On The Road With Lakeway

They say it’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey. They also say a journey is measured in friends, not miles.

And sometimes, just occasionally, they say that when a label owner tries to film an interview with his artist for a cool ‘on road’ style video while driving to gig, but the sound quality is too rubbish for any of that caper, and it’s not the best interview because you’re travelling on busy A-road on the picturesque UK south coast on the first sunny Sunday of 2025 so conditions are a little stressy and fellow road users are far from blessy… Then you should write a story about it. Maybe even send it to your old friends at UKF.

Okay, only I said that last one. And I write it not from the perspective of a music journalist, but in the capacity as both a DJ’s driver (the full round trip involved over 11 hours and 30 minutes of drive time) and (more importantly) a label owner who has worked hard with an artist to help him unleash what I feel to be a genuinely exciting and inspiring debut album into the universe.

The label is 1 More Thing, a brand I stepped down from this site as editor to set up. The artist is Lakeway (Liam Ralph), a young talent who was making unique waves with a very distinct fusion of instrumental grime and drum & bass.

I first interviewed Lakeway on this site back in 2017. We stuck a chord with each other at the time with our mutual appreciation of wave music, our love for The Simpsons and our shared experiences battling very noisy minds. During the interview he told me how he’d had to quit uni as his mental health was so acute.

“I got so self-conscious and socially awkward, I would hold my breath whenever I walked past anyone,” he recalls about that particularly treacherous time in his life as we weave through a little congestion coming off the main motorway and onto a long winding A-road that stretches the English south coast. His descriptions hit my heart hard. Just like when we did our first interview over eight years ago, I wanted to give him a hug.

“I fixed that by spending more time in London,” he lets off one of his trademark chuckles. “You can’t do that on the Circle line at peak time. It’s impossible! So I got on with it. It’s not the healthiest way but… dive in, right? Fuck it.” 

Highs & Lows

Diving out of uni was the best thing Liam could do. As he worked on himself and his recovery, his music began to pick up the attention of Med School, Hospital Records’ once super cool off-shoot testing ground where many artists like Bop, Keeno, Whiney and Etherwood would flourish and start their careers.

“I’d already been talking to London Elektricity about signing to Med School before I left uni,” Liam explains. “But I knew it wasn’t right. It was all way too much pressure and I was only 18. I’m actually quite proud of how mature that decision was, looking back.”

Eventually though, he did sign with Med School and started to sow the seeds for his debut album which is finally ready for release seven years later. Entitled ‘I’ve Missed The Sun’, it’s an overwhelmingly thicc UK bass odyssey that oozes out of its neon trackies in every direction worth shaking a shell toe at. Grime, trance, house, downbeat, jungle, breaks, hardcore, dubstep, rave. Often a few in one tune.

But as wildly wide-armed as it sounds on paper, sonically it’s very much an album’s album. I’ve Missed The Sun is a powerful trip that guides you from high to low and back again with such consistency and smoothness you never feel like you’re being bombarded by too many different sounds and styles and ideas.

In true album tradition it’s also every bit the personal debut as it reflects Liam’s character and personality; Energetic, unpredictable, prone to misdirection, high levels of esoteric magic, a little tense in places and unapologetically  emotional. It’s timeless, too, like all the most enduring albums… While the album’s creation began seven years ago, it feels like the perfect antidote to the turbulent times in which we currently find ourselves.

In reality, it’s been completed since 2022. So why the wait from then until now?

“That’s the million dollar question,” laughs Liam as we drive towards our destination: Butlins Holiday park for the final leg of Hospital Records first ever UK weekender. “I’m not really sure where to start…”

Development Hell

It’s fair to say that during this whole process Liam has endured more than your standard amount of life curve-balls… Label closures, unexplained brain seizures, a cacophony of medical mistreatments and misdiagnoses, severe mental health challenges and of course the universally shared lockdown period five years ago have all had an impact on the release and its delay.

Med School’s closure in 2019 was the first monumental shift. A sudden decision that came with no announcement (even for the artists) this was a brutal twist at the time. “When I told my parents the news it was like sitting them down and saying I’ve got some bad news. The cats dead!” he laughs again but the smile fades quite quickly. “It really was like announcing a death. It felt like that.”

