Cambridge, UK · disco · balearic

DJ Harvey

2 upcoming festivals ↓

Balearic disco lifer whose sets run long, loose, and completely against the grain of modern festival programming — a cult figure worth rearranging your day for.

DJ Harvey, born Harvey William Bassett in Cambridge in 1961, started out as a drummer, joining the Cambridge punk band Ersatz at the age of thirteen. The band's own label, Leisure Sounds, released the single "Smile in Shadow," which John Peel played on BBC Radio 1, and Ersatz continued recording together until 1983.

A 1985 trip to New York exposed Harvey to hip hop, and he bought his first pair of Technics turntables on returning home. He was part of the graffiti crew TDK, which became Tonka Sound System, throwing weekend-long parties across Cambridge, Brighton and London, including five years of parties at Brighton's Zap Club that spilled onto the beach at Black Rock after closing.

In 1991 he began a weekly night, Moist, at London's Gardening Club, playing six-hour sets of disco, house, garage and rock. He went on to hold a residency at Ministry of Sound, which produced the 1996 mix album Late Night Sessions, and played at Cream in Liverpool, Back to Basics in Leeds and clubs in Ibiza.

Harvey later founded a gallery and nightclub, thirtyninehotel, in Honolulu, before relocating to Los Angeles, where he became a fixture on the club scene and held a bi-monthly residency at Santos in New York.

His sets draw on disco, boogie, Balearic and house records, moving slowly between tempos and moods rather than building to obvious peaks. He recorded with the band Locussolus and, on his BC label, produced disco edits of tracks by Larry Levan and Ron Hardy; he also collaborated with Thomas Bullock on the project Map of Africa, and his edits and remixes have circulated widely among disco-oriented DJs.

Read more

discobalearic