‘It's a northern sound, it gives you hope that it can happen to you': how bassline bounced back

The Guardian

05-05-2025

In an old gun barrel factory in deep industrial Sheffield, young ravers bounce around in sunglasses and let out clouds of vape smoke as hefty bass rattles the building to its core. At the centre of this Boiler Room live stream is a 48-year-old woman who by her own description looks more like a social worker than a DJ, commanding the room as she drops walloping dance tracks, living up to the nickname that has been bestowed upon her: the Queen of Bassline.
'That moment proved that a normal-looking girl from Yorkshire, who's just a bit mental on the tunes, can do it,' says Angela Weston, AKA Big Ang, of her debut appearance this year. 'I've had belief in the genre from the start and just always carried on doing what I've done. Bassline is in my blood.'
Often topped with male MCs or female singers, bassline is characterised by four-four rhythms with deep, wobbly bass that sounds wet yet dense. It has its roots in speed garage but evolved to become its own genre and a defining sound of the north and Midlands. It's booming again, so much so that it's getting its own celebratory event this week as part of 2025's Bradford City of Culture: Bassline Symphony, in which pioneers of the genre Jamie Duggan, DJ Q and TS7 are collaborating with Katie Chatburn and the Orchestra of Opera North, held in one of the UK's oldest concert halls. 'It feels full circle,' says Bradford producer and DJ Thomas Sampson, AKA TS7. 'When I was 16 I would sneak into clubs like Boilerhouse, the hub of bassline in Bradford, so to see it get this big support from the city is amazing. It's got a lot of history and legacy here.'
But it has needed the tenacity of people such as Big Ang to keep it alive: the idea of bassline becoming a government-funded, family-friendly event would have once been laughable. 'For a while it felt like it was you against the world,' recalls Duggan. 'I wasn't allowed to DJ in most cities. I got blacklisted. It was a terrible time.'
This came after the high-profile closure of two clubs associated with the genre in Sheffield. First, in 2005, Niche was shut down after a Swat-style raid involving hundreds of police officers, weapons, helicopters, horses and road closures. While the massive operation only turned up small quantities of drugs, the club couldn't get a licence to reopen. A second iteration of Niche was closed in 2010 after multiple stabbings and, by this point, a long history of violent incidents. Bassline was seen as a magnet for out-of-towners wanting to cause trouble and so its star DJs, including Duggan and Shaun Banger Scott, found themselves out of work. It was a slow and steady road back. 'I was constantly at police and council meetings,' recalls Duggan. 'That was my life for a few years – which is crazy for a DJ to have to do.'
The original Niche, opened in 1992, was a no-frills concrete sweatbox surrounded by old cutlery works that ran from midnight to noon. While unglamorous, in the 2000s it became so identified with a buzzy new sound – one fusing overlooked and pitch-shifted B-sides, track reworks, and original productions from the likes of Big Ang, Jon Buccieri and DJ Booda – that a genre was even named after the club before 'bassline' properly took hold. 'You got any Niche tunes?' was a common question put to record shop workers. Big Ang describes her production style around this period as being equally inspired by the speed garage of Tonka and the old school rave of Slipmatt, resulting in something hefty but also uplifting.
A precocious talent from a young age – who would mirror piano riffs from dance tracks on a keyboard at home – Weston was driven to make music from the age of 13. She was a determined artist who worked three jobs while coming up as a DJ and producer on the circuit, and bulldozed any obstacles that got in the way. When she heard someone disparaging her work, she came back at them in the only way she knew how. 'Instead of retaliation, I went: 'What do you call this rubbish then?' And made a tune that got to 29 in the UK top 40,' she says of her 2005 track It's Over Now. 'People don't mess with Big Ang. She comes up with some big basslines and shells them.'
Punters would drive the length of the motorway to hear this music. 'People wanted to hear a certain tune so badly, because they couldn't hear it anywhere else, that they wouldn't leave until they heard it,' recalls Duggan. The Sunday morning sets, a graveyard shift by most people's standards, became a destination. 'You'd have people rocking up at eight in the morning,' says Duggan. 'They would get up, have breakfast, clean their car and drive down for the final three hours.'
