‘The clubbing industry can be a vulnerable place for a girl’: Aussie DJ Havana Brown’s night-life warning

Havana Brown on her new music, the ‘bizarre’ detail in her marriage – and why Australia needs to dance again.

Seventeen years into her career as a pop artist and chart-topping DJ, Havana Brown is on a new mission.

While she has played her share of headline residencies around the world since she made a splash in 2008 with her first DJ mix compilation, Crave Vol 1, she believes the club scene in Australia is now languishing and is determined to breathe new life into it. Enter Havana’s House, a curated night-life experience inspired by the glamour and edge of New York’s fabled venue Studio 54. Her goal: for every night to feel like a proper event.

“Studio 54 was fun, it was fashion, but it was a little bit naughty as well. People used to get really dressed

up, wear avant-garde clothes, the fashion-meets-music vibe …”

Of the shows that will launch in Melbourne on May 28, she tells Stellar: “I wanted to create a new world where I can indulge in that type of scene and create that new community of people. I feel like we’ve gotten a little too casual with everything.”

‘You have to separate yourself from other people to be noticed.’ Picture: Simon Upton for Stellar

The Melbourne-based DJ – born Angelique Meunier – learnt very early on in her career that she needed a point of difference to stand out. Initially signing to a UK record label as a singer, she turned on her business smarts and cut through the noise by spinning tracks at a time when DJing was dominated by men.

“Back then you were a DJ or you were an artist, and no-one combined those two things,” she explains.

“I saw that as an opportunity to set myself apart from what everyone else was doing.

“To me, they just seamlessly blend together. It was very deliberate. You have to separate yourself from other people to be noticed.”

While it was her triple-platinum ARIA single ‘We Run The Night’ featuring Pitbull that cemented her as a multifaceted pop artist in 2011, Brown cut her teeth touring with superstars including Rihanna and Enrique Iglesias. During a 2009 show in Paris she supported Britney Spears and performed in front of more than 40,000 fans.

Picture: Simon Upton for Stellar

“I could see my heart pumping out of my chest, I was so nervous,” she recalls.

“I played for 30 minutes, and when I came offstage I didn’t remember one moment.

“It was almost like I was in a different dimension.

“Straight after I performed, they asked me to do the whole tour of Europe and Australia as well. That was the most pinch-me moment of my life.”

Despite being a contestant on reality shows I’m A Celebrity … Get Me Out Of Here! in 2016 and the 2024 season of The Amazing Race Australia: Celebrity Edition, Brown has mostly kept her private life with longtime manager and husband Vince Deltito just that.

“I see him as my guardian angel because he protects me, he makes me feel safe,” she says.

“Obviously, the music industry and the clubbing industry can be a vulnerable place for a girl. I’m always in safe hands when he’s around.”

See the full shoot with Havana Brown inside tomorrow’s Stellar.

When it comes to combining their personal and professional lives, she adds: “It has worked brilliantly. I think it would be really hard to do what I do where you tour and you’re in the night-life and have a partner outside that world. We’re together all the time.”

If Deltito’s name is familiar, there is good reason: a generation grew up knowing him as pop performer Vince Del Tito on the hit TV series Young Talent Time, where he sang ‘(I’ve Had) The Time Of My Life’ with Dannii Minogue in 1988.

Brown says she idolised the show and actually went to The Johnny Young Talent School (now called the Mighty Good Talent School) to pursue her showbiz dreams.

As for Deltito, she reveals, “I remember being at the school and his face was everywhere, all over that school, and it’s so strange to think that I ended up marrying him. It’s so bizarre.”

Two years have passed since Brown released her last single, ‘Forever Young’, and

11 years since her compilation Club Mix came out.

Havana Brown in DJ mode at Melbourne’s Marvel Stadium last September. Picture: Supplied/Sam Tabone

Havana Brown at the opening of Nadia Bartel’s Henne retail store in Sydney last year. Picture: Henne

But now she’s embracing a fresh sound. “This new era, I’m indulging in the Afro-House scene because I’ve been inspired by a lot of the music that has been coming out of Europe,” she explains.

“It’s a mix between [music from the German electronic label] Keinemusik and the traditional Havana Brown that people know.”

In a sign of a changing industry, Brown, 40, says if she were just starting out, she would study marketing alongside music. “It’s almost the most important thing now,” she says. “You need to work your socials like it’s a full-time job. I would never

have guessed that social media would take over and be so vital for our careers.

“It’s great in some ways – and horrible in some ways, too. In the beginning, it was a way for your fans to know what you were doing and your club [tour] route. Now, it’s just as important for you to be a marketing genius and an artist.”

Read Stellar’s exclusive interview and see the shoot with Havana Brown. Inside The Sunday Telegraph (NSW), Sunday Herald Sun (VIC), The Sunday Mail (QLD) and Sunday Mail (SA) tomorrow. For more from Stellar and the podcast Something To Talk About, click here.

Originally published as ‘The clubbing industry can be a vulnerable place for a girl’: Aussie DJ Havana Brown’s night-life warning