Kilburn High Road

Kilburn High Road came together in 1988 in the room above the Mulvey family's pub, where Maurice Flemming had wired an Akai sampler, a drum machine and a four-track into the same socket as the kettle. Maurice was a Kilburn boy — Jamaican dad, Irish mum, a childhood spent between the blues dances on Brondesbury Road and his grandmother's parlour off the High Road — and he had been cutting beats for a local sound all through the mid-eighties. Kieran Mulvey grew up downstairs from the studio, pulling pints and practising chorus-pedal chords between last orders and closing time.

The voice came from south of the river. Yvette Charles had sung lead in Stockwell Rose at seventeen, three girls from Stockwell with a lovers-rock hit on every pirate in London, and then stopped. Five years later Maurice played her a slow, shuffling beat down the phone and she got on the 31 bus the next morning. Same sweet soprano, heavier beat, fewer words. Samantha Weekes, nineteen, doubles her an octave up. In 1989 Sweetie Nate from Woolwich Ferry Hi-Fi came up on the train to sing a verse on two records, and the sound system and the street soul were one family again. State Cinema Queue is the first thing they made; Kilburn Park, Half Past One is the one people play after the party.