For the past 30 years, James Lavelle has been at the forefront of global club culture. A polymath known as much for his eclectic DJ sets as his production work with UNKLE, Lavelle has been lauded as a highly influential tastemaker and musical curator.
His music career began as a DJ in Oxford. Aged just fifteen at the time, Lavelle started his first club night, Mo’ Wax Please, deriving its name from the column of the same name that he regularly contributed to music publication Straight No Chaser. He would later relocate from Oxford to London, where he established the Mo’ Wax label in 1992.
Mo’ Wax would soon be at the forefront of trip hop, turntablism and alternative hip-hop. No mere record label however, Lavelle saw it as a platform for his varied creative interests.
“I wanted it to be a cultural lifestyle base,” he recalls. “I wanted to create a kind of universe, really. I wanted it to be about art and music, and all those connections in the world from which I was coming. I wanted to have a record label and make films, have a gallery, and create this kind of cultural force, really, in art and music.”
Lavelle’s first few years in London saw him taking up a residency at The Fridge for Gilles Peterson’s Talkin’ Loud. The partnership would see the duo starting their own legendary Monday night club session, That’s How It Is, at Bar Rumba on Shaftesbury Avenue and led to Lavelle becoming a major fixture of London’s burgeoning club scene.
He soon found himself becoming a much sought after DJ talent across the UK, playing the likes of The Blue Note and Plastic People to Ministry of Sound and Cream. The opening of Fabric in 1999 proved to be a major turning point in his DJ career, leading to Lavelle taking up a residency and starting the iconic FABRICLIVE, which lasted for five years.
Alongside his time at Fabric, Lavelle went on to serve as resident at several of the world’s top nightclubs including amongst others, Zouk, Womb, Watergate, and Space. He was one of the first DJs to play China and Eastern Europe and has played in all six inhabited continents and continues to tour as a DJ across the world’s most iconic festivals and venues.
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Lavelle’s ability to craft genre-spanning mixes translated from to the club to the studio, where he created contributions to several iconic mix series. After releasing mixes for Tribal Gathering and Cream, he produced the inaugural FABRICLIVE CD, and has gone on to release four critically acclaimed mixes for Global Underground, the most recent of which went to the top of the electronic charts on iTunes. Pete Tong lauded him as ‘one of the most gifted minds in music’ when introducing his ‘mind blowing’ Essential Mix on BBC Radio 1. More recently has contributed DJ mixes for Keinemusik, Crosstown Rebels and Mary Anne Hobbs, whilst his monthly Living in My Headphones show on Soho Radio continues to showcase the more eclectic reaches of his record collection and is something of a passion project.
Early on in his career, not content with DJing, writing about, living, breathing, and releasing music it is unsurprising that James turned his eye to making his own music producing albums under his UNKLE moniker which he founded with childhood friend Tim Goldsworthy in 1992. Goldsworthy would later go onto start DFA records with LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy.
Outside of music collaborations with streetwear brands, such as Bathing Ape and Supreme, with streetwear heavyweight Nigo, and Nike underpinned Mo’ Wax’s status as a cultural monolith, engaging authentically with the culture surrounding it in a way that contemporary labels had either failed to, or neglected entirely.
“We were living it,” Lavelle muses. “It wasn’t something that we were seeing as a sort of corporate or a big sales thing. It was about creating and making stuff and things that were relevant to our community. The idea of being able to make all this stuff was exciting. It was the first place where you could see all that stuff happening together.”
From those early Mo’ Wax days to now, Lavelle’s relationship with the streetwear world has spanned over 30 years and he continues to collaborate with many of the leading brands including his most recent collection with Pleasures.
Outside of Streetwear his ties to the fashion world run deep. His music has soundtracked runway shows for Alexander Mc Queen, Rick Owens, Hussein Chalayan and most recently what would turn out to be Virgil Abloh’s final Off-White Show at Paris Fashion Week in 2021 and Lavelle has recently launched his own label Studio : Ar.Mour; a multidisciplinary lifestyle brand for creative outsiders in collaboration with the Japanese designer Kazuki Kuraishi. The brand featured in Japanese magazine Prodism’s October 2023 issue.
