Lee Burridge

A pub in Dorset, then a one-way ticket east

Burridge was born in November 1968 in Eype, a hamlet on the Dorset coast. He played his first set on 26 December 1983 at The New Inn, the bar his parents ran, having watched the pub's DJ work the equipment. A mobile operation called Cutz followed, and then his first real residency at The Palace in Somerset, where the resident DJ Wayne Rideout taught him how to mix records. In the summer of 1987, visitors to the area told him what was happening with acid house in London.

In early 1991 he left for Hong Kong to take a full-time job at the club Joe Banana's — a move he has joked he accepted while under the impression Hong Kong was in Japan. He is credited with importing the UK's early rave template to the city and with helping get the club Neptune's off the ground. Through the 1990s he also worked in Thailand, playing the full moon gatherings at Haad Rin as they shifted, in his own description, from hippies drumming on the beach to small dance parties, and taking a weekly slot at the Backyard club in return for somewhere to stay. He dates the change in how he thinks about a set — as one continuous shape rather than a run of records — to around 1992 and 1993.

Tyrant, fabric and the mix-CD years

Sasha and Craig Richards both came out to Asia to play, and the friendships formed there turned into an invitation. On Burridge's return to the UK the three of them built Tyrant, a party and a DJ outfit, with Richards as the constant and Sasha involved for a period. The fabric residency that came with it ran long into Sunday mornings; Burridge has said the memory of looking out at the room at eight in the morning has stayed with him.

The partnership put him on record. Tyrant's mixes for Global Underground, including Nubreed in 2001 and 24:7, are the releases that carried his name beyond the clubs he played, and he reached number nine in DJ Magazine's Top 100 poll. He has been straightforward about the mechanics of it: Richards was the more established figure, and being attached to him pushed Burridge into public view faster than would otherwise have happened. He later recorded Essential Mixes for BBC Radio 1 in 2015 and again in 2019.

All Day I Dream

The idea that now defines him started with a rooftop party in Brooklyn in 2011. Burridge turned it into All Day I Dream, a label and an event series built on daytime outdoor parties and melodic, emotionally weighted house rather than the minimal and harder sounds dominating club bookings at the time. He has described it as a deliberate counterweight — soft furnishings and planting instead of metal trussing, afternoon light instead of a dark room, and an audience he felt the scene was not serving.

His stated aim has been consistently unglamorous: a place to escape to, and making people smile. The community side is not just branding — by 2021 more than sixty attendees had told him they had met their spouse at one of the parties, and two proposals had happened in the DJ booth itself. In 2021 he added a second label, All Day I Dream in Waves, for slower and more ambient material.

The series has since scaled to a touring circuit. The 2026 run alone took in London, Ibiza, Mexico City, San Francisco, Barcelona, Cape Town, Montenegro, St Tropez, Georgia, Brooklyn, Los Angeles and Montreal, with lineups drawn from the label's own roster plus newer signings.

Records, and a film about the man making them

Burridge's studio output is sparse by the standards of his touring schedule. The album Melt, made with Lost Desert, arrived in the summer of 2019. In 2025 the two reunited for the November Snowflakes EP, and he contributed 'Bianco Montana' with Sunora to the compilation A Winter Sampler VII. On 13 July 2026 he put out 'Fading Out' on All Day I Dream, an eight-minute track built on atmospheric breaks and layered synths — his first solo original since 2021.

Running alongside it is Sound of a Dream, a feature documentary about him directed by Hoj Jomehri. It is the launch title for Jomehri's company Unsound Films, co-produced with Believe Media, with Liz Silver as executive producer. The film traces the forty-year line from the Dorset pub through fabric, Burning Man and Coachella to All Day I Dream, using archival footage and close access. Jomehri, himself a DJ and producer, has said that in documenting Burridge he was also documenting part of his own story. The film went into release in the UK on 24 October 2025 and played the Doc 'N Roll Film Festival at the Royal in West Los Angeles on 13 May 2026.

Where things stand in November 2026

2026 was billed as All Day I Dream's tenth annual summer tour, and the schedule was announced in blocks from March onwards: Studio 338 in London on 4 April, Las Dalias in Ibiza on 25 April, the Ex Hacienda de San Pablo de Enmedio in Mexico City on 16 May, Golden Gate Park in San Francisco on 6 June, and the Sea Sea Club in Barcelona on 19 June. Casa Amor in St Tropez followed on 3 August and The Social Space in Shekvetili, Georgia, on 15 August.

The autumn stretch was the more interesting part. On 19 September the series returned to Industry City in Brooklyn — its second New York date of the year, after a sold-out June show at the same waterfront site — with Burridge playing eight hours alone, open to close, reviving the single-DJ format of the early New York parties. Pershing Square in Los Angeles came on 3 October and Parc Jean Drapeau in Montreal on 12 October.

Four dates remain on sale. All Day I Dream returns to Australia for the first time in more than a decade: the Beach Hotel in Byron Bay on 20 November, the ivy in Sydney on 28 November and the Bourke Street Courtyard in Melbourne on 29 November. Byron Bay's early-bird and general-release tiers have sold through, leaving final release at 99.90 Australian dollars. After that comes a markedly smaller booking — Joshua Brooks in Manchester on 18 December, a basement club rather than a park. Songkick lists 14,347 people tracking him for alerts, with Miami, Ibiza and New York his most-played cities at 48, 45 and 45 appearances respectively.