The Mix 037: Holly Lester

How would you say your DJ sets have evolved over time? Do you think they’ve become more refined, or more expansive?

I would say both of those things at the same time – even though that seems counter intuitive. On the one hand, they’ve expanded in the sense that I’ve definitely started to incorporate more genres into my sets. When I first learned to mix, it was purely house records, but in the last six years I’ve started to play more garage, breakbeat, progressive and trance, depending on the mood.

I think the scene in general has moved in that direction where it’s a lot more free and there’s a lot less judgement. Seven years ago, if you started to play trance, your set would have got some funny looks. But now, it feels more like you can do what you want. But also, obviously the longer you’re doing this and the older you get, the more you know what you definitely like, what you definitely don’t like, and what you feel best represents you. It’s not so much of a genre, it’s more of a mood and a feeling. I think that that’s something I know very well about myself now, whereas at the start, it was more of a learning curve.

Is that mood or feeling reflected in your production style?

Finding your sound with production is a whole different journey – it’s much more difficult. Especially when you’re trying to come up with something that feels true to yourself, incorporates all the different strands of influences, but also isn’t doing what everyone else is doing. Production is a fairly new thing for me. I’ve been producing on and off for about seven years, but I’ve never been that consistent. I’ve also struggled a lot with imposter syndrome. So it’s definitely harder, but I think I’m getting there. I’ve had some nice opportunities to dip my toe into releasing via remixing; one remix came out earlier this year on Hidden Assets and the other one is coming soon on Lost Palms.

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Can you tell me about your Free the Night campaign? What has it achieved so far?

The thing to preface this whole conversation with is that it takes a long time to move things to government and policy – especially in Northern Ireland. We’re three years old at this stage and we’ve seen some wins, but they are quite small in the grand scheme of things. I think the main win for us is that we have established several contacts within the government – like in the Department for the Economy and the Department for Communities – and they have started to understand what the night-time economy is and why it is so culturally important.

Everything we do has always come from the angle of culture and why culture is so important in a post-conflict society like Northern Ireland. We’re not really looking at this from an economic standpoint; there’s already a lot of other night-time organisations that do that. In fact, I think we’re the only charity in the nightlife advocacy realm, the rest are trade bodies and things like that.

It’s really important to try and change the mindset of people working in government, and the general population. I think we have started to do that and people are starting to understand what we’re talking about, which is huge. Even in the last six months, we’ve seen the formation of a ‘Night-time Economy Taskforce’ by the Department for the Economy – something we have been asking for for a long time – and a Night Czar appointed by the Belfast Business Improvement Districts (BID). It’s not exactly the way we’d like the role to sit, but it’s a small step in the right direction and we’re really enthusiastic about what could be achieved through it.

What more needs to be done?

The immediate issues we’re looking at are night-time transport – we believe we are the only city in Europe without it – and a review of the licensing laws. In its present form, the system is completely hindering the night-time economy and especially the creatives within it. We have some of the earliest closing times for nightclubs in Europe, at 3:AM, and the licensing system is basically impossible to get on and extremely expensive; it’s just not a fair system.

We believe there’s a small handful of people that own all the licences in Northern Ireland. And, because it’s a one-in-one out system (called the surrender principle), it just makes it really difficult for other people to get on the ladder and open a venue. So, the way things are at the moment, there just aren’t really any venues in Belfast, but if they changed the system, there could be.

What we’ve also suggested is, if they’re not going to change the system, give us a new licensing category, a cultural licence category that sort of bypasses the one-in-one out process, is less expensive, and more accessible to creatives, entrepreneurs and anybody who wants to contribute to nightlife in the cultural way. It’s really important to have these spaces, even if they’re not seen as economically viable.

What does nightlife contribute to society and also to people individually?

We’ve seen over the pandemic how important nightlife and dancing is for everyone. And there are more stats coming out all the time about how good dancing is for you. Measured up against antidepressants, dancing comes out really high.

This is one of the areas that we really hope to study in the near future. We have a really amazing researcher from Queens University and we want to properly study nightlife in a post-conflict context, like we have here in Northern Ireland. Nightlife played a huge part during The Troubles (we can only say this anecdotally but we know it’s true) in bringing the two sides of the community together where they were completely divided before.

The role of punk has been spoken about quite a lot, but we haven’t seen so much about the role of dance culture. We’re actually making a documentary this year that’s been sponsored by Jagermister’s SAVE THE NIGHT fund about the value of the dancefloor, so we’re hoping to answer a few of these questions in our research.