Ratpack are Evenson Allen and Lipmaster Mark, a partnership whose roots pre-date the explosion of British rave. They first linked in 1985: Evenson was already a DJ/vocalist coming from reggae, soul and hip-hop, while the teenage Mark was a human beatbox and keyboard player. Their identity grew from those two traditions meeting rather than from somebody later inventing a DJ-and-MC package for rave.

The decisive change came when Mark took over a spare DJ set and Evenson stayed on the microphone, singing and hyping while Mark mixed. At a point when MCing over house music could still be treated as taboo, the combination suddenly made sense in the room. Ratpack’s defining format was there: Mark controlling the records and Allen working the crowd, singing, chatting and improvising over the music.

Before the giant licensed raves, Trip City and the warehouse/squat-party circuit gave that format a rougher laboratory. Mark has remembered parties in derelict buildings, warehouses and even an empty swimming pool, with crews occupying unusual spaces and building a night around whatever they could turn into a dancefloor. That DIY chapter matters because Ratpack’s crowd style was formed before the polished old-skool brand existed.

Where some strands of hardcore became darker and increasingly studio-focused, Ratpack embodied rave as communal party music. Their sets could move through house, breakbeat, hardcore and familiar samples without losing the call-and-response relationship with the room. That made them particularly suited to the huge event culture of the early 1990s, where personality mattered alongside record selection.

Searching for My Rizla became their signature record and one of the most instantly identifiable tunes associated with old-skool rave. Built around the duo’s humour and vocal identity, it captured something their live appearances already demonstrated: Ratpack were not simply a DJ with an MC placed on top. The interaction itself was the act.

The surviving Rave Archive tapes put that reputation back into its proper setting. A 1993 Dance Paradise recording documents Ratpack at the height of the hardcore tape-pack era; Fantazia’s Big Bang at Glasgow SECC later that year places them inside one of the period’s major rave brands; and Dance Trance at Birmingham’s Que Club in 1994 shows the partnership carrying into the next phase of the scene.

That longevity is important. Ratpack became strongly associated with the old-skool identity precisely because the duo continued to perform the music as a living rave format rather than treating it solely as nostalgia. The records matter, but the archive makes most sense when Ratpack are heard doing what made them different: working a crowd together.

They also kept the studio side alive. The 2017 (co)LabRats project brought artists including Baby D, Skibadee, Ragga Twins, Slipmatt and The Wideboys into a deliberately cross-generation album. Mark described the process in familiar Ratpack terms: build the musical backdrop, give Evenson space to sing or drop bars, then develop the track from the chemistry between them. The same partnership that worked in a warehouse therefore still worked as production method decades later.