This recording was sent in from listener Tom Hills. It’s a recording from 1993 of DJ Skeme (incorrectly titled DJ Ski on the cassette) on Eruption 101.3fm. Very cool recording that includes loads of ads – a real snap shop and insight in to that era. Some words from Tom . . .
“So July ‘93 I’m 14 years old, growing up in Canterbury, Kent. About to go in to year 10 at school and it was that classic summer holiday that went on and on and on.
Got to shout out my pal Dean White at this point, we met and became friends a year or two before and shared a love of Graffiti, Gangstarr and the Hardcore sound of Rave music.
His cousin in Lewisham recorded many different shows for us and it seemed like every couple of months, Dean would turn up with a bag of tape recordings for us all to share around.
Many would be listened to and cast aside, simply because of the volume of tapes coming through and a lot were overlooked due to various technical issues but this one stood out a mile at the time for me, mainly because of the dark side vibe to it.
Hardcore was splitting in two and this sound felt both future and current, although it was the height of summer I could not get enough of this sound!
It really got under my skin that winter though, I spent my whole time outside of school out and about; riding my bike, tagging and getting up where we could, hanging out in record shops listening to every single tune in stock – and picking up 274 copies of each flyer to share around the playground at school!
Throughout those long dark evenings, I listened to mainly two things – this and DJ Ratty at The Edge/Mad P’s birthday. It was my soundtrack for the whole winter, I’ve come back to both throughout the years since, this tape especially has never felt dated or naff in any way – the ads for a while maybe but they’re obviously zero budget affairs but thinking back now, they would have needed some serious cash to make anything remotely mainstream!
Proper diy affair, along with a lot of the music at the time.
Eventually I found a strong enough aerial that could pick up Bukem, then Hype, on Kiss 100 – unless the weather was bad we could just about get that down here but nothing else.
Radio is a curious format, a lot more versatile than club sounds and without the constraints of trying to keep a dance floor moving, at all times. Would our scene be as healthy, diverse and experimental without Pirate Radio? I genuinely doubt it, the best example I can give is the dance floor sounds that Dillinja put out on Philly blunt/V etc, compared to his, Lemon D’s and Alex Reece’
early Metalheadz stuff.
Maybe without the label those bits would still have been made but not put out? For me what pirate enabled was the forum to go a bit deeper, or a bit darker and not compromise in the process.
That I’m still buying and playing a lot of both a lot of the mid 90’s stuff and the very newest productions too, shows just how much depth and subtlety there is under the banner of Jungle/DnB.
I could go on for days about all this but if you’ve got this far then we’ll done and thank you!!
I’d like to end by just saying bigs ups to you Charlie for curating all this – for a kid in Kent to tap in to another world and feel like it was some magical kingdom and then all these years later still have that love, as well as finding out that I wasn’t alone in those feelings, has been quite profound for me and all the credit to you man for putting together what you have. Incredible.
Big love man. “