It’s just an educated hunch, but Sam Divine seems like she’d be good in a crisis.
The DJ is calmly itemising her summer plans – which include “racking up” 20 European festivals this year (including Hideout in Croatia and Tomorrowland in Berlin); a residency at Ibiza turbo-club Eden every Sunday; and Defected Croatia, a six-day festival in the coastal town of Tisno – “80 DJs over four stages and two boat parties a day – the highlight of my summer”. This weekend, she’ll also be playing her brand of dexterous, crowd-pleasing house at Eastern Electrics, the zeitgeist festival in Morden Park (Jamie Jones and Kurupt FM are also on the bill). “It’s nice to get out of sweaty, dark clubs.”
Plus, she’s the host of legendary label Defected’s radio show, which regularly tops the iTunes music podcast chart, and runs her own label, Divine Sounds. And then there was the wedding, to doyen of dubstep, DJ Hatcha, that she managed to squeeze in last weekend. He played an old school RnB set for the occasion. “We’re taking four days off afterwards,” she says. Eastern Electrics will be her “first show as a married woman. I really didn’t want to miss it.”
Divine is used to fast and furious summers. This is her 13th year doing the Ibiza clubbing circuit, and she’s risen up the ranks through graft – hers is not the tale of an upstart who started booking festivals based on a zeitgeist Soundcloud account. She started out mixing in a shed at the bottom of her mum’s garden, before winning a DJ competition, starting to play clubs around Bristol, and graduating to a role at a record shop in Notting Hill – at which point it “escalated from there. When you’re around vinyl 24/7, you just want to play it 24/7.” At work, she ended up meeting DJs and A&R types, started booking nights in clubs across the capital – including starting her own, La Vita, an all-female night for breast cancer awareness – and getting on the Ibiza circuit.
The White Isle is loaded with mythology and lore, the type that can make refuseniks roll their eyes. Does the magic persist after 13 years of the same? “For me, it’s all about the clubbers,” she shrugs. “It’s about the experience I give to people on the dance floor. They’re on their holidays, they’ve saved up to come to Ibiza. My mindset is making sure they have the best time. That’s what I get out of Ibiza – it’s still a job I really enjoy.” The feeling is mutual: this year she’s been nominated for Best House Artist at the Ibiza DJ Awards.
When it all works, it really does feel like sorcery. “Getting a room of people dancing is the most amazing feeling in the world – the biggest high”. Though the larger the venue, the harder it is to cast the spell. “It’s great playing to 5,000 people in a festival, but they’re not all fully sold into you,” she says. “Some of them are on their phones, some people are in their little jam, their clique. When you’ve got 300, 400 people, you look at them and you’re really playing for them.” It’s almost symbiotic. “Their reaction to the tracks is almost telling me what to play next – that one-on-one connection.” On which theme, her next project – a roving night called Openers, that she’ll be taking across the UK and Europe – will be popping up exclusively at venues with a cap of 300 people.
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She’s also planning to curate more line-ups spotlighting female DJs. “There’s a lot of female DJs bubbling,” she says. “But we live in a man’s world, and that probably won’t change. Next year, I want to go back to my roots of putting on all-female line-ups: girls deserve the credit, they’re wicked DJs, they’re hungry for it. It’s a boys’ club out there, so I’m going to start my own girl gang – watch this space.”
For the next few months, she’ll be living itinerantly. This can lead to some spectacular sight-seeing: Defected Croatia takes place at the Garden Resort in Tisno, a Dalmatian jewel blessed with a bleached coastline, ultramarine seas and a cloudless sky, rugged inland making for a suitable natural stages. But it also means spending a lot of time of time kicking back in airports, staring at uncooperative departures boards. “Travelling takes the fun out of the job. My flight to Ibiza was cancelled last week, the flight to Budapest the week before. Every week there’s a delay, and you’re like, ‘why am I doing this?’ And then you get on the decks and you’re like, ‘that’s why’.”
Sam Divine plays the Eastern Electrics Festival, Morden Park (easternelectrics.com) this Saturday and Sunday (August 4 and 5)
