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Charles Williams teaches English litterature, creative writing and poetry to children. When he meets a new class he tells the kids that he’s also called Charlie Dark. They ask him why and he says he’s a musician and DJ. The kids ask him what kind of music he plays and he says broken beat. ‘Is that like hip hop? Is it like garage?’ the kids ask. He tells them it’s a hybrid of many different genres and plays them a tune.
“It’s really funny hearing their reactions,” Charlie Dark says over a coffee at the Oxford Circus Borders bookshop in London. “Some of them really like it for the first minute, but as soon as the singing and the musicality comes in, it confuses them. They can’t deal with it. But at the same time we’ve had some really positive responses when we’ve invited young school groups down to Blacktronica. I remember one kid, who heard John Coltrane for the first time in his life and he’s now the John Coltrane freak. His mind has just been opened up because he’s hearing all this new music. He’s suddenly realised that you can go to a rave and hear ten different types of music in the space of a hour and that’s okay. We forget this, because we’ve grown up with that. But there’s a whole generation of kids who go to a dance and only hear hip hop all night."
Blacktronica is Charlie’s clubnight and community project. Held monthly at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), Blacktronica is an interactive experience across artforms. DJ sets and live performances are sprinkled with impromptu jams, visual art and spoken word performances. The focus is on black music, from John Coltrane to Carl Craig, but in a wider sense. It’s not about skin colour but about influences. “Blacktronica is kind of a role model of how I can see my music being promoted,” Dark says. Many black electronic music artists in England are not really recognised, or given their due for the artforms and music genres that they’ve created because there isn’t that platform for them and that’s one of the reasons why I set up Blacktronica. So that people like myself, who are not the Aphex Twins of the world, can have a space where they can come and perform their music.”
Blacktronica is part of a new club revolution, where the audience is as much responsible for the event as the Djs or artists themselves. It is a vital tool for promoting broken beat, a music genre that the music industry cannot understand and cannot sell. Broken beat does not have the cultural cachet of council estate-garage or the bling-bling gangsta lifestyle of rnb and hip hop. “It’s the DIY thing –no one is playing our music so let’s start our own club, play it ourselves. I can really admire that kind of ethic,” Dark says.
"The essence really is that this is a catalyst for you to get up and do your own thing. The way that I’ve interacted with music over the years is ‘I like that, I’m inspired by that, let me go and make my own version’. As opposed to ‘I really like that, that makes money, let me sit in my bedroom and copy’. I’ve always been about contributing to a genre, not just emulating what’s already there.

Charlie Dark was brought up on his mother’s Isaac Hayes, Aretha Franklin and James Brown records. “The thing with my mom’s records is that I wasn’t really into them at first. But over time, there’s that thing when records become popular and then you remember that you’ve got them at home., you know, and you remember listening to them. But James Brown was the biggest influence on me growing up. We always had James Brown records playing at our house. And they were long. We had a grammophone but we could just put the record on and leave it for an hour before we had to turn it over.” Since he started Djing hip hop and raregrooves aged 16, he’s been a writer for The Face, ID and Dazed and Confused. He’s recorded with James Lavelle’s legendary MoWax label. He’s been through the major label wringer with his former band Attica Blues, being asked to sound more like the Fugees. The record label relationships all soured and the experiences have shaped Charlie Dark’s life today. “In retrospect, being dropped by Sony is possibly the best thing that could have happened to the members of Attica Blues because it made us go out and do our own things,” he says. I have no animosity towards MoWax whatsoever, beacause if it wasn’t for them, the catalyst for my musical career woulnd’t have happened. I was lucky to find someone who was open-minded enough to give an unknown commodity a chance.”
Dark is fast becoming a renaissance man in electronic music culture, working across artforms and promoting the music and causes that he believes in. “I’m a future revolutionary,” he says. Someone said something really interesting to me recently. You have uprisings and you have revolutions. Uprisings go half way round, revolutions go all the way around. I think you do need to have activists in music. Not activists in the traditional kind of preachy way but people who stand up for what they do. I get really fed up with seeing interviews with some rapper who’s selling zillions and zillions of records and telling me that he’s not a role model. Maybe you didn’t intentionally wake up to be a role model but people do listen to what you say and you have to be responsible for what you say and the images that you portray to people. You can’t just say ‘bitch, murder, fuck, bla bla bla,shoot your mom’ and think that it goes in one ear and out the other. I try to be responsible for the images that I push out and the things I talk about."
Charlie Dark appears the right man to introduce the future generations to new music. He talks about his life and the causes he believes in with true passion, to the point where he apologises for starting to sound like Yoda. He thinks on his feet, speaks his mind honestly and realises what impact each instance of his musical life has had on who he is today and how he must approach his role as musical educator.
“The first time I heard John Coltrane, I thought he was crazy. I thought ‘what is this nonsense, I can’t listen to this!’. The characteristic thing that happens is that you hear a Coltrane or a Pharaoh Sanders tune that you like on the radio. You can’t find it in the shop and you end up coming home with Coltrane’s ‘Ascension’ album, which is this 80-minute sax solo going waawaauuwaoo wiiwiou waoo. And you just sit there saying ‘woah, I can’t understand this’. Kids need to be ready to receive the message because they’re dealing with quite heavy music, whereas a lot of the stuff they’ve grown up with is quite lightweight. It’s the standard ‘I met you in the club, I bought you a drink, we went home, we made love and then I never saw you again” story. You’re not going to go from that to ‘Love Supreme’ in one day. You’ve got to bring them in slowly.
The meaning of ‘busy’ is stretched to new lengths through Charlie’s work and aspirations, which he jokingly calls ‘world domination’. He’s taken Blacktronica to Nigeria and his country of origin Ghana on a tour with Black Twang, sponsored by the British Council. He’s got summer festival dates throughout Europe, with Glastonbury and Berlin on the planner. The first Blacktronica compilation is about to drop and Charlie is finishing a book of short stories, poems and recipies. He still finds time time to work in film and music consultancy for he BBC. He also does spoken word tours and manages to fit in producing and remixing. “A ‘Dark’ day varies from day to day,” he says. Usually a very early start, maybe come out of bed six o’clock-seven. Get in the studio by 9. Do some beats unti about 12 o’clock.Then do some writing or or I’m just teaching all day. I’m one of those people who’s always done things across arts. I get bored easily.

So I like to do different things. I’ve been in this vacuum where all I did was wake up and make music. I did that for five years. That didn’t really work for me, you crash and burn. I think you need other influences, outside things that influence the music you make.”

Charlie’s phone rings and a wide smile streches across his lips. His remix for a forthcoming Bitches Brew tune has been accepted. Not all his remixes are successful and rejection is something Charlie is used to. ‘Man, it happens all the time. I did remixes for Spacek and Jazzanova that weren’t accepted. They will commision remixes from you and say ‘we really liked what you did on this other track, can you do that again for us?’ But I can’t always do that, what I do evolves. Maybe I’ll put out an album with all the remixes that never got released.” Yet another fresh idea from a man with a plan. “I’m at the happiest point of my musical career. Definetly,” Charlie reflects.
© Copyright OnTheFlip 2004.