The atmosphere was electric. In the early days, it was a booze-free place fuelled by pills, dancing and ice pops to help quell the intense heat. Resident DJ Nev Wright recalls one audience member, keen to show his love for the tunes, pulling out an aerosol can and lighter to create scorching fireballs as a mark of appreciation. While Bradford, Birmingham, Leeds, Derby and Dewsbury were all kicking off too, the allure of Niche was so huge that some used to travel just to gawp at it. 'When we were underage kids in Leeds we used to pay taxi drivers to cruise us around,' says Tafadzwa Tawonezvi, AKA producer T2. 'One night we paid him for a few hours to drive us to Niche just to sit outside and watch people going in.'
Given that DJs and producers have spent years trying to undo an unfair reputation placed on the music they love so much, you can understand a bit of retroactive PR work on Niche – with everyone I speak to saying it was safe, welcoming and inclusive – but it was unquestionably littered with instances of violence, and even the murder of the club owner's brother, Mick Baxendale, back in 1998. While such headline-grabbing events remained in the minority, its edgy reputation was part of the attraction for some. 'It was the place where the naughty guys went,' says Tawonezvi. 'As an impressionable kid that was exciting.'
Trouble aside, the club and music were in perfect sync, and cassette tapes of live sets by Niche DJs were rinsed and treated like treasure. 'Oh man, Jamie Duggan January 2004,' says Sampson, recalling his favourite.
'They were everywhere,' says Wright. 'Every afterparty; in everyone's cars. The numbers they were doing were ridiculous. They flew out.'
As a predominantly working-class sub-genre of dance music, it took a while for bassline to break through from being treated like a parochial curiosity or anomaly. 'We were ignored by the press,' says Wright. 'It took a while for recognition to come.' However, being overlooked meant that a singular sound and identity could develop. 'Growing up, grime felt London-based,' says Sampson. 'It didn't really get recognition up north but bassline just had a really northern feel to it. It's hard to describe but there's something really raw and organic about it. And because it's a northern sound, it gives you hope that it can happen to you because in Bradford there's not many opportunities.'
The crossover moment came in 2007 with T2's Heartbroken, co-written with singer Jodie Aysha, which spent three weeks at No 2 and would later be sampled by DJ Khaled and Drake. For a teenage Tawonezvi, the track came at a pivotal moment in his life. 'I was getting in trouble a lot and I didn't want the streets to get the better of me,' he says. 'I was just thinking about surviving. Where I grew up, you would see crackheads everywhere. My fear was to be a failed man.'
He finished the song and the very next day he was due in court and looking at a prison sentence (he won't divulge the charge). The case ended up getting thrown out, the track went platinum and his career took off. 'My life could have been completely different,' he says. Ministry of Sound bassline compilations followed, mixed by Niche residents. 'It just spread like wildfire,' says Duggan. 'Trying to shut it down had the complete opposite effect.'
There's now a slew of new artists such Warpfit, Silva Bumpa, Notion, TeeDee and Soul Mass Transit System, as well as the party collective-cum-record label Off Me Nut. Jorja Smith's new bassline-referencing single The Way I Love You, released last week, nods to Niche in its video. BOTA (Baddest of Them All), a 2022 UK No 1 by Eliza Rose & Interplanetary Criminal, got a bassline twist via a Big Ang remix, while Interplanetary Criminal himself has been seen proudly sporting a 'Big Ang Forever' T-shirt while dropping her 2002 bassline tracks to ecstatic young fans at Manchester's Warehouse Project.
'That is one of the most amazing things that's happened to me,' says Weston. 'It makes me feel so proud. Everything I believed in back in the day has come to fruition. There's a real community, loads of talent, and people are flying, while I'm still shelling basslines and showing the young ones how to get down.' Similarly, Duggan can't help but feel some vindication. 'I've been hooked since I was 15, so when everybody talks about it as this legendary thing, it does make you smile knowing that you've been there through it all,' he says. 'The good and the bad.'
Bassline Symphony is at St George's Hall, Bradford on 9 May