Jane Fitz lives in what she calls a "proper old lady house" in "one of those parts of London that no one really knows." I interviewed her there just days after she moved in, so I was surprised to find what looked like a fully formed family home, with books on the shelves, framed pictures on the walls and not a moving box in sight. "We're hardcore," she said by way of explanation. "I don't know if you've met my missus but she's very, you know, 'We need to get everything done now.' But really, we're just both very busy so we knew we had to get it done straight away."

Records, of course, were a big part of the move. Fitz isn't sure how many she has—somewhere in the ballpark of 8,000—but by the time I got there they were all unpacked and filed away in the shed out back, handsomely lining one side of the room. Tucked away nearby were old mix CDs and issues of DJ Mag and Jockey Slut, which Fitz says she can't get rid of, partly for sentimental reasons but also because she still gets tips from the reviews.

Everything in this room spoke to a moment in the last 30 years of Fitz's life, a period over which she's carved out a living, in one way or another, through music and records. She's lived in London, Hong Kong and, briefly, Serbia, has worked as a music journalist, a promoter and what she calls a "jobbing DJ"—the anonymous person in the corner of the room playing records for little or no money. These days she's a different kind of DJ: someone whose extraordinary history with music, embodied in a vast collection and a mixing style honed over many years, creates a transportive dance floor experience for countless strangers and admirers around the world.

Most of Fitz's fans know her for a deep and cosmic sound defined by excellent track selections, but her style is always changing. Since she was a teenager, she's loved and played everything from soul to trip-hop to techno to ambient, and she thinks of her sound today as a culmination of her many influences over the years. It's also the result of the personal experiences she's had, from Body & Soul parties in New York to psytrance raves in Jakarta to festivals like rural in Japan and Freerotation in Wales, both of which are proud to have her as a regular. Sitting beneath the skylights in her kitchen, drinking tea and eating biscuits, she walked me through her life playing records in what amounted to a three-hour conversation on her favorite subject: the art of DJing.

How many records do you think you have?

I don't know, I've tried to work it out. I've probably got about 6,500 in there, but I know I probably have about 8,500 total. I try to be brutal, but the problem is I just like so many different kinds of music.

When I was younger, I was buying records off Juno every week without fail. Every week, every week, every week, probably £60 or £70. I just don't have the time to listen now. Then I'd be able to listen every week. And there'd be less records coming out. This is like, late '90s, early 2000s, back when Juno started, and it was quite a small thing back then. Time has changed, constraints have changed, I don't have the day job anymore that I used to have where I could listen to records all the time at work.

When I was working in editing I was editing content all the time, I wasn't writing, I was commissioning and editing, freelance sub-editing. You don't need to talk to anybody, I was completely in my own world looking for mistakes in print. I'd have headphones on the entire time, and I would have all the new releases running all the time. And if I heard one I liked I'd add it to my wishlist. And after that I'd go to a quiet place and go through the wishlist and do my shopping. I used to be able to do that all day long, every day, all week, so it made record buying super easy online.

Now I don't have a situation where I'm looking at a computer screen eight hours a day, and I don't have the time to make myself do that now. So yesterday I caught up with all my notifications and there were like 600 or something, I was like "Oh... god!"

Those notifications...

Labels, producers, anything I want to keep up with. They were building up for over two months, I'd say. And every time I go through them I say, "I need to do this every week, I need to do this every week." And I never do [laughs]. But I try and keep up as much as I can. Because I love finding new records, I just love it. A lot of people love digging in old records, which I also love doing, but I'm not obsessed with the past, I'm obsessed with new stuff. And I know I've already got plenty of old records.

I was listening to your RA podcast recently, and I was struck by the first track. I guess because there's no tracklist, and because it's you, I figured it was some deep cut of progressive house or something, but the last time I listened to the mix, Mixcloud automatically ID'd it, and it was actually a fairly recent Ostgut Ton track that I already had. Point being: digging is great, but it's crazy how much good stuff is hiding in plain sight.

