The Judge Won’t Budge: Judge Jules on Club Culture, Legal Hustles & Staying Power
By Nicola Freitas
If you were a clubber in the 90’s or 00’s you would know one thing - the Judge won’t budge! Judge Jules’s Friday night show on Radio 1 was an institution and the soundtrack for generations of clubbers to kick off their weekend clubbing adventures. He became one of the most recognisable voices on radio, and played every major club and festival around the world as he rose to superstar DJ status. Few names have had more influence on the evolution of dance music. Many of dance music’s classic tracks got their big break with a first spin from the Judge, and he crashed into the charts himself with top 10 hits as one half of Hi-Gate. His huge Judgement Sundays nights in Ibiza were unmissable for a decade, and he was ubiquitous in the UK’s biggest superclubs. Jules remains in high demand, DJing around the world, producing music, presenting his KISSTORY Legends radio show monthly, as well as his 'Global Warm Up’ syndicated radio show. And, in a suitable twist, the Judge is now a celebrated and highly respected music and entertainment lawyer. Like toilet paper, he’s on a roll, so we thought it was time Loaded caught up with Judge Jules.
You rose from pirate radio in the late ’80s to DJ Mag’s No.1 DJ by 1995. When did you know you’d made it?
As a DJ, it’s quite difficult to define what your endgame actually is. It’s not like other professions that have a got a distinct kind of end where you’ve reached the top, like being a CEO of a blue-chip company or the centre-forward for a football team. When I joined Radio 1, it was quite like an end game, but at the time, the station was only just beginning to fully embrace dance music beyond a couple of DJs, so becoming part of that movement was a real ambition fulfilled. There are milestones along the way, of course, but I don’t think basking in your own glory is healthy. It’s better to just count yourself lucky for doing what you’ve always loved doing.
Weekend Warm-Up on BBC Radio 1 was anthemic. What do you think was the catapult to its/your global success?
I’ve been on radio since I was very young—around 18 —and I’m still on air now in a syndicated format. I’ve always viewed radio as an extension of what I do as a club DJ. I consider myself about 51% club and festival DJ, and 49% radio DJ.
If you have some degree of personality that is relatable, it does give you a significant advantage. In the modern era, there's an awful lot of DJs or podcasts, so it's not quite so unique to have people knowing a bit more about you than just the tunes you play. But it certainly was back then.
You can dress DJs up in all sorts, but at the end of the day, you’ve got to be a bit of a nerd. It takes an obsessive interest in music and a level of determination that not everyone has, because it’s not all fun. Sure, the gigs are incredible, and I’m lucky to do 80 to 100 a year, especially over the summer. Just last weekend I played some brilliant shows, and I’m really looking forward to the next. But that’s only a small part of the job.
The rest of it is getting to know what’s going on in your record box, doing a lot of homework, making music, doing stuff that's a little bit humdrum and sort of robotic - and going through the same processes every week. But it's all made very worthwhile because the performance element of it is just the ultimate drug. It’s hard to describe without sounding really boastful or overly humble, but it’s just incredible. I'd like to use better adjectives, but I'm not sure that they exist.
Has there ever been a slog, when you’ve thought, I'm coming to the end of all this?
Honestly—never. I feel incredibly lucky to do what I do. It’s not that I wake up every day looking in the mirror metaphorically and say, Wow, I’m so lucky to still be here, it’s more that I just love what I do.
Even when you flip to the legal side of my career, it’s all things relating to music, predominantly dance music. It’s part of an ecosystem of a world that I’ve lived all my life and truly love. I still count myself lucky to do what I love doing.
Judgement Sundays was a massive success in Ibiza, but what do you make of the island these days?
It’s fair to say Ibiza is much more corporate now than it was during the nearly 20 years I promoted there weekly—I did around 500 gigs. I don’t want to sound like some grumpy old bloke saying that’s a bad thing. The truth is, it’s a victim of its own success. It’s become a highly professional, business-minded operation—almost like Vegas—run by people who are extremely skilled at producing high-end, big-budget shows.
