In Depth: London Elektricity Looks Back on Hospital through the Years

For the last 25 years, drum & bass has thrived on reinventing itself. You wouldn’t think it for a sound that’s always had a fixed tempo, but alternative takes on the style have led to countless new subgenres spawning through the years. There were several key developments that helped to push drum & bass in new directions. The first notable imprints put out records borrowing heavily from jungle, before the style’s main players incorporated break beat editing to create new sounds like techstep. Later on, producers started using big drops in the first forms of jump-up. Then there was liquid, the soul-drenched sound that pretty much started at Hospital Records. Hospital was launched by Tony Colman and Chris Goss in 1996 who were recording as London Elektricity, and with key artist signings like High Contrast it became one of the most recognisable drum & bass labels in history. By 2002, they were putting out so much music that London Elektricity became a solo act as Chris Goss took on A&R full time. They’re known for more than just their records, though: arguably the best-known part of the brand is Hospitality, the party series that’s grown out of London clubs to its own annual festival in Finsbury Park. Since it launched 21 years ago, Hospital has become one of the most important drum & bass labels ever. With Hospitality making an overdue return to the club later this month, we caught up with label head and London Elektricity figurehead Tony Colman for a rare interview to hear more on the label’s history. Colman was inspired by the funk sounds of James Brown when he first met Goss in 1992. He’d been making acid jazz as part of six-piece project Izit, while Goss was working as a graphic designer. “I was introduced to him by the guy who used to book Ronnie Scott’s, as Izit were playing there.” Colman says. “I’d just started my Tongue And Groove label, and I needed someone to design the logo. So I met Chris, we got on really well, and I asked if he wanted to do Izit’s first album cover. I needed someone to run that label with too, so I asked him if he wanted to get involved.” Colman spent the next few years recording with Izit, while Goss helped with managing Tongue And Groove. With the label pushing a downtempo sound, elsewhere the pair had also started taking an interest in music at 170 BPM. They started writing drum & bass as a three-piece after meeting Oscar Wilson, putting out two singles as the Peter Nice Trio. It was here that Hospital Records first started. Colman and Goss paired to form London Elektricity, while outside of Hospital they also set up Galactic Disco for their 4/4 productions. They operated the two labels (Tongue And Groove was by now defunct) out of studios around London, starting out in Tottenham before moving further West. By the time they’d recorded Song in the Key of Knife, though, Hospital became their sole focus. “It felt like we’d found our sound.” Colman says. “After we played it, we knew it was something worth prioritising.” With Hospital still in its infancy, the high rental costs meant that Colman used their West London studio as a living-work space. “I actually moved in there with my wife because we couldn’t afford the overheads.” He explains. “The live room was our dining room. There were several arches under the pavement and we put a shower under one of them, and a little kitchen in another. I miss those days actually – it was wicked.” This nostalgic image is a long way from the empire Colman oversees today. 21 years into the business, the label has seen close to 600 releases, of which Colman has put out 7 full-length LPs as London Elektricity. Other Hospital signings like Lincoln Barrett, meanwhile, have found huge success since joining Colman’s roster. Barrett is, of course, arguably the most recognisable face at Hospital – his work as High Contrast has broken through the underground ceiling and gained a level of mainstream success with regular spots in the UK charts and plays on one of the nation’s biggest stations. “We first met him in a record shop,” Colman recalls. “He was working behind the counter at Catapult Records in Cardiff. He asked if he could play us some tunes – they were amazing but were all about 185 BPM. So we told him to slow them down and send them to us. The stuff he sent was absolutely banging, and it fitted in with our vision.”

“I’m just trying to make the world a better place by bringing beautiful music into fruition.”

It might seem an obvious point, but it’s also the key to Hospital’s success – they had a vision. The grandiose orchestral arrangements and emotive vocals on the earliest London Elektricity records gave drum & bass something of a soulful feeling for the first time, starting what became known as liquid. It’s been the sound Hospital has pushed ever since. “I’m just trying to make the world a better place by bringing beautiful music into fruition,” Colman says, “and that urge is never going to die.” Pick any track from the Hospital back catalogue, and it’s easy to see what Colman’s getting at. It’s not just something that works to dance to in a club – it’s music with emotional depth that uplifts you too. But why, exactly, would someone dedicate their life to making this ‘happy’ music? “Ultimately, that kind of creative urge usually comes from a dark place.” Colman continues. “And people who have that creative urge tend to have some very difficult moments in their past that they’re trying to compensate for. If you look at the people who really make a difference, the real creatives who change things, you’ll find that they haven’t led what’s known as a normal life. Why else would you lock yourself away in a bedroom with a laptop for hours and hours and hours on end chopping up breaks?” As the label grew, Colman started to branch out from the emotion-led sound they’d been pushing. He launched Med School in 2006, the experimental sublabel that nurtured artists early on in their careers like Bop, Randomer, and S.P.Y. “Around the time I started the Hospital podcast, I used to do a regular democast featuring stuff we’d been sent.” Colman explains. “A lot of them were very experimental and difficult to program into the schedule of Hospital. So I wanted to set up a new label to cater for a more oblique, avant-garde sound.” Variety is another weapon in Hospital’s arsenal. There’s a distinctive style and mood to each of the label artists, but few sound closely comparable to one another. “For our own sakes and for the sake of our extremely loyal fan base, we have to keep switching it up.” Colman attests. “We do champion a lot of underground artists and very niche areas of drum and bass, because we don’t worry about the bottom line of this particular niche or style. We love doing it, we love taking risks, and thank heavens people see that and come on the journey.” It’s especially true about the strength of Hospital’s following. This is certainly to do with the long list of releases spanning the last 20 years, but the Hospitality party series has also played no small part in attracting such a vast number of fans. After the label had first established itself with a group of core artists, Colman and Goss searched London for a venue to present Hospital’s sound. While drum & bass was being championed in small clubs across the city, liquid had rarely been the focus of a night. They discovered Herbal, a new club in Shoreditch that could fit around 350 people. With the huge costs involved, it meant they took the usual DIY approach for their first nights there – from building their own lightbox to flyering outside other venues across the capital. “We used to do everything ourselves. I’d do the till and the tickets, and then pass it over to my wife and go and jump on the decks.” Colman recalls. “On the first night we actually made about 100 quid, and that was so important. It felt so good. So we carried on doing that every month for a couple of years, until the shine came off it a little bit. Then we moved to Heaven.” Heaven, the 1800 capacity club hidden below Charing Cross Station, became Hospitality’s home as the brand continued to grow. With every event selling out, they soon moved onto matter, the club we ran over in Greenwich for 2 years, for a series of their biggest shows to date. While Hospitality also came to Farringdon regularly too, before long they would be selling out Brixton Academy, the large-scale space usually reserved for live gigs. Outside of London, the party also gained recognition. Large-scale events started presenting the Hospitality banner across the world, introducing a new generation to drum & bass for the first time. It’s the event series that’s helped make Hospital one of the world’s biggest drum & bass labels today. Picturing Hospitality in the Park, Hospital’s 10,000 capacity festival dedicated entirely to drum & bass, it’s inspiring to think how many young people will count this experience as their first introduction to dance music. Hospital certainly couldn’t have imagined things happening on such a grand scale, but what does its founder think is the main reason for the sound’s lasting appeal? “Drum & bass is growing. It’s now a fully-fledged, mature genre. And in many ways it’s more honest to its roots than any genre of dance or electronic music, maybe aside from techno. Because along with techno we’re still very underground and very honest but a mature industry. Drum & bass is unique because everyone stuck to the underground. They stuck to their guns, and they kept it real.”