‘I wanted it to sound alive’: cult DJ Midland on his musical journey through the Aids crisis

Having launched three labels and remixed the likes of Dua Lipa and the Chemical Brothers, the musician is now exploring a dark time – and his own queer reckoning

Harry Agius had been DJing in clubs for almost a decade, but in 2019 something switched. After a summer spent at NYC Downlow, the LGBTQ+ dance space at Glastonbury, and Honcho Campout, a queer festival in Pennsylvania, the DJ-producer better known as Midland finally felt as if he had tapped into his “authentic self”. Tracing his formative years at drum’n’bass and dubstep nights, he tells me: “For a long while, I would feel like the only gay person in those spaces. I came out of the summer of 2019 feeling like: I can’t really go back.”

Then came the pandemic. With all live shows pulled and time on his hands, Agius began to reflect on that transformative year and the “dual void” he had been living in beforehand, something he had managed to ignore by being so busy (at one point, he was playing more than 100 gigs a year). Born in Epsom, Surrey, in 1986, Agius had grown up in the shadow of section 28, which prohibited the “promotion of homosexuality” in schools and by local authorities; meanwhile, HIV and Aids had always felt close to home: his childhood nanny had died of an Aids-related illness.

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