Definitely, definitely. That's always been the thing. There's new stuff out there, and you don't know what it is, and we don't know what it is, and maybe the person who made it doesn't even know how good it is. I used to always listen to the broken beat section on Juno, or another section on there, where you'd very, very occasionally find, on the B-side of some record, an amazing, deep, dubby house record, or some weird percussion thing. And if you were just listening to the house or just listening to the techno you would have never have found it. So I've always been a strong proponent of listening to absolutely everything. Because those are the things that lift your sets, those secrets. I'm not afraid to look in weird places. Except maybe the scouse house section.

It seems like Juno is pretty essential for you.

I have a good relationship with Juno. I started buying records from them when I lived in Hong Kong. I think they launched in '96 as the Dance Music Resource Pages. And it was just a list of all the new records coming out, they weren't even a store. Juno happened to be the website address, I guess just because it was small. They rebranded and became Juno, but when it started it was just lists, no links. So then you'd get lists, and you would get a link to a soundbite. But when I started there were no soundbites. And at this point I was probably getting my records from HMV in Hong Kong, which was pretty good actually. But that was when I very, very first started mixing house out. Before that I'd only been playing soul, rare groove, not mixing at all.

That was my eager 25-year-old, 26-year-old self. I'd get all the British magazines, read all the reviews in there. I didn't have a very deep knowledge of house, though I'd known about it since it first came out. So maybe ten, 12 years earlier, when I was 14 or 15 and house was in the charts, I'd listen to it then, but that period in between, the early '90s, because of rave—I hated rave and hardcore so much, all those sped-up vocals—I never got into it, I missed a lot of things I would buy now because of rave. Rave just shut it down for me and I went into soul and trip-hop and all that vibe.

The thing that got me out of that was trance, because my friends ran a trance label, Platipus. And through them I started going to parties. That was in '95, '96 in London. They got me into going out more, got me into 4/4 again. After Portishead, everything was getting blurry and muddy and I was looking for something else. So, I'd be going to parties Platipus were involved with, warehouse parties, psytrance parties, whatever. And that music got me back into it.

By the time I got to Hong Kong, I'd lived in Singapore for a bit and fallen in with a crew there who had a record shop and were throwing amazing psytrance parties with really, really good DJs. After about maybe two or three years of that, I was like, OK, I like this music but it's not really doing anything else for me. So I started getting into house. And Hong Kong was where I started playing house.

While I was in Hong Kong, I had to have my wisdom teeth taken out, so I'd flown back to the UK, and since I was back in Europe I thought, "Fuck it, I wanna go to America, I've never been, I'm gonna go to New York." For some reason I booked a two-week holiday in New York. Which is... expensive! Not anywhere near what it is now, but yeah. It was early '98. I went into Dance Tracks, bought loads of things in there. Went to one of the early Body & Soul parties, heard all this new music—a lot of things I knew from the soul scene with a lot of things I hadn't heard. So I had all this new music that I'd learned about through these experiences, but when I got to Hong Kong it was like, "Where do I hear this now?" So I was reading magazines, looking at these lists, the Dance Music Resource Pages, and that's how I built my knowledge.

I taught myself to mix in Hong Kong. I'd kind of worked out in my head what you need to do, so by the time I had two decks in front of me I mixed straight away, it was never really an issue. I never talked to anyone about it, I just kind of worked it out. I was a bit wonky when I first started, but I just practiced, practiced, practiced. I couldn't get the records, though. My flatmate was telling me, "You need to go on this website." That's how I started buying on Juno.

At that point nobody knew what Juno was. I became one of their most dedicated customers. It wasn't until 2003 or 2004 that it became this thing. So, I got into this habit of buying records online. And in a way, even though I've always liked going into record shops, I liked how online there's no noise in the background, nobody forcing you to buy a pile of records. Some people like that, when someone says, "Oh you must listen to these," but I feel guilty if I don't buy one. I loved the independence that Juno gave me. Buying online was for me the perfect way to buy records, and I continue to use Juno for that reason.

