Bad Company: The resurrection men

Easter Thursday: the biggest night on the raving calendar of the year so far. Four days off work, four days to recover from the fact that four men have just arrived on stage together for the first time in over 10 years... And drum ’n’ bass history is about to be made.

Everything goes black. The band’s unpronounceable logo blazes up in 3D visuals and Bristol’s Motion becomes a sea of lighters. A flood of belligerent beats ensues and the sea erupts into a tsunami. Roars rage through us like an uncontrollable tidal wave. A huge man to my right grabs my hand, throwing my arm up, ragdoll-style. A girl in front turns around screaming "It’s fucking Bad Company mate!" to anyone who’ll listen. At the bar there’s the same fever; everyone jumping, slapping the bar just as d’n’b fans bashed the pipes on the walls in The End years ago. The vibe is physical; overwhelming. It’s fucking Bad Company mate, and everyone in the 1000-capacity room – from 18-year-olds keen to see what the hype is about to heads twice their age who’ve waited for this for years – everyone knows how big a deal the next hour will be.

Rewind: No other act has pushed, pulled and punched drum ’n’ bass forward as much as Bad Company. They are to d’n’b what Masters At Work are to house, DMZ are to dubstep and Underground Resistance are to techno; between 98-2005 DJ Fresh, DBridge, Vegas and Maldini set new parameters for d’n’b across 70 productions and four albums. Their sound could never be defined or pigeonholed; from raw tech grit (‘Dogfight’) to salubrious funk (‘The Bridge’) by way of demonic bass (‘Planet Dust’) epic, body-hurling hooks (‘Torpedo’) and dark, slinky soul (‘Ladies Of Spain’). No other act in d’n’b covered as much ground with such creative excitement and consistency in such a short space of time. Beyond their productions they brought the scene together with one of dance’s most densely populated online forums, Dogs On Acid, while BC-branded labels signed debuts and early releases from the likes of The Upbeats and Chase And Status. They were even responsible for signing D.Kay, Epsilon & Stamina’s 2002 sing-along summertime smash, ‘Barcelona’.

Essentially, Bad Company’s actions and melting-pot attitude captured and shaped the essence of what d’n’b is, what it’s been, what it will always stand for.... in the right hands. Describing themselves as the ‘sacred keepers of drum ’n’ bass’, they’re the first to admit that the genre isn’t always in the right hands. It happened when the four young 20-somethings catapulted themselves into the genre in 1998 with the epoch-defining single ‘The Nine’. It’s happening again now...

“Everything goes in cycles,” explains long-haired bass poster boy Fresh, the most recognisable member of the group thanks to his recent five-year chart assault. We’re in a quiet hotel bar. It’s the calm before the storm: all four – each dressed head to toe in black – sit back and relish what’s clearly ‘a moment’. Their soundcheck has gone well, it’s the first time they’ve seen their visuals set up; they know they’ve done everything they can to ensure their momentous comeback hits as hard as the hype.

The hype clock was wound up last July by one of the biggest DJ agents in bass music, Obi Echolocation (who represents acts from Jack Ü to Chase And Status), who rang them all up individually and insisted that “the world needed a Bad Company reunion.” The hype countdown started two months later, in September, as DBridge was spotted smashing Sun And Bass and Outlook festivals with new Bad Company material. By February, the night they revealed comeback track ‘Equilibrium’, the hype clock was ticking so loudly every DJ, label and fan imaginable was screaming about it. Case in point: on all three occasions I’ve spoken to Andy C since December he’s gushed about this reunion.

“In the 90s there was this moment when drum ’n’ bass had some commercial success and the big guys like Photek and Goldie and Roni had been signed by majors,” Fresh says. “A lot of people who didn’t give a fuck about drum ’n’ bass wanted a piece of it and diluted the scene. There was a backlash. And we were driven by that backlash.”

“It was like, ‘Fuck that! It should be like this!’” laughs Vegas, the youngest member of the crew. The dreamer of the band, he’s slightly scruffy with an air of a loveable urchin. “It’s gone so watered down, a lot of what you hear on the radio and a lot of the sterile, soulless releases you hear now. The commercial thing has exposed d’n’b to a lot of people. It’s time to come along and say, ‘Now this is the real shit!’ It happened like that in the 90s, and it’s happening again.”

These sentiments are approved by the remaining members. DBridge, the self-proclaimed cynic of Bad Company, is the largest and most serious-looking member of the crew. He may look grave and stern but is prone warm grins and dirty chuckles when he agrees with something or a joke is made. Maldini is usually the man behind these jokes. His Cheshire cat grin doesn’t budge throughout the interview as he shoots out wisecracks and offers side-stories of Bad Company past: how they once headlined mainstage Miami’s Ultra festival over Paul van Dyk, while Miami Vice star Don Johnson was raving behind them. Or how they used to give their tracks to Marky and Andy C before anyone else because they knew how to mix them like no other DJs.

