What's in a Name? We Talk Identity with Friend Within

Most of us wander through life with the name we've been given, accepting it as a semiotic essential, an indelibly important part of how we perceive ourselves and how others perceive us. A name is a name, something we can't really change unless we can be bothered with deed polls and petitions and all that wholly unnecessary jazz. Some strange souls go through this and transition from being Eddy Roberts to Blake von Kane, from Edwina Rawlinson to Bunny Laroux or whatever.

Lee Mortimer has a perfectly nice, normal name, a name that sounds solid, dependable, sturdy. Lee Mortimer is a good name. Lee Mortimer is the name Lee Mortimer used when he was making fizzily effective, fidgety electrohouse weapons like "Putto" and "It's Going Down" – tracks that define a moment in time in sound.

Lee Mortimer introduces himself to me when I meet him as Lee Mortimer. Lee Mortimer, artistically speaking, is no more. Lee Mortimer is Friend Within. "I was making electrohouse stuff and it wasn't going down as well as it had been. You're not getting gigs and you want to blame your agent for it. If that's going nowhere you want to do something else. I heard Shadow Child's "String Thing" and it was like rediscovering what it was I'd liked all along. So I started experimenting with a few different bits and the tracks were coming quite quickly. I made a new email address and sent a few of those new tracks to Claude VonStroke at Dirtybird, and Jamie who runs Hypercolour, both of whom I know, didn't say it was me, and luckily they liked them and signed them up." That was the beginning of Friend Within.

A new name is a chance for reinvention, an opportunity to shed the associations of identity. For Mortimer, sorry, for Friend Within, this is more than just a different name to scrawl on check-out sheets in bleary-eyed hotel lobbies. "I feel different. There was a point where I thought Friend Within was a sound and what I wanted to do now," he tells us. "Originally I wanted to make Friend Within stuff and what I normally did but I sat down one day and tried to make electro track and within five minutes I stopped. It felt wrong working in 129, 130BPM. I'm Friend Within now."

As Friend Within, Mortimer's crafting bouncy house hits that simmer with self- confidence - he's not short of them. "Around 50 or 60% of my DJ sets are my own material. I've always stuck to playing what I want to play. If I'm booked to play somewhere, the promoter knows what I play, the audience know what I play. I've been booked to play the music I like." Let's be honest here, if you had weapons like "The Renegade" and "The Game" in your arsenal you'd be doing the same thing.

Tunes like that have seen Mortimer join the likes of Eats Everything, Shadow Child and pop-house behemoths Disclosure at the vanguard of UK producers killing clubs on a global scale. He isn't surprised that the world's eyes are firmly on our little island. "I think we've always been massive. There's always been great talent, great music. That catches on." Attention, he posits, should be used as a driving force for creativity, noting that, "when more people are looking at you, you have to get better." Mortimer doesn't appear fazed by that increase in attention and, invariably, opinion. "Largely, I'm making stuff for myself. So I don't want to carry on making the same stuff. I'm as excited by it as someone on the dancefloor hopefully is." Given the positive reactions he garnered during the course of his first US tour, that excitement is shared. "I think the world is catching up with UK music. So that's what I play."

Mortimer's confidence in his own abilities shouldn't be misread for artistic arrogance, nor should his desire to play his own tracks out be coded as a fuck- you to his peers. "You've got to stick at things. That's what I think I'm good at. Working hard. I might not be some kind of musical genius but I know how to work hard. I've always been a modest person. I'll happily take compliments, which is something you need to be able to, but there's no point being big headed. Its not going to last forever."

We end with the most obvious question of all. Why 'Friend Within'? "I wanted a bit of intrigue. Friend Within doesn't scream house DJ. I liked that. That could be anything."

Friend Within's The Square/The Talk Ft Camden Cox is out now on He Loves You. He'll be playing at Croatia Rocks 19th - 23rd July in Pag, Croatia with Clean Bandit, Rudimental, The Vaccines, Fatboy Slim and many more. Tickets start at £119 and can be found at www.croatiarocks.com

Follow Friend Within on Facebook // SoundCloud // Twitter