British DJ, radio host and astrophysics fan Kissy Sell Out comes to Play

At the tender age of 21, Thomas Bisdee, a cheeky art student from Essex in Britain, decided to give electronic dance music one last try. He mixed a track in four hours, handed it out and found himself an overnight sensation.

"No one had ever taken an interest in my music at all," he recalls. "It was mad, extraordinary, life changing. I never looked back."

Fast forward eight years and the now 29-year-old, known globally by his DJ moniker Kissy Sell Out, is a wildly popular host on BBC Radio 1; the head of his own music label, San City High; and a mainstay of the East London DJ scene, famed for his ebullient, experimental and virtuosic sets.

Although his sound remains fundamentally rooted in electro and house, he uses his mixes to explore a wide array of genres, from hip hop to trap, and is famous for weaving in clips of classical music.

A recent mix features Handel's Zadok the Priest performed by London's Royal Choral Society. It's overlaid with trap-style rap, which sounds odd, but it works — as it should when Kissy appears at Central nightclub Play on April 25.

Kissy sees this kind of experimentation as essential to what he's trying to achieve. "Let's make no bones about it. I'm quite an alternative DJ and always have been. I like the idea of getting away with stuff, taking risks and doing things that other DJs wouldn't have the guts or the ability to do."

He purposefully designs difficult and complicated sets because it "makes it more interesting". Although he practises his sets obsessively, he also insists on improvising. "I think if someone recreates exactly what they've practised again and again, that's quite dry. I also think it's dry to talk on the mic. It's not very musical to say, 'Put your hands in the air' and all that."