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.2 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.