Today, Lavelle looks back fondly on Mo’ Wax’s lofty ambitions, which saw the label putting out hundreds of records on multiple formats over an intense ten-year period with releases by iconic yet cult figures, including Andrea Parker, Carl Craig, Blackalicious, DJ Krush, Kool Keith aka Dr Octagon and Money Mark. One of Mo’ Wax’s most notable releases was Endtroducing….. by the then relatively unknown producer Josh Davis aka DJ Shadow. This seminal release reached the top 20 UK album charts and regularly features on “Best Albums of all time” lists. Lavelle would go on to join forces with Davis as part of his UNKLE project releasing UNKLE’s critically acclaimed debut album ‘Psyence Fiction.’
“In retrospect, what we were doing with Mo’ Wax at the time was great. It was the nature of how the industry worked then. It’s different now. It’s amazing to think about the amount of things that were done in that period, because it was only really over a ten year period and what we achieved through the community of people that I’ve worked with: the collaborations and the connections,
especially in streetwear and how big that’s become, as well as the different people that we collaborated with in that period. It’s just kind of mad.”
While Mo’Wax closed its doors in 2002, its influence can still be felt throughout the music landscape today, with many of Lavelle’s creative collaborators moving on to major successes of their own.
Away from the dancefloor, Lavelle’s production work as UNKLE continues to see him working with a myriad cast of musical collaborators that has included the likes of Thom Yorke, Michael Kiwanuka, Mark Lanegan, Massive Attack, Brian Eno, and Josh Homme.
With UNKLE, Lavelle has won the MPG Award for remixer of the year four times in the past seven years and has reworked tracks for artists as diverse as Beck, London Grammar, Radiohead, and Wu Tang Clan.
Since the release of Psyence Fiction in 1998, collaboration has remained a cornerstone of the UNKLE ecosystem. Subsequent albums Never, Never Land, War Stories and Where Did the Night Fall, saw James work with several different partners, each presenting unique creative situation.
2017 marked the release of The Road: Part I, which saw them return to the UK top 20 to critical acclaim. This was UNKLE’s first studio album in seven years. Having spent several years focused on his artistic endeavours, time away from the studio had given Lavelle time to reflect and the recording sessions that followed were markedly different to those that had come before.
“I’d always been in partnerships, and it was an opportunity to make something in a more manageable way he recalls. “The technical process of recording Where Did the Night Fall was rather exhausting, and I really felt the need to work in a more simplistic way.’ I was just trying to find my feet again.”
The second chapter, The Road: Part II / Lost Highway, arrived in 2019, where it featured in the UK Top 40 Album Chart and topped the Billboard Electronic Album chart.
When the pandemic hit in 2020, it forced Lavelle to rethink UNKLE’s creative roadmap and presented an opportunity for him to revisit his work from a particularly challenging chapter of his career.
“I really didn’t know whether we were ever going to be able to tour or make records in the same way again. Going into studios, working with orchestras, and gathering with other people – suddenly we were limited by not being able to do that, so I just started going into defence mode and figured out a way to make things work. For me, it was this opportunity to look at certain things with fresh ears and to experiment while looking to move what I’m doing with UNKLE forward.”
With plans for shows and tours shelved, the pandemic ushered in a new era for UNKLE. The result was Rōnin, a two-part mixtape series consisting of remixes and brand-new mixes, created in isolation. Its first chapter functioned as a club DJ set of sorts, while the second functioned as the “post-club” follow-up.
“You had a certain framework,” Lavelle explains. “You’re not going to make a completely new record. Its construction meant you had the material already, so we didn’t have to go and record, which at that point in time was limiting.”
The first part, Rōnin I, featured the singles ‘Do Yourself Some Good’ and ‘If We Don’t Make It,’ both A Listed at BBC Radio 6Music. Here Lavelle teamed up with engineer, artist, and producer Steven Weston, whom he has collaborated and performed with for many years.
The second part, Ronin II, saw Lavelle re-team with regular collaborator Dorian Lutz, better known as Miink. With lockdown providing ample time for exploration, the Rōnin sessions proved to be fertile ground for the duo to experiment in terms of production.
Away from releasing his own records, Lavelle has a rich history of providing impactful, atmospheric music to multiple creative disciplines as UNKLE working on everything from Adverts, Feature Films, Documentaries, Short Films, TV Dramas, and Video Games. His music has been used to advertise iconic brands including Versace, BMW, Chivas, Jonnie Walker, Jägermeister, Pepe, Lancôme, Supreme, Vertu, H&M, Armani, Nike, Porsche, and McClaren and many more and his works have soundtracked numerous video games including classics such as Grand Theft Auto and Assassins Creed.
