Rave-culture parents, a Circus deal, and why I changed my name

My parents were rave culture. That is the first fact about me and most of the others follow from it. I did not discover dance music. I was brought up in it, the way other people are brought up in a religion or a football club, and I was making mix CDs and taking vinyl lessons while I was still at secondary school, when most of my mates were working out how to get served.

BROADHURST

For a long time I made house music under my own surname, in capitals. BROADHURST was signed to Circus Recordings, which is Yousef’s label out of Liverpool, and in 2022 I had a record on their Movements Pt. 3 compilation called Once Upon A Time. That same year In the Garden of Light came out on Nothing But, on their Organic House Essentials series.

I am proud of those records and I am not going to pretend otherwise for the sake of a tidy story. Getting a track onto a Circus release is a proper thing to have done. But I was already, by then, making a different kind of music at home from the one I was releasing, and the gap between the two was getting harder to ignore.

The record that decided it

Om Namah Shivaya came out on Flow in 2023, still as BROADHURST, and Beatport put it on their Best New Hype list for organic house. It is a mantra, set to organic house. It is the most honest record I had made and it did better than the ones I had made trying to fit in. That told me something I had suspected for a while, which is that the music I actually cared about did not need me to pretend it was something else.

After that I stopped. Not stopped making music, stopped splitting it. Everything since has been under one name, and the surname went back to being a surname.

What it looks like now

Organic house and tribal, downtempo when the room wants it, drum and bass when it can take it. A djembe and a microphone in the booth, both played live. Residencies at three UK festivals where nobody drinks. An events brand, Awaken, that I started so the rooms I wanted to play would exist. A single, River Is Flowing, in 2025, the first one out under the new name.

The rave culture I was raised in was about a room of people losing themselves to music together. The rooms have changed. That has not. I have just taken the bar out.

Part two of this covers the Himalayas, Indonesia, Mexico, a man in a blessing line, and how a DJ from the Midlands ended up with a standing invitation to a village in the Amazon. That one waits until I have been back to the village and asked how they want it told.