Ben Nicky

Ben Nicky, real name Benjamin Nikki Reginald Wederell, is a British DJ and producer from Bristol, born 14 July 1989. He started DJing as a teenager in the mid-2000s and entered the release circuit in 2007, releasing his first trance track "Dirty Dancefloor" at twenty-one. A 2011 collaboration with Cass Fox, "The One", was highlighted by Mixmag as a memorable tune and earned support from Paul van Dyk, Tiësto and Armin van Buuren — the first generation of editorial backing that has anchored his career since. In 2013 he launched his own Head F**k label as a dedicated outlet for the mash-up series of the same name, taking the generic mash-up format and layering it with effects, samples and sound design — early Head F**k releases included reworks of Porter Robinson's "Language" and Tiësto and Eddie Bitar's "Lethal Industry" branded "Lethal Roller-coaster". The 2016 breakout was "Anywhere" featuring Chloe, which topped the Beatport trance chart and crossed ten million Spotify streams. In May 2019 he made his BBC Radio 1 Essential Mix debut with a two-hour session, and that same year he was nominated for a DJ Award in the Trance category. His earlier release catalogue includes work for Anjunabeats alongside Greg Downey and Christian Burns, alongside Armada and Smash The House placements, and he has played Tomorrowland, EDC Las Vegas and the major UK festival circuit through the 2010s and 2020s. Within the trance ecosystem Ben Nicky occupies the open-format harder edge — his sets cover 125 to 200 BPM and route through trance, techno, hard dance and happy hardcore in the same hour, with Armin van Buuren publicly describing him as "one of the hardest working DJs in the industry" and Diplo crediting him as "leader of a new movement". The harder UK trance lane — Subculture, Pure Trance NEON, Kearnage — and the harder mainstage circuit overlap directly on his sets, and his collaboration network places him alongside Bryan Kearney, Simon Patterson and the broader UK harder-trance scene.