Meat Beat Manifesto

1989, Sweatbox

What would you call it back then? ‘High-energy dub’, ‘noise rock’, and ‘industrial hip-hop’ were all bandied around. One thing’s for sure, the music on Meat Beat Manifesto’s debut album didn’t sound like anything else on the shelves when it dropped into record stores in the late ’80s.

The dense, distorted collage of samples, feedback, breaks and politically charged shouting over the top, had more more in common with the magpie Pop Art aesthetic than anything you’d find in the pedestrian dance music charts of the time.

Jack Dangers, a sort of beat maker generation William Burroughs with a sampler, diced and spliced music snatches, taped randomly off the TV, radio and from his record collection, and fed them into the Akai sampler like a shredding machine, then danced dementedly as the pieces rained down on the mixing desk.

“I was screaming my head off doing vocals through the talkback mic, and distorting shit,” says Dangers. “The original idea for Meat Beat was punk, mixed with electronic music. We really hadn’t thought it had been done, at that point, in an in-your-face way. People like The Prodigy would eventually do it, but back then we were going the full whack.”

Recorded over three main studios, often sneaking in across the dead of night to lay stuff down, Dangers and a small gang of co-conspirators, would push the cutting-edge equipment to its limits, searching for that perfect beat.

“It was pretty raucous,” says Dangers. “Things went into the red on the desk. There were times we’d blow the speakers!

“There was so much stuff going on in these tracks. I took all the things I loved, like reggae, early hip-hop, stuff like Cabaret Voltaire and Adrian Sherwood, and put my own slant on it. There wasn’t a tag for that type of music back then.”

Looking back with the benefit of hindsight, the bloodline of breakbeat, trip-hop, big beat, and even jungle, can be traced back to the experiments on Storm The Studio. These tracks sound ahead of their time now, but in 1989 listeners must have felt like their radio had tuned into another dimension.

“Some of these tracks end up in just noise,” admits Dangers with a chuckle. “We didn’t make it for any real market. We just did it for ourselves.”