"jungle" three years ahead of schedule

 

Via Droid, here's an 1989 pirate radio show on which Randall (RIP) talks about "jungle beats"  - at about 3.55 mins into this clip. 

The track playing is Renegade Soundwave's "The Phantom" - a beat later  sampled by Omni Trio for "Stronger"

One thing I've found consistently is that whenever you think you can pinpoint the moment  when a musical term or genre name gets adopted, you will always find an earlier example.... there's sort of new-word seep-backwards-through-time syndrome

It applies to almost everything

- grunge (used all through the 1980s and probably has earlier usages)

- punk 

- postpunk

- post-rock

- rave 

- poptimism

- Britpop

- rock and roll

- boogie 

- grime (well, "grimy" was used by Onyx almost a decade earlier)

And don't get me started on "techno".... 

Hell, I even found I'd coined neurofunk almost a decade earlier than when I affixed the term to a shit direction in drum and bass 

Talking of funk... they used that in the 1950s, as a specifically musical term, in the context of jazz, hard bop and that end of the spectrum. (Obviously it had other meanings - including the completely non-congruent  quaint-Brit Rudyard Kiplingesque meaning of "loss of nerve", "fearfulness" - as well as the connotatively proximate ones of body odour, sex-smell, etc) 

"Indie" is another one.... color me surprised to see it pop up twice in Nik Cohn's Awopbop:

- describing Apple Records, he says something  that started out as the grand Beatles dream of a free space for artists of all kinds, inventors, people trying to do experimental happenings, etc, but then it shrank down to being just an “indie record label”

- he talks about Andrew Loog Oldham, manager of the Stones, starting his own indie label Immediate Records. Admittedly quite a ways from what indie would mean after punk – although only in his early 20s still, Oldham’s immensely wealthy, a record business insider, lots of contacts, and through Immediate signs up acts many of whom have hits. Doubtless it went through major label distribution too. So indie just means there’s just one boss, the guy who founded it, calling the shots. 

That said, I would be surprised to find if anyone used the term "arsequake" prior to the, well, Arsequake League 

And I feel like "shoegaze" came out of nowhere, as did "trip hop".

The journalistic coinages seem to be more likely to emerge ex nihilo (not always though - post-rock as we know first used in 1967) whereas the ones that come from scenes and populations in an organic sort of way.... you will find more of a semantic prehistory... 

"Punk" as a word goes back to Shakespeare's time. 

RIP Randall

ardkore junglist legend

produced some tracks but primarily a deejay, that's where Randall McNeil's contribution lay

a detailed tribute from Carl Loben + Ben Murphy at DJ magazine

54 - way too early to go

an archive of his deejay sets and other stuff set up posthumously 

Revered for his ‘double impact’ style of mixing, aka 'double drop' mixing -  playing two tracks and aligning their drops so that they detonate simultaneously

Randall on schooling the young Andy C on how to do it:

“I remember telling him how I’d scope out tunes and how I’d count the bars and the maths of double drops. Basically knowing your tunes inside out. He knew it already and just took it another level. I merely showed him the blueprints.”

A regular at the AWOL night at the Paradise in Islington, the focus for the scene's innercore cabal (Goldie Grooverider Fabio Reinforced cru Kemistry & Storm et al) during that period between the closing of Rage and the start of Metalheadz at the Blue Note.  

I remember Goldie regaling me with a story of a one particular triumphant mix by Randall at AWOL that got the jungalistic equivalent of a standing ovation. Something about how he went in and out between the two tracks, back and forth, in some incredibly involuted but sustained way...  the rapid switchbacks so steal-your-breath astonishing, the duration so improbably extended, the precision so needlepoint, that a clamor of awestruck disbelief erupted.... the track was duly rewound - only for Randall to repeat the feat of mixological acrobatics exactly, same jump points -  this was a connoisseur performance 4 the connoisseurs, a tour de force showcase of the emerging artistry of a new kind of music

In the same interview Goldie spoke of how in response to deejays like Randall (and Grooverider at Rage) he made sure his own tracks were always "both music and mixable, with entrances and exits"

Randall appears in the "Inner City Life" video at around 1.10

Here's some of Randall's own productions

 

and a remix (in collaboration with Foul Play)

Randall was the go-to mixer for Reinforced compilations, doing the fully mixed version of The Definition of Hardcore in '93 and more recently a 25th Anniversary comp