Metalheadz
Metalheadz became more than a label: a catalogue, a club institution and a community that helped define drum & bass.
Metalheadz is what happens when a record label becomes a culture. Goldie, Kemistry and Storm created it in 1994 out of friendships formed around Rage, Reinforced and the rapidly changing jungle scene. Records were only one part of the system: A&R, artwork, DJs, dubplates, the Blue Note Sunday Sessions and a community of producers all helped define what drum & bass could become.
Rage, Reinforced and three people building a label
The official Metalheadz histories make one thing especially clear: Kemistry and Storm were not supporting characters in somebody else’s label story.
Kemistry, Storm and Goldie
Kemistry and Storm were drawn into the emerging sound through Rage at Heaven, hearing Fabio and Grooverider push breakbeat music into unfamiliar territory. They met Goldie during that period and introduced him directly to the music and the people making it. Their partnership was already active beyond clubs: by late 1991 they were playing pirate radio, first on Touchdown FM and later Defection FM, while building the DJ identity that would become central to Metalheadz.
Goldie moved into the Reinforced orbit, contributing artwork and A&R and absorbing how Marc Mac, Dego and the wider Reinforced family treated a label as a collective rather than a logo. His own Rufige Kru recordings pushed that studio experimentation further. When Metalheadz launched in August 1994, Kemistry and Storm were not simply DJs attached to it: they recruited artists, handled press and promotion and, when Goldie became consumed by Timeless, took on day-to-day responsibility for running the label.
In 1994 that network became Metalheadz. The famous skull-with-headphones identity fused Goldie’s graffiti and visual-art background with the idea of music surviving beyond the person making it.
The catalogue finds its own room
The early catalogue and the Blue Note nights developed together: producers made music for a crowd that often heard the newest plates before release.
Records built to push the boundary
Metalheadz never meant one production formula. The consistency is the expectation that artists bring something distinctive enough to move the music forward.
Metalheadz channelGoldie — Inner City Life
History SessionsGoldie with Randall — Metalheadz history
25 Years of MetalheadzPhotek interviewBlue Note and the feedback loop
The Blue Note Sunday Sessions are central because they shortened the distance between making a tune and discovering whether it worked. Storm remembers the first Sunday filling almost immediately despite the risk of the slot, and the club’s Eskimo system became part of the creative process. Producers competed to get new plates heard there, DJs heard technical ideas tested at punishing volume, and ravers travelled specifically for music that might exist nowhere outside a DAT or acetate.
That feedback loop helped Metalheadz become more than a record company. The label logo meant a night, a crowd, a standard, a set of visual codes and a belief that drum & bass should keep mutating. The Blue Note years are where “Metalheadz” stops meaning only a catalogue and starts meaning a physical place where the next version of the music could be heard before release.
From the Rave Archive UK collection: original Metalheadz New Year’s Eve 1998 flyer material. By this point the Headz identity had travelled well beyond the original Sunday room while retaining a recognisable community of DJs and MCs.
The founders remain part of the story
Metalheadz’s own artist histories and catalogue pages are unusually valuable because they explicitly record Kemistry and Storm’s organisational role as well as Goldie’s.
