4-Hero are jungle legends
Not many musicians can claim to have been at the heart of a new style of music, still fewer to be integral to two; and basically only 4-Hero can say they were fundamental to the birth of three different musical genres.
When I think of my favourite jungle producers Dollis Hill duo 4-Hero are always there, at the front of my thoughts. They also made some of the very best broken beat records; and you can definitely see their influence in the growth of the nu jazz scene in the mid to late 1990s. (Wikipedia, I see, also has them as pioneers of breakbeat hardcore but I’m not sure we can separate that from jungle.)
But it’s not just what they did; it’s how they did it. 4-Hero — aka Mark “Marc Mac” Clair and Denis “Dego” McFarlane — are one of the most adventurous production duos in modern music, pioneering techniques like time-stretching and pitch shifting that would become fundamental to jungle; but they did so while making astounding records, ones that could as dark as infected hospital waste or as light as a buttonhole carnation, funky, soulful, reflective and mind-blowing in their quality.
Marc Mac and Dego — alongside early 4-Hero members Gus Lawrence and Ian Bardouille — came together, like so many other important UK artists of the time, around pirate radio, specifically London’s Strong Island.
“That radio station wasn’t just about us turning up and playing records, though. We were the station,” Mac said in a 2016 interview with Red Bull Music Academy. “It wasn’t about just music. It was always the technology behind the music, too. We were building the speakers for our sound system and building the transmitters for our radio station. Then, it wasn’t just about making music. We had to run a label.”
That label, Reinforced Records, would go on to become one of the most important labels in jungle. Goldie, Nookie and Doc Scott all recorded for Reinforced, which still continues to this day, although its focus is now more on reissues. But Reinforced is best known for the incredible string of 4-Hero productions, starting with All B 3 / Rising Son, which was released in May 1990, two tracks that combined breakbeats, samples and rave synths at a house tempo in a way that is borderline irresistible, like sunlight breaking over a particularly verdant rave. “When DJ Hype incorporated house and UK hip-hop into his music and dropped Rising Son, nothing else sounded like that. It was a new fusion,” Dego told Clash magazine in 2007.
The contrast with the group’s second release, the Combat Dancin’ EP, and more specifically with its break-out track, the curdled classic Mr. Kirk’s Nightmare, couldn’t have been greater. Where Rising Son was beatific, Mr. Kirk’s Nightmare was demonic, an anti-drug song (apparently) that features the chilling refrain “Mr Kirk, your son is dead; he died of an overdose…” over a murky Get Into Something break and bleeps that would rival anything on Warp for their ominous musicality. Naturally, ravers took it to their bosoms in their thousands and it became an anthem.
They followed this in 1991 with something equally as radical: a full-length LP, In Rough Territory, a rarity among rave producers and particularly those on their own independent label. In the RBMA interview, Gus Lawrence said that the decision was largely a financial one — “We were thinking about the money that we could sell the album for in order to pay off our debts quickly.” — but Marc Mac disagreed.
“I was still trying to make some music,” he said. “But seriously, having grown up collecting records, you know that the next stage as an artist is to make an album. I can’t think of any jungle artists at the time who were making albums.”
The album bears traces of both motivations. Mr Kirk’s Nightmare features twice on and much of the rest of In Rough Territory fees like an attempt to recreate the lightning-in-a-bottle flash of their dark rave anthem. The album even features a track called The Last Ever Bleep Track (Used To Death). It’s a fun release, rather than an essential one — I particularly love the Specials-sampling No Sleep Raver (Tired Eyes Mix) — but it feels very much of its time, a document of the era when British producers were just starting to creep into tentative jungle territory, with breaks, bass lines and mangled attitude.
It was around this time that the duo started to work with Goldie. Kemistry, who would go on to become one of the most famous DJs in jungle before her tragic death in 1999, took Goldie to see 4-Hero play at the Astoria and he was immediately smitten. “When I saw this shit I was like, ‘That’s what I want to do,’ he told Electronic Beats in 2016. “I pulled Marc to the side and I gave him my number and said, ‘Look, I do a lot of artwork and stuff, I wanna work with you.’”
