Jay Darkside

Obsessed with music from a young age, Jay Darkside began collecting vinyl and bought his first set of decks aged 14. Inspired by early rave, jungle, and breakbeat pioneers like The KLF, The Prodigy, Goldie, BT, Hybrid, Randall and Andy C, Jay sent out a mixtape to bag his first DJ booking on Vision FM in 1995. In the following years, Jay was invited to DJ on London pirate radio stations including Upfront FM, Kronik FM and Outcast FM.

Since then he has provided guest mixes for various radio shows including Ministry of Sound Radio, Breaks FM, DJ Station (Russia) and even Totalrock.com for DJ Force X’s ‘Crossing the Streams’ show. Jay also had his own show on dynamicbreaks.com. He created a series of DJ mixes for Superdry’s UK stores. These ranged from Big Beat Classics and Party Breaks through to Indie Dance and Deep House. He has edited a DnB Classics mix for Concrete Junglists, and a Bass Music Mix for Bass Music Movement. His ‘Golden Era’ mixes dice over 100 tracks of a chosen genre using Ableton software, and have gained over 35,000 plays across Soundcloud and Mixcloud. Using the same techniques, his Prodigy Mini Mix cuts though 45 of the band’s tracks in 5 minutes.

Jay has DJ’ed at Ministry of Sound, Brixton Academy, The Zap & Volks (Brighton), Gatecrasher at Heaven, Kinkymalinki, The Telegraph (Brixton), Herbal (London), Redfest Festival and plenty of other venues in London and South East England.

After several years behind the decks, Jay had his first attempt at producing a track, saying, “Me and some mates went to a studio in Croydon, booked an engineer, had no idea what we were doing, but after a day, by some miracle, we’d managed to produce a speed garage tune. I remember coming out of the studio and all of us feeling really pleased with it.”

Jay Darkside continued with music production, releasing GHETTO PEOPLE under the alias Ghetto Monkey, and GIVE IT UP featuring Andrea Britton under the alias Jay Rodriguez. GIVE IT UP entered the Top 10 for the DJ Magazine Breaks & Beats Chart, receiving Radio 1 airplay from Judge Jules four weeks running.