The Wire 300: Simon Reynolds on the Hardcore Continuum #4: Hardstep, Jump Up, Techstep (1996)

During the dark days of 1993, when Jungle was still banished from the media limelight, AWOL was the Hardcore club. Especially after the demise of Rage, one of the earliest Hardcore clubs, AWOL was where the scene’s inner circle of musicians, DJs and label runners would gather on a Saturday Night/Sunday Morning to hear DJs like Randall push the music to new heights of ruff-cut intensity. After a no fixed abode period in 1994, having been dislodged from its location at Islington’s Paradise, AWOL settled last year at The SW1 Club in Victoria, and re-established its former role. Some of the drum ’n’ bass elite may have moved onto Speed or the Blue Note Sunday Sessions, but that core Jungle audience is still to be found at AWOL (or similar nights like Club UN and Innersense at the Lazerdrome), shocking out to the underground sounds of gangsta hardstep and darkcore 96.

AWOL isn’t an acronym for ‘Absent Without Leave’, but for ‘A Way Of Life’. If you’re not involved in the scene, this article of faith – that buying records at specialist shops, going to clubs at the weekend, wearing MA2 jackets and Puffa jackets and smoking a lot of spliff, constitutes a set of tribal folkways – can seem a tad overstated. But the frequency and conviction with which the claim “jungle, it’s a way of life” is restated, suggests that for the true disciple, something massive has been invested in this music. Most external discourse about Jungle has been concerned with the music’s ‘progressive’ formal properties, and disagreements as to where the cutting edge is currently situated. What about the social energies embedded in the music? What exactly is at stake for fans? What makes them return week after week to experience the same thing, over and over again?

Ethnological research wasn’t on my mind the first time I checked out AWOL; fun was. I’m not sure if I found any, at least in the conventional sense, but the visit was a reaffirmation of flagging faith; a confirmation that, despite the surfeit of pseudo-jazzy drum ’n’ bass crossover tracks, Jungle is alive and kickin’. It was also a reminder that, despite all the success of album-length, home-listening drum ’n’ bass, Jungle’s meaning is still made on the dancefloor. At massive volume, knowledge is visceral, something your body understands as it’s seduced and ensnared by the music’s paradoxes: the way the breaks combine rollin’ flow and disruptive instability, instill a contradictory mix of nonchalance and vigilance; the way the bass is at once wombing and menacing. AWOL is a real Temple of Boom; the low-end frequencies are so thick and all-enveloping they’re swimmable. Inside the bass, you feel safe, and you feel dangerous. Like cruising in a car with a booming system, you’re sealed by surround-sound while marauding through urban space.

Tonight the AWOL vibe is neither celebratory nor especially moody, but neutral. In contrast to the rousing exhortations of the MC, the crowd response is subdued (not abnormal for Jungle). It’s a few days after the death of Leah Betts (the teenager who died of overhydration after she took a tab of Ecstasy at her own birthday party), and initially that’s how I account for the utter absence of any E-vibes in the area, and for the insistent –verging on desperate – dealer trying to offload her unusually bargain-price wares. Instead, it’s champagne, Pils and ganja that appear to be everybody’s intoxicants of choice. Later, I notice a gaggle of sofa-sprawled punters who do appear to be E’d up, but are struggling to conceal the fact; their flushed but impassive faces ripple and spasm as if they’re trying to hold down the rising high. It’s only later I realize the reason for their restraint: no one else here is luv’d up, and it’s as though any kind of blissed behaviour is deemed inappropriate, unseemly, a throwback.