As befits his mysterious moniker, DJ Shadow has never been one to take the obvious path. Four decades into a career in which he reset the possibilities of what hip hop could sound like, the artist born Josh Davis has started to look back on the beginning of his musical journey and reflect upon his stellar legacy. Speaking to Angus Batey in an exhaustive interview, Shadow talks about everything: Mo’ Wax, James Lavelle, crate digging, the outer reaches of hip hop and, most confusingly, being compared to The Orb. “If you never contextualise your career for your fans, you’re missing an opportunity to educate a little bit,” he says…

An erudite, generous and careful interviewee, DJ Shadow doesn’t exactly pause to gather his thoughts but does sometimes seem to spend a little time weighing them. When asked whether he still recognises himself in the early work collected in ‘The Mo’ Wax Singles 1993-1997’, a painstakingly crafted collection of his non-LP releases for the storied London-based label, he begins by noting that his twin daughters are now 21, the age he was in 1993. This, he says, affords some perspective.

 “I think I’m basically the same person,” he says. “The only difference is what I can only describe as the arrogance of youth – in that, when you’re young, you sort of just assume everything’s going to work out. And, typically, it did.” 

 Here he allows himself a short chuckle, mainly in gratitude, but perhaps with a touch of ruefulness. 

 “Then you get a little bit older and a little more beaten down and you realise: ‘Wow, that was kind of a magical time’,” he continues. “Because that isn’t the typical way things actually work in life.”

That “magical time” is captured by the box set – which comprises half-speed remastered 12-inch repressings of his first six singles, along with a seventh disc containing the previously unreleased original versions of ‘Camel Bobsled Race’, a megamix of those tracks by DMC world champion DJ Qbert, and an eighth 12-inch featuring the earliest versions of four pieces, just as they were beginning to take shape on his Akai MPC-60 sampler. 

In hip hop, a genre that has always been so obsessed with what’s next that it’s left itself little room to celebrate and honour past glories, this kind of in-depth investigation of catalogue material is rare. So is coming across an artist willing to spend enough time in their own archives, effectively having to re-live their past, to turn in something fans will feel is worth paying for. 

As he has pored through his back pages, Shadow has been forcibly reminded of the good fortune that attended those first exploratory steps, and reliving some of the pivotal relationships that helped him build his career – though you get the sense that those relationships, and those people, are never far from his thoughts anyway. What emerges is not just a clearer picture of the artist as a young man, but a more definitive version, the opening chapters in the biography of a musician who has always refused to allow others to write his story for him.

The package opens with ‘In/Flux’, the single which saw Shadow unveiled as the apparent figurehead of the nascent trip hop subgenre when James Lavelle’s infant indie released it in the UK in 1993 – but the story starts several years earlier. The lazier narratives generally posit Shadow as the guy who showed up out of nowhere to “save” hip hop, his hewn-from-samples instrumentals allowing an entry point for the kind of listener who thought they’d appear cooler if they got into rap but couldn’t handle its unrepentant extremes. This portrayal has always rankled with him. 

“I never wanted to be anybody’s cheat code – [for them] to be able to say: ‘Oh, I can’t stand that rap stuff and the street stuff, but now I can say I like and understand hip hop and participate in it because somebody has offered me a version of it with all of that stripped away’,” Shadow says. “I’m not just some guitarist who was in rock bands for 10 years and then heard Public Enemy and decided to start making beats, the way so many others did. I grew up and went to school with all those kids. They hated rap, hated rap, hated rap – and then suddenly heard NWA or ‘Fear of a Black Planet’ and went, ‘No, no, I never listened to rock, I’m a rap guy now.’ That really bothered me in school and it bothered me later when people started sampling records and then I’d be compared to them. I’d be like: ‘Wait – you’re not listening. My stuff is clearly made by somebody who grew up listening to hip hop.’”

That growing up took place in the city of Davis, just outside Sacramento, north-east of the San Francisco Bay Area, where Shadow started getting serious about hip hop around the age of 10. He remembers being motivated by the music in its totality: not just the cool and cerebral stuff, but the gauche and the gross, too. He recalls a day in 1986, aged 13 or 14, when his father took him to San Jose and spent his allowance in Tower Records on two new 12-inch singles that sat at absolute opposite ends of the then hip hop pantheon: Boogie Down Productions’ seminal ‘South Bronx’, and 2 Live Crew’s notorious ‘Throw the Dick’. 

