Up until late 1993, the terms Hardcore and Jungle had been used interchangeably to mean one and the same, but there was a divide growing. Just as darkside Hardcore came about as a reaction to the commercial side of rave, some DJ’s felt the scene had gone too dark.
Rave is dead!! Declared Mixmag as it pictured The Prodigy’s Liam Howlett holding a gun to his head. The truth was that Rave wasn’t dead – it was just that after a summer of drug-fuelled hedonistic high spirits, the scene was suffering a collective comedown. What many saw as a reaction against the over commercialisation of the scene, rave had gone dark… very dark.
Who’d have thought that the music industry would turn out to be a fickle place!? Within a few months from the end of ’91 to mid ’92, rave (or hardcore as it was now more commonly known) had gone from being the musical bogeyman peeking through the window and luring our youth away with the promise of ecstasy and LSD, to being invited to sit round the mainstream’s dinner table.
When I was asked to write an account of DnB’s history, it turned out that the hardest decision to make was, where to begin?…