Interview with Customs by Juan Izguerra

JI: Hey guys! Pleasure to have you contribute to our mix series, such an honor! I've been following what you guys have been doing since 2018. Such different times hey? Can you give us names of who’s involved in Customs? And where are you all from?

Customs: Thank you! Sad we didn’t get to meet during your London trip but hopefully sometime soon, either here or in LA. We love what we’re catching of the stuff you and Jeremy at BPT are doing in that part of the world

So there are 3 of us … Guy, Tom, and Brendan. Guy and Brendan are from South Manchester, in the North West. Tom is a native Londoner. We all met because Brendan disappeared, funnily enough. Guy was meant to live with him for a year in Edinburgh. Brendan changed his plans and went to work in a bar in Bologna instead. So there was a room to fill in the flat, and Tom was the stranger who answered the ad for a new flatmate. Luckily he mentioned he was a DJ quite early on, so it was an easy conversation…

Brendan has disappeared again more recently, this time to Madrid, where he now lives. But Guy and Tom are still in London, and recorded this mix together at Guy’s, near Finsbury Park.

JI: When I discovered you guys and your youtube channel around 2018/2019 -  I feel like the music people were interested in was different around that time. There was a different mentality on what people were digging for and sharing. For example, Uneven Paths (Deviant pop from europe) by MFM was released in 2018 and i feel like it was a pocket of finding strange records that weren't necessarily dance music focused. Can you tell us how the music scene has changed around you and in London? And have you noticed a change in the kind of music you're looking for these days? 

Customs: Hmm this is a good and difficult question. I feel like that moment in time was almost the end of the road for a certain kind of digging/ digger DJ ‘scene’ (although it took the pandemic to confirm it). There are too many key figures to mention but certainly Redlight Records in Amsterdam, MFM and Jamie Tiller, who is much missed, built up much of the momentum over the 5-10 years leading up to then. I think Jamie’s ‘Big Room Balearic’ descriptor, even if tongue-in-cheek, was good at capturing some of the trajectory - finding these oddball/ ‘Balearic’/ private press and sometimes genre-agnostic records and fashioning them into club and festival sets that eventually Dekmantel, Boiler Room etc wanted to platform.

There was a definite thrill in discovery then - and there still is, for us, in records stores around London especially - and I think that thrill translated at the time to dancefloors as an antidote to the whatever saminess people might have felt in clubland.

It feels like we’re still processing the pandemic and aftermath in culture, so I don’t think it’s easy to fully define what’s changed. But some things were visibly true - more venues (in London) closed down, stuff got more expensive, people maybe had less money and went out a bit less. Or went out ‘big’, more occasionally. You could feel, playing sets in that year after the pandemic, that people didn’t want to have to ‘think’ so much. More just dance and let go.

We’ve maybe been more instinctive with where we’ve followed our musical interests since. Still finding the thrill in discovery but also in discovering a great well-known track we didn’t previously know. I’d say we mix up these kinda choices quite indiscriminately.

That said, you can also see there’s another wave of ‘digger DJs’ who’ve taken the UFO/ private press/ not-on-Discogs philosophy to more absolutist extremes, only playing sets with tracks that are invisible online. That’s not where our heads are at now, but you can’t knock the hustle.

JI: How often are you guys travelling to DJ? and is there a drive to tour?

Customs: Travelling a bit less than pre-pandemic, probably, and also the Brexit mess didn’t help us much in the UK. But we’ve had some fun gigs abroad in the last year or two

It can be hard to find dates that work for 3 of us. Slightly easier with just 2 from London now, although Tom has recently had a second child and fun weekends away are more rationed.

We don’t have agents though, and we’ve always been open to figuring out a patchwork approach, especially given how expensive it could be to fly 3 people to one place. So it’s cool for us when people like Andrej and Bojan, for example, in North Macedonia, clock that there’s a cheap weekly flight from London to Skopje and can load us all out there.

We’d love to come play in LA and SF, so hopefully can figure that out before too long!

JI: What are some goals for the year?

Customs: We’ve felt drawn more into UK sounds since the pandemic and really felt last year that we wanted to play more in London, and also in other cities here.

So 2024 ended pretty sweetly with more regular bits happening at NT’s Loft and SPACE TALK, both great venues in really different ways, as well as continuing residencies at brilliant corners and Giant Steps. We’ve also played more in the north lately but would love to get back to Scotland (since we all met there), Leeds, Sheffield, Manchester, Liverpool, etc.

The flip of what we said about the pandemic has been in the other direction - we used to host guests here in London all the time, and that kinda stopped when the world stopped. But we’re keen to get back to regular guests playing with us for our What’s Good? extended sessions at brilliant corners. We’ve got a killer DJ from Brighton, Ty Abiodun, coming next, and a few more in the pipeline. 

JI: Tell us a bit about this mix!

Customs: Loved putting this one together. We just decided to go for a mellow street soul vibe and bring our best bits/ current faves and play it through.

This has been a kind of ‘sound’ you probably hear in our sets often, if you see us out, normally as we’re bubbling early on. So some old familiars as well as new-ins.

One thing we’ve enjoyed when discovering stuff in this vein is how much of it seems to come from artists around where we live now - North London/ Haringey/ Finsbury Park and East London/ Hackney. But also how big the scene was where Guy and Brendan grew up, in the North West, around Manchester, Salford, Moss Side. We’ve been digging old mixes from sound systems like Soul Control and Broadway, who would mix up popular dance/ soul records from the day with deeper cuts and white labels.