A Brief History of the Bassline That Won't Die

The notes are G, G, B flat, C. Two on the root, a jump up a minor third, then a step up a tone, and back round. Played slowly it sounds like a warning. Played at 165 beats per minute it sounds like a chase. Diggers call it the Freight, after the record it came from, and if you have listened to any dance music made since about 1990 you have heard it several hundred times without necessarily noticing once.

It arrived by accident. In March 1983 a Sheffield trio called The Fifth Reel booked two days at Northlight Studios to cut a single, and put the leftover forty minutes into a B-side nobody expected anything from. Lorna Deane, then 26, played the part on a borrowed Corvair 200 bass synth with a broken octave switch.

She is 68 now and teaches at a sixth-form college. Her account of the most-copied bassline of the last four decades is not romantic. "It was a mistake," she says. "I meant to hit the fourth on the third beat. It was February in a cold room and my hand was slow. Then the engineer said keep it, which is what engineers said when they wanted to go home."

1983: a B-side and a borrowed bass synth

"Night Freight" ran to five minutes at 108 beats per minute and sold, by Deane's estimate, under 900 copies. The A-side sold more and nobody remembers it.

What made the B-side portable was an arrangement decision that had nothing to do with the notes. The bass runs alone for the first sixteen bars, with only a hi-hat, which means the figure exists on the record as a clean isolated loop. "We did that because the singer was late," Deane says. "That is the entire reason. He was on a bus."

A record with sixteen bars of exposed bass is a gift to anybody with two turntables, and by 1985 it was circulating in electro-funk sets in London and Rotterdam as a tool rather than a song, played out at the top of the night to test a system.

The nineties: house takes it apart, jungle speeds it up

The first commercial reappearance was in 1991, on a white label out of a Chicago-adjacent scene that pitched the loop up to 122 beats per minute, squared off the attack, and stretched a four-note figure into an eight-minute house record. Nobody was credited. Nobody was paid.

Then it got fast. DJ Provenance, whose spreadsheet of his own collection runs back to 2004 and whose tagging is more rigorous than most discographies, has 214 records tagged FREIGHT. His count for 1994 alone, at the height of jungle, is nineteen 12-inches carrying a recognisable version of the figure at between 160 and 170 beats per minute. He owns fourteen of them.

"The jungle ones are the interesting cases, because they mostly are not sampling the record," he says. "They are sampling records that sampled the record. By 1995 you are three generations down and the B flat has gone slightly flat because of the tape and everybody thinks the flatness is the point."

That drift matters. What survived into the nineties was not a recording but a shape, mutated by every copy, which is why the figure could jump genres without anyone having to obtain permission or, mostly, notice.

The 2000s: garage, grime, and a lawyer

UK garage took it at 138 and swung it, which turned the minor third from a threat into a strut. Grime took it back down to 140, hard-quantised, played on a bass patch with no sustain, and used it as the entire instrumental under a vocal, one of the more efficient uses anyone has found for four notes.

Somewhere in this period the money arrived, and with it Renata Oyelaran, a clearance lawyer who has been asked to deal with the Freight eleven times.

Her position is that most of these disputes should never have started. "You cannot copyright four notes," she says. "You can copyright a recording of four notes, and you can spend nine years and a great deal of somebody else's money arguing about which of those two things happened. I have settled every one of these. Not one has gone to a hearing, because nobody wants a judgment that says the figure is free."

Deane has received nothing from any of it, a fact she reports without heat.

I was paid for that bassline exactly once, in 1983, in cash, and it was forty pounds. I have since heard it in a supermarket in three countries. One of them was a supermarket I was in with my mother.

The 2010s and after: the line comes home

The 2010s were the Freight's worst decade, artistically. Festival dance music discovered it, put it under a drop, and doubled it at the octave with a saw wave, which is the musical equivalent of shouting a joke. Provenance has 31 records from 2012 to 2016 tagged FREIGHT and describes almost all of them as "the same record with different artwork."

Its recovery came from smaller rooms. Nadia Volt uses it twice on Overcurrent, at 116 beats per minute on a polysynth that detunes as it warms up, so the B flat wanders by a few cents over the course of each chorus. Given how the figure travelled through the nineties on degraded tape, that is either a very good joke or an accident that landed in the same place, and Volt declines to say which.

The strangest current home for it is not a record at all. Adaptive game scores now generate bass figures procedurally within a set of rules, and at least two composers we spoke to have the Freight's interval pattern sitting inside their rule sets as a default, meaning the line is now being played by software that has never heard the record. That is roughly what game audio has been doing to the avant-garde for a decade: absorbing a form and running it without ceremony.

Deane has one of the grime versions on her phone, sent by a nephew. She likes it. She was asked, at the end of a long conversation, whether it bothers her that four notes played with a cold hand have outlived everything else she has made.

"I taught a boy last year who used it in his coursework," she said. "I did not tell him. You would not, would you. It has stopped being mine and that is what happens to things that work. Ask the person who invented the ladder."

You can hear four decades of it in sequence on Wire Radio, in a two-hour show Provenance put together for us, sequenced by tempo. It gets faster and then, around 2019, it slows down again, which is as close to a shape as the history of dance music ever gives you.