Kevin Martin is best known for the piledriver ragga of The Bug, but there’s always been a sweetness lurking amidst the violence.
Over the last few years he’s sneaked out two jaw-droppingly subtle twelves with poet and singer Roger Robinson as King Midas Sound which have built up incredible levels of anticipation amongst those that know. The King Midas Sound album Waiting For You also features female vocalist/artist Hitomi and is about to drop on Hyperdub.
FACT caught up with Kevin and Roger in a Hackney cafe to talk about the album and reasoned with them about emotional intensity. We were joined briefly by Hitomi, who was midway through a mission to find a melodica for the forthcoming KMS gigs.
The guy from FACT pussied out on this interview because he felt a bit out of depth with it being so much of a reggae album. I’m not really sure it is though? How do you see it?
Kevin Martin: “I think it actually is, you know? It has more in common with Lovers [Lovers Rock – sweet strain of reggae with nuff female vocalists originating in south London in the mid 70s] than with anything else. I don’t think it’s got anything to do with dubstep. Or hip-hop. Lovers is very much a British, London fusion.”
“The album was conceived when I’d started BASH [seminal reggae night with a splash of dubstep run by Kevin and Loefah]. Roger was in the studio a lot at that point and we’d originally planned to do dub poetry on the rhythms. Then he brought in this really high falsetto voice which I’d never heard him do. It blew me away – it reminded me of Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield… it had a politic but also a weird androgynous dreaminess to it – really hypnotic.
“I was pissed off at the time because I felt that The Bug was getting really caricatured. In the music industry you’re only allowed to have one dimension. For me it was really important to push against that caricature. The stuff with Roger was the perfect way of doing it. In a way King Midas Sound is the opposite of The Bug.”
That’s interesting because there were tracks on Pressure with you, Roger, which were like coming up for a breath of air after being pummelled by ragga. And this album maybe reaches back a bit further to [past Bug LPs] Tapping The Conversation and the Isolationism compilation Kevin did. So perhaps it’s always been there?
KM: “Yeah, but it gets overlooked. I think Roger was frustrated – with Pressure a lot of the reviews were praising ‘Killer’ or Daddy Freddy… and then they’d have a jibe at Rog! And it was pissing me off as well, so I thought maybe we should do it as a completely separate project. Although in the end I put Roger on London Zoo as well.”
Roger Robinson: “I’m the relaxation on each Bug album!”
KM: “The other frustration is this being seen as a “Bug project” when it’s not – it’s a group, it’s the three of us. It’s very much a combined effort, it’s not just a Bug record without the ragga voices. There’s a real aesthetic behind King Midas Sound.”
RR: “My songwriting comes from more of a folk tradition where it’s really thick with metaphor. So I started coming round the studio, not really to record anything but just to listen to music. So we’d hear reggae records and realise how to say more with less – and not be flowery.”
KM: “The whole album was conceived on a diet of Gregory Isaacs, Cornell Campbell…”
RR: “Horace Andy…”
KM: “I was sorting sets out for BASH and Roger would say “Wow! I haven’t heard that for years!” and just be vibing off it. So the inspiration is almost solely reggae. But I would have felt it was fake to do a reggae album… well, not fake, but…”
…it has to come through the filters of your own life and your surroundings in London?
KM: “Yeah.”
RR: “…and definitely lovers rock in terms of the association of identity through a tone, you know? In lovers rock, those singers weren’t great singers, but they still gave something emotional, and they used a sort of tone to do it. It was very different from the equivalent singers in Jamaica – they were doing it their way. So it was very much like that – how can we use this voice that I’m using and this stripped down form of lyric writing to reassert an identity.”