History and DJs
BONKERS - THE FACTS! The legendary Bonkers brand sprung to life in 1995, following a meeting between Hixxy & Sharkey and the React Music label. DJ Hixxy & MC Sharkey had been enjoying great success with their Toytown rave anthem, the best-selling underground happy hardcore track of it's time and React had been alerted to them by Toytown's distributor and had enjoyed hearing Hixxy spin at the Tribal Gathering rave.
A meeting was called for Hixxy & Sharkey at React to sign Toytown & get some interesting remixes done to see if it could broken into other territories and scenes (Toni De Vit being one mentioned). During the meeting Hixxy had spotted the Carl Cox FACT album poster on a wall and asked about the possibility a replicating the success of that album but with Hardcore. React had just had huge success with their Carl Cox FACT and Reactivate albums and were looking for fresh young talent and with this idea in the bag a plan was hatched.
Hixxy came up with the name Bonkers one night whilst sitting in a theme pub of the same name at Butlins in Minehead with DJ Ramos. Initially Hixxy wanted to use the name on a tune he wanted to do with Sharkey and told DJ Ramos how perfect the word and lyric Bonkers would suit his tune especially with Sharkey to MC over the top the lyrics “THIS IS BONKERS!”
Jon had previously popped into the studio near Aldershot where Hixxy was and played a 60s style rock & roll riff on the keyboard which Hixxy remembered and took into the studio. So not long after Hixxy asked Sharkey to hit the studio so they could work on that track. They came up with what we now know as Toytown. Hixxy & Sharkey dropped the 60s riff and the rest is history - because Toytown was now Toytown it left the name Bonkers free and Hixxy sugested this as a branding name and it stuck from there on in.
"This Is Bonkers" was later also a lyric frequently spouted by MC Sharkey whilst on the mike with DJ Hixxy and others around the world and later made into a track of the same name.
The label employed Me Company to design a fresh and youthful look to the logo and graphics and they in turn introduced cartoonist Paul Garner to create the iconic cariacutures of the DJ's. The first Bonkers CD "Bonkers - Hixxy & Sharkey are..." was released in May 1996 to great acclaim, eventually selling 80,000 units. By the time the second album was released a year later Hixxy & Sharkey had made it onto the front cover of both DJ Magazine & M8 and Sharkey had had a chart single with "Revolutions" and presented a hardcore show on Kiss FM with Sharkey going on to present the station's Breakfast Show with Sarah HB.
Hixxy & Sharkey also both appeared in the annual DJ Magazine Top 100 DJ's poll. The compilation powered into the Top 10 and went on to sell 70,000 units in the UK. To further improve the series with the third Bonkers album, it was decided to release a triple CD, a first for the scene, by adding the musically commercial talents of DJ Dougal and continuing the strong visual concept with a photo shoot and album artwork depicting Silence Of The Lambs with a shocking pink-haired Sharkey depicted as Hannibal Lecter. The re-imagined look for the series once again powered the album into the top 10 where it clocked up sales of 120,000 copies and earned a UK Gold Sales Award. The setting of high-standards for music and graphics outgunned any remaining competition and the series continued unimpeded through the footie-themed Bonkers 4 which charted at number 8 and Bonkers 5 - Anarchy in The Universe, both selling Silver.
By which time both Hixxy and Sharkey decided to take a break from the series at Bonkers 6, Sharkey to concentrate on his artist album "Hard Life" and "Brainstorm" trancecore compilation and Hixxy also worked on a different comp adding Sy and Vibes into the equation before he returned to the mix on 1999's Bonkers 7 "Millennium Fever". With the ascent in popularity of trance and hard house, the hardcore scene retreated underground taking Bonkers with it as people lost interest in the series. However, 2 years later as trance was replaced by yet deeper trance and progressive house the demand for harder, hedonistic sounds once again reared it's ugly head shouting and hardcore slowly built up a new following of young ravers ready to party hard and Bonkers 7 suddenly began selling again and by 2002 in quantities large enough to re-chart the album.
Hixxy & Sharkey reapproached the label about restarting the series and a new Bonkers, The Rezurrection, was born and soft-released in August 2002 followed up quickly by Bonkers 9 "Hardcore Mutation" with Hixxy, Sharkey & Scott Brown and released in time for the Xmas market and even without the supermarkets sold strongly all the way until Xmas becoming the 6th best selling Bonkers with 58,000 sales. Bonkers 10 & 11 followed in 2003 before the series reached a fourth peak. Increasing the series to a 4xCD set and adding Breeze & Styles names in lights led Bonkers 12 to chart at No 7. However disaster struck on the second week of the album's release when React's distributor Beechwood Music collapsed taking the label with it and closing down any further sales.
React was reformed as Resist Music and a Bonkers 13 special Halloween release was planned and sold well that Autumn and by the time Bonkers hit it's 15th release it was increased to an 8 DJ back-2-back line-up, Hixxy & Recon, Sharkey & Marc Smith, Scott Brown & Neophyte and Dougal & Gammer. With in-store prices ever-reducing it was decided to return to a triple CD for Bonkers 16, Best of Bonkers, a top 10 entry for the label and a fifth peak for the series before Bonkers 17 fell foul to the closure and subsequent liquidation of Resist in November 2007. However, the story doesn't end there. The rights to the longest-running and most-successful hardcore compilation series ever - with sales of over 1 million units - were snapped up by leading dance music label All Around The World and together with Universal Music are presenting the series for a new generation of hardcore music lovers and once again featuring the original line-up of Hixxy & Sharkey together with Chris Unknown.
Hardcore never dies, it just comes back harder!
James Horrocks
Bonkers/React Music MD
