Mr.Kirk's Nightmare is an early 1990s hardcore track by UK artists 4 Hero. The track's notoriety was mainly due to the use of a sample which read "Mr Kirk, I'm sorry to tell you your son is dead."
is a band from Dollis Hill, North London, comprising Dennis 'Dego' McFarlane, Mark 'Marc Mac' Clair, Gus Lawrence, and Ian Bardouille. While the band is often cited as 4 Hero (or 4-Hero), 4hero is the style of the name used on the band's albums and website.
McFarlane and Clair also run the Reinforced record label.
They are renowned as pioneers and frontrunners in jungle and drum and bass, and the group obtained a Mercury Music Prize nomination for their 1998 album Two Pages.
Their style was initially uptempo breakbeat house and techno, and has progressed to hardcore, jungle, and drum 'n' bass. Comparisons have been drawn between them and East London band Shut Up And Dance, with both bands evolving in the early 1990s as a rapprochement between the breakbeat-driven African-diasporic musical structures of hip-hop and reggae, and the dark, European reconstruction of the techno sound popularised by the likes of Joey Beltram, CJ Bolland, and Mundo Muzique. 4hero both embraced the dynamics of populist rave culture, and maintained an avant-garde status as innovative and experimental producers. They trailblazed genre-crossing studio techniques like timestretching and pitch-shifting.