Sure enough, Goldie redesigned the Reinforced logo and eventually released a series of classic 12 inches for the label as part of Rufige Kru, alongside his friend Linford Jones and producer Mark Rutherford. Rufige Kru’s first release for the label was the Krisp Biscuit / Killa Muffin 12 inch in 1992, followed by the Darkrider EP.
“When I took it [Darkrider] to Reinforced, they were fucking blown away, and after that I really started to work with them,” Goldie told Electronic Beats. “I would be there with Dego in the daytime and then when Dego would finish at 4 p.m., Marc would turn up after work and we’d continue with the same tune.”
(1992 would also see the debut of Tom & Jerry, Dego and Marc Mac’s more overtly dance-floor focused, rave-y duo. They have enough classics on their own to fill several pages. But Maxi(Mun) Style from the 1994 Dancer
EP is the one for me, for the way it effortlessly fuses airy soul samples with the filthiest dancehall.)
4-Hero’s work with Goldie essentially involved transforming the ideas in his head into musical reality. “I had a lot of ideas and samples in my head and Marc and Dego would listen to what I said,” Goldie told Electronic Beats. “We went into these intense sessions of cutting up breaks, recording them to DAT, resampling everything onto the computer and layering stuff.”
“Goldie was an ideas man. He was very futuristic and would push us as engineers and producers,” Gus Lawrence told RBMA. “He’d say, ‘I need the break to sound like the door was opening and closing,’ or, ‘Can you make the keys sound like flowers blooming?’ I’d sit there thinking, ‘What are we going to do?’ It was sound design before we even knew what it was, and we were doing it for Goldie.”
According to Marc Mac it was Goldie who first brought pitch shifting to jungle, on Rufige Kru’s classic Terminator. “The first time that I ever heard pitch-shifting was from Goldie,” Mac told RBMA. “He phoned me up about 3 AM when I was in bed and said, Listen to this, listen to this!’ down the phone, with Terminator playing in the background. I was like, ‘What is going on? Am I dreaming?’ That was pitch-shifting done though a device called a H-3000 Harmonizer, which musicians would use for harmonising vocals, guitars and other stuff. Goldie was putting stuff that wasn’t supposed to go through there, like drums, and came out with this effect. We used to call it ‘the parameters.’”
Time-stretching — changing the speed of a sample with altering its pitch — however, was a 4-Hero innovation. “Time-stretching came about when me and Dego sat down one day with a 950 sampler and we needed to check every single page of the manual: editing, this, editing that, and so on,” Mac told RBMA. “On the last page there was something on time-stretching and we thought, ‘What the hell is that about? Let’s try to figure it out.’ We started to experiment with it and heard how it made the breaks sound funny.
“Then we thought that if we sample the same break five or six times with a different pitch and put it back together, but made sure that the break stayed the same length, it should stay in time but the sound would change. That was the first time I remember anybody doing time-stretching.”
You can hear this effect on the February 1993 4-Hero 12 inch Journey From The Light, a record of fast, nocturnal breaks that is credited — notably by Simon Reynolds — with inventing the darkcore breakbeat sound that soon became jungle. The title track is a disgustingly stomach-churning record, the synth lead wriggling around like the snake pit in Raiders of the Lost Ark, while the grainy, time-stretched vocal that introduces the song would soon become a classic jungle effect.
It’s a mark of 4-Hero’s incredible polarity that 1993 also saw the duo release Better Place, a swinging US house track with Diane Charlemagne on vocals, and their next album, 1994’s Parallel Universe, would open with one of their sweetest, most heart-rending songs in Universal Love, written by Charlemagne and Marc Mac and beautifully sung by Carol Crosby, with dreamy saxophone licks also to the fore. It is, quite simply, one of the greatest songs in jungle and its jazzy, orchestral bent showed the way forward for 4-Hero as the jungle sound they had pioneered crept into the mainstream.
