Smokers Delight — Nightmares on Wax (1995)
The Yorkshire record that taught a generation how to slow down
By Rafi Mercer
Some records are made in cities. Others are made of them. You can hear weather in certain albums — the particular grey of a northern English sky, the way light behaves at four in the afternoon in October. It's not something a producer sets out to capture. It gets in anyway. Through the studio walls, through the record collections in the house, through whatever the buses sounded like on the way home.
Smokers Delight is a Yorkshire record to its bones. George Evelyn — Nightmares on Wax — grew up in Leeds, where his father and sister raised him on the soul of Curtis Mayfield and Quincy Jones. Hip hop arrived later and hit just as hard. And when he came to make his second album in 1995, he recorded it in three studios you could connect with a single bus route: Fon in Sheffield, TTB in Wakefield, Touchwood in Leeds. Warp Records, his label, was still a Sheffield operation then. The whole thing was built inside a triangle maybe twenty miles across. What came out of that triangle sounded like Rio, Kingston, Los Angeles and the Gambia. That's the trick of it. That's the whole beautiful trick.
The opening track tells you everything. "Nights Introlude" is built on the first bars of Quincy Jones's 1973 reworking of "Summer in the City" — that unhurried organ-and-Rhodes exchange that Evelyn had known since childhood, because it was his father's music before it was his. He didn't dig it out of a crate. He inherited it. And he treats it accordingly: not chopped or disguised, but rearranged with care, the loop turned inward until it becomes something more meditative than its source. It's the sound of a man answering a record his family played him. If you want the full lineage of that borrowed arrangement — and it runs from Paris to Los Angeles and back — the Quincy album sits on the listening shelf already. Play them back to back and the inheritance is audible.
What follows is sixteen tracks and well over an hour of music that history filed under trip-hop, mostly because 1995 needed somewhere to file it. The label undersells the record. Dub is in here. Smooth soul. Jazz-funk fusion. Latin percussion. Downtempo hip hop with the aggression drained out and the warmth left in. "Dreddoverboard" rolls on a bassline that never once raises its voice. "Pipes Honour" stretches past nine minutes because it can. Short connective pieces — "Me and You," "Time (To Listen)" — stitch the long grooves together the way a good DJ stitches a night. The album is sequenced like an evening, not a tracklist. It starts as the light goes and ends somewhere near dawn, on a beach, probably.
It reached number 84 on the UK albums chart. Sit with that number for a moment. Eighty-four. And yet the record made the 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die list, ranks among the finest albums its genre ever produced, and has soundtracked more late evenings than most platinum records manage. Chart positions measure a week. Some albums are built for decades. This one was much admired and much copied, and its follow-up, Carboot Soul, confirmed that none of it was an accident — but nothing that came after quite matched the unhurried completeness of this record. It carries a dedication to the memory of Kelso Thompson and Elton Lewis, and there's something fitting in that: an album this warm was made in memory of people, not in pursuit of a market.
On vinyl, it's a double, and the collectors are consistent on this point — the original 1995 pressing is the one, with a rounded, quiet depth the later editions chase. Warp's 25th-anniversary reissue in 2020 put it back in the racks on coloured vinyl, and while the pressings divide opinion, the reissue matters for a simpler reason: it was the first time the album had returned to vinyl since release, and a record built for needle and speaker deserves to be heard that way.
In a listening bar, this album is a room-setter of the highest order. It asks nothing and rewards everything. Play it early and it lets people arrive; play it late and it holds the stragglers in their seats. The grooves are long enough that conversation can live inside them. Nothing spikes. Nothing demands. It is, quite literally, music made by a DJ who understood rooms before he understood studios.
And if you've been away from it for years — decades, even — it does something few records manage. It picks up exactly where it left you. The opening bars of "Nights Introlude" arrive and the time in between simply folds away. Yorkshire weather, inherited soul, and no hurry at all. Some records wait for you. This one waits beautifully.
Why is Smokers Delight considered a trip-hop classic?
Released on Warp in October 1995, it became one of the defining records of the downtempo era — later included in 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die and ranked among the greatest albums of its genre. Its blend of dub, soul, jazz-funk and slowed hip hop was widely admired and widely copied.
What is "Nights Introlude" based on?
The opening track is built on the first bars of Quincy Jones's 1973 arrangement of "Summer in the City," from You've Got It Bad Girl — music George Evelyn knew from childhood, introduced by his father and sister alongside Curtis Mayfield. Evelyn returned to the same arrangement across his first three albums.
Which pressing of Smokers Delight sounds best?
Collectors consistently favour the original 1995 double LP for its depth and quiet surfaces. Warp's 25th-anniversary edition (2020) brought the album back to vinyl for the first time since release and is the easiest version to find today.
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