Chapter 10: The Incredible Journey
In which I delve into the roots of M-Beat & General Levy's 'Incredible' and share a dub version of my own remix.
Hello, me again. No, this chapter isn’t about the Disney classic starring two dogs and a siamese cat, it’s just that I keep seeing a lot of chat about ‘Incredible’ by M-Beat & General Levy, no doubt because it turned 30 recently, but not unlike Dawn Penn’s ‘No No No’, this anniversary is merely the tip of the iceberg, and there’s way more to the ‘Incredible’ story then most probably realise.
Some of you might know I remixed ‘Incredible’ a while back…
Or did I?
There is most definitely a 7” out there with mine and General Levy’s names on it, but conspicuously absent is M-Beat.
So what’s all this about? I’ll get to that, but I should probably first alert you to the dub mix of my remix which the full subscribers amongst you, blessed that you are, can grab from the link at the bottom. There’s a long journey before we get there though, so let me take you back to…
An industrial estate in Forest Hill, South East London, sometime in 1988. Chris Lane had just moved his A-Class studio out of the basement beneath Dub Vendor in Clapham Junction, and upgraded to a 16 track desk. It was well overdue. Lane and his business partner at Fashion Records, John MacGillivray had made it to number 12 in the UK pop charts 4 years prior with Smiley Culture’s ‘Police Officer’, yet they were still voicing heavyweights like Horace Andy and Junior Degado in the basement, alongside stalwarts of the UK sound system scene such as Macka B, Peter King and Asher Senator.
Way across town in Harlesden, Robbo Ranx was running the Tippertone sound system. Paul “General” Levy was still in his teens when he joined Ranx’s crew, quickly slaying dances with his machine gun delivery punctuated with that inimitable hiccup style which would soon become his trademark. Ranx realised he had something worth capturing on tape, and took the General over to A-Class where they made his debut single ‘New Cockatoo’ which finds the General chirping and hiccupping over a tale about buying a parrot from his local pet shop. It’s quite strange, completely amazing, and it upped the fast-chat ante from Papa San’s international dancehall smash ‘Perdominant’ from the previous year.
A few singles followed for Robbo Ranx’s Musik Street label before General Levy innevitably joined the Fashion Records roster, knocking out a succession of dancehall hits including ‘Heat’ and ‘The Wig’ which featured on his first full length solo LP The Wickeder General dropping on Fashion in ‘92. The ten track set showcases Levy’s lyrical dexterity, but it’s on a lesser mentioned album cut hidden away on side B where we get the full cockatoo treatment. A very familiar “BOOYAKA BOOYAKA as di General a’ pass, BOOYAKA BOOYAKA cos we run di park” opens ‘Incredible General’, and you might suddenly assume M-Beat’s ‘Incredible’ is in fact a remix or bootleg, but somehow this song never made it onto a single, and unlike a few of his Fashion tracks, the acapella never appeared on vinyl.
While ‘Incredible General’ was mostly overlooed, album opener ‘The Wickeder General’ destroyed a few dances with Levy proclaiming “When I was young, my mama always told me that I would grow to be a big time celebrity”. He had no idea exactly how on the money he was, or more poignantly, how it might happen, and at what cost.
The late Erskine Thompson understood what Levy’s mum saw in him. Erskine had hits in the 80s managing Maxi Priest and Loose Ends who both climbed near the top of the pops. He took the young MC under his wing, and soon Levy was snapped up by Pete Tong for London Records’ dance imprint FFRR. They were hoping to replicate the recent chart success of Shaggy’s ‘Oh Carolina’ with the General’s cover of ‘Monkey Man’, but it languished at number 75, and the atmosphere turned chilly in the FFRR office. “Everybody’s head was down when I came in the room” Levy admits in an interview with DJ Mag. “There was no red carpet” he continues, “when it flopped, they didn’t know what to do with me, and I was kind of like on the verge of being shelved”.
Now let’s wind it back again, and head over to Hackney, East London where we find Junior Hart throwing a few raves and setting up his Renk label which launched in ‘91. Following a handful of house 12”s, Renk found its feet on hardcore dancefloors with tracks like ‘Feel The Vibes’ by Mental & Dangerous, and ‘Let’s Pop An E’ by M-Beat, aka Junior’s son, Marlon Hart.
Like the General, Marlon was only 17 when he made his first M-Beat record. His dad was still caught up in hardcore, but the teenager could sense the tide turning as his releases became increasingly junglist, and two tracks from 1992 were a glimpse at things to come. The first was ‘Booyaka’ which borrowed a snippet of… nope, not Levy, but Tony Rebel’s ‘Chatty Chatty’ for the track’s chorus, while the other, ‘Junglistic Bad Boy’, pitted a pitched down sample of Shabba Ranks against chipmunked snatches of ‘Heat’ by General Levy.
And another key record in the ‘Incredible’ story is ‘Style’ which M-Beat dropped on Renk in ‘93, featuring a lesser spotted soul 7” by Foster Sylvers laid over rolling jungle breaks and spare stabs of sub bass. It’s worth noting that Sylvers was only 11 when he made his debut album.
