Keep Hush is spotlighting talent on the UK underground music scene
Written by ABR on 27/07/2023
On the Saturday night of Glastonbury 2023, a dozen DJs bundled into a shipping container in a corner of late-night dance area Shangri-La to share an epic four-hour set. Only those who wandered through one of the tube carriages flanking venue Platform 23 could access the unadvertised event. The legion of artists was gathered by Keep Hush, once a music, streetwear and art blog that’s grown into a community-driven group dedicated to spotlighting rising talent in the UK underground. The show is one in a series of events supporting underrepresented talent that Dr. Martens is supporting this summer.
Dr. Martens partnered with Keep Hush as part of its mission to support and develop the next generation of artists, offering £10,000 in funding for the community, as well as access to useful industry resources. As part of the collaboration, any Keep Hush artist on the lineup was given access apply for this support, as well as funding for both their performance and its promotional material.
For Nadī, a “bouncy bassline-oriented” DJ who performed that night, her first encounter with the group arose at a branch of Sainsbury’s, where a chance conversation eventually led to her playing the Keep Hush Christmas party. “It’s been revolutionary for me because it has made me so much more confident with doing live streams,” Nadī says. A keystone of Keep Hush is creating a safe space around the decks online and offline. “There’s a culture that can be quite toxic around the comments. But Keep Hush guaranteed me that there’s never been anything like that.” The exposure via the platform to promoters has helped her book more shows, including a tour in India next month.
The container showcase was one of four sets Nadī played her blend of R&B, D&B and dancehall at Glastonbury this year. She is a veteran of playing sets en masse, having performed with other organisations such as South Asian music collective Daytimers. “I feel like a good community is one that I can dip into, she says. “It doesn’t owe me anything; I don’t owe it anything.” Her dedication is evident – she made it to the container despite driving into a ditch on the way to the festival, underlining Keep Hush’s commitment “to always [being] a safer space.”
For Fliss Mayo, a DJ who has experimented with blending genres since playing her first set in 2019, the group is a place for up-and-coming DJs to be platformed in the correct way. Despite performing at events like Love Says the Day, Big Dyke Energy and Fabriclive, her full-time career is as a medical physics trainee at a cancer hospital in Liverpool. “What Keep Hush do really well is book DJs that haven’t had opportunities, who are not with agents,” she says. “You might have heard of half of the people on the lineup, or you might have heard of even fewer people. [But] you’ll be listening to DJs who are so talented, and I think that’s quite special.”
“The crowd was electric,” she says of the Glastonbury container. Her goal is to make people dance to tracks they would not usually listen to outside the club. She kicked off with a speedy house banger by I. JORDAN called “WARPER”, before steering through some speed garage and Miami bass.
With 12 DJs in the booth, their styles met at a tempo of around 135 bpm. “One of the DJs didn’t even have her USB,” Nadī says. “I was just like: ‘You can find a song on here that works. If you select by key, what could go wrong? The etiquette is when your song is up; you unplug your USB so the next person can plug theirs in. It works really well, but you need to follow someone who plays a similar bpm.”
The end of the set at 2 am posed the question of what song to play that both encapsulates the four-hour journey and shepherds the crowd onto their next Glastonbury act. Fliss weighed up two options: a sunny disco track or the emotional precision of Disclosure’s 2013 classic “White Noise”. With a signal from a friend, she selected the latter.
ABR Group