Party: SHIFT K3Y // SHAKE IT // ROJO // SATURDAY MAY 30th

Party: SHIFT K3Y // SHAKE IT // ROJO // SATURDAY MAY 30th

Our bookings just get bigger and bigger!

Shake It proudly presents the almighty Shift K3Y with everything in his locker ... producing, DJing and singing.

Already with a top 3 chart hit under his belt with TOUCH and a whole host of releases due this year in collaboration artists such as MNEK and Robin Thicke to DJing at Gatecrasher and the world's super clubs Shift K3Y has it all. Producing everything from garage to deep house Shift K3Y is one of the British stars of the very near future.

An absolute bargain and a once in a lifetime opportunity to see him in a small and intimate environment.

Very limited half price tickets available until May 15th!!!

Half price tickets: £6
Advanced tickets: £9
Standard tickets: £12

www.shiftk3y.eventbrite.co.uk

BIOGRAPHY
Someone get Lewis Jankel a sponsorship deal with Swiss Army Knives. The 21-year-old who trades as Shift K3y is, as he puts it, “an all-in-one” – writing, producing, DJing all over the world and singing with sparkling soul. “It is a vulnerable thing to say: no one else touched this music, no one, from start to finish,” he says. “This is me, hands down.”
It’s been a gradual growth in skills that culminated in March 2015 with his first live show as the frontman of his own band – at Camden’s legendary Roundhouse with Ella Eyre, no less – and began at the age of seven when his dad, Blockheads keyboardist Chaz Jankel, brought home the Logic software for home producing.
In between, he was making dubstep-influenced instrumentals that came out on producer Marco Del Horno’s Bullet Train label while he was still in the sixth form. UKs’ favourite radio stations began supporting him then and haven’t let up, paying particular attention to the glittering garage pop of Touch, a top three hit in spring 2014.
It was at an Annie Mac Presents night at Koko in 2012 that he began picking up a microphone to sing his own songs during his DJ sets. All part of a desire to be involved in every musical avenue available. “I wanted to make a living from music, however possible. That’s how I’m here, because I said: ‘You want a remix? I’ll give you a remix. You want a DJ? I can DJ. Need a singer? I’ll sing.’”
That work ethic hasn’t diminished since chart success became a reality. He’s trained himself to live on five hours sleep a night, starting early in his room in Trevor Horn’s historic Sarm Studios in Notting Hill. He’s already got a morning’s work under his belt before whichever star he’s working with that day has rung the doorbell.
He keeps late nights too, with a gang of hot young singers and producers that includes MNEK, Joel Compass, Becky Hill and Kate Stewart, Producer and school friend Linden Jay and future star Ruby Francis. “If we go on a night out, it’s all back to Sarm.” MNEK and he fuel each other’s fires, pushing each other to push pop music forward. “We’re both trying to set a blueprint. I don’t feel the current blueprint works,” he says.
That’s how he describes his debut album too: “For me this album is a blueprint for how electronic music should sound from now on.” He’s painfully aware that sounds arrogant, but he’s not stumbling into the world of radio A-lists and dizzying chart placings from a place of ignorance. He’s given this a lot of thought, as evidenced by the response if you ask him about his interests outside of music: “Ummmm…” There was a nascent career as a semi-pro magician – parties, magazine launches, a neat trick where he can make the name of your card appear in blood under his skin – but even that has been put back up his sleeve to enable more studio time.
With a father in a successful band, co-writing many hits with Ian Dury, obviously music was everywhere growing up. “I had my dad’s music playing in the house, and funk, disco, jazz, soul, classical, R&B, hip hop. Then I started listening to club music and going out.” He went to a private school in Hampstead alongside Annie Lennox’s daughter and Liam Gallagher’s stepson, where he was made to feel inferior without a genuine household name for a parent. Bad behaviour put paid to that, and he was sent instead to the sixth form at Muswell Hill state school Fortismere – fortuitously also the alma mater of Kinks Ray and Dave Davies, Rod Stewart and, more recently, Michael Kiwanuka and Jess Glynne.
The school’s investment in a brand new music block inspired him. “It was the most incredible place ever. Three floors, every room patched into one of two studios. I was covering D’Angelo records, trying to get them to sound exactly the same.” Meanwhile at home he also had plenty to play with. “My dad’s got a real Seventies jazz bass, the one everyone wants, which is what I learned bass on. I was playing a Minimoog at age five. The house keyboard was a Korg M1, which is now on all my records. You can hear those influences on my music – these things have sunk into my brain.”
Outside of home and school, a love of clubbing took hold early on. He winces when admitting to going to all-ages clubs such as Let’s Go Crazy, but soon it was on to DMZ raves in Brixton and “the dingiest of dingy warehouses”.
“Having gone through that helps me to put myself in these people’s shoes when I play,” he says. “It’s pretty obvious but it’s as simple as that.”
Once he took to the decks himself, Skrillex and Diplo were early supporters, the former taking him on tour around the US. Now he’s got the big names coming to him, with Tinie Tempah, Iggy Azalea and Tove Lo requesting remixes, and Chaka Khan, DJ Mustard and Robin Thicke working with him on his album. Khan was the big one. Of meeting the funk queen in LA to record his song Gone Missing, he says: “It was the most intensely amazing experience of my life.”
But there’s no time for laurel-resting just yet. There’s still much work to be done to ensure that the rest of the world realises that dance-pop, the way he does it, is the way forward. “When it comes to this, I never waste any time, ever,” he says. “I’d love to say that I never wasted a day.” Catch up with him now before he adds any more skills to his portfolio – according to this restless music obsessive, rapping may well be next