Read Chris Cox Part One: early days

Chris Cox on Berwick Street, in Soho, London, 2004.

In 2004, Chris Cox and his partner Sonja relocated to the UK for two years. After they settled in London, he got a job at the Record & Tape Exchange in Notting Hill Gate and helped Mark de Clive-Lowe run a regular club night called FreeSoul Sessions at the Jazz Cafe and the Notting Hill Arts Club. 

“I’d DJ, and we’d have a guest like Domu or Daz-I-Kue from Bugz in the Attic play, and then Mark would do an improvised live thing with musicians like Bembe Segue or the drummer Richard Spaven,” says Cox. “We used to do about six a year. It was great.”

In London, Cox reconnected with UK DJ and producer Phil Asher, who lived downstairs from de Clive-Lowe. “Just seeing how he made things work for him as a producer and DJ in the UK was really influential,” says Cox. “He was a great DJ, made amazing music, and was a cool person. At the time, it was that simple. With the benefit of hindsight, what was really amazing was how he crossed between all these different musical worlds. He helped me realise that when you do music, you don’t need just to do one thing. Coming from New Zealand, where the scenes were very segmented at the time, that was very powerful to me.”

Return to Auckland

By 2006, Cox and Sonja were back living in Auckland. Things had changed, and he found it hard to regain his footing in the local scene. “Auckland was in a bit of a lull period at the time, and I remember feeling like I was at a crossroads moment,” he says. “I never seriously entertained quitting music, but I wondered if it was time to retrain and do something else.”

All of that changed when he started making music with Nathan Haines. “I can’t even remember how it happened,” says Cox. “We just started hanging out, listening to jazz musicians like Yusef Lateef and producing together.”

 

 

Cox and Haines’s first formal collaboration was a remix for the Māori classical musician and singer-songwriter Tama Waipara. “It was a jazzy house kind of thing, and it really worked,” says Cox. From there, Haines invited Cox to co-produce his seventh studio album, Right Now. “That was a big deal for me,” says Cox. “It gave me a musical purpose. You have to look at it like this: I wasn’t really working with Mark [de Clive-Lowe] then, and sure, I was DJing, but I wasn’t fizzing over it at that point.”

A Change of Direction

While working with Haines on Right Now, Cox realised it was time to start making his own music. “I just wanted to try doing something myself,” he said. At the time, he was transitioning from hardware to software, specifically the digital audio workstation called Ableton Live. He was initially resistant, but once he got his head around it, the program enabled him to enter the next phase of his career, producing original boogie and deep house records and DJ edits under the alias Frank Booker.

“I remember talking to my mother while I was trying to come up with a production name,” Cox said. “Her maiden name is Frankland, and my father’s mother’s maiden name was Booker, so she said, ‘What about Frank Booker?’ That was a real lightbulb moment. I liked it straight away. I like that it isn’t random and has a sense of connection.” 

On more levels than just music, his Frank Booker alias represented the beginning of a new chapter in Cox’s life. “It also coincided with getting married, starting a family and working in musical education. I don’t mean this to sound odd, but Frank Booker became a job for me, and Chris Cox is a suburban dad.”

Hit It & Quit It

However, something else pivotal happened before Cox started releasing music as Frank Booker. In 2008, he partnered with the then-Auckland-based Detroit electronic music producer and DJ Matthew Chicoine, aka Recloose, to co-host a new Monday radio show on George FM, Hit It & Quit It. Over the next five years, the show became one of the most popular on the station and featured guest DJs from here and abroad, including J Rocc, Jazzy Jay, Bill Brewster, Nathan Haines and many more. 

  

“At the time,” says Cox, “I felt like what we were playing was too house for the hip-hop crowd and too hip-hop for the house clubs. These days, however, that isn’t an issue. If anything, moving around stylistically is a strength now.”

Alongside the radio show, Cox and Chicoine launched a regular club night called Hit It and Quit It Revue. Cox befriended his future business partner Sam Harman, aka DJ Samuel Harmony, through the radio show and club night. “Sam started turning up at our shows and quickly became an intern producer on the radio show,” says Cox. “He was super into [the Los Angeles musician] DāM FunK and all the 80s US boogie records we were playing. It’s cool how we’ve gone from that to being bonafide business partners in our latest venture, Music First.”

Here Comes Frank Booker

In 2009, Untracked Recordings, a UK-based leftfield dance music label run by Atlantic Conveyor (the production duo of Steve Harris and the New Zealander Christopher Tubbs), released Booker’s first two 12" EPs, Brothers and Paper Cuts. From there, he quickly connected with a range of boutique record labels around the world, including Wonderful Noise Productions (Japan), Fine Art Recordings (US), Sleazy Beats Recordings (Netherlands), Kolour LTD (USA), Razor’N’Tape (USA) and Down In The Basement (UK).

