After three years in London I’ve completed my degree, and last Wednesday graduated from the London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London. It’s a bittersweet feeling.
I’m gutted to be leaving the capital - though I hope it’ll only be a temporary measure - having gained so much in my time there. Some of my closest friends are left in the city, but most of the people I met at uni are now quickly dispersing across the country and the world.
There’s loads of things I’ll miss about London - life in the East Midlands makes it far more difficult to precure a disposable vape and a packet of Torres crisps at 2AM on a Sunday, for example - but perhaps the most considerable is the immediacy of friendship I now realise was so special.
“I’ll get on the 276 and meet you at the Auld Shillelagh” may well become “yes, I think I could do a week night in October, though I’ll need the day off,” while “you expect me to come all the way to Hammersmith?” will no doubt morph into “certainly I can visit: it’s only four hours and three changes. I’ll buy an M&S meal deal, it’ll be a right laugh.”
For the ninth edition of CrateEater, I spoke to Australian DJ/ producer Justin Hancock. He’s also a former Londoner. His new track, appropriately titled ‘11 Years in London’ provokes in abundance that bittersweet feeling I describe above. It’s a slow-building, eventually euphoric progessive house tune, released today on Swedish label Oh! Records.
Over the course of about an hour and a half Justin and I talked about his DJing career, London, Sydney, new music and more. Read the best of that conversation below.
Justin also runs a newsletter called Mixtapes, in which he shares original mixes and details the context which inspired them. For its latest edition, Justin put together a guestmix for CrateEater. There’s also a bit more from our discussion you can read there, diving specifically into Justin’s creative process. That’s all well worth checking out.
I have to thank Justin for all his efforts in the last few weeks: this is a collaboration we’ve been working on for a little while, and I’ve found the whole thing thoroughly enjoyable. I hope you get as much from our conversation as I did.
From chugging drinks to changing nappies: the Justin Hancock experience
The Australian touring DJ turned all-action family man reflects on two decades of the dancefloor and previews new music
“Two heads are better than one, and eight drinks are better than none.“
Travelling the world as one half of Australian DJ duo Rogers Room, Justin Hancock’s philosophy was clear: teamwork was essential, and sobriety, it seems, was absolutely off the cards. The Sydney native played some of the world’s most impressive clubs, and collaborated with many of his hometown’s most exciting electronic musicians.
“We played gigs in Bali. I played at nightclubs in Tokyo. I've played ski resorts in the Rockies of the United States,” he says. “We DJed at a club called Kampus in Jakarta on the 30th story of a skyscraper, and it was rotating. The thing is just spinning in the middle of these low hanging clouds, and that city is like something out of Blade Runner.”
Hancock has been on quite the journey. But as I sit (virtually) across from him, the 37-year-old bears none of the hallmarks of a booze-fuelled club kid. He sports a pair of clear-framed glasses and an impressive silver quiff. The evening lights of Melbourne - where he’s staying on a business trip - blink through the hotel window.
His story is one that so many can relate to: a deep passion for music, fostered in nightclubs during his teens, developed into a furious and frantic love affair in his early twenties. Now he writes and observes from a distance, removed by family and work commitments. Hancock’s personal life has variably steered him towards, and pulled him away from, the dancefloor.
“I grew up in Sydney, Australia in the 1990s and 2000s and I went to a music school. I played the flute, the trombone, the piano, the oboe, the clarinet, the electric guitar, the classical guitar and the violin,” he tells me.
As well as his aptitude for learning instruments, Hancock’s mixing acumen was apparent from an early age: “I used to love compilation CDs. There's something about good soundtracks, you know, movie soundtracks, and they'd be put together with such great thought. I would end up making my own mixtapes. From the age of about seven I made mixtapes with my parents’ hi-fi system.
“I stumbled into DJing through my brother at 16 because he was a club DJ and he introduced me to it,” he continues. “There was that curation and musical experience from very early on, which I think had a big impact on me.”
