Breaks, bass and a sense of time that won't sit still
Rave music that stopped marching: that is the quickest way into jungle. This is a UK dance music of the early-to-mid 1990s that grew out of rave, and it swapped the steady four-to-the-floor kick for the break. Hip-hop breakbeats, dub and dancehall bass, soul and funk, and the futurism of house and techno all go in the pot, with hardcore intensity on top. The Amen loop, a six-second break from a funk track by The Winstons, has been called the most important break in jungle, and every junglist knows the chop. Part of the trick is half-speed dub basslines running against 180 bpm breakbeats, which is where the odd, elastic sense of time comes from. Some put the blueprint at 160 beats per minute, so the tempo figures vary, and heads can argue about it all night.
Studio technique mattered as much as taste. Time-stretching let producers speed up hip-hop breaks without changing their pitch. Marc Mac and Dego of 4hero discovered it while experimenting with an Akai S-950 sampler and first used it on 4hero's "Journey From The Light". Sirens, gunshots and dogs were set against heavy bass tones for proper low-end pressure, and film left its mark too: the Alien films and Blade Runner are pointed to as a major influence.
Where the tune came from
Sound system roots and breakbeat hardcore
One root runs back to the reggae sound systems of early-1980s London. Philip Johnson (PJ) and Carl Hyman (Smiley) built sound systems with their friend DJ Hype (Hyman recalls starting in 1982) and later recorded as Shut Up And Dance. Their late-1989 breakbeat track "£10 To Get In" is held up as an early blueprint for the jungle sound. The Destouche brothers, who became the Ragga Twins (Deman and Flinty), had left the Unity Sound system before they began working with Shut Up And Dance in 1990. Shut Up And Dance were not alone in building jungle, but few gave so much at such a critical time. Flinty Badman has said that the first person to use the word "jungle" on a record label was Paul Ibiza.
The wider story has more strands. Jungle came together as a nascent scene in 1992, and A Guy Called Gerald made a jungle track that year, "King Of The Jungle". "Jungle techno" is said to have been the original moniker for a genre born from the music of Black people in Chicago and Detroit. And the argument goes that soul and rare-groove influences were later written out of tellings that stressed ragga.
Rage at Heaven
Rage, a Thursday night at the London club Heaven, opened in October 1988 with Fabio and Grooverider as resident DJs, the selectors on the floor. Kevin Millins says it had begun to fizzle out by 1993. Millins says that by chance the pair were moved downstairs one week, and Fabio recalls that they were getting more and more jungle tunes every week until it became a whole movement. Fabio also says the DJs played breaks from Masters At Work B-sides, sped up, alongside early techno from Belgium and Germany. Millins calls Rage "an inception point for the idea of jungle in London".
Who named it?
The origin of the word is disputed, and the story splits depending on who you ask. One version has residents of Arnett Gardens, a Kingston housing project, calling themselves "junglists", with Rebel MC sampling the chant from a Kingston sound-system recording, and Rebel and Navigator seeing Tottenham's Broadwater Farm estate as their own concrete jungle. Fabio gives another version: a man called Danny Jungle led the dancefloor shouting "Jungle, Jungle!" and the word stuck. Grooverider, speaking of Danny Jungle, says "He coined the term." Bryan Gee says there is a theory that the word came from Danny.
Radio, labels and the Hoxton floor
Kool FM was launched in 1991 by Eastman and Smurf, and rinsed hardcore, jungle and drum & bass out from the rooftops of Hackney council estates. That pirate signal helped launch DJs and MCs including the Ragga Twins, Shy FX and Skibadee. Bryan Gee recalls Passion FM as the pirate station where he and Jumping Jack Frost used to play.
Several labels shaped the music. Moving Shadow began in 1990 in a Stevenage bedroom under Rob Playford; its artists experimented with faster breaks and deeper bass between 1991 and 1993 and entered the jungle boom of 1994-1995. Reinforced was founded in 1989 and began releasing in 1990 under Marc Mac, Gus Lawrence, Dego and Ian Bardouille, who met through the Strong Island pirate station. V Recordings was run by Bryan Gee, well placed to embrace the acid house explosion in London at the end of the 1980s. Paul Ibiza's label Ibiza Records is said to have charted, more than any other, the music's transformation from hardcore rave into pure junglist sound. DJ Hype's "Roll the Beats" came out in 1994 on Suburban Base.
Then there was the Sunday night run by the Metalheadz label at the Blue Note in Hoxton, London, one of drum & bass' most important parties. Bailey, Loxy and others recall it as an experimental place. Doc Scott recalls that the Metalheadz crowd were "very much in the minority in drum & bass in '94", when the ragga jungle scene was big, and Bailey says Goldie was bringing the sound heritage of Reinforced into Metalheadz. Storm recalls that the pair started running the label in early 1995.
Records to start with
A snapshot of the period, in release order: Goldie and Rob Playford's Terminator as Metalheads (Synthetic, 1992); Omni Trio's "Renegade Snares" (Moving Shadow, 1993); Origin Unknown's "Valley of the Shadows" (RAM, 1993); Rufige Kru's "Ghosts of My Life" (Reinforced, 1993); Remarc, crowned king of the Amen (White House, 1994); and DJ Zinc's "Super Sharp Shooter" (Parousia, 1996).
Shy FX and UK Apachi's "Original Nuttah", on the SOUR label, reached the UK national Top 40 in October 1994, with a horn-led intro sampling Goodfellas. Congo Natty, who also recorded as Rebel MC, is named alongside More Rockers among the artists who still carried the torch after 1995. Ray Keith was already a major mover in the rave and jungle scene before he joined Moving Shadow. The Ragga Twins belong in any list too.
Jungle or drum & bass? The split nobody agrees on
The break from rave is dated to late 1993, and a more sonically disciplined offshoot became drum & bass by 1996; Fabio likewise says jungle became drum & bass around 1996. The change is contested. Goldie's Metalheadz label and club have been called, more than any other, synonymous with the peeling off of drum & bass as a separate entity. The jungle versus drum & bass debate has also been criticised for reducing a bigger story to simple binaries. Bryan Gee says the new term "took the power away from Black people", and Marc Mac says the intelligent drum & bass label was about their use of new technology, and that scene policy makers jumped on it to make the split.
Mainstream attention followed. BBC Radio 1 launched One In The Jungle in 1995, Goldie's Timeless achieved widespread acclaim, LTJ Bukem's 1996 album Logical Progression was also a hit, and Roni Size and Reprazent's New Forms won the 1997 Mercury Prize. One telling has the momentum fading after the No U Turn era as imitators churned out techstep, with many underground dancers moving to UK garage. Ragga-influenced jungle is catalogued on the site under Ragga Jungle.
The revival, wheeled up again
By 2020 the signs of a revival were there to see: breakbeats returning in techno and house records, rising prices for classic jungle, and DJs adding jungle to their sets. The new scene was born online, and one producer says there is no real geographic centre. Names to know include Coco Bryce, Tim Reaper, whose Future Retro began as a club night and became a label during the pandemic, and the club Rupture. Also in the frame are Nia Archives, Sully and Napes, whose labels include Astrophonica and Repertoire. Tim Reaper's Future Retro London won the Breakthrough Label award at the 2021 Best of British awards. Coco Bryce sums up the balance: "It's a fine line. If you make it too different then it doesn't sound like jungle anymore." We have our own piece on it too: The Return of Jungle.
