“When we were young, it was a really good atmosphere,” says Mark Porter, recalling Bristol, England’s recent musical yesteryear. “Fifty or 60 of us would go out as a group and go to the same pubs and clubs. Now everyone’s gone their own ways. You go through phases with clubs. I suppose then was when drum-n-bass had kicked off, so it was new and exciting and you actually enjoyed it. Now the music is a bit stale, same DJs coming around.”

Porter may have gotten his kicks in the drum-n-bass scene, but the decidedly trip hop leanings of his group, the Baby Namboos, may be due to a family association – Porter being Tricky’s cousin. Along with Tony Quigley, Porter constructs the Baby Namboos’ sound and, on its debut Ancoats 2 Zambia (Durban Poison/Palm), the duo further twists the Bristol beat, this time under a host of disparate vocalists. They include Tricky, Leo Coleing, stylist Zoe Bedeaux – who goes under the name Aurora Borealis – Tricky’s sister, another cousin, Antony, and Claude Williams – more commonly known as Willie Wee of the Wild Bunch. There’s also a live drummer, Mad Dog of Bionic of London Posse, and bass player, Julian Brooke, in the mix.

In the studio, Porter and Quigley kept the production simple, using old machinery and vibe-y surroundings as the backbone for the syncopated smokey beats and leisurely dub rhythms. “It sounds naïve, but there was no plan,” admits Porter. “The thought process? There wasn’t none there because the studio that we worked in was rough and it was in a bad area – the sort of place you don’t go walking out on your own – sort of derelict. I think that came out in the record as well. If we’d gone into a nice, plush studio, we would have gotten a nice, plush sound. I suppose you’re influenced by your surroundings. We’re all working class, a lot of our roots are black, half my family’s white, half-black. My granddad – also Tricky’s granddad – Tarzan, used to run a sound system, used to have DJs competing against each other. This was in the ’70s. There’s a big black community in Bristol that’s Jamaican, [so] a lot of the music from Bristol is dub-orientated with that Jamaican feel.”

According to Porter, the final recording of Ancoats 2 Zambia benefited more from happenstance inspiration than the pricey studio gear to which the group eventually had access. “It was done really cheaply to start with, just demos,” he says. “Then we went to a better studio with more equipment. But I find if you go to a better studio, you can overproduce something. It’s too polished. We found sometimes we were going in doing mixing and we’d end up with a different thing. So we’d go back again to how we started. We know there’s mistakes on the album, but we left them in. Other people would have taken it out, but we thought it added character to leave it there.

– Lily Moayeri