In the early 1990s, the suburban town of Romford was known for three things. It was the home of the world’s best snooker player, Steve Davis. It was where people placed bets at Romford dog track, over a dinner of chicken in a basket.
And for those in the know, it was where the UK’s best underground dance music was bought and sold. That pedigree was immortalised by Romford’s most famous musical act, Underworld, with frontman Karl Hyde shouting the words “mega mega mega, going back to Romford” at the climax of 1995’s Born Slippy. Those words now form the title of a new exhibition in the town, Mega Mega: Romford’s Suburban Sound Revolution, which charts how this unglamorous but party-spirited backwater became an upstart rival to great dance music cities such as Manchester or Detroit.
The scene’s key hub was the record shop Boogie Times, opened in 1989 by Danny Donnelly with a bank loan secured shortly before his 18th birthday. He was born in Stratford, east London, but when he was five his parents moved out to Romford, an old Essex market town that had effectively become a suburb of London as the capital sprawled outwards after the second world war. Donnelly’s dad commuted back to Stratford to run the family corner shop, while young Danny inherited his entrepreneurial streak.
He loved rare groove, where hard-to-find jazz, funk and R&B records were selected for the quality of their breakbeats. At 14, he bought huge speakers for his bedroom, which he later used to put on parties around east London: “You’d hire someone’s flat, charge at the door and it would be treated like a club for the event.” Boogie Times opened just as house music and ecstasy found their way into post-industrial spaces and farmers’ fields, building demand for rave tunes on vinyl. The location of Donnelly’s dad’s shop in Stratford was similarly fortuitous: east London pirate station Fantasy FM launched in the block next door in 1989.
His dad got chatting to future drum’n’bass legend DJ Hype, who soon paid a visit to Boogie Times with another artist, DJ Krome. Romford and the wider borough of Havering already housed parties by people such as the polymath producer and promoter Mark Ryder – who later became a star in the UK garage era as Mark “Ruff” Ryder – but Romford was still best known for dancing to pop music on a Saturday night with your glad rags on. Tony Grimley, another local DJ inspired by his first rave, was asked to run a night at Romford’s biggest nightclub, Hollywood.
He named it Culture Shock to describe the way the music landed there. Instead of tame disco and “erection section” slow dances, suddenly there were exciting new electronic DJs such as Andrew Weatherall, Danny Rampling and Underworld’s Darren Emerson. The local crowd didn’t like hard techno, Grimley says, “but that happy, high-energy sort of house music [such as] Danny Rampling … every time we booked Danny, we reached capacity.” Simon Duggins AKA Uncle Dugs, DJ and former station manager of pirate-turned-legit radio station Rinse FM, went to his first rave after he noticed a circus big top on the side of the A13 when his dad was driving him to football training at Leyton Orient.
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