James Lavelle (UNKLE/MO'WAX)

For the past 30 years, James Lavelle has been at the forefront of global club culture. Known as much for his eclectic DJ sets as for his production work with UNKLE, Lavelle has been lauded as a highly influential tastemaker and musical curator.

He began DJing in Oxford aged only 15, where he started his first night, ‘Mo’Wax Please’. Relocating to London to start the record label of the same name, Lavelle took up a residency at The Fridge for Gilles Peterson’s ‘Talkin’ Loud’. The pair went on to start their own night together, ‘That’s How It Is’, a legendary Monday night session at Bar Rumba on Shaftesbury Avenue that saw Lavelle become a major fixture of London’s burgeoning club scene.

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.

He also produces albums under his UNKLE moniker, working with a myriad cast of musical collaborators including Thom Yorke, Michael Kiwanuka, Mark Lanegan, Massive Attack, Brian Eno and Josh Homme. Lavelle also curates multi-sensory art exhibitions, with his highly innovative and hugely successful series ‘Daydreaming With…’ and ‘Beyond the Road’ the latter of which NME described as an ‘album you can walk around’.