How the word "slack" made it into her name remains a mystery.
Janette Slack may be a DJ, but she is no Weekend Warrior. There is an energy around her that even she struggles to contain, one which forces her to take a running jump at every one of life's encounters. It seems apt, then, that Janette is in Hong Kong when we catch up. It's as if she's moved to a city which expresses outwardly the drive to make a mark that inwardly possesses her.
"It's my Dad's birthday in a couple of weeks. I moved to London when I was 17, so that's like 15 years of birthdays and Christmases and New Years that I haven't spent (with them). His birthday falls in December, it's his 72nd birthday so I thought I should get to Hong Kong earlier and spend a bit of time with him before my tour (in Australia)."
Janette talks about reconnecting with her family the same way Marty McFly would describe stepping out of the DeLorean into 2015. There are a lot of things her family don't know about her, the most important arguably being that she can make mulled wine. "Mulled wine" is actually an old Latin term for "total badassery", and no doubt Janette's tastes a little like unicorns and rainbows. Of course, there's other stuff as well.
"My parents came to my album launch in Hong Kong, it was the first time they'd seen me DJ since I was 18. I mean, when I was 18 there were about 15 people there, so that was their last image my parents had."
Her parents were not ready for the wake up call, but are apparently recovering well from their EDM-induced bout of seizures. Speaking of which, there was a time when Janette's album 'Torture Garden Session' looked set to completely take over her life. Her friends were left wondering if this thing was ever going to be finished, if it was ever going to be released. "Fuck it," they'd say, "let's go bowling."
"The album took three years to write. Because I was making it into a DJ mix as well that's what made it extra hard. Obviously a lot of tracks didn't make it to the final cut. There was (this one song) where even when I tried to edit it or just even have a minute of it, it didn't flow."
The release of 'Torture Garden Session' did not leave Janette with time to toast her success. There is an old saying, a saying which tribesman in the hills of Mongolia are rumoured to whisper to their yaks before a storm. "Sometimes," they say, "life happens."
"The day of the album launch I had to demolish my warehouse. About five years ago me and a bunch of friends found a dead space, about two thousand square metres in this warehouse that had been empty because of the recession. The landlord just wanted it occupied, so we were able to get this ten-year lease for really cheap rent. We began renovating by ourselves with no contractors. We lived in tents and joined gyms to have showers while we were building, so I learned how to put insulation in, use every type of drill... I mean, that was my life for about four or five months. Getting ready for gigs is very funny as well when you live inside a tent. You're trying to look glamorous but you don't realise how much you stink of concrete. It was great, though. The knowledge I got from renovating is now something that's stuck with me forever.
"We did everything properly. We got an evaluator to come over and say we were changing the lot from commercial to residential. But then the Council wanted us to pay business-rates Council Tax. We'd been paying 20 pounds per month, which was the residential rate. The business rate is 1,200 pounds a month! We were like "Come on, guys!" We were living in Central London, in a massive place for very cheap. But it really angered me when I'd see people who were obviously on welfare buying beer on a Wednesday at 10am, but we'd just built a place and were paying tax. To then get stung like that when we were feeding the system, I thought: shouldn't you encourage more people like us to be doing things like this?"
Janette holds no grudge; she isn't upset, though she does still carry a sense of bewilderment. The most bewildering aspect of all, though, is this. "That place is still now empty. There's no one occupying it."
