Fabio grew up in Brixton with music around him: ska, Motown, soul and the sound-system culture of local blues parties. In his own long-form recollections, he describes hearing large systems and MC-led parties from an early age, then moving into London’s soul-club culture and becoming obsessive about records, imports and production credits.

DJing emerged from that record knowledge rather than from a plan to become a professional selector. His early circle included Colin Dale and Grooverider, and the late-1980s acid-house explosion radically widened the musical possibilities. Spectrum, warehouse parties and the new electronic records arriving from Chicago, Detroit, Belgium and elsewhere created a space in which the rules were not yet fixed.

Rage at Heaven became the crucial laboratory. Fabio and Grooverider first built a following in the upstairs room before moving into the main room, where they were allowed to play an unusually open mixture of house, techno, Belgian records, breakbeats and dubplates. Both men have stressed that they were experimenting rather than following a pre-existing jungle formula. The sound that later became hardcore, jungle and drum & bass was emerging from a much wider network of producers, pirates, clubs and dancers; Rage was one of the places where those records were heard together and pushed hardest.

The partnership with Grooverider became one of British dance music’s longest-running DJ relationships. Kiss FM provided a radio platform, while rave and club bookings placed them at the centre of the transition from hardcore into jungle. A 1992 Kiss recording in the Rave Archive is particularly revealing because it catches them before the later drum-and-bass identity had fully settled.

As jungle established itself, Fabio increasingly championed the musical, soulful and atmospheric side of the sound. That sensibility eventually fed into Creative Source, the label he founded to support producers exploring deeper and more melodic forms of drum & bass. It also shaped his broadcasting: alongside Grooverider he became a long-running presence on BBC Radio 1, where the pair introduced successive generations of producers to a national audience.

Fabio later coined the phrase liquid funk on his Radio 1 show for a strand of drum & bass he associated with artists such as Calibre — music that retained breakbeat and bassline weight while foregrounding soul, melody and flow. The term spread far beyond the original radio segment and became one of drum & bass’s major subgenre labels.

His importance is therefore broader than any single “first”. Fabio connects black British sound-system and soul culture, acid house, Rage, hardcore, jungle, national radio, label curation and the liquid era. He has spent decades not only playing drum & bass but explaining, contextualising and continually renewing it.