1 week ago
5
One day around the turn of the millennium DJ EZ turned up for his regular slot at Kiss FM. His career was taking off in earnest, in line with his reputation as a technically gifted mixer and linchpin of the UK garage scene. He was among the first DJs to play Daniel Bedingfield’s Gotta Get Thru This on the radio, shortly before it topped the UK singles chart and earned Bedingfield a Grammy nomination, and his Midas touch was now hotly sought after, sometimes to a frightening degree. As he arrived at Kiss HQ he saw some familiar faces – musicians he says we’d all recognise today – wearing a threatening look. “There was three or four of them waiting,” he says. “Like: ‘Here’s my track. Play it today. Or else.’”
EZ played the song (“Had to!”), survived, and 20 years later some consider him the finest DJ in the UK. He throws everything into the pot, remixing tracks in front of your eyes and creating new ones in real time. Snippets of classics appear out of thin air, sometimes several within a minute. Most DJs play crowdpleasers, but EZ craves pandemonium with every drop, and invariably gets it. His sets are feats of not just dexterity but also endurance: in livestreamed charity events he has DJ’d for eight, 12 and 24 hours at a time. “EZ is God,” says dubstep pioneer Skream. “I literally learned how to mix copying his old tapes when I was like 11 or 12 – I’d copy them mix for mix.”
Behold the crossfader-and-loop sorcery as EZ chops between Wookie and Lain’s Battle and Cleptomaniacs’ All I Didn’t Do on his 2012 Boiler Room set (“the greatest piece of DJing ever performed,” according to one comment with 2,100 upvotes), or a recent TikTok in which he brings together Dizzee Rascal and Eurythmics like a matchmaker introducing two new lovers. And as UK garage turns 30 this year – a style which EZ may even have invented – he’s remained its staunch champion while its popularity has waxed, waned and waxed again.
His career dates back to his early teens. In 1988 rave was born in Britain and Otis Roberts, a stocky 13-year-old living in north London, was among the many kids who heard it and decided he wanted to be a DJ. Using two tape decks and the turntable from his mum’s JVC hi-fi he worked out a way to mix, adjusting the speed of a track by squeezing the pinch roller on the cassette player.
He recorded demos of himself DJing and started sending them to radio stations, mimicking his idols by doing shoutouts between songs, speaking into the cups of his headphones because he didn’t have a mic. “Obviously my voice hadn’t broken by then,” he says. “I sounded like a little squeaky mouse.” After a series of rejection letters one station, Dance FM, gave him two weekly slots. He called himself DJ Easy O, later shortening it to DJ EZ and pronouncing it the British way: ee-zed.
“I was a massive celeb in school,” he says, speaking on the phone between a summer of shows in Ibiza and two months touring Asia and Australia. “I was the only person on radio. That was really fun: teachers loving me, girls and stuff, like, Can you shout me out when you do your next show? It was wicked.”
The more his career took off, the less he cared about school. “I was still going, but … not every day,” he says, audibly grinning. “It got to a point where I’ve done my exams and never even went back to find out my results. I still don’t know them to this day.” At 15 he left home and started living at Dance FM’s premises, which made him a natural choice to fill in for any other DJ who was late or failed to show up, giving EZ more airtime. His parents were sceptical, but supportive enough to buy him records when they could.
EZ moved to Freek FM, another pirate, in 1994, and that year he played a show at a now-long-since-shuttered nightclub in Greenwich. He was taken by the house tunes coming across the Atlantic from New Jersey, themselves influenced by the “garage” sounds of Larry Levan’s New York gay club Paradise Garage. EZ picked up The Praise (God in His Hand) by New Jersey producer Todd Edwards, released under the alias The Sample Choir. Knowing his British audience were used to rapid hardcore and jungle, he sped the track up from its usual 120bpm – quick to Americans but sluggish to British ears – to an elastic 130. The crowd went wild and, as the legend has it, UK garage was born.
