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No DJ is as obsessively scrutinised as Alexander Coe. Sasha can expect every track he adds to his set list to be noted and disssected by legions of trainspotting admirers. His famous residency at Shelleys in Stoke on Trent qualified him for the role of DJ messiah, and as clubs got super, Mixmag made him their superman, but despite years of adoration he’s remained a fun and friendly fellow. This interview took place when he was first enraptured by the possibilities of Ableton and the papers were filled with the death of dance music.
Is the buzz of DJing still the same for you?
The buzz now, or the buzz when I was 18? The whole scene was different then. Everything was edgier and more underground. It all felt like it could fall apart at any minute. DJing at warehouse parties in Manchester, you never knew what was going to happen. That was a real buzz. But I just played in Buenos Aires in an outdoor stadium to 23,000 people and they were going fucking mental, it’s an amazing buzz. Doing things like my residencies in the states and coming back to play Fabric every now and again. It’s still a massive buzz.
Are you glad to see the superstar craziness crash?
I guess so. I was never comfortable on the cover of magazines. Hated it, hated doing that sort of stuff, but it’s part of the game isn’t it.
There was a symbiotic relationship between DJs like you, and Mixmag, and some of the clubs you played at. The three kind of fed into each other. So obviously it really helped you and your career.
Of course. I’m the first to admit that. As soon as I was on the cover of Mixmag I suddenly started getting people from Australia ringing me up to book me. And touring the world. Without my covers of Mixmag I wouldn’t have been able to develop my career the way it has. Of course there’s that relationship.
Am I glad to see it go? No I’m quite sad about the way it’s imploded in Britain. Some of those clubs were great, even though they did get a bit out of control. It was quantity over quality. There were too many big nights going on. And the people who were paying their hard-earned money to go into the clubs weren’t getting respected. There were so many mediocre nights on, so much mediocre music being put out. Everybody jumped on this huge bandwagon. It just got big fat and ugly and it needed some air let out of its tyres. It’s a shame cos in Britain they’ve just slashed the tyres completely. The rest of the world is still buzzing.
Did you ever feel like you were just a marketing tool?
Not really. But I was definitely shocked at some of the figures flying around, leading up to 2000, in terms of money that was getting offered. It was like what the fuck is going on?
Money offered to you?
To me and to other people, you know these things you hear.
Can you go on record saying what the most outrageous thing was?
The most outrageous thing was I turned down 50 grand to DJ for two hours.
Seriously?
I knew that as soon as I did that I’m going to fucking regret this.
Where was that?
I’m not telling you where it was or who offered me the money but... I was recording my album in Amsterdam. It was the last two weeks that I’d be in the studio and because I hadn’t actually DJed for four or five months I knew that in order to get my set together and do it properly I would have had to spend a couple of days sorting things out and I knew that I wouldn’t be able to do it properly. What I should have done is just get a load of tunes together got on a plane and taken the money and run, but I guess I just couldn’t in my right mind do that. Daft. Really daft. It was an insane time. Every weekend the amount of competition between clubs in England, it was crazy. And now there are five or six gigs in the UK that are worth playing. And they’re great: Fabric, Tribal sessions in Manchester, and it’s a shame. I used to be able to fill my diary up for three months just touring round the UK.
And it was all those provincial places that were really brilliant, like mansion in Bournemouth. All these little places out of the way. People used to go potty. That circuit doesn’t exist any more. Not for this sort of music. I’m sure people there are going out on Saturday nights, but they’re not listening to this sort of music. Or if they are it’s a local guy that’s playing it and the club owners aren’t paying him ten grand to fill a club.
But the rest of the world’s still fucking having it. Especially in the emerging markets like South America and China. It’s exciting to go out there now. I’m on my way out ot China in November for my second proper tour out there for two or three weeks. It was nuts last time. Beijing and Shanghai.
What size venues do you play?
They’ve booked me into these ridiculous sized venues. I think they were expecting fireworks to come out of my bum or something. But they booked me into these ridiculous... like the science museum in Shanghai. It was really, I praise the promoters for this tour, the productions were just amazing. Walked in there’s this huge sound system, amazing stages, but completely unfeasible venues. I mean the science museum had never had this sort of music. We didn’t start till midnight. The party’s supposed to go till four in the morning. Of course by half past midnight the police have turned up and there’s guns and riot batons everywhere. What the fucks going on? So all the parties got shut down apart form the smaller ones. But when I go back we’re doing much more realistic venues. I’ve never ever had to do press conferences like I had to in China. I felt like J-Lo or something. Fifty microphones and cameras everywhere.
Did the superstar thing ever affect what you were trying to do in the booth?
At certain times it did. When I toured too much. When it was all jammed together. It became this big grinding machine where I was just on tour. And it was never like that when I DJed in Manchester. The furthest I’d go would be Coventry. And I’d have maybe one or two gigs at the weekend and I’d spend all week at home just going through records, and I didn’t have a record contract. I didn’t have remixes to do. I didn’t have an agent, I didn’t have all that sort of stuff. My whole week would be built around the next weeks set.
Once it became this career that I had all my free time just got eaten up completely. It became much more of a business, and it was very important that I deliver the goods every Saturday. But I had much less time to prepare that. Which for me is why I embraced the digital side of things. I definitely find a lot of time I’m sat in a car or sat on a train or a plane; all that wasted time I can utilise it now and prepare myself for the next gig. As a travelling working DJ who’s constantly touring, I live out of airports, until the digital thing came along there is so much wasted time. But now...
Getting your set together in departure lounges?
Yeah, and doing edits in the departure lounge, making sure each gig has its own special moments. Preparing intros for a certain part of the world, and incorporating some music from that area. Just trying to do something interesting and special for each place. Which I think is important. people get disappointed if they hear a set they’ve downloaded off the internet, and then three months later you come to play their club and they hear 80% of what they’ve already heard and they’ve been listening to in their cars for a couple of months.
A hundred years ago a stand up comic could do the same jokes for years because there was no telly. For DJs it’s become like everyone’s watching you all the time.
