Lee Scott x Pete Cannon — Kool Keith Snare Flow / Drones Over Runcorn 7" Vinyl

Eight years back, maybe, Pete sent us a load of beats he’d knocked up on the Amiga. We near enough had an album boxed, but only this Kool Keith Snare Flow thing survived the apocalypse.

On Ultramagnetic MC’s album The Four Horsemen there’s this tune, “Bring It Down to Earth.” A few bars in, Kool Keith switches the flow, every line springs off the snare and lands just before the next one. I’d never clocked anyone hit that pocket before. Half the time he didn’t even rhyme, he didn’t need to, it just sounded proper class. I’m not into over-intellectualising something the artist probably just fell into through natural talent, but seeing as I’m writing about it, that’s the best way I can put it.

Anyway that shit just always stuck in me head, that flow. If I was blanking, I’d rob it and scribble any old shit, just to force some words onto the page. Never recorded any of it, but this time, this one came out too nice to bin. Obviously the only respectable way to execute such a thing is by paying the utmost respect to the originator. So there we have it, Kool Keith Snare Flow, ladies and gentlemen.

The second joint, Drones Over Runcorn, we cooked up post-apocalypse. The words were inspired by the look of the video, pound-shop sci-fi, one for the old heads nailed to nostalgia, and for the newcomers to figure the fuck out.

Defo Duz — Woz Ere ’96 (Video)

In the hazy air of ’95-’96, when pubs reeked of ciggie smoke and the telly served up bowls of Scouse kitchen sink drama on Brookside, Defo Duz knocked about in Runcorn with a pocketful of Valproate and rhymes. He’d done his stretch in the loony bin, put in shifts at the pallet factory, and one day crossed paths with DJ Soap Bar, a London lad stuck up north since school. They clicked over weed, rap records and the right kind of clobber. Soap Bar’s flat was a tip, but buried under the dust was everything needed to make the demo tape Defo Duz had in his head: a microphone, a multitrack cassette recorder, battered beat machines, and records piled to the ceiling. After a few months tinkering, Defo had somehow managed to bang together the beats he wanted to rap on. The Woz Ere ’96 Demo Tape sat unheard for nearly three decades until now, dragged from the attic and cleaned up (slightly), a rough little time capsule from the days before Defo Duz disappeared for good into the system.