From 2004 to 2005, I worked at Record And Tape Exchange, the Music & Video Exchange. I just bought so much music, again just filling in gaps, and it was cheap, no one gave a shit about house in 2004, 2005, it was so out of fashion. You could buy a Prescription record for four quid. No one gave a shit. Working with people who had a lot of knowledge there, talking to customers, even the boring stuff like reducing prices on records, I was just learning so much. So those periods for me were really important for gathering knowledge—that period in Hong Kong, and working at that shop back in London. Although, working in that record shop also showed me that I didn't want to do this for the rest of my life.

Working in a record shop?

Right [laughs]. Because there's proper lifers in there. Who I like! Some of them are my friends. But institutionalized lifers. And so competitive. That's the worst part of the music industry: competitive men, moaning into cups of tea about a crease in a record.

What was your entry into DJing like?

Playing at friends' parties as a kid. Literally a kid, like 13 or whatever. Because I had the records. I was a collector from so young, from ten or so.

I was bullied as a kid, really pretty horrifically, from various stages. Not when I was very small but when I got to senior school. I didn't like people there, didn't fit in. Music was my thing I'd had since a kid that I loved, it was my best mate, it wasn't going to let me down. I wanted to be sociable and make friends, but I just looked at people and thought, "You're an idiot!" I really found it hard. So my only way to be in a social situation, at 13, 14, that horrible time, was to be the person playing the records. I could go to a party, not talk to anyone, but be around people. And also it gave me a bit of confidence, because I had a purpose in this place, I didn't need to worry if someone was going to ask me to dance or not, because I was playing records, it didn't matter.

So that's how I started. I guess that carried on through my teenage years, being a student, playing at mates' parties. But it was just a thing I did because I had the records. I was always making tapes, so many tapes for friends, I'd always make them tapes. It was all about the records you had, and the track selection, and how you put them together. When I was a student and going to Dingwalls and stuff like that, those kind of parties, Bass Clef, those DJs weren't really mixing, it was all fade in, fade out. Gilles Peterson, it was a joke that he couldn't mix, but it didn't matter because he had the tunes.

I can remember a couple things that really got me aware of how you mix. In my early 20s, I had my first job, working for an industry magazine. Like Billboard but for Asia. I went to the MIDEM conference in France, they had lots of showcases. I was there with like, suits. There wasn't anybody that young there. And I went into the Palais Des Festival, and they had Jeff Mills doing a showcase. Weird, right? This big Cannes ballroom with Jeff Mills thumpin' it out. I didn't know anything about him, I was like, "What the fuck is this?" It really made an impression on me, it was amazing. It was the first time I was aware of a DJ doing work.

Through my trancey stage I was friends with DJs who didn't come through the soul path I'd come through, so they were mixing. I remember at a house party somebody being totally off their face, and just pulling off these killer mixes one after the other. I was like, "How the fuck are you doing that? How are you that wasted and you're still mixing?" I found that even more fascinating. And I remember going to see Sasha and Digweed on the Northern Exposure tour, and I couldn't figure out where one record started and the other finished, because they were so into that layering thing. And that really blew my mind, so I knew I had to figure out how that worked.

How did you figure it out?

It was weird, I never watched people DJing, if you know what I mean, I didn't watch their hands or try to see what they were actually doing, it was always listening. I was more interested in what they were doing with their records, how they were using them. I thought of it as, "What can you build with records? How can you create a particular vibe with, say, a chord change? How can you mix together two breaks? How do you make an outro and an intro sound like a different record?" It was those kind of things, it was always to do with, what am I listening to? I never sat around and thought about it, it was more of an absorption process.

When I was living in Asia, I went to a party run by this crew I knew from Singapore. They had some friends in Jakarta, we went to a party there. It was all psytrance, but hearing those DJs, again, I still think about that. I just remember going, "What are you actually doing with those records? I can't understand what you're doing."

Even going to see people like Derrick Carter, I remember in the '90s he always used to blow my mind, because he had a way of having records going where you'd go, "How many is he playing? Has he got a drum machine back there?" I think I've always been really attracted to that, where you don't notice the change till it's happened. Or it's an obvious mix, but you're still thinking, "How is this working?"

When you're DJing, do you try to create that feeling?

