Leaving London

Covid ended a lot of things quietly, and one of them was my version of London. The city was still there. The scene, in the shape I'd spent fifteen years inside — the events outfits, the residencies, the weekly rhythm of rooms and records — wasn't coming back the same. Everyone who lived through those years as a promoter or DJ knows the feeling: the music survived, but the map burned.

So I did the thing you're either built for or you're not. I packed the records that mattered, got on a plane, and landed in Bali with no plan sturdier than find the music people.

Turns out that plan is sturdier than it sounds. Bali post-Covid was a strange, fertile gathering point — artists and musicians from everywhere, all mid-reinvention, all washed up on the same island with their old contexts dissolved. Nobody cared what your name had meant in your home city. The only question was: what can you do, here, now? I played venues and festivals, including Bali Bloom, and learned more about my own sound in eighteen months than in the previous five years — because nothing about it could lean on familiarity.

Here's what leaving teaches you about scenes. Some of what you think is yours is actually the city's — the venues, the crowds who know you, the shorthand you've earned. That stays behind. What travels is smaller and more valuable: your ear, your standards, your way of reading a room, and the discipline of building something from nothing, which London's DIY circuit had drilled into me without my noticing.

From Bali the thread pulled north — Thailand, then deeper into the region. Each scene asked the same question Bali asked: what can you do, here, now? And each time, the answer got a little clearer.

I didn't leave London to escape it. I left carrying it — the jungle lineage, the promoter's instincts, the selector's job description. The city made me; the region is where I've put it to work. Home stopped being a postcode a while ago. Now it's a frequency, and I can find it in most cities out here within a week.