From a DJ’s perspective, it’s also very different now. These days, if you’re a reasonably well-known name, there are often exclusivity clauses that prevent you from playing multiple venues. But when I started out in Ibiza, I was performing across the board—at Pacha, Amnesia, Privilege (as it was then), and other big venues, often for different promoters each week. The thinking was: most people are only on the island for a week, so you weren’t really in competition with what was happening the following week. That’s changed now, and it’s reflective of a wider shift in club and festival culture where there’s a real land grab from major promoters. I can’t really argue with it—the money involved now is much higher, and so the risk on their part is greater too.
There's a huge property crisis in Ibiza and in the Balearic Islands as a whole, and to a lesser extent, here in Majorca where I am at the moment. Tourists often get blamed for everything, but the real problem is chronic underinvestment in social housing across Spain, particularly from the Balearic government. It’s easier for them to fan the flames of anti-tourism sentiment than to take responsibility and spend the money required to address it. It’s a serious problem.
How did the arrival of social media affect the dancefloor and was it a sudden change?
I think the shift really began when short-form, lifestyle-driven platforms started taking hold, moving from the days of MySpace into Facebook and then into what we have now with TikTok and Instagram, where the focus is to look good and film your tune face.
That said, my core audience is predominantly over 35, so the sea of phones in the air isn’t as prevalent at my gigs, simply because they’ve experienced nightlife before social media became such a dominant force. But with a younger crowd, it’s hard to ignore. Scroll through any footage of the big superclubs and you’ll see it—crowds of people filming instead of dancing.
But I guess if that's the new normal, who am I to decry it? As long as you've got a connection with the crowd, that's all that matters.
Global Warm-Up just passed 1,100 episodes and you have your residency on KISSTORY — how do you stay fresh after three decades on air?
I think the same core principles still apply. I’ve always tried to bridge that slightly difficult gap between the mainstream and the underground by not going so underground that it narrows the sphere of people that you would appeal to - I probably wouldn't be into that music anyway – and not so mainstream that you end up sounding like everyone else. To achieve that objective you have to make a lot of records, and you have to make your own versions of other people’s records that are only for you.
You’ve held various A&R roles - nearly a decade at Universal and ran your own labels. How does the ear of a DJ translate into the A&R role? How involved did you get once you spotted a track you wanted to sign?
I suppose it comes down to the idea that setting up your own label is really just another extension of getting people to buy into who you are and what your taste is. It’s not at too much of a tangent from the concept of being a DJ, it’s just a bit more business-oriented where you’re monetising opportunities. As a DJ, you are a filter and live or die on your taste and choice of music, whether that’s music you chose to play or created by third parties or yourself.
That’s the core of A&R then and now. You wouldn’t sign someone unless they already had something enough for you to tweak into an acceptable direction. There’s no point listening to somebody with a very distant potential—it’s too time-consuming. You need an artist who already has a very strong concept and makes good records. Then your role is to guide them for the last 20%.
Are there any tracks you wished you'd signed that you didn’t take the risk on?
Robert Miles Children, and Ultra Nate Free. Two of the biggest dance records of all time. With Ultra Nate, it has a kind of bridge bit in the middle that I really didn't like. I said, we'll sign it, if you remove that, even though other people weren't being so picky about it. And off Ultra Nate went to another label, and the rest is history. In retrospect, they did the right thing!
How do you balance energy levels between being a lawyer, your gig schedule, and being a father and a husband?
The greatest bit of serendipity in this stage my life is that almost everything I do ends quite early. At the weekend I was in Leeds, and I was finished by nine. Saturday, I was at a festival in the Cotswolds and was finished by midnight. Things can get a bit later in the winter and in Ibiza, but most things end early. I think it would be very difficult for me to balance all these elements with the sort of hours that I did 20 years ago when people went out much later. Both generations don't like going out late – the young because they're preening in the mirror and it doesn't help their Insta-friendly look, and the older market will probably drop dead clutching their chests if they stayed out too late. It all suits me, really.
Do you ever get presented with legal requests and quandaries that are brand new to you at this point or have you seen it all?
