Thamesmead Digital

Thamesmead was meant to be the future when they built it on the marshes in the late sixties: concrete walkways in the sky, a man-made lake, a town without a railway station. By 1985 the future had gone off a bit, and Paul Mundle — nineteen, a Saturday job in a Woolwich electrical shop and a Casio CZ-101 bought on the never-never — was making riddims on a drum machine in his mum's flat on the eighth floor of a block overlooking Southmere Lake. He'd heard the Sleng Teng records coming through the Shaka dances and understood something: you didn't need a band any more. You needed a mains socket.

Leon Hibbert lived across the walkway. He'd sung in the Pentecostal church on Harrow Manorway since he was nine and had a light, clean tenor that carried across the lake at night when he practised on the balcony. Paul recorded him four lines at a time — that was all he ever wanted, a hook and then the delay — and the pair of them pressed two hundred copies of Southmere Lake in 1986 with a hand-stamped label. It sold out of the back of a car at the Woolwich market. Lakeside Steppers came next, then Ten Thousand Windows, the one about the estate itself: every light a life, every life awake.