Superstar DJ James Hype is turning house music into homes: ‘Let’s see what we can do’

On 22 November, James Hype will play the Bristol Beacon. The Merseyside-born DJ plays on average 130 shows a year, mainly in North America and Ibiza, and Bristol is one of only two UK dates he is playing this year. 

For it, he is bringing over his SYNC show, in a 360° set up, from his Hï Ibiza residency where the venue lights and screens will be triggered by his live mixing. So far, so normal in the jetlag-defying, cash-spinning, Instagrammable world of the peripatetic DJ. 

What’s different is that all the money raised from the Beacon show will go to fund the building of new micro-homes in conjunction with Help Bristol’s Homeless. It is part of BillyChip Live, the concert extension of the initiative whereby you can purchase tokens to give to people experiencing homelessness and they can redeem them for food, drinks and other provisions from participating outlets. 

“Homelessness is becoming more of an issue in the UK and it’s very apparent when you go to major cities like London and Bristol,” says James of why he got involved. “We’re all out there chasing these wild aspirations of becoming a huge DJ, but there are some people who don’t even have their basic needs met.”

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DJs today, he says, “get paid a lot of money” and really need to give back. 

“We can all afford to not get paid for one show,” he insists. If the Beacon show sells out – and, given his stature, that is a nailed-on certainty – the money raised can pay for three fully fitted and equipped modular homes. 

He is certain, by getting involved in this work, that other high-profile names in the dance world will step forward to help. 

“As soon as I put this out publicly on social media, I guarantee you there are going to be 10 or 15 DJs in the comments saying, ‘This is a great idea!’ Hopefully some of them take it upon themselves to follow in the same path.”

He estimates that maybe 10% of shows DJs get involved in have some sort of charity element, but he thinks this could and should be a lot higher. “There are some DJs who are very out there with their charity, but in general it’s not something that everybody’s involved in,” he says. 

Rather than a one-off, he is hoping it could become a regular fixture – for him and for other DJs. “If this first one goes well,” he explains, “then I see no reason why we don’t do this every year.”

Read more:

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• This UK music festival is building homes and tackling homelessness: ‘It’s a festival of giving’
• ‘A life changing moment’: Inside England’s Homeless World Cup training session ahead of the tournament of a lifetime

James Hype (real name: James Marsland) was born in 1989, just at the end of The Second Summer Of Love when acid house exploded into the public consciousness in the UK and became the lightning rod for a new moral panic. He grew up in the Wirral but in the early 2000s would regularly skip class to get the bus into Liverpool where he would hang out in the city’s specialist dance record shops. 

“School didn’t interest me,” he says. “It just felt like there was this culture that was calling me.”

At 16, he got fake ID and was able to get into a variety of clubs in Liverpool to soak up the music and carefully watch what the resident and guest DJs were doing. “Every club in Liverpool was playing house music,” he recalls of his Damascene dance moment. “I used to go to a lot of the gay clubs because they had the best DJs. That was completely imprinted on me for the next two years.”

By 18, he had started to get his own gigs, including Aura Bar in Hoylake on the Wirral and Funky Box in Liverpool. “From then on, I didn’t do anything else,” he says. “I was obsessed.”

He’s now a rapidly rising star in the world of house and tech-house; DJ Mag listed him at no 57 in its Top 100 DJs 2024 list, praising his “trademark, slinky and swung bangers”, his four-deck mixing and his skill in “bringing clubbers on a kaleidoscopic journey through dance music past, present and future”. 

He has almost 11 million monthly listeners on Spotify and “Ferrari”, his 2023 crossover hit with Miggy Dela Rosa (reaching number six in the UK charts), has generated more than three-quarters of a billion streams on the service. 

He claims no one works harder than he does. His manager, to back this up, shows me his summer bookings and his workload is genuinely staggering. 

We meet in Rankin’s photography studio in North London and James had flown in from Ibiza the day before (as he has a Monday residency there). He is playing Italy the following day. “There are a lot of days where you get three or four hours of sleep,” he says. “When you are on such limited sleep, things that wouldn’t normally stress you out can become very stressful.” 

On top of that, most musicians today have to become ‘content creators’ and feed the ravenous TikTok and Instagram algorithms, as well as release a steady flow of new music. He reveals that when he first started touring in the US, just after pandemic restrictions on clubs were lifted, it all became overwhelming. “I was having panic attacks in hotel rooms,” he tells me.

“I didn’t really know why at the time, but I spoke to another DJ who’s 10 years more established in this world than me and he said, ‘You’re in a really difficult space, but this is not abnormal what you’re going through.’ That really helped a lot.”

He found that journalling was the best coping mechanism. Writing down what was in his head to help neutralise it. “That really helped me get the shit out of my mind,” he explains. “When it all gathers up in your mind, you end up driving yourself crazy. Normally the type of thing that you’re stressed out over, when you write it down on paper or on your phone, it’s not that dramatic. There are simple steps you can take and it won’t be stressful.”

To keep things fresh and exciting during his frenetic run of shows each year, he is constantly making new music to have new work-in-progress tracks to drop into his set to road-test them. “I sit on a plane most days and make music,” he says. “Some of it’s bad and some of it’s good. And every night I go to the club and play it. I look forward to that little moment in my set.”

He knows the world of the international DJ is a curious cocktail of pressure and incredible privilege as astronomical fees rain down on them. Equally he believes the successful need to pay it back. Last year, he toured smaller clubs in cities like Hull, Leeds, Milton Keynes and Lincoln as a sign of support for the grassroots circuit that made him, but which was struggling with mass post-pandemic club closures.

“The UK club scene and culture gave me everything I know!” he posted on Instagram to announce the tour. “I’m doing this to give back to small towns and clubs.”

His work with Help Bristol’s Homeless springs from the same sense of altruism. “If we can build three houses a year, that’s incredible,” he says. I ask if he’ll group message with every big-name DJ in his phone to get them to follow his lead. “Let’s see what we can do!”

House music, fittingly, is now giving shelter to the homeless. 

Get live dates information on James Hype’s website

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