Bristol Trip Hop

The story doesn't start with trip hop. It starts in the front rooms and community halls of St Paul's, the inner-city Bristol neighborhood where Jamaican soundsystem culture had taken root a generation earlier. Adrian Thaws's own father, Roy Thaws, ran a soundsystem called Tarzan the High Priest, later renamed Studio 17, with his father and brother. The system was running years before anyone in Bristol had heard the words hip-hop or trip hop. By the time American hip-hop records started arriving in British record shops in the early 1980s, Bristol already had the people to receive them: DJs, MCs, b-boys and graffiti artists who understood how to build a set around bass weight and space, because that was what Jamaican dub had taught them.

The crew that pulled these strands together was the Wild Bunch, a loose soundsystem collective that came to dominate Bristol's club scene through the mid-1980s. The usual starting point is 1983, when Milo Johnson and Nellee Hooper met at a gig with Magazine and Bauhaus on the bill, a post-punk double header that says as much about Bristol's crossed wires as any record. The pair started throwing house parties and club nights, and within months Grant Marshall, later Daddy G, joined them, bringing crates of rare soul and hip-hop records from his day job at Revolver Records that few in Bristol had heard. Robert Del Naja and a teenage Adrian Thaws came later.