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The Waxonia Desk on UK Garage

Six records most people met in the middle of a mix rather than as singles. The canon this genre left behind was assembled on pirate radio and compilation CDs, and it is not quite the list the charts would give you.

Autoplay · All 6 play here · plays through and starts again

  1. MJ Cole / Sincere

    1998 · Talkin' Loud

    The most musically ambitious record the genre produced, made by a classically trained producer. Garage's reputation for glamour has always obscured how well built the best of it was.

  2. Artful Dodger featuring Craig David / Re-Rewind (The Crowd Say Bo Selecta)

    1999 · Public Demand

    A record about the reload, which is a DJ's device rather than a producer's, turned into a chart single. The scene's own vocabulary went national before most of its records did.

  3. Sweet Female Attitude / Flowers (Sunship Remix)

    2000 · WEA

    The remix, not the original, which is the correct answer and also the whole argument about who authored UK garage. Half this canon is somebody's second pass at somebody else's record.

  4. Double 99 / RIP Groove

    1997 · Ice Cream

    The dark end, and the reminder that garage was never only champagne. The split into speed garage and two-step reads cleanly in hindsight; on a night out in 1997 nobody in the room was choosing sides.

  5. Dem 2 / Destiny

    1997 · Locked On

    The most fragile thing on this list — a vocal cut into fragments that never quite reassemble. It is deliberately hard to hold on to, which is exactly why it still sounds like it was made last year.

  6. So Solid Crew / 21 Seconds

    2001 · Relentless

    Eight MCs, twenty-one seconds each, and the record usually blamed for the scene's collapse. Blame is the wrong frame: what it actually did was show where half the room had already gone.