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Published: 9 December, 2010
by ROISIN GADELRAB

Sam’s top five tunes for Prince William’s stag do:

• Ludacris – Area Codes
• Snoop Dogg – Ain’t no Fun
• Katy Perry – I kissed a girl
• LMFAO – I’m not a whore
• RUN DMC – Down with the King 

HE hangs out with The Killers and Usher, DJs for royalty, and Kasabian owe him a favour.

Sam Young gets around and has the tales to prove it.

As we speak (on the phone), he’s just waking up at his St John’s Wood home after another late night and is preparing for Damien Hirst’s Christmas party later.

“Kasabian’s doing the entertainment,” he says. “I helped get their record deal. I used to work for a record company. The label I was with didn’t want to sign them, they were ‘oohing’ and ‘ahing’. A friend of mine just started doing A&R at Sony BMG so I took their demo in and then, yeah, that was it.”

DJ Young, 31, is best known for regular spots at celeb hangouts Chinawhite’s and Boujis, which may seem far removed from the Camden scene, but he begs to differ.

He says: “I’ve had my own nights at Hoxton Pony and Proud Camden. The crowd is different, they probably think they’re a bit cooler in Camden, same in east London, they may think because they’re partying in Hoxton they’re cool, but actually there’s no difference musically – unless you’re going to a specialist night. You’re more likely to get a tip in the West End from some rich Arab dude for playing a song while some guy in Camden might buy you a beer.”

Young is reputed to be one of Prince William’s favourite DJs and has drawn up a personal top five of stag-do hits for the soon-to-be married Royal, in case he gets  the call.

“If he asked me to DJ at the wedding, I would, definitely,” Young says.

The Prince has been known to request a tune or two: “He likes the classic dance music. He’s current, not cheesy at all. All the times I’ve met him he’s liked stuff that was big at the time, like Outkast Hey Ya and Shakedown at Night. I’ve seen him dance – and the girlfriend.”

Young once attracted the attention of Killers frontman Brandon Flowers for playing a bootleg of Somebody Told Me.

But instead of telling him off, Flowers said it was “a pretty cool mix”.

Last week, he was asked to look after Usher, who passed by Boujis after the X-Factor.

Young says: “He needed to fly really early so we were killing time. I wasn’t DJing, I’d finished my set. We were having crack-babies – a shot they do in Boujis: champagne, vodka, strawberry and passionfruit.”

The son of photographer Richard Young, Sam stumbled into DJing on a whim: “When I was about 13 we used to get Christmas money and my brother said, ‘let’s buy some turntables so we can be DJs’. So I said, ‘OK fine’.”

When his brother went to college, Young was left with the decks and the rest is West End clubland history.

But he says it’s not always an easy job: “It can be hard if the crowd are difficult. If they’re not receptive to what you’re playing or if you read the crowd wrong they can make it harder. 

“It’s all digital nowadays so I have every type of music on me at all times. It’s not like the old days where you have one or two bags of records and you’re screwed if you didn’t have what they wanted.”

His secret dancefloor-filling weapon? “Play some Michael Jackson, or Prince or Stevie Wonder,” says Young. 

And the secret to being a successful DJ? 

“Work hard, keep your head down. It’s a lot of how you go about who you know, you need the talent as well, you can’t just wing it. If you’re not as good as you think you are, you’ll soon get found out.”

• Sam Young has residencies at Boujis on Thursdays and Sun­days, China­white Wednesdays and Fridays, and regularly ap­pears at Bung­alow 8, Covent Gar­den, Ven­dome Mayfair and The Hoxton Pony.