As the acid house movement started to phase itself out and DJs started to fuse hip-house and homegrown breaks into their sets, producers started to experiment with breakbeats and sub bass. Welcome to 1989 – UK sounds emerging!
There was a common trend in ’89 to create home made ‘off-beat’ drum patterns that soon gave way to full incorporation of sampled breakbeats. This in turn started to be combined with a darker, edgier style of sound choice which eventually started to become ‘hardcore rave’, a UK grown sound all of its own but made up of a mix of records from all over Europe and the USA. Careful selection by the DJs is what created the UK rave sound.
Full Kudos must be given to On Top Records out of Miami, Florida for laying down on vinyl the very first seeds of the UK hardcore movement, bought to these shores by NYC DJ Frankie Bones. What? Yep! The research looks credible and until we find out any variation on the history, this is what we’re sticking with.
Read on for more info. Rob Base & DJ E-Z Rock must also get a mention here, for the tracks included in our Breakbeat Origin sections. Hip hop hugely influenced and encouraged UK producers of the era to experiment with breaks.
We’ve gone for 25 tunes in this list, as breakbeat hardcore tracks were hard to come by in 1989, but please keep popping back as we discover more music!
It is worth mentioning here though, as we work through 1989, that the terms ‘jungle’ and ‘hardcore’ were both in use across the UK pirate/DJ/rave community, and can be heard here in this mix from September of that year by the 3 Amigos, one of whom was DJ Randall (RIP).
The music is a mix of what we’d now call tribal house and techno with a bit of UK rave thrown in and if anyone would have been playing breakbeat, you’d have expected it to be him. It’s an area worthy of more research, but we just wanted to point it out. Jungle as a point of terminology was alive and kicking in 1989.
According to NYC’s legendary DJ, Frankie Bones on his YouTube channel, “3 copies of this track made their way from Miami, Florida to NYC just days before DJ Frankie Bones flew to the UK to play Energy ’89 – The Summer Festival. Frankie played this at the event and the history books tell us nothing was ever the same again!
The original from 1989 became the prototype track for what would become Drum & Bass. One of the most wanted records of the early U.K. Rave Scene. Obscure because it came from Miami. How three copies made it to Brooklyn before my maiden voyage to London, was perfect timing.
25,000 people heard that track for the first time on August 26, 1989. I had one copy, Lenny Dee had a copy and we gave Carl Cox the spare copy during Lenny’s first UK tour in December 1989.
Carl Cox produced an edit on white label known as Carl Cox – Success & Effect. This was 28 years ago. The rest is history”
And we believe him. If Lenny De Ice created the first JUNGLE BLUEPRINT, then Frankie quite clearly created the first HARDCORE BLUEPRINT the following year. Wow. THIS IS WHERE IT STARTED! OH, AND THANK THE LORD FOR YOUTUBE!
Don’t let the funky intro fool you. Just imagine this pitted against it’s end of decade contemporaries. If we’re talking about proto jungle/forward thinking underground rave music (which we are) then boom. This is it. When you hear people like Fabio and Grooverider talking about mashing up records from here, there and everywhere to create a style all of it’s own, this is the stuff they’re probably talking about! F*cking Wicked.
