Hannah Laing on Doof In The Park: 'It’s so important to support the next gen'
With her rave and hard house festival returning to Dundee for its second outing, hometown hero Hannah Laing talks to Fiona Shepherd about big breaks and lifting up the next generation of artists
‘You’re never too old to rave,’ reckons Dundonian superstar DJ Hannah Laing. In clubbing terms, Laing is somewhere between spring chicken and elder stateswoman (experienced hand?) but it’s only in the post-covid years that she’s become a household name in DJ circles. Laing has hit the top ten with her tunes, guested alongside trance legends such as Armin Van Buuren, been treated like a homecoming hero in Ibiza and given back to her native city with electronic music festival Doof In The Park, so-called for the sound of her beloved rave and hard house beats.
Her appreciation of the elder clubbers’ market comes from her retro influences. Laing grew up to the pulse of 90s rave and trance thanks to her clubbing parents who passed on their knowledge and understanding when their 15-year-old daughter started to scope out her own clubbing tribe in Dundee and Arbroath. Two years later, they sanctioned her first trip to Ibiza. Laing had been DJing for six months, practicing on a second-hand controller in her bedroom, when she left her job in search of Balearic bliss. To her surprise, she netted a last-minute booking to DJ for a hen party at the Highlander Scottish pub in Sant Antoni de Portmany.
‘It was just a really lucky moment,’ she recalls. ‘I had been hanging around that bar using their wifi cos I didn’t have any. I played for three hours for this crazy Scottish hen do. They must have really enjoyed it because they paid me and I’d never been paid to DJ before.’ Laing’s DJ dues were subsequently paid across three seasons at the Highlander. ‘You’re DJing seven hours a night for four nights a week; that’s really when you learn how to DJ. The bar would get busy, then empty, then busy, so if you wanted to keep people in you really had to learn how to hold the crowd.’
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Back in Dundee, she would take any gig going for the experience before being able to zero in on her signature rave and trance sets. Her voracious appetite for learning extended to making her own tunes, firstly by observing a producer in Ibiza, then enrolling in a production course back in Scotland and following through with one-to-one tuition. ‘It was a lot quicker to learn how to DJ than it was to produce music,’ she says. ‘It took years of consistently making music to find my sound and get good at it. I still learn every day.’
Her tracks ‘Good Love’ and ‘Party All The Time’ both charted in 2023 and she’s set for further exposure via her current Armin Van Buuren collaboration ‘U Got 2 Know’. Laing has not long returned from a US tour, DJing to ‘free-spirited’ crowds, but she is laser-focused on celebrating her roots and bolstering her community, so much so that she created a replica of the Highlander at 2025’s inaugural sell-out Doof In The Park.
The Highlander stage will return for this year’s expanded edition of the festival. Laing will rock the main stage alongside trance veterans Paul Van Dyk and BK and her European peers Maddix and Lilly Palmer, while on the Up The Doof stage Antwerp’s Novah leads the charge. There are plans afoot to add a fourth stage to showcase new artists, some of whom have been mentored at Laing’s own Doof Studios which she co-founded with Robbie Tolson of Edinburgh-based charity Turn The Tables. It’s all testament to Laing’s pan-generational appeal, from young team to old-age ravers. ‘It’s so important to support the next gen,’ she insists. ‘That was me not too long ago.’
Doof In The Park, Camperdown Park, Dundee, Saturday 4 July; main picture: Sullman.