28 Gun Bad Boy

If 28 Gun Bad Boy sounds free and playful, there’s good reason for that: it was the first album A Guy Called Gerald released after he was freed from a restrictive major label contract. His watchword was experimentation, and there’s plenty of it on 28 Gun Bad Boy. It’s no surprise that the album’s been retroactively fitted with the title of ‘first jungle album’; you can hear the music mutating as you listen, letting go of Gerald Simpson’s grounding in acid house and rave, morphing into a primitive articulation of jungle. The first track, an eighteen-minute DJ mix, showcases the 12” cuts Simpson had been releasing on his Juice Box label; the rest of the album blasts off into an aesthetic interzone entirely of its own making. It’s thrilling to hear an artist on the cusp of greatness, just about to make their most important leap – and on his next album, Black Secret Technology, Simpson would fully realise his vision. Here’s the prototype.