JUMPING JACK FROST

Along with Fabio and Grooverider, Mickey Finn and partner Bryan Gee, Jumping Jack Frost is one of the founding fathers of British breakbeat hardcore and the genre it went on to spawn: drum and bass. Over the years he’s built an impressive CV - from the acid house years and pirate radio to the founding of labels V and Philly Blunt to the promotion of the Bristol jungle scene in the UK and beyond, to a pioneering radio show and Movement - currently London’s premier drum and bass club.

It’s a story that starts back in the mid 80s, with Frost playing rare groove and funk on pirate radio. While Fabio and Grooverider took to the airwaves on Phase One, Frost hooked up with Bryan Gee on pirate station Passion (based in Balham, South London). At the time, all four played a mix of different black music. But, as with many of the DJs you’ll see on these pages, all became caught up in the acid house scene and the new American house sounds. In fact, Frost and Bryan Gee were two of the first DJs to play Lil’ Louis’s seminal ‘French Kiss’ to London.

Soon all four were converts to the new house phenomenon, with Frost laying down early house classics at clubs like Carwash in Lambeth before graduating to the big raves of the summers of love - Biology, Immensity and Amnesia House among them.But as time went on, what distinguished Frost and Gee from the other DJs at the time was their interest in the new homegrown breakbeat sounds - sounds that Fabio and Grooverider were also favouring at club night Rage. What attracted them was what Goldie dubbed the ‘militancy’ of the breakbeat - a militancy against the four-to-the-floor strictures of the harsh European techno sounds of the early 90s.

So hardcore was born - a breakbeat-driven scene, fiercely dedicated to the ruffest contemporary sounds and widely spurned by what had now become the mainstream of house music. In fact, during the early 90s, it became de rigueur for so-called house purists to ridicule hardcore as noisy bleep music (given much of the scene derived inpiration from the ‘bleep’ techno of acts like LFO, The Forgemasters and Nightmares On Wax).

Frost and Bryan Gee however stuck firmly to their guns. Their talent had always been - and still is to this day - a talent for recognising talent. In fact, if you take a look at the other DJs on DJ Pages who have been around for long periods of time, you’ll find that invariably they’ve always endured times where people have failed to understand the direction they’ve pursued. What makes these pioneers successful is that they are able to grasp what’s happening before others can. As Juan Atkins once said: ‘This music is not for everybody. It’s for certain people that want a little twist. Some people are content with everyday pop - they don’t have an open enough mind to consider something new. Those aren’t the people I’m playing for; they’ll come around eventually, because they’re basically followers. When they’re told that this is what’s happening, they’ll go along with it.’

Never has a statement been more true of Frost and Bryan Gee’s championing of the jungle sounds emanating from Bristol. Listening to a tape from young producers Roni Size and Krust, the pair were captivated by the new jazz-inflected, rhythmically complex sounds, and agreed to help the Bristol duo find recording deals. But at the time, even with Bryan’s connections in A&R, the record industry was staunchly inimical to anything associated with the hardcore scene. In other words, they were ‘the followers’, people who couldn’t, or didn’t, want to understand. Two years later, of course, and they were all scrambling for the new sounds.

But at the time, Frost and Gee had no option but to go it alone, forming V recordings, releasing a few hundred copied of Krust’s ‘Deceivers’, and then following it up with a string of classics, including Roni Size’s ‘Made To Fit’, ‘The Calling’ and Krust’s ‘Jazz Note’. Form then on, the Bristol crew - Size, Krust, Die & Suv - alternated between V and their own Bristol-based Full Cycle label. Success, some might say, given the sheer quality of the music, was inevitable. Bryan and Frost even had time to form an offshoot label called Philly Blunt, tailored to accommodate a more 'jump-up' sound, whose first release was Jumping Jack Frost's own notorious anthem 'The Burial' (engineered by Dillinja and recorded under the name Leviticus). Philly Blunt itself released its own string of classics, including Firefox’s ‘The Warning’ and Dillinja’s awesome ‘Muthaf**ka’.

In the meantime, while Bryan Gee continued to rule the pirate airwaves at Kool FM, Frost bagged a slot on the now legit Kiss FM, playing the full spectrum of drum and