Yeah, everyone’s watching you. I’m shocked. I’m fucking shocked. Sometimes I’ll play on Saturday night and then someone will forward me on Monday morning my tracklisting for the entire night, bar about three fucking tunes, and I’ve just got that stuff that week. It’s all brand new music. I’m playing out thinking I’m ahead of these bastards, and then I get the tracklisting forwarded to me virtually record for record, and I’m like fucking hell, how do these people know this stuff? Have they got my phone tapped? What’s going on? Drives me nuts. Well, it’s funny. The good thing about DJing with Ableton is you can change things around.
Outwit them?
You can slightly outwit them.
Why do you think you inspire such obsessive adoration?
It’s not just me.
It’s not just you, but it’s you in particular.
I definitely get the worst of them. Fucking weirdos.
I DJed with you at Fabric and the build up of 20 year old boys around the DJ booth...
It’s bizarre. If only it was 20 year old girls. It never is, is it?
Does that disrupt what you do, or are you just used to it?
It is bizarre. When I’m in the club I don’t really notice it, unless its one of those booths where they can really get at you, I hate those. I like Fabric especially because I can’t see anyone around me and I just get into it on my own. I went through a little phase of looking through the forums but it’s bizarre. It’s like being sat in a toilet cubicle and you overhear your name and you’re not sure if you want to listen in case someone’s slagging you off.
Everybody’s got a fucking opinion and you can’t please these people. It’s quite unhealthy. I know a couple of other DJs used to finish their sets and go straight onto the forums and I’m like, what are you doing this for? It’s soul-destroying. And they used to get really upset by some of the things that were said. These kids are sat there off their nuts after the club and they’ve got nothing better to do than just sit there and type crap. I have a look every now and again. It’s a good reality check to see where the land lies.
Have any of them stepped over the line and become stalkers?
Yeah. It’s happened a couple of times. Its weird because I don’t seem to attract stalkers that want to get in touch with me, but they really hassle my managers and my agents and won’t stop phoning the office. I’ve had a couple of people that have invented whole relationships with me, that are just bizarre. They haven’t even got my phone number or my email address but they’ve created this relationship.
What, they pretend they’ve got some kind of business with you?
Yeah. Its very strange.
You had someone going round Northern Ireland pretending to be you.
That was years ago. He pulled it off mate. I got to take my hat off to him. I blew the gig out. I don’t know if the promoter arranged for this guy to turn up. I’d just shaved my head as well. the only time I’ve ever done it. Did this complete skinhead, when I was on tour, some kid shaved his head, played the set, apparently walked off with three grand or something. And noone knew any better until I announced that I wasn’t even in the country.
Do you like playing to huge audiences?
I’ve always struggled playing those big arenas. Apart from the early days when it was just one big acid house family and no-one gave a fuck and you’d play 'Bombscare' next to Denise Lopez, and it was all one sound and it wasn’t split up into all the of different genres.
Now I go to one of those festivals and you see how powerful that trance music thing is. You see 15,000 kids going nutty to one of those classical pieces of music. With a 145 bpm trance beat behind it. It works in that environment, but it’s a million miles away from where the scene came from. The only credible music I’ve ever seen work in that environment is the Chemical Brothers and Underworld. Underworld especially. They just know how to do it. It’s that stadium sound, and they’ve done it without being cheesy. But they’re one of the few that can actually pull it off.
What did it feel like when you first walked into the Haçienda and saw all that in action?
I’d been a couple of times before, when it was much more like jacking house music. Before the acid house thing had kicked in and everyone had gone completely bonkers. There was this dance troupe called Foot Patrol and they used to take over the dancefloor. They’d have almost like dance battles in the Haçienda, and it was kind of early Chicago jack house music, and people would get quite dressed up for it.
I didn’t go for a couple of months and I went back in and literally acid house had arrived and the whole place was day-glo and smiley faces. And everyone was doing this trance-dancing dance. My chin hit the floor. It was just amazing, the energy in the room. I’d never experienced anything like it. the music was just sounding like it was from another planet. Yeah, the energy was just shocking. I’d never seen a group of people behave like that before.
How much is what you do based on trying to recapture those moments?
My career has been based on my experiences at the Haç. The way I learnt how to build my DJ sets from people like Graeme Park and Jon DaSilva, and the sound of the Haçienda, especially in those first couple of years, the way they used to mix up all those different styles together, it was just inspiring. I always gravitated towards a more... I liked a lot of the big records they played at the end of the night. I also loved the stuff they played really early on. That idea of playing a long set, I always love doing that. And building that set towards the big records of the night.
My DJ career took off when the Haçienda went off on a certain route. Graeme Park and Mike Pickering veered off to playing a lot of the American records. The Italian stuff was getting all big piano breaks and I loved that, and our sounds really went in different directions. My first year of going to the Haçienda – pretty much religiously on Wednesdays and Fridays – that’s what shaped everything really. It was such an influential place: the sound of it, the design of it, the whole way it was done. The advertising they used: Peter Saville’s design for all the posters. It was just everything, it was a blueprint for everything as far as I’m concerned: for the whole scene.
Were you involved in any of those Blackburn raves?
Yeah. I used to go to them and then towards the end I started DJing at them.
Was breaking the law part of the appeal?
Absolutely. We were constantly dodging police. Police and riot vans. It got to the point where the police would be trying to find out where the warehouse was because if the police could get to the warehouse before the ravers they could shut the party down. So they started sending decoy convoys of 200 people, and then the real convoy would head off, get to the warehouse, and then those 200 people would end up getting round there. As long as the party got going it was fine. So it really was dodging the police. Especially at Blackburn. it really did feel like two fingers up at the law. But then they brought in the whole Criminal Justice Bill... There were a lot of reasons why that had to come to a stop. The gangsters moved in up there, it just got really messy, really nasty. Quickly actually.
Did you come down to London at all in that period?
