The James Hype Hï Ibiza Interview

In this interview, UK technical wizard and #realDJing champion James Hype discusses how his love for music got him suspended from school, how he honed his skills as a residency DJ in the house clubs of Liverpool, and how an unexpected invitation from Tiësto changed everything.

You can catch the master at work every Monday with MEDUZA as part of their OUR HOUSE residency. It runs until the 29th September at Hï Ibiza, and tickets and VIP tables are available now.

This interview is part of our Road To Now series, where we ask our world-class resident DJs to give the definitive account of the artistic journey that brought them to a residency at the #1 Club in the World. The video version of this interview is out now too.

In secondary school. I used to get bootleg CDs off my dad, put them onto a tape and then take this tape recorder to school because it played music pretty loud. So I'd find the coolest music that I could from the CDs my dad was bringing home and I was listening to The Prodigy, I was listening to drum and bass compilations, putting them on the tapes and then playing them in school and I actually got suspended from school because they just said, “You've got to stop bringing that tape recorder in”. I just loved playing music to people!

Back then I didn't even know what a DJ was. So I feel like I was a DJ before I was even a DJ. When I was 14, I think I'd seen DJs in music videos. I used to skate as well, and sometimes they'd have DJs at the skate park. I didn't really know what they were doing but I just thought it was really cool. So for my 15th birthday, I begged my mum and dad to get me some decks off eBay. I got secondhand turntables and a really shit mixer and started playing some of my mum's old records. And some records that I found really cheaply in local record shops.

I think the local scene in Liverpool really influenced my sound. I grew up just outside of Liverpool and I used to take the bus into the city because it was so exciting for me. I always loved the big buildings and just the energy. As soon as I was 16 I got a fake ID and I started going out to the clubs in Liverpool. It had some amazing clubs at the time. There was a place called Garlands, a place called GBar, and they were in this area of town where all the music was house music and everyone was just up for a good time. I used to go to GBar every Thursday night and just stand by the speakers. Half the time I wasn't even drinking alcohol or anything because I was driving. I just loved the music and I was just so absorbed by the culture of house music that Liverpool had.

I was pretty fortunate in that I was an internet kid. So I lived on the internet and as soon as I became a DJ and started making music, I just put it all on the internet. So the encouragement that I got probably wasn't from any real people around me because I didn't really know any other DJs when I was learning, and I didn't know any producers. So it was the community that I'd found on the internet and people saying, “Oh, you're actually quite good”.

The turning point for me… I used to make remixes and just put them out on SoundCloud. Didn't make any money from it or anything like that. In fact, it was probably quite illegal, but no one really cared back then. So I was doing a remix every single week, I’d put it up on SoundCloud, and some of them did really well and some of them didn't do so well. I was doing so many that it didn't really matter to me. I was building a name for myself. I did this remix of a Drake tune and every DJ started playing it and I was like, no, this is crazy. I was just getting sent videos of DJs playing it in crazy places and I remember David Guetta was playing my remix and it was just wild! Like I'd never met any of these big DJs and, as far as I was concerned, I was just a guy in his bedroom making remixes for my own DJ sets. This one remix spread all over the world.

[The list is] really diverse and really British. So there's a huge jungle influence in my sound, a huge garage influence in sound. That's from just the early music that really hit, really connected with me. As well as a huge R&B and hip hop influence in my sound. My mum listened to R&B when I was growing up and I've listened to hip hop all my life. As far as producers who really excite me, I've always loved Chris Lake, I love Calvin Harris, love Axwell. There're so many more that I'm gonna forget to mention right now.

So I always try and keep pushing creative boundaries with my live performance and my DJ sets. One of the ways that I push myself to do this is just by giving people everything. If I create something cool, I'll just share it with the world straight away because then I feel like it doesn't belong to me anymore. So I have to move on to the next thing. And the whole TikTok generation just accelerates this even more. Like, every day when I go online, I'll see someone 10 years younger than me copying my trick exactly and absolutely nailing it. So then I have it instantly move on to the next thing. Otherwise, I'm no better than anyone else, you know?

So my mixing techniques are quite different from 90% of people and I think the reason for that is I've just DJed for so long. I used to be a resident DJ six nights a week and I used play for five or six hours a night. I spent so many hours DJing that I got to this point where I was like, I wonder if I can do this differently? I wonder if instead of doing a simple transition from this track into this track, what if I do it in a slightly different way? What if I experiment with the CDJ and find out what all these functions do? For me that was just a process of spending so long behind the decks. I created this technique just for my own enjoyment and then shared it with the world on the internet. A couple of videos went viral and people were like, yo, this is crazy! So I just, I just dived into it more.

There's a DJ from the UK called MistaJam. I remember it was like two or three years before anyone had acknowledged me or thought I was good, and I went and hung out with MistaJam in London. It was just the sickest thing! I was like, London, big DJs, radio, all of that! He really believed in me before a lot of people believed in me.

I can't think of any amazing advice that I've ever received from another artist, but there are moments that I’ve had where other artists have just acknowledged me. That's just been the biggest thing ever. I remember three years ago, I was in Miami and Tiësto invited me for breakfast. And like even today that's wild, but three years I was like, what the hell? This is insane! I sat with him and he just had respect for me. That meant so much to me in that moment. I just couldn't believe someone as big as him really thought I was a somebody. That really affected me, just him giving me his time. I hope that I can do the same kind of thing for newer DJs moving forward.

I transitioned from being a local resident DJ into being literally an international artist and that's a huge change in life. Like, when I remember back when I first moved to London and I didn't even have enough money to pay the rent I had to ask my girlfriend, “Can you pay more than half this month please?”. So financially there's been a huge change in my life. I was just chasing the dream and doing whatever it took. Not making a whole lot of money and I'm very fortunate now that I'm in a position where people actually pay me to do what I love and they pay me pretty well, so that's amazing. That's something that anyone would appreciate.

The things that I'm most proud of are the records that have connected with millions and millions of people over the world and they feel really true to me. My record “Ferrari”, for example, I made purely for my own DJ sets. It's the most truest to me thing there ever has been. I'm so proud that I was able to get billions of streams on this record, not even millions, billions of streams without having to make it commercial. Without having jump through hoops, or fit the mould that the record label thinks will get all the streams or whatever. There are so many other records where they feel so true to me… like, I did a collab with Majoy Lazer called “Number 1”, and it's just the craziest mashup of different sounds. We didn't try and fit in, we just did it! Those are the moments that we'll look back at in 20 years from now and we'll still be proud.