to come over and see this.” Most kids are happy to have got a few bars down, but he had already zoomed ahead. He could quickly get information down, but what was most unusual was he would then spend a lot of time refining it – a lot of youngsters wanted to create music, but weren’t as interested in total refinement of a sound. He could string quite a complex rhythmic pattern together, in 20 to 30 minutes, but then be quite happy to spend a week refining and editing.’ On Monday evenings after school, a drop-in session funded by Tower Hamlets Summer University gave him a further opportunity to work on beats; Smith loaned Dizzee Philip Glass, Steve Reich and John Adams CDs, minimalist composers and favourites of his – there was some connection there, in the use of space, he thought. (Hyperdub founder and musical and academic polymath Steve ‘Kode9’ Goodman once said of dubstep that you should ‘dance to the gaps’, a sonic architecture which was shared with some of the more sparse early grime instrumentals, when neither had ‘taken the name’.)

Towards the end of Year 11, Dylan Mills was excluded from all his lessons, after more misbehaviour – but a forgiving headmaster knew that three expulsions, statistically, would most likely lead to a bad downwards spiral, and asked Smith if Dizzee could just sit quietly in the music room with him. So Dizzee would sit alone and work on his music for those last months, and occasionally help Smith teach Cubase to the Year 7s.

‘The music was awesome,’ Smith told me, who has retired from teaching, but now sits on the board of Rinse FM. ‘Nobody else had written music like that, with those really sharp, intricate beats, but sometimes just dropping out to nothing. And that is the hardest thing in music, to create space. And that showed particular talent, especially for someone so young, and you can hear it on Boy in da Corner, to know that you shouldn’t overload it. In Cubase you get quite a visual image of what you’re going to hear – and he would colour code, so you can see when something’s going to be repeated.’

Boy in da Corner was a significant development from the music he made at school, but those basics of creating space were definitely learned there. ‘The giveaways were the very very sharp beats,’ Smith told me. ‘He would compose at about 80bpm – most youngsters were into about 120 – but he would have a deliberately slow beat, so that you could sub-divide each beat, not into 2 but into 4. That’s where you get the really sharp, interesting sound. He would draw it in, so it was filled, and erase certain bits of it, so it had a gap. That’s where that unexpected break in the music came from.’

Many of Dizzee’s instrumental creations in his mid-teens were unfiltered, unvarnished beats, breaks and synths. He spun gold from the most basic and unadorned of sound palettes: the songs he wrote in Langdon Park School were constructed from their kit of a small mixer and Cubase software on the second-hand PCs, using the Cubase sound pack. Simplicity, and the idea of having the beat already ringing around his head, seemed to lead to a very methodical, straightforward composition process. It was the least of experimental techniques to achieve the most ‘experimental’ of sounds – an inborn tendency to the avant-garde, no oblique strategies required:

‘I was always fucking about with some weird noise,’ he said to me a decade or so later, in a break from rehearsing the Boy in da Corner revival show. ‘All the samples were just lined up on the keyboard, I never used an MPC, so each key is a different sample. Those times I would usually start with the drums. “I Luv U”, I definitely started with the drums, and then built around it.’ On both Boy in da Corner and Showtime there are moments that reject not only simple pop structures and sensibilities, but any ‘songiness’ at all – part of his desire to move London electronic music on from UK garage, Dizzee once said, was because it was ‘all too nice-sounding’. Even the regularity and order of a simple 8-bar grime track is absent from tracks like ‘Knock, Knock’, on Showtime, a beat that constantly splits off at awkward angles and refuses to settle down. On ‘Brand New Day’, from his debut, Dizzee juxtaposes the most desperately depressive, real-world lyrical narratives with production of breathtaking otherworldliness. It is almost indescribable: effortlessly light, like someone running their finger around the rim of a glass, but it also makes you queasy, like you’re spinning down a plughole, out of control. In Dizzee’s teenage hands, the Japanese three-stringed shamisen becomes something between an earworm and an inner-ear infection.

‘I think it’s really important that you shouldn’t be afraid to use something if you like it, no matter how fucked the sound,’ Dizzee told Sound on Sound magazine in 2004, explaining his use of the shamisen. ‘Some people process sounds too much, but to me, that defeats the object … I felt that it was a really interesting sound, which didn’t remind me of anything else. I like using sounds that are about as “out there” as they come.’

