IN THE BEGINNING, THERE WAS SHY FX.

Words: Ian McQuaid

“I don’t have a first memory of music,” Shy FX muses. “It was always just around. It was life!” Sitting by the desk of the Digital Soundboy headquarters, quiet and considered in his responses—even while the twinkle in his eye and empty bottles of champagne scattered round the studio suggest the party is never too far off—Shy has come a long way from his days as a wild child running round ‘80s North London, but he’s carried those early days with him every step of the way. Andre “Shy FX” Williams spent his childhood darting between crates of vinyl at Tottenham reggae shop Third World. It was a home from home run by his granddad, UK soundsystem legend Count Shelley. And when he wasn’t in the shop, he remembers his own home doubled up as a venue for local blues parties. “I’d be sleeping and there’d be a shebeen downstairs with the bassline coming through the ceiling,” he says. “It was just always there.”

All this reggae DNA going into young Shy has gone on to have a profound effect on UK musical culture. Over the last quarter of a century, he has shaped and reshaped dance culture, fusing depth charge bass with everything from poppy R&B, to roots reggae, to UKG to, most famously of all, the sound he helped birth in the early ‘90s—the sound of jungle. With his new project Raggamuffin SoundTape, he proudly displays all of these influences, and it’s probably the first time he’s offered so many tempos under the Shy FX name. He remembers the time when he first fell in love with the sound that has defined his career. “I was around 15—not old enough to get into raves—walking around Northumberland Park estate, and you’d hear this new sound from the elders. A lot of people hated it, they’d call it ‘devil music’, but I was like, ‘I don’t know what it is but it’s sick!’”

At this time, Shy was DJing in a dancehall system and taking his first steps in production. His first release was the B-side to Bagga Worries’ ‘93 classic “Ride De Punany”, Shy teaming up with UK MCs Scribbla & Militant for a percussive-heavy cut called “The Good Design”. It’d only be a few months later that he heard this wild new sound sweeping London and changed his style for good. Deciding to try his hand at the new style, he did what any enterprising teenage junglist did in 1994: sampled every record he could get his hands on. His first effort, built from a break taken from another jungle 12” and the acapella of Capleton’s “Everybody” was, as Shy wryly remembers, “totally shit.” The label Permission To Dance thought different, and released the Jungle Love 12”the first record featuring the Shy FX name—in 1993.

Shy was now 16 years old, kicking his heels at life’s crossroad. A chance encounter with his friend (and soon to be UK hip-hop icon) Skinnyman put him on a new path. “I knew Skinnyman from round the way,” says Shy. “He’s from Finsbury Park; absolute G! He had linked up with these guys called Sound Of The Underground Records and done a hip-hop project with them. He said, ‘I like some of the stuff you’re doing, come with me and meet them.’ So I played them a few demos and they took me on as a tape op—you had to make tea for people and splice tape and all that stuff a tape op is supposed to do—then they asked me to clean the toilets and I thought, I’m just not on that.” Shy decided that his time was better spent writing music, and he spent more time developing his jungle sound. This resulted in his breakout tune, “Gangsta”. He returned to SOUR—this time as a producer. They agreed to put out “Gangsta” and “it went nuts for them.” SOUR switched to becoming an entirely jungle-focused label, and then one of the team made a casual suggestion: try re-recording “Gangsta” with their mate UK Apache dropping some lyrics over it.

Shy takes up the story of the surprisingly simple creation of one of jungle’s greatest tunes: “Apache came into the studio, did his job in two takes, went home, and it was done. It felt like it was writing itself. Everything on the tune sounded like a hook. There wasn’t a part that felt like a verse—it was nuts!” Whilst “Incredible” by M Beat was already causing damage in the raves, what Shy and UK Apache had done was something different. The majority of the vocal for “Incredible” was taken from General Levy’s dancehall cut “Mad Them”. “Original Nuttah” was only ever created as a jungle tune—the sound was no longer playing second fiddle to dancehall; it had arrived as a genre able to stand on its own two feet. The minute dubplates fired out, the tune exploded. “Carnival was crazy for me,” Shy explains. “It was the first time I went, it was the first time I’d felt cool enough to go [laughs]. I went with a lot of people who had issues with other people there, and at the same time I’ve got a tune that was playing at a few stages. It was a really weird vibe. At one time I remember hearing ‘Nuttah’ being played, and wanting to hear it, but we were running away from a situation—it was madness. But it added to the whole vibe of what was going on at the time.”

Around late ‘94, the jungle scene was heading into a musical arms race; producers competing to see who had the most technical proficiency. Shy got caught up, forensically dismantling rhythms, until he realised he’d gone so far into music for the head he’d forgotten about the feet. “We ended up showing off a lot. We’d all be competing—who can fuck up an Amen the most—but the more we started swinging our dicks around showing what we could do rhythmically, when you played them tunes, no one knew how to dance. And what I loved about jungle when I first started going out, going to clubs like Thunder, Bassbox, the Wax Club, was seeing people my age and older, black, white, grinding and whining to fast music like it’s slow reggae—it would blow my mind.”

