ABSTRACT
Sheryl Garratt describes how the tensions affected the club night Rage, launched as an acid house event at Heaven in late 1988. The pioneering Jungle DJs Fabio and Grooverider began playing the club’s upstairs bar before moving into the main room in late 1991 and making the night “a laboratory for the new breakbeat science”. The music played, “the overlap of reggae bass, breakbeat and ragga chants”, “drew black clubbers to the rave scene in significant numbers for the first time”. To grow up in London’s Caribbean communities in the 1980s and 1990s was still to grow up with blues parties. The Jamaican sound system had been at the heart of the black music scene in London since 1950s and it now became the driving force in the development of jungle, garage and grime. The most important factor in the development of the London sound system business in the 1980s and 1990s was the activity of pirate radio stations.