“You lot are crazy, it’s like I’m shouting!”
How Marlon and Levy became acquainted seems to be lost in the mists of time, but the most likely version of the tale involves Junior’s cousin, the legendary drummer Sly Dunbar who was working with Fashion at the time; in fact he’d played on The Wickeder General LP. Sly hooked his cousin up with the Fashion crew, and soon Junior was at the General’s door with a copy of the ‘Style’ instrumental. A few days later, on Easter weekend, 1994, the MC was in the booth testing the mic at Von’s Studio in Islington. He launched into a battle cry, bellowing “BIG UP ALL ORIGINAL JUNGLIST MASSIVE…” before settling into the hiccupping hook which he borrowed from that old album track ‘Incredible General’.
In a serendipitous moment in the vocal booth, Levy’s mic check turned out perfect, and Marlon assured him he had what they needed. “You lot are crazy!” the General exclaimed, “it’s like I’m shouting!” but with that, the vocal session was done, and it was back to the reggae business.
Oddly enough it was a reggae DJ who first broke ‘Incredible’. Junior and Marlon did a rough mix straight after recording Levy’s vocals, and took a dubplate over the road to Kiss FM where Rodigan dropped on his drive time show the following day. “The Kiss switchboard was jammed with people wanting it played again” Junior tells Paul Terzulli in his book Who Say Reload. “There were only a few people I would give exclusives to, like Rodigan, Devious D, Mickey Finn, Jack Frost and Nicky Blackmarket, and John Peel at Radio 1. Those were my boys.”
Devious D told Renk’s A&R man Steve B that his copy of the ‘Incredible’ plate had people reaching across the decks to wheel it up. In one set it had so many reloads that he wound up playing it for 40 minutes straight.
Renk knew they were onto something big, so Junior took it to Pete Tong, hoping to get it released on FFRR, but Tong turned it down. Levy played it to his usually astute manager who, convinced jungle was a fad, told the MC to not get involved and focus on his deal with London Records, despite the lukewarm response after ‘Monkey Man’ tanked. “You’ve done the track, fair enough” Erskine conceded, “now don’t do the video.”
“Okay” Levy laughs, “but I did the video!”
The MC was actually surprised when he first heard the finished single. The line “wicked, wicked. Junglist massive!” in the intro was spliced from a lyric in one of the verses, and punched in to create that iconic hook. A phrase which perfectly encapsulates 1994, maybe, but Levy had been peppering his lyrics with “wickeds” for a few years, and many who were teenagers in the UK at the turn of the 90s will tell you it was an integral part of the lexicon. In fact, if you listen back to Smiley Culture’s ‘Cockney Translation’ from ‘84, which translates cor-blimey slang to patois, he states near the end of the song “cockneys say triffic, we say wackaaaaaad!”
Anyway, Renk dug deep into their proverbial pockets and released ‘Incredible’ themselves in June ‘94. It snuck in the backdoor of the top 40, hovering at 39 while reggae and rave records dominated the top 20. That week you could find Dawn Penn rubbing shoulders with The Grid, and Aswad shining next to The Prodigy.
In a brash moment of business acumen, Renk deleted it and focussed on building a live buzz for the song. In July, Levy jumped on the mic with Choice FM’s Commander B at a jam in Brockwell Park in Brixton. His first time performing the song live (over the jungle backing, at least). The place went bananas!
Another event of note that summer was a rave which Junior promoted in the far reaches of East London at Walthamstow Assembly Hall. The strapline was “the first jungle concert ever” featuring live musicians, and of course M-Beat and General Levy performing their track. On stage, Levy told the crowd “this is our music, we’ve actually created something for ourselves!” but after the set, while still buzzing from the show, he was cornered by a journalist who quoted him as claiming “we run jungle”. It appeared in the August issue of The Face, and soon various DJs from the jungle scene colluded, assuming Levy was taking credit for everything they’d built, and agreed to boycott the record.
Levy issued a heartfelt apology in the letters section of the following issue, but it was too late, the damage was done. Those ‘Incredible’ dubplates had gone from 40 minutes of reloads to the bin.
Fortunately for Renk, they reissued it before the boycott took hold, and this time ‘Incredible’ soared up the charts. On September 18th it reached number 8 and Levy tore up the Top Of The Pops stage, having been introduced by Simon Mayo citing the act as “the first jungle on Top Of The Pops, ever. Unless you’re counting Roy Wood’s hair in 1973”.
Jungle had crossed over to the pop charts with a track which was ousted by the scene, a bittersweet moment for all involved. The kids at home knew no better of course, and to this day, most folks who weren’t there at Jungle Mania, Labyrinth, Innersense etc, now imagine it as the pinacle of the genre, while angry revisionists write off the months before the boycott when it was wrecking junglist dancefloors.
Despite the boycott, M-Beat was back in the top 20 at Christmas with the soaring vocals of Nazlyn riding a jungle rework of Anita Baker’s ‘Sweet Love’. Marlon produced a couple of albums for his dad’s label before jumping ship to make an LP for XL Recordings which never surfaced. Most recently he’s released a super-limited box set of 5 12”s showcasing most of his tracks from the glory days of Renk.
