Label History / Biography
It was the revenge of the suburbs, those conservative yet curiously radical stains of land that surround London like a Native-American encampment. It was the homeland of the Mods, the soulboys of the jazz-funk era and it channeled the greatest explosion of British youth culture since punk rock. The suburbs begat acid house and the story of Junior Boys Own is inexorably tied into its mythology.
JBO, along with Warp, was the most important British dance label of its era, one that not only defined what British dance music actually sounded like but also what it should sound like. Long ago, however, when Underworld were still known by a squiggle rather than a name (it was pronounced Freur, apparently) and the Chemical Brothers weren’t yet the Dust Brothers or even Ariel, a fanzine was launched from the badlands of Berkshire. It was called Boys Own and it was the distillation of several years’ growing disenchantment with the popular culture bibles of the day, The Face and i-D and reflected the writers obsessions with football, funk and Socialism.
It was started by four young men, Terry Farley, Andy Weatherall, Steve Maize and Cymon Eckles, all of whom hailed from the M4 corridor. “We were part of that suburban soulboy scene,” recalls Junior Boys Own co-owner Steve Hall, who later joined the quartet in their murky endeavours. “So we’d all meet at soul nights in Southall, the Belvedere in Ascot which had Sunday jazz-funk sessions or local bowie/futurist nights. Right up until acid house we were the footsoldiers to any sort of trendy thing that was going on. We were the guys who queued up outside the Le Beat Route and sometimes you wouldn’t be allowed in and sometimes you were.”
It’s worth remembering how random London clubs were in the 1980s. The door policies were so unfathomable it was impossible to second guess what clobber would pass the muster and what wouldn’t. For the poker-faced door staff at West End clubs it was almost a sport. For Terry Farley and friends it was infuriating. “We all got the hump that we’d go along to these things and they’d let four in but not all of us. We couldn’t go straight from football, we had to go home and get changed. It did piss us off. It seemed like the whole club scene was run by a St. Martin’s School clique and even the London people involved like Robert Elms and Graham Ball, they’d all gone to the London School of Economics.”
The inspiration for Boys Own was The End, an hilarious rag run by Peter Hooton (later of the Farm) and cohorts that managed to combine football, politics, music and fashion with a scabrous Scouse wit. “There wasn’t any magazines at all that represented what later became the house culture,” claims Farley. “All the fanzines were indie or punk and the magazines that wrote about dance music, like Mixmag, were full of wedding DJs and Tony Blackburn. Even Blues & Soul was full of wallies building pyramids and poncing around in Hawaiian shirts. We took the Liverpool blueprint, even to the point of nicking certain things like Uppers and Downers and made-up letters.”
It was an instant success, though that success was measured more in a sphere of influence than any sales graphs or, indeed, profits (it never made any). It was actually a ramshackle affair. “I’d write it out and my mum would take it to work and some girl would type it out,” chuckles Farley. “Then I would cut it out and stick it on bits of paper and cut some pictures out of old Face and i-D magazines and sling it to the printers” Dostoevsky it was not. It’s effects rippled through the suburbs and beyond, so by the time acid house arrived it was perfectly poised to capitalise.
It was Boys Own that published the first article about acid house in late 1987. It was called Bermondsey Goes Balearic and written by Paul Oakenfold. Boys Own, those chaps who’d endured the frozen stares of West End doormen, suddenly found themselves at the forefront of something explosive, different, life-transforming. Within months the old guard had been swept aside. Farley and Weatherall were in-demand DJs. Their parties went from inner circle shindigs to elaborate outdoors events. “It was a friend of Cymon Eckles who owned it,” remembers Hall of their first (open-air) acid-house party. “A hippy musician guy who had a big house with a barn in the grounds. Terry and Andy played with Steve Proctor. There was maybe 200 people, all the usual crowd who were around Shoom, Future and Clink Street. It was the first time I’d ever been to anything outdoors. I’d never been to Ibiza at that stage and I think it was the same for most people. First time you’d ever seen a big sound system in a country setting and a full rave going on!”
