Culture

In 2006, DJ Zinc (Government name: Benjamin Pettit), one of the true legends of jump-up jungle drum and bass, found himself heading towards a crossroads of sorts.

“With drum and bass, around 2006, it became hard to find music that sounded cutting edge,” he says, speaking down the phone line from Sydney, Australia. “So when I noticed I was losing the excitement [for the music], I was like, right, I don’t want to turn into one of those DJs that just turns up and plays music to get paid. It is important to me that I’m excited about what I do.”
By the end of 2007, Zinc, mastermind of such internationally recognisable jump-up jungle drum and bass classics as ‘Super Sharp Shooter’ and his remixes of ‘Ready or Not’ by the Fugees and ‘Junglist’ by Tribe of Issachar, was completely out of love with the genre that had driven him to global acclaim. So, what do you do? Well, in Zinc’s case, he took a year off. After re-emerging in 2009 through the Trojan Horse of a genre he has self-verified as Crack House, in early 2010 he completely battered dance floors across the globe to pieces with a genuine singularity of a tune: ‘Wile Out’, featuring the irrepressible vocals of the UK’s legendary Miss Dynamite. Mid 2010, ‘Wile Out’ shows no sign of slowing down; in fact, it’s only getting bigger.
“It’s in the Japanese pop charts,” Zinc laughs. “That has just happened this week. So it’s really cool the way the track has been received in all different territories. It’s getting played all around the world, and it’s really opened a few doors for me production-wise as well. People are saying, ‘Do you want to come and co-produce a track with this particular artist?’ It’s really cool. I’m very happy I’ve made a track that has done so well. I wanted a track that was going to establish me in the house scene, because when I first started doing house, people were coming up to me and saying, ‘Are you going to play some drum and bass as well?’ They were still after the drum and bass stuff. But as soon as ‘Wile Out’ came out, everyone was just like, when are you going to play ‘Wile Out’? Do you have anything else that sounds like ‘Wile Out’? In London and the UK, they’re not interested in the drum and bass at all. They just want to hear the new stuff, what is coming next.”
It’s brilliant really, because it shows that at heart, Zinc is still the same musically excited dude he must have been when electronic music, records, and turntables first grabbed him in his teenage years: still on the cusp, still looking for the next thing, still seeing and hearing the invisible.