Josey Rebelle: the quiet storm

But Rebelle is a reluctant cover star. Quickwitted, bookwormish and extremely private, she’s the antithesis of the spotlight-chasing DJ: most at home in the darkness of the club, lost in a private party inside her headphones. Her slow-burn success is a story of patience, dedication and occasional stagefright. But the kudos, the skills and the encyclopaedic knowledge she’s acquired along the way make her the most formidable kind of talent — and modest, too.

Rebelle is currently a resident at the Pickle Factory, an unassuming club in Hackney where her all-night-long sets often sell out. The venue is ideal for a fame-averse DJ who just wants to mix records in peace, head down with a focused expression. “Music is the thing, mixing is the thing, that's what gives me momentum,” she says, fizzing with enthusiasm.

She’s been DJing since she was 13-years-old. The only thing that’s different now is that “everyone is there for me,” she continues. “That used to shit me up a lot. I never used to think that anyone might come to a gig because it’s me, even if I’m a headliner. But when it’s all-night-long, I have to address the fact that they have come for me,” she laughs.

We meet Josey twice in December — once before the general election, when she arrives encased in an enormous puffa jacket printed with the cover art for Public Enemy’s classic album ‘Fear Of A Black Planet’, and once after the election, the sombre mood heightened by our choice of a dingy Dalston pub. On both occasions, we sit in dark corners, the gloom at her request. But she talks for hours, virtually without interruption, and laughs warmly as she makes herself the butt of her jokes. As a true introvert, Rebelle explains, she’s not shy — she just gets her energy from being alone. “I love being a bit invisible,” she says. “I’m like that about daylight too — like, why is the sun so bright? Is it necessary?”

She avoids mindless party mingling and you won’t find her posing on Instagram either — but she’s in her element on Twitter, quipping about her obsessions (music, stationery) and her enemies (jet lag, Tories, daylight). She’s most animated when talking about records. Her sentences run aground as she tries to find the words to explain just how much she loves what she does. This is what it comes down to with Rebelle — music isn’t so much a hobby or a career choice as an obsession, one that has carried her through good times and tragedies. Over the years she’s maintained a strict division between her job and her personal life, but as she tells her story, it feels like the unloading has been a long time coming.

TOTTENHAM

Rebelle grew up in Tottenham in the 1980s, an area that often felt like a pressure cooker of acrimony between the police and the black community. In 1985, just two weeks after the Brixton riots, the arrest of a Tottenham man and the death of his mother — of heart failure, after a police raid on her home — triggered the Broadwater Farm riots, which ended in the killing of a police officer.

Rebelle was a small child at the time, but she remembers her brother running into the house as nearby buildings went up in flames. The riots became a flashpoint in London’s cultural history, and left a deprived community further ostracised after the television cameras turned away. Thirty years later, tensions linger; in 2011, the police shooting of Mark Duggan sparked riots that spread across London.

“When I think about Tottenham as a place, there’s always been a really antagonistic relationship with police,” explains Rebelle. “That’s something that everyone in our family has — a distrust of authority, of politicians, of the police for things that they’ve done in the local area. Going into a house to arrest someone and the next minute they’re dead — like, how the fuck did that happen? I’ve definitely grown up in that environment.”

Flashpoints like the riots in Tottenham and Brixton forged a generation that was “political by default”, she points out. “That is as much a part of the history of dance music as the actual music. People created art off the back of those moments. The whole feeling contributed to the energy that ended up creating things like hardcore and jungle, and people like Linton Kwesi Johnson, who I love so much.”

On a more utopian tip, she cites Fabio and Grooverider’s long-running Rage night as an example of the era’s cultural melting pot, where the mingling of different communities and influences extended to the loose selection, where you might hear a soul record mixed into hard techno. That fluid eclecticism is fundamental to Rebelle’s own style: she still plays the tunes she loved back in the day and the 12-inches she first learned to mix on, an approach that exactly aligned with the ethos of Nonsense; a party at Plastic People, once home to nights like dubstep incubator FWD>> and residents like Theo Parrish and Floating Points. Plastic People was where she first built her reputation, turning up with a bag of records she’d wanted to play out for years.