Tim Smith noted that when Dizzee arrived in his GCSE music class at 14 he was already very comfortable with creating clear structures, and balancing rhythm, bass and melody – that he knew what the song sounded like in his head already, and the only challenge would be making it a reality. Tellingly, and unusually, many of the vocal recordings on Boy in da Corner were first takes: Dizzee’s pirate-radio training – as well as the street hustle of practising in the playground or around the estate – meant he could just walk in and get it right first time. But that one-take skill also helps explain the album’s vocal rawness, and its freshness. ‘I’ll never forget da way you kept the faith in me, even when things looked grim,’ he wrote in tribute to Smith on the album sleeve. Smith casually mentioned to me that he still had 33 tracks Dizzee composed back then. ‘I couldn’t pass them on to anyone,’ he said, seeing the glint in my eye, but reassured me they were at least fully backed up (many classic instrumentals have been lost over the years in hard-drive meltdowns). We agreed maybe some kind of donation to the British Library sound archive would be in order.

It takes a village to raise a scene, and it gives that scene an extraordinary power and coherence when everyone in the village suddenly becomes obsessed with it. Appearing on Commander B’s Choice FM show in 2002, Wiley was asked about his ongoing beef with Durrty Doogz (later Goodz) – who did the fans think was winning, of the two of them? He told the radio host he ‘wasn’t really interested’ in what listeners in the world at large thought – there was only one audience which counted. ‘Home is where it matters,’ he said. ‘I care about my own area, I’d rather be the top boy in my own area – I want to be the top boy in east.’

MC Griminal, one of the younger of several members of the Ramsay family to become a key figure in the grime scene (older brothers Marcus Nasty and Mak 10 were founders and legendary DJs with Nasty Crew), tells a story of being an 11-year-old at St Bonaventure’s School in Forest Gate, when Tinchy Stryder, several years his senior, and already well known on the local scene, approached him, handed him a CD of his tracks, and a £10 note for his troubles, telling him to make sure Mak 10 got it. ‘None of my mates could believe that Tinchy was coming up to me, or that Dizzee was at my house,’ Griminal told local paper the Newham Recorder eight years later, in 2010. It was the era of hyper-local celebrity, even while almost all of the celebrities in question were living in cramped council homes with their parents, or sharing bedrooms with their siblings. When Slimzee’s gran went to the Woolworths on Roman Road, five minutes walk from their house, to buy his Bingo Beats CD, she saw two teenage girls enthusiastically pawing it. ‘That DJ Slimzee is my grandson,’ she told them, much to their excitement.

‘We started to become local-famous,’ Kano recalled in the Made in the Manor documentary. These years of dedicated community-based underground music making, in youth clubs, pirate-radio sets and house parties, made for a unique kind of apprenticeship, and a quietly confident mindset, once the stage unexpectedly became much bigger a few years later. ‘What helped when we broke through,’ Kano continued, ‘was the practice hours that we put in, performing in front of like, 20 people.’ When he was signed to 679, and was booked to do his first proper gig outside the manor, opening for The Streets, he wasn’t overly worried. ‘It was my first time performing in front of that many people, but I had put in so much hours, and made all my mistakes behind closed doors, that it was cool. We got to make our mistakes in someone’s kitchen, on a pirate radio.’

‘Let us know you’re locked.’ Rinse FM aerial, 2009

FOUR

THE LAST OF THE PIRATES

The first few years of the new millennium were also the end of an era. Grime’s first flush of youth, before it took the name, took place in the last days of a wilder, rougher metropolis; before a swathe of council estate regenerations began and others were demolished altogether. The demographics in areas like Bow, Stratford and Lewisham would grow ever more affluent, as richer people moved in, and New Labour plastered London with CCTV – a change intimately connected to their Urban Renaissance strategy to bring the middle classes back to the inner cities.

