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Roni Size, right, and Dynamite MC in 2000.
Bedroom beats … Roni Size, right, and Dynamite MC in 2000. Photograph: Sean Smith/The Guardian
Bedroom beats … Roni Size, right, and Dynamite MC in 2000. Photograph: Sean Smith/The Guardian

How we made: Roni Size on the Mercury-winning album New Forms

This article is more than 5 years old
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‘We just went to the Mercury prize ceremony to scoff all the free food and alcohol. Then Eddie Izzard said: You’ve won!’

Roni Size, AKA Ryan Williams, producer

I was born Ryan Owen Granville Williams but, because I was lighter-skinned, everyone called me Roni, after the only white character in the film Babylon. I was quite short and if my mates were talking about a girl, they’d say: “Oh, she’s Roni’s size.” So that’s how I came up with the name Roni Size.

Getting expelled from school in Bristol was one of the best things that ever happened to me. I started going to the city’s Sefton Park youth centre and they had a drum machine. Suddenly I had something that excited me. Then they got a sampler and I was in the basement all the time, making tunes.

I got to know [female vocalist] Onallee after she did some jingles for me. We formed part of a collective, Reprazent, with DJ Krust. We’d go to raves, recreate the parts we liked, then use them to build our own music, which could be drum’n’bass, breakbeats, soca, jazz. I sampled everything from James Brown to Everything But the Girl and put all this into New Forms.

‘The title was just something I came up with after smoking herb’ … Brown Paper Bag by Roni Size/Reprazent

We wanted to make music that sounded like the future. So the track Beatbox was just us making drum patterns with our own voices. Brown Paper Bag started off as samples of double bass licks. I chopped them up on the sampler and suddenly there was a song. The title didn’t mean anything. It was just something that came to me after smoking herb, which I did back then.

At first, the album went right over people’s heads. One reviewer described it as: “Kids in a bedroom on drugs fiddling around with computers.” But when we started touring, with a bass-player and a drummer, people went: “Wow.”

We found out we’d been nominated for the 1997 Mercury prize just after we’d played the Montreux jazz festival. We were up against Radiohead, the Prodigy, the Spice Girls and the Chemical Brothers. Because we were so tired, we moaned all the way to the ceremony, and just scoffed all the free food and alcohol. Then Eddie Izzard said: “I think you’ve won it!” And all the cameras started moving towards our table.

We were broke, so winning was the stuff of dreams. When I announced that I was donating the £20,000 cheque to the Sefton Park youth centre, my crew looked at me as if to say: “You’re doing what?”

‘Just the right amount of chefs’ … Dynamite MC, Roni Size and Onallee in 2015. Photograph: Joel Goodman/LNP/Rex/Shutterstock

Dynamite MC, AKA Dominic Smith, vocals

I met Roni at a club in Didcot, Oxfordshire, in 1995. It was one of my first shows and I was the only MC there. “Do you want me to stay on the mic,” I said, “or get off?” He told me to keep going. A month later someone said: “Remember that Roni guy? He’s trying to get hold of you.” I jumped on the train to Bristol and eventually moved up there. No disrespect to Gloucester, my home town, but Bristol was much more exciting. There were lots of clubs and parties – and Massive Attack, Tricky and Portishead were all inspiring each other.

I’d grown up with fast music: house, rave and jungle. We took all that energy and put it into a melting pot on New Forms. The collective was just the right amount of chefs: DJ Krust was strings-oriented, DJ Suv brought science-fiction type soundscapes, DJ Die was good at cut-ups, scratches and bass lines, while Onallee was a wonderful singer and songwriter.

I feature on Railing and Brown Paper Bag, which was just a working title until I went: “Step to the rhythm made out of brown paper!” It built from there. If it had been called anything else, the rap would have been totally different. The album title was about saying who we were and what we represented, but we had no idea it would have such impact.

My strongest memories of the Mercury are the meal – monkfish – and meeting TV hypnotist Paul McKenna. I went: “Wow, I love your show!” And he went: “Never mind my show, tell me about your album!” It felt like we were flying the flag for the entire drum’n’bass scene. The Mercury statue is still in Roni’s front room. We went in as 100-1 outsider kids from the West Country and came out as champions. I wish I’d put a tenner on us.

This article was amended on 17 July 2018 because an earlier version referred to DJ Krush. This has been corrected to DJ Krust.

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