- 30 years of a UK rave anthem.
- In early 1989, Matthew Nelson, the UK rave artist better known as Slipmatt, began a two-year apprenticeship to become a "sparky," the informal British term for electrician. In his first year he earned £40 a week, rising to £80 the year after. "Imagine earning £40 a week now?" Nelson told me over the phone. "It was bad then."
Nelson, who was 21 or 22 at the time, was also DJing, supporting his meagre wages with the odd gig here and there. The rave scene was starting to explode in the UK, and his brother Paul was one of the people behind East London party Raindance, which launched in September '89 and later hosted the UK's first legal rave in collaboration with Newham Council. Nelson became a Raindance resident.
He spent the next 18 months juggling three trades at once: wiring, DJing and making tunes, which he did alongside his schoolmate John Fernandez, AKA Lime. Together, they were SL2. By summer 1991, after a popular 12-inch on Awesome Records, they found themselves in the middle of a bidding war between eight dance music labels, including Warp and XL. They chose the latter. Around the same time, Nelson's apprenticeship was drawing to a close. He'd reached a fork in the road.
"We got a nice little advance from XL and I just thought, 'alright, that's it, I can't carry on doing everything,'" he said. "I felt a bit bad for my guvnor really because he was a friend of the family. Two years training me up—I even got quite good grades. And then it was just, 'ta-ra mate, thank you very much.' What can you do, eh?"
The track that got SL2 signed was "DJs Take Control," a rave anthem with all the trimmings: stabs, chords, proper euphoria. This was the sound of the era. But the track that took them to #2 in the UK Singles Chart, and turned them into global touring artists, was a different beast, tapping into the duo's other great love: reggae.
According to Nelson, SL2 made "On A Ragga Tip" at home using an Akai S950 sampler, a Roland D5 synth ("to trigger the samples"), an Atari 1040ST computer and some "dodgy old software." They'd done the reggae-rave thing before—"Way In My Brain," which sampled Wayne Smith's classic riddim "Under Mi Sleng Teng," was the B-side to "DJs Take Control"—but this time the vocal was brighter, louder and clearly the main attraction. After trying and failing with a Yellowman sample, the duo chanced upon Jah Screechy's "Walk & Skank" while listening to records at a friend's house. They knew immediately.
"We sampled tons of it," Nelson said. "It wasn't exactly what we were thinking, but it just fitted perfectly. It's got the piano at the beginning, which gave the whole thing a totally different character from what was around. We totally had a vision for it. And it worked exactly as we wanted it to. We did that with quite a few of the tracks really. We were quite goal-oriented."
Nelson thinks they probably made "On A Ragga Tip" in about a day and a half—Fernandez wasn't one to tinker endlessly. They cut it to dubplate and began hammering it out and about. When they met with XL cofounder Nick Halkes, he took a little convincing to make it the A-side on their next EP. But he eventually came round, and On A Ragga Tip landed on April 6th, 1992. Within two weeks, it was in at #7 in the UK Singles Chart.
"The following weekend we were in LA doing a show and XL gave us a call to say we were #1 on the midweek chart," Nelson said. "To go from council house to Top Of The Pops and suddenly #1 in the charts, it was absolutely crazy. Although we actually went down to #2 the day after."
From there, it was a whirlwind. Nelson's typical weekly gig schedule in the UK ballooned to playing three or four shows every Friday and Saturday night. This was on top of all the midweek gigs, too. "Jump in the motor and just burn up and down the motorways everywhere," he said. "You couldn't really do it these days. The reaction was just mental. It took everything to another level."
SL2 only put out one more EP on XL: 1991's Way In My Brain (Remix). Within two years, the project was over. "The scene changed massively in 1993 and we wanted to leave SL2 as a success rather than go down the pop route, which wasn't really us," Nelson said. Still, 30 years later, "On A Ragga Tip" endures.
In 2010, SL2 re-recorded their biggest hit in order to own 100 percent of the rights, which, Nelson estimated, has saved them "tens of thousands of pounds" due to a subsequent stream of lucrative sync deals. Since leaving the electrician's life behind in 1991, Nelson has only ever worked as a DJ and producer.
"It's been a life-changer for me and made a decent bit of money," he said. "But more than that it's propelled my career. I still get calls on a weekly basis from friends and family saying, 'oh Matt, I just heard your tune on the radio.' So yeah, it's given me a totally unexpected life. I feel like I've not worked a day since the middle of '91."
Correction, December 16th: A previous version of this article said "On A Ragga Tip" was 20 years old. It's actually 30 years old.