Daren Ellis came out of Grays, Essex, with hip-hop, electro, reggae and sound-system culture already in his ears. He started DJing in 1983 on cassette decks, moved onto Technics and then got hit by the same thing that grabbed so many of us at the end of the decade: acid house, pirate radio and the feeling that the dial had suddenly opened onto a completely new world.

Radio quickly became more than a sideline. Daz did graveyard shifts on Elite FM alongside DJ Vibes, and when that station disappeared he did not wait around for somebody else to give him a slot. In 1989 he helped start Cyndicut FM. If you were in Essex, East London or North Kent and found it by accident, it became one of those pirate frequencies you stopped touching. That was the power of those stations: they did not ask permission, they simply put the underground straight into people’s bedrooms, cars and kitchens.

Cyndicut also became a doorway for the next lot coming through. Andy C, Majistrate, Ego Trippin’ and others all sit in that early story. That is the thing with people like Daz: they were never just “the DJ.” They were finding transmitters, keeping shows alive, giving younger names somewhere to be heard and making sure the music had a home before the wider industry even understood what it was looking at.

Production followed. He worked with Darren Hickey and cut an early version of Rougher before a prison sentence interrupted the momentum. The interruption became another turning point. Daz later recalled helping establish a recording studio inside Highpoint Prison, using the time to learn production properly and write the business plan that became Splash Recordings.

When he came home, the plan became real. Splash Recordings arrived in 1994 as the rougher underground outlet and a route for Cyndicut-associated producers. Juice Records followed as its more polished sister label. The names told their own story: Splash drew on Reggae Sun Splash; Juice nodded back to the hip-hop Juice Crew that had been part of Daz’s earlier musical world.

As a producer he moved between names — Undercover Agent, Daz, M.T.S. and, for one particularly important record, Splash. The Undercover Agent name suited somebody who was never especially interested in being the loudest personality in the room. He could operate behind the scenes while the records did the talking.

Then came Splash – Babylon. Some tunes are good records; some become part of the furniture of the scene. Babylon is one of those. Released through DeeJay Recordings in 1995, it had the reggae weight, the jungle pressure and that instant recognition factor where a crowd knew what was coming almost before the tune had properly opened up. Grooverider wanted it for Prototype, but DeeJay got there first. Decades later it still does exactly what it was built to do.

The catalogue around it is deep: Oh Gosh!, Barracuda, Dub Plate Circles, Five Tones, World Mash Up, Jah Works, Hard Disk, Incredible and many more. The tunes appeared across Juice, Splash, Suburban Base, Eastside and DeeJay, carrying the same mixture of breakbeat pressure, bass weight and dub logic.

Daz died in his sleep on 20 March 2024 after health problems in his later years. Cyndicut responded not as a brand looking backwards, but as a family remembering its founder. The station has continued to grow and its later move onto DAB was framed in part as a tribute to the man who began it in the pirate era.

That is why Daz’s story is bigger than one anthem, even when the anthem is Babylon. He made the records, built labels to get them out and helped build a pirate station so the underground had somewhere to be heard in the first place. That is rave culture from the inside out — not standing beside the scene, but helping keep the whole thing moving.