Samantha Leese talks up d’n’b doyen Roni Size ahead of his landing at Sugar
 

Roni Size is probably someone we were a little bit scared of at school – the BMX-riding, spray-can toting kid who disappeared from the classroom one day to resurface a ragga-mixing king of youths, ruling over a shared sampler with the beats in his bones.
Like most of formal education’s Great Expelled, it wasn’t until he walked out of the institution, at 16, that Size did anything to talk about. He joined the Sefton Park Basement Project, a youth club in Bristol where he learned the basics of music production. Now, some 20 years later, he is one of UK jungle’s big cats, helmsman of Mercury Prize-winning drum’n’bass collective Reprazent and founder of the influential Full Cycle Recordings.
 

Though his arrival on the infant 1990s jungle scene was less noisy than, say, Goldie’s or LTJ Bukem’s, Size’s position as one of its pioneers is solid. Among the first to add the jazzy elements to the dark offspring of techno, he softened the sound and helped it into the mainstream where it thrives today.
 

Born Ryan Williams to Jamaican immigrant parents and raised in the Bristol suburb St Andrew’s, Size is one of several gifted musicians to emerge from that part of the world. Massive Attack, Smith & Mighty and Tricky were town-mates. And from further up Britain’s west, in Gloucester, came Dynamite MC. The mighty frontman became an integral part of the Reprazent crew, and will perform with Size when he appears in Hong Kong.
 

The Electronic Music Festival is really more a gig at a club, and is unlikely to compare to epic gatherings like Good Vibrations, Coachella, or Glastonbury – all of which Size has played, and rocked. He and the newly resurrected Reprazent (the group paused in the early 2000s) were nominated for best dance act at last year’s UK Festival Awards, and in February the band left Good Vibrations crowds – and one very excited

In the Mix reporter – breathless after they took the stage at Sydney’s Centennial Park.
Size’s studio output is just as impressive. Having won the Mercury Prize for debut album New Forms in 1997, Reprazent’s second harvest In the Mode boasted sit-ins from Method Man, Zack de la Rocha of Rage Against the Machine, and UK beatbox prince Rahzel. Size’s first solo project, Touching Down, is still one of the biggest selling independent drum’n’bass records around, and 2005’s Return to V earned the underground magnate a top 20 hit.
 

Size’s next album has yet to be finished. Along with a new release from Reprazent, we expect it to drop sometime next year. Mysterious as these things tend to be, one thing we can count on is that Size will stay true to his signature Bristol-bred sound. That drum’n’bass is what his fans know him for, so he’ll give it to them. As Size said earlier this year, “If David Beckham started playing cricket, people might get a little bit worried.”
 

Back in that basement in the early 1980s, Size, it turns out, could have chosen a quite different career. At the youth centre, he recalled on In the Mix TV, “there was always music, and basketball.”
Thank God the man chose music.