Cover of RAVE & JUNGLE, volume 22 of Origin Story

Origin Story  ·  Volume 22

RAVE & JUNGLE

Breakbeats, Pirate Signals and the Fastest Music Britain Ever Made, 1988–1997

Where it sits on the century

19151988–19972030
$14.99Paperback
about 120 pages

$13.49 each from three copies, $11.49 from sixteen, and $299.00 for all thirty-one with every ebook and audiobook included. Postage is free on every order over $79.

Out of that combination came the fastest music Britain has ever produced, rebuilt every eighteen months for a decade: rave, hardcore, darkside, jungle, drum and bass. This is its complete story in about three hours.

The machine is a sampler and a pirate transmitter, and both get taken apart properly. A second-hand twelve-bit box whose tiny memory forced producers to chop a 1969 soul B-side’s drum break into pieces and rebuild it — six seconds of a Washington session drummer’s work became the foundation of a genre, and this book follows the money on that fact all the way down, because there was none: not for the drummer, who died homeless, and not for the writer, whose eventual recompense was a fan appeal, decades late. And a home-built radio rig on a tower block roof, wrapped in a bin liner, whose economics ran backwards — the DJs paid the station — and whose enforcement war with the state the pirates won by arithmetic: the box cost less to replace than the raid cost to run.

It takes the money seriously throughout, because this was a cash economy with almost no contracts in it: what a white label actually cleared against what a promoter took at the door; the dubplate cut for thirty pounds that was worth more unreleased than released; the record shop counter that was the only chart the culture had; the clearance reckoning that arrived late and retroactively and froze half the catalogue; and the 1994 Act of Parliament that defined this music — in statute, debated in both Houses — by its succession of repetitive beats. No other genre in this series frightened its government into describing its rhythm in law.

And the ending, for once, is neither a death nor an emigration. In 1997 a jungle album won the Mercury Prize, the majors arrived with album deals, and the one culture split into the named genres it has occupied ever since. Nothing was exhausted. It was institutionalised — and the pirate aerials stayed up, already carrying the next music.

Contains no song lyrics. Not one line, and in this volume that includes everything an MC ever said over a rhythm. That is a deliberate rule, explained on the first page; what replaces quotation is a description of what these records actually do — the six seconds of 1969 drumming detonated into runs no drummer could survive, the bass drop that plays backwards, the time-stretch algorithm audibly tearing.

Format
Paperback
Trim
5.5 × 8.5 in
Pages
about 120
Chapters
31 in five movements
Period
1988–1997
Audiobook
2h 50m

The playlist

ORIGIN STORY: Rave & Jungle — public, and sequenced to the order the records appear in Movement Three. The book describes them; the playlist plays them.

Volume 21
HOUSE & TECHNOthe parent: Chicago, Detroit, and the machines this book’s crowds imported before they built their own→Volume 11
REGGAEthe grandparent: the sound system, the dubplate, the MC and the bass, arriving in Britain a generation before this book begins→Volume 17
PUNKthe uncle: the independent apparatus of labels, shops and one-page methods that this book’s economy rebuilt at double speed→

Free to read  ·  the opening

How volume 22 starts.

Origin Story · Volume 22 · RAVE & JUNGLEIntroduction

The Empire Writes Back at 160 Beats Per Minute

The previous volume of this series ended in a field. It had followed house and techno out of Chicago and Detroit to the place where their paying audience actually lived, and closed with Britain in 1989: warehouse parties, a motorway orbit, a tabloid panic, and a generation of American producers flying home from airports full of fans to ordinary jobs. That book stayed with the cities that were left behind. This one stays with the fields.

Because something happened in Britain, between 1988 and 1997, that did not happen anywhere else. Here is what it was and what it was not.

It was not the invention of dance music. Britain imported that, wholesale, from Black America, and any account that begins in an English field is telling the story of the harvest and calling it the story of the seed. The records that filled the first warehouses were made in Chicago, Detroit and New York; the DJ’s craft came down the line this series traced through three earlier volumes; and the deep grammar of the whole culture (the sound system, the exclusive pressing, the man on the microphone, the bass as the point of the exercise) arrived in Britain by ship, in the 1950s and 1960s, with the Caribbean migrants whose story is the reggae volume.