After Parallel Universe, there wouldn’t be another 4-Hero album until the classic Two Pages, in 1998. But the duo weren’t being lazy. In 1995, just one year after Parallel Universe dropped, they re-surfaced as Jacob’s Optical Stairway, releasing an eponymous album for Belgian techno label R&S.
It is a fitting home for a record that draws parallels between Detroit techno and jungle, pulling the two genres together as perhaps no release has done since. 4-Hero had long been Detroit fans and the influence was definitely there on 1994’s Parallel Universe, in the astral synth sweep of Follow Your Heart, P.t Two and — especially — in the Carl Craig-ish Sunspots, which fuses a four / four and hi hat techno beat with a clipped break.
Marc Mac’s Nu-Era project, too, specialises in Detroit-ish beats. But 4-Hero made this connection explicit on the Jacob’s Optical Stairway album, which not only came out on a label best known for techno but also featured a collaboration with Detroit innovator Juan Atkins, on The Fusion Formula (The Metamorphosis), a dark, overdriven electro number that eventually mutates into a jungle break. Jacob’s Optical Stairway isn’t a techno album by any means — breaks still dominate — but it does admirably in showcasing the elegant electronic melodicism that 4-Hero took from Detroit.
Jungle blew up in the UK in the mid 1990s. 4-Hero’s former protege Goldie signed a major label deal and even had chart success with his fantastic debut album Timeless, which made number seven in 1995. Roni Size’s Reprazent collective signed to Gilles Peterson’s Talkin’ Loud label in 1996, which was part of the major label Mercury, and would go on to score a platinum album with their New Forms the following year.
It was no massive surprise, then, when 4-Hero themselves signed a deal with Talkin’ Loud, the first fruits of this being the Earth Pioneers EP in 2007. The record was led by the Ursula Rucker collaboration Loveless, a truly stunning song that combined a prescient environmental message with live instrumentation — double bass, strings, drums — and an orchestral jazz feel, in a way that definitively expanded jungle’s scope while staying true to its cosmopolitan roots. “We did have a negative reaction to the idea [of going overground] at first. But fans that we’d never have picked up wouldn’t be there if we hadn’t,” Mac told Clash magazine in 2007 of signing to a major label. “We needed to get out to more people.”
The same year saw the release of two of my all-time favourite 4-Hero productions: the creeping, cosmic Hero EP with composer and saxophonist Chris Bowden (a MUCH overlooked record); and the duo’s epochal remix of NuYorican Soul’s “I Am The Black Gold of the Sun”, a mix that danced ever so delicately around the original, teasing out strands of jungle in the drums until it seemed that this surely was the song’s destiny. (4-Hero are excellent remixers and I particularly recommend their takes on Terry Callier’s Love Theme From Spartacus and Courtney Pine’s I’ve Known Rivers.)
The scene was set for something remarkable from 4-Hero on their major-label album debut. And this is precisely what they delivered on Two Pages. It is, in many ways, the pinnacle of 4-Hero’s dazzling career, the one record that everything had been leading up to and a brilliant summation of their sound. Released as a double CD or four vinyl set, the first half of the album (Page One) drew on the jazz and funk sounds that had been scattered through 4-Hero’s music from Parallel Universe onwards, as the duo’s early influences took root.
“I believe we started producing ‘jazz fusion’ without knowing we were doing so,” Marc Mac told Duane Powell in 2018. “Both myself and Dego have always collected records from a young age so by time we started making music we not only had a good collection of music but also had a fair knowledge about the records in our collections.”
