My First Music Album: Blackmarket 2-Step Compilation

From Top 40 radio to the first singles

When people ask me about my earliest musical sources, the answer is rarely glamorous. My parents did listen to music, but more sideways than actively, and they did not push me or my brother into one clear lane. When I was 12, in the summer of 1999, the spark simply lit by itself. The main sources were Radio 538, the Dutch Top 40, TMF and the Free Record Shop.

The explosive development of the internet added a 56kbps modem connection that summer and, in its wake, the revolutionary download tool Napster. MP3 files could suddenly be installed on a Windows 98 computer through the now-classic peer-to-peer route. The first cracks in the hegemony of the CD as the primary audio carrier.

I did not have much money as a 12-year-old. Still, I bought singles. My love for house actually started inside the Dutch Top 40 when British producers Jason Phats and Russell Small opened a door to the splendour of that musical commune I desperately wanted to join. Turn Around was a world hit and therefore my first single. The second CD single I bought was the Backstreet Boys’ I Want It That Way. I have been well beyond shame for a long time now.

The revelation of 2-Step and UK Garage

With the revelation of 2-Step and UK Garage — a British subgenre born from jungle, grime, drum ’n’ bass and American house influence, and one that also found ground on mainland Europe — a new musical obsession began. Crucial at the time was the mother of UKG hits, Re-Rewind (When The Crowd Say Bo Selecta) by The Artful Dodger featuring Craig David. TMF kept those videos in heavy rotation.

Not long after that I bought my first full album in what was then the biggest Dutch music store, Free Record Shop: the London Azuli Records compilation Blackmarket Presents 2 Step - The Best Of Underground Garage, containing 20 UKG bombs, only a handful of which I already knew. As inspiration it became a personal landmark: I still listen to many of those tracks now. It also deepened my fascination with the art of compilation itself.

That album also introduced me to the classic Gabrielle by Roy Davis Jr., with the melancholy vocals of Peven Everett. Inside the playlist, Gabrielle always felt like a slight outlier: is it really UK Garage, or is it simply house?

CD player reading function completely broken

One evening in the spring of 2000, while I was shuffling through the six discs in my stereo tower’s changer before going to sleep, Gabrielle was selected. Because of a scratch, or a reading error in the device itself, the track slipped into an almost perfect thirty-second loop. I had never listened to Gabrielle that closely before, and it took me maybe twenty minutes to realise the track was actually stuttering. I left the loop untouched and drifted into a meditative, almost transcendent state I still struggle to describe properly. My mattress transformed into a canopy bed. Then and there I fell in love with the track for good.

Peven, Southport and the force of memory

Later, on dancefloors during my clubbing years, I learned that Gabrielle also holds a special place in the heart of many other members of the house commune. At the British festival Southport Weekender in 2015 — fifteen years later — I watched Peven Everett sing Gabrielle live in a memorable performance. For a second I was back in that room where a CD malfunction had pulled me deep into the soul of this magical composition. The power of memory, Peven’s voice and the gratitude of simply being there produced a wave of goosebumps through my entire body. But that happens more often at Southport.