What Britain did was combine the inheritances. It is the only place they all landed at once. From America, via the import shops: house, techno, and the idea that one person with machines is a band. From Jamaica, via forty years of settlement: the sound system culture of west London, Birmingham, Bristol and the East End, the rigs, the dubplates, the MCs, the blues parties that had been running since the fifties. From its own recent past, via the punk volume: a functioning national apparatus of independent labels, distributors, weekly music papers and one-man record shops, built by punk a decade earlier and standing idle, waiting for something to carry. And from its own housing stock: the tower block, whose roof turned out to be the ideal place to stand a radio transmitter, and whose living rooms turned out to be the ideal place to make this music, once the price of a sampler fell below the price of a used car.

The introduction runs on for another 6 paragraphs, and then the book starts. 31 chapters · about 120 pages · $14.99

Contents

31 chapters, five movements.

Every volume in the series runs the same five, in this order. What each movement is for.

01The Room6 chapters
  1. 1The Field Beside the Motorway
  2. 2A Thursday Night Under the Arches
  3. 3The Common and the Convoy
  4. 4The Jungle Rooms
  5. 5The Voice in the Room
  6. 6Who Was Actually There
02The Machine5 chapters
  1. 7Six Seconds of Somebody Else’s Drums
  2. 8The Sampler
  3. 9Time-Stretch, and the Sound of the Seams
  4. 10The Transmitter on the Roof
  5. 11Friday to Friday. How a Tune Travelled
03The Records7 chapters
  1. 121989–1990. The Bleep
  2. 131990–1992. Hardcore
  3. 141992–1993. Darkside
  4. 151994. Jungle
  5. 161995. The Split
  6. 171996–1997. Techstep and the Prize
  7. 18The Ones the Album Racks Dropped
04The Money7 chapters
  1. 19The Dubplate Economy
  2. 20White Labels
  3. 21The Record Shop as the Chart
  4. 22The Door, the Decks and the Tape Pack
  5. 23The Clearance Question Arrives Late
  6. 24The Law Against the Beat
  7. 25What These Records Earn Now
05The Ending6 chapters
  1. 26The Names on the Shelf
  2. 27The Major-Label Money
  3. 28The Continent, and Further
  4. 29What the Story Leaves Out
  5. 30The Handover
  6. 31The Aerial Is Still Up

Free to read  ·  reference

RAVE & JUNGLE: the dates.

The book’s own timeline, in full and free to quote. 12 entries, 1988–1997. Where a date is contested the book says so at the point it appears; these are the ones that are not in serious dispute. All thirty-one timelines on one page.

1986
  • October, the M25 orbital motorway is completed. Its promoters intend it for freight.
1988
  • Akai’s affordable samplers reach the British second-hand market within reach of teenagers. Acid house fills the clubs of the house-and-techno volume’s last British chapter; the new pirate wave goes up across London. In Bradford, Unique 3 cut the first bleep track.
1989
  • The orbital rave summer: Sunrise at White Waltham in June, convoys, phone lines, the tabloid front pages. The Pay Party Unit is formed in the autumn. Warp Records is founded in Sheffield; The Theme and Track With No Name are released. Rage begins its Thursday residency at Heaven.
1990
  • July, the Entertainments (Increased Penalties) Act prices the unlicensed pay-party out of existence; the big promoters go licensed. The Eclipse opens in Coventry. Kiss FM goes legal. LFO reaches number twelve. 4hero’s Mr Kirk’s Nightmare is released on Reinforced; Moving Shadow is founded.
1991
  • August, Charly reaches number three; the toytown wave follows. Bombscare and Mentasm circulate. Kool FM goes on air from Hackney in the autumn. Fabio and Grooverider’s Rage room splits hardcore from house.
1992
  • May, Raving I’m Raving enters the chart at number two and is withdrawn by agreement within weeks. The same month, the convoys settle on Castlemorton Common: a week, tens of thousands, national news. The licensed mega-raves peak, Fantazia at Castle Donington, Vision at Popham. Terminator makes the time-stretch artefact an instrument; Here Come the Drumz names the darkside. Andy C co-founds Ram, aged sixteen.
1993
  • Darkside’s year: Ghosts of My Life, Valley of the Shadows, Renegade Snares. AWOL is resident at the Paradise Club; the jungle rooms fill. The word jungle settles on the music, against the preference of half its makers.
1994
  • Jungle’s public year: Incredible reaches the top ten in September; the boycott meetings follow. Original Nuttah and The Burial are released. Metalheadz is founded; Speed opens. November, the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act receives royal assent, defining the music by its repetitive beats; three demonstrations against it end in the Hyde Park riot in October. The Spiral Tribe trial ends in acquittals; the free-party circuit emigrates to the continent.
1995
  • Timeless enters the album chart top ten. The Blue Note Sunday sessions begin. Pulp Fiction previews the two-step future. The rename to drum and bass spreads through the trade. Radio 1 launches a jungle programme. Happy hardcore completes its departure. November, the death of Leah Betts puts the ecstasy panic on every high street.
1996
  • Techstep arrives via the No U-Turn school and the Mutant Jazz remix. Logical Progression sells the atmospheric wing to the album market. Shadow Boxing rules the dubplate winter.
1997
  • Ni Ten Ichi Ryu; Circles on daytime radio; speed garage’s first chart records inherit the Sunday rooms. July. The Prodigy’s third album enters at number one in Britain and America. September. Roni Size and Reprazent’s New Forms wins the Mercury Music Prize. The span closes with the underground institutionalised and the aerial still up.
2006
  • Gregory Coleman, whose 1969 drum break underlies most of this book, dies homeless in Atlanta. The public appeal that put about twenty-four thousand pounds in Richard Spencer’s hands follows in 2015; Spencer dies in 2020.

