BC088 - Five Mixes: DJ Randall
R.I.P. to a London drum & bass legend
Photo via DJ Fresh’s tribute on X
Randall McNeil, the London drum & bass powerhouse, dead last week at age 54, was a DJ’s DJ—someone whose spot on the lineup came so late because he was the one everybody was there for, including the others on the bill. This is from Marcus Barnes’s obit in Mixmag:
It was said that Marly Marl and Goldie would vie for the opportunity to carry Randall’s records into A.W.O.L. where he would host a weekly masterclass in mashing up the dance. “He absolutely ruled, I’ve never seen a DJ take over a club and rule. They had six other DJs playing in there and no one really gave a shit because they were just waiting for Randall to come on and play,” Fabio said in an interview with Outlook Festival in 2017. “He was doing this mixing thing and I’ve never seen anything like it and he used to have people come from all over England to watch him play . . . He used to make two tunes sound like one tune.”
There wasn’t a cult of personality around Randall the way there was and is with the flagrantly charismatic likes of Goldie. But Randall’s longevity wasn’t just a case of sticking to it. “We were guys that had nothing, all we had was our music and this scene that was starting to evolve,” Randall told The Ransom Note of the scene-making record shop De Underground. “And we were just passionate about that. We didn’t know I’d be still here at this age still out there playing music to the masses.” Things have changed considerably since the dubplate scene of the nineties, but as Randall told UKF, “I’m blessed to be top of a lot of lists still. Very blessed.”
Randall’s sets have been prized so long that there are already enormous archives of his DJ mixes available. MixesDB2 lists 265; a public folder via @DorkSirjur on X contains over 500 sets. But these five will give you a good idea.
You can hear four of these sets at this SoundCloud playlist, which also contains a link to the fifth mix.
DJ Randall, Rave FM, London, Pt. 1 & 2 (1990)
The version above has a typo: “Rave 99.2 FM.” Clear as day, Randall announces it as “Rave FM, 99.3” around 15 minutes in. That’s how it appeared when I first found it, several years back while researching my Primer on UK pirate radio mixes for The Wire. The mix was part of a colossal haul of vintage pirate tapes by one DanWarbo of Mixcloud, which I spent a lot of time cataloguing in an XL file. Well, I still have the file, and all the DanWarbo mixes, hundreds of them, are gone now, including two others I figured to be shoo-ins here—a 1989 Rave FM set and a 1994 multi-DJ tape from Ice FM, for the record.
This was one of those, but it turns out—and this was not the case with the others I checked for—has been widely traded in different forms for years. Thank goodness, and no wonder—if you want the bleep & bass era summed up in an hour and a half, this is your ticket to paradise. Deeply pitchy vocal samples, building-block melodies played on Speak & Spells, and bass lines that thunk imperturbably on, like a planter punching holes in the earth.
We get a full menu of drum & bass’s musical predecessors here—Brit-rap, industrial, house, cut-up DJ tracks, and of course bleep. “Mr. Kirk’s Nightmare” emerges @ 40:00, the full-blown offspring of the industrial, bleep, and house leading to it. It goes right into some more bleep—logically enough, bleeps are how 4Hero close out their emergent opus. But it is telling—there aren’t many records like this one yet. That won’t be the case for long. Solution: play the record again, over some bleep this time, and have it work beautifully even while the seams show. And he’s a natural, engaging presence on the microphone, calmly shouting out his friends, fielding requests—he replays “Mr. Kirk” in response to one—and handling business. One later moment resonates for other reasons: over bleeps so massed they overlap with also-just-forming trance, we get a sound bite from ABC: “I’ve seen the future/I can’t afford it.”
DJ Randall, The Ultimate in Hardcore—Volume 1 (mixtape, 1992)
Heavy-lidded and loved-up, this tape is so ripe it threatens to burst apart. If the mixes sometimes sound like three or four records at once instead of two, well, that’s how the records sounded then too. Maybe at the time, the title of this thing looked simply like a sell job, and very likely that was the idea—it was the first of a series, Randall first up because he was the known don—but over time it looks, sounds, feels like simple fact. Obviously, gloriously, stupidly definitive.
DJ Zinc & DJ Randall w/MC Flux & MC MC, Live on Kiss 100 FM: Innovation ‘Sweat,’ Camden Palace (April 13, 1995)
This half-and-half tandem came at the start of a busy weekend for Randall. The set aired, it appears, on a Thursday. On Friday, April 14, he played a Helter Skelter event at Milton Keynes; MixesDB2 has a half-hour tracklist, probably from one cassette side of a tape pack. Next on that list—it’s credited as the 16th, which probably just means early Sunday morning, a.k.a. late Saturday night—is the listing for an hour from Equinox (SoundCloud). Neither of the latter pair repeats a tune.
But this hour gets the nod because (a) it was a near-miss from the above-mentioned Primer, before I realized Kiss 100 didn’t really count after a certain point, and (b) it’s deadly from the off, and not because it kicks off with something outwardly rough—nope, it’s none other than “Pulp Fiction,” whose smooth bass line was a fork in the music’s road. Yet the volume here, not to mention the MCs’ exuberance and the crowd’s in turn, make hash of such distinctions: it rips, flat out. It gets more rambunctious quickly—the B-lines and the drums alike pound it out for dominance and the whistle crew hardly lets up—and it stays there.
As the first song indicates, the breaks are going so fast that producers are getting ready to leave their hi-hat snake trails behind in favor of cleanly articulated twos and fours. But that hasn’t happened yet, and the trudge that would drag the music down later in the decade is yet to be codified. So we get all the exuberance of old with all the fiddly production science to come—the best of both worlds. It’s real punch-you-in-the-chest shit. If you want to know where the wubs came from, start here.
DJ Randall, History of Jungle Set, The Lab, LDN (Mixmag; January 16, 2016)
Randall clearly excels in front of a crowd, and the audience is audible here as it is at Camden Palace in ’95, but the affect is very different. You don’t have to watch it to grok it—I listened on SoundCloud and got the effect. It’s a small, appreciative crowd of aficionados, not a massive, and it’s two decades removed from the heyday it celebrates, but the thrill remains real. Granted, only playing stuff that came out in the four years covered by the above two sets, even without repeating much, is cheating some; Randall remained in the flow of new work throughout his career and life. But he also played lots of old-school parties and events, and clearly knows how to keep it fresh without stinting on the classics—and how to elicit cheers like an old pro.
DJ Randall, Isolation Session (Rinse FM; March 30, 2020)
Randall had spun regularly on Rinse FM starting in 2014; the most recent show on file there aired in October 2023 on the Rinse subsidiary, and former pirate rival, Kool FM—not just a beloved eminence, as with the Lab set above, but a regular presence. When things began shutting down in March of 2020, Randall turned it into his episode’s theme—a propitious pairing of topic and sound, given the moody vibe so much D&B proffers, particularly post-1995. The dark sound Randall had championed from the go—he was the first to play Metalheads’ “Terminator” in 1992—here benefits from the brooding focus. There’s playfulness here, for sure—the tweaked B-lines start showing up in force close to the hour mark, and they keep coming. But the restlessness of lockdown shows up in the music, too, as well as Randall’s occasional interjections, urging the listeners to take COVID seriously. And the set is structured so cleanly that it sounds foreordained rather than assembled, no surprise at all given the DJ. R.I.P.