“They were both incredible to me for completely different reasons,” he says. “The production on the Boogie Down Productions record I thought was really, like, amateurish and broke as fuck, but the rapping was incredible. And then the 2 Live Crew record had some of the dopest scratching I had ever heard and incredible drum programming.” 

Around the same time, he began “hanging around” at KDVS, the local college radio station, and befriended Oras Washington, host of its first hip hop show. The pair tried – and failed – to get into the 1988 Def Jam tour stop in Oakland, but made it to the aftershow party, where Shadow heard Public Enemy’s then-unreleased ‘It Takes a Nation of Millions...’ album being played on a portable cassette machine by Flavor Flav, and got Chuck D’s autograph. 

“Something I’ve realised over the years is that, particularly in hip hop, it’s not considered cool to venerate your influences or talk about how you have so much respect for this other person that you’re quote-unquote ‘competing against’, or whatever,” he says. “I never thought of it that way. I’m always a fan first, and I think that’s served me well through the years.” 

This means he’s always thought and spoken warmly about contemporaries whose work he rates, and in turn that has allowed him to acknowledge their influence and be inspired by their example, and to take encouragement when he maybe needed to be reminded that it was OK to go your own way.

“Whether it was Prince Paul or Premier or Steinski, or Large Professor or Q-Tip, fortunately, there always seemed to be somebody holding a lantern in the darkness and just going, ‘Follow me, I know what I’m doing, I’m over here doing it,’” he says. “Even later, the first time I heard Portishead, the first time I heard drum’n’bass coming out of a car in Piccadilly, you kind of go: ‘Oh, OK, good! This is something new for me to help me along the way.’ You see that they’re doing things differently and it’s inspiring.”

Shadow started making mixtapes at home, and by the dawn of the 1990s he’d joined the roster of mix-show DJs at San Francisco radio station KMEL. Aged 18, he submitted a mixtape-cum-demo to the Unsigned Hype column of the first US-wide hip hop magazine, The Source. Some of the genre’s biggest and most important artists – from Common to Notorious B.I.G., DMX to Eminem – received their first nationwide coverage in Unsigned Hype, but the only time it was ever awarded to a solo artist who wasn’t a rapper was in July 1991, when the column profiled Shadow.

One of the writers at The Source he’d sent the tape to was Dave ‘Funken’ Klein, who, in 1991, was in the process setting up the label Hollywood BASIC, a rap imprint funded by the Disney corporation. Funken-Klein commissioned Shadow to remix a track by Lifers Group – a band comprised of inmates in a New Jersey prison – and released it on a 12-inch with a Shadow solo track (‘Lesson 4’, titled in tribute to the ‘Lessons’ series of cut-and-paste classics made by the duo Double Dee & Steinski) on the B-side. 

Funken-Klein also signed Harare hip hop duo Zimbabwe Legit and got Shadow to remix their ‘Doin’ Damage in My Native Language’ single in 1992. As with the Lifers Group remix and ‘Lesson 4’, ‘Shadow’s Legitimate Mix’ eschewed the kind of funk samples that were by this stage already becoming hackneyed: Shadow, a voracious listener to all kinds of music, was determined to make sure his work sounded different. On a trip to LA, the British DJ James Lavelle picked up a promo copy: months later, he tracked down Shadow and asked if he’d be interested in making a record for his new label, Mo’ Wax, named after his record review column in Straight No Chaser magazine.

“James liked everything about the Zimbabwe Legit track and wanted me to do [something like] that,” Shadow recalls. “He said: ‘I want you to go way out, I like the thread that you’re on, I don’t want you to use familiar stuff.’ I just kind of went, ‘OK, great, I will take that ball and run with it’.” 

Lavelle’s interest in Shadow – and his encouragement of his idiosyncratic approach – came at a time when Shadow needed it most. Funken-Klein, who had suffered from spinal cancer for some years, was seriously ill – he died in September 1995, aged 31 – and other offers of remixes and production work were thin on the ground. Those which did come Shadow’s way would have involved a degree of compromise that was untenable. He was thinking about abandoning music entirely.

“Everybody just kept saying: ‘Your stuff’s too weird, you need to tone it down, you need to sample things other people have sampled’,” he recalls. “So the fact that James called me when he did, and that his message to me was basically, ‘I like what you’re doing, go as far out as you want’... I mean, it’s just incredible that it happened the way it did when it did, because I literally was sitting there going: ‘Well, maybe this is the end of the line. Maybe I should start getting serious about my degree or start thinking about other options.’”

