Bought with a bank loan \u2026 Boogie Times Records, pictured in the 90s. Photograph: westhamdan\/Danny Breaks<\/p>\n
The scene\u2019s key hub was the record shop Boogie Times, opened in 1989 by Danny Donnelly with a bank loan secured shortly before his 18th birthday. He was born in Stratford, east London, but when he was five his parents moved out to Romford, an old Essex<\/a> market town that had effectively become a suburb of London as the capital sprawled outwards after the second world war.<\/p>\n The Donnellys\u2019 old shop at 18 Abbey Lane, Stratford in 2006. Photograph: \u00a9 Vici MacDonald<\/p>\n Donnelly\u2019s dad commuted back to Stratford to run the family corner shop, while young Danny inherited his entrepreneurial streak. \u201cI was already buying and selling records at school,\u201d he says. He loved rare groove, where hard-to-find jazz, funk and R&B records were selected for the quality of their breakbeats. At 14, he bought huge speakers for his bedroom, which he later used to put on parties around east London: \u201cYou\u2019d hire someone\u2019s flat, charge at the door and it would be treated like a club for the event.\u201d<\/p>\n Boogie Times opened just as house music and ecstasy found their way into post-industrial spaces and farmers\u2019 fields, building demand for rave tunes on vinyl. The location of Donnelly\u2019s dad\u2019s shop in Stratford was similarly fortuitous: east London pirate station Fantasy FM launched in the block next door in 1989. \u201cThey would come downstairs and get a cup of tea and a sandwich after they had done their show,\u201d says Donnelly. His dad got chatting to future drum\u2019n\u2019bass legend DJ Hype, who soon paid a visit to Boogie Times with another artist, DJ Krome. \u201cKrome said: \u2018Your mum makes the best cheese and onion sandwich.\u2019\u201d After being switched on to hardcore rave, Donnelly endeavoured to supply some of the freshest vinyl to a burgeoning local clientele.<\/p>\n A visiting legend \u2026 DJ Hype in Boogie Times Records 1990s dance music record shop in Romford, Essex, Photograph: Danny Donnelly<\/p>\n Romford and the wider borough of Havering already housed parties by people such as the polymath producer and promoter Mark Ryder \u2013 who later became a star in the UK garage era as Mark \u201cRuff\u201d Ryder \u2013 but Romford was still best known for dancing to pop music on a Saturday night with your glad rags on.<\/p>\n Tony Grimley, another local DJ inspired by his first rave, was asked to run a night at Romford\u2019s biggest nightclub, Hollywood. He named it Culture Shock to describe the way the music landed there. \u201cIt was a party venue: a very Sharon and Tracy, 80s place,\u201d says Grimley. Instead of tame disco and \u201cerection section\u201d slow dances, suddenly there were exciting new electronic DJs such as Andrew Weatherall, Danny Rampling and Underworld\u2019s Darren Emerson. The local crowd didn\u2019t like hard techno, Grimley says, \u201cbut that happy, high-energy sort of house music [such as] Danny Rampling \u2026 every time we booked Danny, we reached capacity.\u201d<\/p>\n Making music themselves \u2026 Danny Donnelly leans on his Jeep with Boogie Times manager and Suburban Base Records artist Winston Run Tings. Photograph: Danny Donnelly<\/p>\n Simon Duggins AKA Uncle Dugs, DJ and former station manager of pirate-turned-legit radio station Rinse FM, went to his first rave after he noticed a circus big top on the side of the A13 when his dad was driving him to football training at Leyton Orient. \u201cI walked into that rave a budding professional footballer,\u201d says Duggins. \u201cI walked out wanting to be [rave DJ] Slipmatt.\u201d Duggins had already been nervously stepping into Boogie Times on a packed Saturday when he was still at school. \u201cSomeone would walk in, and then the whisper would go round the shop: That\u2019s DJ Hype. You can\u2019t even believe that you\u2019re in the same space as these people.\u201d<\/p>\n Garage music? \u2026 Suburban Base\u2019s first recording studio, built in Danny Donnelly\u2019s parents\u2019 garage. Photograph: westhamdan\/Danny Breaks<\/p>\n Romford was also surrounded by pirate radio stations such as Conflict FM in Rainham, and Force FM, which operated above a nearby sweet shop. \u201cPirate radio, the community around record stores and flyering was the analogue version of the internet,\u201d says Donnelly. He broadened that community by creating his own record label, Suburban Base, brainstorming its name in the office above the shop on the day of the Rumbelows Football League cup final on 21 April 1991. It was a canny way to surpass dance music\u2019s supply-chain gatekeepers by making the music themselves. \u201cWe were trying to compete with more established dance music shops in central London that were getting exclusives, stuff that we couldn\u2019t get hold of,\u201d says Donnelly. So he used Suburban Base to press small runs of records, \u201cthat we could keep exclusive to our shop for at least the first few weeks. People had to come to us.