The Angell Town estate in Brixton, South London, was built in the 1970s. Council-run housing estates, offering heavily subsidised rents to low-income individuals and families, began appearing throughout the UK, particularly in London. It was an excellent time to be a government contractor specialising in homogenous property development.
For better or more likely worse—because unkind labels can come with self-fulfilling prophecies—many of these locations became known as “sink estates.” The poet Byron Vincent, who grew up in such an estate, described it as “taking a bunch of people with social and fiscal problems and forcing them to live en masse together is an idiotic idea that is destined to create a culture of perpetually spiralling criminality.”
Starting in 1990 and finally completed in 2002, there was a government attempt to regenerate Angell Town, which included various improvements to the living conditions: a playground, a cafe, an “enterprise centre,” and, most importantly, dear reader, a recording studio. It’s 1998, in a room not much bigger than a broom cupboard in Angell Town community studio. A recording desk with a strictly mono set-up takes up most of the space. Toiling away at the desk, finalising his vocal mix, is Rodney Hylton Smith—a.k.a Lord Gosh, Hylton Smythe, and, my personal favourite, Brigadier Smythe—most commonly referred to as Roots Manuva, though he’s far from common.
Roots Manuva had already released a few singles earlier in the ‘90s: “Next Type of Motion” (released on the London-based Sound of Money), “Fever” (which reappeared on Brand New Second Hand), and even a remix of Grandmaster Flash. He had created some underground buzz because, at this stage, all the buzz a British rapper could hope for (excluding a genre-defying Bristolian) was rooted underground, but he wanted to put out an album.
More than ten years in the making, Brand New Second Hand was originally intended for release on Sound of Money, the UK hip-hop label that helped launch another South London rapper, Blak Twang. Blak Twang's debut album, Dettwork SouthEast—a wordplay on the Network Southeast train rail that connected much of South London and the neighbouring suburbs—was slated for release in 1996. It included the single “Queens Head,” featuring a guest appearance by young Roots Manuva.
The notion for the track was simple, and the scene was set in the opening line: “It’s all about making that wonga in the ‘90s,” “wonga” being an English-Romany word for “money.” The duo had to get the “queen’s head” “before they end up lying dead.” Bills “coming like a personal vendetta” became a UK hip-hop trope years later, but it was fresh and intrinsically British at the time. Blak Twang (real name Tony Olabode, a.k.a. Tony Rotton) and Roots Manuva’s rap style was as much indebted to the toasting of dancehall as it was to hip-hop MCs.
However, Dettwork SouthEast didn’t make it beyond a limited run of advance press copies.
According to Blak Twang: “It was a situation where we had a verbal agreement. There was a Japanese label called Avex. They said they’d license this album and put it out.” Avex promised him a considerable promotional budget, but they went back on their promise and slashed the budget considerably. When Blak Twang refused the new terms, Dettwork SouthEast was shelved for eighteen years, when it was finally released by Sony BMG in 2014. If it weren’t for this, perhaps Blak Twang would have carried the UK hip-hop baton from the buzz of Britcore, through the barren early years of the decade, and into the mid-’90s.
Instead, we turn to Rodney Smith, an occasionally mystical, eccentric man that his label manager Will Ashon described as “a self-contained, shy individual. Partly why he found all the attention quite painful at times.” Smith was once a shy kid with a musical interest in reggae. Moving to the UK in the early ‘60s and settled in Stockwell, South London, Smith’s parents hailed from the rural Jamaican village of Banana Hole, and they held traditional, even Victorian values. By all accounts, the Smiths weren’t exactly wallowing in the wonga, hence his mother’s use of the term “brand new second hand” to characterise the occasionally pre-used presents he would receive for Christmas and birthdays. And like many first-generation Jamaican emigrants, religion was the glue that held family life together—Rodney’s father was a Pentecostal preacher and tailor.
Pentecostalism, a branch of evangelical Protestantism, is based on a critical event in the life of the early Christians: the baptism of twelve disciples by the holy spirit on the day of Pentecost. In popular culture, Pentecostals are best known for speaking in tongues, also known as glossolalia.
