THURSDAY 20 & 21 | “Everything starts with an E,” chirped MC Kinky as part of the E-Zee Possee in 1989, homage to the meteoric rise of acid house and, more specifically, a great new drug called ecstasy. BBC Radio 1 promptly threw up its collective hands in horror, banning the song outright. In so doing, the station secured the destiny of the track – penned by Kinky, Boy George, Simon Rogers and Jeremy Healy – to become a global dance anthem. And it set this white female ragamuffin toaster on a course that would ultimately take her – via incarnations as Cantankerous, Feral, The Infidel, and finally Feral Is Kinky – from growing up in a small flat above a London betting shop to cutting a Number 1 hit single with Erasure, the pop duo’s anthemic remix of Abba’s Take A Chance On Me, and beyond. The first MC to chat dancehall lyrics over music other than reggae, Feral’s breed of low-slung ragga chat is a by-product of being obsessed with reggae from the age of eight (she used to get woken up in the middle of the night by the heavy bass pumping from a shebeen next door, the music still thumping by the time she got up to go to primary school) and knowing no racial boundaries. Today, following her first official solo release My Selector last year, a sound system-inspired dubstep banger (“Play one last tune, my selector” she raps over wub wub bass and big beats), Feral can be forgiven for looking back on her rave days with misty eyes. “When I MC’d over Everything starts with an E, I hadn’t taken one,” she tells The Independent. “The track got banned from Radio 1 and TV, but it was massive. I had no manager, agent, nothing. People used to phone up my house all the time and say, ‘Hi my name’s so and so, can you do a gig?’ Me and my mates would drive up to a massive party somewhere. I’d put my hair in curlers in the car, put on mad light-reflecting clothes in pub toilets. When the screechy guitar on Everything began, the crowd would roar like a football stadium. Afterwards I’d get off stage and go and dance for hours with everyone else. People would come up to me saying, ‘I love you. I love your hair. You’ve changed my life.’ I couldn’t believe it.”
WHO: Feral is Kinky
WHAT: Electronic ragga, manic house, Moombahton bass and dub step
WHERE: Pontoon, St. 172
WHEN: 11pm March 20 & 21
WHY: Everything starts with an E