Straight Outa Bristol
Phil Johnson
205 pages
published in 1996

Back in the early nineties, a stream of pop acts started coming out of Bristol in a way that had not happened before. Acts like Massive Attack, Portishead, Tricky (and a little earlier Neneh Cherry and a little later Roni Size and a stream of triphop acts) made Bristol's presence felt on the British music scene in the same way Liverpool, Manchester or London had done for years. Until then, Bristol had never had much of a reputation as a music city, though there had been some local successes in the early eighties (the Pop Group, Pigbag), so why did the "Bristol sound" became so succesful then, when it had not before? What happened in the Bristol scene to create this succes?

Those are the questions Phil Johnson tries to answer in Straight Outa Bristol. He does this by tracing the roots of the succesful Bristol acts of Tricky, Portishead and Massive Attack back to the music scene there of the early eighties. Johnson himself was a part of this scene and still lives there and was a first hand participant in the scene's development. He was therefore well placed to write this book, even if several of his subjects were less than enthusiastic about participating.

Johnson succeeds pretty well in writing a readable history of what lead up to the then current Bristol scene, if not entirely in answering the question of why the socalled "Bristol sound" suddenly became so popular, or even why it emerged when it did. What became clear is that Bristol, because it is a provincial city, but with both a large student population as well as a large West-Indian/Black population, had trouble connecting with the larger national music scene but because of this, musicians were more free to pursue their own course in a way their counterparts in other cities couldn't. The local talent pool may just have been forced to rely more on their own abilities rather than copy the latest trends from London, simply because of a lack of connections. And when hip-hop arrived in Britain, Bristonians may therefore have been more eager to give their own spin to it rather than mindlessly copy the Americans. And once that sound evolved enough, it may have been uniquely placed to break out and provide the UK with its first real homegrown, British hip-hop.

That's the highlevel explenation. Johnson also describes the Bristol scene from groundlevel, showing that this whole Bristol sound was build on the efforts of not that many people... The active scene wasn't that big and the same people keep popping up in different combinations. Johnson also shows that the succes of groups like Massive Attack and Portishead didn't happen overnight, that they are in fact building on the foundations that earlier groups like the Wild Bunch or Smith and Mighty have laid for them and that in their turn, these build on the work of early eighties cult eacts like Rip Rig and Panic. The Pop Group and Pigbag; not so much musically perhaps as well as by providing examples and experience and helping opening doors for their successors.

Johnson succeeds in making all this accesible, though he does at times assume perhaps a too great a familiarity with the material. At times also his writing is a bit too magazine styled, too disposable and bound to the moment, too fluffy. However, it achieves the one thing I want any music book to do: make me want to play the artists mentioned.