No. I didn’t at all. So I missed whatever Shoom was. And I’m sure it was as influential to people down here. I guess if you were in the north it was the Haçienda; down here it was Danny Rampling and Paul Oakenfold.
Do you think with what you and John [Digweed] did in Twilo, you had a taste of that in inspiring America?
Maybe. I think the scene was already really going, developing. I think probably what we did in Orlando a few years before, even though we didn’t have a regular club there, but just the fact we were going to Orlando every two or three months and doing these massive parties there. I went out first and then a while later John came out and then the Chemical Brothers. We were some of the first ones to go out there and then it really opened up.
Twilo was more like the jewel in the crown, after eight, nine years of hard work touring the States, to get that gig was wow, to get a residency in New York. At that club as well, which used to be the Sound Factory, it was Junior’s club, to get into that place, where Danny [Tenaglia] had been a resident, and Frankie Knuckles, to get that residency and to hold on to it and for it to be so successful. It was really a defining moment.
I guess for people that were just getting into the scene maybe that did shape things. It was such a big huge space, and this low ceiling and this enormous sound system and this really dark room, and those minimal progressive dark records just sounded so brilliant in there.
As soon as the club went that music just seemed to lose its place and it didn’t seem to have a home any more. I pretty much stopped playing that sound within six months of that venue stopping. It just didn’t fit anywhere any more. The more minimal the records, the darker the records, it just sounded fantastic in there. It really did fit the room. How certain records just work at Fabric and you struggle to make them work anywhere else.
There was also a whole mood change in music around that time as well. Just after 9/11 you started hearing guitars on the dancefloor. It got much more like bootlegs and electroclash came along and the whole sound just became more eclectic.
Where would you say America’s at at now?
I’m really enjoying playing there at the moment.
Have the new rave laws affected US clubbing?
Definitely. People for a while were scared to be putting those kind of nights on. I think for a while people might have ditched our kind of nights in favour of hip hop nights, but I think hip hop nights bring their own brand of trouble. In the States especially.
Is America anywhere nearer to embracing dance music on a mainstream level?
I don’t think it ever will. I always said it was never gonna happen, and then a couple of years ago when the trance thing started to get really big, I thought maybe there’s a chance that somebody like Tiesto, or somebody of that nature to break through into the top ten, but then even with his remix of the Sarah McLoughlan thing, the biggest selling trance record ever, it still didn’t make an impact. I think a lot of the problem with America is the slow-moving nature of the charts; you have to have such a battle plan in place to get a record up the charts in the States, and you have to sit on it for so long. In its 12th 13th 14th week and it’ll start to slowly move up the charts, and your record company has to have a whole machine in place to keep going, and then you’ve got to do the daytime television, you got to do MTV.
Whereas the whole nature of dance music is about hearing stuff you haven’t heard before and loving it and slinging it away. When you go to a rock show you want to hear David Bowie do all his old hits. You don’t want to hear his new shitty album. But the thing about electronic music is, people want to hear the new stuff. Yeah, they might want a little classic thrown in at the end of the night just for a little smile, but the rest of the night they want to hear shit they haven’t heard before.
The idea of an electronic record staying in people’s record boxes and on the DJs’ playlists for 20, 30, 40 weeks, which is sometimes what it takes for these pop acts to ease their way up the charts, it doesn’t work like that. So it’s gonna need a Prodigy style act, an Underworld style act, but maybe from America, to really take it home. It’s gonna take stars, it’s gonna take characters, and that’s the one thing dance music’s always struggled with: we’re all faceless... We all like to sit in the dark. Except for Tiesto, he loves being main stage. It will take somebody like him to break it through, but I don’t think he’ll be the figurehead of a movement like it was in the UK.
Everything But The Girl charted in the US.
They did alright. DJ Sonique, I think that was a top ten record.
Top three.
It was, but it wasn’t the beginning of anything. It didn’t lead to anything else. Even the Prodigy’s album being number one didn’t lead to anything else. It’s all about stars and faces and characters, whereas in England you know, some weird Benny Benassi record or whatever, with a great video, can get into the top five. That’s the great thing about the British charts. Everyone’s got a shot at it. In the States it’s so much more calculated. There’s so much more at stake. These big record companies aren’t going to allow some shitty little record from a 19 year old kid in his bedroom to get to number one and knock Beyoncé off who they’ve invested ten squillion quid in. To go from selling 200,000 copies to selling ten million copies you’ve got to tap into that middle America thing, and the only way to do that, it seems, is with the power of a big record company behind you.
The internet radio things opening it all up. It’s great now that there are all these great little radio stations happening, broadcasting that sort of music, but its such a niche audience. It’s not the middle America crowd of people. They’re the people who make or break album artists in the states. I’m quite happy for it to be sitting in the underground and never get to that mainstream thing. It would just fuck it up anyway. Maybe that’s why the scene might have longer legs there. Maybe it’ll last a lot longer because it’s not going to go nuts like it did here.
So what’s all the fuss about Ableton? What can you do with it that you can’t do with vinyl or CD?
The spontaneous way you can re-edit things is just amazing. I had a problem with it last weekend. I turned up in Greece ready to play and we had no power supply. So I spent about four hours frantically burning CDs, and I went out and DJed on CDs and it was so weird because a lot of the tunes I’ve been used to playing are only four or five minutes long – I’m grabbing music from lots more diverse sources now – and I don’t realise how short they are. In the computer I can loop them up and I’m stretching them out and turning them into eight or nine minutes long. Extending the breakdowns. But when I had to DJ with CDs this weekend and the intro’s only eight bars it was really quite all over the place.
And I’ve only scratched the surface of it. People who use it much more as a live performance thing really start to get into the snippets of sounds and the cut and paste element of it. that’s when you can come up with some really interesting stuff. You’re almost writing and composing little hooks in the club and creating. When I was DJing with Josh Wink, he made me play a lot more cut and paste. He was looping up bits of his set over the top of my bit and sampling bits of mine and we were throwing things backwards and forwards and it became this wall of sound, from just snippets. Instead of playing whole tracks. There’s so many different ways to approach it.