You know what? In absolute truth, a lot of the time I'm completely winging it, I really have no clue what I'm doing. I don't drive, but it's like that thing with driving: when you get in a car, you don't think about looking in your mirror, that's just shit that you do. Same with DJing. Once you know what you're doing, you just do it. Sometimes I'll be having a mix, and I'll have the headphones off, just listening to the booth monitors, and I'll be like, "Fuckin' hell, I can't believe it! I can't believe this is working!" And I'll be buzzing just as much as everyone else. But I can never remember exactly how it worked, I can never repeat it.

I never set out trying to pull off a huge, long mix, but it will happen, because I just like the possibilities of where that kind of mix can go. And I also think, well, I don't play an instrument, I might as well do something here that represents my personality, you know? In addition to picking the records, in addition to putting them in this order, there's got to be something else.

Also this is my opportunity to hear those records out, as much as anyone else. A lot of the time when I'm DJing, as conscious as I am of everyone else who's there, I've also kind of forgotten about them, and I want to hear these records. I never mix at home, I just have one turntable here for listening, so when I'm out I'm mixing them for the first time, and it feels fresh. I'm always like, "Wow, those two went together really well!" I know some DJs have pairs of records they always mix together, but I couldn't do that. I love the thrill of the possibility. And I like to create slightly stressful situations for myself, because that's where the fireworks happen. If you can surprise yourself that's such a buzz.

Do you ever regret putting yourself in that stressful situation?

Maybe for ten seconds? There will be certain times where I'm frantically going through my records, you know, "Oh god what am I going to play?!" Then you think, "Jane, you spent five hours packing this record bag, you really put a lot of time and effort into this, trust your earlier judgment." So yeah, I'll do the work ahead of time, but then leave a lot of space for the moment, the mood, whatever. And then it's a buzz when you get it right.

Even if you're winging it, you're also very prepared.

The thing with winging it, there's two things you gotta be aware of. Number one is to really know your source material, then you can go off in any direction you want. And number two, you need to be super alert. You can't wing it if you're not taking notice of what's going on in the room, or if you keep flicking past the right record. The only way to wing it is to be awake and concentrating, otherwise you miss stuff.

And I think you should be willing to fail, that's a good mindset. You might think, "Well, I could really fuck this up in front of a lot of people." As soon as that's not an issue for you, you'll be fine. You've accepted the worst thing that could happen, and it isn't that bad. All you have to do is make people dance, and people would dance to a drum banging, so you've got infinite possibilities there. If I turned up at a gig and played Scottish piper music, OK, that might be a problem. But the odd fucked up mix? Or one thing I've done many times is play the wrong track off a record, but I'll still see it through, I won't cut it out early or whatever. Fuck it, see what happens.

What was it like when you changed from being the person playing records to being Jane Fitz? In the sense that people come to see you and are curious what you're going to play.

Kinda weird, I gotta be honest. I was always one of the people at the party who knew a lot of people. I was social, I was a journalist for a while, I was big on message boards, I put on parties, I always knew plenty of other people at clubs. So I didn't really notice it. It was other people noticing it for me, and as soon as that happened I was freaking out. Going to a festival and someone you don't know going up to you and saying hi, I was like, "W-w-w-whaaat the fuck?" A couple of years ago at Freerotation I became very, very aware that it wasn't just my mates coming up and talking to me anymore, it was total strangers. Which is fine because you're in small environment there, but inwardly I was freaking out.

The thing is, I said it earlier on, the reason I started DJing parties is because I didn't really like people that much. I knew that I had to be social, and it allowed me to be in a social situation without talking to people. So, even though I became super social over the years from going out, part of that version of me is still there, and I'm kind of going back to who I was back then, just the random person playing records. I love playing in the dark, in the corner, I hate playing on stage. Being a focus makes me feel weird. You don't sign up for that. At least I didn't.

What about in terms of DJing? If people walk into a club and there's an unknown DJ, that's different from people walking into a club where there's a DJ they know and expect something from.

Well, that part's kind of nice. It's like people have done their homework, they've invested in you and they want to stay for the whole set. And I'm aware that I play quite differently from one set to the next. I could play a few gigs with the same bag of records—I never do, but I could—and sound very different each time. So I know the people who come to see me won't always get the same sound.

