:: DJ BIOGRAPHY
By the mid-2000's Neil established himself as one of Wales’ busiest house DJ’s with regular bookings at Escape (Swansea), Godskitchen (Birmingham), his residencies at En Rouge and Funkathon in Cardiff and bookings across Europe.
:: HISTORY
Having been into dance music since the early 90's and a regular visitor to most of Cardiff’s underground dance events such as Time Flies and The Hippo Club, in '95 Neil found himself wanting to be on the opposite side of the turntables and giving other people the buzz that he had so often found from dance music himself. Neil started his DJ career at a small breakfast club in Cardiff, opening in the early hours and running until lunchtime, a first for Wales’ capital city. He progressed very quickly to playing at a many of Cardiff’s leading underground venues including The Hippo Club, Emporium and Model Inn.
Things took a turn for the better when he co-founded a Cardiff based house event called FunkyDory in '99. The event won Best Pre-club at the Welsh Music Awards three years running. In 2001 Neil split from FunkyDory to concentrate on his solo DJing and also tour events for his dance music website Offitsface.com. This turned out to be the turning point in his young DJing career. In 2002 Neil was voted position 145 in the world by readers of DJ Magazine, proof that he was turning a few heads within the dance music industry.
Neil was a regular guest in the house rooms of Godskitchen and Polysexual in Birmingham and also Escape in Swansea. He was chosen by Mixmag to play in their Future Heroes Arena at Wales’ leading outdoor dance music festival Escape Into The Park in 2003 and then re-booked in 2004 and also in the ‘Defected In The House’ Arena for 2005. It is a proven fact that wherever Neil plays he gets re-booked again and again!
In the mid 2000's Neil organized tour events at many of the UK’s top clubs and giving up and coming DJs the opportunity to play at big nights in front of capacity crowds. Events included Ministry Of Sound, Smile, Slinky in Bristol plus Lamerica & Cool House in Cardiff. The list of clubs and events Neil has played is impressive. He has played the likes Ministry Of Sound (London), Slinky (Bristol), Godskitchen (Birmingham), Escape (Swansea), Lamerica (Cardiff), Utopia, (Warsaw, Poland) Blu (Lodz, Poland), Metro (Gdansk, Poland), Savannah’s (Ibiza), Cool House (Cardiff), Perversity (Edinburgh), Kuavehume (Helsinki, Finland), HAND Productions (Oulu, Finland), The Crystal Rooms (Hereford), Bionic (Cardiff), Enzo’s (Salisbury), Stateside (Cardiff) and many more.
Neil plays most types of house music ranging from funky vocal & disco influenced house, tech house, deep house, melodic & progressive house. His favourite sets are the longer ones where he can build from funky vocal early to tech, then deep and progressive later spanning 4-5 hours or even longer.
:: OFFITSFACE/DANCEMUZIK WEBSITE
Neil founded the Offitsface.com website in early 1999 and from humble beginnings the site peaked getting two million page views per month and receiving visitors from over one hundred countries as far a-field as Azerbaijan and Venezuela! Receiving excellent press coverage in the eleven years it had been running – voted one of the best clubbing websites on Rapture TV and recommended on Graham Gold’s Kiss FM show and The Slammin’ Boys show on Galaxy 102. In 2002 Offitsface.com was reviewed on UK national television on a show called The Web Review on ITV and got 8/10 score and very positive feedback.
The site itself contained thousands of pages including busy discussion forums with over 10,000 members, DJ’s biographies & mixes, club listings, news, articles, comps etc. It was then relaunched as Dancemuzik.com and continued until it closed down in 2010.