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Before Drum & Bass had a name: Nigel Broad’s journey through the UK Underground
Revibed Editorial Team
Original Artists
Five catalogue releases now available through Revibed trace Nigel Broad’s path from late-’80s house to the breakbeat pressure of the early ’90s.
Between 1989 and 1993, British dance music did not develop through a tidy succession of genres, but rather mutated in public. In the aftermath of acid house and the Second Summer of Love, imported Chicago house and Detroit techno encountered hip-hop breaks, Caribbean sound-system culture, synth-pop, rare groove and the particular energy of Britain’s clubs, warehouses, fields and pirate-radio networks.
The result was a period of extreme creative compression. House became harder and more sample-driven, and Breakbeats displaced four-to-the-floor rhythms. Hardcore rave reached a mass audience in 1991 and 1992, often with little conventional radio support. By 1992 and 1993, the darker, bass-heavier experiments inside hardcore were becoming recognisable as Jungle.
Nigel Broad was living that transformation from the inside. Across two projects—State Of The Rhythm and Rhythm Junior—five releases form an unusually coherent record of those years. Heard chronologically, they operate like a time-lapse film of the UK underground in motion.
From Essex keyboards to underground electronics
Raised in Upminster, Essex, Broad’s musical life began before the rave explosion. In 1985, he was already on stage playing keyboards as part of the band Special Guests in Brentwood. Within a few years, however, his attention had moved towards electronic production and the new possibilities opening around club music.
His subsequent catalogue spread across several names and partnerships. Broad worked with Darren Cooper as State Of The Rhythm, with Vince Mitchell as Rhythm Junior and, in 2008, with DJ Rush Puppie as Release. He also issued solo material as Aeon Flux and contributed production and writing to Origin Unknown’s Eastern Promise EP.
Each collaboration created a different space in which Broad could respond to a scene whose tempos, technology and musical vocabulary seemed to change from month to month. The five releases gathered here capture the earliest and most compressed part of that evolution.
1989: State Of The Rhythm — Don’t You Want My Love / Play That Bass
The story opens with a stamped UK promotional white label. Don’t You Want My Love / Play That Bass appeared in 1989, as the first acid-house explosion was giving way to a more fragmented and distinctly British club culture.
Both tracks looks towards house music’s emotional and vocal tradition, nailing a distinctive house bassline. “Don’t You Want My Love” lies on sensual repetitive vocal, while “Play That Bass” appeals to the funky spirit of the dance floor. Together they belong to a period when a 12-inch was expected to work as a functional DJ tool.
The white-label format was central to that economy. Records could be tested in clubs, passed between DJs and build reputations before—or sometimes without—receiving extensive artwork, promotion or press coverage. The relative anonymity allowed the dance floor to decide what mattered.
1990: State Of The Rhythm — Experience / Kennedy
A year later, State Of The Rhythm returned on Contagious Records with music that suggested a widening electronic vocabulary. Experience / Kennedy pairs “Experience (Spaced Out Mix)” with “Kennedy (Subversion Mix)” — titles that suggest a search beyond straightforward club utility. The record remains connected to house, but its sampling, atmosphere and electronic edge point towards a stranger and more forceful future.
That sense of expansion reflects what was happening across British dance music. American house and techno were being cross-pollinated with local influences in clubs, free parties, warehouses and pirate-radio broadcasts. Producers were not treating genre as a fixed template, but taking it apart.
The record’s smooth, funky character, make it a timeless archive from the turn of the decade. “Kennedy” received particular attention for placing samples connected to John F. Kennedy and his assassination over supple house grooves. The result is a contrast that makes the track feel both inviting and unsettling: dance music carrying a fragment of political history inside it.
1991: Rhythm Junior — The Empathy E.P.
With the arrival of Rhythm Junior, Broad began working alongside Vince Mitchell. The change in name coincided with a decisive change in rhythmic language.The Empathy E.P. brings together “Murderous Style,” “Float On,” “Empathy” and “Voodoo.”—and preserves that sense of plurality that can simultaneously offer direct breakbeat impact while maintaining a more suspended, atmospheric motion.
That tension was central to the breakbeat underground emerging in Britain. Hardcore could be aggressive without losing its euphoria; house atmospheres coexisted with chopped breaks, samples and heavier bass. The music had not yet divided into the genre categories that would later be used to organise it.
1992: Rhythm Junior — The Overdrive EP
This was the year in which rave culture grew dramatically in scale. Large events, pirate stations and cassette recordings turned underground tracks into shared reference points, while records could become anthems without depending on the established music industry.
Hardcore’s collision of house, techno, hip-hop breaks and sampling was also beginning to reach the pop charts, even as its most adventurous producers pushed in darker directions.
The Overdrive EP is a print of that era, remembered for its enormous, aggressive synthesiser riffs and the way its opening pattern builds towards a harder release. Intensity and warmth occupy the same space, in which soft, houser melodies meet breakbeat impulse.
The record appeared during Broad’s most productive early period. In the same year, his Release project with DJ Rush Puppie issued “Dance In Eden” and “Passion,” followed by The Spirit Of Space EP. Such works would become Broad’s best-known connection to the early-hardcore and proto-jungle continuum.
1993: Rhythm Junior — The Deep ’n’ Dark EP
The Deep ’n’ Dark EP was released as a promotional 12-inch on Contagious Records in 1993, and it combined darkness, escape, intimacy and collective feeling. By this point, jungle was coming into its own. Tempos, breakbeat structures, basslines and sampling techniques were evolving faster than the terminology used to describe them.
The release captured that ambiguity perfectly. Styles melt into one another, but the border between hardcore and jungle remained porous. Heard retrospectively, the record seems to reach beyond its own historical moment, suggesting that the experiments of early rave contained possibilities that other scenes would explore years later.
Broad’s wider work from 1993 reinforces this direction of travel. As Aeon Flux, he released “Reality” and “Unconscious Thoughts.” With Release, he issued “The Jungle” and “Musical Movements.” The transformation traced across these records had reached its clearest expression, although it had not settled into a single form.
***
It is tempting to arrange British dance music into a clean sequence: house became hardcore, hardcore became jungle and jungle became drum & bass. The records themselves tell a more complicated story. House grooves remained present inside breakbeat tracks. Ambient passages sat beside aggressive synthesiser riffs. Tracks that sounded futuristic in 1991 could still draw on disco, funk, dub and imported American club music. Producers moved between aliases and collaborators because the scene itself had multiple centres of gravity.
Broad’s story continued well beyond the early-rave years. After moving to the United States, he expanded into music for television and film, including the 1999 De Wolfe production-music album Hard Beats, composed with Scott Kluesner. He also developed a parallel visual-effects career and later became a music-production educator, creating courses on drum & bass, dubstep, synthesis, sampling, Logic Pro, Korg Gadget and hardware trackers.
His wider career gives these early records a different perspective. They are not isolated artefacts from a brief subculture, but the foundations of a creative practice built around rhythm, technology, atmosphere and motion.
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