There was a bit of a moment at the exhibition Red Bull staged last year of the pictures from my book, Bass, Mids, Tops. We were having a discussion evening, with Mykaell Riley, Noodles, Shy One, Cooly G and Adrian Sherwood and myself—along with others including the legend Jumpin Jack Frost chiming in from the audience—discussing the stories in the book, and it started to get... not heated, but intense. Because as we talked, the conversation ceased being just about the book, and turned to questions of why these stories are important, who gets to tell them, and why they’re not better known.

The thing is, the tales of soundsystem culture are as important to British culture and identity as anything in any rock band’s exploits: Saxon clashing at Sunsplash; John Lydon finding a sanctuary in the shebeens of Notting Hill because nobody knew who he was there; Shaka as a gathering point at Glastonbury in the ‘80s; the crews that would become Shut Up & Dance, Ganja Kru, Congo Natty and the Dreem Teem combining scratch DJing and dub basslines on an estate in North London; The Treworgey Tree Fayre where acid house culture and the traveller/squatter community became inseparable; Krust and Roni Size meeting at a free party in the fields of the West Country; Loefah nervously coming into Big Apple to play “Indian Dub” to Hatcha, Artwork and the rest; London and Birmingham in uproar as Skepta clashed Devilman; the triumphant euphoria of all the people in the crowd at the Rinse at Matter raves as captured in the “Katy On A Mission” video. All of these and a hundred thousand other moments are as thrilling, as exciting, as worthy of retelling as any moment in The Beatles or Sex Pistols or Oasis’ life stories.

Yet, unlike The Beatles, punk and Britpop, they’re not part of the story that Britain likes to shout about. These aren’t things you’ll see on Friday night on a BBC channel, or in a glossy magazine retrospective about the ‘70s, ‘80s, ‘90s or ‘00s. Maybe—maybe—things are changing slowly as moments like Stormzy’s Glastonbury triumph are written into history, but that doesn’t compensate for the imbalance in the way the past has been documented. This isn’t just about race or class, it’s about what we consider important: about how stars on stage are held up as more significant than the crowds below them, about how explosive performances are held to have more cultural value than weekly parties, even if those parties have all of the musical and communal intensity.

And as we talked at the event about the stories in Bass, Mids, Tops, and the many other memories we all had of raves, parties and dances, the issue of this imbalance became more and more overwhelming. And with it, the importance of telling the stories ourselves became more and more evident too. It’s by repetition and reinforcement that simple anecdotes become myth and history. Terror Danjah, one of the key interviewees in the book and someone I’ve spoken to many times over the years, had only recently been hospitalised when the event took place, and this brought home how easy it is to lose the great repositories of knowledge in underground scenes. How many of the greats in this music, who are true scholars and raconteurs, might never get their stories written into history?

I never set out on the interviews and writing for this book with much sense of mission: more just a set of opportunities gave me the chance to document the music I loved, and the pictures of Brian David Stevens gave me a focus and a metaphor in the wires that run behind the scenes of soundsystems. But as the interviews came together, as the discussions around me have continued, it’s made me think constantly about the lives that are contained in it and their value. We all love a great story, we all love to gossip, we all love to reminisce, but all too often the telling of those stories is just passing the time or amusing our friends. But making this book, and everything that’s happened in the wake of doing it, has brought home how much we need to repeat, repeat, repeat those stories. We need to tell them until everyone has heard them, we need to shout them for the rooftops, we need to preserve them for the ages—because, ultimately, they make us what we are.