Bryan Gee came through Gloucestershire’s Jamaican sound-system culture before becoming known as the figure behind V Recordings. Reggae was the first education: while still young he became selector for the local Challenger sound, learning that the person choosing the records could control the whole direction of a dance. Later he ran his own Kleer FM sound and, after meeting Jumpin Jack Frost, the pair moved through pirate radio including Quest FM and Passion. That background mattered because V was shaped by direct dancefloor experience: Bryan knew records from the perspective of a working selector, testing material in front of crowds and hearing quickly whether a tune connected.

He also gained record-industry experience at Rhythm King, working across club promotion, mailouts and A&R around Warp, Outer Rhythm and smaller underground labels. While rave was rapidly changing outside the established industry, Bryan was learning how records were promoted, distributed and developed from inside it — useful knowledge as the music began moving faster than many companies could follow.

A key turning point came when friends of Bristol producer Roni Size gave Bryan a demo. It arrived without major industry attention and initially sat unheard. When Bryan returned to it as Rhythm King was winding down, the drums stood out — funkier breaks moving differently from much of the material around them.

Bryan and Jumpin Jack Frost then travelled to Bristol to meet the people behind the demo. Meeting Roni and Krust and hearing the music directly in the studio changed the scale of what they understood was developing there. The material sounded bigger than the cassette had suggested and, more importantly, there was a group of producers they could build lasting relationships with.

That relationship became V Recordings. Roni Size, Krust, DJ Die and Suv already belonged to a Bristol scene with its own ideas and eventually its own Full Cycle and Dope Dragon outlets. Bryan didn’t invent that scene and V didn’t need to pretend it had. What V could do was give those tunes another road out — into London, into Bryan and Frost’s DJ sets, onto dubplates and eventually into raves far beyond either city.

Roni Size & DJ Die’s “It’s A Jazz Thing” helped draw wider attention to what was developing around the label. V never became a factory for repeating one successful formula. Bryan heard something different in each producer: Roni could make it direct, Krust could go deep, Die brought a distinctive roll and Dillinja pushed sound-system weight. The label identity came from curation rather than forcing every artist into the same production template.

Then the family got bigger. Philly Blunt, run with Frost, gave the rougher jungle and ragga side somewhere to go. Later Liquid V and Chronic opened other lanes for soulful rollers and tougher tunes. That’s a much more believable picture of jungle than pretending everybody in the crew wanted to make exactly the same record.

The DJing is central to understanding Bryan’s A&R. He has said that sometimes the reason for releasing a record was simple: he wanted the tune so he could play it. The process was rooted in jungle’s working culture — hear something strong, get it onto dubplate, test it in the rave and then decide whether it deserved a wider release.

It also meant the label boss never completely disappeared behind a desk. Bryan kept playing while the catalogue grew, so new music still had to survive the same basic test as the old stuff: does it roll when you’ve got a room in front of you? Rave Archive’s 2014 Kool London birthday recording with Frost, Brockie, Bryan and the crew shows that family still functioning years later, while the V Podcast puts fresh dubs next to records carrying decades of history. That is still active in 2026: Bryan remains the host, with new V, Liquid V and related material continuing to arrive through the Planet V channels rather than the label becoming a 90s reissue operation.

That’s why V hasn’t needed to freeze 1994 in glass. Roni Size, Krust, Die, Dillinja and Ray Keith can sit in the catalogue without becoming museum pieces, while younger producers get judged by the same pair of ears. Bryan’s real instrument has always been taste — knowing when a tune has that thing you can’t quite explain but every raver understands when the bass drops.

Bryan Gee’s importance goes beyond being the figure behind a famous label. He was a DJ with an ear for records and people, and that judgement shaped what V became. A modest Bristol demo led to long-term relationships rather than one-off signings, and those relationships helped the music travel. Bryan’s role was not simply to maintain a catalogue, but to build a label family whose identity could be heard on dancefloors.