Judge Jules was Julius O’Riordan before the nickname stuck, and the “Judge” bit wasn’t dreamed up by a record-label marketing department. He studied law in London while DJing, and the name followed him out of that world and into the clubs. By the time most of Britain knew the voice from Radio 1, Jules had already spent years buying records, playing parties and building a crowd one night at a time.

His roots sit in the London club and warehouse-party years of the 1980s. Soul, funk and early house all fed into the box as imported American dance records started changing what British DJs could do. Jules became part of the capital’s club circuit and also promoted nights, so he understood club culture from both sides of the booth — trying to fill a dancefloor and trying to fill a venue.

Radio arrived before Radio 1. Jules started radio DJing on the pirate Kiss FM in 1987, three years before the station won its legal FM licence in 1990. That mattered. Kiss sounded like club culture because so many of the people behind the microphones were actually working DJs. House, garage and the records being played at the weekend could reach London during the week without waiting for mainstream daytime radio to decide they were acceptable.

Through the first half of the 90s his club profile kept growing. The sound was still mainly house-led and far broader than the “trance DJ” label that later got attached to him. Listen to an older Jules set and you hear the period changing underneath him: house, tougher club records, big vocals and increasingly euphoric European sounds all rubbing shoulders before trance became a massive scene in its own right.

He joined BBC Radio 1 in 1997, and from there Judge Jules became part of the weekend routine for a ridiculous number of clubbers. Like Pete Tong, he wasn’t explaining dance music from a distance. He would play the records on the radio and then play them to a club crowd. For listeners preparing for a night out or trying to identify a record from the previous weekend, those shows became part of the wider machinery of club culture.

By the end of the 1990s trance had become enormous. Gatecrasher, Cream, Godskitchen and the major festival arenas were full of large riffs, breakdowns and euphoric records, and Jules was closely associated with that expansion. His sets were deliberately high-energy, built around records capable of producing a strong collective crowd response.

Ibiza became another huge part of his story. Radio 1’s broadcasts helped British clubbers follow the island every summer, while Jules turned his own connection with Ibiza into Judgement Sundays at Eden in San Antonio. For years it became one of the island’s best-known weekly parties, carrying the Judge Jules name beyond a radio show and into a full night where house and trance audiences could hear the records that had already reached them through radio.

There was plenty happening away from the decks too. Jules worked on productions and remixes, compiled mixes and remained involved in the record industry while maintaining an intensive DJ schedule. His reputation continued to rest on practical club work: specific records, specific clubs, radio recordings and long-running Ibiza nights.

After a long run at Radio 1 he left the station in 2011, but he didn’t disappear from dance music. DJing continued, as did production and later a return to Kiss. By then the way people discovered tunes had completely changed — downloads, streaming, social media and track IDs everywhere — but Jules had come from an era when a DJ on the radio could genuinely send thousands of people looking for the same piece of vinyl the next morning.

Our New Year’s Eve 1995 Essential Mix catches him before the later Radio 1 residency and before trance completely swallowed the end of the decade. That’s exactly why it is worth hearing. It shows that Judge Jules did not suddenly appear when superclubs became dominant. He came through the earlier house and club years first, then followed the music as it became bigger, faster, more euphoric and increasingly mainstream.