No Tags

For 20 years, Mantra and Double O have been running Rupture, the London-based party that’s become guiding light for 160-inclined ravers. As any promoter will tell you, that’s a damn good shift.
Next month they celebrate two decades with a book – We Are Rupture: Signals From The Heart of the Rave – which gathers stories and reflections from their community, from international pilgrimages to processing grief on the dancefloor.
They’re also working on perhaps the world’s first junglist play, Ferry to the Underworld – a theatrical prelude to their London and Bristol parties this November. A play!
The blurb for their book asks: why do we rave, and why does it matter now more than ever? That felt like too big a question to ask of Mantra and Double O on a Tuesday morning, but we did find out what makes Rupture such an unusual D&B night and what’s kept them going for two decades.
We also pried into both of their individual histories: from Dubs bringing Detroit techno to the Doncaster Warehouse in the early ‘90s to Indi’s hippy-Sikh upbringing, and the chance Xbox Live encounter that led to their first ever party in – ahem – Windsor.
Plus, in this episode’s lengthy intro: Tom and Chal return to the conversation about proteinmaxxed dance music and what makes a festival a festival, with added insights from the listener mailbag.
Our next 180 Studios listening session takes place on 11 November with NTS residents Nadia Ksaiba and Sofie K! That’s sold out already, but you can keep an eye out nearer the time for resales. Follow us on IG if you want a better chance of nabbing tickets next time.
We record and edit No Tags ourselves. If you like what we’re doing and want to keep us ticking over, you can subscribe to our paid tier or buy our latest book, Conversations on underground music culture Vol. 2.


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We need to talk about this event flyer, and not just because of how Big Beat Cinema-coded it is.
Prospa, Josh Baker and Kettama have worked their way into the uppermost stratum of dance music – a rarefied zone which might seem a million miles away to No Tags listeners, but which has officially become too big to ignore.
The massive Finsbury Park show that this photo shoot is advertising received 220,000 presale sign-ups and sold out in a day. At the time of writing, the boys have just added a third date. Clearly their Guy Ritchie-style promo video did the business.
So what’s the secret recipe? It’s tech-house-but-not-quite, it’s gymbro-adjacent, it’s hetero to the point of retrograde... in fact, there’s a whiff of post-woke to the whole thing. After a decade of dance music attempting to diversify line-ups and recognise its Black and queer origins – at least, that was the claim – how did we end up back here, with four white lads as the DJ event of the year?
To find out, Tom and Chal rack up two fat lines of creatine and attempt to chart the rise of 2020s protein-house: from Circoloco to Finsbury Park, via @joshbakertourmanager and the underworld of UGC clip farming.
Plus: we tackle your feedback on our recent festivals episode – there was plenty of good stuff here, so we’ll come back to it next time. And of course, send in your thoughts and feelings on the whole Ket Street Boys situation.
Support the show and help us inch closer to that Finsbury Park headline date by subscribing to our paid tier for just a fiver a month. https://notagspodcast.substack.com/


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Is this the way they say the future’s meant to feel? Or just 20,000 people milling about at the White Claw gazebo?
This summer Tom and Chal attended a LOT of different festivals, which got us thinking about not just what makes a festival good, but what makes a festival a festival.
As well as rating and slating our 2026 jollies, we look back at the half-forgotten lifestyles that birthed British festival culture in the first place, talk about our personal festival histories (guess who hates camping!) and figure out what distinguishes a proper festival from a temporary cluster of outdoor stages and energy drink activations taking over a city park.
Let us know what you think. What makes a festival a festival in your eyes? What are your best and worst festivals – and what’s the saddest festival brand activation you’ve ever witnessed?
No Tags is a self-funded project that we squeeze in around our day jobs. If you want to keep us topped up on White Claw and Happy Tuesday pills, consider joining the paid tier.



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Closing a hectic summer, we’re back with our regular report on the best music of the last three months.
We’re joined as always by No Tags third Beatle and zillennial savant Henry Bruce-Jones to talk us through the more fried corners of his musical diet. Can he sell these stubborn uncs on DMV crime-rap, Ivorian plugg and people who simply refuse to rap on beat? Or will we just have to find our middle ground at the altar of Kwengletarianism?
We’ve listed all the music that we discuss on the show below – so if one particular corner’s not your thing, it’s easy to skip along. Get the full details from notagspodcast.substack.com
Pop Corner (3:00): Kelela, Chanel Beads, Charli XCX, M.I.A., Qendresa
Home Listening (24:20): DJ Plead, K Wata, Leo, Lifted, Dance Fountain, Lilen, Amil Raja
Dance Corner (50:00): Yushh, LWS, Will Hofbauer, Jenny Sparks, Rustie
Rap Corner (1:10:02): Jeune Morty, Twentythree, Jaeychino, RealYungPhil, Tony Bontana, Kibo
Real Music (1:40:10): Nirosta Steel, Father Dionysios Tabakis, Horse Lords, feeble little horse
Experimental Coda (1:53:48): Laurie Anderson, Rabit



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“Is this dubstep?”
There was a time in the 2010s when approximately 23% of all YouTube comments were a variation of this question. One of the UK’s most influential yet misunderstood dance exports, dubstep is also one of those rare genres that can trace its origins to a handful of people working in a few rooms.
That unusual origin story is definitively told in a new book, Aftershock: The Seismic Impact of Dubstep. Based on hundreds of hours of interviews by journalist Lauren Martin, it weaves together testimony from the main players (including Benny Ill, Skream, Hatcha, Loefah, Mala, Coki, Youngsta, Plastician, Sgt Pokes, Kode9, Shackleton, Pinch, Joker and Rusko) with thoughtful framing from the likes of Martin Clark and Ammunition’s Neil Jolliffe, plus stacks of of flyers, ephemera and unseen photos.
We had a blast going through the archives in preparation for this conversation with Lauren, where we talked about Croydon in the early 2000s, the school-age crew that formed around Big Apple Records, the closed loop of creativity that allowed the nascent genre to develop, the particular magic of FWD>> at Plastic People, the impact of Radio 1’s Dubstep Warz broadcast, and the competing explanations for dubstep’s demise in the 2010s, among many other things.
Before the episode’s big drop into dubstep, Tom and Chal compare notes on a very ‘Merican month in the stunned afterglow of the World Cup half-time show, UFC on the White House lawn, a pretty decent Madonna album and Tom’s trip to the sunshine state.
We do No Tags for the love of the game, but you can support the podcast in material ways by buying our latest book or subscribing to our paid tier for £5 per month.


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