Bake played Ormside Projects for Expert Death on 4 July, then headed to Euston Station the next morning to get home to Glasgow. Somewhere in that station, someone took his backpack. Inside: his laptop, his harddrives, his medicine, his wallet, his earplugs, his headphones. He reported it to police, but a stolen bag doesn't come back the way a stolen phone sometimes does.

What's actually irreplaceable isn't the hardware. It's what was on it. "I've lost the majority of my current music collection, which kills me," Bake wrote. "I'm not sure how I will bounce back from that."

Why does a DJ still carry music that can vanish forever?

Streaming and cloud backups have made a lot of creative work recoverable after theft or disaster. DJing hasn't fully caught up. Working sets, edits, promos, unreleased collaborations and years of digging still live on physical drives for a huge number of touring DJs, because that's how the culture has always worked and because a lot of that material was never meant to exist anywhere public. A stolen laptop bag isn't just an inconvenience. For someone whose entire creative archive rides in it, it's closer to a house fire.

Bake isn't the first person this has happened to in a London venue in the past few years. In May 2025, the London duo The Menendez Brothers had a bag stolen from directly in front of the decks while they were mid-set at fabric, one of the city's most-monitored clubs. Inside were years of collected music and new unreleased material they'd been building. They posted footage of the theft and appealed publicly for its return. It's the same story with a different postcode: years of work, gone in the time it takes to walk past a booth.

Why hasn't the scene fixed this already?

Cloud backup for DJ archives is neither expensive nor technically hard, and most touring DJs know it. The gap isn't awareness, it's the road: gig life doesn't leave much room for disciplined backups between overnight trains, early flights and the next booking. Promoters and venues carry some of that responsibility too. A DJ's rig sitting unattended at a booth for the two minutes it takes to get robbed is a known risk at exactly the kind of packed, high-traffic rooms where fabric and Euston Station both sit.

FAQ

What exactly did Bake lose in the theft? His backpack contained his laptop and harddrives holding most of his current music collection, along with his medicine, wallet, earplugs and headphones; he says the music loss is what hurts most since it isn't backed up elsewhere.

Has this happened to other DJs recently? Yes. In May 2025, London duo The Menendez Brothers had a bag containing years of collected music and unreleased tracks stolen from in front of the decks while performing at fabric.

Was the bag recovered? As of this report, no recovery has been confirmed for Bake's stolen backpack; the theft has been reported to the police.