The problem that it has is the interface is very much a studio interface. Its not very user friendly. I’m used to it but it took me a good four or five months practising every weekend before it started to feel like DJing. The first few months it didn’t feel like I was connected to it. I can understand that might scare people off a bit. I hope Ableton will listen to all the advice on the forums and come up with an interface that’s much more DJ friendly. They’re still quite off the mark.
The important thing about technology is when it becomes transparent. Like a CDJ1000 it took about two nights for the thing to become transparent. You don’t have to think about it any more. You just reach over and that button does that, and it’s just transparent. With Ableton it took a long time before it became transparent, and you still have to really focus on it. What I’ve realised in the last month or so is that for a while I was just doing pure Ableton sets and its so draining on your head. Every point in your set you could go a thousand different ways, and its quite daunting.
Isn’t that the problem with digital DJing in general – you’re paralysed by possibilities?
I had a couple of weekends where I didn’t have time to load up my computer so I was going 50/50 between the computer and then playing a couple of CDs and I just found my sets sounded a bit more vibrant that way, and also I enjoyed it more. When you’re focusing 100% on that computer it can be quite taxing on your brain.
Just navigating all those tunes. With records you’ve got all those extra cues: the sleeves, the colours, the labels.
Well CD to records is another thing. That’s a whole other argument, looking through a record box and you get shapes in your head and colours, yeah and looking through a browser at names of records you really have to stay on top of what things are called. I mean I know what my records are called now. Three or four years ago I never remembered names of tunes at all.
When I’ve seen you DJ, your box looked like you’d just tipped it in from a dustbin, and then tipped it out again to start, and there’s stuff everywhere, stuff not in sleeves... Have you had to alter that?
Yeah, absolutely. It forces you to be a lot more organised. But it means every time I play out it’s different. I can play different styles of sets for different clubs and not just go on tour with the same box of records for two months. Now I’m getting a DVD of new music every week. That’s 40 or 50 tunes that are going into the pot. It’s allowing me to be a lot more on the ball and be playing new music all the time, and also it’s really fucking important the position I’m in, ’cos sets get leaked out over the internet and you get slagged so much if you play the same record over and over. There’s definitely a pressure to deliver something new and exciting every time you play out.
Cos the way you get so scrutinised...
Right. The fact that I can log into my server anywhere I am in the world and download straight into my laptop and be playing out that night with new music. Before, if I was on tour for a long time I’d have to get sent a box of records from London, I had to make sure I had access to a set of decks. Now it’s like stuff goes straight onto my iPod and I’m in a taxi listening to new music and sorting things through. It’s definitely allowing me much more freedom to be spontaneous and throw new music in, cos I know it, rather than testing stuff out in the club.
What do you say to people who say DJs should play vinyl?
I see their argument. My girlfriend really loves vinyl. She’s constantly having a go at me and I see the attraction to it. I’m not sitting here saying this is the only way forward. It works for me and I like it. I also really enjoyed playing this weekend off CDs, when I was stuck without the computer. At the end of the day it’s DJing.
Someone might have heard me a year ago playing off CDs and then hear a set off Ableton and think Ableton sucks, but maybe they just don’t like the music this year. It’s just a format of playing records, but it’s not the only format. I think Ableton may well be superseded by another technology in the next sixth months. Maybe Pioneer might come out with something that looks like the CDJ1000 that’s got some hard drive in it that loops stuff up automatically. Who knows? As the technology moves forward I’m just embracing it.
To be honest I needed something to help me in my DJing career, ’cos I think I just got to the point where I was a bit, not bored but lethargic. I wasn’t feeling too inspired in 2003. I’d just had whole year of 2002 touring my ass of an not really enjoying it. And 2003 I was scratching my head wondering what I was going to do. And that was when I discovered the Ableton thing. For me it’s given me a massive shot in the arm and I’m really enjoying playing out again. I’m excited every weekend to go out and play, cos I know I’ve got a new armoury of tunes, especially when you’ve got old stuff in there that you haven’t played for years, and you can suddenly chop it about and find new records that mix perfectly with it. It’s exciting to be able to do that sort of stuff.
Is this a revolution? is there going to be a real split between people who use things like this – studio techniques live – and people who don’t?
I think it’s a huge change. Not everyone’s going to embrace it. But what it will mean is people are going to start getting used to hearing these kind of sets in clubs, and they’re going to start demanding it. So if you turn up with vinyl and start train-wrecking mixes, you’re gonna get hammered for it. With DJs like James Zabiela coming through who are really embracing the CDJs and sampling stuff live and really turning a DJ set into something more than just playing two pieces of vinyl, it definitely means the crowd are going to start looking for that sort of stuff.
I’m approaching this from my angle of having DJed for the last 17, 18 years. You give this new technology to an 18-year old kid who’s gonna approach it from a completely new set, that’s when fireworks will happen. That’s when maybe the next sound, the next generation of what a DJ performance is will come through. It probably won’t come from me, it’ll come from some 18, 19 year old kid who’s sat in his bedroom right now who’s downloaded it from the internet. Who’s approaching it from a different musicality sense. A completely different angle.
Ours is probably the last generation that thinks of music as objects. Teenagers now don’t have that. So someone with that conception and this equipment is going to be a very different DJ.
Absolutely. They’re gonna be a very different DJ. They’re going to approach it a very different way. Bring it on. It’s exciting. but still there are certain DJs who watching them spin records is mesmerising. Carl Cox, Jeff Mills. Watching DJ Shadow. I think he’s starting to embrace digital as well. Watching the turntablists do their stuff with vinyl. I can’t imagine them switching over to a keyboard and a mouse. But I think the technology, the interface of it will catch up.
Someone will come out with an interface where you hardly have to look at the computer. It’ll be all in one box and that’ll be that. It’s definitely the early days for the technology but it is the way for the future. Five years time computers in DJ booths will be completely normal. The idea of having 10,000 records on a hard drive sounds daunting to us now but in five years time that’ll be the norm. Everything that’s every been made will be catalogued in the DJ booth. So it’s gonna be about taste and programming.
