“The line from La Belle was down the vennel and away up the road on the Cowgate. “We had never had a sellout, and it completely sold out in advance,” says DJ Kid. “The majority of music that was always heard up here was a 4/4 beat.”īut there came a turning point in 1997, when Manga booked Ed Rush to play their first birthday. “You just couldn’t get breakbeat and jungle accepted in Scotland,” he says. More than once, DJ Kid played to a room of 30 people in a 500 capacity venue. Unlike the nights that were booking him down south, where he played teeming jungle and hardcore raves, he and Manga founder G-Mac struggled to fill the floor at La Belle Angele. Scotland didn’t take easily to breakbeat at first, DJ Kid remembers. That’s as true today as it was in the 90s, when DJ Kid was a resident at the one-time Edinburgh institution, Manga. “If it wasn’t for the amount of English students that were in Edinburgh, there wouldn’t have been a scene over the years.” Nearly a quarter of students admitted to the University of Edinburgh in 2021 were English, and they bring their music tastes with them each year when they come up to study. It means you’ll always have that support,” he says. “Because you’ve got that new influx every year, it’s like this revolving door of students. Scene veteran DJ Kid thinks that the reason why drum & bass has taken off so much more in Edinburgh than elsewhere in Scotland mostly lies with its university students. Photo Credit: Ben Glasgow (Lights Out Collective) Richard Ince and DJ Era ventured up from the Scottish Borders in 2007, before they built their now notorious rig, Electrikal Sound System.

Refracta used to mission over to Bongo from North Berwick, a seaside town an hour up the road. She’s far from the only Scottish d&b fan to have gravitated to Edinburgh. “Edinburgh’s definitely the drum & bass capital of Scotland,” says Anikonik, who moved down from Dundee with the night she co-promotes, Junglism Scotland, in 2016. It’s one of Scotland’s oddities that, though Glasgow’s is considered the country’s music capital, it’s in Edinburgh that breakbeat has built its strongest enclave. Names like Slam, JD Twitch, Optimo, Sub Club and Pure have all helped to put Scotland’s name on the global electronic music map, with Glasgow’s nightlife especially celebrated worldwide for its bustling house and techno scene. “Everywhere else in Scotland is a lot more of a techno culture, really,” says producer Refracta , who plays as a resident with Electrikal and Midnight Bass.

There’s even the Jungle Bus, which couriers Aberdonians down to big d&b nights in the central belt.īut in spite of its committed fanbase, drum n’ bass remains an underdog genre in Scotland. You’ll see the same faces at Midnight Bass in Edinburgh, Symbiosis in Glasgow, or the Junglism Castle Party in Dundee. That means that, even with more than a hundred miles between Aberdeen and Edinburgh, Scottish heads tend to travel between cities to attend club nights. “You could probably fit the whole of the drum & bass scene in Scotland into Bristol.” To put the size of the Scottish scene into perspective, there are fewer people in the whole of Scotland than there are in London – London has a population of nearly nine million, while Scotland only has five million. “Edinburgh’s a really good hub for connecting the whole of Scotland together,” says Anikonik, local DJ, Nook promoter and former EQ50 mentee. This feature was first published by the UKF website.

Sneaky sound system summertime madness