Until that point, illegal and semi-legal economies, black markets, cottage industries and thriving sub-cultures circling around inner London were essential to the informal city. In east London in particular, coping strategies in the face of entrenched poverty had long been part of the fabric: ducking and diving, wheeling and dealing, while the proximity to the Thames and docks meant historically the black market was always thriving.1 There is very little left of the informal city now, and pirate radio in the grime era might be the last bastion of truly autonomous, urban working-class self-expression – autonomous in the sense that it is possible to make a living from it, without the approval, or profit extraction, of the whiter, wealthier established British culture industries.

Mostly, it wasn’t about making money at all. In fact, DJs would pay monthly ‘subs’ of £20 or £25 for the upkeep of their station, and broadcast to a narrow radius of only a few miles, for the sheer love of it – although, in return for their subs, equipment and dubplates, came rave bookings, record sales, and a just-about-sustainable living. It’s hard to overstate how vital the pirates have been to the incubation and growth of eighties and nineties dance genres, from acid house and soul through ragga, jungle, happy hardcore, dubstep, UK garage, bassline, funky house, and so much else of the UK dance family tree. Their proliferation had reached a high point by the early 2000s, and they were the lifeblood of grime in its embryonic period: a meeting point; a testing and rehearsal ground for new and established talent, live on the mic and on the decks; a place where hits and stars were made; a communication channel and a binding agent, for the community contained within earshot. ‘I came from nothing. I came from the underground, the pirate-radio scene,’ Dizzee Rascal said in his Mercury Prize acceptance speech in 2003. ‘If you don’t acknowledge it, it will creep up anyway.’

Some arms of the British establishment were more than happy to acknowledge the pirates. Using the 1949 Wireless Telegraph Act, the government’s Radiocommunications Agency (part of the DTI), and later Ofcom, were the Wile E. Coyote to the pirates’ Road Runner: always on the hunt for their secret locations, shaking their fists, threatening prosecutions, raiding studios, shutting them down, or more often just seizing transmitters (worth a few hundred pounds) to disrupt and penalise their activity. DTI operations more than doubled between 1991 and 2002, reflecting the spread of pirate stations as the equipment got cheaper, and the music evolving live on the broadcasts flourished. In 2002, the Radiocommunications Agency raided 209 pirate stations, 181 of them in London. It’s hard to imagine how grime could ever have developed without them.

It’s also hard to convey to people who’ve never heard them just how exciting and unpredictable listening to the pirates could be. Unexpected guest cameos, collaborations and musical detours were commonplace: they worked to reasonably consistent, though changeable schedules – but you never quite knew who was going to be brought along to ‘touch mic’ on any particular set; or whether your favourite station might suddenly disappear completely, without, of course, any warning or explanation. The premiere of a new anthem on pirate radio could be a genuine event: the jaw-dropping sonic newness of some of the hot-off-the-vinyl-press dubplates, the sheer hype of the latest club banger being reloaded, two, three, five times or more – with no prospect of hearing it anywhere else until the next rave featuring the same crew, possibly no prospect of hearing it again full stop. Each show was a unique broadcast, especially when the MCs were inside: it’s why so many fans had a TDK recording while listening. It helped that as a listener, you too could be a participant in the hype: by joining the ‘phone line crew’ and quickly texting in or dropping a missed call, or a ‘one dinger’, to show approval (one ding, because you only let it ring once, so it displayed on the screen of whatever Nokia ‘brick’ phone they had in the studio).

‘I want ten missed calls for the reload’ would be a common injunction as the DJ flicked the cross-fader to a new dubplate: they would be strict about this, too – if the tune got about a minute or so in, with only eight or nine, they’d chide the audience as a group for their decadence: ‘You’re too slow man … nah sorry you’re too slow, it’s not coming back now – I can see you still ringing in, yeah big up the 392, but it’s not coming back.’ It was a conversation: a peculiar, imbalanced conversation, but a conversation nonetheless. Sometimes the conversation was more detailed, or even stretched to call-ins: I dimly recall the banter during the African Cup of Nations, maybe in 2006, as two MCs of African descent debated the relative merits of Ghana and Nigeria’s chances and abilities with each other and the audience. Shystie first got her break from ringing in to her local station Heat FM and spitting bars down the phone, live on air. Eventually another aspiring female MC called in to do the same, and they had a slightly stilted clash, taking it in turns to call in. ‘It was literally just hunger,’ she told me later, ‘I practised and practised and practised and I wanted people to hear me.’

