In November 1994, London pirate station Kool FM celebrated its third birthday at the Astoria. The party caused havoc on Tottenham Court Road when thousands of ravers, including a young Josey Rebelle, failed to get into the party. “People were stopping to take pictures of the queue — all these kids just desperate to get into this fucking rave,” she remembers. “They started throwing bottles. Some boys managed to open the fire doors and rush in.”
Stuck outside, she heard the UK junglist vocal refrain of Firefox and 4-Tree’s ‘Warning’ through the walls and felt “so desperately unhappy. All these years later I’m still talking about it — and if someone mentions it, I’ll be like, ‘Oh, you got in, did you?’ I still have a massive grudge. I was so young and I’d just learned to mix. If you didn’t go to this rave you just didn’t exist — don’t even come to school on Monday.”
Josey Rebelle’s career in the club began long before she was allowed to step inside one. That sense of yearning, bound up in still-raw memories, will resonate with anyone who grew up obsessing over music — but Rebelle has never quite grown out of her fandom. Born in the North London neighbourhood of Tottenham, where she still lives today, Rebelle is regarded as one of the city’s most talented underground selectors, made known through her sets at the legendary Shoreditch basement club Plastic People and her long-running show on Rinse FM, where she plays an era-spanning and personal selection every Sunday night: a Black Atlantic fusion of soul, jazz, jungle and house.
In recent years, she’s become a DJ of international stature, adored by in-the-know crowds in the UK and abroad. At home in London, she represents the muddled magic of the city’s inheritance: Caribbean soundsystems, warehouse raves, the ever-mutating sounds of Carnival. As other London DJs lean into harder, rougher, “deconstructed” sounds from outernational orbits, Rebelle’s approach feels distinctly rooted, even familial. On her BBC Radio 1 Essential Mix — voted the best of 2019 by listeners — she invokes an underground history of black music: Jamal Moss’ visionary Afrofuturism and Moodymann’s slippery heat, alongside swirly-eyed ’92 rave from Dave Angel and Afrodeutsche paying tribute to techno’s raw mechanics.