A successful New York techno DJ is returning to play a rare gala gig in town Wednesday — but his life sure is different now than when he was a resident of the East Village.
More than a decade ago, English downtown DJ Nicholas Ashley-Cooper unwittingly became the 12th Earl of Shaftesbury, due to a series of family tragedies, and was tasked with taking over his family’s abandoned 17th-century estate in England.
Recalls a New York pal, “Nick is a supercool, young guy. It’s pretty crazy: He moved to the East Village, was a DJ and got a lot of tattoos . . . then his father was murdered, his brother died and he inherited the earldom and this estate.”
As a 2015 Telegraph profile tells it: “With his shaggy hair, Doc Martens and faded gray jeans, [Ashley-Cooper] cuts an unlikely aristocratic figure.” But in 2005, Nick’s “father, the 10th Earl, went missing in France. His body was eventually found at the bottom of a ravine and his third wife . . . a Playboy model turned prostitute, and her brother were convicted of his murder.” Then, “six months later, the new earl, [Nick’s older brother] Anthony, 27, died of a heart attack while visiting Nick in Manhattan.” That’s when then-25-year-old Nick, a “raver with nocturnal habits and sleeve tattoos, found himself elevated to the noble line.”
A pal tells us: “He was doing really well as a DJ working big clubs in New York. He never expected to inherit any of this. The ‘Dowager Countess’ was behind bars. The estate was really falling apart at the time.” Nick got an MBA and painstakingly restored the 5,500-acre family estate, called St. Giles, to eventually win the Historic Houses Association and Sotheby’s Restoration Award. He and wife Dinah last year even made the cover of James Reginato’s Rizzoli book, “Great Houses, Modern Aristocrats.”
Wednesday, Nick’s back in New York DJing the Royal Oak Foundation’s Follies fund-raiser at the Prince George Ballroom to support the National Trust. Says a patron, “He still sometimes DJs at his estate for rare and special occasions.” Another adds, “Nick’s very much eager to get back to his roots . . . He definitely had fun back in the day.”