Rowan Blades returns to Australia in July for an exclusive residency at Chinese Laundry in Sydney. Get a taste of where he’s at musically right now, with this live mix from his recent performance in Kosovo.

His deep tan, relaxed smile and crow’s feet suggest someone more at home in Havana than Hackney, and one look at Rowan Blade’s passport confirms it. There’s more ink on there than an Octopus’ calligraphy class – a look through the tatty pages conjures images of exotic places, dodgy planes and a thousand sweating and scowling passport control officers.

It’s a radically different life than the one Rowan had planned out just a few years ago, when he was one half of the hugely successful prog house production team Breeder. Maybe “planned” is the wrong word. The way Rowan tells it, suddenly being one of the most in-demand producers in dance music, with the accompanying late night pep-talks from Sasha and Digweed, record sales in the hundreds of thousands and a head-first-catapulting into the London dance music ‘scene’ took him completely by surprise.

“It all happened at a very young age for me, I was 22 and I was suddenly caught up in all the bollocks.” Breeder’s anthems ‘Twilo Thunder,’ Tyrantanic’ and ‘The Chain’ were, quite simply, huge. At a time when prog house ruled the world, Rowan and co-producer Simon Noble were shifting thousands of records and being feted by everyone from Sasha and Digweed to Orbital.

After catching the rave bug at an early age, Rowan knew his destiny lay in dance music.
Within a year, Rowan was working as a ticket agent for Rave promoters Raindance in his hometown of Saffron Walden (“or Suffering Boredom as we called it at the time”). Within a year he was editing cassettes on his double tape deck, taking mix tapes and cutting them up together. Gigs followed at clubs like the Ouch records night in the Tunnel Club and Club UK in Ipswich. When his contemporaries started to leave home and go on to college, Rowan stuck around and bought a share in local record shop.

It was while Rowan was running his second record shop in Cambridge that the call came that was to change his life. The first two Breeder tracks had been rejected by nine different labels. Unfazed, Rowan sent acetates to John Digweed (“I was too scared to send them to Sasha in case my hero turned it down,” he admits with a grin). He needn’t have worried – when Digger’s played Breeder’s “Twilo Thunder” in the legendary club of the same name, Sasha came running down to ask for details and soon Breeder were soon one of the most important production teams in dance music.

Following Breeder’s split in 2001 (as the epic prog sound that Breeder had dominated waned in popularity) the wide-eyed enthusiasm Rowan had carried into his production work with Breeder, seemed to be dissipating.

The answer came from an unexpected source – an invitation to play at the Roxy in Prague. “I had two or three weeks before the gig, and I had the realisation that turning up after half a days’ preparation is not enough. I didn’t want to be just another ‘DJ producer’ – turning up, getting fucked, playing badly and getting away with it just because I had a name.”

It was that night in the Roxy that Blades’ realised that the more he put in to his DJing, the more he got out.

Like best mates Omid16b and Desyn Masiello, Rowan is part of the post-prog generation who rose from the chin-stroking ashes by playing that people can dance to, rather than kow-towing to the trainspotters. Since that night in Prague, Blades’ has secured a residency at Moscow’s XIII club, been the first DJ to tour Bulgaria, played massive festivals in the interior of Argentina and the Ukraine and even the Great Wall of China.

There may not be too many valleys full of madness off the M25 these days, but they’re still out there somewhere, and chances are that Rowan Blades’ will be over the brow of the hill any minute, passport in one hand, record box in the other.