No More Idols hit number two and went double platinum, and the singles still had drops that would detonate a festival tent. Read that back. In 2011 that is what mainstream British music actually sounded like, and Chase & Status are the ones who dragged it there — by welding rave energy to pop structure without sanding the bass off.
Saul Milton and Will Kennard met in London and reconnected as students in Manchester, where they bonded over jungle and the kind of dark, heavy drum and bass that lives around 174 BPM and does not care about your feelings. MORE THAN ALOT, their 2008 debut, is the document. It’s the rave record — “Eastern Jam,” “Pieces” with a pre-superstar Plan B, the title track that sounds like a klaxon having a panic attack. That album was a club artefact. It was for the room, the smoke, the 4am. Nobody outside the bass underground was supposed to care, and for a minute nobody did.
No More Idols: the crossover
Then No More Idols dropped in 2011 and the whole equation flipped. They cracked the thing nobody else had: you could take the energy of a DnB rave and the structure of a pop song and weld them together without either one apologising. “Blind Faith” put a euphoric piano line and a Liam Bailey vocal over a beat built for a Reading tent, and it hit number five. “Time” with Delilah took the same formula to number 21. And “End Credits” with Plan B — who by the No More Idols era was a #1-album pop star in his own right — soundtracked Harry Brown and went to number nine. Suddenly the rave music was on Radio 1 daytime, not the specialist show at midnight. That’s the arc the whole British dance establishment had been failing to make for a decade, and Chase & Status just did it, casually, across one album — while building the infrastructure under it, founding MTA Records in 2009 to put out the records around them.
Why they didn’t soften the bass
The retrospectives always undersell this: they did not soften the music to get there. The pop-crossover acts of that era usually sanded the edges off until you couldn’t tell what genre you started in. Chase & Status kept the low end nasty. A No More Idols single still had the drop. They smuggled actual heavy bass music onto daytime radio inside a pop trojan horse, and a generation of British teenagers got their first hit of DnB and dubstep thinking it was just what the charts sounded like now. Pendulum get a lot of the credit for taking DnB to the masses and they earned it, but they went full stadium-rock to do it. Chase & Status didn’t have to.
The live show is the proof
The live show is where this all makes sense, and if you’ve never seen it you’re working with half the information. They tour as a full band — an MC out front running on pure adrenaline, live drums hammering, the two of them behind the decks and electronics. It’s loud in a way recorded music can’t prepare you for. Strip the radio polish off “Blind Faith,” put it in front of a festival crowd at full volume, and it turns back into the monster it always was. The records were the trojan horse. The live show is what was inside.
The 2020s rave revival
Most artists who had a moment in 2011 spend the 2020s either chasing it or pretending it didn’t happen. Chase & Status went the other way and leaned all the way back into the rave. 2023’s “Baddadan” was a jump-up DnB monster, and the album it came from, 2 Ruff Vol. 1, put four singles in the UK top 40 at once. Then “Backbone” with Stormzy became their first-ever UK number one. UK dance is having a full rave-nostalgia moment right now, breakbeat and jungle are cool again, the kids who were too young for the first wave want the real thing, and Chase & Status are sitting there as the guys who never left. Elder statesmen and current at the same time, which almost never happens.
Here’s what I keep coming back to. They weren’t the most technically dazzling DnB producers — there were heads in the scene doing more intricate, more purist work who never sniffed a chart. And they weren’t the slickest crossover act — plenty of people made cleaner radio hits. What they had was timing and nerve. They figured out you could make rave music legible to the mainstream without lying to anyone about what it was, and they did it at the exact moment Britain was ready to hear it. No More Idols is the sound of that gamble paying off in real time.
Go back and listen to it now with this in mind. Put on “Blind Faith” or “Time” and notice how the song is built like a chart record but moves like a club one, how the drop does all the emotional work a key change would do in a normal pop song. Then go listen to MORE THAN ALOT to hear where they started, and “Baddadan” to hear where they ended up, and the line connecting all three is one of the more impressive long games anyone in British dance music has played. DnB crashed the UK charts. These two held the door.
Internal links: /blogs/news/tagged/drum-and-bass (anchor: “drum and bass”), /blogs/news/tagged/plan-b (anchor: “Plan B”), /blogs/news/tagged/pendulum (anchor: “Pendulum”), /blogs/news/tagged/stormzy (anchor: “Stormzy”). Verify each tag page exists before publish; drop any anchor whose tag has no posts (per the mirror-desync 404 rule).