Wildchild

Roger "Wildchild" McKenzie penned the big-beat club anthem "Renegade Master," a British hit on its 1995 release that achieved far wider global reach in 1998, well over two years following his premature passing. He started out in Southampton and relocated around 1991 to Brighton, soon to become the epicenter of big-beat, where he operated as an underground house DJ and issued four EPs on Loaded Records, all bearing the Wildtrax subtitle. Drawing from the sampladelic hip-house pioneered by Todd Terry, tracks such as "Bring It on Down" and "Jump to My Beat" emerged as major club anthems that foreshadowed the big-beat techno surge which took hold years afterward. He also launched his own imprint, Dark & Black, and cut "Renegade Master" for Norman Cook’s Hi-Life Records, with a 1995 reissue climbing to number 11 on the British charts. Only months after relocating to New York alongside manager and partner Donna Snell, McKenzie succumbed to a heart condition that November. Fresh Wildchild material kept appearing anyway, including a remix of East 17’s “Do U Still?” the following year. Norman Cook revisited “Renegade Master” himself in 1997 under the Fatboy Slim moniker, returning the track to club prominence.