REWIND back to the roots of drum n'bass, before the junglist days, pre-hardcore uproar, and there was the breakbeat. The cut n'drop DJ style provided the staple backdrop for hip hop's rappers, and its source was old funk records. James Brown and Funkadelic lived on through the hip hop old skool, providing a funky edge as the backbone of the sound. Breakbeat, hardcore and the subsequent sounds of dark, jungle and drum n'bass carried the vibe of funk, fusing its sexual urgency with the cold technology of the day to create hybrid forms.
Funk the four-letter word, you see, was always about sex. Somewhere along the line, drum n'bass forgot this. Instead of exploring breakbeat's basic urge, the scene's players moved deeper into cerebral territory. Breaks were increasingly created rather than sampled. Not a bad thing in itself, except that many of the programmers couldn't build a funky break if their sex lives depended on it. Add to this the proliferation of two-step breaks, Reese bass lines and moody ambience, and it became clear drum n'bass was drifting down an impotent cul-de-sac.
At the same time, the dreaded full-length album meant that artists were losing any need for dancefloor credibility. Tech-step turned into the new heavy metal - a funkless form for headbangers - and the serious recording artistes disappeared up their own conceptual dark back passages. "Funk was about being subversive with the music," says Dextrous from liquid funk pioneers Solid State. "It turned things on their heads and played with people's perceptions of what dance music should be. Drum n'bass is funk's natural successor, but dark forgot that. Dark is about producers impressing each other with a few filters. It's a technical thing, made for your peers, and that is too elitist." One of the biggest criticisms of the headfirst dive of drum n'bass into the depths of dark was that it turned the scene into an environment rife with musical snobs and self-selected elite.
In other words, the clubs were suddenly full of boys admiring the sounds of someone's toys. The girls? They just stopped coming. "With jungle, there were always a lot of women around," says Fabio. "But as things got darker and harder it all became a lads' thing and the clubs got too aggressive, too moody. People would just stand there and go 'leave me alone, I'm here by myself' which is the opposite to what jungle or acid house was about."
There is an argument that dark did the scene a favour, that it rid the clubs of media fly-by-nights and cheque book-waving record company whores. The irrelevant in-crowd found the dark sound too foreboding, preferring to powder their noses to the less edgy vibes of big beat. It's a point raised by original Leicester junglist DJ SS: "Dark had to happen - it cleared the scene of people who came in and spoiled our parties," he argues. "We came from hardcore, which went dark to clear the scene. The same has happened to drum n'bass. Dark wasn't a bad thing, but the people who jumped on it were.
There was this really bad time over the last couple of years when drum n'bass lost its originality. It became about using the same breaks and bass lines." To make matters worse, many of the leading DJs throughout this time seemed intent on narrowing down the styles they would play to such an extent that only the dark tunes - preferably on their own labels - were getting an airing.