As time has gone by things have settled on this front. While the sudden closure of the label was a very harsh wake-up call to the realities of the music industry, Liam’s relationship with the brand is still on good terms and he can occasionally be spotted on the line-ups for their bigger events and festivals. Such is the case with our mission today.

With the beauty of hindsight, like his decision to leave uni, Med School’s closure came with a silver lining.

“The creative benefit was that I wasn’t thinking, ‘What’s going to go down on the weekend?’,” explains Liam who was touring every weekend while he was signed to Med School. Like so many producers whose main income comes from club shows, his sound was very influenced from his weekend activities. “With fewer bookings, I was able to write what I wanted to hear. I couldn’t be in that headspace when I was doing lots of shows.”

This was a huge turning point for the sound and focus of I’ve Missed The Sun. Working closely with Diffrent (the currently snoozed imprint run by Planet Wax co-founder Dexta) Liam re-imagined his album and reworked the whole thing into what you hear today; an LP that gradually unfolds with a sense of grandness and drama that can you imagine on any dancefloor around the world but carries a musicality and sense of imagination that transcends any rave experience. It’s a fusion that – to my ears at least – touches on reference points of Justice, Andrew Weatherall or dBridge.

It’s a sound that could only come from time away from the rawdog life of a gigging DJ, and it was also heavily compounded by a phase of listening to early rave and electronica during the early chapters of the 2020 lockdown. “It was a strong phase,” he grins, this time legitimately. “A Guy Called Gerald, Orbital. Those kinda ones. It created a very strong vision in my mind.”

Released exactly five years after that strange chapter in our lives began on March 20 this year (also on the first day of spring if you’re into equinoxes and that) you can feel that energy and the strong sense of poignancy. Those unseasonably hot days that marked the first part of lockdown are the sun that inspired the title. “I did miss the sun,” he insists. “Okay so I’m an only child stoner nerd so lockdown wasn’t so different to any other time but I did miss that heatwave.”

As we continue to negate millions of roadworks, endless potholes and countless snooty 4×4 drivers, our conversation continually flips between deadpan admissions and deadly serious confessions. It’s an enduring characteristic of Liam as he is able to jump from an incredibly serious topic to something jocular and silly in seconds. Another confession during the journey was how he deleted all the project files during the process of the album. In non-producer terms this means that the version you hear today can never be reworked or reimagined without being entirely reverse engineered and rebuilt from scratch.

“I deleted it in frustration,” admits Liam who had become obsessed with the album having a seamless production finish that runs throughout the entire journey. Mixdown after mixdown and many extra cost re-mastering his new versions drove Liam to the point of distraction “Frustration at myself! It’s like ‘No, fuck you brain, you’ve been thinking thoughts your whole life and look where it’s got us! Stop. Stop thinking now.”

As all over-thinkers know, there is no ‘off’ button. But the delete button prevented any further over-thinking or over-working the project and the album you hear today is the album he was left with in 2022 thinking it would be due for release on Diffrent in the near future. A very sudden and unexplained neurological issue also put the kybosh on any further developments for several years as around this point Liam also began to experience unexplained seizures.

“A random brain hemorrhage builds character apparently,” he laughs.

Sick Music

In case the label closure and lack of gigs and sudden lack of any type of social life wasn’t quite enough of an impact, Liam’s health then became a priority that meant he had to shelve music almost entirely as he underwent myriad tests and appointments with surgeries and consultants.

“I’m always going to write music. I’m too emotionally driven to not write music,” he explains. “But I don’t know what I wrote during that time. It’s just brain fog. A random jumble of memories. Most the stuff wasn’t worth remembering…”

Except the really scary bits… Like the seizures themselves and the catastrophic fuckries from certain establishments and professionals. At one point he was prescribed such levels of one particular chemical he later learnt he’d been poisoned. At another point he was about to undergo a procedure before understanding he was at risk of having a stroke (he walked out of the hospital on that occasion). Over our epic drive he shares many details and tales of hospital woes but it’s best summarized when I asked him if he had a bucket list. Had things got so bad during this phase of his life that he was no longer obsessing with any type of album ambition and was just hoping to do a few nice things during his final days?

