DJ Brockie’s place in jungle culture starts before Kool FM had a signal. He has described DJing from about 13 and working professionally by 17, moving through ragga, rare groove, hip hop and sound-system culture while also helping put on illegal parties. Detroit techno, acid, garage and hardcore then widened the box as rave accelerated around him.

In 1991, Brockie says he started Kool FM with Eastman and Smurph. The early station still carried ragga and soul alongside hardcore, but the audience response pushed Kool increasingly towards the faster breakbeat sound that would become jungle. Radio gave DJs somewhere to play new music repeatedly, build an identity and develop relationships with MCs; raves then carried those combinations into much larger rooms.

For a jungle DJ, selection was never only about owning released records. Dubplates and unreleased music could make one set materially different from another. Producers cut tracks for particular DJs, versions changed before release, and tunes could become known from radio or tapes long before listeners could buy them. That culture rewarded selectors who were connected to the music at source, and it helped pirate stations function as testing grounds for the scene.

Brockie dates his partnership with MC Det to 1992, after Det — who lived only a few blocks away — talked his way into the pairing with the confidence people would soon recognise on the mic. A DJ-and-MC partnership could develop its own rhythm over time: the MC learning where the selector leaves space, the DJ understanding how the voice changes the energy of a mix, and both becoming recognisable together. The Kool FM recording from January 1997 catches that relationship in its natural radio setting.

The One Nation tape from March 1997 expands the picture. Brockie is joined by Det and Skibadee at the Sanctuary, showing the same culture operating on the large-rave circuit. By this point jungle was increasingly being described as drum & bass, but pirate-radio personnel, MC combinations, dubplate culture and tape-pack circulation still connected the newer name to the scene that produced it.

By the end of the 1990s Brockie had also created Undiluted Recordings, using the label to move from selector into producer and label-owner without abandoning the DJ-first identity. Releases with Ed Solo, Kane and others turned the dubplate culture he had been testing on Kool into records carrying his own imprint.

A later One Nation recording pairing Brockie back-to-back with Nicky Blackmarket adds another useful layer. Both DJs were closely embedded in London’s jungle infrastructure, but through different institutions — pirate radio, record shops, labels, raves and dubplate networks. Heard together, the archive is less a list of famous names than evidence of how that infrastructure overlapped.