4hero

4hero or 4 Hero is a band from Dollis Hill, North London, comprising Dennis 'Dego' McFarlane, Mark 'Marc Mac' Clair, Gus Lawrence, and Ian Bardouille. While the band is often cited as 4 Hero (or 4-Hero), 4hero is the style of the name used on the band's albums and website.

McFarlane and Clair also run the Reinforced record label.

Career

They are renowned as pioneers and frontrunners in jungle and drum and bass, and the group obtained a Mercury Music Prize nomination for their 1998 album Two Pages.

Their style was initially uptempo breakbeat house and techno, and has progressed to hardcore, jungle, and drum 'n' bass. Comparisons have been drawn between them and East London band Shut Up And Dance, with both bands evolving in the early 1990s as a rapprochement between the breakbeat-driven African-diasporic musical structures of hip-hop and reggae, and the dark, European reconstruction of the techno sound popularised by the likes of Joey Beltram, CJ Bolland, and Mundo Muzique. 4hero both embraced the dynamics of populist rave culture, and maintained an avant-garde status as innovative and experimental producers. They trailblazed genre-crossing studio techniques like timestretching and pitch-shifting.

Early Output

4hero's first EP, Combat Dance (1990) underpinned the sub-bass pressure of the bleep 'n' bass artists associated with Sheffield's Warp Records, such as LFO and Nightmares on Wax, with mid-tempo hip-hop-style breaks. Their next release, Mr Kirk's Nightmare (1990), pivoted around the 'Give the Drummer Some' break (taken from the Isley Brothers) and a morbid vocal sample ("Mr Kirk. Your son is dead. He died of an overdose.") taken from "Once you understand" by Think, connected dancing at raves with oblivion (often pharmolocologically-induced), and parodied the moral panics in the tablod media concerning rave culture and the use of dance drugs like ecstasy.

Throughout the early 1990s, 4hero continued to produce tracks under different pseudonyms, which reflected the various mutations of rave.

Manix. Juvenile, happy-hardcore style popular at large-scale rave events ('Feel Real Good' and 'Head in the Clouds', both 1992).
Tek 9. Jazz-tinged, Detroit techno vibes, which retained the accelerated speeds of hardcore ('You've Got to Slow Down', 1993)
Tom and Jerry. Ragga structures of jungle's mainstream breakthrough ('Maximum Style', 1994).

They maintained their 4hero moniker for perhaps their most celebrated single release, "Journey From the Light" (1993), which was a violent reaction to the chart-busting commercial rave tracks, and functioned as a progenitor of the 'darkcore' sound that characterised early jungle.

Recent Material

The Parallel Universe LP (1994) is widely regarded to be the first drum 'n' bass album. It explored sounds that had not been generally associated with jungle up until that point: fusion jazz-style synth washes, chord multitracking, and oleaginous female vocals professing transnational peace and a new age discourse of unity with Mother Earth. This served as a prototype for their more recent full-length releases, such as the MOBO award-winning Two Pages (1998) and Creating Patterns (2001), which almost entirely jettisoned the tension and schizophrenia of their early material in favour of complex, mid-tempo breakbeat structures. They have also ventured in the realm of 'live' musicianship by going on tour.

The main players in 4hero first came to prominence in the late 80s when they set up a Pirate radio station. The founding members of the group are Marc Clair, Dego McFarlane, Ian Bardouille and Gus Lawrence. After setting up the radio station the four then set up Reinforced Records to release their own productions as 4hero. The group became known in the rave community as early as 1990 for their hit Mr Kirk's Nightmare, and the conception of drum and bass was helped with a series of releases on Reinforced Records.

Goldie met 4hero at a performance in London's Astoria, from which Marc and Dego went on to collaborate and bring the sounds "in his head" to life forming the Ruffige Cru and MetalHeads monikers with forward thinking releases on the legendary Reinforced label.

In 1995 NME voted Parallel Universe the album of the year in its dance category.

In 1997 one of their most celebrated tracks, a remix of Nuyorican Soul's Black Gold of the Sun was released to critical acclaim with Louie Vega himself describing it as "...one of the best remixes ever...". The next year, they rose again to mainstream visibility with their second studio album as 4hero, Two Pages (1998). Released on Gilles Peterson's Talkin' Loud record label, the double-CD album blended jazzy double bass, flowing breakbeats and a brew of mysticism, spiritualism, astrology, U.F.O.s, and environmentalism. Luke Parkhouse provided the drums while Ursula Rucker, Carol Crosby and Face provided vocals alongside veteran singer Terry Callier and a few other special guests. The album gained critical acclaim and a place on the shortlist for 1998's Mercury Music Prize as well as picking up a MOBO award in the same year.

Their third album Creating Patterns (2001), featured another Ursula Rucker collaboration, an appearance from Jill Scott, and a cover of Minnie Riperton's classic 1970s song Les Fleur with Carina Andersson as the lead vocalist. The latter was featured in a Baileys commercial in 2004, and in a 2005 Stycast.

In 2004 the group released a compilation album consisting of two discs. The first disc contained 4hero Remixes, while the tracks on disc 2 are remixes of 4hero tracks by other artists. This was released on their new label Raw Canvas.

Six years after the release of Creating Patterns, Play with the Changes was released in February 2007 to great critical acclaim. Mixmag described it as "their finest album to date" and awarded it the title of Album of the Month in its January 2007 issue.

Album discography

External links