Doing It With The A: Take A Trip Back With Aquasky

Earlier this month Aquasky provided all old school heads and D&B historians with a true slice of remastered jungle history: Doing It With The R, a collection of stone cold classics from the legendary Reinforced imprint.

A kindly reminder that Aquasky were killing it in drum & bass long before they smashed up the breakbeat scene, we asked the act’s driving force Brent Newitt to reflect on this unique period in scene history and his role in it. Spoiler: he’s gone in DEEP!

You played a pivotal role in breakbeat but rewind further and tell us about your D&B foundations…

“We grew up on the rave scene and when it came to the split between darker vibes/jungle and hardcore/happy hardcore, we went with the darker vibes of jungle. This was all pre-Aquasky and we weren’t recording together at this point. Dave was making his Fugitive/Mad Dog amen butchery records, Kieron was making his Artemis tunes, also for Underdog Records and I was making instrumental hip hop on Kiss FM’S Bob Jones label Black On Black.

Kieron was DJing a lot of jungle/D&B back then and everyone was selling mixtapes. Kieron did a mix which had some early Good Looking, Moving Shadow, Reinforced, Basement and some of the early Dillinja bits. These tunes had really cool jazzy samples and deep breakdowns. It also had lots of orchestrated strings and pads. I collected (and still do now) records and had quite a decent jazz and Latin collection. I was a bit of a Gilles Peterson fan back in those days when he was more about the folky, deep jazz bits and latin jazz tunes. So, I dug out some records and we all went into the studio on a Sunday afternoon in February 1995.

We wrote Images and the following week we started Dezires. After the tunes were written, I rode my Raleigh Chopper (no joke!) down to HMV and wrote down the addresses of all the labels we really liked from the back of the record sleeves and sent them a demo tape. We sent it to three labels and were offered deals by all three (Shadow, Reinforced and MoWax). We went with Shadow but later also signed with Reinforced. We were offered another deal a few years later by MoWax but turned that down as well and went with Polydor instead.

I know we got a lot of hate from certain key figures because we were three kids from Bournemouth who never played by the jungle rules and I think this pissed people off… That and us getting a shedload of money.

Part of our conditions of the deal with Polydor was that we released on a sub-label, so we created Passenger for that. After our music was put out, our first signing and release was with Total Science. We were very lucky with that deal. It kept us afloat during the bleaker years when we started to move away a bit from D&B. Back then, you were either 100% D&B or against D&B. I know we got a lot of hate from certain key figures because we were three kids from Bournemouth who never played by the jungle rules and I think this pissed people off… That and us getting a shedload of money.

This makes me laugh now as I don’t think I know any D&B artists who only make D&B… if anything, D&B is just for fun. Not their bread and butter genre. I like to think we were ahead of the game there, as we were the first people to release a non-jungle record on Moving Shadow back in 95 (Images Remix, flipside to the DJ Krust remix he did for us). Thankfully those bleaker years only lasted a short while before we were raking it in making breaks!

We did a remix album of our 1998 Bodyshock album for Shadow called Aftershock and got Adam Freeland to do us a remix. He is the one responsible in getting us into breaks. We stated that if we were going to do a full genre shift, we would turn breaks into the same intensity as D&B… and that we did. We were again out on a limb as no one else made music like we were doing. The genre we created was termed Bassline Breaks by DJ Mag. I like that term… it suited us and what our ethos was.”

You’ve just released Doing It With The R on your own label Passenger. It’s a collection of remastered tracks you recorded for Reinforced in the 90s under the names Aquasky and Spacelink. Take us back there…

“Well, we were signed exclusively to Polydor at this time but somehow I think we blagged them, told them that it would assist in the overall profile of Aquasky (which it did) and that they should let us release concurrently. For some reason they said yes… so we wrote the Concrete Boom EP. We were living in North London by this time, just round the North Circular from Dollis Hill… the home of ‘The R’ (Reinforced).

