Soul Revolution, three years in: what a closing set has to do

Soul Revolution is at Weston Park, near Shifnal, at the end of May. No alcohol, nothing else either, and it is a family festival, so the dancefloor has children on it. I have played it in 2024, 2025 and 2026, and in 2024 I was given the official closing set, which is the last music anyone hears before they take the tents down.

A closing set is not a late set. I want to be clear about that because the words get used interchangeably and they are different jobs.

The last set of a night

At a normal event the last set is a peak. The room is as loose as it is going to get, the DJ’s job is to hold the top for as long as the licence allows, and then the lights come up and everyone is thrown out into the street still buzzing. The set ends abruptly by design. The night ends, the night out continues somewhere else.

The last set of a festival

At a festival, the last set is an ending. People have been on site for days. They are tired in a way that a night out never makes you. They have made friends they are about to lose, and they know it. They are not looking for a peak. They are looking for a way to finish that does not feel like being switched off.

So the closing set does the opposite of the last set of a night. It brings a floor that has been up for four days down to the ground, slowly, and leaves them there in a state where getting in the car is possible. The tag on my recording of it says closing and sunrise, and that is the register: the music you would play as the light comes up, played as the festival goes down.

It is the hardest kind of set I know, and being handed it is the line I would put first on any CV.

You do not get asked to close a festival because you can make a room jump. You get asked because someone trusts you to land it.

New Year’s Day

Soul Revolution asked me back for a New Year’s Day set at the start of 2025, which is a different job again: a room that has decided to start its year sober and dancing, on the one day of the year when most of the country is doing the opposite. The recording is the longest set on this site, just under two hours, and it is the one I would hand to anyone who thinks sober means quiet. Tribal fusion into drum and bass, on the first of January, with nobody hungover.

2026

In 2026 Amelia Yawanawá joined me on stage. I have an ongoing relationship with the Yawanawá of Aldeia Yawarani in Acre, Brazil, which the home page describes, and I will write about it properly after I have been out to the village in October and asked the people involved how they want it told. For now: the set exists, the festival filmed it, and it is on the home page.

Hear them

The 2024 closing set and the 2025 New Year’s Day set are on the mixes page. The 2026 set with Amelia is on the home page. Between them they are a fair account of what three years at one festival does to a DJ, which is mostly to make him quieter.