1999: Drum & Bass Opens New Doors

By the end of the decade, drum & bass had several audiences at once: the dubplate-obsessed club, the late-night radio listener and the person who discovered a record in an album shop. No version could speak for all of them.

London Elektricity’s “Pull the Plug”, released on Hospital Records in June 1999, placed songs, jazz harmony and live-sounding detail around the breakbeats. London Elektricity was then the duo of Tony Colman and Chris Goss. Their own retrospective describes the album as the result of months of studio work and experimentation.

Official Hospital Records upload of the full 1999 album, posted in 2017.

Track from the original 1999 Pull the Plug album.

Breakbeat Era’s “Ultra-Obscene”, made by Roni Size, DJ Die and vocalist Leonie Laws, pushed toward a tougher fusion of drum & bass, rock energy and full song structures. It was not the only direction for the genre, but it challenged the idea that a D&B album had to be either ambient or purely functional.

A 1999 original album; listen through your preferred licensed service.

View the album and credits

London club fabric opened in October 1999 and would soon become important to drum & bass and the wider spectrum of electronic music. A bigger audience did not mean the disappearance of small labels or specialist nights.

The 1990s ended without a winner between hard techstep, atmospheric music, jump-up and soulful experiments. Instead, the next decade inherited several mature, sometimes competing creative traditions.

On 25 April 1999, Kemistry (Kemi Olusanya) died in a freak road accident. Any serious account of the year needs to recognise not only the shock of her death but the scale of her contribution while alive. Alongside Storm she helped define Metalheadz as a DJ and curator. She was part of a network that made space for adventurous music and new talent. Reducing her to a tragic footnote after a discussion of male producers would repeat an old editorial imbalance.

The 2014 Mixmag retrospective offers a useful reconstruction through witnesses including Goldie. It also underlines how much of a scene's history lives outside a discography. Kemistry and Storm connected people, shaped nights, heard possibilities in unfinished music and helped decide which records should be heard. Those were creative acts with consequences for decades.

A record can be reissued; the everyday labour of a curator is harder to recover. Who encouraged a nervous DJ? Who recommended a tune to a promoter? Who knew the crowd would give an unusually difficult record a chance? Contemporary flyers, photographs, radio recordings and detailed oral histories are essential because label catalogues usually omit these relationships. A 1999 chapter can use the year's loss to ask whose contributions music history makes visible.

The late-1990s technical sound was still expanding. Bad Company—later widely known as Bad Company UK—became an especially significant new force, bringing fierce bass design and highly effective dancefloor architecture. The group's impact belongs to the transition around the millennium and should not be collapsed into a single debut date for every famous tune. Deep, atmospheric and melodic production also continued, with musicians such as Calibre becoming increasingly central to conversations about the scene's next phase.

A crucial distinction is emerging between loudness as an experience and density as a production style. Some tracks fill the speakers with aggressive motion; others find power in a sparse bassline and a few carefully arranged drums. Both are descendants of the same breakbeat experiments. Listening across that spectrum demonstrates the problem with chronological histories that present each new tendency as having replaced the previous one.

Vinyl distribution and dubplate culture remained powerful, but digital communication was becoming harder to ignore. Internet forums, specialist sites and email could accelerate arguments about releases and producers beyond the range of any one pirate transmitter. That new visibility was partial and uneven: many tracks still reached the audience first through a DJ's bag. The mixture of emerging online culture and durable physical infrastructure helped prepare the 2000s scene.

Bristol continued to matter, as did Manchester, the Midlands and increasingly international local scenes. Labels could influence music hundreds or thousands of miles away through records and mix tapes. A promoter abroad did not need to recreate London to create a meaningful D&B community; they needed records, speakers, reliable local organisers and listeners who understood the rhythm.

Use the surviving Kemistry & Storm mixes as historical performances, not merely a memorial playlist. Hear the pacing, restraint and choices. Set them beside the heavier turn-of-the-millennium records and the softer music beginning to gain its own identity. The scene's story in 1999 is one of loss, but not a pause: an interconnected culture was grieving while continuing to change.

Editorial check: For Pull the Plug, Apple Music catalogues June 6 while the artist Bandcamp page says June 14. The article intentionally uses June 1999 without a disputed day.