Bomb The Bass

Bomb The Bass biography

Bomb the Bass (formed 1987, in London, England) is the umbrella title for the output of British musician and producer, Tim Simenon. The band, which has evolved its style over the years, has been classed as electronic or dance.

As a name, Bomb the Bass came from Simenon's approach to collaging and mixing sounds whilst DJing in the mid to late 1980s; he says "samples were either scratched in live or sampled and looped on top of the rhythm section. So the concept was one of bombing the bass line with different ideas, with a collage of sounds. Bombing was a graffiti term for writing, like people would 'bomb' trains or whatever."

thumb

Released in 1987, the band's debut single was "Beat Dis", with composition credited to Emilio Pasquel / Captain Black / DJ Kid 33. Keenly disguised as a U.S. import on the Mister-Ron imprint, in an attempt to conjure the mystique of Bomb the Bass being an underground New York act, the single exceeded mere expectations by eventually reaching number two on the UK charts.

Its roaring success put the then still relatively unknown Simenon on the front cover of Britain's most serious, and highly influential music newspaper, the NME. This event was notable not only for being the moment when the previously pro-rock / anti-disco paper sided with post-disco dance music (at this time indie was the NME's genre du jour), recognising and valuing Simenon for being a DJ first and foremost, rather than a musician; but also for the dawn of the term DJ culture. Used as the cover's sub-heading, the term would henceforth become the accepted term for the incoming trend (of which Simenon was arguably one of the UK's pioneers) of DJs as superstars, and which would dominate popular music at least for the next decade.

The recording of "Beat Dis", which cost a reputed £500 - funded by Simenon himself with money coming from DJ sets at London club, The Wag, and an odd-job stacking shelves in a supermarket - was one of the first hit singles to introduce the mainstream to sampling culture (along with releases by M/A/R/R/S, S'Express and the genre-defining Coldcut remix of Eric B & Rakim's "Paid in Full").

Whilst the bass line and drum tracks were written by Simenon, the rest of the track was compiled from samples, presenting an aural mood board of where his influences were at. Having already taken a part-time sound course at The School Of Audio Engineering in Holloway, Simenon was in the enviable position of being able to build "Beat Dis" himself - assisted in the process by producer Pascal Gabriel, who would go on to experience his own success as co producer of S Express and a wide variety of other artists.

According to the BBC, which featured "Beat Dis" on their clip-based TOTP2 show, the track contains an alleged 72 samples, including lifts from hip hop like Public Enemy, funk (including The Jimmy Castor Bunch), and Ennio Morricone. Also featured were dialogue clips from the television shows Dragnet, and Thunderbirds. Talking to Sound On Sound magazine many years later, Simenon said of the tracks construction, "I suppose I was tuned in to what was current at the time and was able to pick and choose what I wanted with some knowledge of how it should be applied."

Biography from , the free encyclopedia.
It may not have been reviewed by a professional editor, and recent changes may not show up straight away. See the latest version of this article. Used under licence. Subject to disclaimers.