Any DJ worth their Ableton has one major pet peeve: request culture. “I once had to play the original version of Shah Rukh Khan’s ‘Badshah’ at a club at the Burj Khalifa because these guys were popping two bottles of champagne,” recalls Dubai-based Jeftin James, aka DJ Jeff, his upper lip curling with distaste. He knows of DJs being asked to play the same song 10 times in a single night; he’s been to brunches where they’re still playing that tired old greatest-2010s-hits-of-Bollywood track list.
It wasn’t always like this. He has seen a time in his 17 years of DJing when “80 per cent of the people would come to listen to the music”. But then, as club culture itself witnessed a slump around the globe, “it became all about the money” for Dubai’s promoters and nightclub owners too. Which, of course, meant the death of anything remotely original or experimental. “As an artist, you put in the work and time into your craft,” he says. “To then be used like a jukebox is a joke.”
With the COVID-19 pandemic came curfews, and his moment of reckoning. “I decided I wouldn’t step into a nightclub until I could put out what I wanted to,” he shares. And what DJ Jeff wanted to plug into was the amorphous soundscape of his life—a mash of all the diverse musical influences, from vintage Bollywood to contemporary hip-hop, the music of his homeland Kerala as well as emerging Indian indie, fused with R&B and Arabic rhythms that a diaspora kid like him growing up in the UAE and on the internet had access to in the early millennium. In short, he wanted the world to hear the sound of the third culture.
A fateful meeting with Aaron Ferns, a basketball player who had co-founded another culture-building property called Karak Nights during the pandemic, finally led to the birth of Stick No Bills in 2023. Soon, DJ Jeff had scouted another prominent and similarly disillusioned Dubai DJ, Gaurav Thakur aka GT, who “taught himself the art of turntablism and is now a brilliant scratch DJ”; the Philippines-origin emcee John Adriane aka BossJBeats; and the “accounts man and anchor” Vinay Premachandran to complete their “little collective”.
The name? A doff of the hat to those warning signs you might still spot scrawled on the outer walls of Indian homes, and a declaration: “Don’t label us.” Their goal? To swill in some South Asian representation in the melting pot that is Dubai’s emerging cultural landscape; to build a bridge between the Indian and Middle Eastern creators; and even define the sound of Dubai, in the way Dialled In has in London, for instance. In short, to create a community.
Since their debut two years ago with an invite-only night at the restaurant Tandoor Tina, Stick No Bills has become a mainstay of Dubai nightlife—their 9-to-3 club sets and pop-ups incorporate everything from Lifafa to Fuego to Diljit Dosanjh and Karan Aujla to ‘Mehndi Laga Ke Rakhna’ with a funk rhythm or an Amitabh Bachchan track with an Arabic drumbeat, occasionally with Indian artists like Lush Lata and Spin Doctor as guest DJs.
