Jungle and roots reggae have been the most visible and documented parts of my musical history. I've written about tape packs, record shops, the years spent DJing Jungle and the move into roots reggae and dub and from playing in clubs to on the radio.
Hip Hop has always been there too, but it's the influence I've probably spoken about the least over the last 20 years or so.
It came before I started DJing and stuck with me as the musical landscape around me expanded. It gave me rebellion, rhythm, a love of rhymes, stories and a completely different way of using turntables.
Straight Outta C90
I can't place the exact year, but it would have been around the early 90s when I was introduced to N.W.A. One of the first rap albums I had on tape was Straight Outta Compton.
My older brother’s friend Spencer regularly travelled to America and brought the album back with him. It was shared around their friend-circle and eventually copied onto a Philips c90 cassette and given to me by my brother.
That's how music travelled at the time. One person could find something, copy it onto tape and introduce an entire group of people to sounds they might not have discovered otherwise.
The title track really stood out to me, It was full of swearing yeah, but was also driven by energy with solid beats, and delivered with a style of rapping unlike anything I'd heard before.
F**k tha Police also resonated with me. At the young age I was, it taught me about rebellion in music. It was confrontational, unapologetic and about fighting the system. The energy and defiance of that whole album made a lasting impression on me. The idea of fighting the system would later become a huge theme in the roots reggae music I later worked with.
Paper Rounds and Rave Tapes
During the early 1990s I also started to get into rave music. My earliest experience of it came through tape packs of live DJ and MC sets. Some of my strongest memories from that period are not from being in clubs; they actually come from tape packs.
I've mentioned my paper rounds before, but they remain one of my clearest memories from that era. I would take the tapes with me and listen through my Walkman. I was amazed by the music and always had it playing. While most people were beginning their day, I was walking around the housing estates delivering people’s morning papers with the atmosphere of a rave playing directly into my ears.
Another memory comes from early 1994. My brother was driving me and a couple of friends to school in his Mk1 Ford Escort, with a DJ Rush and MC Peta Pan tape playing through the huge bass speaker in the car. The tape was from Vibealite, Boxing Day 1993.
When Deep Blue’s The Helicopter Tune came through that speaker, the bassline was mind-blowing. It genuinely felt as though the front windscreen was going to pop out. All I can remember thinking is: wow.
As the rave sound developed, I became heavily drawn to the breakbeats and basslines that were becoming Jungle. There was also a short time when I loved the happier side of rave music, but Jungle became the deeper and more prominent influence.
Hip Hop never disappeared, though. It sat alongside all of that.
Compton to El Segundo
Around 1997, I discovered A Tribe Called Quest through People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm, again on cassette.
It was completely different from the aggression that had first pulled me into N.W.A. I always described Tribe as “happy Hop.” There was far less swearing, but the rhymes and lyrics were clever, sometimes fun and always full of character.
I Left My Wallet in El Segundo, Public Enemy, Bonita Applebum and Can I Kick It? were some of the tracks that I loved from that album.
A Tribe Called Quest gave me somewhere different to go musically. Away from the speed and intensity of Jungle, I could slow down and concentrate on the words, the personalities and the way the rhymes worked with the beats.
N.W.A. had shown me that Hip Hop could be aggressive and rebellious. Tribe showed me that it could also be laid-back, witty and intelligent without losing its identity.
Turntable Tricks
The lyrics and beats were only part of what attracted me to Hip Hop. I also loved the scratching and turntablism.
Scratching was there in the other music I listened to. DJ Hype was renowned for it in Jungle, while DJ Sy was known for it in Happy Hardcore. I loved hearing both of them scratch, but to me, the technique always felt most natural with Hip Hop. The beats gave the scratching space and flow, and turntables were instruments in their own right.
From around 1997 onwards, I started practising beat juggling. I would juggle certain parts of tunes, repeating and rearranging sections of the bars to create something new.
I particularly remember juggling EPMD featuring Foxy Brown's Never Seen Before and later in 99 Eminem’s My Name Is. They were brilliant to play with. I practised with those tunes over and over again, trying to sharpen my skills.
That side of Hip Hop was as important to me as listening to the records. It was hands-on, creative and, most importantly, fun. It taught me to hear individual beats and bars within a tune and understand how they could be pulled apart, repeated and put back together differently all on a set of turntables.
Sometimes I would also mix Hip Hop acapellas into Drum & Bass. The genres were different speeds, but they never felt completely disconnected to me. Adding an acapella over Drum & Bass was almost like having an MC there. I could even fit in a cheeky scratch here and there.
Basslines Without Borders
All of these influences coexisted with one another. That is the beauty of music, even though I did eventually start to focus more heavily on Jungle and D&B.
One of the things I had always loved about Jungle was its connection with Reggae and Dancehall. Hearing Buju Banton’s voice sampled in Jungle tracks was what first made me want to look for more of his music. I can't remember the specific Jungle records off the top of my head, but I remember his voice.
That led me to Mr. Mention. From there, I discovered more of Buju.
Inna Heights meant so much to me, particularly Hills and Valleys, which got me through some difficult times in my life. I later discovered ’Til Shiloh, with Complaint becoming one of my favourite tracks from that album.
Reggae did not suddenly replace Jungle. The connection had already been there through the samples, the basslines and everything surrounding both genres.
In 2004, I heard Dub Judah’s Better to Be Good. Around that time, I was finding the hecticness of faster music harder to listen to, let alone DJ with, and Dub Judah’s music offered a welcome step back in pace.
What mattered musically was the positivity, the lyrics, Dub Judah’s voice and the chilled sound. It was not hectic, but it still carried the heavy basslines I loved from Jungle. It gave me that familiar low end, but with more space to absorb the music and the powerful messages within it.
That discovery later helped influence the direction of my reggae radio shows.
Playing Their Parts
Looking back, it was never a clean jump from one genre into another.
N.W.A. gave me rebellion and raw energy. A Tribe Called Quest gave me clever rhymes and a different way of hearing Hip Hop. Scratching and beat juggling inspired the way I used the turntables. Rave brought energy and excitement, while Jungle gave me breakbeats and basslines that became central to my early years as a DJ. Buju Banton and Dub Judah then helped draw me further into Reggae and Dub.
I was also influenced by the meeting point between Hip Hop and Reggae, especially through artists like Daddy Freddy. All of these genres were intertwined, just as my influences were. I'd simply never spoken about them this deeply before, because for so long I was focused on learning about and working in roots reggae and dub.
They all moved at different speeds and carried different messages, but each one shaped how I listened, mixed and created.
Hip Hop may be the part of my musical history I've spoken about the least, but it was there from the start and it never really left.
