It's Always Been There

WHAT’S CHANGED MOST SINCE YOU WERE
A TEENAGER?
PABLO I’m trying to work out what’s
worse, this new generation or our
generation. Or whether it was just
as bad then but I don’t see it as
much now, now that I’m older.
ONEMAN It was harder to get
what you wanted back then.
PABLO Now I look at these kids. They all
go to the gym, they’ve all got Gucci.
I’m thinking, when I was your age I
was smoking weed down the park in my
Nike tracksuit I’d had for four years
[Laughter]. Or an XXL Akademiks tracksuit
with bare hot rocks in it. Ticking three
Zs a week to buy a new pair of trainers.
Now they’re all decked out. It’s crazy.
ONEMAN I remember in 2002 going to
Soho for the first time as a teenager
to shops like Hideout and Bond. Bond
was on the corner of Carnaby Street
near Deal Real records. Bond was
stocking Supreme in 2001, 2002, and
no one really gave a shit about it.
I still go to record shops. The only one
I go to for new music is Sounds of the
Universe, the soul jazz shop. I love the
soul jazz compilations. I just got the
second Vogue compilation. Other than
that I’ll go to Tape Exchange in Notting
Hill and DnR records in Croydon which
is run by a guy called Dan and his mate.
They’ve been running this UK garage record
shop since ninety-eight or ninety-nine
I think. He’s still running it and it’s
all garage and I’m not joking when I say
he’s got around 50,000 records in that
shop, things you’ve never heard of. Other
DJ’s dubplates, he’s bought them. I’ve
spent a lot of time and money in there.
There was so much that came out. I don’t
think people realise how big the garage
scene was. Sometimes I look at some
of my white labels and they’ll have a
distribution company but it’ll be like,
GNZ distribution. I’ll try and look them
up and they don’t exist. No one was
distributing these records. They’d make
them, pressing them up, putting them in
the boot of their cars and driving round
all the record shops, sticking them in
there with a sticker on it with a mobile
number, usually, so if you wanted to book
them you’d ring them up. That’s how it was.
It was like wheeling and dealing. I never
realised until recently that a lot of the
records I was buying from A&D Sounds in
Mitcham produced Sovereign, Brasstooth,
El-B, Horsepower. All these producers are
from South London, all from the areas I’m
from. I never knew that then. Looking
back all these guys are from my area
and they must’ve just gone around to all
the record shops locally and put their
records in there. It’s fucking brilliant.
There’s so much garage out there. If I
play at a club or anywhere in the UK,
to be honest, and there’s eighteen- to
twenty-year-olds I see a lot of wavey
38 / DEEP CUTS