The difference, as Mac explained, was that 4-Hero now had the budget to work with session players and live instruments, from Chris Bowden on saxophone to Roger Beaujolais on vibraphone. The result was symphonic live-sounding jungle at its very best, like Roy Ayers or Charles Stepney beamed into the final years of the 20th Century. Planeteria (A Theme From A Dream) sounds so utterly lush and brilliantly poised, with its delicate string arrangement, brushed drums and operatic vocals, that it is hard to believe this is the same group who were making No Sleep Raver (Tired Eyes Mix) just seven years previously.
The second CD, or Page Two, was for fans who wanted to hear “something more D&B, hard”, according to Mac. As such, it brings dark, city vibes to Page One’s pastoral sunshine, delivered on tracks like We Who Are Not As Others in a graceful manner that expands on, rather than undermines, Page One’s sophisticated musical styles. 1998 was a year in jungle was started to get very dark indeed, through techstep anthems like Ed Rush, Optical & Fierce’s Alien Girl, and Page Two suggested that Dego and Marc Mac could be as dark as anyone, should they turn their minds to it. But now was not the moment.
Two Pages was a minor chart hit in the UK, reaching number 38, and it was also nominated for the year’s Mercury Music Prize. But if anyone was hoping that 4-Hero would build on this jazz-step base, they hadn’t been paying attention to the duo’s history of innovation.
In a 2007 interview with Clash, the group said that jungle had become “a prison and we had to break out. Drum & bass beats always had to be hard and up-tempo, at 100 beats per minute rather than 90.” The duo were getting older too. “Age creeps into it as well,” Mac told Clash. “When we were doing jungle and drum & bass, we were banging it all night long, sometimes playing until 10 in the morning. It was music for the dance floor, it always had that dance angle… I suppose we don’t need to make it now we’re not on the dance floor any more. I got married, I’ve got a kid; I’m chilling. It’s the grown-up side to 4-Hero.”
Two Pages turned out to be (basically) 4-Hero’s last jungle record. On 2001’s Creating Patterns this was replaced by nu jazz styles (as on the gorgeously downbeat Ursula Rucker collab. Time), techno funk (Twothesme, Eight) and broken beats (the utterly anthemic Hold It Down and Something Nothing.) 4-Hero’s Reinforced Records was also turning towards broken beat, releasing records from the likes of G Force and Seiji, who would later become part of Bruk leading lights Bugz in the Attic.
Broken beat was on the up in 2001 and 4-Hero were right at the front of it. But the genre never quite reached the commercial heights of jungle / drum & bass and Creating Patterns, while an excellent record, didn’t recreate the success of Two Pages.
The group’s next — and so far final — artist album, 2007’s Play With the Changes, felt a bit like 4-Hero doing a tribute to themselves, returning to familiar collaborators (Ursula Rucker, Lady Alma) and familiar sounds (soul, broken beat — and there’s even a kind-of jungle-ish break on Bed of Roses.) Some of it is excellent, notably opening song Morning Child, but it lacks something of the duo’s vital spark, a feeling reinforced by the release of the brain-bursting Reinforced Presents 4-Hero — The Early Plates, a compilation of some of the group’s earlier, wildest songs in 2008.
And then…. nothing. Both Marc Mac and Dego have busy solo careers — Dego’s 2000 Black project with Kaidi Tatham is well worth investigating — but it looks like they haven’t worked together in years and it is hard to say if 4-Hero still actually exist.
Maybe they don’t need to. 4-Hero records are still there to listen to, still box fresh and the duo’s influence is widely felt, from the jungle revival to the current crop of London jazz acts. Yussef Dayes, for example, named 4-Hero’s Loveless as a particular influence in a 2016 interview with Dummy. They are a group of infinite variety, ceaseless innovation and pure musical quality.
And the love runs deep. Rave historians love 4-Hero; jungle purists love 4-Hero; Detroit techno legends love 4-Hero; West London jazz funk heads love 4-Hero. And you really should do too.
This was originally published on my Substack — if you like it, why not subscribe? https://linenoise.substack.com/
PS I’ve put together a best of 4-Hero playlist for you, on Spotify.
