Go DJ! — DJ Zinc, Bingo Beats and ceaseless innovation
DJ Zinc has long been the joker in the jungle pack. Not the most technical producer, bearer of the heaviest beats, best song writer or conceptually profound artist, Zinc could always be relied on to pop up with something unusual, new and frequently devious, his invention delivered with an air of casual joy that undercut our sometimes lofty notions of the great musical innovators.
Zinc’s classic 1995 track Super Sharp Shooter was one of the first jump up tunes, marrying a vicious Method Man vocal to a superbly wobbling bass line and an innovative half-time drop. Fugees Or Not, from 1996, raised further bridges between US hip hop and drum & bass, by transforming the Fugees’ moody Ready Or Not into a dance-floor anthem.
His 1999 single 138 Trek made Zinc into one of the first jungle producers to successfully cross over into 2-Step, earning him a UK chart hit in the process; 2001’s Casino Royale had a rolling astral ambience that sounded quite unlike anything else on the drum & bass scene; and in the late 2000s he got bored with jungle and decided to dream up “crack house”, as sort of extra dirty fidget / speed garage hybrid house that never really took off.
What united them, as well as Zinc’s light-handed inventiveness, was the London producer’s brilliantly springy melodic bass. Zinc bass lines were never the heaviest. But they were always the ones you would end up humming after a night out, the ear-worm melodies that would lodge themselves in the brain, ready to be sung to some poor underpaid record shop employee when you made it out of the house on Monday.
Sandwiched somewhere in between 138 Trek and Crack House was Bingo Beats, the album that, for me, cemented Zinc’s role as a master of weird and wonderful UK beats. The album took its name from the label that Zinc set up in 2000 as an outlet for his drum & bass / garage / breaks output, under a variety of pseudonyms, including Jammin’ (responsible for the label’s first release, Hold On / Distraction), Shelltoe, Shox and Tuned Air, although it would later release music from the likes of Menta, Chase & Status and Zed Bias.
Zinc told the Red Bell Music Academy in 2005 that the success of 138 Trek made him realise he could make music at other tempos and people would listen to it. “So I started doing breaks stuff then and I set up a label called Bingo,” he explained. “The idea for that label is that there ain’t no rules. If I want to release house or drum & bass or breaks or whatever, I do.”
Breaks (or Nu Skool Breaks, of you must) was one of those very British subgenres of dance music that shot up around the late 19990s, hung around for a few years of success, then slunk off, when we all realised it was nowhere near as good as 2-Step. Frankly, it is not often missed.
However, in Zinc’s hands breaks — remarkably, briefly — managed to sound like the best music in the world, combining the frenetic energy and melodic bass wobble of jump up with the slinky rhythmic contortions of 2-Step. Zinc’s productions captured the moment when the musical pieces were thrown up into the air and there was briefly all to play for, before drum & bass, 2-Step, dubstep and breaks became entrenched in their own ways.
You can see this in the tracklisting for Bingo Beats, which came out in May 2001. Over 21 tightly-mixed tracks it features drum & bass producers DJ Hype and Pascal; UK Garage don Wookie, 2-Steppers Sovereign and Zed Bias, dubstep pioneer Ghost and Oris Jay (as Darqwan), a producer who sat somewhere in between future garage, dubstep, breakbeat and 2-Step. And yet the album hangs together perfectly, a reminder that breakbeats and bass lines are key ingredients of so much post-rave music from the UK, however they are served up.
For these tracks alone, Bingo Beats would be a remarkable release. Highlights includes Zinc’s gnarled and vicious remix of Wookie’s classically-guitared garage anthem Back Up; Wookie’s sweetly melodic take on Jammin’s Kinda Funky (as if taken in revenge); the skeletal proto-dubstep of Ghost’s Express, Hype’s lethally swinging breakbeats on Mentally Ill 2 Kill; and Darqwan’s dancehall-ish, genre-eluding Come On.
The tune I have listened to most, however, is Sovereign’s Carmen, a breakbeat take on — but of course! — Habanera from Bizet’s Carmen, which sounds like the kind of 3AM idea that should never have seen the light of day but ended up being a nigh-on perfect dance tune. (By the way, if I ever hear a DJ play this, I will tip them €5 and on this you have my solemn promise.)
But the album’s absolutely best songs are Zinc’s own tunes. Aside from the epochal 138 Trek, which appears in its extra-springy VIP mix, these round up the best of Bingo Beats to date, evidence of a label on a remarkable hot streak in its first two years of existence.
All three come under the Jammin’ nom de plume. Kinda Funky, which kicks off the mix, has a bass line so exciting that when it kicks up an octave it feels like you might be sick in your mouth; Treats — which is exclusive to this compilation — has a weirdly brilliant baroque edge to its bass line and acoustic guitar strum; and Go DJ is the epitome of what dance music should be: stupidly exciting, a heart-attack rush of bubbling, billowing bass line, diamond-sharp beats, well-chosen vocal sample and nerve-tingling sound effects, which slumps to a well-earned swoon before leaping back to its feet with the fury of a countess on smelling salts. It is also the closes that Bingo Beats got to an actual hit, cropping up in the mixes of everyone from DJ EZ — in his famed Boiler Room set — to Lily Allen.
For a producer who made his name with jungle, Zinc’s transition to break sounded entirely natural. “The thing that got me into the music in the first place was the breaks,” Zinc told RBMA. “I’ve always just been moved by breaks at whatever tempo, whether it’s 70 BPM or 170, if there’s a break, it just makes me want to dance.”
Bingo Beats, both album and label, were briefly big. I remember hearing Go DJ, in particular, all over London, when I first moved there in summer 2001, alongside the likes of So Solid Crew. The album’s release coincided with a moment when drum & bass’s innovative streak had slowed, the ever-more-extreme sonic assault of the bass taking over from the fractured funk of the drums, and it felt like, just maybe, Bingo Beats would be a way back into the funk.
That didn’t happen. Drum & Bass remains as popular as ever today and it was dubstep that would break through the mishmash of genres on Bingo Beats to becoming world-beatingly vast.
A second volume of Bingo Beats followed the first album into the stores later on in 2001. Fine though it was, it didn’t capture the moment like the first volume, lacking the sharply focused joy of the original record. Bingo Beats the label continued until 2008 (although offshoot label Bingo Bass is still operational) and one year after that Zinc launched Crack House to the world. I remembering being briefly excited by the idea of Crack House but Zinc’s excellent Ms. Dynamite collab. Wile Out aside, it never really caught the imagination.
As for Bingo Beats the album, its reputation foundered on the rocks of being neither fish nor fowl. It wasn’t quite breakbeat, not exactly 2-Step, not really dubstep either and it came from a producer still best known for jungle. What was so exciting about Bingo Beats, in other words — its brilliant freedom and unplaceability — became its Achilles heel, at least in terms of historical reputation. And these days you will only find the album on YouTube.
But find it you must. Bingo Beats is a time capsule of a moment when British music could have gone in many different ways: that it eventually gravitated towards grime and dubstep, rather than breaks and future garage, is no bad thing. But for a moment Bingo Beats genuinely soared, the sound of pure innovation in flight.
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