A motormouth in a cap and orange puffer is speaking from the past. Backstage in a club in Ilford, he’s extolling the life of the MC on the jungle scene. “This is what I do, but it’s a knackering job, believe me,” he laughs, cracking a gap-toothed smile. An intertitle tells the viewer that Stevie Hyper D would be dead within a year. 

At this point, many music documentaries might freeze the frame and leave you looking back at distant history. But the film keeps on rolling, the clock ticking towards midnight on New Year’s Eve. You move through the claustrophobic back corridors of The Island, and then the main room of the club where pale teenagers nod as they step around security in their bomber jackets. At 5am, Hyper D fist-bumps the DJ, and another record is dropped onto the decks. Then the crowd spills out onto the streets, looking for minicabs as the sky turns dark blue, and we’re looking out the window on a cruise through the city. A night at a rave is unfurling in the present moment.  

Hyper: The Stevie Hyper D Story keeps up the pace for the entire film, like a DJ set mixing in videos of raves, recordings of Hyper D on the mic, photos of life back in the day, and the occasional rare interview with the late MC. The flow is like the perpetual motion of jungle, and the way that one rave could blend into two or three more over the course of a long weekend. Whether we’re in 1997 or 1992 or 1989, the pulse of the music is moving on to the next tune or bassline or bar from an MC. Although this long party would take its toll on Hyper D, likely contributing to his death from a heart attack at the age of just 31, the documentary does his memory justice by bringing jungle to life for 90 minutes.

Hyper D was the most mercurial and exciting of the MCs on the jungle scene, and his double-time, ragga, sing-song and rasta microphone licks soundtrack the film. Because he died so early, it’s natural to speculate what he might have gone on to do in the music industry – he was signed to Island Records by childhood friend Darcus Beese at the time of his death. But his story is a simple one, in that he helped define the music in its crucial years, but never made it to the second act of his creative life. His MCing fitted so perfectly with the massive energy of the jungle rave that it can be hard to imagine anywhere else, and we’ll never know how, or if, he would have progressed to the next phase of drum ’n’ bass – there’s parallels with hiphop’s Scott La Rock of BDP Productions. 

Because Hyper D’s story overlaps so closely with jungle’s classic era, he becomes a benevolent spirit in the documentary overseeing the history of the scene. And the film, which took years of crowdfunding and patient research, is a significant act of rave archaeology. There’s footage and photos of raves, backstage areas, studio sessions and sound systems which is so good it’s hard to believe exists. Rave was a celebration, so people brought along their new camcorders and cameras to mark the moment, and Director Jamie Ross-Hulme and nephew Darrell Austin have somehow won everyone’s trust to hand those memories over.

The skill and craft with which it’s all blended together is key. There’s a magic moment about halfway in where DJ SS’s “The Lighter” has been rolling away in the background, and then suddenly and seamlessly the audio switches to Hyper D rhyming over the same track in the rave. VHS tapes from raves like Telepathy are cleaned and blown up to look as good as possible for the cinema screen, and whether it’s mixed in with old footage from YouTube, or interviews from the present day, it all looks and feels as strong and real as it possibly can. The design and graphics of the film are neat and elegant, showing raves from different eras rolling simultaneously in different size windows. It’s like gazing at a living, breathing timeline of jungle.

“It was the analogue era, he passed away and people forgot about him,“ comments Austin in the film, as he drives off on another trip to dig through his lock-up of Hyper D’s old stuff, on the lookout for more clues about the life he led. Hyper: The Stevie Hyper D manages to preserves the feeling of those times, but also comes correct for 2024 with one of the first documentaries to truly capture the rave experience.

The film is still in cinemas at time of writing with screenings this week in Camden. The film took several years to put together, with many crucial contributors. Rinse FM DJ Uncle Dugs did a great history show looking back on Stevie Hyper D’s life and career. You can check the trailer for the doc here and there’s a bunch of information and the story of how they put it together on their Facebook page.

Middle image: Stevie Hyper D on the mic for Confusion Sound at St Luke’s Road, Notting Hill Carnival 1995