And that’s really the thing I like. It takes out that whole thing about “Ooh he can beatmatch, isn’t that amazing.” he can mix things in key. Maybe in ’94 ’95 when we started doing those really long seamless mixes and everyone would be stood around the booth really buzzing on the fact that you’re holding mixes together for ages, that doesn’t really happen any more. Those kids don’t sit there going oh he’s mixing in key. The only time your mixing is noticed is if you fuck up. Mixing in key is like being able to kick a football if you’re a footballer.
This software takes it out of the equation. It takes it back to your ability to programme a night and where to drop a specific record. And also sourcing your music. As I said I’ve started buying records from all these weird and wonderful record shops. Where I didn’t do that before. And it doesn’t matter if I’ve only got a two-minute piece of music. It’s going into the computer I’ll just use it and stretch it out and utilise it in my set. It’s allowing me freedom to do stuff like that rather than wait for my next box of records.
It’s blurring the line between production and DJing.
I think at certain points in your set it can get like that. If you’re doing a 45 minute live set and you’re approaching Ableton like that, as a hybrid of a DJ set and a remix thing, then I think you could do something really exciting. Playing in a DJ Shadow sort of way, grabbing snippets of other peoples records. But you could only keep that up for 45 minutes or an hour maximum, or your head’d be fried. When I play a six hour set it’s only really the last hour or so when I start really getting four or five or six channels going. You really start remixing. For most of my set up to that point I’m just playing a track after a track.
Will it help convince people that the DJ is an artist?
I think this goes some way to maybe separate the men from the boys. People who are really into that producing side of things are really going to gravitate towards this. People that aren’t interested in it I don’t think they’ll find it useful. It just blows my head off sometimes when you have these spontaneous ideas and you grab an old record and layer it, and mix in an old classic. I love doing that sort of stuff.
It seems like it’s really given you the buzz back.
It has, absolutely. I was definitely in a bad state in 2003. I think I’d achieved in 2002 a lot of goals I’d been heading towards. Touring the states with the Delta Heavy thing, releasing my album, a lot of things happened in 2001, 2002. I got to 2003 and I was, right what the fuck shall I do now?
I definitely spent the summer of 2003 treading water I think: musically, and DJing. Not really knowing what to do with myself. And I think in general that year was a big breakpoint for electronic music. We’d been talking about the internet a few years beforehand, but 2003 was the year when the music industry took its first kick in the nuts. And especially for electronic music. Where the fuck is this going. What are we doing now? How’s this going to develop? And the software came along and I grabbed hold of it and it definitely showed me a way to move forward and stay interested. It’s not like I was bored, ’cos how can you be bored getting flown around the world and playing gigs and stuff, but I was definitely looking for something.
The cultural role of a DJ, you’ve seen it change from being someone who doesn’t get paid very much and does it for a laugh, and then it became this huge thing, and now it’s come back down to earth...
It’s come down to earth in this country. I would understand if you don’t travel how it would seem, from this point of view, standing in this country it looks like its all turned to shit, but I travel everywhere and it’s fucking vibrant everywhere. It’s kicking off everywhere
You don’t get a sense that it’s changing? It’s still on a high everywhere else?
It is on a high, yeah. It might not be that frenetic madness that was happening around 2000 when there was ridiculous money being offered and everybody was fighting each other for gigs, but its still keeping me really busy.
What’s the most preposterous treatment you’ve ever had as a DJ?
I think just getting flown around in private jets is ridiculous, and it’s happened a couple of times. It’s nice though, when people roll out the carpet for you.
Didn’t you have a police escort somewhere.
Yeah, I’ve had police escorts in the Philippines. That was brilliant because the traffic was literally not moving for 30 miles, and we got into the town centre it would normally take two or three hours and we got there in 15 minutes. Wish I could request one of those everywhere I went.
What are your ambitions now?
I don’t know. I’m scratching my head about that at the moment. I always had plans to really move into production and film scores and that sort of stuff and I’m not sure now. I spent some time in LA and I don’t really see myself living that life. I just don’t see it. To become part of that whole film world you have to live there and it changes people in a really weird way.
There are the famous Nick Gordon-Brown sleevenotes where he sets you up as an artist. How did you feel when that happened?
I think unless you’re making your own records or doing remixes it’s very difficult to put your hand up and say that’s what you are. But if you’re making your own records, producing your own stuff, and also getting into these new technologies where you can be doing your own little re-edits and remixes of songs in the club, it’s still a difficult argument to call yourself an artist I guess. But you are putting so much into it. It is a real creative expression. I do think what DJs do is a creative expression. It is art, it is an artform, so I guess we are artists, but I wouldn’t really wanna be standing on a soap box shouting about it.
Where do you think the whole trance sound has its roots?
It’s an amalgamation isn’t it really. Without those British crowds to egg it on I don’t think it would have quite got to some of the lengths it got to. But it had to come. Superstition and Eye-Q records in Germany. Superstrings and a lot of that stuff was a blueprint for it. There was some really kinda funky trance, quite trancey but funky, records that came out of Holland in the mid ’90s. It wasn’t that sound but it had that element to it. And I think that combined with that German sound, and then with the British edge to it, throwing these ridiculous breakdowns and drum rolls into it, and it just ended up... A lot of it had to do with DJs suddenly starting to travel about in between countries. the Dutch guys and the Germans. It all started, I think, that trans-migration had a lot to do with it.
Paul Van Dyk once cited you as a primary influence in
what he was doing in Germany. But I guess what he does now is quite
different...
Musically we were very close around 1994, ’95, we used to play together at E-Werk, and even though he played a lot faster, we used to do back-to-back sets. We were musically very close. It was only when Paul started playing at Gatecrasher his sound just went off into that area. And that whole trance thing kicked off.
Are there any interesting little scenes that you’ve come across in your travels? Or are we headed for global homogenisation?