Levy stuck around with Renk too, and the push back from the jungle fraternity didn’t deter him from recording more in that vein. Fashion themselves embraced the jungle-dancehall crossover, releasing a double LP of General Levy and Top Cat tracks reworked by the likes of Lennie D Ice, DJ Rap and Project One, with the Dali of rave flyers, Junior Tomlin on cover art duties. It’s a time capsule of an exemplary moment in UK dance music, and DJ Rap’s mix of Top Cat’s ‘Ruffest Gunnark’ — which flips the original rhythm from Levy’s ‘Incredible General’ — remains a stone cold banger.
In an effort to win back the junglists, perhaps, Levy teamed up with M-Beat again in ‘97 for the single ‘Unique’ on which he namechecks Grooverider, Mickey Finn and MC Dett before adding “big up all of the jungle DJ who mi leave out”. Mostly he stuck to reggae and dancehall, though, with a foray into UK garage now and then around the turn of the century.
“I was just sitting there watching everybody go crazy!”
Things took a surprising turn in 2002 with ‘Incredible’ hitting the big screen when it was licensed for the Ali G In Da House movie. “I went into the cinema to watch it by myself” Levy told DJ Mag. “I didn’t know what’s gonna happen. The whole cinema’s rammed with people, and when that scene started I see the whole cinema just stand up and start skanking. I see girls on the chairs brucking out to the tune like they were in a rave. And no one knew who I was. I was just sitting there watching everybody go crazy!”
Less than a decade had passed since those tumultuous times on the jungle scene, and Levy had reached something close to national treasure status, yet he claims he never saw a penny from the record labels which handled ‘Incredible’. Still, it opened plenty of doors, and certainly kept him in dubplate sessions, which is something I can attest to myself.
In June 2012, around a decade after the Ali G movie came out, I got an email from my label boss Paul Jonas over at Tru Thoughts: “We are doing a remix thing with Fashion Records… part of a series of Fashion meets other labels remix thing (including Hospital Records)… Whatdoyouthink??”
Of course I jumped at the chance. I’ve loved Fashion since I was a kid, thanks to Smiley Culture popping up on Top Of The Pops, and I continue to use Chris Lane’s productions as a reference point when making my own tunes. I kind of knew Chris too. We met in 2011 when I popped round his house with my mate DJ Shepdog to interview him while Shep was sorting out the details for a Fashion remix 12” on his Nice Up! label. The result dropped in April 2012: a two sider featuring huge skanking DnB mixes of Andrew Paul and Pato Banton by Serial Killaz and Dub Pistols, respectively.
The question was what would I do in this situation when a lot of my stuff already (kind of) sounds like old Fashion productions? It was a no brainer. I love Levy’s Fashion material and, as cynical as this might sound, I knew that if I remixed ‘Incredible General’ most people would assume I’d taken the M-Beat hit and flipped it into some 80s dancehall.
The deal was wasn’t great. No upfront fee, but a 50/50 split of profits between the two labels, and then Tru Thoughts would go 50/50 with me. Potentially I was working for free, but I was still happy to do it. The deadline was tight, and I delivered it on July 27th, the day of the London Olympics opening ceremony.
Living close to the Olympic site at the time, one of my lasting memories of that day is parking up on my street after testing the mixdown on my car speakers, only to be hassled by some overzealous police who proceeded with the usual “what are you doing here, son?” Oh, just trying to park outside my flat without being harassed for no reason. For context, there were anti-aircraft guns set up in various parks and on top of tower blocks around the area.
I sent the finished mix out to a few trusted DJ friends, and started hearing good things back from various dancefloors around the world. Maybe there would be a couple of quid for my troubles afterall. And so, I waited for the hysteria and local chaos from the Olympics to subside, expecting the remix to drop imminently, but then nothing.
I toyed with pressing it up myself, though I was flat broke, so instead I started using the rhythm track during gigs with Deemas in the run up to our album release that September. We recorded a version with Deemas freestyling over it live in the Xfm studio for John Kennedy. It sounded great, and I considered recording it properly for a B-side, but then suddenly the remix was back in action and ready to come out… on Nice Up! Which was fine, Shep’s a friend, I’d released something on the label already, I was happy to see it out, which finally happened almost a year later on a 7” with my mate Mr Benn’s remix of Cutty Ranks on the flip.
I think it did pretty well, there was decent radio play from the likes of Daddy Ernie who clocked his own voice on the intro, and of course the guy who gave the M-Beat version it’s first play the day after it was made, David Rodigan. A few years on, after the 7”s had sold out, Shep included it on the Inna Nice Up! Fashion compilation alongside mixes from Machinedrum, Toddla T, The Bug etc, and I still have people who missed out on the vinyl bugging me for a copy now, not to mention various requests for the instrumental so they can record dub plate versions with the General himself.
For some reason I’ve never made contact with General Levy, and I’ve no idea what he thought of my mix, but I’m guessing he liked it if he’s voiced a few dubplates over the rhythm track. Maybe I should give him a shout because, even if I say so myself, a Wrongtom Meets General Levy album could be wicked. Watch out!
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