 

 

Over the following years, Cox’s unhurried, slow-to-boil production style garnered him a cult reputation within the global underground dance music community. In recognition of his tasteful sensibilities, respected disco and deep house DJs such as Horse Meat Disco, Todd Terje, Rahaan, Detroit Swindle, Session Victim, Red Greg, Jimpster, and DJ Nature began slipping them into their club sets and radio shows.

“I have to give [Christopher] Tubbs his flowers here,” says Cox. “He was so supportive when I was finally ready to release music and gave me confidence. Because I was so used to being in the background and helping people do stuff, I wasn’t sure if my music was any good. So when someone you respect comes along and releases your music, it’s very validating.”

A DJ’s DJ & A Dancefloor Hero

By 2013, Cox felt ready to take his DJ skills abroad. Initially, he started playing regularly across Australia through a connection in Melbourne with Jamie Bennett, the leader of the longstanding promotions group and talent agency Crown Ruler. After building a following across the Tasman, Cox found a booking agent based in Paris and began venturing further afield. Since then, he’s been able to DJ in Japan, Britain, Ireland, France, Holland, Switzerland, and the USA.

Frank Booker in Amsterdam, 2017.

“New Zealand has been very lucky to have Chris [Cox] here as a DJ,” says Tubbs. “He’s a very classically informed person in that he really understands the tropes of Chicago, New York and Philly Disco and the origins of house music. He’s done the research, and it really informs what he does on the dancefloor. I’ve heard a lot of DJs, and when he is on, he’s as good as anyone in the world.” 

Frank Booker in 2015 at the Motown Museum in Detroit, home to Hitsville USA and Studio A where Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, The Supremes, The Temptations and many other Motown legends recorded.

In a testament to Tubbs’s words, over his DJ career, Cox has spun alongside a long list of high-profile US, UK and European DJs, including Hunee, Moodymann, Francois K, DāM-Funk, Kon, John Morales, Rich Medina, Max Graef, Musclecars, and Ron Trent.

At the start of 2016, Cox received two of the most symbolically significant DJ bookings of his career. In January, he played a private party for filmmaker Quentin Tarantino, who was in Auckland to promote his western film, The Hateful Eight. In an interview with the New Zealand culture journalist Chris Schulz for his Boiler Room newsletter, Cox described playing 1960s funk and soul songs. “I know Tarantino likes Kool & the Gang,” he said. “I played things from that era.” In Schulz’s words, “Later in the night, Cox got the response he was looking for when Tarantino turned and thundered, ‘Good fucking music,’ at him.”

A few weeks later, Cox signed a non-disclosure agreement and played another private party. This time, it was a rooftop bar-type affair for American music icon Prince, who’d just played two of his Piano and a Microphone solo shows at Auckland’s ASB Theatre. After Prince arrived at the party around 2am, Cox managed to lure him onto the dancefloor with a record from the Chaka Khan-fronted American funk band, Rufus. As he told Schulz, “That’s my epitaph … ‘I made Prince dance.’ ”

A Move Into Music Education

Alongside DJing overseas, in 2013, Cox also started working as a tutor on the DJ EMP (DJ & Electronic Music Production) programme, which Chicoine was leading at the Music and Audio Institute of New Zealand (MAINZ) in Auckland. “I took over the role from my friend Philippa [McIntyre, aka DJ Philippa], when she moved to Berlin,” he says.”‘We’d just bought a house, so it seemed like a good idea.” Working at MAINZ, Cox learned to communicate and explain his processes as a DJ and a producer before becoming a certified Ableton Live trainer.

A year later, Chicoine left MAINZ to return to the US and take on an Artist Relations and Education role at the Serato DJ software company, and Cox took over as the Programme Leader. “At first, I had this fear that as a teacher, I might not be able to relate to the music some of my students were into,” he admitted.

Soon enough, however, he realised that regardless of your stylistic preferences, there was something deeply infectious about watching younger people discover music for themselves. “At the end of the day, I’ve got my own story about what I’m into, and you’ll have your own story,” says Cox. “I realised I was there to help facilitate that and give them the best ideas around practice to pursue their dreams.” 

Former MAINZ colleagues Harry Lyon (Hello Sailor) and Chris Cox aka Frank Booker enjoying a pint down the road at The Brewers Co-Operative on Victoria Street West, Auckland, 2018.

Cox continued to work at MAINZ until 2019 when he took voluntary redundancy and began working on various music education projects with Auckland Council, Serato, and SAE New Zealand on a freelance or contract basis.

