100 Greatest Songs of the 00’s #97 Skream – Midnight Request Line

Released: 2005

At the beginning of the new century the South London borough of Croydon had one asset which couldn’t be taken away easily: nobody liked it. Writing in The Independent post the lockdown malaise of 2020, former resident Soma Ghosh described the tower block filled suburb as a “Concrete haemorrhoid” whilst in 2014 it was voted the second unhappiest place to live in the country, beaten narrowly by East London. Some even found it getting the runners-up spot more than a little ironic.

This was precisely not you’d bet the sort of area from which a global underground music would emanate, but there was more than a little of the place’s urban brutalism in dubstep, a bass obsessed twin to grime with which it rapidly became synonymous. Like grime, it’s entry costs in equipment terms were minimal and the initially small and youthful group of producers experimenting with Playstations and bootlegged copies of Fruity Loops were at least able to congregate around the Big Apple record shop. Now with roots, they also had their own performance space at FWD>>, a club night where most of the audience were the people who’d made what was on the speakers.

Oliver Jones – Skream – was one of the youngest members of this crew and as a seventeen year old in 2003 he decided that the grime track he was working he called Minus C would be better with some arpeggiation and a new bassline. In that moment, arguably dubstep’s most famous tune was born.

Retitled Midnight Request Line in honour of Rock Master Scott & The Dynamic Three’s “Request Line,” from which the intro was sampled, the finished track was rubbery hybrid that by accident was able to function in both weed infused back rooms and on more sophisticated dancefloors. For his part Jones told Resident Adviser years later even he was surprised at how easy creating this monster had been. “It was literally hitting two keys. It was the simplest thing. When I showed my missus, she was like, ‘That’s the tune you’re f*cking famous for?'” Maybe we can blame it on Croydon. Everyone else does.