IN CONVERSATION WITH… BEN MACKLIN
Faversham House Music producer on viral tracks and studying the genre
Sitting in the heat, sipping from a cold can in a beach bar with your feet in the sand - Ben Macklin’s summer-seducing anthem Fanta captures a feeling perfectly.
The house-music producer from Faversham has a talent for crafting tracks with infectious grooves and captivating melodies.
His knowledge and appetite for studying the genre has allowed Ben (@itsbenmacklin) to evolve into the modern electronic music era while continuing to encapsulate impactful moments that so many of us recognise. Humble to a fault, his recent releases have seen his following jump significantly, but the former Canterbury student’s career actually started with a bang back in the early 2000s - an experience that shaped, for good and bad, the next decade of his musical production. We caught up with Ben to find out a bit more.
Have you always wanted to work in music?
I was basically quite quiet and wanted to work in music. But my dad had always been in local bands and I didn’t want to be in a band and on the mic and the rest of it.
And so I really got into the bedroom dance scene and thought about someone like Liam Howlett [Prodigy], a quiet guy from quite near here, having these massive big dance tracks that are doing well. Or Daft Punk, for example - no one knew what they looked like, and that appealed to me.
What was the first big moment in music?
It was moving into doing more, like, commercial stuff because in 2007 I had a track that did really well called Feel Together. It went on Radio 1 and MTV and it was under my own name, so I was doing lots of gig and shows in Europe, DJing stuff and production for other people. But that dragged me out of my quiet little hideaway.
That was cool, but after that died down it took me a little while to work out ‘what am I supposed to do now?’.
The music industry was obviously a very different place at that time, with no Spotify etc.
Yeah, it got to 71 in the UK charts, which at the time the record label weren’t happy about. Even though I think we sold something like 5,000 CD singles, which now is absolutely ridiculous. I came out of that time feeling like I hadn’t quite done it, even though, looking back, by any standards today, I’d be happy with that.
They weren’t happy? Surely getting bookings off the back of your single, that’s the point, isn’t it?
Yeah, I was doing club gigs, like at Space in Ibiza and Pacha and places in London. It was a real 18-month high.
So you would be like a selector and then drop your tune halfway through?
Yeah. So that was, like, the thing they asked me to do. We got quite big in France. We’d go to Paris quite often, doing a few in Paris, half-hour sets, which I think I’d enjoy a lot more now. At the time, you’re so caught up in developing the next thing, you’re thinking ‘Oh my god, this is a lot of pressure’.
There was a lot of Swedish house mafia around and lots of house and dance tracks out at that time…
Yeah, I would do a lot of shows with people on that scene, like Fedde Le Grand and people like that. That year was so hectic. And the people you associate with doing that sort of thing are quite big characters. I just found myself in the middle of it and it didn’t come naturally to me.
It carried on to a point but not commercially.
Around 2010, when there was that blog culture, it appealed to me more to see if I could get one of my tracks on SoundCloud and embedded in a massive blog.
Spotify had started but wasn’t very big and so had iTunes. That changed the direction of me from being a commercial producer to a slightly more niche one.
So what happened to your music after that?
My own stuff almost became a shop window. Every bit of production work I would get, people would ask if I could do something like it, or they’d say ‘Can you come in and work with our artists and do something like that?’. During that time, I had a publisher and they would send me quite a lot of links. I’d work with someone like The Saturdays - I did a track for them. I would get briefs in the morning and sit there and have a go at it.
One day I got briefed and it said ‘Chinese artist looking for tracks that are like Jesse Ware’. So I thought I’d have a go at it. My friend and I wrote a song and sent it over to China. A few months later, I got a link back to the song being performed in these massive arenas
Who was the artist?
It was Bibi Zhou. That was a weird kind of time again because I was accidentally working with quite a big artist. No one knew her here, but that kind of gave me a bit more acknowledgement. She then came and produced her album in London with me.
Wow, that’s crazy. We have seen that you’ve started writing and releasing your own music again. Does that mean you have the bug back?
Yeah, I also do production music for TV, so I just had a track that was on the BBC’s Wimbledon coverage. I try to focus on the fact that if someone hears something of mine, whether it’s made for TV or it’s mine for release, that the quality will be the selling point of the whole thing. The music I self-release now is stuff that I like. In 2007 it was totally unplanned. But now I enjoy the fact that I’m in control of it all and just see what happens.
Your streaming figures are big and you have some 50k monthly listeners - has that jumped up again since your latest release?
Yeah, but I don’t think there’s any way you can kind of plan what to do. I released an album last year and it did what it did. And then last month I got notifications on my Instagram saying some people are using this track called Magic, number 17 on the album, on their reels. And then I suddenly got a massive amount of notifications, so I checked and it was 20th on the viral Instagram charts and then it went to Number One on Instagram reels for a week, being used by these enormous brands, with hundreds of thousands of reels and millions and millions of views. That was with no plan, no promotion. And so if I was a record label, I’d be aiming for that with the budget, but I might not get it. And yet that can just suddenly happen.
And you release under a few different names, right? How did that come about?
I did a remix for someone on my own label, someone I work with [Emma Brammer], and I wanted to get it out and put on streaming services - but it was more of a soul track. It didn’t really sound like something I would do. So I made up a name - FVHM - referring to Faversham. It got picked up on a Spotify playlist, quite a decent one, and has had about 10 million streams. It’s called Cutting Ties.
Well, luck aside, getting those sorts of numbers under multiple names obviously means you’ve got whatever it is that is needed to make a song go viral.
I think it’s a combination of things, like I’m a real student. I really like to watch what other people do in their mixes and work out how young producers are doing stuff - I don’t get put off by new technology. But also I do make a lot of tracks and I don’t get put off by the tracks that don’t do anything.
In the house genre, how would you describe your music?
I want to make something that makes me feel like it’s a nice, optimistic summer thing without being too cheesy. Maybe that’s why it makes lots of playlists and stuff - beach, yes, summer, yes – that’s probably the thread that runs through it all,
We featured your track Fanta in our playlist in April - did you have an eye on that becoming the tune of summer 2025?
Yeah. The sort of acid test of these is I try not to be too cynical with it. And I think, well, if I like it, then maybe some other people will like it, too.
