FOUNDATION X RUDE JUDE

UK garage veterans Sticky and Scott Garcia team up with new school aficionado Rude Jude to show us how they made their dancefloor stomper, Epic

The UK garage dons discuss their collab with the YouTube piano hero

Back to the old school

Those who were fortunate enough to have experienced the golden age of UK garage in the late 90s will no doubt be familiar with two of the scene’s biggest names. Sticky and Scott Garcia had massive crossover hits with Booo!, featuring Ms Dynamite, and A London Thing with MC Styles, respectively, and in recent years they’ve joined forces as Foundation to bring their music to a new generation. We caught up with Sticky (AKA Richard Forbes) and Scott in their West London studio to find out how they created their cinematic banger Epic with collaborator Rude Jude, and find out more about their musical journey. Computer Music: Did you engineer your own projects back in the 90s? Scott Garcia: “I used to use three or four different engineers, so I used to kind of be the classic producer role in the studio just telling people what to do! Over time, I gradually started to pick up bits and bobs of what the engineers were doing, until I went for about a year just using my studio on my own. I used to switch the studio on and start making a tune until I fucked everything up, basically, and then I’d just turn everything off. That was my process for about a month until I started to get my head around it! I was on an Atari 1040. I used Notator and Cubase, then went to Logic around 2000 on a Mac and I’ve been using it ever since.” Richard Forbes: “I started with an Atari ST and Cubase, which I didn’t really like. Then I moved to Notator, because I was working at a reggae label called Fashion Records – most of the reggae studios I went to had Notator or Creator. I thought it was a bit tighter than Cubase at the time.

“I blagged my way into a session with Maxi Priest’s brother. I met him in a club. I said to him, ‘I’m a producer, I’ve got tunes!’ – that was some bullshit. And he invited me down to introduce me to his brother. I got there and his brother was Maxi Priest! I was honest after that; I said, ‘Look, I don’t know how to produce… I know how to make beats – I think – and I wanna learn!’. He was welcoming – he said to come down every Wednesday. So I went down to make beats.

“Then I went to Jamaica in 1997 with these discs, thinking they’ve got Creator, but they had an MPC! They showed me how to use that, and a couple of years later, I got one. Most the tracks that I’m known for were done on the MPC and a Yamaha O2R. I was using Logic, but only for vocals. I’m more of an MPC guy.”

: When did you guys start producing music together? RF: “Well, we started as friends. Scott called me up and said, ‘I think we should do this garage thing again’. This was five or six years ago now – we didn’t actually meet when it was the buzz of garage.”

: You didn’t know each other back on the day? SG: “Not at all! I mean, Sticks is a hero of mine anyway from the garage era, but garage in the latter years was quite fragmented. In 2011, I was systematically going through my memory bank of people who were sick, because everyone was, like, nonexistent. I’d spoken to Sticky briefly before, and we got on well, so I hollered him and it just developed from there. I remember Sticky sending me a Bluey Robinson vocal and saying, ‘Yeah, put the bass on this’; and I was like, ‘Put the bass on it?! Like, you’re Sticky and you want me to put the bass on it?!?’ And that was the start of it. It just kind of developed from that one little remix.”

“I used to switch the studio on and start making a tune until I fucked everything up, basically”

RF: “Scott was a bit sceptical in producing, and I was like, ‘Nah, bruv, come on!’”

: What was it like getting Julian into the mix? SG: “It was just very, very straightforward, which is rare in this game! It was extremely easy and very pleasant – he’s a dream to work with.”