No, if anything, that homogenisation is causing more of these underground pockets to happen. Little fucking afterhours parties in Mexico city that are just amazing. Energy levels through the roof. Dirty and seedy. That’s where I have the funnest times. And it’s all stuff that’s off the beaten track, stuff that isn’t written about. And that’s where it’s at, and that’s where it... Those illegal warehouse parties in the beginning, that’s where it all came from.
So you’re conscious that when you go to these places there’s always something very underground and very different?
If I’m doing a big party guarantee there’s some dirty little afterhours going on afterwards and its some...
...and the music will be indiginous?
Yeah. Local DJs playing wicked shit I’ve never heard before. It’s healthy, it’s thriving, it’s out there.
That kind of outlaw attitude, it’s embedded in dance culture really.
It’s the real shit. Those afterhours parties you hear about that are unannounced or unadvertised. They’re the things of dancefloor history and folklore, but they’re still going on and they’re really important. The commercial end of it will live and die by its sword, and we’ve been witness to that in the UK. But still that underground thing is going on. You go to the East end of London any Saturday night I guarantee there are loft parties going on, fucked up acid house music playing. Everywhere. Strobe lights, smoke machines. Everywhere.
Is the buzz of DJing still the same for you?
The buzz now, or the buzz when I was 18? The whole scene was different then. Everything was edgier and more underground. It all felt like it could fall apart at any minute. DJing at warehouse parties in Manchester, you never knew what was going to happen. That was a real buzz. But I just played in Buenos Aires in an outdoor stadium to 23,000 people and they were going fucking mental, it’s an amazing buzz. Doing things like my residencies in the states and coming back to play Fabric every now and again. It’s still a massive buzz.
Are you glad to see the superstar craziness crash?
I guess so. I was never comfortable on the cover of magazines. Hated it, hated doing that sort of stuff, but it’s part of the game isn’t it.
There was a symbiotic relationship between DJs like you, and Mixmag, and some of the clubs you played at. The three kind of fed into each other. So obviously it really helped you and your career.
Of course. I’m the first to admit that. As soon as I was on the cover of Mixmag I suddenly started getting people from Australia ringing me up to book me. And touring the world. Without my covers of Mixmag I wouldn’t have been able to develop my career the way it has. Of course there’s that relationship.
Am I glad to see it go? No I’m quite sad about the way it’s imploded in Britain. Some of those clubs were great, even though they did get a bit out of control. It was quantity over quality. There were too many big nights going on. And the people who were paying their hard-earned money to go into the clubs weren’t getting respected. There were so many mediocre nights on, so much mediocre music being put out. Everybody jumped on this huge bandwagon. It just got big fat and ugly and it needed some air let out of its tyres. It’s a shame cos in Britain they’ve just slashed the tyres completely. The rest of the world is still buzzing.
Did you ever feel like you were just a marketing tool?
Not really. But I was definitely shocked at some of the figures flying around, leading up to 2000, in terms of money that was getting offered. It was like what the fuck is going on?
Money offered to you?
To me and to other people, you know these things you hear.
Can you go on record saying what the most outrageous thing was?
The most outrageous thing was I turned down 50 grand to DJ for two hours.
Seriously?
I knew that as soon as I did that I’m going to fucking regret this.
Where was that?
I’m not telling you where it was or who offered me the money but... I was recording my album in Amsterdam. It was the last two weeks that I’d be in the studio and because I hadn’t actually DJed for four or five months I knew that in order to get my set together and do it properly I would have had to spend a couple of days sorting things out and I knew that I wouldn’t be able to do it properly. What I should have done is just get a load of tunes together got on a plane and taken the money and run, but I guess I just couldn’t in my right mind do that. Daft. Really daft. It was an insane time. Every weekend the amount of competition between clubs in England, it was crazy. And now there are five or six gigs in the UK that are worth playing. And they’re great: Fabric, Tribal sessions in Manchester, and it’s a shame. I used to be able to fill my diary up for three months just touring round the UK.
And it was all those provincial places that were really brilliant, like mansion in Bournemouth. All these little places out of the way. People used to go potty. That circuit doesn’t exist any more. Not for this sort of music. I’m sure people there are going out on Saturday nights, but they’re not listening to this sort of music. Or if they are it’s a local guy that’s playing it and the club owners aren’t paying him ten grand to fill a club.
But the rest of the world’s still fucking having it. Especially in the emerging markets like South America and China. It’s exciting to go out there now. I’m on my way out ot China in November for my second proper tour out there for two or three weeks. It was nuts last time. Beijing and Shanghai.
What size venues do you play?
They’ve booked me into these ridiculous sized venues. I think they were expecting fireworks to come out of my bum or something. But they booked me into these ridiculous... like the science museum in Shanghai. It was really, I praise the promoters for this tour, the productions were just amazing. Walked in there’s this huge sound system, amazing stages, but completely unfeasible venues. I mean the science museum had never had this sort of music. We didn’t start till midnight. The party’s supposed to go till four in the morning. Of course by half past midnight the police have turned up and there’s guns and riot batons everywhere. What the fucks going on? So all the parties got shut down apart form the smaller ones. But when I go back we’re doing much more realistic venues. I’ve never ever had to do press conferences like I had to in China. I felt like J-Lo or something. Fifty microphones and cameras everywhere.
Did the superstar thing ever affect what you were trying to do in the booth?
At certain times it did. When I toured too much. When it was all jammed together. It became this big grinding machine where I was just on tour. And it was never like that when I DJed in Manchester. The furthest I’d go would be Coventry. And I’d have maybe one or two gigs at the weekend and I’d spend all week at home just going through records, and I didn’t have a record contract. I didn’t have remixes to do. I didn’t have an agent, I didn’t have all that sort of stuff. My whole week would be built around the next weeks set.
Once it became this career that I had all my free time just got eaten up completely. It became much more of a business, and it was very important that I deliver the goods every Saturday. But I had much less time to prepare that. Which for me is why I embraced the digital side of things. I definitely find a lot of time I’m sat in a car or sat on a train or a plane; all that wasted time I can utilise it now and prepare myself for the next gig. As a travelling working DJ who’s constantly touring, I live out of airports, until the digital thing came along there is so much wasted time. But now...
