BosBos.net - embrace the sub-culture » Blog Archive » Vintage Solid Steel: King Megatrip - I Must Insist You Eat Steel/Coldcut

(Introduction courtesy of Strictly Kev) For this week’s vintage session we turn the tables over to Solid Steel’s US ambassador: King Megatrip. For those who don’t know, Megatrip has been first a fan, then a show archivist, amassing possibly the world’s biggest collection of past Solid Steels. He has also had guest mixes featured but most importantly he is the creator of the Soundbank, a huge resource of spoken word samples that he has supplied exclusively to us for years. If you listen to Solid Steel then you’ve heard speech from one of over a hundred volumes of spoken word he has collected for us from every source imaginable. This has earned him official Solid Steel membership, always present - lurking in the shadows even if sightings of him are rare. We’ll turn it over to KM himself to explain his choice for this entry…
** OFFICIAL DISPATCH FROM MEGATRIP CENTRAL **

For me, it all started back in 1996 when I found a copy of Coldcut’s Journeys By DJ mix (and that wasn’t easy at the time, living here in the US). Next stop, January 2000. I read that Coldcut did a 3 hour fill-in show for Annie Nightingale… so I head on over to the BBC message boards looking for a copy. This is where I met the great and generous Dave Parkin from Cambridge. He said, “I’ve got that show and I’ve got 20+ hours of Solid Steel if you want those too?” I’m like, “Solid What?!” Dave sent me all his early and mid 90’s Kiss FM recordings and shortly after that, Coldcut and company were doing the show on BBC London and he was sending me CDRs of these all the time. I was hooked.

During one show back in late 2000, Matt Black came on the air and basically said if there were listeners that wanted to submit a 30 minute mix, send it on in… that week I was out buying my first CDJ decks. Soon after, my mix was getting airplay! (Jan 01.2001) Since then I’ve had six mixes featured on Solid Steel, under 3 different names. Split personality disorder? Well, probably! My first mix aired under the name Flexx Mentallo, the next as Agent MK and finally I just settled on my King Megatrip name to keep everything consistent.

Now, I hold no illusions of my DJ skills, I don’t have any - I totally rely on my selections and jamming them together with quick fades, spoken word samples, sound effects or a combination of all of the above. In the liner notes of Mr. Scruff’s retail Solid Steel mix CD, he says, “…it is vital to remember that the most important DJ skill is to play great records in the right order. Many of my favourite DJs don’t even mix.” I hope to hold true to this ‘most important DJ skill’ somewhere along the way - I really wanted to archive these shows, there was just something unique about Solid Steel. You take any genre of music - mash it together with some spoken word and it would take on a life of it’s own. So archiving seemed logical and it’s become quite a collection.

I’ve always been fascinated by the spoken word element in the Solid Steel mixes - so I decided to compile and share a ’soundbank’ of samples with Matt, Jon, Kev and DK. Well, as often is the case, my obsessive compulsive disorder kicked in and now there are well over 20,000 dialogue samples, all edited and ready to drop into a mix in this soundbank. I’m sure you might recognise some of them in the mixes that air today.

I was quite honored when Strictly Kev asked me to boil down my 6 previous mixes into an hour for the Classic Solid Steel segment this week. I added a new spoken word intro over the old mixes and distilled everything down to an hour of jazz pop, hip hop, funk, soul, reggae covers, 70’s pop and a touch of drum and bass in the middle somewhere. Uptempo stuff for the most part - I insist you eat steel! (See below for podcast information).

One last word on my selection of a bonus “Classic Solid Steel” hour for bosbos.net… I chose a Coldcut mix from August 2001. Matt and Jon must have been gearing up for the Tim Burton ‘Planet of the Apes’ remake at the time, because here we have an hour of ape-related tunes and a heavy dose of samples from the classic films alongside the POTA children’s records. Coldcut and Planet Of The Apes - need I say more?! Enjoy.