It was on hearing Trace’s classic, rolling remix of T Power’s “Mutant Jazz” that Shy realised he had to change his sound—mostly because when he first heard the Trace remix, he hated it. “I didn’t get it at all,” he says. “Speaking to Trace, just trying to understand, he told me: ‘People just want to roll out, mate! Just find a groove and roll it out.’ Those words really stuck in my head. So I started just having fun.” The result of this was a run of tunes that are amongst the foundation texts of grime. Shy stripped back his tunes to simple drum loops and yammering basslines that provided a relentless kinetic pump that physically forced you to move. It’s no surprise the sound got christened ‘jump up’. With bangers such as “Chopper Remix”, “Wolf”, “The Message”, “Raw Dogs Relick” and more, Shy gave DJs dancefloor bombs—and the MCs loved it. He had inadvertently created perfect beds to spit on, the throbbing energy in music leaving space for endless bars to roll over. Even as original junglists were moving on to the speed garage scene, tunes like “Chopper” were played everywhere: garage, jungle, even hip-hop sets, laying a beat for grime’s forefathers—the likes of Wiley and D Double—to perfect their art on.

Now Shy had written a run of hits he started to grab the headline slots at raves, dominating with exclusive reworks of his cuts. It was this, combined with his constant curiosity about new styles, that led to his brief expulsion from the purist jungle scene, something he laughs about to this day. “I was making dubs of my tunes, naming the venue in the intro, and people would go mad to them. I was always a person who loved fucking around with different tempos, and at a Telepathy event I made a dubplate of ‘The Message’ that slowed down into a garage tune, then switched back into ‘The Message’. It absolutely annihilated the rave—people went crazy—but it caused a HUGE division. The DJs hated it.” In 2019 language, Shy FX was cancelled. “No DJ wanted to fuck with me,” he says. “I heard the phone calls about me—people had had enough of me doing what I was doing. I was a bit of a show-off.”

Bored of it all, Shy didn’t give a fuck. D&B felt like a trap, so he went deep cover. He doesn’t talk too much about exactly who he wrote tracks for in the late ‘90s, but will give a few teasers; he worked on major label pop acts, writing tracks for gold-selling chart R&B act Damage, as well as the lesser-known girl group Truce. He kept firing out the occasional jungle tune on his own Ebony label (notably the wild percussive bomb “Bambataa”), and turned his hand to UKG under different aliases. Soon he found himself considering whether it was possible to make a jungle tune that drew on the melody he had learnt in his work as an R&B producer. He remembers complaining to Fabio, long champion of soul in drum ‘n’ bass, about the lack of vibes in the then tech-heavy scene, “and he said to me: ‘You’re a producer! If you don’t like it, do something about it.”

Never one to back down from a challenge, Shy pulled a fast one. Enlisting Di, one of the singers from Truce (who was completely against making D&B), he recorded her voicing a summery 80bpm R&B jam he’d knocked up with T-Power. Once Di left the studio, they pulled out all the original drums, and replaced them with clattering breakbeats and cone-wobbling subs. He called the track “Shake Your Body, handed it out to a few DJs, and the whirlwind started all over again—the track smashed into the Top 10; the biggest hit drum ‘n’ bass had ever had.

The cash from “Shake Your Body” gave Shy the clout to start Digital Soundboy, his label that released dubstep, electro, grime, D&B and house, forging the recognisable rave sound of Britain in the 21st Century, where tempo is less important than heavy bass pressure and constant sonic innovation. Releasing music from the likes of Skream, Benga, B Traits, Caspa, DJ Fresh, Redlight, Breakage, Calibre and more, Shy created the home he was always looking for, where the invention that had characterised early jungle was more important than a turgid reiteration of its rulebook. He remembers it feeling like freedom. “The whole idea that you discover a form of music and you make that form of music from then onwards—that sounds like torture to me. Doing the same palette over again—I would go mad! It doesn’t work for me.”

So now, it’s little surprise that he’s got an album that has everything from moody rap to throwback jungle. The list of collaborators includes everyone from Kojey Radical to roots reggae hero Proteje, and Shy is as interested in inventing as he ever was. And he knows one thing: he wants people to enjoy listening to the music as much as he has making it. “I just want people to listen to this album, take it in, don’t think it’s going to be anything, just know you’re going to hear some really good music put together.” And what would the kid who first heard jungle in the streets of Northumberland Park make of it? “Ha! the 15-year-old me would be like, ‘What the fuck! You’re making tunes like this?!’ I wouldn’t have even been able to imagine making that sort of music... I’d be overly gassed.”


Posted on March 19, 2019