UK funky: a short-lived sound whose influence lives on

If you want to understand British club music’s eternally giddy flux, the diaspora of black British dance producers from the late 2000s UK funky scene can tell you a lot. Look at Rinse FM stalwarts Roska and Marcus Nasty – each pushing wide-ranging but tough sounds with a new EP and label respectively – or at the pop-dance of Ill Blu, the brooding sound of Cooly G and the brainwarped trip-outs of Cooly’s Hyperdub labelmate DVA. Each is utterly different to the next, yet all broke through in the brief flowering of funky from 2006 to 2010.

Back then, funky could encompass yearning soul such as Frontline by Ill Blu & Princess Nyah and Tell Me by DJ NG and Baby Katy (later Katy B); instrumental oddness like Apple’s Mr Bean and Cooly G’s Narst; and MC-led playground chants like Gracious K’s Migraine Skank and KIG’s Heads, Shoulders, Knees And Toes. All were united by a pumping house undercurrent, clattering grime and dancehall rhythms, and car-window-rattling bass: it was the sound of London’s pirate radio stations and clubs for a few summers. But it couldn’t last.

“By 2011 it was done,” says Roska. “Nobody even seemed to care, everyone had gone on to something else.” He’s not wrong: funky didn’t just retreat to a hardcore of support like its second cousin up north, bassline house; it completely disappeared. The scene, says Cooly G, “just wasn’t strong enough: the people involved weren’t tight like those in grime. In funky everyone was trying to make it, but not getting together to make more out of it.”

It’s easy to mourn this unsustainability, but its fragmentary nature is also what made funky great. It was, in Roska’s words, “a make-do sound”, patched together by and for an uneasy alliance of shiny-shoes “real house music”-lovers, grime kids craving something less macho, hipsters looking for a new buzz after dubstep, and those raised on the riotous party sounds of dancehall, soca and west African music. Unlike bassline, funky was so diverse in its cast of characters that, inevitably, it spun apart as quickly as it fell together.

Like so much of the best UK music, then, funky was a haphazard, fractious, unstable hybrid, but its effects were profound. As Cooly G concisely says, “it changed a lot”. Providing a break from dubstep and grime’s dominance, it was a direct and vital inspiration on important leftfield labels such as Hyperdub, Night Slugs, Local Action and Four Tet’s Text imprint, but also primed a generation for the Afrobeats movement and the chart-conquering house grooves of Disclosure, Route 94, Gorgon City and co. Add that to the continuing careers of Cooly G, DVA and Roska (plus Champion, Lil Silva and Funkystepz), and funky’s rapid rise and fall looks like something to celebrate, not mourn.

Roska’s Crossed Wires EP is out in the UK now