Shaun Warner: From Djing in Local Galway Clubs to Topping Charts in the Middle East

A humid afternoon in the Westin Hotel. Galway lad Shaun Warner is flicking through an app called ‘Anghami’ – the Middle-Eastern equivalent of Spotify – to show me a bit of what he’s been up to these last few years. It explains a lot actually, because although his face isn’t a familiar one on the playlists of your average western streaming service, on Anghami, he has upwards of 500,000 people listening to his music. Over tea and biscuits in the Westin bar (and after having laughed at how woefully underdressed we both are for such a fine establishment), Shaun fills me in on how he became one of the biggest musicians in the Persian Gulf.

“I started off DJing in a bar in Galway at 16,” he tells me. “It was a place called Cuba. A few people were helping me out, and eventually I started playing at the GPO there. Then I got my own night, playing my own stuff. I worked my way up so that I could feel comfortable moving to Dublin.

“I moved to Dublin and I was working my balls off, doing my day job five days a week, and DJing six days a week. Then my day job asked me if I wanted a promotion. My boss literally said to me: ‘Either shit or get off the pot.’ So I said: ‘Thanks for everything, but I think I’ll get off the pot!’”

Shaun followed the path of most young people who leave Ireland: he went to Australia.

“I was broke for a while when I was out there,” he laughs, “but it’s always easy to fall back on DJing, so that kept me going. Then I ended up living with a talented music producer who taught me how to produce properly. I started finishing tracks, focusing on new types of music, and that led to me getting better gigs. Before long I started to get booked with major festivals and that was great, but I wanted a change. “I moved to UAE with my girlfriend, but I was back to square one. I would’ve had to start from scratch, play at the small clubs and play the same game as in Ireland and Australia, to work my way up. But by that stage I had a bit of an ego. I’d been doing well for myself in Australia: getting flown across the country, having people meet me off airplanes. Then I moved to UAE and there wasn’t the same sense of a buzz at the start.

“I realised I could either do that scene – three hours a night DJing, not enjoying myself – or I could go into the studio. I went into the studio. I gave up TV every night. Gave up everything. I spent every evening just working in the studio. Then I finished my first album and shopped it to some people in the industry. Inadvertently I got in front of a guy from Universal and gave him the album. I didn’t tell him it was me who’d made it. I just got him to listen to it. Then he was like, ‘This is amazing! Where the fuck did you get this?!’ So I said, ‘Listen… That’s me!’”

Shaun Warner & Friends ended up being one of the bestselling albums from an artist based in the Middle East and earned him minor celebrity status in the country. It meant that he could quietly leapfrog over having to do the DJing grind and stick solely to his live show, taking ownership over everything that he’d written and produced (while occasionally doing the odd remix for some of the top charting artists from Egypt to Syria). A few years on and his second album has just been released. It’s one that Shaun is more confident about.

“The first album came from a strange time,” he admits. “My life went so quickly from, you know, one day hanging out with Carl Cox and his mates after a show, thinking I was a legend… to being married, with a baby on the way, living in a strange country, all in a matter days really. With the second album, I wanted it to be representative of my life. . I found myself wanting to write about love, wanting to write these bangers that you’d play over and over on a long drive. I enjoyed doing this record a lot.”

Stay is out now on Universal.