ESG; Ma Scroggins's girls

ESG began when Ma Scroggins bought her daughters instruments in a bid to save them from the South Bronx streets. Two decades on, one of the most sampled bands in history are still going and, as Garry Mulholland discovers, still an all-girl, all-family affair

"Ha! That's funny! You needed a woman! I never looked at it that way. Let me beat you down, but first – let me have your music! I'm still angry, though." For Renee Scroggins, applying a little irony is not quite enough to offset one of her life's chief bugbears, sampling clearance. Because this apparently typical middle-aged American mom is, in reality, as atypical as it gets. She is the leader of one of the most sampled groups in hip hop and dance music history, the matriarch of a 20-year-old band entirely made up of female Scroggins family members, the singer and co-songwriter of a band who uniquely straddle the points where funk, punk, hip hop and disco met, before they all inevitably merged and created what we now know as dance music.

She laughs a great deal about the happy accident of her music's far-reaching influence, but she remains angry at the amount of time and energy she has spent chasing all those who have sampled her sounds without wanting to pay for them, and the kind of words those sounds have often framed. The name of her band is ESG, and they are one of the greatest bands alive that almost no one has heard of.

Renee is in London to promote ESG's superb new album, Step Off. The music is as it always was – a completely original, weird and powerful mix of dominant drum'n'bass, funk and rock rhythms, spacey, sparse dub-style production, pop-soul melodies and sensual chants.

Once you know the trials ESG have gone through in the US, then it's no surprise that it's a British independent record label, Universal Sounds/SoulJazz, that are releasing their first studio album in 11 years, and only their third non-live, non-compilation LP ever. As Renee puts it, "Soul Jazz reminds me of when we first started out – someone being willing to put their faith in you. I think only independent labels have the balls to do these things. Over in the States we gotta bargain for every dollar we get."

The strange story of ESG begins back in the late 1970s in the South Bronx projects, with four sisters – Renee, Valerie, Deborah and Marie watching The Jackson 5 on TV, listening to their mother's James Brown records, and figuring that maybe they could do this. Ma Scroggins, whose main desire in life was to help her daughters avoid the nightmare of South Bronx street life, saved her pennies, bought the girls instruments, and let them rehearse at home.

After supporting Manchester's A Certain Ratio in New York, Factory's Tony Wilson approached them to make a one-off single with legendary Joy Division producer Martin Hannett. The three songs – "You're No Good", "Moody" and "UFO" – were astonishing enough to make their name, and remain the source of Renee's sampling woes. Particularly the instrumental "UFO", which rode on four transcendent sci-fi guitar notes, and ended up on tracks by Public Enemy, LL Cool J and pretty much everyone who was anyone in mid-period hip hop. Yet "UFO" was only recorded at all because Hannett had three minutes of tape left, and asked if they had a short song they could play to fill it. "He was our first recording experience. And it was so cool! We thought it would always be like that. It wasn't."

Renee now employs a company solely to chase sample clearance. "Every day, something new comes up. To me, that's horrible. To the people who clear it with us – thank you! To the people who don't, you're a pain in the ass and I'm gonna come after you! You're taking food out of my kids' mouths. Sometimes also, I don't like the way they use it. Really negative, woman-beating type of songs. I've been in situations with domestic violence, so I don't appreciate any song glorifying domestic violence using my music. Go get your own damn music!"

ESG made more critically acclaimed music for 99 Records, but no money. They played every hip New York club – The Mudd Club, The Danceteria, the legendary Paradise Garage, the New Jersey spot where Larry Levan invented garage and chose ESG to play the closing night. They even played on a fantasy punk-funk bill opening for the Clash and Grandmaster Flash. "That was at Bonds. It was famous because the fire marshals used to come in the whole time and try to shut the place down. The first night we opened the show the crowd drenched the Clash in beer. It was cool pay but we didn't wanna get drenched, because we were just starting and we didn't have money for new instruments. And they'd left our instruments up there and we were like, 'Save the drums!'"

But, on the cusp of real success, it all fell apart. Bassist Deborah left the band due to drug problems. 99 Records went bust after they tried to sue Sugarhill Records for using a sample by another band on the label, only to be left with the court costs when Sugarhill went bankrupt. ESG continued to perform and record, but on such a low-key basis that British fans such as myself thought they'd long ceased to exist, until Soul Jazz put out a superb compilation in 2000.

I ask Renee if she thinks things would've been different if ESG had been, say, white guys. "Of course! Of course. We've had to fight sexism. We've had to fight, in some situations, racism. That has a lot to do with the clubs and the level of respect they gave you because you were a woman, because you were black."

So, would she describe ESG as a feminist group? "No. That comes up a lot. We have played lots of fairs for feminist organisations, and if we can help to support women in the business, that's great. But we weren't trying to make a point that we're women, we're here, all that stuff. What happened was I had a bunch of sisters. If my younger siblings had been brothers, it would've been a whole different thing."

Sampling hassles aside, Renee agrees that this is a happy time to be in ESG. She's justifiably proud of Step Off, and it will be adored by anyone who loved the original ESG sound. They've played live in The UK twice recently, been received like the heroines they are, and hope to be back soon to play again. Best of all, Renee, Valerie and Marie Scroggins are now joined by Valerie's daughter Chistelle on guitar and Renee's daughter Nicole on bass, making ESG the ultimate family girl group. And as for claiming their just desserts, Renee is modest but confident ESG are finally being appreciated, and that the late Ma Scroggins did the right thing to help her kids.

"We didn't notice the breadth of our influence at the time. But you sit back and you reflect and realise that our mother's dream of us doing something positive came true. We made our mark on musical history. It wasn't intentional, but I guess people who do things never do 'em intentionally."

'Step Off' is out on Universal Sounds/ Soul Jazz. Garry Mulholland's book 'This Is Uncool – the 500 greatest singles since punk and disco' is published by Cassell Illustrated on 12 September, £17.99