Good Looking

You're asking for Bukem's canon, but Bukem is barely a producer — he made a handful of tracks and then built a world around them. So the real answer is Good Looking Records and its sub-label Looking Good: the pads, the Rhodes, the rolling break, the eight-minute intro nobody would play.

Start with his own four, then the family.

Danny Williamson, from Watford, came out of soul and jazz-funk before rave. "Demon's Theme" was Good Looking Records' first release, and it was cut with borrowed parts — Tangerine Dream panpipes, the "Buffalo Gals" chanting, Rhythmatic's "Frequency", the Amen break and Isaac Hayes' "Breakthrough".

Promoters were cynical about the long intros and strings, and Bukem was disheartened until he took it to Fabio & Grooverider. By 1995 "Horizons" launched the Looking Good label and coincided with the Bukem/Fabio residency at Speed at Mars Bar in the West End — a short-lived midweek session whose flyer read "deep, beautiful, rollin' drum and bass".

The 1996 Logical Progression comp took that room to the charts and the branding — Earth, Progression Sessions — ran for years after.

Who: Bukem, MC Conrad on every mic, Fabio at Speed, and the roster — PFM as label mainstays alongside Axis, Seba and Tayla, with Photek and Peshay each cutting more than one 12" for Good Looking.

What: sets that opened at ambient tempo and never went for the drop, MCing that talked rather than shouted. How: records were built jazz-first — Rhodes, flutes, string pads lifted off library and fusion LPs, then a break rolling underneath rather than chopped to pieces.

Bukem A&R'd by feel and hoarded dubplates, which is why so many of these tracks sat unreleased for two years before hitting wax.