The pirates developed very specific codes, rituals and semantics, bringing listeners closer into the in-group – the one ding for the reload, the shout-out via three final digits of a mobile-phone number, ‘hit us up on the text’, ‘hold tight the Plumstead massive’, ‘this one’s a persie’ (personal favourite) – even down to knowing to tune in at 20 past the hour, because there will usually be 20 minutes of continuous adverts at the start of a two-hour show, but then none after that. The slang evolves between the MCs, DJ and the listeners with little managerial input or oversight, with the exception of some stations prohibiting swearing – ostensibly confusing, given the whole thing is illegal – or the need to read out information about a rave organised by the station. There are times when requests to ‘let us know you’re locked’ takes on a plaintive air – because without that, how would you ever know anyone was listening? There are no official RAJAR figures (those used by legal stations to determine listenership), and there’s always been a chance some scruffy herbert has nicked or broken a vital part of your £300 rig during the night.

Listening to the pirates can be a romantic experience, as anyone who has waltzed around their bedroom with the aerial clutched in their arms can attest – all the more so when the signal plays hard to get, and you can hear the unique, one-of-a-kind musical moment you were looking forward to all week being swallowed up by static and crackle, the MC holding the mic aloft as the ship tragically disappears beneath the waves. Then there is the beguiling patter of shout-outs, and the adverts for raves voiced by MEN WHO MUST HAVE SOME KIND OF HEARING IMPAIRMENT, THE WAY THEY’RE SHOUTING. Most of all it is the sheer gusto the DJs have for the music they play; molten-fresh new music direct from the artists themselves, tunes that would maybe become the club, or even, occasionally, mainstream hits of weeks, months or years hence. Turning that mind-bending innovation into mainstream money would often take a comically long time; turning it into cash-in-hand wads from club promoters, or sale-or-return deals with independent record shops, much less so.

Pirate broadcasting has always been a perilous business. The stations have been positioned against cultural gatekeepers, state authorities and dodgy rivals for their entire history – and have always been stoically determined to broadcast to their public, no matter what, ever since the broadcasting was done from actual boats. One early pirate station, Radio North Sea, was attacked by fire bombs in 1971, lobbed aboard from a small boat owned by a rival station, and had to be rescued by the Dutch navy – with the ship ablaze, the DJ on air broadcast a Mayday call while pop music continued to play underneath.

Famous 1960s nautical pirate stations like Radio Caroline transmitted pop music from the sea to European listeners when there were only three stuffy BBC stations on the legal airwaves in the UK; as the voice of the establishment, the BBC was hostile to youth culture in general. Like latter-day dance and black-music pirate stations, the subversive activity of the pop pirates of the 1960s and 70s was always at risk of co-option or assimilation – when the big ships on the mainland finally conceded defeat, and offered young people at least some of what they wanted to hear. The point is that the pirates have always been the site of rebellious or marginal culture, operating outside managed or official creative avenues, and often ending up changing them – when the music, DJs and even the stations themselves move from the pirates’ rickety schooners to HMS Culture Industry. Famously, Radio Caroline’s illicit success led directly to the creation of BBC Radio 1. 1980s acid house pirate station KISS FM became a legal station in 1990, and today is a well-established media brand and platform (because that’s what we have these days) – it also hosted Logan Sama’s weekly grime show from 2004–14, for most of that period the only grime show anywhere on legal radio.

Even while they remained hounded by the establishment, and illegal, pirate stations effectively became the feeder stations and cultivation grounds – of new artists, DJs and entire genres – that would sustain their commercial counterparts, and the entire ‘legit’ music industry, in years to come. And while the grand histories of the pirate stations that made it big – KISS FM and Rinse, primarily, or Kool FM, during the jungle era – are told in documentaries, with justification, there were literally hundreds of others, some short-lived, others not, some amateurish, some bound up in criminal activity, but most just doing it for the love, never making any profit. Rinse FM founder Geeneus got his first show on east London jungle station Pressure FM, and met his fellow founders Slimzee and Wiley at Chillin FM; it was an ever-changing constellation of cheap, illegal hubs for new music.