James Lavelle
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Biography
- For the past 30 years, James Lavelle has been at the forefront of global club culture. Known as much for his highly eclectic DJ sets as for his production work as UNKLE, Lavelle has been lauded as a highly influential tastemaker and musical curator.He began DJing in Oxford aged only 15, where he started his first night, Mo’Wax Please. Relocating to London to start the record label of the same name, Lavelle took up a residency at The Fridge for Gilles Peterson’s Talkin’ Loud. The pair went on to start their own night together, That’s How It Is, a legendary Monday night session at Bar Rumba on Shaftesbury Avenue that saw Lavelle become a major fixture of London’s burgeoning club scene. This period saw his influence expand as he DJ’d across London and the UK, playing clubs from The Blue Note and Plastic People to Ministry of Sound and Cream. The opening of Fabric in 1999 was a major turning point in his career, and saw him take up a residency and starting the iconic Friday night FABRICLIVE that lasted for five years. Alongside his time at Fabric, Lavelle has also served as resident at a number of the world’s top nightclubs including amongst others, Zouk, Womb, Watergate and Space, where played most recently at it’s closing, for Carl Cox’s birthday. He was one of the first DJs to play China and Eastern Europe, and has played in all six inhabited continents. The development of his UNKLESounds project saw him traversing the globe, headlining festivals and clubs everywhere from Tokyo to Mexico City, with one of the first audiovisual DJ setups. His ability to craft genre-spanning mixes translated from to the club to the studio, where he created contributions to a number of iconic mix series. After releasing mixes for Tribal Gathering and Cream, he produced the inaugural FABRICLIVE CD, and has gone on to release four critically acclaimed mixes for Global Underground, the most recent of which came out in 2015. Pete Tong lauded him as ‘one of the most gifted minds in music’ when introducing his ‘mindblowing’ Essential Mix on BBC Radio 1. He continues to produce albums under his UNKLE moniker, working with a myriad cast of musical collaborators including Thom Yorke, Richard Ashcroft, Brian Eno and Josh Homme. The most recent UNKLE album, The Road: Part II / Lost Highway topped the Billboard Electronic Album chart in 2019. With UNKLE, Lavelle has won the MPG Award for remixer of the year four times in the past seven years, and has reworked tracks for artists as diverse as Beck, London Grammar, Ian Brown and Can. In 2014, Lavelle was asked to curate the iconic Meltdown on London’s South Bank, joining a long list of musical luminaries such as David Bowie, Yoko Ono, Massive Attack, Nick Cave and John Peel, amongst others, something he described as one of his career highlights. 2018 saw the release of The Man From Mo’Wax, a critically acclaimed documentary film about Lavelle career, that saw a major release with the BFI, as well as showings at a number of international film festivals. With plans to take his Living In My Headphones night to new cities, and the return of That’s How It Its for a reunion night at Gilles Peterson’s We Out Here festival, as well as touring festivals and clubs around the world, and the long awaited Director’s Cut of Psyence Fiction, 2020 is set to be another exciting year for Lavelle.