From a council flat payin' higher-rate tax

Roots Manuva - 'Dreamy Days' (Run Come Save Me - 2001)

Remember that if you ever hear ‘Haunted Dancehall (Nursery Remix)’ by Sabres of Paradise on daytime Radio 1, turn the TV on; something terrible has just happened

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As September 2001 became October 2001, the post-9/11 landscape saw something as mundane as what UK radio stations were playing change slightly. I remember that the music of the emerging decade, a lot of it brash, electronic and bold, took a hiatus for a few weeks as it felt like some songs rotated from A-list to C-list and vice versa.

Three specific examples of songs with fewer BPM and less “in your face” than some of 2001’s all-time great tracks like ‘Get Ur Freak On’ or ‘The Modern Age’ were Super Furry Animals ‘It’s Not The End of The World’, Ian Brown’s ‘F.E.A.R.’ and Roots Manuva’s ‘Dreamy Days’. It felt like they got more and more play in the aftermath than at the end of the long nineties beforehand.

The first two felt like they had been written about the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, but they merely seemed to be. Roots Manuva’s song isn’t something that you could ultimately tie to what was going on as many have done with Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. However, it still benefited from the general need for everyone to calm down, take stock and get their bearings.

Run Come Save Me and the companion remix album Dub Come Save Me

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strike me as moments in British hip-hop that probably don’t get the credit they deserve. There’s a little more in the way of experimental boundary-pushing than on Roots Manuva’s debut, Brand New, Second Hand - Rodney Smith leans much more into his Jamaican roots here, for example. It is still the 2001 effort that sold better and broke Smith into what could be called the mainstream back then. It may just be that people’s memories of that time naturally bring to mind the Mercury Prize-winning albums from Ms Dynamite and Dizzee Rascal and The Streets’ debut, Original Pirate Material, more quickly.

Before Mike Skinner informed us that “around here we say birds, not bitches”, Roots told us about his cheese-on-toast and lifts from Craig David on other tracks. To bring the album to a close, we get a whirlwind tour through a relationship resplendent with more UK-centric language (frocks and wooden spoons for coming last) and references (Primrose Hill in London is namechecked.)

Musically, the song lifts the intro from Floyd Cramer's

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cover of the ridiculous rain-drenched cake song ‘MacArthur Park’ and gives the song's springboard for the string and clavichord backing.

The lyrics take us from the initial parts of the relationship, where the two of them seem to be in an “us against the world scenario” as friends castigate him for living a buttoned-down existence and enjoying the natural highs of his relationship than the chemical ones he potentially wanted with them in weekends past. I instantly think of the two of them hosting dinner parties while White Flag, Come Away With Me and Whoa, Nelly! play in the background while his friends are out dancing to Fischerspooner.

Later on, that has worn off; Roots is sleeping on a couch and laments this by wondering why this is happening when it is his house. He reflects on the amount of heartbreak and now finally being financially well off. The professionalism of having a manager, a black book full of posh ladies and paying a higher income tax rate are all badges of pride for the boy from the South West London council flats.

Roots doesn’t feel that well inclined to the whippersnappers around him, dismissing them, but to me, it is evident that the road we see him on the cover paves the way for Little Simz, Dave, slowthai, Stormzy, Wiley, Skepta and M.I.A.

1. This is a quote from a Huffington Post UK article BBC producer Chris Price wrote in 2011

2. Which features a remix of ‘Dreamy Days’ by The Super Furry Animals

3. Cramer’s ‘On The Rebound’ was a mainstay for BBC Documentarian Adam Curtis in his films.