“It all started with Inspector Morse,” begins Fish56Octagon, talking to MusicTech backstage ahead of his debut Cambridge gig. “It was an episode called ‘Cherubim & Seraphim’ and featured the 90s illegal rave scene,” enthuses the car influencer turned viral DJ and producer who is in his mid-40s but prefers to keep his identity hidden. Just 12 years old when he watched it while on a family holiday, and he was mesmerised. His parents? “Horrified.”

However, it inspired him to get into pirate radio once home: “It was accessible; you’d turn it on and you’ve got it”. A passion for record shopping followed: “It’s a world where you can go spend hours looking at stuff,” the Brit says, adding that he’s always had a good memory for certain details; “I thought it was all useless, but it turned out to be pretty useful after all.”

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Such an encyclopedic knowledge of dance music has served him well. In the year of his whirlwind rise to online fame, Fish, as he is known, amassed a rare cross-generational fanbase of OG ravers and new-gen dance heads, played three sets at Glastonbury and was dubbed the human Shazam.

The latter is an appropriate accolade for someone who has spent the majority of his money on vinyl records (his collection is currently 3,000-strong) and taught himself how to DJ and produce several decades ago. As a kid, he dug out two hi-fi record players from his dad‘s loft and, aged 13, got a belt-driven Soundlab DL P1 (“it was a good way to learn because you had to be very accurate with beatmatching”) and a mixer that didn’t have EQ on it (“if you were slightly out, the kickdrums could collide, whereas now you can take the kickdrums out if you’ve got a clash so it’s much easier”).

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♬ original sound – Fish56Octagon

Aged 16, he got a set of Technics SL1210s, but later sold the pair in 2005 for £180. “It was when everything went digital,” he recalls, having moved onto Octane, ACID Pro, Ableton Live and NI Traktor gear.

Over a decade of partying at clubs and several visits to Ibiza followed, before he “got stuck in a rut of buying records” once the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent lockdown hit. “I got a new credit card which had a £12,000 limit with 0% interest for 18 months,” he laughs. At the same time, he had started filming and posting TikTok videos about cars – “another big interest of mine, but not as much as dance music” – under the name Fish56Octagon; in a later clip, he revealed the moniker was “the most random pile of shit I could come up with”.

While he saw it as more of a hobby that turned into a side hustle, it got him to Porsche driving days with journalists. “But it wasn’t really going anywhere,” he says. However, he had noticed a trend: his top-viewed videos were those that featured a dance track that he selected. “I thought it would make it more dynamic than me just standing talking about cars,” he suggests, adding that “it wasn’t really about appealing to a young audience, although it inadvertently did that”.

Having then decided to focus explicitly on music, his posts about new records and festivals proved incredibly popular; “a few people were surprised that I was, at my age, going to see the dance acts”. However, he did face some criticism, with users calling him out on his choice of genres (despite having DJ’d and produced for practically all his life). “I’d get comments like ‘why are you playing drum ‘n’ bass?’ and I’d respond by saying ‘I’ve been into it since the scene started in the 90s’.”

Such skepticism made him “feel the need to validate myself” and led to a content pivot towards showing people his record collection (while wearing his dressing gown). “I noticed there was a lot of interest and said to myself, ‘If I just switch and do some music stuff, then maybe I’ll get a few tickets to go backstage, interview a few DJs and get into some festivals for free’. That’s all I was angling for,” he confirms.

It worked, and very quickly; one fan even wrote ‘I wish my dad were as cool as you’. “That was weird, and a bit of a surprise, but I wasn’t arguing!” he laughs. Incidentally, by the time he attended his first guestlisted event – Drumcode at Drumsheds – he had already been booked to play the same venue later that year. “It had all taken off so fast.” Booking requests from small promoters started coming in, and an all-night-long gig at Manchester club Hidden sold out six weeks in advance. Realising the demand, and with fans travelling from London and Glasgow, two more sell-out shows followed.

Having quit his job, Fish56Octagon has since become one of the biggest names in dance music, playing shows worldwide and counting huge names including Skrillex, Kerri Chandler and Disclosure among his followers – though he never imagined any of this would happen. “Music fell by the wayside for quite some time… it wasn’t an ambition,” he says of his advertising career taking precedence. “I was just having fun and sharing my enthusiasm for dance music.” In fact, he doesn’t think it would have connected in the same way had there been a strategy: “If it’s something you’re aiming for, that makes it less likely to work. Sometimes the natural thing resonates with people and becomes more of an authentic story.”

While he doesn’t see himself as an influencer – “it’s a dirty word” – he thinks that, whether artists like it or not, “social media is completely inseparable from music. I don’t think there’s any other real route into DJing or music production,” he suggests. “That’s not to say you’ve got to be a star on social media – far from it,” he considers. “But the notion that people totally reject it being part of their job… the whole structure is different now and record labels want to have something”. Likening the modern singing process to BBC show Dragon’s Den, he ponders that “they’re not so interested in hearing about a great invention, what they really want is a great invention that’s got a bit of business behind it and a track record. You don’t need to be distributed in Sainsbury’s, Marks & Spencer, Tesco and Waitrose, but you do need to have some orders. It’s the same with music now,” he considers.

This “unfortunate” development, he feels, has “commodified something that’s an art form; if they’ve got the choice of signing someone with a following and ready-made audience proven for the music, they’ll go with that”. But how much time should aspiring artists dedicate to growing their online presence? “It certainly takes a lot less time than learning to produce music,” he says. “Social media isn’t the hard part – music production is the hardest, then social media, then DJing is the easy part.”

As a selector who’s used to playing extended sets — his first gig was five hours, and his popular Fish Tales events see him man the decks for an average of four — he stands out in a saturated market. “It depends on what you’re doing and what your crowd’s like,” he says when MusicTech asks why he likes to take his crowds on genre-spanning journeys.

“If they’re really into the music, you can dig out some deeper tunes and play some more experimental tracks. But sometimes you’ll play to a crowd that just wants to party and have fun — that’s more about instant gratification than waiting ages to hear something build up,” he suggests. “It’s good to do those journey sets, but it depends on who you’ve got in because attention spans aren’t what they used to be.”

All this has been catalysed, he feels, by social media and COVID, “which have altered the way people interact with technology”. While those in the crowd may want to hear shortened edits of classic hits, he’s not one to cut things down. “I don’t like mixing out of a track before it’s peaked or finished peaking because, as a producer myself, I know how much care, thought, and attention goes into forming and arranging music,” he says, adding that most tracks he plays are four or five minutes in length.

To the contrary, he feels that “just cutting it dead” is something DJs do if they’re “not feeling particularly confident” in front of the crowd they’re playing to. “They’re perhaps thinking ‘I need another drop and another drop’, or worrying because they haven’t got their own following.” While he feels that “it does work”, he doesn’t think it’s the best choice considering the lengthy creative journey for a song to reach a finished state – “not just when you’re sitting writing it, but the years spent learning before that too”.

It’s this respect and patience for the craft that encapsulates his journey to becoming Fish56Octagon. Teasing to MusicTech that he has worked on 60 tracks since August – “many never progressed past my laptop, but I’ve had several mastered and played them out in my sets, and of those, a small number have gone forward as releases” – it’s clear that TikTok’s unlikely star is far from a flash in the pan (or pond).

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