Metalheadz
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 jungle through nights such as Rage, hearing Fabio and Grooverider push breakbeat music into unfamiliar territory. They met Goldie during that period and became a close creative partnership. Metalheadz later described the three as a “trinity”.
Goldie had already moved into the Reinforced orbit, first contributing artwork and A&R and then spending long sessions watching Marc Mac and Dego stretch sampling technology into new forms. His own Rufige Kru recordings proved how far that experimentation could go. Kemistry and Storm, meanwhile, recruited artists, worked press and promotion, DJed and helped shape the network around the emerging imprint.
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 on film and record
Selected recordings and films from the label, its artists and its history.
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. Producers competed to get new plates heard there. DJs could hear technical ideas tested on a serious system. Ravers travelled specifically to hear music that might not yet exist anywhere 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.
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.
