Five records that mark drum and bass's climb from the underground
A landmark album in 1995, a Mercury Prize in 1997, a best seller in 2005 and a number one single in 2012. The dates tell the story.
By D-N-B Desk
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A few seconds of drums on the B-side of a 1969 soul single became the backbone of jungle and drum and bass. Here is where it came from and who got paid.
The Amen break comes from a record called Amen, Brother, released by The Winstons in 1969 as the B-side of the single that carried their hit. The drummer was Gregory Coleman, and the break is a short solo about a minute and a half into the track: four bars of syncopated drumming with a crash cymbal. Wikipedia gives its length as seven seconds. Many writers round it to six.
The break reached producers through hip hop. It appeared on the 1986 compilation Ultimate Breaks and Beats and was used that year on Salt-N-Pepa's I Desire. Mantronix's King of the Beats in 1988 treated it in a way that influenced what followed, and the same year it turned up on N.W.A's Straight Outta Compton and Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock's Keep It Going Now.
By the early 1990s producers in the UK were chopping, speeding up and rearranging the break, and it became a staple of jungle and drum and bass. It has appeared in thousands of tracks, which makes it one of the most sampled recordings in music history.
The copyright belonged to the band's leader, Richard Lewis Spencer. Neither he nor Coleman received royalties for the sampling. Spencer only learned how widely the break had been used in 1996, when an executive contacted him, and by then the three year limit for a legal claim had passed. In 2015 a crowdfunding campaign raised more than 18,000 pounds for Spencer.
Our Culture and History panel tells the story of the scene it built, from the pirate stations to the clubs.
A landmark album in 1995, a Mercury Prize in 1997, a best seller in 2005 and a number one single in 2012. The dates tell the story.
By D-N-B Desk
Jungle came first, out of the rave and the sound system. Drum and bass followed in the mid 1990s. Here is how the two connect and who built the first.
By D-N-B Desk
Six labels keep coming up whenever the history of the sound is told. Here is each one and the name tied to it.
By D-N-B Desk