The Australian would travel to parties in Sydney and Melbourne in his teens, often under familial supervision. “My brother snuck me into nightclubs when he was DJing and did radio shows in Melbourne,” he says. “The scene there was very cool and progressive, edgier than Sydney. I think Melburnians like to think it still is.”
Hancock’s DJing career took flight at university, where he teamed up with Alec Brown to form Rogers Room. “[The band] was named after this weird function space on campus at Sydney University. We liked the alliteration. We had a following at uni, then they started following us around the clubs and it got bigger and bigger,” he explains.
The selector began writing music around that time, but struggled to do so consistently because of Rogers Room’s demanding gig schedule. During that period, the pair worked with some of the lucky country’s most talented DJ/ producers.
“We actually wrote an EP with [Australian electronic musician] Hayden James. He was a friend of ours back in Sydney. And a lot of those guys, like Hayden and [Sydney duo] Flight Facilities, went on to become very big international brands,” continues Hancock.
“Hip-hop was making a major resurgence, the 90s hip-hop vibe,” he says of Sydney’s ‘00s nightlife landscape.
“I learned to play hip-hop, but I was always a house music artist. I loved house, and I followed a lot of the English and European acts. That music did permeate nightclubs in Sydney. There was a sound that came out of Australia, though: more summery, kind of semi-tropical.
“Disco was a major influence in the clubs at that time as well. So whilst there were the hip-hop clubs, there were also the house music clubs playing cooler house music from Europe, but also disco-infused references. That made its way into a lot of the acts that became popular at the time.”
While there were plenty of exciting sounds coming out of Sydney in the early 2010s, trouble was brewing in the city’s nightlife space. Two ‘one-punch’ deaths in New South Wales put a spotlight on alcohol and drug-fuelled crime in the area.
New ‘lock-out laws’ were introduced in 2014, and many felt that Sydney’s bars and clubs struggled as a result. Hancock is a little hesistant to talk about the controversial laws, although he agrees they stifled NSW’s dancefloors.
“The lock-out laws decimated the nightlife scene and impacted tourism badly. I thought it was incredibly narrow minded, bureaucratic and misrepresented,” he says. “Nightclubs were essentially blamed for large rafts of violence. But it was much more complex than that.”
By the time Sydney’s new laws were actually announced, Hancock, then in his mid-twenties, had moved to London. Though dance music was still close to his heart, he wasn’t quite the weekend warrior he’d been during the mid-2000s.
In the English capital, Hancock didn’t look for the party-hard lifestyle he led as part of Rogers Room. Instead, he sought out warm-up sets and weekday parties.
“By the time I got to London, I was so over going out on the weekend that I did the inverse of that,” he explains. “Me and my wife wanted to make friends. We went to a lot of side shows and parties. And one of the things that we loved about London was that on Resident Advisor, you could go and find an artist playing any night of the week and you didn't have to go to a mainstream club.
“The first thing I wanted to do was warm-up gigs. Warm-up gigs for me have always been the thing I look forward to most. There's no compelling reason to keep the dancefloor moving, so you get a lot more leeway in terms of setting the vibe and taking the floor in the way you want to go. Then there's this magic when a room gets to a critical point and a gear shifts and suddenly people start to move. That is incredibly compelling.”
Sonically, London was in a different place to the DJ’s hometown. “Sydney sounded tropical and disco and funky and cool, but the UK sounded driving, gritty and dark,” Hancock says.
Reflecting on his time in London, the producer says the city became an incredibly significant part of his life: “I’ve never been homesick for anywhere except London. And I miss the city desperately. My wife - who was my girlfriend when we left Australia - and I moved to a new city to reinvent ourselves. I became incredibly attached to London as a city and everything that it stood for: a multicultural melting pot; a place of progressive business and cultural ideas.”
After 11 years on British soil, the now-37-year-old returned to Sydney with his family. He’s currently vice president at an Australian tech company. “In August 2023, when we had our daughter, we knew our time was ticking in the UK,” he says. “I wanted my parents and my wife’s parents to have a meaningful relationship with our kids. And ultimately, we just figured that the amount of time you could get together, if you raised a family on the other side of the world, would be too limited.
