Kelly Lee Owens: Record Shops, Raves, and Rebuilding Music From the Ground Up

Jan 13, 2026

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Fresh from touring stadiums with Depeche Mode, DiS meets electronic music pioneer to discuss her past, the present, and the future of music.

This is part of Drowned in Sound’s 25th anniversary series in which Sean Adams continues the anniversary series by sits down with some of our favourite acts of the past quarter century. Kelly Lee Owens is very much one of those artists, who has featured in DiS year end lists and awards and playlists since releasing her debut EP.

The episode starts on the education that comes from working in record shops and becomes a wide-ranging conversation about how music communities form, fracture, and sometimes regenerate. Moving across North Wales to London basements, from pressing white labels by hand to playing for 75,000 people with Depeche Mode, Kelly Lee Owens traces a path through all corners of music: the shops, venues, teachers, collectives, community centres, and accidental mentors that shaped her, her music, and her career.

Sean and Kelly chat about their working class roots, the discipline of DJing as storytelling, and the economics of grassroots music. Kelly Lee Owens reflects on why she now deliberately plays shows in places artists rarely go, why she sees music as a form of healing as much as entertainment and why community matters more than scale.

If there’s a thread running through it all…it’s this: music isn’t a product or a pipeline. It’s a relationship. And like any relationship, it needs time, space, and care to survive.

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Chapters

00:00 - Introduction

02:00 - Record shops as education and community

05:05 - Obsession, discovery, and how taste is formed

10:00 - The early 2010s shift: risk, hedonism, and electronic culture

13:05 - DIY culture, SoundCloud, and pressing your own records

15:00 - Human curation vs automation and playlists

22:10 - Playing huge rooms: Depeche Mode, confidence, and scale

26:05 - Returning to small places: community shows and access

29:00 - Grassroots collapse, class, and structural inequality

32:10 - What £500 million could fix in music culture

42:05 - Music as healing, frequency, and emotional space