“It was around before that, slowly bubbling under,” he argues. “I was one of the ones that maybe brought it towards the attention of the masses. I was known for playing at the wrong tempo, and then it caught on.” People called it speed garage for a while, then UK garage once Brits started producing it themselves. “I’m still proud of that moment.”
“The thing about EZ is that he’s always been there,” says Eliza Rose, a member of UKG’s new generation who in 2022 hit No 1 with BOTA (Baddest of Them All) alongside speed-garage revivalist Interplanetary Criminal. “EZ’s the first DJ I can think of that had an understanding of, properly, what a DJ was. When me and my mates were going to raves, he would be the one we were going to see.”
Despite all his technical hocus-pocus, EZ insists he’s never practised DJing in his spare time: “Never, and that is God’s honest truth.” In the 90s and much of the 00s he played shows almost every day, including as many as six clubs in one night one New Year’s Eve, so his skill is simply the result of spending 30 years learning on the job. He also crossed over to legal radio stations like Kiss, and not long after Shanks & Bigfoot’s UK garage lullaby Sweet Like Chocolate topped the charts in 1999, Warner commissioned EZ to mix Pure Garage, the first of nine now-epochal mix CDs. Then, around 2002, EZ had a hand in the formation of another sound that defined a generation of British music.
As Dan Hancox writes in Inner City Pressure: the Story of Grime, EZ was playing new music by artists such as Dizzee Rascal and Wiley on his Kiss FM show, “describing some tracks as ‘grimy garage’, until the word ‘garage’ eventually fell away”.
“I do recall saying ‘this is like grimy garage,’” EZ says, noting down the book title. “But I didn’t know that term was lifted and made a point of.”
after newsletter promotion
Grime took over the airwaves and garage fell from grace, but EZ stayed loyal. In 2012 he played a short set filled with turntablist trickery on the then-nascent Boiler Room, precipitating a garage revival and establishing what a DJ mix could be in the online age. The video catapulted EZ’s name on to festival lineups everywhere from Stockholm to Singapore, eventually driving his fees to a reported minimum of £25,000 a booking.
“Um, that’s incorrect,” he demurs. “Very incorrect. I’m kind of flexible now in terms of fees, because I really want to play all over the world in 200-cap venues, 2,000-cap, you know? If you’re at a 200-cap venue, you’re not gonna get £25,000.” One website estimates EZ’s net worth at between one and three million dollars. “I just wanna know where they get their information from. I’ve been looking under my mattress, thinking: Where’s this three mil? Where is it?”
He admits that choosing garage might have cost him a more lucrative career. “Sometimes I wonder if I’d stuck to techno, which is one of my biggest loves, what would have happened,” he says. “I’m a big fan of Carl Cox – look at the levels he’s at. But I’ve just got to celebrate what I’ve done in the garage world.”
Perhaps one key to EZ’s success is he has always refused drink and drugs. “I’ve probably had a little sip of Bailey’s at Christmastime, years ago, but obviously in this game you get offered everything,” he says. “It’s always been a no. I don’t even accept open drinks.” What puts him off booze? “The taste. And I’ve seen what it does.”
He’s not even minded to stay out late and mingle. “I just wanna go, play my set and get home. I’m not really one for socialising.” Though he’s never been diagnosed, he’s had people wonder aloud whether he’s on the autism spectrum, “at least a couple times, and recently as well. I could be. I don’t know what the signs are, but from what I’ve read about it everyone’s got some sort of autism in them. How do I find out?”
Neurodivergent or not, EZ remains as devoted to his craft aged 48 as he was as a teenager on pirate radio. “I don’t think I’ve ever cancelled a show,” he says. “And I tend to say yes to a lot of things.” His bookings increasingly include private parties filled with A-list guests who are all “sort of NDA’d up” (meaning non-disclosure agreements). That’s a long way from sweaty Greenwich dives, and as with any job there are motivational challenges. “There’s loads of times where it’s like: I really don’t want to do this,” he says. “But I’ve gone and I’m so glad I played.” Does he ever think of hanging up the headphones? “Nah. Love it, all the time.”
