You’d be forgiven for hearing the names “Ben and Louis Helliker-Hales”, and mistaking them for the handsome brothers of a well-to-do London family who DJ together at parties across town. In nearly every respect, that’s exactly what they are — except they hail from New Zealand and they also perform at Glastonbury.
The HH brothers, alias Chaos in the CBD, are among the most successful electronic music producers of our time. They’ve played at Love International and Primavera Sound and clocked up hundreds of millions of streams across the platforms. It’s hard to express how much of a cult status they hold both in London and beyond. Suffice it to say, they invariably sell out every show in which they appear and have become a byword (or three) for a particular brand of dance music aficionado: the thinking man’s disc jockeys.
Their work ethic and gargantuan performance schedule epitomise the viral, 14-year-old Lady Gaga quote in which she describes her promotional circuit for her debut album, The Fame: “Bus, club, another club, another club, plane, next place.” They dart from Tokyo (their favourite city, which they describe as “Disneyland for grownups”) to Ibiza (where they typically perform at Pikes, the legendary nightclub George Michael sang about in Wham!’s Club Tropicana), to London (where they've lived for more than a decade), to the Southern Hemisphere. As is the case for most people who run on fumes without crashing, they do a good job of masking any burnout they may be experiencing.
The Helliker-Hales are laid back, unassuming gents. Louis looks like someone who once did a lot of rugby and now goes on a lot of runs, while Ben is a wiry fellow: jaunty and angular. Ben looks like he should be called Louis; Louis looks like he should be called Ben.
Interviews with the pair rarely bother to distinguish them. But they play different roles. Ben is the creative, while Louis is akin to an executive producer. Their fraternity, however, ensures the squabbles that typically occur between left-and-right brained partnerships don’t. “We don’t plan our sets a lot,” Louis said in a recent interview, “but sometimes, Beans will give me a look, or he’ll say: ‘Okay, I’ve got the next three tracks,’ and I’ll be like, ‘Do your thing’.”
They “take turns” to mess it up, they reveal to me today. “It’s usually me,” Louis admits. “It’s not a spoken arrangement, but it tends to happen naturally… One of us won’t be up in time to make the train we’re meant to catch…”
Chaos in the CBD are, above all else, very cool – although their stage name sounds a little passé (CBD is the legal high found in cannabis as well as an acronym for Central Business District). From what I’m able to glean, the two were practically engineered to be that way. “Walked on the beach, went to a vineyard for lunch, smoked weed, drank too much and got to play my music all weekend: Etta James, ‘80s stuff, Winans Brothers Louie Vega remix, The Orb and John Tejada’s Sweat On The Walls.” This is not a quote they’ve given me during our interview, but a text message they once received from their mother.
The Helliker-Hales have been putting out hits for well over a decade. The first to resonate with their future British audience — which is one of their most substantial — was Midnight in Peckham, their 2015 EP. Five songs, including the title track, have been spun on repeat every summer since across groovy basements in their patch of South London and beyond. Their trademark sound is deceptively simple: sax solos, 90s-style percussions, and long, jazzy tracks that mine from diverse sources. The whole thing feels Antipodean by way of SE22 — which, in many ways, is exactly what it is.
“The music we make is very accessible,” Ben says today — which is to undersell it, slightly. No artist or producer ever wants to be singled out as creating something akin to “easy listening” — although their music is certainly easier on the ear than the more provocative electronica produced by people like Barry Can’t Swim. “It’s not offensive,” Louis clarifies.
“The music we make is very accessible”
We are meeting during the first of many sunny spells. It’s a hot day in early April at Café G on Peckham Rye, near where they live: we order coffees and orange juice (the latter a reassuringly expensive £5.00). Theirs is a genteel area that’s somewhat befitting of their musical niche: yes, they’re house DJs, but of a supremely respectable variety. If their music was described by an estate agent they might even call it “village-like”.
We’re here to discuss their new — well, their first album, at a time when it’s becoming rarer for electronic musicians to put these out. “My experience is that people consume, and therefore make music differently,” explains a friend who works as a music consultant and producer. Artists are advised to “waterfall” releases (i.e. put out one track every month). Chaos are bucking the trend with A Deeper Life: an exquisite debut that goes back to their Kiwi roots. The record has a nostalgic vibe without ever feeling overemotive, and mines from their nature-filled youth in New Zealand and their love of surfing. The latter is evoked through instruments that recall the sound of a coastline, and the overall result is a collection of tracks that could just as easily be played on a dancefloor in Hackney as at a high-end yoga retreat.
The nostalgia, however, stretches further still. Maintaining My Peace, the album’s third track, sounds like something that could feasibly have been produced for Sade in 1997. On the sixth track, I Wanna Tell Somebody, Josh Milan lends his soulful voice to a song that feels lifted straight from the Motown playbook.
Too much melody is always a gamble for electronic musicians, and can pose a challenge during sets when other DJs are playing “harder” material (quotation marks my own). Over the years, Chaos have learnt to navigate crowds expecting “untss untss”-style techno (ibid) and weave in their own conspicuously more polished and, for want of a more proficient term, elegant music.
