4 Days. 1 Junglist Soldier: HYPER Streams Worldwide This November & Jamie Ross-Hulme Explains The Cut
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- 24/10/2026
Darrell Austin and Jamie Ross-Hulme team up with Kinema to put Stevie Hyper D’s story in front of everyone who missed the cinema run.
Somewhere right now there’s a raver in Perth, Toronto, Birmingham or Brooklyn with a Stevie Hyper D tape in a shoebox and a story about the night they heard him live and they’ve never seen this film. The reception in cinemas was huge and HYPER has already travelled as far as New York and Western Australia. A cinema screen can only reach the people who can get to a cinema and Stevie’s fan base has never fitted inside one country.
“Stevie’s fan base has never fitted inside one country.”
That changes from 26th to 29th November 2026. HYPER: The Stevie Hyper D Story streams online for four days and anyone, anywhere in the world, can watch it. Darrell Austin, Stevie’s nephew and the film’s writer and producer, has teamed up with director Jamie Ross-Hulme and a platform called Kinema to make it happen. Kinema is a New York platform founded in 2019 by Christie Marchese, built on the idea that a film lands harder when you watch it together. Anyone can host a screening, in a room or online, with ticketing and live chat sorted for them.
“Pirate radio carried him into bedrooms across the country, on tapes wound and rewound until the plastic stretched.”
We’re sure there’ll be plenty of watch parties across those four days, so let’s break that down. A watch party is a group of people pressing play at the same moment and watching together. It might be a living room, the back room of a pub, a studio full of MCs, or ten friends on three continents with a group chat open. You laugh at the same archive footage and go quiet at the same scene. Think of it as a rave in your front room, minus the queue for the toilets. Kinema‘s live screenings play in sync with a chat running alongside, which suits the idea perfectly.
“In 1996 Darcus Beese signed him to Island Records, which made him the first jungle MC with a major label deal.”
So what’s the film? Start with a nephew. In the mid-80s Darrell Austin spent his afternoons after school at his gran’s house in Fulham, where his uncle Stephen Austin practised his bars. Decades later he went back through the scene that made Stevie to find out what his uncle left behind. It took twelve years and a Kickstarter to clear the music, and somewhere along the way it became a story about family and grief as much as a jungle history. The Guardian gave it four stars and called it“impeccably crafted.”
Getting HYPER in front of a global audience has come at a cost that Jamie and Darrell carry themselves. They’ve poured every resource they have into the film and continue to self-finance to bring it online. To stream it worldwide, they had to buy a global licence to clear the music for the four days of the screening. The end goal is to clear the music for good, so the film can be distributed to everyone, everywhere, for as long as people want to watch it. That makes this November a chance to show exactly how many people want this film.
“They’ve poured every resource they have into the film and continue to self-finance to bring it online.”
The people who sit down with Darrell read like a Kool FM line-up. Andy C, Evil B, Harry Shotta, Rage and Uncle Dugs are there, alongside Navigator, who’s been on the mic for more than 45 years and remembers everything. Nicky Blackmarket, the Soho record shop legend, appears too. His daughter DJ Millz told us what a privilege and a responsibility it was to remix Stevie’s vocal on “Jungle Music” this summer. Bionic, formerly of London Posse the man who led the charge for British MCs to use their own accents, also features in the film, having worked with Stevie in the Drum & Bass years.
For anyone arriving fresh, this is who we’re talking about. Stephen Austin was born in Fulham on 20 September 1966 to a family with Caribbean and Gibraltarian roots. He lived with dyslexia and found his place in the rave scene, where his love of dancehall and reggae met the breakbeat. By 1991 his double time flow on “Teknoragga” was firing lyrics at twice the usual speed and landing every one on the bar. Pirate radio carried him into bedrooms across the country, on tapes wound and rewound until the plastic stretched. In 1996 Darcus Beese signed him to Island Records, which made him the first jungle MC with a major label deal. In May 1998 he collected Lyricist of the Year at the World Hardcore Dance Awards in Toronto. On 5 July that year he died of a heart attack, aged 31, after years of relentless performing. His album The Next Step came out in 1999, so he never saw it in a shop window.
“Stevie’s name arrives in every one of those conversations, usually followed by a pause.”
Team Hyper has spent years making sure his name never fades. The Hyper D Legacy Project began in September 2017 with official merchandise under the name Original Junglist Soldier, the documentary followed and Darrell and Jamie are now calling for a blue plaque at his old home in Fulham. Stevie’s voice is still turning up on new records, and a whole generation of MCs who never saw him live can still hear exactly where their flow came from.