Flamingo Pier

In 2015, New Zealand/UK-based dance music production trio and DJ collective Flamingo Pier asked Cox to play at the second edition of their annual summer dance music festival on Waiheke Island. “From the first time I played for them, it was just a really good party,” says Cox. Over the following years, Flamingo Pier has continued to book him for the festival. “As I became more involved with them, they started asking me to handle things like artist liaison. I guess they saw me as a safe pair of hands.”

Throughout the 2010s, Flamingo Pier divided its time between the UK and New Zealand. However, in 2019, their main DJ, Luke Walker, decided to stay in Auckland for winter after the festival. “One day, we met up, and he said, ‘What do you think about doing some parties together?’” Cox recalls. “At the time, I’d taken a long hiatus from promoting events to focus on teaching and trying to be a dad to two young kids.” Regardless, he was taken with Walker’s enthusiasm and decided to dive back in.

Frank Booker at the entrance of Las Vegas club on Karangahape Road, Auckland, 2018.

Following further discussions, they settled on throwing a party at the old Las Vegas Club upstairs on Karangahape Road. “Initially, it started as a pop-up called For The People! for a couple of months, but because it went so well, we turned it into a regular series called Pleasure!,” says Cox. Between 2019 and 2021, they organised close to 30 events, hosting a range of established and emerging local DJs, plus a few special guest DJs from overseas, including Melbourne’s Sophie McAlister.

 

“Chris [Cox] got me to do a few gigs with him [and Flamingo Pier] after the first lockdown,” recalls DJ Manuel Bundy. “I really saw how much the new generation love him. He’s become a bridge between generations.”

“One of the great things about the old-school residency concept is you can build up tunes the audience might not get to know otherwise,” says Cox. “By the time Pleasure! finished, everyone who came to our parties knew all the words to ‘Concrete Jungle’ by The Fatback Band.” 

After Pleasure! ended, Flamingo Pier and Cox regrouped and ran a semi-regular Sunday party series called Afternoon Delight at the nearby East Street Hall.

Music First

By 2022, Cox was feeling the pull towards playing long all-night DJ sets in the same mode as some of the US and UK disco, boogie and house DJ heroes. To scratch this itch, he made the jump and started throwing a series of club nights around New Zealand under the brand House of Booker. “In a lot of ways, it was about control,” Cox said. “I wanted to be able to control the branding, production, sound, and overall experience.”

When it came time to deliver these events, he asked his former Hit It & Quit It radio producer intern Sam Harman, aka DJ Samuel Harmony, to help him out with production. By this stage, Harman had spent several years promoting and producing events as part of the Friendly Potential party collective under his F1 Team brand. After realising how well they worked together, Cox asked Harman if he’d like to go in with him on starting a new collaborative party called Music First. 

“It was great to ask Sam to go in with me on something where we were on equal footing,” says Cox. “We’ve both got unique but complementary sets of skills, and I think those make for the best partnerships.”

In his interview with Chris Schulz, Cox explained that the idea for Music First came to him while he was on holiday. Casually scrolling through his Instagram feed, Cox noticed that most of the posts DJs were making were about the parties and festivals they were playing, but no one was discussing the music they were into. He told Schulz, “It seemed weird that it was almost a secondary thing.”

Music First posters. Left: Poster for debut Music First gig with Frank Booker and Samuel Harmony at Leigh Sawmill, February 2024; right: Upcoming Music First gig with DJ Spinna (NYC), Frank Booker and Samuel Harmony at Hollywood Avondale in Auckland, Friday 7 March 2025.

In February 2024, Cox and Harman organised their first Music First event at the Leigh Sawmill Cafe. Since then, they’d hosted a select range of local and international DJ guests at shows, including Wellington’s Benny Salvador, the UK-based Auckland producer-DJ Manuel Darquart, old-school US house music legend Ron Trent and the new generation New York producer/DJ duo Musclecars. Along the way, Cox and Harman have also launched a Music First record label, which they inaugurated with the release of Collected Works, a 12" vinyl EP of four out-of-print songs from Cox’s extensive back catalogue.

 

Outside their Music First events and label, in April 2024 Cox and Harman started helping with bookings and regularly DJing at Nami, a recently established Ponsonby record bar. Over two and a half decades into his ongoing musical journey as a DJ, event promoter, music maker and now educator, Cox has seen countless scenes and trends come and go around him. He’s still here.

Cox reveals a simple but powerful truth that continues to resonate with him as of late. “Things don’t happen unless you make them happen,” he says. “Whether you’re talking about Music First, Nami, or anyone else trying to do anything in hospitality or nightlife, it’s a crazy time to start new things because everyone is feeling the pinch. At the same time, that makes it a great time to try new things out because everyone needs an escape from the drudgery and the depressing elements of reality today. After all, the best parties have always been about taking your mind off the day-to-day grind.”