Monday, February 23, 2015

garage rap # 10

Sticking with the Cockney theme...   "Millennium Twist" by Shy Cookie & DJ Luck featuring Spee and Sweetie Irie, off The Warm Up EP  from 1998.



( + "K.O." by DJ Luck & Shy Cookie featuring MC Neat and Spee - I recorded the whole second side of the EP as one track on The History of Garage Rap Volume One)

Slightly different version of "Millennium Twist" (I prefer the first)




On my copy of  The Warm Up EP, the track is definitely titled "Millenium Twist" not "Oliver Twist"

Middlerow was a prolific UKG label.

Got no recollection of the two A-side tracks on this 4-track EP - Ed Case & Holy H featuring Spee and Sweetie Irie's "Holy Morning"; Ed Case featuring JJ's "Right Time".

But on the flipside, B1 "Millennium Twist" is an undying fave. One of the first proper narrative tunes in garage rap: Shy Cookie, Sweetie Irie and Spee reinvent the Englishness of canonical literature and costume drama with a hilarious slice of Dickensian dancehall, starring an updated Fagin from Oliver! instructing modern urchins how to duck 'n' dive Y2K style.

Wonder if they got the idea from 2step's top production team being called The Artful Dodger?

And then B2,  "K.O." - the promised reappearance of MC Neat, accompanied by Shy Cookie and Spee and DJ Luck. Here the extended lyrical conceit (MC-versus-MC as boxing ring battle) doesn't quite come off, but the track is another of those loveable oddities that the nuum, especially the MC end of it, throws up.