I’ve spent this year writing about Navigator, about Nicky’s daughter, about the whole world that grew out of those pirate signals and Stevie’s name arrives in every one of those conversations, usually followed by a pause. This is your chance to sit inside that pause with the people who loved him. Mark 26th to 29th November, clear the sofa, call the crew and press play together. It’s a 15, with strong language and drug misuse, so choose your room accordingly.
Book your tickets for HYPER: The Stevie Hyper D Story HERE
INTERVIEW:
Cheryl: Jamie, you made a film about Navigator before this one, and he remembers everything in order. What did working with him teach you about interviewing people who carry history in their heads?
Jamie Ross-Hulme: My grounding is in music journalism. I started as an intern at Mixmag in 2002 and interviewed artists from that era consistently after that. Early on, that meant jungle and drum and bass figures like Nicky Blackmarket, Brockie, Ed Solo, Pendulum, MC Fun, Fatman D and Shortston. I also wrote for allhiphop.com in the US, which was one of the biggest hip-hop websites in the world at the time. I did a big feature on UK MC culture and spoke to Durrty Goodz, Wretch 32 just before he blew up, and Sway, God rest his soul. I interviewed Giggs and Sway in person. Writing for Pyrotechnic Radio, now known as Pyro Radio, I also wrote a piece on Unorthodox, a West and South London collective making what people in the area called NuShape at the time, their own version of grime. It was made up of Silkie, who went on to become a big dubstep DJ, his brother Silva, who was one of the sickest MCs I’ve ever heard, NoLay and G Kid. They had tunes such as “No Help or Handouts”, and they were proper next-level MCs. NoLay has gone on to become super successful in her own right, including a leading role as Mandy in Top Boy.
I’d been around the scene for a long time before I made the Navigator film. I’d also been promoting jungle and drum and bass parties in London and in Brighton.
I interviewed Navigator at the beginning of 2011. He’d been MCing for more than 30 years by then, having started on sound system in 1979, and we made the film before people were documenting this scene as heavily as they do now. His knowledge and memory are remarkable. We collaborated closely. I produced the film and did the interviews, and my friend Nathan Jessel, a respected documentary director, made the first two parts with us. I directed the third part, which was released in 2017, a few years after the first two. It really taught me about chronology and the importance of recognising history and culture, and I learned a huge amount from Nathan about how to direct. That third part was the first short film I directed, and it was a real grounding before I made the Stevie film.
Cheryl: Jamie, what was the scene or track you were most certain would make the final cut, and what took its place?
Jamie Ross-Hulme: The scene we lost was the backbone of the original idea. The film was called *The Hidden Influence* before it became *HYPER*. It had a whole sequence at the end on Stevie’s influence after his death: how it passed into garage, then grime, and then everything that followed. We had the garage tune “Gabrielle”, which is a real classic, and we’d have loved to make it work. But we’d built the film around that ending and it just didn’t work, so we cut the scene completely. The ending became much quicker. I think that was the right decision. A fan, Stephen Turner (big up Stephen), messaged us on Facebook the other day saying it’s the best ending they’ve seen in any film, which is a huge compliment.
Cheryl: Bionic, Navigator and Nicky Blackmarket each knew Stevie from a different corner of the scene. Which of them told you the story that didn’t make it into the film?
Jamie Ross-Hulme: There are many stories from all three of them. Bionic’s key story, about when he and Stevie first met, is in there, and so is Nicky’s. The story that didn’t make it, broadly speaking, is how influential Stevie was. The original version was all about his influence. We still touch on it, but much more briefly. He took his inspiration from sound system culture, carried it into rave, mixed it with hip hop, and pioneered a double-time style of MCing across 32 bars, where most sound system MCs, or DJs as they were known back then, worked in 8-bar phrases. The original cut went into much more detail. Everyone had specific stories about Stevie and his wider influence. Nicky talked about Dizzee Rascal and Chase & Status coming up to him and saying it was because of the Nicky Blackmarket and Stevie Hyper D tapes that they were doing what they do, and he said that felt like an award. In the end, it was less about specific stories and more about his influence in general. We made a conscious choice, because it made a much better narrative film, with less of the traditional music doc material.
Cheryl: Someone in Perth, someone in New York and someone in Fulham all press play together at a Kinema Watch Party. What would Stevie do first: heckle the screen or grab the mic?
Jamie Ross-Hulme: He’d say, “Junglist, are you ready?”
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