Before Beyond: Razor B and the Bedroom Record Label

Beyond the Records · Episode 2 · David McGovern

Read Episode 1: Beyond Vinyl — The Story So Far

Before Beyond Vinyl, there was XR Slamm.

My name was Razor B.

“I’m Razor B and I cut like a knife.”

That was me, trying to rap in my high-pitched voice in a bedroom covered in Kylie and New Kids on the Block posters. Manchester United clock on the wall. Back gardens outside the window.

We took it seriously.

I can laugh at it now, especially looking at the photographs I’ve just dug out, but we put a lot of time into it. Days, weekends, school holidays. Writing songs, rehearsing, recording ourselves and thinking about what we could do next.

And at the centre of all that was my friendship with Ali.

We first met sitting on the raised hill between the upper and lower fields at Rutherford School in Newcastle. I was trying to write a song. We got talking and clicked.

He already had a rap group called XR Slamm and invited me to join. He went by Axon Gemini Jackson, which was considerably more elaborate than Razor B. I remember him even having a bank card in that name. How he managed that, I still couldn’t tell you.

We ended up spending loads of time together, making music, listening to Ice-T, Body Count and all sorts of other stuff, or just being mates. We were like brothers.

Most of our rehearsing happened in my bedroom. We’d work on XR Slamm songs and freestyle, with a dictaphone recording the proceedings. There were loads of tapes.

I knew I’d kept some of this stuff, but while writing this I’ve been looking through it. The tapes are still here. So are the photographs, homemade posters and piles of lyrics on A4 paper and in school exercise books.

I’d forgotten how much we wrote.

Ali wrote most of the lyrics, but I wrote some too and contributed to others. Some of the sheets have both our names on as writers. There are songs I remember straight away and others I’d completely forgotten existed.

Then there are the photos. Very cheesy. Very embarrassing. Two aspiring rappers in a room absolutely plastered with pop stars.

And there’s me in purple shell suit bottoms, a blue shirt and a loose perm. I wanted the hair to look natural and cool, but it wouldn’t hold. It just kept dropping out.

Trendsetting right there. Fuck you, Vogue!

The bedroom pop-star business had already involved getting my dad to buy me equipment. A four-track recorder, and another time a radio microphone.

How was I supposed to be a pop star doing shows in my bedroom if I didn’t have a radio microphone?

Duh!

I also had a cool Roland D-5 synth. Couldn’t play it. Never really got very far with it before it ended up under the bed.

That’s still in the loft too.

The Tascam Porta 05 I’ve found was for messing about at home. But between that, the dictaphone and whatever we could manage with tapes, we were having a go.

One of our songs was called “Demo”. A sensible title. Nobody could accuse us of being unclear about what we were offering.

“A demo is what this is, an example, a funky sample, don’t be glum, there’s more to come…”

And there was more to come: “Nothing”, “Happy Birthday to Ya” and “Safe Sex”.

All the classics.

“Safe Sex” opened with a fictional encounter in a chemist, asking for a condom. I should make that clear before anyone mistakes it for something that actually happened.

Our homemade remix of “Happy Birthday” involved recording between tapes, dropping pieces of the song in, repeating them and adding a drum break from another record. I can’t remember where the break came from. We also recorded an announcement along the lines of “Live—totally live!” that I remember using in it.

It was primitive and sounded shit.

We thought we were the dog’s bollocks.

We even decided we were on our own record label: EMW Records. East Meets West.

There’s a homemade poster with a photograph of each of us, identifying us both as half owners. We’d given ourselves a label, made the artwork and sorted out who owned what.

Thinking big even back then.

We also went to the Lexus dealer on West Road and asked if they’d let us take photographs in one of their convertibles.

They agreed!

Ali got some of his friends together for the photos. Now we had a crew! Well, for those couple of hours at least.

We took the pictures on a shitty little disposable camera and were absolutely chuffed. Then we got the film developed and found it was knackered. None of them came out.

