Music / MJ Cole

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Matthew James Firth "MJ Cole" Coleman (born in 1973 in London) is an English musician, songwriter and UK Garage remixer best known for his debut singles "Sincere" and "Crazy Love" in the late 1990s. Although he entered the UK garage scene quite late in its underground phase, Cole was luckily just in time for its mainstream transition which catapulted him into an influential UKG icon.

As a child, Cole became a musical Child Prodigy. His mother taught him the piano, his father was a singer and theatre actor,^note Yes, Cole's father helped give him singing lessons. Nope, you probably won't hear Cole's vocals on a track any time soon. and he professionally learnt the oboe. He frequently won or was the finalist of many piano recital competitions and won scholarships to music schools, but after graduating, he landed a job at indie Drum and Bass label Sound of the Underground Recordings (SOUR) as a member of the recording studio department. He began as a tape operator and session musician and then got promoted to engineering, working with Ramsey And Fen as Rafmat just as UK garage culture had almost finished completing its travel through London. The new nightclub genre fascinated him and he worried that working for a completely different genre's industry would make him miss out, but a chance meeting with Jam Lamont from Tuff Jam convinced Cole to try producing full time.

Cole resigned from SOUR and became an engineer for UKG label Very Important Plastic, practising deejaying and using a sampler on the side and successfully working his way into the pirate radio scene. Being a gadget geek as a child made technology in music forever fascinating, even if it baffled his peers once they knew about his past. He released a bootleg with the song "Sincere" which got signed to AM:PM Records and became one of the first mainstream UK garage songs to enter the UK Singles Chart. He followed the success by signing to Talkin' Loud and collaborating with other artists, releasing his debut album Sincere in 2000.

The work signalled a new direction for UK garage and Cole soon got hired to produce remixes for American Contemporary R&B artists like Mariah Carey, TLC and De La Soul, and was a sought after Record Producer for the latest artists like Dizzee Rascal and Example. Of all the mainstream UKG producers, Cole remained mostly unscathed when the genre fell into obscurity and still quietly worked with it in the mainstream until its brief mid-2010s deep house revival. He received a Newbie Boom at the end of the decade largely from overseas as UK garage finally broke out of England and the United Kingdom and became an inspiration to UKG's new international indie producers.

Discography

• "Talk to Me"/"Treat Me Right" (1998) [under Box Clever]
• Anyway EP (1998) [under Matlok]
• "Feel the Fire"/"If You Love Me" (1999) [with J Kaye, under Box Clever]
• Sincere (2000)
• Cut to the Chase (2003)
• So Damn Into You (2006) [with Elisabeth Troy]
• Battle Stations EP (2009) [with Zed Bias and MC Fox]
• Riddim EP (2010)
• Satellite EP (2011)
• Southern Electric (2011) [with Scrufizzer]
• Foundations (2018)
• Madrugada (2020)
• Business As Usual EP (2024) [with Eliza Rose]

Tropes

• Classical Music Is Boring: Downplayed, as it was more Cole found experimenting with electronic dance music time-consumingly interesting.
• Deliberately Monochrome: The music video for "Sincere". The one for "Crazy Love" is not but relies on the orange lights of the street lamps to make the music video have a black-and-orange colouring.
• Early-Bird Cameo: SOUR released Jazz Fusion albums Jazz Jungle (A Collection Of Metamorphic Breaks'N'Beats) and Millennial Jazz: Excursions Into Drum & Bass in 1996 and 1997, respectively. Cole had one song on each under Morf and mixed/engineered the productions for other tracks. On the latter, his "Fruitcake" by BLIM's production work is credited as being engineered and mixed by "Sir Matt Coleman".
• Early-Installment Weirdness: Whilst at SOUR, Cole briefly had an interest in producing Drum N Bass, released that and breakbeat music under Morf, and did House Music remixes under Babyback.
• Greatest Hits Album: Many of Cole's music distributed at Prolific Recordings featured on 2006's Prolific Recordings, Vol. 1.
• The Klutz: Self-admittedly accident prone. His first injury was bashing his head on the swimming pool floor at his 8th birthday party which left him with a forehead scar and this followed many more injuries throughout his youth.
• New Sound Album: Madrugada was described by Cole as returning to his roots as a classical musician.
• The Not-Remix: Subverted, due to an SEO error. Briefly in 2024, his UKG song "Sincere" was retroactively credited as featuring Nova Caspar and Jay Dee but don't actually appear on the track. They actually appear in a version of "Sincere" that came out prior that was closer to House Music than UKG.
• Supergroup:
  • Formed a duo with Deepest Blue's Matt Schwartz called UnBalanced. They've only released one album, titled Earthlift, in 2006.
  • Released an extended play with grime emcee Scrufizzer in 2011 called Southern Electric.
• Trope Codifier: Before being shot into superstardom, UK garage was a genre full of dub, rap features and (bootleg) remixes, but Cole proved to his peers that the genre could have songwriters creating pop music that wasn't filler lyrics over an instrumental.
• Trope Maker: For UK Garage's NUKG era and its generation of new producers, despite him sticking to the Old Skool sound he came to fame in.