Digging for Creators: When the Search for a Track ID Becomes a Life-Changing Mission

There's this record. That's how most good stories start. Always with a record, at a party, in this place, during a time, that defined our lives, etc, etc, etc. That's music for you.

Anyway, there's this record. It's a few hours after sunrise. We're on a heap of freshly cut Douglas pine. Techno's been replaced by the fantastic pianos of Old Skool, Hardcore and Breakbeat. It's one of the hottest July's on record. It's 2007. Slack Banta Sound System have turned Watton Woods into a saturnalia of euphoric underachievers, and out over the beaten roofs of hatchbacks, cut through the forest trees, comes this rising synth. It's this record.

On the ride home, we talked about it. At college, I talked about it. Years later, I posted a similar sounding YouTube rip to a friends Facebook page. At university, I bored the ear of some dubstep aficionado with the melody to it. Hungover one afternoon, searching through the listless white labels uploaded via numerous YouTube rave channels, I found it.

It was glorious. I forced friends to nod awkwardly at it whilst I paused it at key intervals to check they were still listening. My girlfriend waited patiently for it to end, smiled and told me she loved me regardless. An all office email thread, full of confused attempts to categorise it, resulted in its banishment from the office speaker system. Today, I feel alone in love with this record.

The thing is, it soon became clear finding it wasn't enough. This record defined, for me, a moment in time where every place was open to change. It was chaos and ambiguity. Saturday nights and Sunday mornings. It was the soundtrack to my personal mission: annihilating my self within the whirling maw of a mad crowd as they tore up the dance. I decided then, this year, that I would find the man or woman that made it.

I started searching the only place my appreciation of this record had ever been echoed, the place I found it: YouTube. Amongst the memories of other commenters who had been touched by the tune, I hit gold.

All I had to do now was find The Doctor, DJ Skeme, DJ Kick & Froggy, Austin, or Boogy Times Records.

The Doctor turned up a number of healthy looking medical profesionals and one Fantazia interview with a DJ known as The Doctor, which, whilst on point musically, provided no reference to Romford, the record, or any further contact details. One down.

DJ Skeme turned up a funk/soul DJ easily contactable via Twitter. As he appeared to be an integral pioneer in the early soul acetate scene in Philadelphia, I thought it fair to discount him. Locating a specific DJ Kick was like trying to find a fart in a hurricane.

Froggy, turned up another soul DJ, this time British —tick — who'd played warm up shows for T.Rex and Slade, untick, and was prolific in the 70s and 80s — question mark.

I moved on to Austin, and tried out several syntactical variants on AUSTIN PRODUCER BOOGY TIMES ROMFORD and found nothing.

Finally, I searched for Boogy Times. When the page search loaded I lifted my pickaxe from the scarred walls of the Internet and ran my finger along its smooth veins: Gold. Again.

Boogie Times, as I was about to learn, was ground zero for an indelible period of dance music history in the early 1990s: the formation of Suburban Base Records.

At a time when Essex was much maligned for its East End diaspora — satirical stereotypes flush with gaudy jewellery and the auburn char of prolonged sunbed exposure — a DIY movement helped create one of the most legendary dance labels of the decade. As an indie, Suburban Base grew from behind the record counter at Boogie Times, Romford, into a major-label challenging upstart that broke chart-topping artists, Rachel Wallace and Danny Breaks.

Romford was on the map. All thanks to a circle of friends, producers and promoters that made the music that moved them and became wildly successful in the process. Watching videos of them all - Prodigy, Rachel Wallace, Danny Breaks and Danny Donnelly, the label's founder – from around the time, you could see that they were all just kids at the centre of some great event that had caught the attention of MTV, lifestyle magazines and the population at large.

Danny Donnelly was the man behind the label. I found him on Twitter and after a few weeks— he's now a movie producer and filmmaker in Los Angeles — he sent me an email about the record and the birth of the label.

"Suburban Base days were fantastic, just making records for fun and having hits. I used to buy the whole first run pressings of white label vinyl for my store Boogie Times in Romford, both to help new acts and start up labels and also as a way of keeping product exclusive to my store which made it a real destination throughout that period, I did this for a lot of people — giving them money to press their first run sometimes just from a listen copy on tape — including Andy C at the very start of Ram Record for instance," he told me.

"I believe this is the case for the track you're asking about, this came in as a pressed up white though and we bought in sufficient quantity to keep it exclusive for a while. It's bit of an obscure one to be writing about and wasn't that big to be honest, I remember the white label though, Froggy was involved in this and he was a local well-known DJ and had a 'soundsystem'. He was well respected amongst the soul crowd, which was big pre-rave. Froggy passed away a few years back. He was part of the 80's soul funk jazz scene and not really involved in the rave scene greatly, [he was] much older than all of us. Interesting dude though, apparently he was the first person in the UK with Technics 1210s."

Thanks to Danny, I found the man that made my record. To my disbelief, it was the same Froggy I'd seen before in my previous search, but disregarded due to his influence within the soul and funk scene in the 70s and 80s. To think that a soul producer may have contributed to a piano hardcore track seemed at odds with the tropes of each respective genre. But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. The record seemed unique to me, and in truth it was.

Froggy was Ilford's own boy, an East End answer to John Peel where soul classics and funk odysseys were concerned. His residencies were legendary for their boundless introductions to music from across the continents. They were an education. Here he's captured in 1981 introducing the Oscar's crowd in Newbury Park to a bit of Latin Jazz, with the charisma and casual patter of a fairground announcer. Scream if you want to whirl faster. At another early recording during his Friday/Saturday residencies at the Royalty club, near Southgate, Froggy lets the soul crooners of the day do the talking in a set that still sounds fresh today.

It is no surprise, looking back at Froggy's own set up, that he became interested in the sound system culture taking rise in the rave era. He spent his sets beat matching between two stacks of a self built A.S.S. Sound System, hopping up and down — which is how he was awarded his moniker — in front of a Matamp Supernova sound mixer within an atomic orange and brown console.

To get a real portrait of the man and his influence across the music scene as a whole, and not just my own predilection, you could do no better than to scroll through the comments underneath some of his mixes that have been uploaded to YouTube.

In an age where the idea of being inducted in to any Music Hall of Fame merits revulsion, YouTube comments have come to define legacies of a certain pariah of music culture and these eulogies lay best testament to the soul of the man by those that were lucky enough to see it.

I don't know why the New Science E.P. speaks to me so much. I don't know why it makes me want to embarrass myself droning on about it or by playing it in the most inhospitable environments. I don't know why I needed to find out who made it. After all, as Danny said, it didn't even do that well.

I'm just glad I did, if only to discover that a legendary soul DJ dipped his sage toes into the rave scene going on around him in Romford, circa 1992.

Steven Howlett, aka DJ Froggy, passed away in 2008. He is survived by his family and his friends. His son, Mark Howlett, aka DJ Tadpole, organises a free music event every year in his honour, aptly titled, Frogmarch.

His legend lives on in the grooves of that record, at the heart of a legendary moment in rave culture, and at the top of my record pile.

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