Matthew Nelson — Slipmatt — was already embedded in London’s rave culture before SL2 reached XL. His older brother Paul was one of the people behind Raindance, giving Matt a frontline training ground at Jenkins Lane and the wider Raindance circuit while he and school friend Lime were also learning production, pirate radio and white-label economics for themselves.

SL2 grew directly out of that environment. Formed with Lime and MC Jason “JJ” James, the group moved through Raw FM 104.4 and their own Awesome Records before XL carried the records to a much wider audience. That order matters: the rave built the act before the charts discovered it.

DJs Take Control and Way in My Brain established the group before On a Ragga Tip crossed into the UK mainstream in 1992. That crossover matters because the record did not arrive from outside rave culture: it carried breakbeats, bass and sampled reggae influence from the same scene Slipmatt was playing every weekend.

As hardcore changed through the decade, his DJ career changed with it. Slipmatt became a fixture at promoters including Dreamscape and World Dance, moving from breakbeat hardcore into the faster, brighter happy-hardcore era without losing the rave-tape audience that had followed him from the beginning.

The key production bridge was the SMD series. Slipmatt cut the first SMD dubplate in 1993 and used the records to pull euphoric rave hooks back into a scene that was splitting between darker jungle and four-to-the-floor hardcore. He has described SMD as a major part of the birth of early breakbeat happy hardcore, and the records became some of the most sought-after tools in that 1993–95 period.

In 1995 he started Universal Records to push that new generation further, releasing artists including Force & The Evolution — soon to become Force & Styles — Sy & Unknown, Hixxy, Brisk, Billy Daniel Bunter and others. The label role makes his importance bigger than his own sets: he was helping create routes for the producers who would define happy hardcore after the first rave explosion.

Radio remained part of the same network. By the later 1990s Slipmatt was hosting on Kiss FM, carrying a career built through pirate radio, rave booths and cassette culture onto a legal London station without leaving the event circuit behind.

The archive documents that progression unusually well. Dreamscape 6 at The Sanctuary in 1993 catches the earlier phase; World Dance at Lydd Airport in 1994 captures the scale of the outdoor circuit; Dreamscape 24 in 1997 and a BBC Radio 1 In the Jungle session with MC Det show how his sound and audience continued through the later 1990s. His Bagleys recording with MC Ruff also links this profile directly back into Dream FM and London’s MC culture.