It’s 1995 and my parents have just bought cable television for the first time. Now instead of having four channels (BBC1, BBC2, ITV and Channel 4) we had around 30 different channels including Sky One, Channel 5, Eurosport, Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, VH-1, Discovery Channel, MTV and lots more.
These were the days before Internet, modern computers, mobile phones were in most people’s homes (although were all certainly available).
Aged 10, I had an interest in music and in terms of exposure to new music on TV, you would have to rely on Top Of The Pops or the ITV Chart Show every Saturday at noon. On radio there was Radio 1 and a couple of local (Northampton) stations playing a relentless parade of generic pop music and golden oldies. A quick scan of the FM, MW and AM frequencies however using our 1980s ghetto blaster would sometimes allow you to pick up the odd pirate radio station playing some crazy dance music you’ve never heard of!
So really, not much chance of finding something fresh, cutting edge and culturally profound.
There were two TV channels dedicated to music, VH-1 which was a nostalgic golden oldies music video channel generally favouring rock n roll and easy listening fluff and then there was MTV.
It didn’t take long for me and my younger sister to fall in love with MTV. A daily schedule of hot new music videos all day/night long exposing us to a whole arrangement of music from a variety of different genres.
1995 was a pretty incredible year for music. Hip hop, R&B, Britpop, Eurodance, and Alternative Rock were all heavy in airplay on MTV at the time. Technology advancements and genre diversification was in full flow; house, techno, hardcore and jungle all pushing the experimental boundaries of culture and technology.
Visual art was also highly experimental in terms of artistry, photography and animation. MTV were undoubtedly trend setting with their catchy idents and show transitions showcasing forward thinking producers’ minds of the post-rave, new Europe ideologies of the world.
MTV Europe was broadcasting to all the European countries after the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989. It was broadcast initially showing times for upcoming shows based on different cities across Europe like London, Rome, Berlin and Athens giving you a real feel of consolidation between European countries, like never before. Even the presenters or VJs (video jockeys) were continental coming from the Netherlands, Italy, Germany and even Israel (who remembers the awesome Eden Harel)?
Despite this, MTV Europe had its headquarters in Camden, London. And as I’m British, I would always prefer to hear British music over something made in mainland Europe – this matched what I feel MTV broadcast at the time; a British centrality about the channel despite it being broadcast to all of Europe.
The shows broadcast around 1995-96 were most of the time based around new music videos including Top 10 and 20 countdowns from Europe and the US. Genre based shows like Yo! MTV Raps, 120 Minutes and Party Zone. MTV had its own unique series of US adult animation shows such as Aeon Flux, Beavis & Butthead and the incredible MTV Oddities series including The Maxx and The Head respectively.
In the context to watching TV in the pre-MTV days, it was now a cultural explosion happening on the living room TV every day and night! Friends at school were seeing the same things and because MTV was directed at the youth, it became a massive influence on the things we listened to, what we wore, how we spoke and how we saw the world.
What made MTV refreshingly unique was its approach to some of the small things. The crucial time between the shows and music videos, the creative visual and audio ways to keep you watching their channel. Even the adverts selling Levis (remember the Babylon Zoo – Spaceman ad?), Coca Cola and Sketchers were cool.
However, it was the work of the producers at MTV Europe creating a series of idents/bumpers/promos labelled “MTV Focus” which single handedly changed my life forever.
From my perspective, the purpose of the MTV Focus idents was to focus in on the current fashionable genres of electronic music of the time, seemingly first occurring in 1993 and fizzling out around 1997. Each ident only lasted about a minute and from memory included snippets from music videos of genres such as jungle, house, ambient, techno and downtempo.
Consider that this era of dance music was going through an explosive breakneck speed of change, exploration and expressiveness.
The MTV Focus Jungle ident I first noticed in 1995 was the one minute that changed my life forever.
A sound I’d never heard before and at the time of watching, had no idea what type of music it was – it was jungle and was accompanied by a collage of snippets from music videos such as Goldie, A Tribe Called Quest, The Prodigy, M People and 808 State.
The ident began with some people navigating inner-city struggle, expressive nightclub dancing, graffiti and abandoned buildings before sweeping elegantly into a waterfall and a boat searching up a still river, deep jungle and forest greenery before breaking out into street breakdancing and moving shadows – an ingenious and absorbing celebration of an essential, expressive, defiant and emotionally deep type of music – jungle.
Many of the faces in the film are black, a respectful and reflective representation of the roots of jungle and its acknowledgement of being the first Black British music scene.
There are three jungle tracks which feature in the one minute video including DJ Tamsin & The Monk’s “A Better Place (DJ Crystl remix)”, Lemon D’s “Deep Space (I See Sunshine) Original Drum & Space mix)”, Groove Corporation & Bim Sherman’s “Ghetto Prayer (O.P.D. Jungle Mix)” in addition to Stevie Be Zet’s “Passion And Hope”.
Three of the four compositions could be argued to belong to the ambient/intelligent jungle variety of jungle and two of which (A Better Place and Deep Space) appeared on the 1994 jungle compilation “Counter-Strike: A Collection Of Deep Beats”.
The ident disappeared from our screens around 1997 and I still hadn’t understood what music genre it was until roughly around 2001 when I began properly listening to jungle music.
I’d not see the indent for another generation of years after last seeing it, but another milestone media outlet in YouTube helped me reminisce when someone posted a video of it during the early 2010s.
So why did it change my life? It’s hard to describe but it felt like the pinnacle of visual and music put together – like the holy land. It shaped my future music tastes and provided a catalyst for my own creativity when later producing, mixing and writing.
From then on, every piece of music or piece of visual art wouldn’t come close to that ident, it became the template of artistic excellence and creative genius that I wouldn’t see again in my lifetime.
