ROAR Rave Pods

To you the ROAR Crew, We are proud and humbled to today celebrate ROAR’s first birthday by bidding you farewell, and sending out a MASSIVE thank you for all of your support, in whatever shape that took, since our launch this time last year. ROAR was always meant to be a lockdown project to bring a smile to the faces of ravers while journalistically chronicling the rave scene and with raves on their way back, lockdown (sort of) lifting, and Latch expecting his second kid in September and having to do some paid work, our first birthday this week seemed...

HOSPITAL RECORDS co-founder & CEO, LONDON ELEKTRICITY, speaks publicly in an interview for the very first time about allegations of racism that consumed the label in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and the Black Lives Matter movement, in this the final part of ROAR’s engrossing marathon three-parter with one of the most influential figures in rave music. The DJ & producer AKA TONY COLMAN admits he was initially “furious” Hospital had been accused of being a racist organisation by Black former employee CHRIS INPERSPECTIVE, which went viral online causing a huge storm in the jungle drum and bass scene....

HOSPITAL RECORDS co-founder and CEO TONY COLMAN reveals exclusively to ROAR about his decision to step down after a difficult last year, in part 2 of our exclusive mega-interview. Some 12 months after the label was caught in a storm of allegations of racism, Tony AKA DJ and producer LONDON ELEKTRICITY explains he wants to focus on performing and producing as he moves into his sixties. Beginning with a discussion about how his label’s rise coincided with New Labour’s landslide 1997 General Election win which was set to the sound-track of D:Ream’s Things Can Only Get Better and ‘Cool Britannia’,...

ROAR gets typically deep with LONDON ELEKTRICITY, one of the most influential names in the current drum and bass jungle scene, and co-founder of arguably its biggest label HOSPITAL RECORDS. Through his work Hospital, the DJ, producer and event promoter AKA TONY COLMAN has been hailed by some for changing the face of drum and bass and jungle by helping push it to a more mainstream audience. But last year Tony and the label faced allegations of racism by a Black former staff member and the wider public. In this mega three-part interview no stone will be left unturned and...

Rave originator JUMPING JACK FROST rounds up his three-part interview with ROAR by moving into the modern day and assessing the many positives, and some negatives, of the current drum and bass scene, while comparing the then and now. Praising ANDY C for his huge success which continues to push the music into the mainstream, Frost AKA NIGEL THOMPSON also addresses recent claims of racism and ‘whitewashing’ which came to the fore when his label V RECORDINGS was not featured in last year’s Drum and Bass Arena documentary about the history of the scene, and why until recently there have...

ROAR gets gritty with JUMPING JACK FROST in the second of our three-part interview as he opens up about the dark times that he and the jungle scene endured and how both have thankfully bounced back…and some! In typically honest fashion, the unashamed former bad-boy from the streets of Brixton AKA NIGEL THOMPSON admits he revelled in the violent times jungle experienced in the mid-90s, before he helped change the face of drum and bass by winning the Mercury Music Prize with RONI SIZE & REPRAZENT, who Nigel and his V RECORDINGS co-owner BRYAN GEE had discovered several years earlier....

ROAR meets one of the DJs who helped shape the early rave scene in JUMPING JACK FROST for a typically frank chat with this larger-than-life personality. In the first of three parts of this romping journey through his fascinating life, the jungle and drum and bass legend talks about how came from the streets where violence and robbery was a part of life, and was in and out of Her Majesty’s Pleasure before finding a home in the emerging rave scene even though it was seen by many of his peers as ‘devil music’. Frost AKA NIGEL THOMPSON was one...

This week ROAR meets MISTRESS MO, one of the ‘90s rave scene’s most prominent females, for a fascinating dive into the old skool. The DJ and promoter AKA MO JONES discusses how she went from a teenage raver who’d just learned to drive and would spend every weekend haring around the country attending often “dodgy” free parties, to one of the UK’s leading events organisers. Mo tells the story of how her popular Birmingham-based old skool event FLASHBACK came about and what were the ingredients to its success. She also gives her thoughts as to why there were so few...

MAMPI SWIFT concludes his frankest interview ever, by speaking to ROAR regarding the commercialisation of the drum and bass and jungle scene, which has led to allegations of ‘racism’ and ‘whitewashing’ and seen industry leaders forced to do plenty of soul-searching over the past few years. Pointing to the lack of diversity in modern DnB crowds, and increasingly behind the decks, despite the genre having been invented by a melting pot of cultures, Swift AKA PHIL ANIM justifiably tackles the questions: where have all the Black people gone, how it came to pass, and does DnB have a race problem?...

In part 2 of MAMPI SWIFT’s most in-depth interview of all time, the double-drop master talks to ROAR about his infamous DJing skills and techniques which saw a rivalry develop with drum and bass colossus, ANDY C, whose success Swift reckons he could have replicated had he made better decisions at key times. Swift – AKA PHIL ANIM – explains how he honed his turntablism as a teenager through hours and hours of practice, in the same way he did with football – even claiming he’d have played professionally had KOOL FM not given him his big DJing break at...