‘Steve is the Jesus Christ of MCs, man. He died for all these guys.” With a chuckle, Darrell Austin is lionising his uncle Steve – who under the moniker Stevie Hyper D was the 1990s’ main man in live drum’n’bass MCing.
A swaggering, gap-toothed, stentorian town crier for the scene at key raves like One Nation and Dreamscape, he was credited with accelerating the fastchat of Caribbean soundsystem MCs into exhilarating “double-time” rapping, which defined the sound of jungle and pointed the way towards garage and grime. He also coined or popularised many of the rudeboy battle cries doing the rounds at the time: “Bad boy come again!”; “Junglists, are you ready!” Then, after dying of a heart attack in 1998 aged 31 on the eve of releasing his first album, Stevie Hyper D fell into obscurity. “When I first met Jamie, I was still very raw and bitter about how Steve’s legacy was being handled,” Austin says.
