In the year 2000, UK garage was at the epicenter of British underground music and culture. Anywhere and everywhere—from the block to the barbershop—you couldn’t walk past a corner of London where the sound wasn’t blaring out of speakers. Slowly pollinating the clubs, radio and charts of the day, it had captured the imagination of Britain’s youth towards the end of the 1990s, who then channeled the phenomenon into the champagne-toting, Moschino-copping days our olders gleefully tell us about in 2019—an era firmly entrenched in UK music folklore. But by the turn of the millennium, garage was gradually watering down, leaving a space in the underground to be filled by a generation more in tune with spitting bars than singing their emotions out.



In amongst this new breed were the likes of Heartless Crew, So Solid and, perhaps the most influential, Pay As U Go Cartel. These were younger men disillusioned with garage’s current and future direction, who had developed a flair for intricate lyrics over darker, moodier production than the sun-kissed sounds of the time, and were ready to kick UK garage (or ‘grimey garage’ as their version would become loosely known as) up the backside. So Solid were undeniably the most successful—not much more needs to be said about their story—but Pay As U Go represented the most fascinating and, arguably, most important journey, laying down what was to come next for UK black music. Sparking a change for garage that would inevitably create a division between the older UK-G’s and the new upstarts, the Cartel were instrumental in carrying over the spirit of the darker garage they represented into the sound’s now-distant relative, grime. This impact was twofold: by becoming a force in and of themselves in the garage scene while simultaneously contributing to the end of its reign as a bonafide movement, the Cartel swung over garage’s future like a sword of Damocles, ready to pick up where it left off in the UK underground.

Pay As U Go’s roster read like a who’s who of future grime royalty: Wiley, Maxwell D, Flowdan, God’s Gift, DJ Slimzee, DJ Target, Geeneus, Breeze, Plague, Bubbles and the late Major Ace. They were heavy hitters who would constitute major moves in grime, from music to infrastructure. “Pay As U Go was like a crew of headliners,” Wiley wrote in his 2017 autobiography, Eskiboy. “Each person was important and had their own skill. Every individual could hold down a set on their own, could probably have made it on their own. It was like a supergroup.” This is not to say they weren’t an out and out garage crew, able to switch up the more lyrical material for party bars at a whim.

Following the trend set by DJ Luck & MC Neat, PSG, DJ Pied Piper and countless others, Pay As U Go’s impactful “Champagne Dance” broke yet more barriers for mainstream garage, charting at No. 13 on the UK singles chart in 2001. Here, they followed a formula—memorable sung hook, bouncy, summery production, and party video—and ran away with it towards success.