Do you ever get the feeling that you’ve seen or heard something before? Here at Ears To The House, we often experience this – for example, we believe the fashionable sound of techno at the moment borrows rather more from late 90s trance than it should. And it turns out it’s not just us getting a sense of déjà vu listening to a lot of the stuff out right now.

Grant Nelson is, too. He should know, of course – the prolific British producer was there in the 1990s. Nelson was the architect behind Nice N Ripe Records, a label critical to the development of UK garage. Indeed, just about the only person not to end up being remixed by Nelson during the decade was Janet Jackson.

Recently, garage house has been slowly on the ascent once more. House music behemoth Defected have noticed, with a moody Groove Assassin bootleg of “Heaven”, the 2019 song by The Vision and Andreya Triana riding high on the Traxsource charts. In addition to that, garage house rising star Marc Cotterell has been commissioned to remix an old K-London Posse track, with another rework due out later in the year.

However, it turns out Grant Nelson isn’t much of a fan of Marc Cotterell. Taking to the DE3P Radio – which he founded and owns – page for DJs, he accused Cotterell of “robbing my musical parts like chord progressions and choices of instruments and sounds to basslines, drum programming and even entire tracks in the hope of trying to make records that sound like me”.

Cotterell denies the allegations and makes a full statement below.

Nelson has requested the station’s DJs no longer play Cotterell’s music – although despite being DE3P Radio’s owner, he curiously claims he “can’t, and wouldn’t ever enforce this”. He also insists that he’s “spoken to him personally about this in the past… yet he has chosen to continue disrespecting me with his incessant plagiarism of my work”.

In response, Ears To The House contacted Marc Cotterell over the weekend to offer a right of reply. A few hours ago, he sent us this – which we publish in full…

“Grant has been the biggest influence on my musical career over the last twenty-five plus years. I see Grant as one of the greatest producers of the modern era.

Because Grant’s productions have been a huge inspiration to me, you can certainly hear that sound in my music. But I would never intentionally do anything to disrespect Grant’s legacy. I believe in and stand by my music, as do many others.

I’ve reached out to him to offer my apologies for any misunderstanding. I would like to try to resolve this situation so we can all instead focus on what we share – a love of garage and house music.”

Some would say, of course, that all this in-fighting is nothing new. Garage house has seen more than its fair share of bickering in the past few years – in much the same way the scene was fragmented by in-fighting in the 1990s. Tommy Musto himself commented on this trend in Muzik Magazine’s September 1997 issue…

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose…

Many thanks to the person who kindly sent us this screenshot. We’re always looking for new stories at Ears To The House – do shoot us an email if you have something you think we might find interesting…