Four very distinctive personalities: their make-up, like their music, is a delicate dynamic. To understand this dynamic is to understand what they’ve achieved since Bad Company went their separate ways...

Vegas and Maldini run Bad Taste, one of the most influential labels in thoroughbred underground d’n’b where the careers of Billain, Teddy Killerz, Prolix, Royalston, Urbandawn and many more began. Prior to pioneering the poppier side of bass music Fresh made outrageous d’n’b bangers like ‘Heavyweight’ and ‘Signal’ and launched Breakbeat Kaos with Adam F, igniting the careers of Pendulum, Brookes Brothers, Nero and Sigma.

DBridge, meanwhile, runs Exit, one of the most respected imprints on the leftfield frontier that joins previously unchartered dots between d’n’b, electronica and techno. A driving force in the autonomic/half-time movement, he’s involved in acts such as Heartdrive and Binary Collective, projects that are so musically far-out they’re genre-unclassifiable. While Vegas and Maldini have stayed true to Bad Company’s original spirit, the extreme polar positions of Fresh and DBridge creates the contrast and diversity the band thrives on.

“I’m always fascinated by what Darren [DBridge] thinks; he has a knowledge base I simply don’t have,” explains Fresh – and it’s clear the feeling is mutual. “I like doing new, exciting stuff and for me the pop stuff isn’t exciting any more. People are coming out of the woodwork saying ‘Oh I’ve got a drum ’n’ bass crossover song’. I don’t want to say ‘bandwagon’, but...”

He trails off. But let’s be real: Fresh, alongside Chase And Status, drove the bandwagon for everyone to jump on in the first place. But no matter how mainstream he’s gone, Fresh has always been respected by his peers because, as his name suggests, he has always innovated. Now that pop drum ’n’ bass is being jumped on by people with less genuine intentions, it’s no longer fresh territory. The band shares his frustration.

“The same happens on the underground,” says Vegas. “You make tunes that come from the heart. Then you hear the copies... and copies... and copies. You can really hear when it’s coming from the right place, and you can really hear the rinsers.”

“In any genre or scene if you’ve been doing it for a long time you’ll start hearing it,” agrees DBridge. “You start doubting yourself, you start thinking you sound like a bad copy of yourself! That’s one of the reasons we went off and did our own thing and why reuniting is relevant now; we can revisit that original ethos and apply today’s mixing techniques and bring in all our various sides of the scene. It’s about remaining interested and keeping ourselves excited.”

It’s the crux of this tale that validates their reunion and makes it all the more exciting: as individuals, and as a collective, they have nothing to prove. There’s nothing contrived or cynical about this comeback and the only air of nostalgia is their love for real analogue machines (which they’ve spent the last nine months re-amassing) and pushing drum ’n’ bass away from its current obsession with chart hits and clinical button-pressing, crystalline-produced minutiae back to its raw, rugged, gut-punching heavyweight roots.

They’re pushing hard, too. After the two comeback shows over Easter, the foursome will – just like they did previously – split into pairs to tour and keep up with their studio duties. “We want to keep the flow of music coming,” says Fresh. “But we have to be realistic and give each other time for our individual projects; letting us breathe our own personal music vibes in our own way but then come together to unleash our shared musical aggression. We didn’t let that happen last time.”

Their last incarnation was so accelerated, intense and prolific, the split was inevitable. This time, though, they’re not rushing things. And while they allude to a “Very well known label in d’n’b” signing their new material, they’re happy to sit on it for the foreseeable. In fact, the only way to hear what they have in store is to see them live this summer...

And so we find ourselves back in Motion. Iconic track ‘The Nine’ causes reactions so raucous you can’t hear the bassline for a second. The grimy ‘Mo Fire’ creates instant mosh mania. ‘Ladies Of Spain’ has those of us lucky to be beside a wall melting into it. Moments later DBridge and Vegas’s distinctive ‘True Romance’ oozes through the system causing 1.21GW of goosebumps, before the planet-aligning synth intro of Fresh’s ‘Signal’ stops every one of us dead in our tracks.

It’s perhaps the most exciting realisation of their reunion show: the new Bad Company performances aren’t nostalgia-rooted exercises in past success muscle flexing, but a celebration of each individual’s benchmark-setting output, how it’s influenced the wider d’n’b picture and, most importantly, how the new material will move the genre forward.

One of the most exhilarating hours of d’n’b you’ll hear this summer climaxes with the machine purrs of ‘Equilibrium’ and an epic, unnamed studio-fresh dispatch that floors the crowd. Eleven years and four lifetimes of experiments and successes after they split, Bad Company still have something serious to say. History has been made... here comes the future.

Bad Company play Nu Forms (Austria) and Dour (Belgium) in 2016, more festivals TBA

Dave Jenkins is a freelance journalist and regular contributor to Mixmag. Follow him on Twitter here