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About Calvin Harris

Adam Richard Wiles was born on January 17, 1984 in Dumfries, a market town in the southwest of Scotland, and grew up there in a household that ran on his father's job at a chemicals plant and the ambient melodic-electronic music that was filtering out of the wider Scottish dance scene through the late 1990s and early 2000s. He started producing as a teenager on a budget bedroom setup, working primarily in the funk and disco-leaning indie-electronic lane that record labels in the mid-2000s were marketing under the loose banner of nu-disco. The Calvin Harris stage name was put together from a mix of childhood references and a sense, as Harris later explained in interviews, that "Adam Wiles" did not sound like a producer name. After failing to make traction with self-released material under various aliases, he posted demos to MySpace in 2005 and 2006, attracted attention from the British indie-electronic blogosphere of the era, and signed a deal with Columbia Records subsidiary Fly Eye in 2007. The debut album I Created Disco, released in June 2007, produced the singles Acceptable in the 80s and The Girls and landed in the top ten of the UK Albums Chart. Ready for the Weekend followed in 2009 with the title track and I'm Not Alone reaching number one on the UK Singles Chart, but it was 18 Months — the third album, released in October 2012 on Columbia Records — that turned Calvin Harris from a UK chart act into a global one. 18 Months produced We Found Love with Rihanna (which had already been released as a Rihanna single in 2011, with Harris credited as producer and featured artist), Sweet Nothing with Florence Welch, I Need Your Love with Ellie Goulding, Feel So Close, Bounce with Kelis, Drinking from the Bottle with Tinie Tempah, and Thinking About You with Ayah Marar, becoming the only album in history at the time of its release to produce nine top-ten singles on the UK Singles Chart. The follow-up Motion in 2014 produced Summer, Blame with John Newman, Outside with Ellie Goulding and How Deep Is Your Love with Disciples, and consolidated the dance-pop production template that Harris had built around rotating vocal collaborators on a producer-led platform. Funk Wav Bounces Vol. 1, released in June 2017 on Columbia, abandoned the EDM big-room template in favor of a deliberately retro disco-funk and hip-hop-adjacent record built around an extensive guest list — Frank Ocean and Migos on Slide, Pharrell Williams and Katy Perry and Big Sean on Feels, Khalid on Rollin, Young Thug and Pharrell and Ariana Grande on Heatstroke — and reached number one on the UK Albums Chart and number two on the Billboard 200. Funk Wav Bounces Vol. 2 followed in August 2022 with Dua Lipa and Young Thug on Potion, 21 Savage on New Money, Pusha T on Stay With Me, Justin Timberlake and Halsey and Pharrell on Stay With Me, and a continued embrace of the hip-hop crossover lane. Live, Harris has built one of the most durable touring careers in dance music. He has headlined Coachella in 2016, headlined the Saturday night main stage at Tomorrowland multiple times, played the EDC Las Vegas kineticFIELD main stage repeatedly, headlined Ultra Music Festival in Miami, played Lollapalooza in Chicago and the European festival circuit (Creamfields, Parklife, V Festival, T in the Park during the years it ran in Scotland) consistently throughout the last decade-plus. The Las Vegas Strip residency is the structural anchor of the live calendar. Harris was reportedly the highest-paid DJ in Vegas during the mid-2010s on the strength of his Hakkasan Group residency deal at Hakkasan Nightclub and Omnia at Caesars Palace, with regular pool dates at Wet Republic and the Liquid pool decks. Subsequent cycles have shifted his Vegas anchoring into the Wynn Resorts portfolio, with dates at Encore Beach Club for the dayclub format and XS Nightclub inside Encore for the night format. He has been Forbes-listed as the highest-paid DJ in the world for multiple years across the late 2010s and into the 2020s. Outside the music, Harris is based largely between Los Angeles and London, was in a high-profile relationship with Taylor Swift during 2015 and 2016 that produced the co-write This Is What You Came For with Rihanna, married TV presenter Vick Hope in 2023, and runs the Fly Eye Records label and the Big Beat-distributed touring infrastructure. The on-stage persona is restrained by EDM standards — no cake-throwing, minimal between-track talking, no Vegas-comedian shtick — and the show leans on the production rig and the catalog rather than the showman behind the booth, which is the most plausible single explanation for why a Scottish bedroom producer from 2006 is still headlining mainstream festivals two decades later.

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