Benjamin Pettit came through London pirate radio at a time when legal stations gave little space to the music developing around hardcore and jungle. He has recalled spending so much on records that buying decks remained out of reach, which meant his first sustained access to turntables came through his first pirate-radio show in 1991.

Pirate radio threw him straight into the actual scene. He linked with DJ Swift, and the pair were making tunes and broadcasting while hardcore was getting darker, faster and more chopped-up by the month. There wasn’t a meeting where everybody agreed jungle had started. People like Swift and Zinc were simply pushing the breaks until the old description stopped quite fitting.

Under names including Swift & Zinc, Dope Skillz and later his own name, Pettit produced across the transition from hardcore into jungle. The aliases were practical: different outlets, different experiments, but the same obsession with hip hop drums, samples and bass pressure.

Then came Super Sharp Shooter in 1995. Its instantly recognisable vocal and tightly edited hip-hop sampling made it one of the defining jungle records of the period. Along with Zinc’s unofficial Fugees Ready or Not remix, it established him far beyond pirate radio. The importance was not simply the use of recognisable source material, but how the samples were cut into the drums, bass and overall architecture of the track.

Ganja Kru with DJ Hype and Pascal followed, along with True Playaz. The collaboration grew through the record-shop, club and dubplate networks that connected jungle DJs and producers in the mid-1990s. Hype and Pascal became a major part of Zinc’s musical world, and that relationship is audible across the records and sets from the period.

The late-90s Rave Archive tapes catch him at the height of that drum & bass phase. Innovation at Camden Palace in 1995 has Zinc and Randall with Flux on the microphones; One Nation Millennium at Stratford Rex in 1999 has Zinc with Funsta and Flux, showing the style in a much more streamlined, late-decade form.

And then Zinc did something that could easily have annoyed everybody expecting another D&B tune: he made 138 Trek. Slower, swinging and sitting somewhere around breaks and UK garage, it was still unmistakably built by somebody who understood bass pressure. The record went massive and, more importantly for Zinc, proved he didn’t have to spend the rest of his life making one tempo just because he’d become famous at it.

That freedom fed into Bingo Beats. Breaks, garage and bass-heavy club records could sit together without being restricted by one tempo or scene label. That kind of crossover later became familiar within UK bass music, but around 2000 it marked a significant departure from the expectations attached to an established drum & bass producer.

Zinc later stepped away from making only drum & bass because he felt the scene had become too self-referential. He began describing his bass-heavy house work as “crack house” — partly as a joke, partly to avoid other people’s preconceptions about what “house” should sound like. The important part was the same as before: change the tempo, keep the low-end impact.

His production tools changed too. Early jungle demanded expensive studio access, while later software let him work far more independently. Yet the method stayed consistent: absorb what pirate radio, clubs and younger scenes are doing, then make records that sit slightly sideways to the established genre rules.

That is the thread through Zinc’s whole story. Moving into garage, breaks or house did not erase the jungle background: the hip-hop influence, chopped breaks, pirate-radio education and focus on how a record works through a sound system remained constant. The tempo changed; the underlying club logic did not.