As in life, it’s all about taking the principles that you've learned and applying them to novel situations, so it’s rare if something’s completely new. I’m working in record deals, music publishing deals, management deals, distribution deals and some brand stuff. They come in a million-and-one shapes and sizes, from the smallest underground labels to majors with six figures - you’ve always got to think on your feet.
Are there common mistakes that you see young people making through the music or legal side of things?
On the legal side of things, it's desperation to do that first deal, signing anything that people thrust in front of you because you think that no similar opportunity will ever come your way again. The great thing about being a music lawyer specialising in electronic music and being a DJ and artist - and being the only person to do both simultaneously at the same level - is this view from the mountaintop. When I was just a DJ, all you've got it's this tunnel vision view about your own career, and you've got a few mates that you mutually speak about your respective careers, but you're still a little guarded. Whereas when you become a lawyer, suddenly you're looking at what hundreds of people are doing and what hundreds of great managers are doing to guide their careers along.
Tell us about your live band shows — what’s your role in that?
I’ve got this little band project that I take out for around six shows a year. It’s something a bit different with live DJ mashups with vocalists, leaning toward a funky, housey vibe. Most of my role is as the musical director, planning the structure of the show. I map out the general flow but deliberately leave space for each of the ten musicians to have their own ad-lib moments throughout. This setup gives the musicians a lot more freedom to have fun, humbling me as a DJ.
Mental Health has rightly been discussed a lot more in recent years. What was it like through your early days - were people discussing these things?
They definitely weren't. I think late-night culture, unknowingly and in a subliminal way, is a bit of a magnet to people who perhaps do have mental health issues, or disproportionately so. I watched the Avicii documentary, whom I’d met a few times, and what upset him was that disconnect, going from being in front of tens of thousands of people to sitting alone in an obscure hotel room in somewhere like Kuala Lumpur or Buenos Aires. You might have a friend or tour manager with you, but more often than not, you’re travelling alone, and there’s a need to fill that void of loneliness. Most people in music at a passionate, slightly geeky level have a backstory to why they’re there. I certainly do, and you’ve just got to come to terms with that particular backstory.
What’s your relationship with social media like? It can be a dangerous game indulging in the constant endorphin hits of likes and comments.
I really ration myself with social media for that reason, because you can just get into this horrible rabbit hole where you just can't get out of it. I recently found myself in a similar rabbit hole with all the shit that's going on in the world in current global affairs. It’s really difficult to back out of that, let alone back out of that rabbit hole of your own social media persona and what people had to say about you.
With your lawyer hat on, how does AI factor into the discussions about copyright and IP?
There's not enough law on AI yet, so what you have to do is apply existing legal principles in a square-peg-into-a-round-hole way to work out what impact AI has on intellectual property rights and copyright. Everybody around the world is waiting for governments to create some clarity. Some of what the UK Government has purported to be doing has looked very negative and allowed big business to copy the creator’s work as an influence on AI, but that story hasn't yet been told, so we wait to see what happens.
From the creative side, do you think AI is an interesting addition to a studio that can be useful for an artist?
I haven't tried creating anything with it. I've experimented with borrowing vocals that have already been sung, just trying to put it to different voices. It almost harks back to the conversation about sampling when it first came around in the late 80s. Sampling, per se, wasn't bad if it was used in a creative way, and I suppose the same applies to AI. But if you're simply using it as a substitute for creativity, then that's clearly a bad thing.
Some people may not know your uncle is celebrity chef, Rick Stein. Which is the most challenging working environment: in the kitchen, behind the decks, or buried in legal contracts?
The kitchen is much harder. I worked a summer in my uncle’s restaurant in Cornwall and I was also - very unsuccessfully - on Masterchef. At least as a DJ you get some time off. As a chef, in order to make it you've got to be doing six nights a week, have no social life, working in a hot and potentially quite an aggressive environment that's not necessarily very well rewarded.
As an Arsenal fan, the chat about signing a new striker must be playing on your mind. Who would you like?
It's between Sesko and Gyokeres. I think I'd be happy with either, but they're clearly playing a bit of a game at the moment, so we'll see.
To find out where you can catch Judge Jules this summer across the UK and Ibiza, visit JudgeJules.net or follow on Instagram.