Back in 2000 James scored his first soundtrack for Jonathan Glazer’s seminal gangster film Sexy Beast. The two would also work together on the celebrated video for Rabbit in Your Headlights, a video often considered to be one of the best music videos of all time and nominated for MTV’s Best Music Video of the year in 1998. UNKLE’s tracks would go on to appear on numerous film and television spots, including FIFA, CSI, X Files, Top Gear, Misfits, The Bourne Ultimatum, most recently including The Mosquito Coast, Hijack, Dr Death, and Rain. In 2018 he worked with Alfonso Cuarón on the Roma soundtrack. Lavelle has also had an ongoing relationship with Danny Boyle since UNKLE’s Lonely Soul was used to conclude his cult classic film The Beach. More recently he wrote the soundtrack to Boyle’s television series Trust.
Curation has also remained a major focus. In 2014, Lavelle was invited to curate the iconic Meltdown on London’s South Bank, which remains a career highlight. His interest in visual mediums led to the creation of the ‘Daydreaming With…’ exhibition series in 2010, a celebration of creativity and innovation that aims to create a unique and multi-sensory experience. Pairing music with art in a wide range of disciplines, including film, photography, fashion, performance, painting, street art, sound, and sculpture combined, the multi-sensory exhibition has attained worldwide acclaim.
Blending Lavelle’s passion for music and cinema, 2016 saw the debut of ‘Daydreaming with Stanley Kubrick’, a blockbuster exhibition that attracted over 50,000 visitors at London’s Somerset House. It featured contributions from artists such as Anish Kapoor, Sarah Lucas, Gavin Turk, and Thomas Bangalter. James worked closely with Kubrick’s family on the project. It was the first time they had allowed his work to be exhibited on that scale and Christiane Kubrick (Stanley’s widow) herself an artist, also exhibited her work within the show.
Lavelle explored the use of physical spaces further in 2019, working with Punchdrunk creatives Colin Nightingale and Stephen Dobbie to launch ‘Beyond the Road at London’s Saatchi Gallery’. A ground breaking immersive exhibition featuring a deconstructed exclusive soundtrack and work from contemporary artists, filmmakers and photographers, NME described it as an ‘album you can walk around.’ The exhibition visited Asia for the first time in 2021, making it Korea’s first multi-sensory immersive exhibition. It ran in Seoul for four month and attracted over 85,000 visitors, despite the global pandemic.
Over the past few years James has been building Studio:UNKLE, a creative focus for his work that acts as a boutique label and archival space across fashion, film and art including new music, reissues, merchandise as well as other projects.
2023 saw UNKLE return to touring following the pandemic, with shows across Europe. Lavelle curated, DJed and performed the UNKLE Rōnin show with bespoke visuals at Hydra’s closing party held at London clubbing institution Printworks before it shut its doors at the end of April. Autumn saw UNKLE take the Rōnin show across the Atlantic returning to the USA and Mexico for a tour as well as DJing across the globe.
Throughout 2024 the UNKLE Rōnin show went from strength to strength with dates across the world. 2024 has seen UNKLE perform to massive crowds in China at Bubbling & Boiling Festival in Tianjin and at Kiloglow Festival in Hangzhou, a headline slot at the infamous Secret Garden Party festival, dates in Latvia, in Germany, and a hugely successful UK tour culminating in a packed show at London’s Outernet in the autumn. Lavelle continues to DJ with shows in Europe and the UK as well as DJing at and curating a special “Invites” night celebrating Fabric’s 25th anniversary.
UNKLE toured internationally throughout 2025, including one of the headline slots at South Facing Festival in London, the O2 Victoria Warehouse in Manchester, Mandela Hall in Belfast, Progresja in Warsaw, and the Shiiine On Weekender in Minehead. Further afield the band returned to China playing to packed crowds with selected dates in Shanghai and Foshan. The highlight of the year was a stunning show at KOKO in London where the band presented UNKLE Rōnin Live 3D:FX in London for the first time, featuring immersive hologram visuals utilising Bristol-based Holotronica’s cutting edge Hologauze technology, reinforcing the band’s reputation for truly spectacular cinematic live shows.
As we head into 2026 James is back in the studio writing a new album, continuing touring and excited about what the next chapter for UNKLE will bring.

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