Fred Again is on the move. Performing against the stunning backdrop of Lake Vouliagmeni in Athens. Floating on a barge through the centre of Copenhagen. Popping up to play – well random! – for the shocked punters of an ordinary gastro pub in rural Somerset. Professionally captured and slickly reproduced, all of these moments are visible on the Instagram grid of Fred Again (real name Frederick Gibson), the ubiquitous 31-year-old DJ and producer who is both one of British dance music’s biggest social media superstars and one of its most controversial.
Gibson makes polite, emotive dance music at the boundary between the club and the chart for a vast audience who, domestically at least, have been stereotyped as modern house music’s hetero, hench and homogenous new hires. But with his new album Ten Days, he is forging a steelier phase. The informal iPhone notes app screengrabs which customarily announce his tour dates now display the names of huge US arenas. His 2022 Boiler Room online DJ set has 38 million views on YouTube. In June this year, he sold out a 77,500-capacity sports stadium in Los Angeles. He has closed Coachella, and it is not unlikely that he will soon headline Glastonbury. For a young, British DJ, in the scale and ambition of his recent live spectacles, he’s charted a course of success very few others have.
But how? Barely two years ago, I watched an early Fred Again live show at a sold-out hall in Manchester. At that point, Gibson was pivoting from backroom beatmaker – he had a credit on a third of all UK Number 1 singles in 2019 – to front of house, and his first release as Fred Again was in 2021.
The pandemic helped. Not just the hush of isolation, which gifted Gibson the space to hone his Instagram and TikTok style, which converts to a high level of engagement from his followers, but the emotional turmoil of lockdown itself: his 2021 hit “Marea (We’ve Lost Dancing)” took clips from a FaceTime conversation he had with fellow DJ The Blessed Madonna about how Covid facilitated the closure of nightclubs and transmuted it into swooning and meditative electronic dance music.
This style – splicing personal voice notes and internet detritus into house tracks – was the anchor of his diaristic Actual Life album trilogy, which were released in 2021 and 2022. At the Manchester show, Gibson – an affable and understated presence in his now-signature oversized T-shirt and joggers – mixed beats on stage in front of projections of candid lockdown selfies. Couples in pristine, white Carhartt kissed, lads grasped their mates tightly: who couldn’t be seduced by this defiant, if sentimental, celebration of music liberated once again to collective public spaces?
Then came the controversy. Excitement over Oasis’s reunion can be read as nostalgia for a culture that could still throw up artists who resembled the majority of people’s class backgrounds, and where second-generation Irish immigrant pop stars raised in council housing could summon huge audiences for their (at least initially) confrontational and rowdy art. In the summer of 2023, Fred Gibson’s elite aristocratic background burst noisily on to social media and into broadsheet newspapers. (“Fred Again fans are left stunned after learning the DJ has VERY posh relatives and attended the same swanky £45K school as Kate Middleton,” ran one Daily Mail headline.) Gibson – who has not spoken on the record about his upbringing – was educated at Marlborough College. Both of his parents are members of the British peerage. He was mentored closely by producer Brian Eno, thanks to a handy Notting Hill connection with Gibson’s aunt.
Suddenly, Gibson’s bashful, little-old-me moniker began to look like an exercise in obfuscating his Tatler pedigree. This happened after the pandemic had turned up the house lights on a sector riven by casualised insecurity at the bottom and globe-trotting excess at the top, and at a moment when British dance music was reflecting on its roots in black, queer, and poor communities.
Not that this slowed brand Fred. His 2023 Glastonbury set became one of that year’s most-talked about performances. Not because of a standout singalong track, or one of the festival’s many political homilies, but because – as the sun descended behind a ram-packed Other Stage in front of a visibly grateful and awed performer – he had created a moment.
