Moose is one of those MCs where the tapes tell you more than a tidy discography ever could. He was already on the microphone while hardcore was mutating underneath everybody’s feet — breakbeats getting rougher, bass getting heavier and nobody stopping the rave halfway through to agree what the new music ought to be called.

Listen to the Rave Archive tape from 10 January 1992: Colin Dale and LTJ Bukem at Passion’s “Kicks Into 92” at The Event in Brighton, with Moose on the mic. That’s early. We’re still talking hardcore and rave, yet you can already hear the ingredients pulling towards jungle. Moose isn’t somebody added to the story afterwards; his voice is actually on the tape while the change is happening.

By the middle of 1992 Moose was at Roast. One surviving Linford Studios tape has Kenny Ken and Grooverider on the decks with Rebel MC, Moose and Five-O on microphones. You hardly need somebody twenty years later drawing a genre family tree for you — the line-up already shows the collision: rave DJs, breakbeats, bass and a microphone culture with roots well beyond house music.

Then there’s the old argument about who first called the music jungle. Rebel MC appears in versions of the story; Moose appears in others, remembered using “jungle” or “hardcore jungle” naturally on the mic. We’re not going to invent a winner because rave history rarely works that neatly. The interesting bit is that the language was coming out of the dances themselves. MCs weren’t waiting for magazines to decide what everybody was listening to. They were naming, describing and hyping it while it was still being made.

Kool FM became another major environment. At the station’s third-birthday party in 1994, Moose appears repeatedly alongside Det, Ragga Twins, Navigator and Five-O. Those tapes preserve the multi-MC format at full strength: voices overlapping and handing space between one another rather than a single frontman dominating the set.

The BBC later brought that performance culture onto national radio. In the first 1995 series of One in the Jungle, DJ Rap’s programme was hosted by MC Moose. That matters because Radio 1 did not simply invite DJs to submit anonymous mixes; the show reproduced the DJ-and-MC structure listeners already knew from pirates and raves.

Moose also developed long-running associations with DJs including Grooverider. Rave Archive UK’s 1996 Roast “Sunday Sessions” tape from SW1 Club captures the combination at a time when jungle was increasingly being called drum & bass and the production style had become cleaner, deeper and more technical.

Moose also wasn’t welded to one DJ or one catchphrase. The tapes put him with very different selectors and different combinations of MCs, which tells you something about the job. There was no backing track arranged around your verse and no guaranteed sixteen bars waiting for you. You had to hear what the DJ was doing, hear what the other MCs were doing and find your place in it.

And he kept doing it. A 2014 Rave Archive recording from the Moondance Camden Palace Reunion has Moose over Randall and Storm. Call it old skool, reunion or whatever you like — once there’s a crowd in front of you, nostalgia won’t MC the rave for you. You’ve still got to read the room.

That’s really why Moose belongs here. 1992 breakbeat rave, Roast, Kool FM, Radio 1, jungle, drum & bass and the later reunions aren’t separate little careers. They’re one long run through a scene that changed its name and its records several times while he was standing there with the microphone.