Black History Month: Krust and drum and bass

Black History Month: Krust and drum and bass

15 February, 2010 | 9.04AM

• Written by: Zack Rico
• Filed under: Music News: black history month, drum & bass, full cycle, krust

No one really knows exactly how drum & bass started or where it came from, but stand next to a soundsystem and you’ll feel its Jamaican dub reggae roots.

Bristol’s Krust aka Keith Thompson, whose parents moved to England from Jamaica, was there right at the beginning before drum & bass’ predecessor term ‘jungle’ had even been coined.

As part of our Black History Month celebrations, we asked Krust to talk about his earliest memories of the blistering breakbeat sound, from its hip hop and squat roots, to its biggest records, and one of its most important record labels, Full Cycle Recordings, which Krust set up in 1993 alongside Roni Size, DJ Suv, and DJ Die.

Krust - My drum & bass

I’ve been into music since the year dot. Music was always in the house when I grew up, so it was quite a natural thing for me to explore.

Then I saw the film Wild Style, which changed my life.

On the film there were all these people breaking, painting [graffiti], and dressing differently, and I wanted to be a part of it. So my brothers and I started a crew and tried to do whatever they did in the film.

After a while we started DJing in clubs all over town, and my taste in music changed.

We moved into a squat where we could play music really loudly, and then we found a scout hut that we broke into to start doing raves in. From there we went to raves in the fields every weekend.

I guess I just loved being part of the movement, first the hip-hop scene, and then the squatter side of Bristol’s club scene.

When the jungle thing came along, it just seemed like the next thing to get into, to a be a part of. It was about community, about like-minded people sharing a common goal to make music, play music, and meet other people who thought the same way.

Drum & bass didn’t exist when we started experimenting with music. A group of us had started to make drum & bass tracks but none of us had a name for it yet. I remember sitting in a flat in Bristol with Roni Size, DJ Die and Suv wondering if anyone else out there was doing the same kind of music that we were doing.

Suv is from Oxford, so he knew the Total Science boys and we soon found out that they were doing similar music to us. Slowly we found out about all these other groups and crews in England that were making the same kind of music, which no one had a name for yet.

A few people called it jungle techno, or even rave music, but I think after the big Jungle Fever events in Coventry, the name jungle stuck.

We didn’t really know what we were doing. As far as we were concerned we were just pushing buttons and having fun making beats, just seeing what would happen. Slowly the music started to speed up, and it became quite ravey, with big stabs and bleeps.

As it evolved the stabs went, and big basslines and tones came in. I remember making a tune one day and thinking ‘no stabs, more bass’.

Stylistically, drum & bass developed out of reggae’s deep basslines and samples from soundsystems. So the roots of drum & bass is black music.

It’s hard to say who the true pioneers of drum & bass were, because there were loads of artists who had an impact at the beginning. Shut Up and Dance and Bristol’s Smith & Mighty trio - Rob Smith, Ray Mighty, and Peter D Rose - showed me what you could do with music, and how you could fuse different types of music together.

I learned a lot from Smith & Mighty. As a kid, I used to hide in the corner and watch what how they used sound. That was my training ground.

We started Full Cycle (check out some of our back catalog in the player at the bottom of this page) because no one would put our records out. We kept getting told by label A&Rs to make music that sounded like other people, or to change our names. So we thought fuck it, let’s do it ourselves. So we did.

We were pretty cut off in Bristol which was a good thing and a bad thing. It meant that we could make music without getting distracted by what everyone else was doing, but it also meant that we were out of the loop. So we had to go to London a lot to touch base with the rest of the scene. Drum & bass artists and labels all connected in London, and the scene grew from there.
 
Ultimately though, my black heroes are the first black families that came to England, and who paved the way for us and subsequent generations to follow. I think we should appreciate the sacrifices those families made to come here to give us a better life, and remember the families that they left behind.