Free to read  ·  where it comes from

The sources.

This series is written from published material and its byline claims method rather than credentials, so the sources are listed. They are given as books and categories of material rather than as page citations; where a claim in the text is contested, the text says so at the point of the claim.

The standard histories. Energy Flash, Simon Reynolds, the fullest single account of rave, hardcore and jungle, first published just after this book’s span closes, and the source that takes the music’s mutations most seriously as music. Altered State, Matthew Collin, the standard history of ecstasy culture and acid house, and the best source on the promoters, the police response and the free-party movement. Both are cited by the house-and-techno volume for the years the two books share, and this volume follows their chronology where the participants’ accounts do not contradict it.

The oral histories. All Crews, Brian Belle-Fortune, the jungle and drum and bass scene told by its participants, and the indispensable source for the rooms, the pirates, AWOL, Music House and the MC culture of Movements One and Two. Who Say Reload, Paul Terzulli and Eddie Otchere, the era’s canonical records described by the people who made them. State of Bass, Martin James, a contemporaneous 1997 account, valuable precisely because it was written before the endings were known. Oral history is memory, and this book has treated all of it the way the reggae volume treats Kingston’s: shape trusted, details hedged, disagreements printed.

On the bleep years. Join the Future: Bleep Techno and the Birth of British Bass Music, Matt Anniss, the corrective history of the Yorkshire chapter, and the source for this book’s claims about the sound-system roots of the northern records.

On pirate radio. London’s Pirate Pioneers, Stephen Hebditch, for the engineering, economics and enforcement history of the transmitter chapter; the trade and enforcement figures of the period as reported in the contemporaneous press and the regulator’s own publications.

On the machines. The technical literature on the Akai samplers, the Atari sequencing environment and the era’s studio practice, which is extensive because the equipment has been documented, emulated and interviewed about for three decades; producers’ own retrospective interviews across the dance press for the working methods of Movement Two.

On the Amen break and the Winstons. Richard L. Spencer’s interviews across several decades; the reporting around Gregory Coleman’s death in 2006 and the 2015 public appeal, including the BBC’s coverage; the documented history of the Ultimate Breaks and Beats series. The chronology of the break’s reuse is reconstructed territory and this book keeps its claims general.

On the law. The Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 itself, sections sixty-three to sixty-six, from which this book’s one quotation is taken; the Entertainments (Increased Penalties) Act 1990; Hansard for the parliamentary debates around both; contemporaneous press reporting of Castlemorton, the Spiral Tribe trial and the 1994 demonstrations.

The contemporaneous press. Mixmag, DJ Mag, i-D and The Face for the span’s club journalism; the specialist dance and jungle press of the mid-nineties, Knowledge magazine above all; the national press for the moral panics, which are themselves primary sources about everything except the music.

On the money. The figures in Movement Four (pressing costs, dubplate fees, DJ rates, door takings, tape-pack sales) are drawn from participant accounts across the sources above and are labelled in the text as the ranges and claims they are. This was a cash economy; no audited numbers exist, and a book that printed precise ones would be lying about its own evidence.

