Entry fee 15 euro, Drinks promos on the night!

Goldie – Autobiography

Some people might call what I do drum ‘n’ bass. But I’m not going to narrow it down to what the music industry thinks is commercially viable. I’m not really into narrow thinking. Making this music is like poker. You begin with five cards. You don’t play poker with two cards. That’s just the rule of the game. Once you learn how to play you can bend the rules.

I’ve been in this game for as long as I can remember, seeking out bits of punk rock, pop and reggae when I was still a kid in Walsall. When slap bass days arrived in the mid eighties I started to get into Loose Ends, Change and Maze travelling for funk all-dayers. I even gave Rastafarianism a shot earning myself the nickname Goldielocks, but then the hip-hop scene blew up and you can’t spin on your head if you’ve got locks. So I said see you later to that!

Hip hop allowed me to express myself artistically for the first time. Doing graffiti art made me learn how to make something out of nothing, and it got me involved in the music scene. I spent time in New York exhibiting my work and appeared in Africa Bambatta’s feature film ‘Bombing’ as one of Britain’s top graffers. That rocked. In ’86 I moved out to Miami and started a business selling engraved gold teeth. By 1990 I was on the move again, to London, where something very special was about to kick off…

The club was Rage at Heaven. Everyone was just going for it. The adrenaline was pumping around the place. I heard DJs playing a weird hybrid sound, there was still the late rave stuff but here was a new sound, a mad fusion of the old and new. I’d always been the sort of kid who wanted to belong and felt like I’d found a home. In ’92 I produced my first track as Ajax Project while I was doing some design and A&R work for 4Heros’s Reinforced label. My next tunes Killermuffin and Menance were put out under my early moniker Rufige Kru1 on the Metalheadz label. But at first I was just this deranged kid at Rage with gold teeth shining, this nutter talking a million miles an hour. I remember clutching the cage, watching Fabio or Grooverider take the record I’d made out of the box and put it on the deck and thinking “Fuck, fuck”!

By late ’92 a darker sound was taking over. By ’93, recording as Metalheadz, I had released my darkcore anthem Terminator, lifting the buzz saw synth riff from Joey Beltram’s Mentasm alongside the mutating breakbeats that began to characterise darkcore. It was just like rebelling with the music. The darkness was Britain’s new urban blues. Dark to me was just a representation of the way people were feeling at the time, there was a recession and the country was in decline. But forward ever backward never, I was in the studio again creating something fresh.

My ’93 release Angel was one of the first tracks to push what the industry referred to as drum ‘n’ bass in a more musical direction, with Urban Cookie Collective’s Diane Charlemagne providing jazzy vocals. Rage shut down this year with AWOL quickly stepping in to fill the void that it left behind. Meanwhile I was working on my debut album Timeless. For me Timeless was the ultimate statement of drum ‘n’ bass’s technical sophistication and manipulation. Back then I was the first of the drum ‘n’ bass crew to sign to a major label; London records. To me this made no odds, I didn’t care if music was underground or overground; I knew where it came from!

Timeless shot straight into the album charts at number seven, which was a first for a drum ‘n’ bass record. But I don’t even know if I’d call it a drum ‘n’ bass record. I’d prefer to call it inner city ghetto music, because I’m not going to come up with stuff just to match people’s perceptions of drum ‘n’ bass. Inner City Life, one of the albums vocal tracks, became a signature tune at LTJ Bukem’s club Speed in 1994. But my style was now far removed from the bark of the Jungle music that I was putting out in my Rage days.

By ’95 the Metalheadz label was well up and running. Then came the Metalheadz Sunday Sessions at the Blue Note. The atmosphere was just unreal and drum ‘n’ bass was the music of the moment. In ’96 and ’97 I collected awards for Timeless, my DJing, the Metalheadz label and my compilation album Platinum Breakz. It was fair to say I’d arrived, but I was by no means burnt out and I was looking for new ways to challenge myself as an artist. In my second album Saturnz Returns the tones and tempos were more varied, the experiments bolder and the tracks definitely more personal. No one could sing about my own misfortunes more than myself. I just wanted to be sincere in my work.

Sometimes I think back to when I was a kid staring out of the window going “fucking hell I’m really depressed, I really want to make it”. To go from that to now is to go from real extremes and it’s quite unbelievable to me. In ’99 I played a bad guy in James Bond film ‘The World is Not Enough’ and also in Guy Ritchie’s ‘Snatch’. In 2001 I had a part in Eastenders as a Gangster called Angel. It’s surreal. But now my focus is getting back on the music while keeping the acting thing going strong.

