WELSH HIP-HOP HISTORY: 83 to 85
The early 80s were alive with youth subcultures, centred around different (though sometimes overlapping) musical styles. Mods, Skinheads and Soulboys, Rudeboys and Punks. In 1983 however, a new subculture started to emerge. We wouldn’t know it’s name in Wales for a few years, so those who followed it were grouped under the dance phenomenon which they were now followers of, a mixture of American styles which included Breakin or B Boying from the Bronx in New York, and Popping and Locking from California, but when the British media picked up on it, we got the catch all name of Breakdance. Suddenly kids across the country put down their BMX’s and Skateboards to start learning a new skill. Disco dancers changed their suddenly dated moves to the new styles. Even teenage football hooligans took a short break from fighting to place their excess of energy somewhere less violent. After all, Casuals were already wearing sports gear.
Although as we saw in my last post, Malcolm McLaren helped to spread the full spectrum of hip hop culture via his Buffalo Gals video at the end of 1982, it took a little time for budding breakers and body poppers to take their skills to the street. By the summer of 1983 some were making themselves known, taking inspiration from anywhere they could, sometimes just pictures in magazines. Rock Steady Crew were the biggest influence at this time. As well as the Buffalo Gals video they had been the first breakin’ crew to tour the UK at the end of 1982 and towards the end of 1983 they hit the UK charts with a music release called ‘(Hey You) The Rock Steady Crew’, fronted by the youngest and only female member of the crew, Baby Love. They also hit the big screen for the first time here in the movie Flashdance, though it would be two other films that would help catapult the craze to a whole new level.
Beat Street (which also featured the Rock Steady Crew) and Breakdance The Movie (originally called Breakin’ back in the USA) hit the UK in 1984 and from Cardiff to Colwyn Bay competitions and crews started to pop up everywhere. Of course there were already established breakers, and by the time they’d finished watching Beat Street in the cinema, many of them in Cardiff got up and started throwing down moves at the front of the screen.
Warren Davies from Street Fleet (Barry) with his Rubicon students Power Force - Photo courtesy of Warren Davies
By the end of 1984 there were dozens upon dozens of established crews across Wales, many with matching outfits that carried their crew names in bold letters. Some of the stand outs were: Devious DMCs, Electro Force, Street Crew, Star Force; Street Snakes in Cardiff; Crazy Rock in Cwmbran; Crazy Crew in Newport; BlazeOne Crew in Port Talbot; H2 in Brecon; Street Fleet from Barry and Electric Footwork in Newbridge, who had a head start on the others after a New York breaker called Joel Fenton found himself sent to stay with family in the small Welsh town after getting into trouble back home in the Bronx.
Electro Force, St Mellons & Trowbridge in Cardiff. Photo courtesy of 4Dee
You’d find crews practising everywhere, on street corners and school yards, usually on scraps of cardboard, or lino if they were lucky (just concrete if they weren’t). Most youth clubs had classes or training sessions, and crews would often roam from estate to estate, and even town to town, trying to find other crews to do battle with. The main spot for any self respecting Welsh breaker though was Maskells skating rink in Newport on a Saturday, where breakers would come from all over Wales, as well as Bristol, Swindon and Wolverhampton, waiting for DJ Robbie Howells to play the necessary music for them to throw down during the weekly ‘Breakin’ Hour’.
Andre from Crazy Crew at Maskells. Photo courtesy of Nikita Clay.
Music was not always easy to come by of course, the right tunes often required a trip to Groove Records in Soho, if you weren’t quick enough to pick up the imports that Virgin Records in Cardiff sometimes managed to have in. Of course for those living in the Docks, Merchant Seamen would sometimes bring over tapes from America but for most people, outside of the occasional chart hit, it was either waiting for John Peel to play something on BBC Radio 1 and taping it or taking a trip to London and using your boombox to record one of the pirates, or if you’re lucky some of Mike Allen’s show on Capital FM, which by 1984 was almost exclusively hip hop.
