The Night Drum and Bass Beat OK Computer

On 15 October, Roni Size is due to climb down into Cwmorthin, a disused slate mine in Eryri in North Wales, and play a DJ set roughly 400 metres underground. A handful of competition winners will follow him through waterlogged passages to a chamber that becomes a dancefloor for one night. The plan is to set a record for the deepest underground rave. It is a striking stunt, and it raises a fair question for anyone under thirty: why does a drum and bass producer from Bristol still carry enough weight to make headlines like this? The answer goes back to one evening in London in the late summer of 1997, when a record made by a crew of jungle DJs beat "OK Computer".

Who is Roni Size?

Roni Size was born Ryan Williams in Bristol in 1969, the son of Jamaican parents. He grew up on reggae and sound-system culture, was expelled from school at sixteen and found his way into the house parties thrown by The Wild Bunch, the collective that later produced Massive Attack. He learned to make music at the Sefton Park basement project, a youth club that had turntables, a mixing desk, drum machines and samplers for anyone who turned up.

By the early nineties Bristol had a jungle scene of its own, and Size sat at the centre of it with three friends: Krust, DJ Die and Suv. Together they ran Full Cycle Records, while Bryan Gee's London label V Recordings put out early tracks by Krust and by Size with Die. This was the circuit described in our piece on the pirate stations that built UK dance music: dubplates, pirate shows, specialist record shops, and a scene that was only beginning to register in the mainstream press.

Reprazent: turning a DJ crew into a band

The idea that changed everything was simple to say and hard to do. Size wanted to perform drum and bass live rather than as a DJ set. He put together Reprazent: the four Full Cycle producers, Dynamite MC, the singer Onallee, Si John on bass and Clive Deamer on drums. Breakbeats that had been chopped and stitched in a sampler now had to be played by a human being at around 170 beats per minute, with a double bass walking underneath.

The album that came out of it, "New Forms", was released on Gilles Peterson's Talkin' Loud label on 23 June 1997. It was enormous by any standard: the full two-disc version runs well over two hours. It mixed hard jungle rhythms with jazz chords, soul vocals, hip-hop phrasing and real instruments. The singles were "Share the Fall", "Heroes", "Brown Paper Bag" and "Watching Windows". At the time, most of the British music press still filed drum and bass under club music, something you danced to rather than an album you sat down with.

The 1997 Mercury Prize shortlist

The Mercury Music Prize is judged on one question: what was the best album of the year from a British or Irish act? In 1997 the answer looked obvious. Radiohead's "OK Computer" had come out that June to the kind of reviews bands wait a career for, and Music Week reported that it went into the night as the 11-8 favourite. The rest of the shortlist was a snapshot of a peak year for British music: The Prodigy's "The Fat of the Land", The Chemical Brothers' "Dig Your Own Hole", Primal Scream's "Vanishing Point", Suede's "Coming Up", Beth Orton's "Trailer Park", the Spice Girls' "Spice", and two classical works by John Tavener and Mark-Anthony Turnage.

Reprazent were a 16-1 outsider. They were up against two of the biggest dance acts in the world, a stadium-sized rock band and the best-selling pop group of the moment, with a sprawling double album of drum and bass.

Why New Forms won

When the result was read out at the Grosvenor House hotel in London, Music Week reported that Size was clearly taken aback himself. According to Music Week, the judges, chaired by the pop sociologist Simon Frith, placed "OK Computer" second and still called it a classic album.

It is hard not to read the result as a verdict on the live idea. Reprazent had shown that drum and bass could work as a band: proof that the music could stand up as composition and performance, not only as twelve-inches cut for a sound system. "OK Computer" was a brilliant rock record in a long tradition. "New Forms" sounded like something that had not existed five years earlier. Mercury juries have often leaned towards the record that points somewhere new, and this one pointed further than anything else on the list. It was also a second win for Bristol in three years, after Portishead took the prize with "Dummy" in 1995.

Radiohead fans have argued about the result ever since, and "OK Computer" routinely appears on lists of famous Mercury snubs. Both things can be true: Radiohead made the more influential rock album, and Reprazent made the more surprising one.

What changed after the Mercury win

The prize did what it is designed to do. "New Forms" peaked at number eight in the UK album chart and eventually went platinum. "Brown Paper Bag", released that October, reached number 20 and became the group's best-known track; we placed it among the ten records that built drum and bass. Reprazent became a band that festivals booked, not a name on a flyer, and they toured internationally on the back of it.

For drum and bass as a whole, the effect was bigger than one album's sales. It is fair to say that labels, broadcasters and magazines that had treated jungle as a youth-club noise from London and Bristol now had a reason to take it more seriously. The idea that a dance record could be judged as an album, alongside rock and classical work, became normal. Arguably, the path from "New Forms" to the live drum and bass acts that headline festivals today is a straight one.

The story did not stay a fairy tale. Size and Die had already started a side project, Breakbeat Era, with the singer Leonie Laws, and its album appeared in 1999. The second Reprazent album, "In the Mode", came out in 2000 and never matched its predecessor's impact, and Size went on to make solo records. Then "New Forms" refused to go away. In 2008 a reworked edition appeared alongside a revived Reprazent with Dynamite MC, Onallee and Si John; that September Size said he planned to end the group after a third album. A larger reissue followed in 2017, and the reformed band went on to play festival stages including Glastonbury and Bestival.

From the Grosvenor House to a slate mine

Which brings us back to Wales. The deepest-rave attempt is, on one level, a marketing idea. But it also follows the same instinct that built Reprazent. FAZEmag reports that geophones and hydrophones will pick up the frequencies running through rock, mud and water, and feed the resonances back into the mix live. A sound-system culture that started in basements and youth clubs is still, three decades later, looking for new rooms to make bass move air.

Plenty of Mercury winners are now remembered mostly as answers in a pub quiz. "New Forms" lasted because it proved a point that sounded radical in 1997 and obvious now: a record born on dubplates and pirate radio could be the best album in the country. Whatever happens 400 metres under Eryri, that night in London is why Roni Size's name still opens doors.