THE Welsh front of cutting edge drum and bass, aka Kosheen, play Bristol Academy next week.

Sian Evans, a tree-loving, tepee-dwelling hippy from Cardiff, returns to the band's home town on Tuesday April 9.

Kosheen, pictured, are promoting their latest dance floor stormer, Hide U, out now on Moksha/Airsta.

Hide U was the band's first single, voted Best Drum and Bass song at the Drum and Bass Awards, which has been re-released.

The slice of frantic beats and dreaming vocals was the first of three acclaimed singles that effectively made the band's name; Catch and (Slip & Slide) Suicide were singles two and three.

Kosheen's story begins two and a half years ago on the junglist/breakbeat scene of Bristol at which point Sian, the granddaughter of the conductor of a male voice choir, was living on a Welsh commune having spent some months in a tree house protesting at the Newbury bypass.

Kosheen maestros two and three, Markee Substance and Darren Decoder, were Bristol- entrenched dance bods largin' it on the hardcore scene.

After hooking up to make music they tried to break free of the existing sounds and moved into drum and bass, booked a session with Sian, and Kosheen was born.

Sian left Wales and the free party scene she loved and installed herself in the gateway to the west.

"Wales was buzzing at the time," she remembered. "Everyone wanted to get a party together and there was plenty of space to do it. With the free party thing, we all thought we were having a revolution, we thought we were going to change the world through dancing and in a small way maybe we did. It certainly broadened a lot of people's horizons, musically and otherwise."

Some might say Kosheen has already past its best and are now a another highly commercial dance outfit milking a lucrative vein for all its worth. However, Sian is a Welsh success story you should hear at least once.