It wasn’t necessarily rap music either that the breakers were into, although in 1983 artists such as Kurtis Blow, Whodini and even Run DMC were finding their way over, other New York styles such as Latin Freestyle or Boogie went down well, though the sound that proved to be most popular was a futuristic fusion of Kraftwerk style electronic music, with influences of funk in the basslines and heavy synthesised beats courtesy of the Roland 808, but where to find it? Once again it was left to Morgan Khan to come to the rescue as he brought out his first Electro compilation in 1983, giving us a name that everyone could get behind in the process.
In 1984 there was even a UK Electro album, although this mostly consisted of Greg Wilson, Martin Jackson from Magazine and Andy Connell from A Certain Ratio under different names (the latter two later went on to form Swing Out Sister). One of their tracks was a kind of UK answer to the ‘(Hey You) The Rock Steady Crew by the top UK breakdance crew of the time, Manchester’s Broken Glass - fronted by two of the crew’s members Fiddz and Kermit (later of Ruthless Rap Assassins then Black Grape). It would be a couple of years before Wales would have any hip hop releases, though that said, Thomas The Voice’s 1985 single ‘I Was A Young Man’ was probably the first ever Electro Folk fusion on record.
Gradually around 1984 the term hip hop became more widespread in the UK, thanks in part to a BBC Arena documentary called Beat This: A Hip-Hop History, along with a new American documentary film Style Wars and the almost docu-drama offering of Wild Style, it helped to cement Hip hop in our minds as being a cultural fusion of music, breakdancing and graffiti. The former film was a massive inspiration on budding graffiti writers here in Wales, who like the breakers had limited accessibility to the art they loved and took snatches from wherever they could, record sleeves, magazine articles or clips from TV and films. Then in 1984 came a book by photographers Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfant called Subway Art, documenting the many trains that had been illegally painted by artists in New York. Suddenly there was a real blueprint that people could practise from and the amount of graffiti multiplied all across Wales.
Swansea (1985). Roxy burner by John Surman of Fantastic 4 with breakdancer Poppa Jez in front. Both sadly no longer with us. Photo courtesy of DJ Demo.
As these new artists did the best they could with stolen cans of Carplan or Duplicolor spray paint from Halfords, burners, throw ups and a whole lot of tags could be found along various train lines and across the housing estates of North and South Wales. Writers such as: Storm Boy in Colwyn Bay, who had returned to his birthplace from Perth in Australia around 1985; Bulldog, P-Nut (later Fina Outline and Coma) and Monty in around St Mellons and Trowbridge in Cardiff; Writers like Dice, T.Trouble and Frosty or the crews Fantastic 4 and Blood Brothers were mostly around Manselton, Penlan or The Vetch football ground in Swansea; Elite, Color Scheme and Second 2 None (no relation to the Bournemouth breakers) with writers such as Face (later Ron One), Race, Deano and Mr Wiz, around Llantwit Fardre and Church Village in the valleys.
Swansea (1985) Roxanne Shante piece by T.Trouble. Photo courtesy of DJ Demo.
There were many other crews and individuals, some of whom would find their own crews later in the decade as graffiti continued its rise, and a number of breakers and graffiti artists would start taking to rapping and djing as a whole new wave of Hip-hop music started to take hold in 1985, with Doug E Fresh & MC Ricky D (aka Slick Rick) in the UK Top 10 (helping to kick start beatboxing here), as well as underground acts such as Mantronix, Roxanne Shante, UTFO and Schooly D. Not to mention the first few releases from the new Def Jam label by T La Rock & Jazzy Jay, LL Cool J and the Beastie Boys. As we shall see in the next post, it was time for Wales to step up and start making its own music.
For more in-depth stories of Welsh Hip-hop, check out the Hip-hop Cymru-Wales podcast by Fly Fidelity.