Getting your set together in departure lounges?
Yeah, and doing edits in the departure lounge, making sure each gig has its own special moments. Preparing intros for a certain part of the world, and incorporating some music from that area. Just trying to do something interesting and special for each place. Which I think is important. people get disappointed if they hear a set they’ve downloaded off the internet, and then three months later you come to play their club and they hear 80% of what they’ve already heard and they’ve been listening to in their cars for a couple of months.
A hundred years ago a stand up comic could do the same jokes for years because there was no telly. For DJs it’s become like everyone’s watching you all the time.
Yeah, everyone’s watching you. I’m shocked. I’m fucking shocked. Sometimes I’ll play on Saturday night and then someone will forward me on Monday morning my tracklisting for the entire night, bar about three fucking tunes, and I’ve just got that stuff that week. It’s all brand new music. I’m playing out thinking I’m ahead of these bastards, and then I get the tracklisting forwarded to me virtually record for record, and I’m like fucking hell, how do these people know this stuff? Have they got my phone tapped? What’s going on? Drives me nuts. Well, it’s funny. The good thing about DJing with Ableton is you can change things around.
Outwit them?
You can slightly outwit them.
Why do you think you inspire such obsessive adoration?
It’s not just me.
It’s not just you, but it’s you in particular.
I definitely get the worst of them. Fucking weirdos.
I DJed with you at Fabric and the build up of 20 year old boys around the DJ booth...
It’s bizarre. If only it was 20 year old girls. It never is, is it?
Does that disrupt what you do, or are you just used to it?
It is bizarre. When I’m in the club I don’t really notice it, unless its one of those booths where they can really get at you, I hate those. I like Fabric especially because I can’t see anyone around me and I just get into it on my own. I went through a little phase of looking through the forums but it’s bizarre. It’s like being sat in a toilet cubicle and you overhear your name and you’re not sure if you want to listen in case someone’s slagging you off.
Everybody’s got a fucking opinion and you can’t please these people. It’s quite unhealthy. I know a couple of other DJs used to finish their sets and go straight onto the forums and I’m like, what are you doing this for? It’s soul-destroying. And they used to get really upset by some of the things that were said. These kids are sat there off their nuts after the club and they’ve got nothing better to do than just sit there and type crap. I have a look every now and again. It’s a good reality check to see where the land lies.
Have any of them stepped over the line and become stalkers?
Yeah. It’s happened a couple of times. Its weird because I don’t seem to attract stalkers that want to get in touch with me, but they really hassle my managers and my agents and won’t stop phoning the office. I’ve had a couple of people that have invented whole relationships with me, that are just bizarre. They haven’t even got my phone number or my email address but they’ve created this relationship.
What, they pretend they’ve got some kind of business with you?
Yeah. Its very strange.
You had someone going round Northern Ireland pretending to be you.
That was years ago. He pulled it off mate. I got to take my hat off to him. I blew the gig out. I don’t know if the promoter arranged for this guy to turn up. I’d just shaved my head as well. the only time I’ve ever done it. Did this complete skinhead, when I was on tour, some kid shaved his head, played the set, apparently walked off with three grand or something. And noone knew any better until I announced that I wasn’t even in the country.
Do you like playing to huge audiences?
I’ve always struggled playing those big arenas. Apart from the early days when it was just one big acid house family and no-one gave a fuck and you’d play 'Bombscare' next to Denise Lopez, and it was all one sound and it wasn’t split up into all the of different genres.
Now I go to one of those festivals and you see how powerful that trance music thing is. You see 15,000 kids going nutty to one of those classical pieces of music. With a 145 bpm trance beat behind it. It works in that environment, but it’s a million miles away from where the scene came from. The only credible music I’ve ever seen work in that environment is the Chemical Brothers and Underworld. Underworld especially. They just know how to do it. It’s that stadium sound, and they’ve done it without being cheesy. But they’re one of the few that can actually pull it off.
What did it feel like when you first walked into the Haçienda and saw all that in action?
I’d been a couple of times before, when it was much more like jacking house music. Before the acid house thing had kicked in and everyone had gone completely bonkers. There was this dance troupe called Foot Patrol and they used to take over the dancefloor. They’d have almost like dance battles in the Haçienda, and it was kind of early Chicago jack house music, and people would get quite dressed up for it.
I didn’t go for a couple of months and I went back in and literally acid house had arrived and the whole place was day-glo and smiley faces. And everyone was doing this trance-dancing dance. My chin hit the floor. It was just amazing, the energy in the room. I’d never experienced anything like it. the music was just sounding like it was from another planet. Yeah, the energy was just shocking. I’d never seen a group of people behave like that before.
How much is what you do based on trying to recapture those moments?
My career has been based on my experiences at the Haç. The way I learnt how to build my DJ sets from people like Graeme Park and Jon DaSilva, and the sound of the Haçienda, especially in those first couple of years, the way they used to mix up all those different styles together, it was just inspiring. I always gravitated towards a more... I liked a lot of the big records they played at the end of the night. I also loved the stuff they played really early on. That idea of playing a long set, I always love doing that. And building that set towards the big records of the night.
My DJ career took off when the Haçienda went off on a certain route. Graeme Park and Mike Pickering veered off to playing a lot of the American records. The Italian stuff was getting all big piano breaks and I loved that, and our sounds really went in different directions. My first year of going to the Haçienda – pretty much religiously on Wednesdays and Fridays – that’s what shaped everything really. It was such an influential place: the sound of it, the design of it, the whole way it was done. The advertising they used: Peter Saville’s design for all the posters. It was just everything, it was a blueprint for everything as far as I’m concerned: for the whole scene.
Were you involved in any of those Blackburn raves?
Yeah. I used to go to them and then towards the end I started DJing at them.
Was breaking the law part of the appeal?
