When his father came home from work, Adam Maton could hear him coming from a mile away. “He’d be blaring his house or trance music,” Adam recalls. “My older brother and I were heavily influenced by him. I attended Creamfields (an annual dance music festival) with him when he was fifty!”
It seems, then, that a love for music is in Adam’s blood; what’s more apparent is that a passion for mixing that beloved music is part of his lineage. For when Adam was about 15 years old, his older brother started DJing on some Technics 1210s—the industry-standard decks at the time—and Adam was naturally drawn to the skill and magic of it.
“My brother used to live in a kind of shed in the garden,” he says, laughing at the memory. “And when he went out on the weekends, I’d go in there and try to work it all out. These were the days before YouTube and that sort of thing, so it was literally just me trying to work out how to mix on my own. Soon, I was using the money I made from part-time work to buy my own vinyls.”
As you’ll hear shortly, it didn’t stop there. But let’s set aside DJ Maton for now, and introduce Adam Maton the entrepreneur.
Adam, 37, founded Bournemouth-based removals company WeMove in 2016. Looking to disrupt the sector, Adam created a company committed to taking the stress out of moving by providing a friendly, reliable and, perhaps most importantly, fit removals team with careful hands and clean vans—no more wheezing contractors with greasy shirts and half-eaten pies on the dashboard.
So, yes, back to DJ Maton. After some years building up his vinyl collection and perfecting his deck work, Adam started playing in a couple of nightclubs in Bournemouth. It was extremely tough to get a slot in a club—competition is fierce—and Adam says he was “terrified” the first time he played a live set. “My dad came with me and drank a Diet Coke in the corner. There was hardly anyone there and it was scary. But you have to put yourself out there, challenge yourself to get out of your comfort zone.”
Any fantasies of becoming a top DJ and living a hedonistic life in Ibiza were quickly dismissed, however—not because Adam wasn’t good enough, but because, as it turned out, he didn’t actually enjoy playing in clubs.
“I love DJing,” Adam says, “but the perception is that it’s this cool person like (Scottish DJ) Calvin Harris, who’s really highly paid and plays all these great sets; the reality is that I’d be there and be beholden to a certain extent to the club owner and what they wanted me to play. The lifestyle is quite intense as well. I’d also be behind the decks while all my friends were dancing and having fun, so it’s actually quite a lonely place.”
Partly as a result of this realisation, Adam stopped DJing in his mid-20s. He took it up again in his early-30s and now plays for the pure enjoyment of it. He regularly gets together with a friend and they mix back-to-back; sometimes he plays at friends’ parties or weddings—but always for free because he doesn’t want to make money from it.
“I don’t want to make it about the money, because it’s a hobby,” he says. “As soon as you have this constraint where you’re getting paid for it, it’s another job. And my job is to run a business, and that’s a really important thing for me.”
During the height of lockdown in 2020, Adam did several livestreams from his WeMove office, where he keeps his decks. He’s now looking into doing a music production course in the New Year. For him, DJing is not only an evolving passion, it’s a way of shutting off from the world and from the stresses of running his own business.
“My concept of mindfulness used to be this idea of having to do yoga or meditation,” he says. “But someone recently told me that mindfulness is anything you do where you’re in the present and you’re conscious and only thinking about that one task. This is such a huge part of why I love DJing.
“Tonight, for instance, when I’m mixing with my friend, I won’t be thinking about what work we’ve got next week, or a big job I’m worried about—I’ll just be thinking about the tune and the next tune coming in; I’ll be really present in that activity. I think it’s so powerful as a business owner to have something that takes you away from the busyness of the mind.”
Listen to Adam’s Evolve mix here.