Fats
Wildale Spencer, known professionally as MC Fats (also credited as Fats or Singing Fats), was a London-based vocalist, MC and producer active from the early 1990s. His work sat across jungle and drum & bass and touched on bassline, breakbeat, ragga, UK garage and grime through vocal collaborations and releases. He ran the imprint U Understand Me Music and released the collaborative album We Gotcha in 2014.
Fats entered the scene in the early 1990s as a vocalist and MC. From the start his delivery drew on reggae-style toasting and jazz-inflected phrasing; those two strands are the through-line on the records and live sets he became known for. He built his career by linking vocal performance to producers across multiple strands of the UK bass spectrum, moving between studio recordings and a long-term role fronting dancefloor sets as Fabric’s resident MC in London.
Vocally, Fats combined toasting with melodic singing and phrasing that leaned on jazz timing. He used call-and-response lines and short melodic hooks that locked into breakbeat-driven arrangements. On recorded material his voice often occupies the midrange: it carries the hook and doubles as a rhythmic instrument, punctuating bars where the beat drops or the bassline shifts. That approach made his voice adaptable — it sat over harder, weighty productions and over sparser, rolling tracks without losing clarity.
As a contributor to other producers’ work, Fats appears on landmark tracks such as DJ Hype’s "Peace, Love & Unity" and Calibre’s "Drop It Down." He also collaborated with Dillinja, Alix Perez and Chase & Status — names that span heavy, technical and more contemporary drum & bass production — and his vocals are frequently used as an identifying element on those recordings. On his own imprint U Understand Me Music he shepherded the collaborative album We Gotcha (2014), which documents his role as both a front-line vocalist and a curator of collaborators.
On stage at Fabric he functioned as a resident MC: introducing tracks, riding drops, and creating transitions that linked DJ selections to vocal hooks. In the studio his work shows attention to timing and melody rather than dense lyrical streams; the emphasis is on concise vocal lines that complement break patterns and bass movement. Those choices made his style particularly effective for tracks that need vocal motifs to lift an instrumental arrangement into something singable and memorable.
Fats credited reggae and jazz as key influences in his delivery and phrasing. Those influences are explicit in his toasting-singing hybrid and in the way he phrases over syncopated breaks. He remained an influential voice in UK jungle and drum & bass until his death on March 10, 2023.
