All Crews
Brian Belle-Fortune
Monday- August 3rd, 2005

Jungle/Drum and Bass (JDB) is one of the fastest growing music genres of our generation. It is surrounded by a scene filled with amazing stories, dedicated talents, and most of all, technologically advanced cutting-edge sounds. In All Crews, author Brian Belle-Fortune (DJ Zy:on of London pirate radio stations Rude FM/Ruud Awakening), eloquently documents the ascension of a scene that introduced a new sound which became the modern threshold of musical innovation. Some people called it “devil music,” and the media reported it as a “black-male phenomenon,” but to people like Dillinja, Roni Size, and Goldie, JDB was a musical revolution. It was a way to break the mold and introduce a style of music unlike anything ever heard before. Rich with carefully developed multi-layered tracks and speeds that exceeded 160 beats per minute, JDB quickly caught the masses attention and became the quintessential sound of the underground.

Written in diary-like entry style, Belle-Fortune starts by taking us back to the summer of 1989 with memories of his first all-night outdoor rave party. He describes the innocence of the scene in its earliest moments before addressing issues that threatened JDB’s longevity such as racial tensions, safety in clubs, media misrepresentation and so on. Through quotes and interviews, we hear opinions about JDB from the scene’s most prolific and pioneering DJs such as Ram Records’ co-founder and sensational talent Andy C, V Recordings’ founders, Bryan Gee and Jumping Jack Frost, and Grooverider, who was one of the first JDB DJs to take his music beyond illegal pirate radio and land his own show on the famous Radio 1 (a subdivision of the British Broadcasting Corporation). Being an updated version of Belle-Fortune’s original cult classic All Crews Muss Big Up, which covered the first decade of the scene’s evolution, this revised edition gives us an extra 80 pages filled with all the most recent developments that have occurred throughout JDB within the past five years.

Belle-Fortune put together a breath-taking anthology of the many facets that contributed to the success of Jungle/Drum and Bass. All Crews captures the essence of heroes, and tells the stories of legends. Through Belle-Fortune’s lush descriptions and straightforward writing technique, we get an intimate look at all the dedication and perseverance that helped make JDB the world’s most internationally recognized form of electronic music. After reading this book, Jungle/Drum and Bass will never sound the same again.