Krust’s biggest drum & bass records

Capone ‘Tudor Rose’ [Hardleaders] (1999)

Krust is a big fan of Dillinja’s ‘Tudor Rose’, which was produced under the producer’s Capone alias. “It was totally futurist when it came out,” says Krust.

The track begins with a sample of Richard Burton’s speech from the 1969 film ‘Anne Of The Thousand Days’, in which he plays Henry VIII.

Digital ‘Deadline’ [dPulse Recordings] (2005)

Digital’s 2005 track ‘Deadline’ “is simply brilliant,” says Krust.

Goldie ‘Timeless’ [FFRR] (1995)

A list of the greatest drum & bass records is not complete without Goldie’s groundbreaking 1995 album ‘Timeless’. “It is probably the boldest drum & bass album I’ve ever heard,” said Krust.

Often named as one of the finest d&b albums ever put to wax, ‘Timeless’ was co-engineered by Moving Shadow’s Rob Playford, who was also one third of the breakbeat pioneers 2 Bad Mice.

LTJ Bukem ‘Music’ [Good Looking Records] (1993)

Ambient drum & bass protagonist LTJ Bukem took the sound in a completely new direction with his Good Looking label, which counts seminal jungle hit ‘Music’ as one of its first ever releases.

Krust reckons LTJ Bukem brought a sense of “creative arrangement to drum & bass”, opening up the genre to influences from jazz, soul, and atmospheric Detroit techno.

Roni Size / Reprazent ‘Brown Paper Bag’ [Talkin’ Loud] (1997)

Another evergreen d&b classic, Roni Size’s Reprazent crew won the Mercury Music Prize in 1997 for their magnum opus ‘New Forms’ album.

‘Brown Paper Bag’ might well be the greatest drum & bass track ever written, because it probably brought more people to the genre than any other track in its history.

With smooth futuristic beats, a slightly uncomfortable - and some would say threatening - feeling, and street-swagger vocals, it set a benchmark for musically-intricate drum & bass.

“Not to mention, it’s great use of double bass,” says Krust.

Lemon D ‘Toxic Rhythm’ [Planet Earth Recordings] (1993)

Lemon D’s 1993 b-side ‘Toxic Rhythm’ was “way ahead of its time”, says Krust.

The old school jungle track is very hard to track down today, but an interesting snapshot of the liner notes on Discogs reveals where its makers were coming from.

‘We must Pursuit thru [sic] the darkness’, it reads.

4hero ‘Mr Kirk’s Nightmare’ [Reinforced Records] (1990)

4hero’s 1990 single ‘Mr Kirk’s Nightmare’ was one of the first ‘broken beat’ dance tracks ever made - it split the four-four template into simple rolling breakbeat.

“It was pioneering definitely,” says Krust.

Shy FX ‘Bambaata’ [Ebony Recordings] (1997)

Shy FX’s jungle sampling ‘Bambaata’ proved that drum & bass could incorporate drums from anything, by layering African bongos over heavy breakbeat.

“I loved the bassline on it too,” says Krust. It was one of the tunes of the year in 1997, and a Dillinja remix in 2008 (above) was well received.

Asylum ‘Da Bass II Dark’ [Metalheadz] (1995)

Krust reckons L Double’s 1995 track ‘Da Bass II Dark’, produced under the alias Asylum, “sounds like Star Wars on wax”.

Sound of the Future ‘The Lighter’ [Formation Records] (1995)

Sound of the Future aka DJ SS fiddled with the piano-led theme song from the 1970 movie ‘Love Story’, and juxtaposed it with some rough London jungle beats to create something of a laser monster.

“It was classic meets the streets, and pretty different to anything that had come before,” says Krust.

The track was remixed by DJ SS himself in 2007.

Lest we forget...

Krust ‘Warhead’ [V Recordings] (1998)

Krust was too modest to put his own groundbreaking hit ‘Warhead’ in his list, but it gets my vote as one of the greatest drum & bass tracks ever written.

With balls-to-the-wall bass, tough tech-laced bleeps, and supreme sound quality, it continues to rip up dancefloors to this day.

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