Where figures are disputed (attendance at the orbital raves and Castlemorton, the pirate audience sizes, the sales of the era’s white labels, the etymology of the word jungle, what was and was not agreed at the meetings around the 1994 boycott) the text says so rather than choosing. As in every volume of this series: the disagreements are not gaps in the record. They are the record.

What this book does not do

This book quotes no song lyrics. Not one line, not one phrase.

That is a series rule, explained in every volume, and the reasoning is short: lyrics are owned, licensing is negotiated song by song and publisher by publisher, and there is no safe quantity, the copyright office says so in as many words. In this volume the rule has a specific extra edge, because the music in it is built almost entirely out of other people’s records, and the question of what may be borrowed, from whom, at what price, is not background here. It is Movement Four. A book about uncleared samples that quoted uncleared lyrics would be a joke at its own expense. So the rule holds, and it covers everything sung, everything chanted, and everything an MC said over a rhythm, in any accent and any language. What replaces quotation is description: what a voice is doing, where it sits, what it is about. One category of text does get quoted in these pages, once, with its source named, an Act of Parliament. Legislation is not a lyric, although the legislation in this book comes closer than any other law ever has.

The book reproduces no album art, no photographs and no flyers, and it cannot play you a record, which matters here more than in most volumes, because this is a music of texture (a six-second drum recording rebuilt at double speed, a bass note below what most speakers can produce) and texture survives description worse than melody does.

There is a playlist, sequenced to the order the records appear in these pages. It is called ORIGIN STORY: Rave & Jungle. Search for it by name. Everything described in Movement Three is on it, in order, and this book is substantially better with it running.

One further note. A large share of the sources for this period are the participants’ own recollections, collected years later by journalists and oral historians, about a scene that kept few documents, ran on cash, and was in several respects illegal. Where a figure in this book comes from one person’s telling, the sentence says so. Where the record shops kept no ledgers and the promoters kept two, the numbers are given as ranges and labelled. That is not a weakness of the book. It is an accurate description of the economy it is about.

Where the record is contested, this book says so. Where it does not know, it says that too. Sources are listed at the back.

Shelved under

MUSIC / History & Criticism  ·  MUSIC / Genres & Styles / Electronic  ·  MUSIC / Business Aspects

Identifiers

Ebook ISBN
979-8-90623-911-2
Audiobook ISBN
979-8-90623-912-9
Paperback ISBN
not yet issued

Buy it

Paperback, $14.99, posted direct. Every ebook and audiobook comes free with the complete set.

Questions

About this volume.

What is Origin Story volume 22 about?

Breakbeats, Pirate Signals and the Fastest Music Britain Ever Made, 1988–1997. The previous volume of this series ended with house and techno emigrating to Britain. This one stays with the fields, and with what Britain did next — because Britain was the one place all the inheritances landed at once: the Chicago and Detroit records from the import shops, the Jamaican sound system culture of rigs, dubplates and MCs that had been maturing in British cities for thirty years, and punk’s old apparatus of independent labels and one-man record shops, standing idle and waiting for something to carry.

What years does RAVE & JUNGLE cover?

1988–1997. The volume is numbered 22 because that is where the genre sits in the chronology of the music, not the order the books were written in — the first three written were volumes 17, 19 and 21.

What made RAVE & JUNGLE possible?

The sampler, the pirate transmitter. Movement Two of every volume is about the technology that made the genre possible and would not have ten years earlier.

Are there song lyrics in it?

None. Not one line, in this volume or in any of the thirty-one. Lyrics are copyrighted expression, licensing is negotiated song by song and publisher by publisher, and there is no safe quantity — so the rule is zero, and a program checks the manuscript, the EPUB and the narration script against it before the volume ships. What replaces them is a description of what the record actually sounds like, what it cost, and who was paid.

How long is it?

About 29,000 words: 31 chapters across five movements, roughly 120 minutes’ reading, 120 pages in the paperback. The audiobook runs 2h 50m.

What is in the back of the book?

A dated timeline of 12 entries, a source list, and a note on what the volume does not do. All three are reproduced free on this page.

Can I buy RAVE & JUNGLE in print?

Yes, here. It is a 5.5 × 8.5 in paperback, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, about 120 pages, and it never goes out of print.