You see, the music you love may have been revolutionary, but the seeds of that revolution began not in Brixton, or on the dancefloor of Rage at Heaven, but in the spare bedroom of a terraced house in Bradford. It was merely the most culturally significant step on a journey that had begun not in London, Essex or Bristol, but 200 miles north in Yorkshire. Yet jungle itself did not arrive fully formed. Be it UK garage, dubstep, grime, UK funky or bassline, the UK-pioneered styles that followed over subsequent decades all owe much to the sweaty, bassbin-bothering thrills of early jungle and drum & bass. It was a key moment in the development of what would become British “bass music”, a varied and nuanced collection of interconnected sub-genres born from the same sub-heavy blueprint. Jungle was loud, extreme and forthright, ripping up the rulebook while sticking two fingers up at British dance music’s established order. When the first “proto-jungle” and “jungle techno” records emerged, mostly from London and the South East, in the very early 1990s, they sounded like little that had come before, mixing high tempo, fiercely cut-up sampled breakbeats with the booming bass-weight of Jamaican soundsystem culture and nods to the reggae, ragga and dancehall records that had been a formative influence on many of the scene’s pioneers. In the eyes of many commentators, critics and cultural historians, the emergence of jungle and drum & bass marked the moment when British dance music finally found its voice.
Loud ear bleep full#
In this exclusive full extract from our 25th-anniversary book, Matt Anniss, author of Join The Future: Bleep Techno & The Birth of British Bass Music, explains why the seeds of jungle revolution of the early 90s began not in London, but in a terraced house in Bradford.
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