As DJ Krust, Kirk Thompson was one of drum’n’bass’ poster boys, but in 2006 he disappeared. Here’s how he came back with a new creative cycle…

By the age of 19, Krust/Kirk Thompson’s hip hop group Fresh 4 had signed to a major and scored a national top ten hit. Within three years he’d launched Full Cycle with Roni Size, and their Dope Dragon label came the following year in 1995. For well over a decade - as DJ Krust -he produced a catalogue of searing, purified, genre-defining drum’n’bass, including three artist albums. He remixed Björk, Moloko and Sneaker Pimps, as well as d’n’b’s top artists, and as part of Reprazent he picked up a Mercury Music Prize. And he achieved his success without bending to commercial forces, insisting instead that the rest of the world keep up or be left behind in his relentless breakbeat slipstream.

And then in 2006, having been fully immersed in the industry since he was 14, Thompson withdrew from music, stopped gigging, shuttering Full Cycle in 2008. “I was one of those textbook success guys: the car, the house, the girls, the money, everything,” he explains today, “but there was this feeling:
‘Is that all there is?’ And I woke up one day in a club and came to this realisation that I just wasn’t happy. And so, from there, I just stopped.” 

Thompson’s career has always been defined by continual creativity. He’s constantly pushed musical boundaries, his diamond-hard beats as deadly as a shark homing in on its prey, his creative drive every bit as restless as the shark’s fabled ceaseless motion. It’s an approach, Thompson admits, that originates from the B-boy code as laid out in 1983’s seminal hip hop movie ‘Wild Style’: “Be original, be first, be fresh, be unique, treat others with respect, and have honour. I took those codes and I said: ‘How can I apply that to my version of the Bristol sound?’” 

Clearly, it was an extremely effective approach but by 2006, Thompson realised he’d never once actually paused, and that the constant motion had become unsustainable. “I come from the whole Bristol sound. When I was 16 I was hanging around with Tricky and Massive Attack…” he continues. “I grew up in the Bristol scene, the national scene, then the international scene. I’d been Krust all my adult life and I didn’t know who Kirk Thompson was, and that person needed to express himself. I’d made Krust up because he was capable of doing lots of things that Kirk Thompson wasn’t, but inevitably it wasn’t built to last.”

It sounds like a breakdown and Thompson is content to see it as such, but ever the creative he flips it, stating: “It was a breakdown, so I’d have a breakthrough.” In practical terms this meant he gave up partying and drinking and entered a period of personal exploration. He began to read, research and travel, studying consciousness, meditation, neuro linguistic programming and creativity, a process that helped him understand himself, heal and then refocus. 

“It kind of re-centred me,” he says, “I was kind of reborn! I’ve integrated Krust (minus the DJ prefix) now: it’s more of a tool, something that I do when I go to work. When I perform, he comes out. I use that as a vehicle for work, and I know the difference between the personalities and what they’re for.”

The language of therapy can sometimes seem a little detached from real life, but for Thompson, understanding the impact his upbringing had on his creative process proved to be, literally, life-changing knowledge; knowledge he realised he wanted to share. “I understood how the trauma I went through when I was growing up made me retreat into myself,” he continues. “Why there was a need for Krust and what it was for, and that in itself gave me a lot of empathy and has helped me understand other people’s thinking.” 

Fired up by his journey Thompson began to embrace a whole new set of skills: “I learned how to do public speaking, how to build businesses, how to coach and mentor, then I learned how to do that for other people, and it all just kind of blossomed.” 

This blossoming included Thompson’s Disruptive Patterns, a mentoring-for-creatives agency that later became Adapt The Canvas, and with his partner he also began Amma Life, a successful CBD Oil business. 

Then in 2016, Krust relaunched Full Cycle, beginning a new creative period culminating in 2020’s triumphant ‘The Edge of Everything’. So, what happened in 2016 to trigger his musical renaissance? He casually replies, as though talking about double glazing or hoover bags, that 2016 was the end of his seven-year cycle. Yes, it turns out that Krust operates on a seven-year creative cycle. 

With 2024 the beginning of the next cycle, there are lots of new plans: “Now it’s all about [his label] Wonder Palace where we’ve just put out all the back catalogue, we’ve got a new compilation coming later in the year, I’ve got a lot of new music coming including the Cloud Lord project, that’s me and Need For Mirrors. There’s a few other projects that I’m not allowed to talk about – and I’m working on a new album.”

Ever the creative facilitator, Krust concludes by sharing a single, pithy piece of advice that perhaps sums up his entire career. A few days previously, he had a dream in which he was brandishing a sledgehammer that he used to smash down a wall. It turns out that back in Bristol in the late-80s, there was a scout hut at the bottom of the garden of the house he was squatting. He and his mates hired a generator and some sledgehammers, smashed a hole in the wall, put a tarp on the roof, cleaned it up and began to put parties on. 

“And I remembered that,” he finishes with clear glee. “But it was more of a metaphor for me because I’d felt a little stuck creatively. And it’s like: You know what, bro? Just go get a fucking sledgehammer and knock the fucking walls down!”

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This article first appeared in issue five of Disco Pogo. Which you can buy here.