Live at Manning Bar in Camperdown: Honey Dijon

To understand Honey Dijon is to understand dance music as lineage. Coming of age amongst Chicago’s Black, Latin and queer club culture, she was immersed in the world created by figures including Ron Hardy and Frankie Knuckles, while looking outward to the dancefloors shaped by Larry Levan, David Mancuso and Nicky Siano. It is a history she refuses to separate from the music being played today.

“I stand on their shoulders,” Dijon says of the artists who came before her. She carries that history into every set, moving through music like a living collage of the cultures and sounds that shaped her artistic identity - disco, acid, gospel, techno and classic house, alongside funk, soul, R&B and Detroit techno.

Her influence now extends far beyond the booth. Dijon co-produced Beyoncé’s “COZY” and “ALIEN SUPERSTAR” from RENAISSANCE, bringing the language and history of Chicago house into one of pop music’s defining dance records. She has also remixed Madonna and released two albums of her own, including 2022’s Black Girl Magic.

Fashion exists as another extension of the same worldview. Through her label Honey Fucking Dijon and collaborations across the fashion world, she translates the codes, attitude and self-expression of club culture into clothing - treating the dancefloor as a multidimensional space where sound, style, identity and possibility collide

Across everything she does sits the same commitment to the Black and queer communities from which house music emerged. As Dijon puts it, her work is “deeply rooted in queer Black culture and Black American music art forms” - not interested in becoming a role model so much as creating a “role possibility.”

This November, one of house music’s great storytellers returns to Eora.