This frenzy of activity was rewarded with a label deal with London Records. Their contacts there were Paul McKee, an old school friend of Farley, and Pete Tong, fellow resident DJ at the Raid. The Boys Own in-house band Bocca Juniors were put to work recording their debut Raise. “Pete really supported us,” says Terry. “He’d put us in ridiculously priced studios with full catering. If we wanted a piano, there was no samples. There was a classical piano in the corner and in came a piano player! Raise took us about two weeks to do and must have cost about £20,000. We probably sold about 2,000 copies.”
The deal was not a success. While their careers independent of the deal flourished with Eckles’ band Airstream signing to One Little Indian, Weatherall co-producing Primal Scream’s now classic Screamadelica and Farley and Pete Heller’s remix career blossoming, London label bosses became frustrated that their best work was being produced elsewhere so when the deal came to term, it was not renewed. “The problem was,” reflects Steve Hall. “We all knew what we didn’t want to do, but we didn’t know what we did want to do.” Bound up in this was a frustration that some of the acts they wanted to sign were being rebuffed. “I can see why they did it at the time, but they rejected Underworld and the Chemical Brothers.”
So the birth of Junior Boys Own was hardly a grand plan. It was simply the only outlet left for the productions and acts accumulating around them. “I’d been trying to sign the Chemicals and Underworld and they both said they’d stay with the label if we were dropped,” says Steve Hall. “Terry was making his records with Pete so we had them as well. I could see we had something to say and somewhere to go but I couldn’t see where it was going to end up. There was a group of people forming around us who the majors weren’t interested in and it must have seemed to them that we knew what we were doing.”
Which was more than you could say for some of their nascent producers. JBO had put Rocky and Diesel in the studio to make their first record which was meant to be a cut-up of Happy Song by Cloud One. Rocky: “We ended up with a shaker – chukkuduk – from a nine minute song.”
“What we liked was the groove of the American records, but we liked the arrangements of the European tunes, those big drop downs, which American records didn’t really do,” continues Diesel. “We put those two together and Muzik X-Press was the outcome.” They weren’t particularly impressed by the outcome. When Farley asked if they’d buy it, they answered a barely-convinced yes.
“Fabi Paras was playing at Stages in Chesham and they cut an acetate and took it down there and he played it,” laughs Rocky. “He calls up and goes, ‘That record annihilated the club!’ And we were like, ‘Did it?’”
Muzik X-Press perfectly characterised JBO’s early days, a heady brew of studied incompetence allied to no little talent. Although the productions are raw and unpolished, it’s surprising how many of them still stand up today. Suddenly what had flopped at London/ffrr, hit home here. JBO’s first release, Fire Island’s In Your Bones, instantly outsold everything they’d done through London. “All you had to do then was press them, put them in a warehouse and get someone to sell them into shops,” claims a matter-of-fact Steve Hall. “From 1992 to 1997 things just seemed to get bigger and bigger, the momentum of the scene just drove us along with it.”
The pinnacle of JBO’s success arrived in the summer of 1996 when the release of the cult Scottish movie Trainspotting propelled Underworld back into public consciousness a year after they had first charted with Born Slippy. “It was a brilliant summer,” sighs Hall. “Being number 2 in the charts for almost the whole summer. Selling millions of records and thinking it was going to go on forever.”
It didn’t last forever, but along the way, they released albums by Ballistic Brothers, Underworld, Black Science Orchestra, the long-forgotten Regular Fries and put out bewildering array of 12-inches by, among many, Rocky & Diesel, Ashley Beedle, The Beloved, Farley & Heller, Phil Asher, Swag, Noel Watson, Paul Woolford, Mark Wilkinson, utilising more pseudonyms than an on-the-run cocaine baron.
Listening back to the many classic JBO released, they are not just great records, or even great house records, but evoke something more; something that is embedded in the British culture which spewed them forth. Acid house did not just change music, it transformed us as people. It showed us an index of possibilities. “I was probably drifting away from clubbing and dance music before until house kicked off,” confesses Hall. “It stopped me from taking a conventional path through life. It changed everything.” Here’s the evidence.