William J Samarin is one of the leading linguists to have studied the practice. In his book, Tongues of Men and Angels: The Religious Language of Pentecostalism (1975), Samarin concluded that the resemblance to human language was merely on the surface and that glossolalia is “only a facade of language.” Reading the book—Samarin adopts dense prose, somewhere between textbook and sermon—I can’t help but wonder how Samarin would respond to today’s mumble rap.
Pentecostalism is the fastest-growing Christian religion on the planet, with 35,000 people converting to Pentecostal, or “born again,” each day. In a contemporary twist, it is a faith that is powerfully experiential, not something that can be found through mere ritual or thinking.
Although Rodney himself isn’t particularly religious, he was inevitably influenced by Smith Senior. Describing him as “a very great public speaker,” he elaborates in an interview with The Independent:
“As a grown man, I haven't always agreed with his interpretations of Biblical instances, but he still makes it sound so convincing and uplifting. He always encouraged me and my siblings to speak with the fullness of our voices, but before anything, he has a love for what he is saying – so, yes, memories of my dad's vocal delivery have been a massive influence on how I try to put originality and mystique into my songs.”
If religion was the adhesive, providing discipline for the heart and mind, music was food for the soul of the Smith household. While his parents mainly listened to gospel music, young Rodney studied the violin begrudgingly and with limited grace, recalling, “Violin lessons for a 9-year-old the size of a 16-year-old...it wasn’t a good look.” In contrast, the beat and drum of reggae provided an alluring pull: “Sound systems were always there.. weddings, funerals, parties. I had vivid memories of looking at the sound systems, looking at the various wires.”
Growing up in the ‘80s, alongside dub and reggae, Rodney was inspired by electro, DIY scenes (including surprising sources like synth-pop group The Art of Noise), and of course hip-hop. LL Cool J and Run-DMC were the gateway rappers, but UK hip-hop lit his creative fuse. Seeing fellow South Londoners like Scientists of Sound, London Posse, and Hijack performing live, combined with his fascination for technology as music production tools became more accessible, convinced Rodney Smith to take part and eventually become Roots Manuva.
Sound of Money was run by the wiry and energetic Jeremy “Tuse” Tuson, who was also Roots Manuva’s first manager. Something of an unsung hero in UK hip-hop, Tuse introduced Roots to Wayne “Lotek” Bennett, an aspiring producer and face about town selling import mixtapes at Camden Market.
Writing to me over email, Lotek recalled his first meeting with Roots Manuva: he was at Trinity Studios where Tuse had an office out the back, when Tuse played Lotek a demo of a Roots Manuva song and asked what he thought. “‘Vocalist is great, [the] beat isn't,’ I told him. ‘I'm the vocalist’s manager, and I made the beat’ he replied. He wasn't upset with my opinion. He seemed more concerned that I didn't like it as I was the target audience.”
Tuse asked if Lotek could do any better. “Being a super confident teenager, I obviously said yes, even though I had never finished a song at that time,” Lotek remembers. “I had studied sound engineering but didn't have access to the equipment to make beats.” Lotek returned to the studio a few days later and made a beat using whatever records he found, “mostly charity shop rejects” and some “drum sounds and then shaped them in the sampler.”
Eventually, Lotek recalls how a “weird seeming guy wandered into the studio, nodded his head to the beat in tacit approval, and then wandered off again.” Tuse returned a few minutes later and said, Roots Manuva likes the beat. Lotek was familiar with the name as he’d heard “Next Type of Motion” a few months earlier but had no idea what he looked like.
Lotek produced two tracks for the album—“Sinking Sands” and the haunting off-key piano of “Soul Decay”—and, alongside IG Culture, was the only producer to work with Roots Manuva on Brand New Second Hand, returning to produce two more tracks for his Mercury Prize nominated follow-up, Run Come Save Me.