Months later, Hancock is preparing to share two new tracks which celebrate his time in London, as well as the event which inspired his homecoming.
‘11 Years in London’, released today on Stockholm label Oh! Records, is an emotive progressive house tune, at once danceable and reflective. “It’s a euphoric track,” says Hancock. “It’s stabby and uplifting, there’s a really massive bass line from an awesome synth.”
The producer describes ‘Hey Daughter’, dropping 30 August on Oh!, as “this rolling, melodic, downtempo track," featuring vocals from the man himself.
“These are my two favorite tracks ever that I wrote,” he says. “I love listening to them. They both speak to two critical experiences from the last decade of my life: living in London, the city that I love as much as I just described to you, and the birth of my first child.”
Today, Hancock juggles a busy family life with a high pressure job and a passion for writing and finding music. While he can’t often make time for the club, he looks back on his dancing days warmly, and hopes he’ll return more frequently in the future. In the meantime, his newsletter Mixtapes has become an outlet for his creative pursuits.
“I had about 15 years of going out and I gave it a really good nudge”, he says. “I've been out so many times in so many places around the world, which is a real privilege.
“Eventually I just thought: ‘Hey, I'm going to build a family and a career, but I'll still do music and I can do it through writing music and I can do it through Mixtapes.’ When things free up in the future, I hope to be a little bit more involved again.”
In his newsletter Mixtapes Justin Hancock shares original mixes, as well as the context which inspired them. For the newsletter’s latest edition, we talked about Justin’s creative process in depth, and touched on the tracks he chose for his 11th mixtape, a fresh collection of tropical house tracks put together for CrateEater. You can have a look at all that and subscribe for free here.
CrateEater Recommends: 26/7/24
A handful of projects I’m into right now. Always some new music, always some classics- let’s dig in.
I was blown away by this album on first listen, and each successive replay proves increasingly rewarding. Genius Loci is an ambient/ drone LP by London-based sound artist Brian D’Souza, also known as Auntie Flo. Recorded in the Het Hem gallery, a former munitions factory in Zaandam, the Netherlands, it features an accordian as its lead instrument. The project was released on D’Souza’s label A State of Flo, in whose corresponding newsletter the Scottish producer goes into more detail about its recording and release.
Samurai is the ninth studio album by Chicago rapper Lupe Fiasco, released about a month ago on 1st & 15th. The project is just over 30 minutes long, and boasts eight consistently impressive tracks including highlights ‘Cake’ and ‘No. 1 Headband’. Fiasco tops mostly laid back jazz rap beats with braggadocious bars, often lacing his lyrics with lofty cultural and historical references: “It's a Kabbalist novelist inside of my esophagus” stands out particularly.
I recommended Patrick Holland’s Left at the Table EP a few weeks ago, and the producer continues his hot streak as one half of Jump Source on this latest EP, JS05. Holland and fellow Canadian Priori combine to impressive effect over the course of three tracks and 19 minutes on their seventh collaborative release, opener ’Balance’ being the high point. Gritty, momentous and danceable, there’s very little not to like here.
Morcheeba - Who Can You Trust?
Much of Morcheeba’s work has often been panned in the past, and while it’s true that the band’s discography is pretty inconsistent, Skye Edwards and the Godfrey brothers have produced some very impressive work in the past three decades. Who Can You Trust?, released in 1996 on China Records, fuses psychedelic rock with hip-hop and downtempo. The LP is beautifully well recorded; it sounds like the polished, Hi-Fi-ready cousin to Portishead’s Dummy, and the London trio rather wear their trip-hop influences on their sleeve on this, their debut album.
If you want to share the music you’ve been listening to with the CrateEater community, we’d love to hear it. Add a couple of tunes to our playlist here.
That’s all for this edition.
Before you log off on account of your blood-curdling screen time, don’t forget to have a look at Justin Hancock’s latest newsletter, as well as his mix for CrateEater.
Thanks so much for reading!
Luke