“No!” he laughs. “It’s hard to care in that type of way. I don’t think the brain is great at acknowledging its own lack of existence anyway but if you’ve got a bucket list then you’ve got pressure and stress. For me I decided it was just better to bumble around, be happy go lucky and hope my brain doesn’t explode. It’s still ongoing now. No one knows what caused the seizures and I’m still on meds to this day. For me it’s the confidence thing. You feel like you’re making progress but then you have a seizure and it’s back to zero again.”

Stamina Crew

Highlighting an invisible challenge that many people who have neurological disorders face daily, Liam has been living with that feeling ever since and explains how it can play hell with your mental health and confidence; especially when it comes to aspects such as driving; he has to be seizure free for a number of years before he can re-apply, hence me being his driver for this gig.

Gradually though, over the course of three years, he’s emerged through a haze of meds and complications and the Lakeway I’d been a fan of for years prior has come back into view. Releases on Diffrent, Unchained Asia and Super Sonic Booty Bangers all started to drop over the last two years, setting the scene for the album that’s been sitting in its own time capsule, waiting patiently to be released. Originally signed to Diffrent, a label that has played a huge role in the breakbeat underground and indeed in Liam’s career, I’ve Missed The Sun was handed over to 1 More Thing as I could give the album the energy it deserves and Diffrent is currently on standby mode as the owner Dexta builds up a community around his and Sicknote’s thriving independent record store in South London Planet Wax.

“It’s funny, I can listen to it now and really enjoy it,” he smiles with complete transparency. This isn’t a nervous laugh or his way of making light of something dark. He means it. “I had a moment where I was a little tipsy and just dancing around my room to it at 2am without a care in the world. I genuinely enjoyed it.”

To have that type of relationship with your own body of work is a rarity. In all my years of interviewing artists (who are highly self critical at the best of times), I’ve found most have a love/hate relationship with most of their output. Especially debut albums. And very few would be able to have that type of joyous experience from their own output. But if anyone should be award this experience, it’s Liam. The journey has been so long and eventful that it’s almost like he’s listening to someone else…. Which is fitting really as everything else about the album is different to how he’d first imagined when he started to write it in 2018, too. The label, the context, the inspiration and the word in which we live have all changed drastically. Especially the politics. Yet the album sounds every bit as relevant and attuned to 2025 as if he wrote it under the current excruciating shadow of populism, fascism, neoliberalism and woeful late-stage capitalism

“What would the album sound like if I was writing it now? Some type of dystopian nightmare I suspect!” he laughs. “I’m glad I don’t have to imagine that. I’m just happy that it’s finally coming out and I can move on.” 

And with that we arrive at our destination and we’re reminded that despite the many changes in our lives, the world and the scene, one thing that hasn’t changed is the unreliability of Sunday ravers at the arse-end of three day knees up in a UK holiday park. And after all those hours of driving from my own house in Wales to Lakeway’s house in Devon to the show in Sussex, the set is a classic anticlimax scenario as his dancefloor comprises a small collection of fellow DJ friends, a really enthusiastic sound tech, an enthusiastic driver/label owner/ journalist (me) and a few curious passers by who are on their way to the more mainstream D&B attractions of the night; on the left is the Valve warming up with Lemon D, on the right is Shogun Audio preparing the ravers for a full night’s showcase with Deadline and Viridity while the main room behind us has some of the biggest names in dnb in just a few hours including Bou and Camo & Krooked.

It’s a classic schedule clash that all DJs face regularly and have done since the dawn of rave. Ho

Liam seems completely ambivalent about it. If anything, he’s quite happy about the lack of pressure he’s faced with. “It’s just like being paid to have a practice isn’t it?” he laughs before dropping into a series of wonky 140 cuts. Holding a massive ‘banger’ sign above my head to re-balance the flagging energy of the straggling weekend ravers, I nod in agreement, happy not be driving for an hour or two but knowing we’ve got another six hours ahead of us to get home. This time I won’t be trying to interview him in the process.

They were right. It’s definitely not about the destination. It’s about how we got here. And where we go next. Our journey and friendship continues… 

Listen To I’ve Missed The Sun