The hurdles we faced, man! The world obviously wasn’t ready for XR Slamm.

Back to school

At the start of fourth year, when we were beginning our GCSEs, I moved from Rutherford to Heaton Manor.

I started my new school with that perm. Didn’t exactly help the transition!

Ali was still at Rutherford, and we carried on making music together. I carried on using Rutherford’s music facilities too, despite no longer being a pupil.

That involved sneaking out of Heaton Manor and back into Rutherford’s music block. A teacher helped us use the facilities, although I wasn’t officially supposed to be there. Sometimes Ali would go off to a lesson and I’d lock myself in the room so other teachers wouldn’t discover me.

On one of those occasions, waiting for him, I recorded an ambient track called “This Is the Hybrid”. Vocals, lots of delay and reverb. I believe I’ve still got it on a cassette somewhere.

I also recorded a shit cover of New Kids on the Block’s “No More Games”.

Proper hip-hop!

The two demos we recorded together at Rutherford were “Demo” and “Nothing”. Those were the tracks we submitted to Panasonic Audio Rock School. They were recorded using the school’s equipment, rather than my Tascam at home.

I eventually told Heaton Manor I was recording and rehearsing for the competition. Which was true. I’d just already been doing it.

Getting to the competition wasn’t entirely straightforward between me and Ali either. As I remember it, he hadn’t initially told me about it. He’d asked a girl he had a crush on to sing Madonna covers with him.

So I joined proceedings a little annoyed.

Still, we had our songs to perform, and I had plans for the show.

I’d persuaded two girls from my new school to be backing dancers. We rehearsed at lunchtimes in a room upstairs, working on coordinated moves for either side of the stage.

I wanted the whole works. Backflips and everything, with me in the middle busting out my own limited moves.

We also rehearsed in Rutherford’s hall, taking turns onstage with a younger girls’ band from the school. There were laughs and nerves as we got ready to take these songs somewhere beyond the bedroom and music room.

We were going to perform at Newcastle’s Mayfair.

The Mayfair, 19 February 1992

I’ve found the stage pass now, tucked away in my school Record of Achievement.

Panasonic Audio Rock School. The Mayfair. X-R Slamm. 19 February 1992.

It’s strange seeing the date printed there after trying to piece it together from memory. There it is, on something I had with me that day.

What I remember most clearly beforehand is pacing the corridor behind the stage, battling the nerves and trying to find the confidence to go out.

I remember wearing green bottoms and a funky patterned long-sleeved top. Looking back, I’d describe it as a bit of a De La Soul or Arrested Development vibe.

There were huge bass speakers on the floor. We cheekily asked if we could climb on them.

We were told no.

The stage setup also didn’t leave enough room for the dancing I’d imagined. All those lunchtime rehearsals, and the space on the day wasn’t what I’d pictured.

As far as I remember, we were the only act there that wasn’t a guitar band. We had a big old school computer involved in the drums and backing, and the two of us on the microphones.

We went out and performed “Demo” and “Nothing”.

Once I was onstage, I loved it.

I’d been pacing about backstage trying to get myself ready, and now we were actually doing it. The songs we’d rehearsed so many times in my bedroom were coming out in front of an audience at the Mayfair.

After our tracks, I left the stage while Ali and the girl did a Madonna cover.

I wasn’t being part of that. For no girl.

And although I’d loved performing, I was glad to come off afterwards too.

I think we came second.

Or we might have just told ourselves that so we didn’t feel so bad about not winning.

Either way, people came up to us afterwards, and the response felt really positive. They seemed to get us.

We’d spent all that time together writing, rehearsing and making tapes. We’d called ourselves Razor B and Axon Gemini Jackson, put ourselves on our own record label and posed for photographs in a convertible that nobody would ever see.

And now we’d performed at the Mayfair, and people were coming over to talk to us about it.

For the rest of that day, we felt like we’d made it.