Artists

Most people come into music, do the same thing for a few years, slowly sink back into obscurity and spend the rest of their life collecting publishing royalties and re-forming for tribute tours. Their biographies can afford to be quite short – most of us aren’t that interested in golf or angling. The problem with Coldcut is that, despite their veteran status, they act like two unruly children who just won’t sit still. Which is why even a brief trawl through their various activities looks like a large chapter of a big book.

You may have heard of The Nextmen. In fact, unless you’ve been captive in Guantanamo Bay for the most of the Noughties, we’d wager you’d definitely heard of them and more than likely witnessed them at one of their many festival-stopping summer performances or heard their incendiary mixtapes on the neighbourhood ghetto blaster. Dom (real name: Dominic Betmead) and Brad (real name: Brad Ellis) joined forces when Brad blagged a remix for London Posse and realised he didn’t have any kit with which to do it. In stepped Dom with his Roland S10 and not much else. “The track was called Style,” chips in Dom, “But it put us on the map. Everybody loved it. Radio 1 got hold of it.” “It was 75 bpm and really pedestrian,” deadpans Brad. “Fucking terrible.”

Serge Santiago on producing: “I started producing because I was
clubbing so much and wanted some involvement, so, using my old computer
I started to teach myself how to write beats. From there I must’ve
written about 50 to 100 half tracks before I finished one… And that one
was a track called ‘Push it’ (using a sample from the Salt n’Peppa
track). It’s funny, listening back now I can hear myself learning
within the track; it’s great! Anyway we decided it was a classic
‘Stompa Phunk’ sounding record so ‘Push it’ was released 1999 on Stompa
Phunk.

BusterHistory-writing is a process of interpretation. A short glance through the skarchives shows that the Goddess of History will be generous to Bad Manners for the band deserves a decent history. This first article concerning the history of Bad Manners hopes to provoke other people into thinking they can add to or even improve it. Go ahead and make our day!

The Bad Manners story…