\u201d<\/p>\n The name Suburban Base accurately described Romford\u2019s outsider status in a scene defined by the inner city: away from more credible tracks in London, sometimes Essex artists veered into full-on cheese such as the kids-TV-sampling Sesame\u2019s Treet<\/a> by Loughton locals Smart E\u2019s. Released by Suburban Base, it reached No 2 in the UK singles chart in July 1992. Donnelly says the track was seen by some on the scene as selling out, but adds: \u201cIt was hugely popular amongst rave DJs before it crossed over.\u201d And it does have an innocence that chimed with the family vibe of the Boogie Times shop, which was \u201clike a youth club in a way, with loads of people hanging around listening to music\u201d, says Rachel Wallace, a key member of the Boogie Times tribe. She dated Donnelly and recorded her first tracks for the label in a studio in his parents\u2019 garage, including the relentless and evocatively 90s tune Tell Me Why<\/a>.<\/p>\n Key member of the Boogie Times tribe \u2026 Rachel Wallace in 1992. Photograph: Suburban Bass Records<\/p>\n Suburban Base helped to propel the dance scene as breakbeats got faster and more intricate, the bass got bigger and rounder, and ragga MCs became more prevalent. This new sound became known as jungle, showcased on hot Suburban Base dancefloor fillers such as RIP by Remarc. DJ Rap, AKA Charissa Saverio, was living in nearby Walthamstow and put jungle tracks out on Suburban Base, and found the scene unusually welcoming. \u201cYou saw Black people and white people together for the first time,\u201d she says. \u201cYou walked in [to a jungle night] as a girl, and you weren\u2019t harassed by a bunch of men; you could wear what you want, you didn\u2019t have to look sexy, you could just be you.\u201d<\/p>\n As the 90s progressed, Suburban Base became the first independent UK rave label to open up an office in the US, on the corner of Hollywood and Vine in Los Angeles in 1994. It expanded into Brazil, where drum\u2019n\u2019bass took off in a big way<\/a>. Donnelly discovered a DJ working in a S\u00e3o Paulo record shop called Marky Mark, who became DJ Marky, and whose track LK became one of drum\u2019n\u2019bass\u2019s biggest UK hits. \u201cIf you travel to Brazil now, particularly S\u00e3o Paulo, and you\u2019re wearing a Suburban Base shirt, someone will come up to you,\u201d Donnelly says.<\/p>\n Boogie Times carried on into the 2000s after a record seller from the other side of the river in Gravesend decided to buy it off Donnelly, who had already stepped back from Suburban Base to focus on compiling huge-selling CD compilation series such as Pure Garage and Euphoria.<\/p>\n Suburban Base on tour \u2026 Danny Breaks, MC Special A and Dave Nodz on stage in Orlando Florida 1992. Photograph: Danny Donnelly<\/p>\n Duggins, meanwhile, had soundproofed an old primary school building in nearby Dagenham to house Rinse FM, and was putting on nights in Romford to showcase garage-era acts that pre-empted the incoming grime explosion, such as DJ EZ, Masterstepz and Pay as U Go Cartel. EZ would return to Romford to put on what might be the town\u2019s most famous clubbing event: Todd Edwards at Time & Envy on New Year\u2019s Day 2003<\/a>, in which the US DJ and producer, whose style had so influenced UK garage, stared out at his adoring (and very male) crowd with a mixture of shock, fear and delight \u2013 scenes that still frequently go viral on social media.<\/p>\n Time & Envy was rebranded a few times before it closed for good in 2024, and the empty venue will now host the Mega Mega exhibition, including a replica of a 90s recording studio with original equipment from Suburban Base, and a pirate station recreated using original transmitters, aerials and the turntables from Boogie Times. \u201cYoung people now are so interested in those kind of analogue and early digital forms of music making,\u201d says Katherine Green, the show\u2019s curator.<\/p>\n Like his old man might have done on a quiet day in the shop, Donnelly is finally taking stock. \u201cI definitely played my part in the global expansion of the scene,\u201d he reflects, but adds a warning that it wasn\u2019t all parties and glamour. \u201cIt just comes from the ethos of doing things in a professional way,\u201d he says. \u201cCreating a label identity \u2013 and putting barcodes on the records.\u201d<\/p>\n Mega Mega: Romford\u2019s Suburban Sound Revolution<\/a> runs from 29 October to 20 December at Atik, Romford. See You Down Raquels: Clubbing and Commune-ing in Essex, edited by Tim Burrows, is available to buy here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the early 1990s, the suburban town of Romford was known for three things. 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Suburban Base Brazil \u2026 DJ Marky Mark enters the roster. Photograph: Courtesy Danny Donnelly<\/p>\n