Daren Ellis grew up in Grays, Essex, with hip-hop, electro, reggae and sound-system culture already in the air. He started DJing in 1983 on cassette decks and moved onto Technics as the rave years approached. A visit to the Gold Mine on Canvey Island helped turn his attention towards acid house and the new music arriving through the late-1980s pirate stations.

Radio became central. Daz took graveyard shifts on Elite FM alongside DJ Vibes and, when that station disappeared, he did not simply look for another show. In 1989 he helped create Cyndicut FM. Broadcasting across Essex, East London and North Kent, Cyndicut became one of those stations people discovered by turning the dial at the right moment and then refusing to move it.

The station also became a doorway for DJs who would shape the next decade. Early Cyndicut history includes Andy C, Majistrate, Ego Trippin’ and others who went on to become established names. Daz was therefore part DJ, part organiser and part infrastructure-builder — one of the people making sure underground music had somewhere to live before the wider industry caught up.

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. Released through DeeJay Recordings in 1995, it became one of the records that defined jungle’s mid-90s sound: reggae-rooted, heavy enough for a sound system, instantly recognisable and still capable of turning a room decades later. Grooverider had wanted the tune for Prototype, but DeeJay Recordings got there first.

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 makes his legacy bigger than one anthem, even when the anthem is Babylon. Daz helped make the records, built labels to release them and built a radio station to give underground music a home. That is rave culture from the inside out.