Talkin’ Loud, 1999

Words by Roy Spencer

As the 50-strong string orchestra started to play, Krust welled up. Until then this music had been trapped inside him. He knew what it was that he had wanted to say with this album – the pain, the joy, the struggle he’d been through in getting to this moment.

It was like everything that he’d ever wanted to express effortlessly filled the air, and it was beautiful.

“It was like a movie!” says the famed junglist. “The stress that we’ve been through, and all this effort. All of that stuff that we’d put out, these guys started to play back. It was a magical moment. I just burst into tears. It was such a relief.”

This would be his first solo album. And the drum & bass pioneer, who’d helped define the genre through ground-breaking releases with Reprazent, and on the legendary V Recordings, Dope Dragon, and Full Cycle labels, had to dig deep.

“That was the spirit of it: the writing had to really be personal. The storytelling had to be personal. It broke us all in the process.”

Helping him tell the story was a tight knit group of close friends and musicians, willing to bare all. String arranger, Simon Hale. Vocalist and songwriter, Morgan. Soul Coughing drummer, Yuval Gabay. Double bass don, Si John. And keys whizz, Mike Crawford. Each opened up, and provided heartfelt loops for Krust to break apart and carefully piece back together.

“I had so much amazing stuff to work with,” he says.

The resulting music deconstructed the template of the drum & bass Krust was known for, and fused it with golden era hip-hop swagger, classical music sophistication, film score cinematics, trip-hop depth, and a punk mentality.

“I was experimenting with everything to help soundtrack what I wanted to get across,” says the Bristol legend. “I just wanted to make a record that was ambitious and different to what I normally did. I had to push the boundaries and just be bold.

“I mean, why else are we doing what we’re doing, if you’re not making art for people 10 or 20 years from now?”

Track by track with Krust