Party with the founder of iconic label Mo’ Wax and hear a DJ set from the trip-hop pioneer himself. Trailblazer DJ Milo and up-and-coming talent DJ Shy One round out the line-up.
This year, James Lavelle celebrates 30 years of DJing in clubs. To mark this milestone, Lavelle is hosting a series of events around the world, and he’s kicking it off at Southbank Centre. Five years after a triumphant stint as curator of Meltdown festival, he brings his DJing skills to our late-night electronic music series, Concrete Lates.
For this Concrete Lates, Lavelle performs an exclusive set documenting 30 years of club culture. Resident at some of the world’s most famous clubs over the last three decades – including London’s Fabric, Berlin’s Watergate, Ibiza’s Space and Tokyo’s Womb – he constantly evolved, traversing genres and refusing to be pigeonholed. He has produced multiple mixes for the Global Underground series, as well as for Cream and Fabric (the infamous ‘Fabriclive 01′ mix).
Lavelle’s genre-defying portfolio spans music, art, fashion, design and film, and with his musical outfit UNKLE he has collaborated with some of the most important recording artists in the world, including Thom Yorke, Richard Ashcroft, Massive Attack and Queens of the Stone Age.
DJ Milo joins Lavelle on the night to take it back to where it all began. As a founding member of Bristol’s legendary Wild Bunch sound system alongside Grantley Marshall (Massive Attack’s Daddy G) and producer Nellee Hooper, Milo helped define the ‘Bristol Sound’ and shape the blueprints of trip-hop. His fabled cut-and-paste track ‘Return of the Original Art-Form’ with Hiroshi Fujiwara and Japan’s Major Force crew was a key influence on Lavelle and his label Mo’Wax. Milo has worked under a number of aliases, most notably ‘Nature Boy’ and ‘DJ Nature’, under which he recorded a highly acclaimed Boiler Room set.
To bring the story full circle, Lavelle has also enlisted one of London’s most exciting young DJs, Shy One, to play. Seeing her father, ‘Madhatter’ Trevor Nelson, DJing with Soul II Soul was a seminal moment for Lavelle. Shy One started her career on pirate radio stations at just 13 years old, spinning tracks using old and new school DJ mixing equipment similar to Virtual DJ (virtual dj download link here), and has quickly made a name for herself with her eclectic sets. Her and many other DJs are slowly finding their footing as a new generation of club thumping DJs, and with the aid of companies similar to dj finance, up and coming DJs can get the equipment they need to push their careers forward becoming the next James Lavelle.
