Nicky Blackmarket — Nicholas Andersson-Gylden — grew up in London and came into dance music through electro-funk, pirate radio and the record culture of the 1980s. Before jungle had a name, he was already part of the network that would make it possible: buying records, DJing house parties and following the rapid shift from acid house into breakbeat hardcore.

Blackmarket Records in Soho became the defining institution around his career. In 1990 Nicky and Dave Piccioni took on the established shop and pushed it toward the new breakbeat sound. As hardcore separated from house and garage, Nicky championed the faster music in the basement. For DJs from London and far beyond, the shop became part record store, part information exchange and part social network.

That role is hard to overstate in a pre-internet scene. New white labels arrived at the counter; DJs heard what other DJs were buying; promoters dropped off flyers and tickets; producers brought acetates and test pressings; and ravers could discover what was happening that weekend. Nicky’s knowledge became a practical map of the scene.

His DJ career developed alongside the shop rather than separately from it. Pirate radio — including Friends FM, Pulse FM and later Kool FM — gave him regular access to listeners while the rave circuit expanded across London and the UK. He was therefore hearing new music at source, selling it in the daytime, broadcasting it on pirate radio and playing it at raves at night.

Production was never the centre of his identity, but it was part of the history. In the early 1990s he recorded at the 4hero/Reinforced orbit under the Nick OD name, placing him directly inside the experimental breakbeat culture that was becoming jungle.

His partnership with Stevie Hyper D became one of the most recognisable combinations of the jungle era. Nicky has spoken openly about the closeness of that friendship and the impact of Stevie’s death. Surviving Rave Archive tapes from Roast, One Nation and Kiss FM preserve the chemistry in a way no retrospective biography can reproduce.

The shop remained open through jungle’s growth into drum & bass, allowing Nicky to witness several generations of producers and DJs from behind the same counter. His importance lies partly in that continuity: he was not simply booked by the scene, he serviced it, supplied it and remembered who was connected to whom.

That is why Nicky Blackmarket belongs in rave history as more than a popular DJ. Blackmarket Records, pirate radio and his huge contact network were cultural infrastructure — the analogue systems through which underground music moved before search engines, streaming platforms and social media existed.