Shadow doubled down on his mix-show method, and the ‘In/Flux’ single was the result. The track still has the power to shock today, its stately pace, episodic structure and extended running time making it pretty much the opposite of an obvious debut single. It also stuffs at least an album’s worth of ideas into one track. Was that deliberate? Was there a sense of, ‘Let’s get it all out there, in case it’s the last chance I get?’ Shadow’s response is concise, and instant.

“I always have felt that way,” he says. “Every record I’ve made I’ve felt that way.” 

Mo’ Wax released the single in the autumn of 1993. Reviews were positive, if perplexing. 

“Everybody mentioned The Orb, this kind of ambient house thing, and of course I didn’t know what they were talking about,” Shadow says. “And some people thought it was acid jazz, and I didn’t know what that was either. So I think for me, then, I was just like, ‘OK, time to do a total left turn’.”

That turn became the second single, ‘Lost and Found (S.F.L.)’. It represents the first example of what has become something of a defining characteristic – Shadow’s determination to make sure that whatever the expected next move is, he goes another way.

“I would sit around at home and be like, ‘People think [my music is] all about these weird samples: alright, fine. I’m going to sample [U2’s] ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ and Fleetwood Mac and deliver something to James that he’d never release in a million years’,” Shadow says. “When James called me and gave his reaction to ‘Lost and Found’, which was way more effusive than he’d been with ‘In/Flux’, that’s when I kind of went, ‘This guy, he gets me.’ You know what I mean? ‘And he’s going to let me do whatever the fuck I want to do.’ Because that was a risky move, ‘Lost and Found’. It was a risky proposition – a risky record.”

Risky in what way? 

“It was just the idea of it, I think. The idea of, ‘Wait a minute: you’re committing sacrilege as somebody who’s supposed to be some digging-in-the-crates type of dude’,” he says. “I don’t know sometimes where the inspiration to do the music that I was making came from. It didn’t really have a precedent in my own listening. But I was just trying to do something different within the loose framework of hip hop sampling. I remember thinking that I was compelled to make it, but I certainly wouldn’t have been surprised if it was just completely slated. But at least in the UK, where it was released, it was the opposite.”

Singles three, four and five – ‘What Does Your Soul Look Like’, ‘Midnight in a Perfect World’ and ‘Stem’ – all ended up on Shadow’s celebrated debut album, ‘Endtroducing…..’. After ‘Lost and Found’, making an album had become the plan. But Shadow says he was “gutted” when Lavelle and business partner Steve Finan decided that the first half-hour of music he presented to them – which he thought of as the basis of the album, not a standalone project – should be released as an EP. To him, this effectively meant starting again on the LP.

“It may sound quaint now, 30 years later,” he explains, “but you were looking around at the ‘competition’, and being like, ‘Oh, Tricky’s doing this’ – even though I never in my life heard a Tricky album; but you couldn’t escape the fact that in the press you were constantly put in the same category – or, ‘Massive Attack is doing this, and Portishead is doing that.’ And all of them were putting out albums. I felt like I was missing the boat here a little bit. So I had real concerns about releasing ‘What Does Your Soul Look Like’ because it was like I’m starting from zero again. I just spent four months, maybe even longer, making that, and now I was back to square one. It was a lot to get out from under.”

Concerns about risking burnout may have increased in the summer of 1995, when Lavelle booked Shadow for his UNKLE project as work began on what would eventually become the album ‘Psyence Fiction’. Shadow was spending more time in London, eventually moving to the city for a few months. He agrees with the suggestion that this would have found its way into his music, but argues that, thanks to both Lavelle and to Klein, his musical worldview was already far wider. 

“One of the things I always liked about Funken-Klein was that he thought globally about music and about hip hop,” he says. “That’s why he signed a group from Africa, a group from Japan, a group from Denmark. He and James had a very similar aesthetic. I talk about living in London, but James also brought me to Japan for the first time, to Australia for the first time, to Germany and continental Europe for the first time. He exposed the world to me. At any given month in 96 or 97, one minute I’m in New York, the next I’m in LA, the next Sydney or Tokyo or Paris or London or Aberdeen or wherever. It all contributed to the music I was making.”

