DJ Kemistry & Storm: Titans of D&B

In honor of Women’s History Month, we are throwing some shine on the most influential female industry figures who helped pioneer electronic and dance culture.

DJ Kemistry and Storm are two of the most enduring personalities of drum & bass’ golden age (i.e., the 1990s). Together with their mate Goldie, they were some of the most memorable and influential drum & bass DJs ever, even some of the best in that whole UK continuum across decades. If you weren’t around in the ‘90s and missed the whole first-wave D&B thing in general, Kemistry and Storm are the perfect gateway into a wild, feral, and formative time in club music and culture.

Both natives of Northamptonshire, UK, Kemistry was born Kemi Olusanya, and Storm goes by Jayne Conneely on her passport. Their relationship started in college as friends. Olusanya turned Conneely onto pirate radio and rave, and it wasn’t long before they were both fully hooked.

The two young women then moved to London together and became regular fixtures as dancers at UK club institution Rage. Years later, they’d be playing Rage alongside some of the hardcore DJs they originally got the bug clubbing to.

Kemistry started dating this B-boy/tagger guy named Goldie and eventually turned him onto drum & bass. He would ultimately become one of the key personas in UK dance music—and, for all intents and purposes, the face of drum & bass—and in 1994, Goldie, Storm, and Kemistry would go on to found and run Metalheadz, one of the scene’s defining, if not the definitive, drum & bass imprint.

Conneely and Olusanya then picked the names Storm and Kemistry because they sounded a bit masculine, like tough sort of DJ names. Conneely told Thump, “We’d say we were DJs—we wouldn’t say anything about our gender—so it wasn’t until we turned up that people were like, ‘Oh, they’re women.’”

For the label, Kemistry and Storm handled everything from the A&R (when A&R was still a thing) to the distribution, somehow managing to do all the work from a one-bedroom apartment in between DJ gigs. The duo’s investment in the label became even greater as Goldie’s star rose and he started releasing on Pete Tong’s FFRR label, leaving even more responsibility on these two women, who were guiding where the scene was going. Their DJ style was super aggressive, and the music that came out of Metalheadz during these salad days is some of the weirdest and darkest music you’ll ever see people attempt to dance to.

Metalheadz’s success was both as a label and what became a famed label night on Sundays at the Blue Note Club (despite the doubts of many). Once Metalheadz began gaining notoriety, Kemistry and Strom became hot commodities on the booking circuit and gained a reputation for being some of the best around.

Their success culminated in being tapped by venerable compilation label !K7 to submit a mix for the coveted DJ-Kicks series. But three months after the mix was released, the group experienced a tragedy that no one could have seen coming.

Driving back from a DJ gig with Storm and Goldie, Kemistry was struck by a stray piece of highway debris (a metal piece known in the UK as a “cat’s eye”) that instantly killed the 35-year-old. This senseless, uncanny horror rattled their crew. Both Goldie and Storm continued with music, but it seemed like it would never be the same for anyone in their orbit.

Storm told Bassrush in 2016:

We were all so devastated. Kemi was not just my friend; she was my soulmate. Whatever adversity we came up against, we were able to work through together. We were totally dedicated to one goal: our love of DJing and spreading the word of drum & bass.

Grief is a strange thing, and looking back, I think I was in shock for a long time without realizing it. It’s still hard for me to go back to that fateful night, as the hardest thing for me is being able to reconcile that I couldn’t save her. My only true solace is being in the mix. Still to this day, it is the only place I feel 100 percent happy and that she is just behind me, waiting to go on.

Tragedy notwithstanding, Kemistry and Storm had a lasting influence on the next generation of producers and DJs. As Mumdance recently told RA:

DJ Storm and Kemistry were the first DJs I ever saw. There was a festival in Brighton, and me and my mates went there. We weren’t allowed to stay for long; I was like 12 or 13… I can see it now, vividly. That was the first time I was hit in the face, because with drum & bass, there’s a physicality you get that you can’t get from listening to it on a Walkman… That was what set me on my path to where I am now.