- So it's the early 2000s,
a female vocal is recorded in Leyton, East London,
it goes on to become synonymous with the grime world
over the next two decades.
But who was the vocalist
and what is the mystery behind the "Rhythm 'N' Gash" girl?
This vocal was pretty momentous
in terms of developing the genre, really.
It was absolutely crucial.
Grime music went from being dusty samples
made on PlayStations and FruityLoops
through to raves packed with people
absolutely losing their head
as soon as they heard just a snippet of this female vocal.
It became a signifier,
absolutely synonymous with what became a global genre.
So how did it all begin?
The track emerged in about 2006/2007 officially
on the first Rinse release.
So Rinse FM was once a pirate radio station,
now is a well-established underground station.
Back when they started, they had a record label
and this got on to the first release; a compilation.
But it was doing the rounds before then,
it was pre-internet.
In an offline grime world built up in VHS videos
that did the rounds.
At the point it got released,
it was already getting reloads in nightclubs,
whether they were legitimate nightclubs
or whether they were illegal raves,
this was already doing the damage.
It was influential for many reasons,
partly because of how many people jumped on it.
It just perpetuated that hype.
It came to be used by huge amounts of people.
Some of the earliest people to use it, Skepta and JME.
♪ I'm calm ♪
♪ I've got the devil in my palm ♪
♪ Know I said that I wear sunglasses at night ♪
♪ But tonight I need to see wagwan ♪
♪ When I spray everyone gets haps ♪
♪ Jumping about, shouting brap, brap ♪
♪ Doing bare tings with their hands ♪
♪ That's how you know man's got bare facts ♪
And producers like Faze Miyake,
DJ Spyro as well,
he's a notable producer.
He's a presenter on BBC.
He's presented on various grime shows and stations.
Even people like Flava D
who are not even from the grime scene,
she's a house producer,
somehow have gotten their mitts on these stems
and been able to rework and reword
this absolutely seminal track.
Every time someone reloaded it and reworked it,
jumped on it and did their own bars over it,
it just gained more and more momentum.
So the story of the "Rhythm 'N' Gash" girl.
What do we know about her?
Not a huge lot
The stories are pretty fantastical I have to say.
Some people think that it's a chopped up version
of a Whitney Houston sample.
There's a DJ called DJ Andy Purnell
who recently did a live stream
and actually reverse engineered the lyrics to
'I Will Always Love You' by Whitney Houston,
taking bits and pieces of it
and working it into what was that rhythm 'n' gash sample.
- You know nobody knows who sang the vocals on that tune.
- It's good.
It's a good attempt,
but it isn't what it was.
A lot of people that I've spoken to are adamant
that it's a UK vocal and I'm inclined to agree.
Because of that,
it also rules out the other mystery and the other story,
which is it could be a New York trio
called Sisters With Voices who were a nineties group.
And some people are of the opinion
that it could be a sample from there.
The "Rhythm 'N' Gash" girl,
rumour has it her name's Angela.
We really don't know much more than that.
We don't have a second name.
We know that with PRS,
you have about a three year window
in terms of recovering royalties.
We're well past that.
We've never had any kind of requests
for backdated PRS royalties.
It would be in the hundreds of thousands of pounds
if it was.
Essentially, we think that she was just someone's partner
a producers girlfriend,
or friends who came along.
This happened a huge amount.
There was so many undocumented vocals.
Maybe they weren't native to the music industry.
The rhythm 'n' gash girl potentially is one of them.
But she's something of a meme.
If you talk to grime heads,
if you talk to people in the industry
and ask about stuff that is little known,
those things that have got a bit of dust on them
that people aren't quite sure about.
It's sometimes referred to as an 'Angela'.
All we know is there's a person called Angela
who voiced potentially the most influential grime track
of the scene.
So the producer was a guy called Rebound X,
real name Benjamin Darroux.
The story behind who this guy was,
he emerged in the early 2000s
was making tracks for his friends to MC over,
same sort of story as the rest of them.
He put out a couple of releases.
He was active on forums like RWD Rewind Forum
which was a grind forum.
The archives are still available
and you can see conversations
where people are trying to figure out who this guy was,
where the track came from.
Some people think he's the
British Asian producer Naughty Boy,
although that's unconfirmed.
It's rumoured that his family came into some money.
There was an article connected to him
about his dad winning 62 K on the lottery.
And that may be also being a reason why they dipped out.
It turns out Rebound X's disappearance
potentially stems from an online spat
in early grime forum history.
A lot people reference a pretty embarrassing
compromising photograph emerging onto one of these forums
leading to Rebound X,
who was going to go on to become
one of the most infamous grime producers
of the early grime scene,
disappearing forever.
We don't know what else happened to him.
Whether he ever came back,
I can't find any other evidence
of him releasing anything else since.
So moving forward to today, the question is
is it still a big track?
Undoubtedly, the answer is yes.
You can still go to raves.
You can still see Boiler Room streams with this track
absolutely shutting the place down.
Whether it's DJ EZ,
whether it's grime DJs like Spyro,
the Boy Better Know crew,
Logan Sama, whoever it is,
these guys are still pulling these records.
It is still relevant and it is still crucial to the scene.
Coming out of the UK,
grime still is one of the biggest genres.
Noted as a follow-up to punk,
in terms of antiestablishment,
it's definitely something that is referred to
as a voice of the people.
And because of that you see it in the charts.
Heady One, AJ Tracy and Stormzy
are in the top five currently at time of recording
and grime music still continues to be at the top tier
of music in the world today.
So that's the story of the rhythm 'n' gash sample.
That's what we know so far.
The mystery of Angela still lives on.