2001 Daniel Beddingfield: Gotta Get Thru This

Much like punk in the late seventies, the UK Garage scene was a branch of music that always had an outlaw, do it yourself ethos about its output with a corresponding in-built attitude of non-compliance that gave the genre a keen, parent unfriendly edge. As a case in point, New Zealander Beddingfield created and recorded his garage track 'Gotta Get Thru This' using domestic software on his bedroom PC. Yes, I know the are many who'll roll their eyes at the 'not proper music' minimal electronic repetition of it and say "so what", but I in turn roll my eyes at them in the same way I would at food connoisseurs who poo poo fast food like chips by saying they are 'just' deep fried potatoes. Maybe they are, but they taste nice enough and anyway, chips are deep fried potatoes in the way that UK Garage is repetitive electronic beats - if you don't like either then fine, but you don't try and intellectualise what's essentially an emotional response to an external stimulus and act all superior about it (and UK Garage won't make you fat if you overdose on it either).

All of which is a roundabout way for me to set the scene to confirm that what I have to say about 'Gotta Get Thru This' is said without prejudice. Because I don't much like it. Yes, fair play to Beddingfield for his home made achievement, but to my ears 'Gotta Get Thru This' is a touch too minimal and a touch too repetitive to be genuine; Beddingfield's beats are too rinky dink to stir the blood - they sound like they were knocked up in a bedroom. Beddingfield himself is all over the tune with a curious falsetto that adds no stock to the stew and his white bread whine is, to me, the antithesis of what UK Garage was all about - instead of the urban, inner city danger that the genre normally replicates, the garage that houses 'Gotta Get Thru This' is on a tree lined avenue with a Mondeo parked in it. I flinched from calling 'Gotta Get Thru This' the 'Ice Ice Baby' of Garage at first because it seemed a bit harsh, but now the more I listen to it, the more apt it seems.