Jungle ! (January 22, 1994)

 

Not the first thing I did on jungle in Melody Maker - there was this Singles Club column from three months earlier focusing on releases from Moving Shadow and Reinforced.

And much earlier in April '93, I did a Letter from SW2 column about "Junglist" music 

But this 

was the first proper feature, as in piece that includes interview material with an actual living-breathing junglist (Goldie, my go-to motormouth for much of ,the earlier championing). 

But although this was the first proper feature to appear, it was actually the second to be written - for in the last months of '93 I had written for the then-new US rap 'n' B mag Vibe a much larger piece on jungle - including more quotes from Goldie - and making the hip hop connection central to my pitch to the readership as to why they oughta take heed. Owing to longer lead times with a monthly mag, this appeared in spring '94.  

Now I think of it there was actually there was another smaller piece on Goldie in among this flurry - from October 1993. Using that same odd, disconcerting photograph - his press shot of the time.

 

Getting a lot of use out of that first interview with the G-Man! He could cram a lot of words into a 45 minute phone chat. I particularly enjoyed Goldie's swipe at Sven Vath - at that time, the superiority of jungle over trance was self-evident to me, if no one else. Indeed around this time I did yet another piece, this time for The Wire, that was based around this trance v. jungle counter-view.  

But back to the January '94 piece. It was part of a big Melody Maker issue dedicated to the electronic dance music explosion - Underworld on the cover, page upon page upon page of coverage of the kind of artists that would be the staple of Muzik magazine (essentially a club culture offshoot of MM). The singles page was put in the hands of Orbital. Even the technical-muso pages were given over to electronica (The Drum Club talking about their gear - pass the smelling salts). 

The whole of that issue is below for your delectation. Seldom has such a confraternity of pale, male, bald-bonced individuals been gathered within a single publication! 

Jungle was included on the periphery of this feature package, held at arm's length as it were - the (literal) black sheep of the family. 

Scanning the contents today, what strikes me about all these names - then automatically given more credence than your 4 Heroes and LTJ Bukems -  is how few have them have endured.