“It wasn’t even about mixing, it was about hearing music. Someone could mix gospel into techno and it would make sense.” That’s what being a ‘selector’ is really about, she says. “Being around people like that at Plastic People was really important to me, because straight away I could see myself in it. I realised I could play it all.”

Running a label at the peak of its powers was hard graft; after a long day, Rebelle would often sleep in their studio in Charlton. As well as organising releases — records like ‘Big Bad Bass’ and ‘The Killa-Hertz’, early ’00s albums from the Valve bosses — it was Rebelle’s responsibility to get the freshest dubplates to DJs before the weekend. “DJ Hype would text Dillinja on a Saturday saying, ‘Fucking hell, I played this tune and got eight rewinds!’ That’s how you knew a tune was gonna be big. They’d be selling 20,000 on vinyl through word of mouth.”

After nearly three years at Valve, Rebelle got back on the corporate ladder, working for TV production companies and advertising agencies. Though she’d kept her DJing quiet when she worked at Valve, the obsession was creeping back in. Thankfully, she hadn’t thrown out her records. In 2011, she played the first of hundreds of sets at Plastic People, joining the crew at Nonsense and making friends with some crucial characters: MC Judah, one of the kids who broke down the fire doors at that Kool FM party (and MC’d at her early Pickle Factory sessions), and someone called Rat, who later brought Rebelle into Rinse FM.

Aligned with Nonsense’s anything-goes music policy, she explored every corner of her collection, dropping baby-making soul alongside rabid Detroit techno, brainscrambling jungle and rough-edged Chicago jackers. Plastic People was the space where Rebelle honed her intuitive style, prioritising selection over flashy tricks; she has a knack for choosing the right tune at the right time. The venue was a hotspot for innovative, genrespecific nights as well as more freeform parties like Nonsense. Everyone who worked there was a “true music head”, says Rebelle. “The first time I met [club owner] Ade, the first thing he said was, ‘Can I go through your record bag?’” The gloomy intimacy of the basement venue was ideal, too: “The sound was incredible and it was dark — it felt like I was cocooned in.”

HUNGRY

Rebelle soon landed residencies at two other Plastic People nights, Gullyver and Deck Queens. “As if that wasn’t enough, I used to ring up begging for any more warm-up slots,” she laughs; Theo Parrish once interviewed her over the phone before letting her open for him, on the promise she’d only play vinyl. In 2010, Rebelle also appeared on several of the very first Boiler Room broadcasts — not a natural habitat for a camera-shy introvert. “You didn’t even think of the cameras being there [at the early Boiler Room sets]. Femi from NTS Radio phoned me and said, ‘Do you wanna come down and play some records? There’s some rum here.’ Yeah, sick. There were probably 10 people in the room.”

In 2011 Rebelle was offered a show on Rinse FM, not long after the pirate station had got its official licence. There was just one catch: the slot was at 3am. “It just sounded so bonkers,” she giggles. “It was a very romantic idea to me, thinking back to Sunday nights listening to Kool FM when I should have been getting ready for school.”

“I’ve experienced it enough times to know that it has saved me. When my sister died, I cancelled a lot of gigs but kept going to Rinse. Just being able to go there and play music was the thing that kept me sane.” She leaned into the tougher parts of her record collection then, blotting the pain by going hard, fast and loud.

Writing has also functioned as a channel for her grief. She’s currently studying for a Masters degree in Creative Writing at Birkbeck. “The last couple of years have been just trying to keep my energy there so I’m not going under,” she says. “I’ve got a million unread texts and emails on my phone because I haven’t been able to do much more than DJing and writing. They are ideal pursuits for me. I like travelling, I like being alone a lot of the time. It’s the perfect place for me to be able to grieve.”

