The preamble to an interview is usually pretty boring – ‘How’s your day?’, ‘What’s the weather like?’ and so on. Not with Deviation co-founders Benji B and Judah Afriyie, though. Within minutes, the self-described “musical twins” are knee-deep in a discussion about the philosophical implications of Gen Alpha using Chat GPT to do their homework. “I say to my daughter, ‘Sometimes those small grammatical mistakes are very, very human’,” says Judah. Benji B, who also hosts a weekly show on BBC Radio 1, agrees: “I can tell within five minutes whether a guest mix has been made on Ableton or [with vinyl] – it’s just so perfect that it’s not human.”

None of this, of course, is directly relevant to the new book that has brought us all onto the same video call: These Are The Levels. But it does mean that, when the real interview eventually gets underway, I don’t doubt Jonah for a second when he insists that the duo aren’t promoters but rather creatives.

While These Are The Levels is composed of images from 18 storied years of Deviation club nights, it’s not your standard club night retrospective. Not least of all was the decision to publish it on the platform’s 18th birthday – because, for Benji and Judah, Deviation being old enough to enter a club itself seemed more significant than the standard 10 or 20-year milestones. The photos themselves, meanwhile, seem less concerned with highlighting the numerous high-profile names that have appeared on Deviation line-ups – Travis Scott, A$AP Rocky, Virgil Abloh, to name just a few – and more concerned with documenting innocuous in-between moments on the dancefloor. 

“Not only did we want to mark the key moments from Deviation’s inception to now, but the book has also got to capture the tone of Deviation,” Judah explains of this unique approach. “If our younger versions were to pick up this book, we wanted them to be able to look at it and be like, ‘What?! This happened?’ It’s a time capsule – it has to reflect the economic climate, the technology, the style.”

True to this spirit, many of the resulting images capture moments where sound and time meet: a pre-smoking ban clubber lights up a cigarette indoors, DJ EZ plays with a CD in his mouth, a phone light and lighter are thrown up side-by-side in an intergenerational display of musical respect. But one evolution in particular forms a key focus of the book: the gradual flooding of London dancefloors with iPhones over the last 18 years. 

“The demand and rhythm of nightlife has changed,” says Benji. Judah agrees: “The book captures the UK at a time where there was an abundance of clubs and less phones, people being in the moment in real-time.” Benji jumps back in: “Why do you think there are now clubs where you have to put your phone in a locker or whatever? It’s the old balance of being in the experience versus documenting it. One of the things that makes this book unique is that it straddles pre- and post-iPhone.” Even in conversation, Benji and Judah go B2B, it seems. 

Read on for the untold stories behind some of Benji and Judah’s favourite images featured in their new photobook, These Are The Levels. 

Judah: This is one of the best in the book. 

Benji B: What’s significant about this picture is that it’s the night when Kelela is performing at the club – possibly the first time. That is Bok Bok DJing and Kelela singing. The long story is I met Kelela when I was first working on Yeezus with Kanye in LA. I was in a studio with Hudson Mohawke at Westlake in LA, and in the other studio, there was Arca and Kelela. She played this song called ‘Enemy’, and it blew my head off! 

Anyway, what matters here is that this is an amazing photo. It tells you, ‘Oh, that was that era of iPhone’. It is of someone taking a picture of Bok Bok and Kelela just as a message from Zainab Jama is arriving – and Zainab is the captain of the ship, she’s been steering Deviation for many years. It’s like a one in a million chance of that photo being taken at that exact time. I’d love to know what the message said. Probably like, ‘Water or incense to the DJ booth!’ 

Benji B: As far as we’re aware, this was Travis’ first ever club show in the UK. I saw Travis last summer, and I pulled up the PDF on my phone. He was like, ‘Oh man, I remember that night so clearly!’ I’d been DJing all night in XOYO and I couldn’t really leave the booth. I remember Zainab coming up to me and going, ‘We need to get on the Wi-Fi!" I was like, ‘Why?’ She said, ‘Travis’s DJ ain't coming, and you've got to DJ for him… but he hasn’t got any of his tunes, so he needs to get online to download them.’ 

I remember going into the janitor’s office or something in XOYO. They’d plugged him into the Ethernet and he was on a computer downloading his own tunes off Datpiff!  He came out with a USB with totally unlabeled files and, of course, if you download stuff from DatPiff.com, they have [audio watermarks] like ‘DatPiff.com!’ or ‘DJ Drama!’ or whatever it is. I just remember the pressure that night…

When I started to DJ, I saw him take off his watch and give it to one of his boys. Then he took his chains off and put them on someone. I was like, ‘What's about to happen?’ Then he took his shirt off and grabbed four massive water bottles. Instinctively, I took my top off and covered all the DJ stuff, and, sure enough, Travis sprayed water everywhere! I was holding the CDJs above my head! Wasn’t that the one that A$AP Rocky came to? 

Judah: Rocky. Skepta, Mos Def, JME, it was crazy. Absolutely rammed! Yasiin and Rocky pulled up on the fly.

Benji B: This picture is quite meta, because what you’re looking at is a USB stick that turned into the flyer for our 15th birthday night. The USB stick is hand-painted by the artist Jim Joe. He did all the [music media] formats – the 12-inch [vinyl], the CDs, the USB.

And that was the USB I used at the time, which were called Magnum USBs – the fastest USBs that you could use. There’s actually a whole story about Virgil loving that USB because of its utilitarian vibe... But, anyway, this picture is the hand-drawn Jim Joe flyer on the USB, which is the lineup of Moody Man, me and Judah. I actually DJed the entire night with said USB. There you go, nerdy one for you.

Judah: This is a picture of Virgil Abloh MCing.

Benji B: We just told you about the prelude to this picture. This image was actually one of those that held the book up because we just couldn’t publish it without it. 

Judah: You are never going to get a bigger advocate of Deviation than Virgil Abloh, God bless the dead. He was so in tune with what we were doing. I always laugh at this one because he’s in full V mode, he’s sitting on the desk, grabbing the microphone. He’s in a place of pure euphoria.

Benji B: In the back, you’ve also got Ibn Jasper, who was an original member of Kanye West’s creative team and squad. Him and Virgil were very close. There wouldn’t be a single time when Virgil was in London, and he wouldn’t attend Deviation. There aren’t many people who could come to the club and just pick up a mic.

Benji B: This is one of, if not the, best nights we ever did: the fifth birthday. It’s in a Sunday church in Hackney Wick, before Hackney Wick was demolished and turned into what it is now. Jude and I always say we wouldn’t change a thing about that night because it was perfect. We had Moody Man there, of course; we had Dam Funk, Dillah’s mum, Kode9, Hudson Mohawke… it was amazing.

The famous story at the end here is that I played the last set with Jude, obviously, and we played all the Deviation classics. I just remember tunes like ‘Angola (Carl Craig remix)’ going off in a different way. Then at the end of the night, like 6AM, we’re doing our usual thing of just wanting to play one more tune, one more tune. The security came up to us and were like, ‘You’ve really got to end now because, in one hour, Sunday service starts and we’ve only got an hour to clean up.’

Judah: But then the pastor was up on the mezzanine looking down at us, and he done this motion: [Judah gestures for a reload]. So we played one more!

Benji B: He gave us both a massive bear hug and was like, ‘The frequency was up tonight!’ Yeah, we did alright.