Two decades ago, MJ Cole gave birth to UK garage. Then things turned sour. Now, his first album in 17 years is a long way from two-step
“It’s a weird time in the world right now,” said MJ Cole on social media last week. “Let’s brighten things up a little bit and play some music… music isn’t cancelled.” Beneath the words was a clip of Cole playing the piano. He asked his followers to send in their own videos and promised to send a free T-shirt and his new album on vinyl to the person behind his favourite clip.
Cole seems happier than most in this period of self-isolation. For one, he lives alone, and has so far been able to see his two daughters, aged four and six, who live with their mother a short drive away. Second, a piano is all he needs to stay sane – he reckons he has played three hours a day for the past 10 years.
But most importantly, he has UK garage in his DNA – and it is almost impossible to be unhappy when you are listening to garage.
Cole did as much as anyone to define the sound that emerged from London’s nightclubs in the late 90s, combining influences from American house and R&B with the UK’s rapid drum and bass sound. His 1998 track “Sincere” is perhaps garage’s most ubiquitous anthem, while his album of the same name, released two years later, was one of the genre’s first (and, to this day, only) long-players.
Two decades on, his third album, Madrugada – and first since 2003’s Cut to the Chase – is a neoclassical record, its name the Spanish word for the time in the early morning between midnight and sunrise.
Cole plays keys, accompanied by 14-piece string arrangements and the occasional double-bassline. It recalls Brahms and Hildur Guðnadóttir, and is as far from garage as you can imagine.
The sound Matthew James Coleman helped pioneer in the 90s took its name from garage house, a disco-influenced American sound that British DJs played at faster tempos so it would mix with jungle and drum and bass records (hence its original name, speed garage). Then Brits such as Cole, Groove Chronicles and Wookie started producing tracks themselves, adding its trademark “two-step” rhythm and cheeky attitude. Soon garage invaded the pop charts, giving rise to artists such as So Solid Crew and Ms Dynamite. Its beats were ideal for MCs to rap over, providing the foundation for what would later become grime. Then, like so many a British club sounds (see also: dubstep and funky house), garage crashed and burned.
As new sounds became fashionable, garage became anything but. From around 2004, grime and dubstep began to assert dominance, while UK garage, deemed cheesy by some, epitomised by Keith Lemon’s Craig David impression on Bo’ Selecta!, was effectively banned from popular radio and banished from clubs.
“It kinda rose up very quickly and then it became a dirty word overnight,” Cole remembers. At one point, because of his association with the sound, he was advised to ditch the name MJ Cole. “I remember someone from the label phoning me and saying, ‘I’d be careful using your name in the future.’ So I was thinking maybe I should start a different alias, do different things.”
He kept his name, but garage remained in exile until a few years ago, when artists such as Disclosure, Conducta and BBC comedy People Just Do Nothing reintroduced the sound into the public consciousness. Now garage is popular again, more so than it has been in well over a decade. Which is what makes MJ Cole Presents: Madrugada, to give the new album its full name, such a surprise. “I mean, it doesn’t feel like a surprise to me,” says Cole. “Because this has always been me. This is actually me before garage was even invented.”
Cole was raised on classical music. He grew up in south-west London, where his dad, a West End actor, would sing and play piano at home. Cole learned piano and oboe and later studied music theory at London City University. After graduating, he found a job making teas in a drum and bass studio, then slowly worked his way into engineering records. He produced some drum and bass tunes himself under the name Morph (though he has previously said “my drum and bass had too much music in it”), before founding his record label Prolific in 1998, writing “Sincere”, and never looking back. During garage’s heyday he appeared on Top of the Pops, remixed Amy Winehouse, and was nominated for the Mercury Prize.
But he never wanted to be a celebrity. In 2000, he said he wanted to be remembered not as a performer, but as a producer, “like Brian Eno, George Martin or Trevor Horn”. He now seems closer to that goal than ever, not because Madrugada could almost be the fifth instalment in Eno’s Ambient series (though it could, maybe), but because he is now a bona fide super-producer. He produced Dizzee Rascal’s 2012 garage pop hit “Bassline Junkie”. He is credited on “Crown”, the second single from Stormzy’s recent No 1 album Heavy is the Head. Last year he topped the Shazam charts when his track “Waking Up”, featuring Freya Ridings, was played on Love Island.
A club and studio wizard making a segue into classical is a familiar story. Hearing that your favourite DJ is playing the Barbican is a bit like seeing your favourite comedian doing a travel programme. Cole’s fellow garage pioneer DJ Spoony recently took the form to the Royal Albert Hall with Garage Classical, adapting classics such as “Sincere” for a 36-piece orchestra. Did Cole see it? “Erm… yeah. I thought it was great, but…” he says, then puffs out his cheeks. “It’s a bit of a tricky one for me, because I come from classical and I just feel it’s like… a little bit cheesy.” He says he enjoyed it nonetheless, noting that for those songs to be moving audiences 20 years after they came out is a testament to their value as works of art.
Madrugada, however, is not that. Cole is not a club head having a go at classical, but a classical fanatic with a career as a DJ. “It’s a visit to another little room in my house, that I kinda grew up in,” he says of the album. “It’s a little secret cupboard under the stairs. It’s got all my old piano history, my piano books, my love for classical, my old piano concerto tapes that I used to listen to on a little red Walkman when I was in bed when I was eight.” He recorded most of the album in about two months. “It had been building up all my career.”
Still, he is keen to emphasise, “I haven’t jumped ship.” Although a few years ago he was reluctant to engage with talk of a garage revival (“I think I’d been so wounded by its death that it took a long time to grieve”), he has recently come to terms with the sound again.
“It’s a genre that’s gonna be around for ever,” he says, and promises another album of “noisy MJ action” in the near future. He has had to cancel shows in the coming weeks, but has seemingly no trouble staying positive. His immediate plans? Hit the studio. “I might even do a little livestream,” he says. “And try to find some bog roll.”
‘MJ Cole Presents: Madrugada’ is out on 3 April via Universal Music Group
