Amped: Annie Mac

In stark contrast to the early days when Annie was full of trepidation and uncertainties as a club DJ, and the first few years of her tour when she was more curator than headliner, this is Annie as star attraction. She’s full of confident swagger, dancing between track selection and rousing the crowd with arm gestures: rock-star status with her name literally up in lights. Giant balloons are released into the crowd when she drops ‘Dancing (Again!)’ and when she finishes with Four Tet’s beyond epic remix of Eric Prydz’s ‘Opus’ she stands on the speakers to the left of her and jumps on the mic to thank the crowd, as pyrotechnics go off across the front of the stage.

While Annie’s clearly the main draw these days, that doesn’t mean she leaves the organisation of her AMP events to her team and simply attaches her name and turns up for her set. Last year’s Lost And Found festival in Malta was perhaps a three-day distillation of everything that the AMP tours represent.

“I have to micro-manage everything,” she explains. “At the festival, things like making sure there are enough transfer buses are really important to me. You don’t want people waiting for a bus for two hours.” Annie’s stamp was all over Lost And Found, from the emojis on the toilet doors to the neon cocktail glasses either side of the Annie-designed main stage. And then of course there’s the programming, with Annie keen to make sure the sense of inclusivity she brings to the radio and her DJ sets extends to her tours and festivals. “Keeping it broad in terms of electronic music and making sure there was something everyone wanted to see was important,” she begins. “Things like taking into account that people from the North might be into different stuff to people in London, and making sure it reflected all of the UK was essential.”

But that doesn’t mean she spent all her time sorting airport transfers and making sure there was enough bog roll in the toilets. One of the highlights was the Annie Mac boat party where she exuded such levels of nonchalant cool that she DJed wearing a bath robe, à la P Diddy at an Ibizan yacht party.

As for the future, while she’s unsure if she’ll follow in ex-workmate Zane Lowe’s footsteps and tackle things on an increasingly global scale (“it all feels a bit far away when you have a family and roots”) she’s certainly not lacking things to do in 2016. In March there’s the second edition of her Lost And Found festival, and she’s launching a new concept called The High Five tour, where she’ll play all night at small, sweaty basement venues to a few hundred people, with tickets costing just five pounds each – a counterpoint to her role as a main-stage mainstay. Meanwhile, February 4 and March 10 will see her AMP Collected second series at the ICA, showcasing fresh new talent including 16-year-old folk prodigy Billie Marten and acoustic-electronic hybrid A.O.S.O.O.N.

It’s all a far cry from the Annie who Mixmag met in 2006, who had just started a two-hour weekly radio show and was struggling to find things to fill the rest of her time. Does she even get the time to go out clubbing any more?

“Not often, but when I do I find it exciting,” she laughs. “I went to XOYO a few weeks ago to see Busy P. I was in town having dinner and thought, ‘Fuck it, I’ve got a babysitter, I’m going. I walked in and he was playing ‘Runaway’ by Nuyorican Soul. I was in heaven!”

Annie Mac. Global brand, evangelist for new music and talent, superstar DJ, festival supremo: but still, most importantly, the girl on the dancefloor.