I wanna dance with George

Let’s say you’re the drummer and producer in one of the world’s most successful rock bands. You just spent two years on a gruelling, relentlessly viral tour. And as soon as it ended, you were swept right into the new album campaign by your popstar fiancé, which ends up being the defining cultural moment of the summer. What do you do next? Disappear to Bora Bora for a few months, or maybe the penthouse suite at the Waldorf Astoria? Sweat it out at home in LA, get drenched at your other house in London?

If you’re George Daniel – one quarter of The 1975 and Charli XCX​’s romantic partner and Brat collaborator – none of the above. Instead, you prepare a new solo dance project that’s much grittier than your band’s shimmering, earnestly romantic sound. And, while you’re at it, why not start a label, too, to release said project as well as all the weird dance curios your friends have been working on?

You might assume that after filling arenas for so many years, George would have no qualms about launching his new imprint dh2, a dance-focused offshoot to The 1975’s longtime label Dirty Hit, at the 550 capacity Phonox club in Brixton. But underground club music heads can be cagey and judgmental towards those deemed outsiders. On the night, George was really nervous.

​“I was secretly having a bit of a meltdown,” he says over Zoom from his home in LA, wearing one of the many dh2 shirts he’s been wearing in recent months. ​“I actually didn’t settle into [my DJ] set until I made a commitment to myself to stop being mean internally. I was like, right, no one knows this music. That’s the whole point of why we’re here.” George’s playful, raging DJ set was a sweat-soaked success. And up in the booth, he was supported by friends and collaborators including Charli, The Dare and dh2 signee Kelly Lee Owens, who played a harder-edged techno set earlier in the evening.

dh2, like a lot of good ideas, came from a drunken conversation. In recent years, George has felt energised by dance acts like Floating Points, Sammy Virji and Salute, and having sharpened his DJing skills during lockdown, he’d taken to DJing at The 1975’s after parties. At the knees up following the band’s Finsbury Park show in July last year, Dirty Hit general manager Ed Blow floated the idea of a Dirty Hit club night. ​“It ended up being like, ​‘Well, what’s stopping us from doing an imprint?’” George says.

Things fell into place when Charli’s managers Twiggy Rowley and Sam Pringle started managing the Welsh electronic musician Kelly Lee Owens, and they approached George about signing her to Dirty Hit. ​“It was the most weirdly universe-aligning moment ever – I’d literally just put the phone down to Ed about deciding that we’re going to do this,” George says. ​“Me and Kelly had been trying to work together for years, or at least hang out and talk about music, so we met up and that was the start of her being the first signing on the label, which was so cool. And to be working with Sam and Twiggy and Kelly, and Charli’s involved with her to an extent – there’s a real nice family feel to it already.” dh2 was launched with Kelly’s euphoric single Love You Got last month, and the label will release her album Dreamstate in October.

George’s new venture might seem like a curveball, but he’s always harboured a love for electronic music. When he was 16 and left school in Wilmslow, Cheshire, he pursued a college diploma in production and electronic music in Manchester, where his tutors put him on to mind-melting records by Aphex Twin, Luke Vibert, Squarepusher and Boards of Canada. When the members of The 1975 – who in their early years were an emo band called Drive Like I Do – started to write and record music, George used techniques he’d learned from electronic music.

“The way we made music initially was actually very dance music in its method,” George says. ​“Not necessarily in what it sounded like – but we didn’t really know what a song structure was, we didn’t know any chords, we were very much making sounds that looped, and the peaks and troughs were from repetition or something dropping out. It wasn’t traditional songwriting, because we literally didn’t know how to do that. At this point, I’m 16, Matty’s 17, we’re really finding our feet – we didn’t know what the band was gonna sound like. So this is a really nice full circle moment.”

Although the band haven’t found loads of time for raving over the years, the interest in dance music never died off. ​“I wouldn’t say we were ever regularly hitting the clubs in Manchester,” George says of the band’s formative years, ​“but we all had a hatchback with a sub in the boot, and we were being little naughty boys, playing our silly dance music in our little town.” He also recalls spending ​“a summer of Lee Foss and Jamie Jones” in Ibiza when they were in their early twenties. ​“We kept up to speed with what was going on, and never really stopped listening to that world. We just had to take a backseat while the band kicked off.”

The fact that Geroge hasn’t necessarily been flexing his club bona fides in recent years does give him pause, especially considering the fact that the Resident Advisor set is often keen to savage any interlopers looking to get into club culture. ​“I have a huge amount of imposter syndrome with this stuff – I think about this every day, like ​‘Oh, this is the guy who plays drums and produces this band, they’re successful, now he decides he’s going to do a label because every other video on Instagram is a DJ right now’ – that’s my nightmare,” he says. And he insists he’s not doing this to gain any celebrity status outside of the band. ​“The last thing I want people to think is like ​‘Oh, George wanted more attention.’ Absolutely not,” he says with a terrified, slightly manic laugh. ​“Matty can have everything!”

It was George’s dance producer friends such as Salute, Virji and Owens, who encouraged him, telling him that the music he was making was worthwhile. And you can hear his confidence in his debut single Screen Cleaner – a slightly tongue-in-cheek, sexy club track that whips a dial tone and some garbled vocal samples into a sneery electro-house maelstrom. It sounds primed for the peak of the DJ sets he’s played as part of Charli’s Party Girl shows this year, including deliriously popular Boiler Rooms in New York and Ibiza.

That dh2 and the so-called Brat summer would coincide, George says, is just kismet. ​“dh2 started maybe a few months before Charli started thinking about Brat, and these two things happening simultaneously this summer is a big coincidence,” he says. ​“It’s quite exciting – this is the summer of a lot of changes in my life, which is really cool. It’s not intimidating, because Brat is… why would I compare? That would be the most futile exercise. I’m really happy and proud of her, and proud of my input in [her] record. To be honest, that gave me a bit of confidence.”

For the first time, maybe, the general public sees him not as George from The 1975, but George from Brat. ​“I didn’t anticipate the ​‘I want to dance with George-ism’ of everything’ – I didn’t see myself as a protagonist,” he says. “[But] it just feels celebratory. Actually, I’m relieved – when I heard my name on Club Classics for the first time, Charli was like, ​‘What do you think of this?’ and I was like, ​‘People are gonna cringe – are they gonna hate me?’”

Judging by the euphoria on the dancefloor at the dh2 launch the other night, and the smile on George’s face when Screen Cleaner sent fists pumping in the air, he’s got a good chance of getting over that imposter syndrome. ​“I was worried about being accepted,” he admits. ​“But I think I’ve passed the test so far.”