A conflicted sense of piousness has often seeped its way throughout Roots Manuva’s music, emphatically so on his debut and expanded upon in his sophomore release. The fluid vocalising Rodney would have seen in his father’s sermons is also evident, although you’ll have to check “Kicking the Cack” on Run Come Save Me to hear Roots in full glossolalia mode. Rodney is divided by his father's godliness, upbringing, and, perhaps, his own spiritual aspirations. However, the bright lights and “sinny sin sins” of London’s nightlife often tempt him.
From the opening chords of “Movements,” there is a celestial quality, the sense of a holier presence. This is spelt out literally at times—rapping “I believe in the power of the G.O.D.” on “Sinking Sands”—and in more characteristically abstract terms—as heard on “Inna,” with its lush and trippy Wurlitzer sound recalling some of the transcendental experiences raving can be capable of. Rodney feels brave, even though his vision is blurred.
If Brand New Second Hand had a theme, it would be a dub-infused kitchen-sink realism with a borderline healthy dose of paranoia. Addiction, capitalism, and gentrification are among the concerns: “Soon there'll be no dollars, no yens, no pounds / Just madness, microchips and hi-tech war—but that’s not to call it a despairing record.
Quite the opposite, BNSH contains moments of freewheeling, transcendent optimism, vulnerability, and lucid confessions from its host. Upon its release, Pitchfork described Roots Manua as “the positivity rapper you don't laugh at.” Rodney described it as his album for Brixton, “For my next-door neighbours and my mates,” but that was an understatement. A new bar was set for UK hip-hop.
After whittling the album down from fifty to seventeen tracks, all they needed to do now was package, release, and sell it. Tuse had secured funding from an East London businessman and had set up a studio in the basement of his gold shop. The original plan was to release BNSH through Sound of Money, but, in what was becoming something of a recurring theme, “That investment didn’t go well’ according to Lotek, and Tuse decided to close Sound of Money as a label and operate as a management company instead.
With his debut album stuck in purgatory, Rodney could have sunk, but, together with Tuse, they determinedly shopped the album around labels, with Lotek drumming up interest at record shops like Dark n Cold and Mr Bongo in Soho. Gilles Peterson’s Talkin’ Loud label was said to be interested in releasing the record. Still, it took a meeting with the music journalist Will Ashon, who had recently launched Big Dada, the hip-hop leaning offshoot of Ninja Tune, to find the right type of record label to release Brand New Second Hand.
Over multiple cups of coffee (possibly to stimulate his “terrible memory”), I spoke to Will at a cafe in Shoreditch. He first met Rodney when he interviewed him for Muzik magazine, saying, “I wrote the ‘British rap’s moment is coming piece,’ one of the many, that would have been 1995.” The interview occurred at the Sound of Money studio. “Skinnyman was there rolling a blunt,” Will recalls of the charismatic rapper from North London, who we’ll return to later, “and Rodney was there barely saying a word.”
The avuncular Will Ashon—a politically active middle-class Oxford graduate from Leicester—and Rodney are, on the face of it at least, an unlikely pair. Yet it was the start of a long-lasting and potent relationship. “I asked if he could do us a single,” remembers Ashon. “And Rodney said, ‘I don’t want to do any more singles. I’ll do an album for you.’” Familiar with Roots Manuva’s music, the powers that be at Ninja Tune gave Will the green light to release Big Dada’s first-ever album.
The press reception to Brand New Second Hand was overwhelmingly positive, with “Juggle Tings Proper” getting Single of the Week in Melody Maker and NME. Rodney’s expectations were modest: “When I was making the record, I would have been happy to sell five or six hundred copies because, in my head, if you made a challenging record, there were about 400-600 people out there [who] would buy it and support it.” But the album did sell well. As Will explained, “We pressed two thousand copies on vinyl and a similar amount of CDs, and it just kept selling.”
What Do You Call It? From Grassroots to the Golden Era of UK Rap is out now on Velocity Press. The book is available directly from the publisher and at all good book and record stores.