Top Cat’s place in rave history begins before jungle became a settled genre. Anthony Codrington started MCing while still at secondary school after spending time with cousins in Jamaica who pushed him towards the microphone. His foundations are in UK reggae, dancehall and sound-system culture: music in which an MC’s voice is not simply placed over a backing track but functions as part of the system itself — identifying the crew, addressing the crowd, reshaping familiar rhythms and turning a performance into something specific to that dance.

That tradition fitted naturally into early jungle. As breakbeat hardcore absorbed more reggae and dancehall language, recognisable vocalists could give a tune an immediate sound-system identity. Top Cat has explained that several of his first jungle appearances came from producers sampling the acapellas of his existing reggae tunes — including Push Up U Lighter, Ruffest Gun Ark, Bunn the Sensi and Special Dedication. The relationship worked in both directions: jungle producers drew on reggae’s bass, dub and vocal culture, while singers and MCs found a new high-speed setting for techniques already developed outside rave.

In April 1994 he formed 9 Lives Records, moving from vocalist into label ownership and production at exactly the point ragga jungle was becoming a major force. That matters because Top Cat was not just a voice being sampled by somebody else’s scene; he was building infrastructure of his own inside the same movement.

Top Cat became one of the voices strongly associated with that meeting point. His vocal presence sits comfortably across reggae and jungle because the underlying performance logic is related: rhythm, repetition, personality, crowd recognition and the ability to make a version feel owned rather than merely played. In jungle, a distinctive vocal phrase could circulate through records, remixes, dubplates, pirate broadcasts and rave tapes until it became part of the scene’s shared language.

The Congo Natty connection places Top Cat inside a particularly explicit strand of this history. Michael West’s productions foregrounded reggae and Black British sound-system culture rather than treating them as background flavour, and vocalists were central to that identity. The archive photograph bringing Top Cat together with Congo Natty and Tenor Fly captures that culture visually as well as musically.

The recordings retained here work differently from a conventional artist discography. DJ Ron’s 1995 Essential Mix documents the wider jungle environment in which this vocal language circulated; the Congo Natty / Top Cat promo mix puts the connection directly in focus; and the old-skool jungle selection preserves the broader record culture around it. Together they point back to the thing that matters most: Top Cat’s voice belongs to a continuum from sound-system session to jungle record to rave floor.