In 1997, the speed garage movement was getting underway in the UK. The scene developed from Sunday club parties which took place near the Ministry of Sound in London – there were only so many times you could play Todd Edwards dubs at 130bpm, so new records were soon required.

Things went well for the first year or two, then the UK garage scene started to eat itself alive. The majors got involved and so did the gangs at the parties. Since then, garage in the UK has never exactly taken off again – and its most recent incarnation was garage house. Again, this never took off in the way it could have.

As this blog has mentioned in the past, the scene is absolutely rife with infighting – “my toddler would be absolutely embarrassed if they saw how petty some of them are”, said one source to me recently. They could do worse than listen to this piece of sage advice Tommy Musto – one of the names behind garage when it emerged in the USA in the early 1990s – which he dished out in September 1997

No one ever learns the lessons of the past anymore, do they?

By The Editor

Editor-in-chief at Amateur’s House.