This story is from the spring 2025 edition of VICE magazine: THE ROCK BOTTOM ISSUE. To subscribe to receive 4 print issues of our newly relaunched magazine each year, click here.
As a promoter of trailblazing nights like Telepathy, Life Utopia, and New Jack City, manager of pirate station Deja Vu FM, and owner of storied East London venue Stratford Rex, Kenny ‘Sting’ King is one of the most criminally overlooked figures in UK dance music lore. In a new book, Rollo Jackson and Andrew Bravin chart Sting’s journey from being a kid immersed in 1980s reggae soundsystem culture, to moving through the rave, jungle, UK garage, and grime scenes that followed, leaving dents on them all along the way.
The imagery in Step In Time is ephemeral; there are no heavily posed Ibiza sunset photos, it’s all taken from VHS footage and party flyers for nights long lost to the wider memory. This makes the book feel more dynamic than other rave retrospectives, which tend to take those moments of unvarnished, explosive youth cult energy and ossify them in polite and neutered white wall gallery displays and $400 photo books for the benefit of the global good taste mafia.
Instead, Jackson says he wanted Step In Time to be a dynamic “unedited history” of Sting’s life to date. “One thing that always appeals to me is hearing things from the horse’s mouth,” he says. “Singular tales from singular individuals.” The interviews they conducted with Sting for the book certainly do the job in that respect.
Step In Time is out now; VICE sat with Jackson for a chat about it.
VICE: What did you wanna do with Step In Time?
Rollo Jackson: I’ve always been wary of things that perfectly encapsulate a time and package it neatly into something that ends up sitting on your coffee table, next to your special 180g Record Store Day vinyl copy of a reissued Roots Manuva album or whatever. The book is very much objective; these are images taken from films where it’s someone… not amateurish but very unknowing going around filming different events. The VHS tapes feel very, very honest.
It’s cool telling the story of a man’s life through the parties he put on and the moments that he created. Every single image in the book wouldn’t have existed unless he did.
Yeah, which is interesting, as he basically didn’t want to have his own picture taken for a long, long time, coming from pirate culture. It made more sense to not be seen; it was hard to be a Black person in the 1990s, putting on events like this. That’s something that could very easily be glossed over, I think there was an ‘Us and Them’ feel at times, and a running side-struggle between the people trying to put on music and the authorities, alongside the fun stuff.
That sense of fun is very present in the book. The way a lot of night clubs ‘talk’ online these days, it’s like a prime ministerial speech or something. It’s so pompous.
One of the funniest moments in the book is when they go to Islington Council and try to get permission to put on a party in the Sobell leisure center in North London. They get it for a capacity of about 3,500, but 13,000 people show up. What they were doing had a looseness, and a recklessness, and an entrepreneurialism. As a promoter, they’ve seen an opportunity to make money, but also there’s an element of people behind the scenes, putting in a huge amount of energy to make something happen, which at the time, they didn’t get any credit for.
There are so many great stories in the book. Andy C being 16 and hanging around the Deja Vu studios, waiting for his chance, then smashing it up every time he got an opportunity. Dizzee Rascal phoning Sting when he’s 13, asking for a set…
I think that’s why it felt like a coup to speak to the person who did arguably the most legendary raves in London. ‘Iconic’ is an overused word, but… Maybe sometimes it’s more interesting to have just one person’s voice.
Yeah, it feels like a good way to avoid the pitfalls of consensus.
Yeah, everyone just parroting the same thing… I like that these are the tapes he’s had in his attic for 30 years. This isn’t consensus; it’s the only place you’ll find those images.
How did Sting get his nickname?
I don’t know, actually. I think he might have just given himself it as a kind of stage name.
There was one more thing I wanted to ask. It’s a highly canonized moment now, but in the book are shots from that film of Dizzee and Crazy Titch going at it up that tower block in East London at dusk, with that amazing violet sky when they go out onto the roof. I’ve always felt that’s tied into this idea I have of an ancient, eternal London that is always there just below the surface, no matter how much the city changes.
Yeah. In one of the earliest videos, the Life Utopia one, there’s this amazing moment where whoever’s filming in the rave basically zooms on the camcorder through a hole in the wall, and you suddenly realize it’s daylight outside, with a tower block visible against a blue sky through this hole. It’s pretty extraordinary and you can’t sum it up in the book sadly, but it’s like this idea of there being a total other world—literally, an underground bubbling below.
Throughout, there’s this sense of Sting forging his own path. Of flowing through the frontiers into the unknown.
I guess as a promoter, you just need to have that ‘build it and they will come’ attitude. When you read some of his stories, it does feel like it makes a lot of modern clubs and promoters seem like crooks, or people exploiting this idea and this energy that he helped foster for so long. They package it up and push you through into this space which is kind of completely sanitized. He touches on it a bit, this idea that things have become very heavily diluted and anodyne and safe now… you know, ‘get your pills checked here’ and all that sort of stuff. Rightly or wrongly, at what cost does that come, that dilution? You know, perhaps the risk is the reward.
Step In Time is out now through Idea Books.
This story is from the spring 2025 edition of VICE magazine: THE ROCK BOTTOM ISSUE. To subscribe to receive 4 print issues of our newly relaunched magazine each year, click here.
The post Kenny ‘Sting’ King Is the Ruler of the London Night appeared first on VICE.
