Too hot to handle: RIP Randall, the jungle and drum & bass DJ’s DJ

There at the genesis of acid house in the UK, turned on to the sound at Notting Hill Carnival in 1987, Randall started to DJ himself at warehouse events like Delirium and on pirate radio station, Centreforce. When Colin Faver didn’t show up for a 10,000 capacity gig at a Living Dream rave in Leyton, Randall got his big break. “When you’re put in a situation like that, you end up playing better,” Randall told Drum & Bass Arena in 2017. “You have to really think about it. That was my signing-on date as a DJ people wanted to hear play.”

As acid house morphed into distinctively UK forms like breakbeat hardcore and later jungle and drum & bass, Randall was at the forefront, playing at key clubs like AWOL, Orange at The Rocket on Holloway Road, Lazerdrome and many more, and gaining a reputation as one of the finest selectors in the scene. “We all signed on to the craft of acid house, and I learnt the format,” Randall said. “It all became numbers, just counting bars, matching them perfectly and finding the drop. It’s exactly the same style I took into drum & bass.”

While Fabio & Grooverider were making seismic waves at Rage in Heaven in the early ’90s, Randall — alongside Micky Finn, Dr S Gachet, and Randall’s long-term MC, GQ — was ruling AWOL at Paradise Club in Islington (which later became Complex, and is now a shopping centre). A hotbed of seething polyrhythms and ruinous bass, it was another crucial incubator for the emerging jungle sound.

After Goldie moved back to the UK in 1992 and immersed himself in the scene, he started to hang out with Randall. “You knew the second he and Goldie arrived in the club by hearing Goldie’s whistle,” recalled Andy C. “It’s like, ‘Right, Randall’s here and it’s going to go off’.” Goldie, of course, started cutting tunes on dubplate for his top DJ boys Grooverider and Randall, and when he started Metalheadz nights at the Blue Note, Randall was a key resident. He remained an integral part of ‘Headz throughout the label’s long, storied history. As he was at the time with Reinforced, too.

Andy C also used to follow Randall, hanging out at AWOL and learning from his mentor. In 1994 the two recorded ‘Sound Control’, one of the earliest releases on Andy’s fledgling Ram Records, a tuff, minimalist jungle missive full of time-stretched Amen breaks, a Tarzan-like wail, and a deep “we control the sound” sample. After starting Mac II Recordings, Randall released ‘Mystical Merlin’, a collision of roughneck drums, ethereal moods, bright synths and vocal snips, while A-Sides collab, ‘Turn It Loose’, was a monstrous techstep piece with a Reese bass that could cause tidal waves in the club. Later, on the title track of his 2020 EP ‘Time 4 Da Switch’, Randall showed his versatility, blending liquid keys and overdriven bass with crisp beats.

Randall regularly guested on Kiss FM’s early jungle radio show in the early ’90s, and was involved in starting Forest Gate record shop, De Underground. He continued to be a stalwart of the scene as drum & bass went overground in the late ’90s, still regularly booked by the true headz and those in the know as the sound went international.