‘Endtroducing.....’ was released in the UK in September 1996, preceded by the ‘Midnight In a Perfect World’ single, with ‘Stem’ released a couple of months later. All were effectively part of the same body of work. But the sixth single included in the box set – ‘High Noon’ – was something different; and, in a similar way to ‘Lost and Found’, it was a response to situations Shadow found himself in but had no control over. Mo’ Wax had licensed ‘Endtroducing.....’ and its singles to London/FFRR in the US, but the album wasn’t released there until November. Returning to the Bay Area between the release dates, Shadow seemed to be trapped in a crack between worlds.

“’Endtroducing…..’ had come out, had received its acclaim in the press in the UK and was resonating out there,” he recalls. “But then I went back home and I found myself back in the same shitty apartment in my hometown where nobody knows anything about me or who I am or what I’m doing, and I felt kind of rinsed; I guess. I made ‘High Noon’ as a reaction to everything. It was just me trying to deal with the minor success that I achieved but also the minor notoriety – and at the same time, the real sense that absolutely nothing had changed. There was this feeling of it’s all a mirage and a disillusionment. Working on ‘High Noon’ was an outlet [for] a lot of those feelings.”

The Mo’ Wax era was drawing to a close. UNKLE’s ‘Psyence Fiction’ was released to huge acclaim in 1998, but it marked the end of Shadow and Lavelle’s working relationship. While they clearly had their differences, Shadow only has good things to say about his erstwhile partner.

“People always talk about the conflict between James and I,” he says, “but for me, what I always think about is just all the ways that he contributed to my musical evolution and maturity. Largely it was because of access, and he was much more worldly than I, even though he was younger than me. I was somewhat of a yokel, just a suburban kid, and he introduced the world to me. And I benefited musically, obviously.”

The pair are still in touch, “a bit,” he says. They last met in Manchester in August, when Shadow headlined a bill that included both DJ Krush and the current iteration of UNKLE. “It was good to catch up with everybody,” is how he recalls that day. 

“I think sometimes people get disappointed I don’t add fuel to the fire of the negative narratives that exist about us, but there’s too much good that he did for me,” Shadow says. “I wouldn’t have a career if it wasn’t for James, most likely. He’s certainly one of the most important people in my career – if not the most important. That’s what matters, really. Every relationship has its challenges, but I always wish him well, always want the best for him.” 

Mo’ Wax’s corporate parent, A&M, was dissolved in 1998, its artists’ contracts picked up by Island, which released Shadow’s follow-up to ‘Endtroducing.....’, 2002’s ‘The Private Press’. In 2006, ‘The Outsider’ found Shadow doubling down on his determination to stress his hip hop bona fides, featuring a string of collaborations with the kinds of rappers that would confound any listeners still harbouring the delusion that he was offering a diluted version of the music. 

Since 2016 he’s been recording for Mass Appeal, the label run by Nas, and has continued to determinedly defy all preconceptions. His most recent LP, 2023’s ‘Action Adventure’, inspired in part by a collection of hundreds of tapes of the output of a Baltimore radio station in the 1980s, remains a record he’s “really, really proud of” but which “found a smaller audience than I would have liked” he laments. 

“It’s much more rewarding to be making new music and to be creative, [but it’s] a different animal releasing new music these days,” he says, when asked if there’s another album in progress. “I have no problem at the moment holding out and waiting for something new and compelling to lead the way creatively. I remain excited and the spirit is there - but we’ll see.” 

He’s currently working on a “deluxe edition” of ‘The Mountain Will Fall’, his 2016 debut for Mass Appeal, which has been out of print for some time. This kind of work is just as important, he argues – and the opportunity to do it is one he knows he is fortunate to have earned for himself.

“If you never stop and take stock and you never contextualise your career for your fans, you’re missing an opportunity to educate a little bit,” he says. “I feel it’s important once in a while, because now there’s people younger than my own daughters discovering my music on TikTok or whatever. I’d rather tell that story than have them try to piece it together through AI or some other means where you just go: ‘What? No, that’s not the story that I value, it’s not the story that I want to be known for.’ That’s what I think this type of work is about: let me try to give it my all – in the way that I’ve always tried to give my all, whether it’s a new record or whatever it is – because it’s forever. Whether people listen to it or discover it now, or a year from now, it’s like, ‘Oh, this was his output for Mo’ Wax – forget all that other stuff, this is what matters. Here it is’.” 

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This feature first appeared in Disco Pogo issue 9