After a two year break the Metalheadz Sunday Sessions has a new home at The Limelight, Shaftsbury Avenue. I’m currently in the studio with Jamie Matrix and J Majik recording my third album Sonic Terrorism. Meanwhile I’ve got a release out under my old moniker Rufige Kru called Stormtrooper VIP / The Beach on Metalheadz. The stuff I’m putting out as Rufige Kru is more dancefloor than my new album which is more like my older experimental stuff. The new Metalheadz album Platinum Breakz 3 has also just been released.

So, Metalheadz has been away for a while, but it isn’t dead. We don’t need to put out releases every five seconds to prove ourselves. The label is still one of the most respected on the scene. After a decade of doing music it’s still all good for me.

Sub:Era’s constantly looking for new DnB DJ’s and MC’s simply send us a mix or post it on our wall at:

www.facebook.com/SubEraDnB

For more info on the Savoy Theatre and other upcoming nights visit:

http://www.savoytheatre.ie/

alongside MC’s:
Bassline
BC

Info on Krust

Krust has been at the creative heart of the drum and bass scene for more than 15 years. Alongside Roni Size and DJ Die, he was one of the founders of the Full Cycle/Reprazent collective, which has come to define the “Bristol Sound”, and that has broken through into mass culture winning the Mercury Music Prize in 1997, while still managing to remain at the cutting edge of contemporary urban music. Hes currently working on his new label Rebel Instinct a collective founded by Krust to nurture new talent and create music, art and film releases.

For more info on the Savoy Theatre and other upcoming nights visit:

http://www.savoytheatre.ie/

Support on the Night from The one and only Beatnik from the legendary Studio B and co-founder of Irishdrumandbass.com and Rastachaun member Skeletor A/K/A The Dream Team with a Special B2B Set !!! Spectrum Residents Nick Fury , LpMasterWong , Donny Wang & The Count inside the building as well !! Hope to see a few of ya’ll down there !!!

http://www.savoytheatre.ie/index.php?viewevent.html?id=201#

Calibre
Jet Li
Kodie

The Good Bits Main Room, Store St., Dublin

13th February 2010

€10 Door tax

Calibre

Calibre, birth name Dominick Martin, is a Drum and Bass, and Liquid Funk, music producer and DJ hailing from Belfast, Northern Ireland. He originally started producing at a young age and has spent many years refining his sound. He is a classically trained musician playing a variety of musical instruments eventually becoming a self-taught music producer. Martin started producing Drum and Bass in 1995 and his first signed release was credited under the now defunct Quadrophonic label owned by U2.

In addition to impressing some of the biggest names in the business, he soon came to the attention of drum and bass DJ Fabio, who signed Calibre to his influential Creative Source label. While studying Fine Arts at the University of Ulster in Belfast, he became interested in the music of John Cage whose work was influential in entitling Martin’s first album release Musique Concrète in 2001.

Since his initial releases in 2001, Martin has been known for his consistent signature style and sound, which is highly sought after for remixes, by both major labels and independent recording artists.

In 2003, Martin decided to launch his own record label, Signature Records, which became his primary vehicle for launching singles and full-length releases in both vinyl and digital media format. Martin states, “Signature has been set up as an outlet primarily for my own work and collaborations. There won’t be any other artists on the label for the foreseeable future”. For a few years the label’s website ran of the back of Soul:R, the record label he ran alongside Marcus Intalex. With the Soul:R website receiving very few updates since 2006, Calibre has published most of his work and news through his own MySpace Page.

Jet Li

Jet li hails from a small island off the south coast of Ireland called Valentia and first started getting into music at an early age when he heard a tune called Pass the Dutchie by Musical Youth. After that he moved to Manchester in 1991 and found his love for jungle where he stayed for almost 2 years.

On return to his native Island he started running events and djing in local pubs and clubs trying to spread the sound using hip-hop and reggae as a crutch to get jungle heard.   He started the first Drum and Bass event to be held in County Kerry called Manga Nights, which ran for a year or so before he moved to the USA in 1995 where he continued the night called Manga Nights, with a crew called Urban Assault, well known around the San José area and also DJing in many clubs State-side and returning in 1998.

Since then Valentia has become a very well respected home to Drum and Bass and where the infamous Jungle Republic, (brainchild of Jet Li and ran by Phase2 and Bassbin) was run for three years. This is known as the best event ever to hit the Irish shores for the movement of Drum and Bass in Ireland.  It is just one of the many events that Jet Li has been involved in throughout the years both in Ireland and America.

To date Jet Li is found in Cork still pushing the Drum and Bass sound through his studio and promoting through Phase2 (which was set up by Jet Li and DJ Source in 2000) which has brought the likes of Simon Bassline Smith, Total Science, Marcus Intalex, A-Sides, Caliber along with many others to the unexpecting public.

Jet li and Phase2 has had a massive impact on Drum and Bass in Ireland and now with the setting up of phase2recordings, distributed by Nu Urban Music, surely more is to follow