Southwark
It’s difficult to overestimate the draw of London clubland. Whether it’s the myths and famed hedonistic menace luring party migrants to the capital from practically any location on Earth, or people seeking a more spectral connection – suburban kids picking up pirates with foil-wrapped aerials, UK garage nights in Oz, Drake’s roadman accent – the city’s late-night zones and the rituals you can find there are in demand the world over. If that clubland can be defined by anything at all, it is by its own formlessness. Every day, licensed venues – whether they’re pubs, basement bars, cocktail lounges, concert halls or megaclubs – close and new ones arrive in their place. Every day, thousands of young people in this city move address, each townhouse living room and local authority bedroom a potential new site for pre-drinks, ragers, afterparties. There was a time when London clubland seemed sonically conquerable – whether by 60s mod groups on Eel Pie Island or the post-millennial bass weight of dubstep. Now, things are splintered. The magazines and pirate stations that used to act as the city’s “voice”, devoted as they mostly were to specific genres or movements, have been replaced by the constant, instant polyphonic blare of the internet.
James Browning is the founder and proprietor of Balamii. Based in Peckham, the online radio station – alongside others like NTS, Radar and Reprezent – is the champion of pretty much any non-charting type of music you want it to be: afrobeats, kraut rock, rave classics, ruff sound, rub-a-dub, trap, jazz techno, cosmic boogie. It’s a voice of a new iteration of London that deals with an onslaught of cultural choices not by bunkering down into tribalism but by opening up, inviting the world in. It all started for Browning with the 1950s jukebox that used to soundtrack special occasions at his family home in Deptford.
“You’d put a sixpence in it and it would chuck out a record,” he explains. “My dad’s had it since I was born, basically, and he fills it with all his 7-inches. Every Christmas, birthday or whatever, it was on – there’s a little photo of my family stuck on the middle of it. The company that made the jukebox was called BAL-AMi – that’s where the name of the station comes from.”
Browning explains that his father’s eclectic tastes meant it had “a bit of everything on it – old crooners, Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, Aretha Franklin”. He picks out the sore, sullen trio of “Riders On the Storm”, “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine (Anymore)” and “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” as key hits introduced to him by the machine in those formative years. “It had a Thunderbirds record in there as well,” he adds, “but that was less influential.”
It didn’t take him long to build on this grounding. At 15, Browning started putting on raves before he was legally old enough to be in the clubs they were held in. “It was a drum n’ bass night called Submission and it got shut down in about two hours ‘cos loads of Woolwich boys came down, beat up the bouncers and tried to take the money,” he explains. “We had to barricade the door to stop them from getting the till.” New, more discreet nights followed at other venues in southeast London before he started his A-levels, and he picked promoting up again while at university in Brighton. Now returned to home turf, he lives with his girlfriend a couple of roads away from the house he grew up in, and spends the vast majority of his time running the station.
“I f*cked around with radio the whole time I was at uni,” Browning recalls. “I remember in my teenage years, too, we used to text the pirate stations and gun each other on the radio. One day we got the MC to start chatting about my mate’s waxy ears and his mum. And we got it all on tape!”
Life running a non-mainstream radio station is easier now than it was in those days. “You’ve got to respect the agg you had and still have to go through to run a pirate,” he says, referring to a story told by Geeneus, the founder of Rinse FM, in a Resident Advisor podcast last year. “It was insane what they did: climbing up tower blocks and dangling off ropes to hang a mast… F*cking ratings to people who do that shit, that is dedication. If you wanna do an internet radio show all you need is a f*cking internet connection. Anyone can do it.”
Now, Balamii runs out of small, custom-built studio in a small arcade by Peckham Rye station. Wavey Garms, the social clothing resale company that started as a Facebook group in 2012 and since has gone on to dictate streetwear fashion in the UK, also has a shop there. The area has become a hub of fashion, nightlife and art in the last decade or so, and the station’s ethos revolves around keeping things local. “Everyone that does a show has come on from word of mouth and friends of friends. A lot of people we used to chill out with as teenagers come on and do shows today. I met Andres [Branco, the founder of Wavey Garms] about three years ago and he’s telling stories about the same people I knew growing up, so it all dovetails.”
Other alliances have blossomed with late-night venues in Southwark, which provide the station with a steady slipstream of global stardust – Detroit house figurehead Marcellus Pittman was a recent guest – to complement the local talent. “Whoever’s playing Bussey, Corsica, we ask if they wanna pass through while they’re in the area,” he says. “But the main thing is just to do right by South London, then build. You can’t rush. You’ve gotta earn your stripes.”
Southwark isn’t lacking for stripes when it comes to nightlife, home not just to the venues Browning cited above but also Ministry of Sound and London Bridge’s fabled arches club network. In 1987, it was the birthplace of acid house in the UK, Danny Rampling’s Shoom night – inspired by an ecstasy-fuelled epiphany in Ibiza – first finding its London foothold in a fitness centre near where the Tate Modern stands today. But while it retains its party pull, in other ways the borough is vastly changed from the one Browning grew up in as a child: “When the estates got pulled down – North Peckham, Ferrier, Heygate – they basically ripped down the ‘hood. Fuck knows where the people who lived there ended up. Out of 7,000 flats, only 70 families from the original populations are left. The places are bought up by foreign investors and left empty.”
Unsurprisingly, Browning has put down strong roots in the area. Between the ages of 15 and 18, he sold fruit and veg on a stall at Borough Market, turning up at the local pubs after shifts with a thirst for pints and a bag of spare produce to sell the regulars. He remembers going to local clubs at round the same age, before the smoking ban came in, and hot boxing them with his friends. He holds an annual party in conjunction with Morley’s, the fried chicken chain that is exclusive to south London and revered by its schoolkids, students and ravers, and talks passionately about the important poignancy of the Cross Bones Graveyard, a pauper’s burial ground from late medieval times that through local pressure has been preserved even as the Shard has loomed up behind it.
But none of this means that Browning’s worldview is parochial. Balamii recently launched a booking agency to get their up-and-coming regulars more shine on the live club circuit. Soon, a New York studio will turn the station into a transatlantic baton chase between the hours of 9PM and 9AM, when the Peckham branch has to shut along with the other premises on the arcade. Browning has big ambitions, but for now he’s keen on ruling his patch.
“I just wanna do this every day for the rest of my life,” he says, “and I’ll do whatever has to happen for that to happen. I don’t DJ myself; I just like running it and doing the business side of things. Also, I think people would look to that show as indicative of what Balamii is and I don’t wanna pigeonhole it. I wanna roll with the times and to do that you can’t pigeonhole yourself. I’m always aware not to nestle yourself in one genre too heavy. You gotta be able to keep it moving.”