How Scott Garcia’s ‘A London Thing’ became an era-defining UKG anthem

Despite the legal issues, Garcia had a hit record that was doing damage in clubs and quietly establishing its early popularity as a cult hit. MTV approached Garcia as they wanted to make a video for the record, with the now famous visuals shot at Notting Hill Carnival. With the video on heavy rotation, Garcia’s manager’s phone was ringing off the hook with bookings, and Styles was touring doing PAs. “We’re doing the news,” he laughs. “I was flying everywhere, being driven around: gigs, gigs, gigs. It was just mental for about two years.”

At the same time, UKG had blown up and become one of, if not the biggest sound on London’s dancefloors, while the track, and its message, started to take on a life of its own. A lot of Garcia’s gigs would involve being driven down the M4 to cities like Bristol and Cardiff. “Someone got up on the sign where it says, ‘London, however many miles’, and sprayed ‘It’s a London Thing’ graffiti.” There was a separate mural at Vauxhall Tube Station on the London Underground that he would pass when going record shopping in Wimbledon. “It was so surreal,” he recounts. “I never really took it in properly. Now I think back and [it] was crazy.”

The injunction stopped Garcia releasing music under his own name for a time, including a follow-up called ‘4 The Ladies’, which was eventually released as part of a limited vinyl run in 2020, before landing on Garcia’s album, ‘XXV’, in December. But, far from a one-hit wonder, he went on to work under a number of different aliases. Through arguably the most well-known, Corrupted Cru with Mike Kenny, he would help popularise the 2-step sound that acted as a precursor to grime and dubstep. By 1999, he’d bought a studio in Wandsworth Workshops, where he had recorded his early releases, using an advance from a publishing deal.

There, he built an empire, setting up his label Kronik Music to release his own recordings, as well as music by Shy Cookie, Timeless, Genius Cru and more. His studio saw artists including Oxide & Neutrino pass through, while So Solid Crew recorded much of their debut album there. Garcia also took over a pirate radio station called Flight FM, and ran his It’s A London Thing club night. “Every day, we were just bashing it out, man,” he smiles. “We were going hard, and making a lot of money. It was beyond all your dreams. At 19. It was a pretty wild place. At that time not everyone was operating as business-like as they are now.”

At its peak he hired five staff to work across two offices, including his brother who ran the accounts. “Then it all went to shit, man,” he recalls. “All of a sudden you had this negative vibe towards garage. So Solid were the obvious scapegoat for that. Even now people go, ‘So Solid killed garage!’ They didn’t kill garage. Every event was popping off. What killed garage was that there was a lot of trouble.”