Eats Everything: Small Town Boy

This November, I’m realising one of my dreams and heading off on a tour of my native West Country. While I’ll be playing in bigger cities like Bristol, Bath and Cardiff, I’ll also be hitting up Barnstaple in Devon and my home town of Wotton-under-Edge in Gloucestershire. It’s places like this where everything began for me. When I was 14 I organised a rave in Wotton Town Hall. We were too young to go properly raving, so we put on our own. Wotton had never seen anything like it: ‘Futurio’ felt massive and it was organised by a bunch of 14-year-olds. That experience was what really gave me the raving bug, and I want to make sure getting to experience a proper night out while you’re young isn’t limited to those who either live in a major city or are close to one.

Later on we used to travel to Bristol to go to Lakota as a contingent of about 40 people from Wotton. I used to have bright orange hair and a bright orange T-shirt and trousers, dancing with a glowstick to some of the incredible acts that used to play there – honestly, I think I had some of the best few years of my life there. Had that not been available to me at the time, I don’t know where I’d be. Once I’d moved to Bristol I became one of the gang there, and broke into the DJ circuit as resident in house at Heresy and Ripsnorter. Playing those parties week in week out is what really helped me hone my craft as a DJ – you wouldn’t learn as much if you went straight in just guesting at the big clubs.