I was massively in awe of Dego and Marc. I was a proper vinyl nerd, into hip hop, knew all their 4Hero/Tek9/Manix and Tom & Jerry releases and also a prolific graffiti artist. These guys were the same, though they were heavily involved in that scene long before me… They were also responsible for the first releases by Goldie. He was a bit of an idol for me, not due to his music but for his graffiti in the 80s and his breakin’ as part of The B-Boys. They were just really sound guys. I then got to know Gus and Ian who ran the label. From there I got to know Arcon 2 (Leon Marr), DJ Stretch, MG, Randall… all the guys who use to hang out up at Dollis Hill. It really was the hub of D&B around that time and you could bump into anyone in that studio complex. I was also lucky to be there the day that SRD (their distributors) returned a load of backcat of Reinforced and I was allowed to go through it and yes, I did manage to get most of the original releases with the original R artwork by Goldie (before he re-did it in 95).

Spacelink was an alias for the D&B I wanted to make. I did those tunes with Dave… They were a little out there for the time, but they really went down well. Timezone was licensed to the classic Kruder & Dorfmeister DJ Kicks album and Offset Jazz was a favourite of Fabio’s in his club and KissFM sets. I then decided to remix them. I wanted to make the Spacelink remix more like something The R was about. So I chopped the shit out of the classic Reinforced breaks Funky Mule and Apache. Kieron did a 120bpm breaks mix of the flipside as Artemis. The final tune we did for them – Aquasky – Alien Honey – was on the Enforcers compilation Beginning Of The End. It was a really fun time to be into D&B and live in London. We were really lucky to be there at that time. Marc Mac recently said to me that Dezires was his favourite tune of that era… and I told him there and then that was probably the best compliment I have ever had in music. There would be no Aquasky if it wasn’t for those guys and the music they made six years earlier!

Passenger is still extremely active. Can you tell us about the projects you have released recently and what’s coming up on the label?

Yes, it’s now 17 years since the label started. In 2013 I took over the label from Dave and Kieron and I run it by myself now. I had put so much of my time and soul into Passenger I couldn’t see it coming to an end. I still have too much I want to do with it! I run it now more as a hobby than a business, though I put as much time and effort into each release… but we all know what it’s like now. The days of living from releasing music solely has gone! You gotta do gigs, publish stuff, have a label, release music as an artist, do samplepacks and everything else just to get back. I found my enjoyment levels were going down rapidly trying to hustle a living in music; 20 years is a long time! Now I put out music, I get some awesome guys doing PR, I have an awesome distribution team and a wicked publishing deal with Bucks Music Group for our Skyhigh Music company. Everything is in place… but the stress is reduced by 90% now! It’s nice to enjoy what I do again…

Aside from the Reinforced project I have just released the fifth instalment of Breakbeat Bass… a compilation series we have run for the past 10 years. This one is mixed by Eat Rave and he has done a banger of a job:

Before that I released a Rico Tubbs release. Rico was my first signing to the breakbeat incarnation of Passenger in 2001. He was recording as Infekto back then. This was a release I really wanted to do as it’s an amazing testament to a label to ask an artist nearly 15 years later to record for it again. Rico is a top chap and I wanted to pull out as many stops as I could to show my appreciation. I hooked up the Ragga Twins for him as well as getting Manix (Marc Mac – 4Hero) to do a remix in his ’92 style. It did really well:

I followed this up by remastering all his original releases on the label and also released a recent Aquasky single featuring Daddy Freddy and Lex One:

Other great artists I work with include 601, RadioKillaZ, Eat Rave, Zombie Robot, Futurizm, SpeakerBomb, DJ Twista and the legend that is Ellis Dee! Naturally I’m always looking for new heat, too. So hit me up!

You have recorded a new mix to coincide with the release of Doing It With The R. Its full of upfront D&B tunes. Can you give us your Top 5 D&B tracks right now?

In no particular order…

Evol Intent & Eye-D: Jim Skynner