GRADUATION

It’s in these last couple of years that Rebelle has graduated from local treasure to something like an international star — though reluctantly. Her sets at Dimensions Festival in Croatia and at Sustain-Release, the insider techno festival run by Aurora Halal in upstate New York, won her a legion of new fans. Travelling to America also led Rebelle on a pilgrimage to Detroit, where she saw Theo Parrish play on his own turf and found herself among her heroes: “Marcellus Pittman dancing over there, Moodymann over there, Patrice Scott — all these artists I look up to so much. It was like, I’m doing the right thing, this is where I belong.”

Kristin Malossi, who performs as DJ Voices and is also a booker at Queens venue Nowadays, explains that Rebelle’s “unforgettable closing set” at Sustain-Release made a huge impact on New York’s techno community. “She’s incredibly good at what she does, and she also doesn’t give a fuck,” says Malossi. “Not in a dismissive way, but she truly doesn’t care about trends, hype, or keeping up with anyone’s expectations but her own. What she does care about, deeply and obviously, is the music, and playing that music with integrity. That’s always been the strongest projection I’ve felt from her, and I think that vibe is contagious and compelling.”

This year Rebelle will begin a residency at Astin, the second room in Barcelona’s Nitsa club, while continuing her reign at the Pickle Factory. She’s putting together a Beats In Space compilation, following in the footsteps of Powder’s release on Tim Sweeney’s label last year. Her spin on the concept will include older tracks that have never seen a digital release, as well as her own liner notes. This summer, she’ll also make her debut appearance at Amsterdam’s Dekmantel festival, playing on the impressive main stage.

Apart from all that, she claims to have no particular plans for her career. “Other DJs are more ambitious,” she says. “I just want to keep going. The slow burn has absolutely been my choice. I have an agent but I don’t have management, I don’t have PR, I don’t have Instagram. All of these are my decisions.”

Some of Rebelle’s decisions are more perplexing. It’s hard not to wonder, perhaps, why someone so fanatical about music wouldn’t try to make tracks of her own? It’s a question she thinks about all the time. “There’s definitely been an urge,” she admits; she sometimes makes her own edits and plays them out without telling anyone. The real reason we’ve not heard Rebelle’s debut 12-inch is that she holds herself to the same extreme standards set by her heroes; technical wizards like Dillinja.

“There’s always been a thing in me that’s like, 'Are you going to be able to achieve that — and if not, why bother?' I don’t think that’s a good thing. I think that can stop a lot of people from progressing. But to me, the worst thing I could do now, after working so hard to get to the place where I am, would be to make some dry, boring, middle-of-the-road tune,” she says, cringing.

As our conversation wraps up, talk turns to the photo shoot and the looming prospect of being on a magazine cover. Rebelle has never wanted to be famous. “With my upbringing and the generation I grew up in, the worst thing you can do is be a show-off. You don’t want to be seen as thinking you’re too nice,” she says.

But as a black woman who has become one of the UK’s most respected DJs, and through her endless championing of London’s soundsystem history, Rebelle has become an inspirational figure for a new generation. Young black women often line the front row of her shows — particularly when she plays the harder stuff, she notes with pride. “I think having someone like me on the cover is an important thing — and that overrides my fear of doing a photo shoot.”

There’s something particularly awkward about one writer interviewing another when the objective is to sketch out their life story — a story that the subject has obviously imagined writing themselves. Rebelle’s university tutors have been encouraging her towards exactly that. “I’m reluctant to do it because I’m so private. But I’ve got to a point in my life where this whole privacy [thing] — holding onto too much stuff and not talking about it — is actually doing me a disservice.”

She’s not once made reference to a partner, or any aspect of her love life, we point out. There’s a long pause. “Yeah, that’s on purpose.” Maybe it’s someone well known? She laughs it off.

“To me, there’s a very sharp division between what people know about me and what they don’t. Although DJing is very personal, it’s me stepping out of my zone and interacting with other people. And actually, I need some stuff to be there just for me.” Thinking about writing her memoirs has made her question what she’s willing to share. In the long run, it’s been her most personal relationship — her desperate, undying love for music — that’s cracked open a tough exterior. “I don’t want to keep it all in,” she says. “DJing has forced me to open up.”