It’s a case of parallel evolution. The southern half of the UK was where the breakbeat hardcore scene was (and it was very English dominated), but Scotland and the north of England was more influenced by the Dutch hardcore scene. I don’t know for certain where the tipping point from one to the other was, but I do know that Stoke-on-Trent was home to both the breakbeat leaning Club Kinetic and North Radical Technology, which was mostly gabber and speedcore with hard trance and acid techno in the back room.
Breakbeat happy hardcore started losing its breakbeats around 1995-96 as there was more and more crossover between the two scenes, but happy gabber slightly predated that as the Dutch were being influenced by the likes of Scott Brown, Ultra-Sonic and Ultimate Buzz. Happy gabber may have even been the reason why breakbeat happy hardcore ended, I remember stuff Paul Elstak, Bass D & King Matthew and Charly Lownoise & Mental Theo being included more and more throughout 1995. I lost interest in English breakbeat happy hardcore when it finally stopped being breakbeat and focused more on the Dutch side of things who were moving on from their happy phase.
I don’t think there’s much point in arguing which was the real hardcore, they both were and their descendants still are.
Kniteforce. They were the one of the hold outs (and then not really, they just had a seperate label for the non-breakbeat hardcore). When the label went bankrupt* that was it for the breakbeat side of things. I have a load of old Knite-force and Remix Records stuff that I want to rip to FLAC, but I haven’t had a chance to do it in the last 15 years and now I’m a bit scared to look at it in case it is all unplayable now.
Hopefully I’m not going too off topic here.
* Knite-force founder Chris Howell made a lot of money from Sesame’s Treet getting to No.2 in the UK charts and invested it all into starting Knite-force. For some reason no-one told him that he would have to pay income tax on it, and when the Inland Revenue caught up with him he had to sell all his labels and their back catalogues to pay them.
The moral of that story is “don’t be a one hit wonder and always pay your taxes”. Chris finally managed to get his original label back about 10 years later.