“We don’t really go out anymore. It just feels like work”
The brothers and I come onto the topic of clubbing: a culture from which they are now somewhat removed. “We don’t really go out anymore,” Louis tells me. Now in their mid-thirties, they experience nightclubs almost exclusively as performers. The idea of frequenting one out of their own accord — on a day off, say — doesn’t register. “It just feels like work.”
What they provide with their own parties — and their music — is a safe space. Last year, drink-spiking offences hit the headlines after Metropolitan Police Data suggested these had more than quadrupled in London over five years. Chaos draw a diverse demographic: 50-50 male-female and wonderfully intergenerational. I ask if any altercations have ever taken place at their live shows. “Once,” Ben tells me. “Two boys started fighting when we performed at Coromandel.” “That’s very, kind of, traditional for a Kiwi,” Louis laughs.
This Saturday, Chaos are hosting a street party in Shoreditch — a stone’s throw from The Standard’s offices on Finsbury Square — at a time when London’s nightclubs are closing at an alarming rate and venues in neighbourhoods as central as Soho face calls for “quiet nights”. Although outdoor events have thrived in the city as nightlife evolved post-Covid, these are now in danger as well. This Thursday, a judge will assess the evidence put forward by SayYesLambeth, a South London campaign group, against the festivals held each summer in Brockwell Park — which include Mighty Hoopla, Wide Awake, Field Day and City Splash. Though many of the campaigners have entirely valid environmental concerns (the festivals take place in such quick succession that it gives nature little time to recover), their victory would deal yet another blow to London nightlife.
Nightclub closures aren’t something Chaos in the CBD seem too preoccupied with. When I ask whether Sadiq Khan ought to shoulder some responsibility for the city’s faltering nightlife, the duo are reluctant to make any sort of statement. They tell me, humbly, that they’re unqualified to answer: that it’s been a while since they were “on the scene” and are in the now fortunate position to be “quite selective” about where in London they play. Daytime sets, like the one they’ll do this weekend, are “something special,” Ben tells me. “If you can play for six to eight hours, you can really dictate the flow of an evening and take your time with it a little more. We did it at The Cause a year or so ago [an industrial venue with massive outdoor space], and that was brilliant… But it wasn’t a knee jerk reaction [to club closures].”
“London never misses”
If live music has diversified into areas that shift away from late-night partying — with a global trend for listening bars such as Devon Turnbull’s The Listening Room at 180 Studios and Space Talk on St John Street — Chaos’ pivot towards outdoor or warehouse-style sets is a sign that they have, more personally, outgrown the grassroots venues of their youth.
London itself remains the ultimate live music capital of the world, the brothers believe. I venture that a city like Austin, which I visited in March, might have a better claim to such an accolade. They double down: “London never misses,” and only New York holds a candle to it. Their advice to young producers is to “work out where you fit”. “We didn’t really have the mentorship,” Ben says, “or the kind of resources we have now when we were coming up… I think if we’d known what we know now, we’d have approached things slightly differently.”
It’s easy to become a DJ these days, and it feels increasingly like every Tom, Dick or Harry is an amateur selector on the side. (Main hustle: something corporate.) You can’t help but feel, somewhat, like Chaos in the CBD are the Goldman Sachs of DJs: suave, elite, ultra successful and never pausing for breath. I ask if they’re due to perform at Glastonbury. “Yes.” Who are they most excited to see? “We… actually haven’t had a look at the lineup yet. Who’s playing?” When I run through the headliners, it’s Neil Young who sparks the most excitement.
Other DJs who they’ve spoken to are “so excited about Glastonbury”, and I cannot help but wonder whether Chaos think they’re too cool to be in the loop or simply haven’t had a second to consider it.
For many a budding DJ, the Helliker-Hales brothers represent the Holy Grail. They’re the ones who’ve “made it” — without the legacy connections that propped up a private school lad like Fred Again. They are, in their own way, grownup; but do DJs ever really grow up in the traditional sense? With a touring schedule befitting of their name, it seems to me that Chaos exist in a somewhat liminal state. The thrill hasn’t yet worn off. “You still have those moments where you’re DJing and having a blast,” they tell me, “and you’re like – this is the greatest thing in the world.”
Will they ever settle down? “I have a girlfriend in Amsterdam,” Ben says. “We’ve been together almost two years.” Not living in the same city, he opines, has allowed it to be a “healthy” relationship. “When you’re always on the road anyway, it’s good to know the other person isn’t expecting you to be home all the time…”
They’ve flirted with the idea of a more sedentary lifestyle; but ultimately, it’s touring that brings in the monies. An album like the one they’ve just put out is akin to a justification — a manifesto for more time in the sun. With their brilliance, the spotlight shows no sign of relenting.
Chaos in the CBD’s album, A Deeper Life, is out now (In Dust We Trust)
