4-Hero are jungle legends: part two of two

Plus Nick Léon, Erika de Casier, SOPHIE; Luke Sanger and more

Summer in Catalonia gets satanic

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4-Hero are jungle legends: part two of two

This is part two of my homage to 4-Hero. Part one can be read here. Last time out, we got to Parallel Universe, in 1994.

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.

PS I’ve put together a best of 4-Hero playlist for you, on Spotify.

PPS let me know your 4-Hero favourites below.

Some listening

Nick Léon and Erika de Casier - Bikini

Nick Léon and Erika de Casier is one of those musical combinations that seems obvious when you say it, her sultry R&B melodies combining brilliantly with Léon’s experimental dance-floor smarts. And so it proves on Bikini, a beach banger that is somehow both ethereal, wistful and rock solid, like the memory of summer parties past.

Adelaida - La Carn Vol Carn

More gothic decadence from Catalonia’s Adelaida, who makes music with all the dark allure of a poison flower. The production here is minimal and rhythmic - it reminds me oddly of the once-omnipotent Diwali Riddim - over which her vocal slinks, like a drunken cat coming down a stair case. Meat wants meat, indeed.

SOPHIE  - Berlin Nightmare (feat. Evita Manji)

A wonderfully crunchy synth line lies at the centre of this new single from SOPHIE and Evita Manji, like Benny Benassi’s Satisfaction having its wicked way with Kernkraft 400’s Zombie Nation. This kind of synth was also prominent on Charli XCX’s summer-slaying Brat, which may suggest something is afoot. Or just that a good synth crunch is eternal. Anyway, Berlin Nightmare is catchy and fun and not exactly ground-breaking but who cares when the sun is in the sky? It also speeds up tantalisingly in its very final second - so maybe the album will be a mega mix?

Luke Sanger - Solid Steps

After more than a decade stuck obstinately at one - that’s Luke Abbott’s Holkham Drones - the genre of Norfolk coast electronics will finally tick over into two albums in September, with the release of Luke Sanger’s Dew Point Harmonics, a record inspired by “hiking in a particularly wild and isolated section of the Norfolk coast”. As someone who lived on a particularly isolated section of the Norfolk coast for three years as a child, I very much welcome this, particularly when the results are so melodically charming on album throat cleaner Solid Steps. The song shines and wobbles like The Orb at the bottom of a rock pool, somewhere between idyllic and troubling, where much of the greatest ambient music lies. Boards of Canada are an obvious reference point, although Sanger’s work is a lot brighter, as, on this particular song, are Kraftwerk, for the clean melodic lines.

Things I’ve done

Line Noise - With Mike Dunn

This week on Line Noise, I spoke to one of the funkiest men in house music - God Made him Funky, after all - yes it is Mike Dunn, the Chicago house producer, DJ and supreme vocalist. We talked about recording at his grandma’s house, working with Armando, turning down French Kiss and the relaunch of his Dance Mutha label. 

The playlists

My newest and the bestest playlist is so close to that three-figure breakthrough I can almost smell the Deep Heat of the changing room. After that, surely, all will be diamonds and pearls in my life. So please do follow my playlist of all the best new music from the last three or so years. And if you prefer new music to be strictly 2024, then I have the Newest and the Bestest 2024 for your demands.