I've got friends who think of me as Deep House Jane, and they say, "What's going on with you these days? Where's the old Jane?" Some friends have really said that to me, and it's kind of like, well, she was temporary! She was just a moment in time.

She was three Janes ago.

Yeah, three or four Janes ago. I think I just will always evolve with whatever's interesting to me. I remember playing a gig at the beginning of the year at Soup Kitchen in Manchester, and I definitely played completely different to how I'd been playing everywhere else, and I really enjoyed it but I was kind of shocked. It was less trancey, psychedelic deep vibe, and more... well, I don't know. But it didn't sound like me. And I thought that at the time, "This doesn't sound like me!" That was the first time I ever thought that. Other times I'll think, "This definitely sounds like me." But I'm also conscious that you can't get locked into that idea of what "me" sounds like.

Basically there's a thread connecting everything I've ever played, which is basically: you are listening to my taste. I'll only ever be me, and I've only ever been me in what I play. You are hearing what I hear, and why I chose those records and why I bought those records. It's definitely not a particular sound or style or way of playing, it's just, "Ah, now I hear what Jane looks for in a record when she buys it." And that's all I can think it is.

When you're doing something for so long, do you still find you're getting better? For instance, is there some part of DJing that you're much better at now than you were two or three years ago?

That's a good question. I think... probably not? For me, I can't put that positive spin on it, I'd actually put a negative spin on it in the sense that I still have the same anxieties about the same kind of things. Which is going into a room thinking, "Is this gonna work?" There's definitely a confidence thing, in that I still don't completely believe in myself, or believe in what I'm doing.

Sometimes I'll come away from a gig, and even though I liked it I'll think, "I could have pushed that a bit more, I could have been wackier, I could have taken them down another wormhole." I feel like there was an opportunity missed. I don't worry about it, but the end result is the feeling of a missed opportunity. And I'll be more pissed off about that than if something actually went wrong—if the decks were jumping, if the soundsystem was shit, because that's just expected, I go into gigs thinking that's gonna probably happen, so I'm just not bothered. And it's not my fault. But coming away from a gig and thinking, "Ugh, I wish I'd been just a bit more rude with my records. A little bit more brazen, a bit deeper, a bit weirder." I'll think, "That crowd were good, I could have tested them a bit more, given them a bit more crazy shit." That's the regret you feel DJing. But not about fucking up. Fuck ups don't bother me at all.

I think if any of my friends read that they'd be like, "Fuck off." They wouldn't believe that I have those kinds of anxieties.

It sounds like you're just worried about doing the best job you possibly can.

Well, put it this way: I love going out and dancing, right? I love being in a dark room, loud music, dancing. I loved it as a little kid before I could get into clubs, and I love it now. And actually I can't do that anymore, not as much anyway. I don't have time, and the last thing I want to do if I get a weekend off is to go out clubbing, partly because I don't want a late night when I've just had shitloads of late nights on the trot. So when I'm DJing, a lot of the time that's my night out. Even though I'm not partying in the crowd, if I'm really getting into it, I'm winging it, a mix is sounding amazing and I didn't expect it to do that, if I heard a record and it sounds way better out than when I played it at home, then that's my night out. So when I'm DJing a lot of the time I'm just creating a night out for myself. So yeah, I am socializing in a way with everybody but in a very independent way.

When I hear a record, I still get so excited by a particular sound. There will be a bit in a record, it could be a drum break or a synth sound or an arp, it could be space in the record, there will be that one bit of every record where I'm like, "Yesss!!!" And when you're having that moment, and you can see someone else having the exact same response to the same part of the record that you are... You're so excited! It's this confirmation that you are having a connection with people, and you can read their mind and they can read your mind... I don't know what it is, it's just a buzz. Having that instant connection about some weird bit in a record, that's the thing that drives everything, it's like, "Wow, you really heard what I heard, that's so nice, because I'm really excited by this, and it's so nice that somebody else is really excited by this as well." Then I feel like I've done my job. You hear what I hear.