Alex Adair: From the chalkboard to the charts

Image: Alex Adair 

Alex Adair is one of the few artists whose success seems to have developed overnight. The 22 year old from West Sussex burst onto the scene with one of the most infectious tracks of the year so far, championed by the likes of Annie Mac, Zane Lowe and Mista Jam on Radio 1. 

After discovering dance music at university and then choosing to finishing off his degree, Alex was free to take his career to the next level last year. He has only just moved off the starting line, but with his debut release hitting the charts, Alex Adair has proved he's destined for big things. 

The feel good, tropical drenched 'Make Me Feel Better' is still sitting comfortably in the charts, and as the weather gets brighter and the temperature get warmer, the track is the perfect companion to the season change (listen below to see what we mean). We caught five minutes with Alex ahead of some of his UK gigs. 

First up we need to talk about the UK tour, how has it been?

Well I've had a few gigs in Ireland and that's where my first few gigs were. I hadn't really done any big DJ gigs before that so that was really the start for me. The first one in England was at the Electric Brixton with Klingande, I've got a few gigs with him.

There's a few festivals coming up as well, I'm really excited for Creamfields at the end of the summer. 

So these have been your first ever major gigs? 

Yeah these are my first proper gigs, I've done some warm ups before to sort of get into it. But yeah Brixton was my first big one. 

'Make Me Feel Better' has been around for about a year, but it was only released in the UK a few weeks back. Why do you think it all of a sudden picked up and took off, what was the process like? 

Yeah it's been exactly a year since the first big pick up of the track happened which was The Sound You Need getting in contact and them putting it up on their YouTube channel so that was the first thing that took it to a wider audience. and it all just sort of went from there. Timewise it's taken a while because I had to finish uni so I had to put things on hold for a bit. 

The track has been in the UK chart for almost three weeks now, does it all feel pretty surreal?

It's pretty crazy really, when I think about where I was a year ago when I made the track and it's really unbelievable when I take a step back that I'm now that I've been in the charts.

Do you feel there's a certain level of expectancy from crowds these days when a DJ has a specific track in the charts, and that they attend events to hear this one song and would be disappointed if they didn't?

I suppose there's that element of it because a lot of people would only know that one track from me and there's a few artists with that nowadays. People obviously are keen to hear the songs that you are associated with, but there's always room to build a whole set around that.

So you still think you get to showcase a decent amount of music and the crowd appreciate it? 

I think I've definitely got room to manoeuvre, I think the sort of key aspect of my sound is the feel good aspect so there's quite a lot of room to play a lot of music within that.

You're from West Sussex, not exactly renowned for its club scene, how did you get into dance music ? 

Well I started making dance music when I was at uni, and I went to uni in Canterbury so yeah there's the side of that which maybe helped out a bit. Just like anyone else, I just sort of got caught up in 3 or 4 years of dance music and then started making it. 

When can we expect some new music from you?

What I will say is I've got a few tracks the moment that are looking very promising, there will be singles. I'm just trying to lay down a few tracks at the moment so hopefully in the not so distance future there'll be a follow up single. 

Hypothetical question, if you could have produced any track ever made, what would it be and why? 

That's a tricky one, I'd go for something humongous, why wouldn't you want to produce the biggest track so something like 'Happy' by Pharrell. Imagine producing something like that. 

You can catch Alex in Edinburgh on Easter Sunday and he also plays Cream alongside MK and Duke Dumont on Sunday 3rd May.