Fred Again, explained Gibson’s label boss at Atlantic last year, “has built an incredible relationship with his fanbase through exciting, unexpected moments,” describing his team as “obsessed with having moments that create vitality and bring more people into his orbit”. When Gibson announced his new album Ten Days, he explained in an Instagram post which, in typical Fred Again style, could be read as both a personal post and a press statement, “There’s been a lot of big mad crazy moments in the last year, but basically all of these are about really very small quiet intimate moments.” The moments maketh the man, all delivered in a register that is insistently humble, compulsively informal and, presumably, a little dumber than a Marlborough education should provide.
The first sounds that you hear on Ten Days is a short collage of found sounds: a field recording of friends boozily singing; a fragment of a spoken word piece; a birthday voice message addressed to Fred (presumably from his 30th birthday). This introduces “Adore U”, last year’s single with the Nigerian-British artist Obongjayar and one of Gibson’s prettiest cuts. The vocal sample – Obongjayar’s distinctive near-falsetto at its most velvety – is buffeted by warm synth pads introducing a straightforward house beat. Its mood – romantic, optimistic – is a red herring for an album that is downcast and introspective.
When this mood is mastered, it can be effective. Take “Just Stand There”, a track scaffolded around an original spoken word piece by the Northern Irish singer-songwriter Soak. Her plain-speaking Derry brogue delivers a snapshot of a moment in love, a one-bedroom apartment that now “feels like a coliseum”. Vivid and specific, the piece is as close as the album gets to grit. But as with much of Fred Again’s output, the emotional cues of its producer are blunt and obvious. Its range is like one of those plastic HappyOrNot customer service prompts with smiley faces – are you having a good, medium, or a bad time? Gibson’s serious-face piano or his more jubilant markers of release will be sure to let you know.
With the exception of “Glow”, a workout of stadium house pyrotechnics produced in collaboration with veterans Skrillex and Four Tet, as well as the 26 year old Duskus, Ten Days fixes itself within the sonic template laid down by his Actual Life albums and gently deviated on by last year’s iffy collaboration with Brian Eno, Secret Life. Like Ed Sheeran, who Gibson has produced and written for, Fred Again’s everybro persona is stubbornly resistant to the ideology of eras, in which pop stars reboot their identities and sound with each new instalment; it shirks from risk.
On the face of it, the riskiest idea on Ten Days is “Where Will I Be”. It’s an outlier in that it is a reworking of Emmylou Harris’s 1995 country song of the same name. This is the year of the country-pop crossover, led by Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter, which was a smart and ambitious landgrab of black America’s foundational role in country music’s genesis, a surprisingly experimental mainstream exercise in counter-history. But here, Harris’s sampled vocal fights for oxygen against wafts of sonic mulch, as Gibson simply mines the track for a simplified catharsis that dims rather than enhances the song’s power. Watch out Nashville, a social media moment might be coming your way.
In a perceptive article for the Face, Clive Martin posited Fred Again as part of a lineage of musical anomalies whose era-specific success – artists such as Phil Collins, Moby, Mötley Crüe, or Korn – could at least reveal important truths about the specific time they were performing in. Gibson does. When Tim Walz was announced as the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, it was with an uplifting social media video purporting to capture the moment that Kamala Harris phoned the Minnesota governor to offer him the job. Increasingly, we are childishly invited to share in intimate experiences – repackaged as viral moments – of people who are elected legislators on their ascents to power. Fred Again’s success is to speak the language of broad-brush digital intimacy fluently.
More than this, the Fred Again story sounds bleak noises about who has had the time and freedom to make creative experiments over the last 14 years. As Britain’s culture industries grow more unequal, and as the music of Fred Gibson insists evermore firmly on a collective experience, his appeal brings to mind an aristocratic slogan from early in the last decade: we’re all in this together. Or at least for a moment.
Fred Again’s “Ten Days” is out now on Atlantic
[See also: The Sabrina Carpenter effect]
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This article appears in the 11 Sep 2024 issue of the New Statesman, The Iron Chancellor’s gamble