Lee Burridge

Moving on his 22nd birthday, Burridge moved to Hong Kong starting his full-time DJ career for the first time at a club called Joe Bananas.

He initially played to a mostly mainstream audience at his first Hong Kong job, where he earned a reputation for being a party DJ, hanging upside down from the sprinkler system on the ceiling above the booth and mixing top 40 music to a more commercial crowd.

After 4:00 am though the crowd changed and drew local bar employees.

Burridge played more underground house music which led to him forging a friendship with two managers of another local bar named The Beach Hut.

All had attended some of the UK's early rave parties and decided to bring their experiences to Hong Kong.

Lee Burridge (born November 1968) is a British DJ and producer who helped launch the underground club scene in Hong Kong during the early 1990s.

He currently plays at nightclubs across the world.

Renowned for his storytelling musical style in his DJ sets as well as for his energy and enthusiasm in the DJ booth, his style encompasses the deeper and groovier end of house and techno that are equally suited to night time as they are for sunrise or sunset events.

Burridge was a member of England's Tyrant Soundsystem (along with DJs Craig Richards and Sasha) and has mixed albums for labels such as Balance, Fabric, Global Underground and Hooj Choons.

Lee Burridge's DJ career began in the tiny tourist village of Eype in the county of Dorset on 26 December 1983.

He played for the first time at The New Inn, a bar owned and run by his parents at the time.

Shortly thereafter, with the help of his father, Burridge started his own mobile DJ operation, "Cutz" and spent the next few years travelling the surrounding countryside villages and towns playing weddings, birthday parties and even the occasional funeral.

Working as a mobile DJ led to a seasonal opportunity at a local holiday resort.

Soon after that, Burridge began performing every weekend at the local town's nightclub where he played mostly chart music while also entertaining the crowd with his antics behind the decks as well as on the microphone.

Burridge's first true big break came when he landed a residency at an award-winning club called The Palace in Somerset.

He played weekly and was introduced to the art of mixing records by one of the club's other resident DJs, Wayne Rideout.

It was also at The Palace during the summer of 1987 that a group of visitors turned Burridge on to London's emerging acid house sound which would shape his career and define a path to this day.

In early 1991, Burridge was spotted and headhunted by a club owner from overseas who offered him a job abroad in the then British colony of Hong Kong.

Aimed initially at the Western crowd the tiny venue hosted the first electronic music event in 1992 which thereafter led to a thriving dance music scene.

The first event drew approximately one hundred people but by the second event a month later five hundred people turned up attempting to get into the bar causing a roadblock outside that the police had to disperse.

The scene grew rapidly as other promoters popped up but it was the mainstay nightly venues that really cemented this period of Hong Kong's dance music history as unique and exciting.

After finishing work at 5:00 am in Joe Banana's Burridge had discovered an empty basement bar with great sound directly across the street.

The Big Apple slowly became the place to be as seven nights a week Burridge would be found playing into the mid morning or later.

Burridge created and held two different club residencies in the once-seedy Wan Chai District between 1992–1997 which were The Big Apple and Neptunes.

Playing an eclectic mix of dance music six or seven nights a week to packed dance floors these parties were the most popular nights in Hong Kong club scene helping establish Burridge's early DJ career and gaining attention from visiting artists and promoters.

Arriving in February 1992 after hearing about the location from a group of travellers who passed through Hong Kong, Burridge's performances helped grow the full moon parties from drum circles around open fires on the beach into what can be considered the Mecca of Full Moon parties.

One of Burridge's arguably biggest Hong Kong achievements, which he rarely mentions, was the establishment of Neptune's. Burridge and his friends at the time had left for Hadrin in Thailand during Christmas of 1996.

Being people of leisure, thought nothing about whether their regular gigs would be available when they got back to Hong Kong, if they decided a few more weeks in Thailand was a good idea, which they ultimately ended up doing.

Also during his Hong Kong stint, Burridge discovered Haad Rin, Thailand, and was a key player in bringing electronic music and DJing to the island.

Burridge would continue to visit the island regularly until 1999, staying for three months at a time to play full moon as well as weekly parties held at the Backyard venue alongside local DJ A and another Haad Rin mainstay, Backyard Dave who was also institutional in bringing dance music to the island.

In his final few years in Hong Kong he often invited visiting DJs to play at either the Big Apple or Neptune's and it was after one of these weekends that he began his friendship with UK DJs Sasha and Craig Richards, who ended up inviting him to form the Tyrant Sound System upon his return to the UK.[1]

Although Burridge's reputation in Hong Kong earned him gigs nearly every night in the city's top venues, he was completely unknown in the UK.

Richards—who was running several successful club nights in London at the time, including Georgie and Malibu Stacey—invited Burridge to play at several of his parties.

Traction was slow and after one year back in the UK Lee considered returning to Asia.

It was shortly after this that Tyrant was formed and the subsequent launch catapulted Burridge's career in the UK.

As part of Tyrant, Burridge teamed up with Richards and Sasha to play regular monthly nights in London, first in a warehouse space In Park Royal, which then moved to the End nightclub.

Adding a monthly night at The Bomb in Nottingham, the brand garnered a great deal of interest and press allowing Burridge to begin playing more solo gigs at leading British nightclubs, such as Cream, Golden, and Ministry of Sound.

He mixed his first compilation for Hooj Choons, Deeper Shades of Hooj 2 in just a single night.

In 1999, Burridge cracked DJ Magazine's prestigious annual Top 100 list for the first time, placing 33rd.

That same year, Burridge also released his first solo mix album, Metropolis on Tide.