Artist profile · Drum & bass
Deep blue
Deep in the music.
Closer to the artist.
Deep Blue is Sean O’Keeffe of 2 Bad Mice, whose solo jungle work includes The Helicopter Tune, linking Moving Shadow’s hardcore roots with later drum and bass.
Behind the music
About Deep blue.
Deep Blue is Sean O’Keeffe, one of the producers behind 2 Bad Mice. His solo records carried the breakbeat experiments of the early hardcore scene into jungle, with The Helicopter Tune becoming the best-known introduction to that work.
O’Keeffe and Simon Colebrooke began making records as 2 Bad Mice around the start of the 1990s, working with Moving Shadow founder Rob Playford. Their studio relied on sampling, pitching breaks, and finding combinations that made a familiar rhythm do something unexpected. O’Keeffe brought that same curiosity to Deep Blue.
The Helicopter Tune appeared in 1993. In a MusicRadar conversation about the 2 Bad Mice catalogue, he recalled it reaching the same UK chart position as Hold It Down and their remix of Blame’s Music Takes You: number 46, tantalisingly close to the top 40.
The solo work continued through the following decade, with releases connected to Moving Shadow, 31 Records, and Good Looking Records. O’Keeffe has also recorded as Black Rain and Shimiko. Deep Blue remains the name that leads listeners back to the helicopter sample and the breakbeats, before opening onto the less familiar records around them.