Absolutely. We were constantly dodging police. Police and riot vans. It got to the point where the police would be trying to find out where the warehouse was because if the police could get to the warehouse before the ravers they could shut the party down. So they started sending decoy convoys of 200 people, and then the real convoy would head off, get to the warehouse, and then those 200 people would end up getting round there. As long as the party got going it was fine. So it really was dodging the police. Especially at Blackburn. it really did feel like two fingers up at the law. But then they brought in the whole Criminal Justice Bill... There were a lot of reasons why that had to come to a stop. The gangsters moved in up there, it just got really messy, really nasty. Quickly actually.
Did you come down to London at all in that period?
No. I didn’t at all. So I missed whatever Shoom was. And I’m sure it was as influential to people down here. I guess if you were in the north it was the Haçienda; down here it was Danny Rampling and Paul Oakenfold.
Do you think with what you and John [Digweed] did in Twilo, you had a taste of that in inspiring America?
Maybe. I think the scene was already really going, developing. I think probably what we did in Orlando a few years before, even though we didn’t have a regular club there, but just the fact we were going to Orlando every two or three months and doing these massive parties there. I went out first and then a while later John came out and then the Chemical Brothers. We were some of the first ones to go out there and then it really opened up.
Twilo was more like the jewel in the crown, after eight, nine years of hard work touring the States, to get that gig was wow, to get a residency in New York. At that club as well, which used to be the Sound Factory, it was Junior’s club, to get into that place, where Danny [Tenaglia] had been a resident, and Frankie Knuckles, to get that residency and to hold on to it and for it to be so successful. It was really a defining moment.
I guess for people that were just getting into the scene maybe that did shape things. It was such a big huge space, and this low ceiling and this enormous sound system and this really dark room, and those minimal progressive dark records just sounded so brilliant in there.
As soon as the club went that music just seemed to lose its place and it didn’t seem to have a home any more. I pretty much stopped playing that sound within six months of that venue stopping. It just didn’t fit anywhere any more. The more minimal the records, the darker the records, it just sounded fantastic in there. It really did fit the room. How certain records just work at Fabric and you struggle to make them work anywhere else.
There was also a whole mood change in music around that time as well. Just after 9/11 you started hearing guitars on the dancefloor. It got much more like bootlegs and electroclash came along and the whole sound just became more eclectic.
Where would you say America’s at at now?
I’m really enjoying playing there at the moment.
Have the new rave laws affected US clubbing?
Definitely. People for a while were scared to be putting those kind of nights on. I think for a while people might have ditched our kind of nights in favour of hip hop nights, but I think hip hop nights bring their own brand of trouble. In the States especially.
Is America anywhere nearer to embracing dance music on a mainstream level?
I don’t think it ever will. I always said it was never gonna happen, and then a couple of years ago when the trance thing started to get really big, I thought maybe there’s a chance that somebody like Tiesto, or somebody of that nature to break through into the top ten, but then even with his remix of the Sarah McLoughlan thing, the biggest selling trance record ever, it still didn’t make an impact. I think a lot of the problem with America is the slow-moving nature of the charts; you have to have such a battle plan in place to get a record up the charts in the States, and you have to sit on it for so long. In its 12th 13th 14th week and it’ll start to slowly move up the charts, and your record company has to have a whole machine in place to keep going, and then you’ve got to do the daytime television, you got to do MTV.
Whereas the whole nature of dance music is about hearing stuff you haven’t heard before and loving it and slinging it away. When you go to a rock show you want to hear David Bowie do all his old hits. You don’t want to hear his new shitty album. But the thing about electronic music is, people want to hear the new stuff. Yeah, they might want a little classic thrown in at the end of the night just for a little smile, but the rest of the night they want to hear shit they haven’t heard before.
The idea of an electronic record staying in people’s record boxes and on the DJs’ playlists for 20, 30, 40 weeks, which is sometimes what it takes for these pop acts to ease their way up the charts, it doesn’t work like that. So it’s gonna need a Prodigy style act, an Underworld style act, but maybe from America, to really take it home. It’s gonna take stars, it’s gonna take characters, and that’s the one thing dance music’s always struggled with: we’re all faceless... We all like to sit in the dark. Except for Tiesto, he loves being main stage. It will take somebody like him to break it through, but I don’t think he’ll be the figurehead of a movement like it was in the UK.
Everything But The Girl charted in the US.
They did alright. DJ Sonique, I think that was a top ten record.
Top three.
It was, but it wasn’t the beginning of anything. It didn’t lead to anything else. Even the Prodigy’s album being number one didn’t lead to anything else. It’s all about stars and faces and characters, whereas in England you know, some weird Benny Benassi record or whatever, with a great video, can get into the top five. That’s the great thing about the British charts. Everyone’s got a shot at it. In the States it’s so much more calculated. There’s so much more at stake. These big record companies aren’t going to allow some shitty little record from a 19 year old kid in his bedroom to get to number one and knock Beyoncé off who they’ve invested ten squillion quid in. To go from selling 200,000 copies to selling ten million copies you’ve got to tap into that middle America thing, and the only way to do that, it seems, is with the power of a big record company behind you.
The internet radio things opening it all up. It’s great now that there are all these great little radio stations happening, broadcasting that sort of music, but its such a niche audience. It’s not the middle America crowd of people. They’re the people who make or break album artists in the states. I’m quite happy for it to be sitting in the underground and never get to that mainstream thing. It would just fuck it up anyway. Maybe that’s why the scene might have longer legs there. Maybe it’ll last a lot longer because it’s not going to go nuts like it did here.
So what’s all the fuss about Ableton? What can you do with it that you can’t do with vinyl or CD?
The spontaneous way you can re-edit things is just amazing. I had a problem with it last weekend. I turned up in Greece ready to play and we had no power supply. So I spent about four hours frantically burning CDs, and I went out and DJed on CDs and it was so weird because a lot of the tunes I’ve been used to playing are only four or five minutes long – I’m grabbing music from lots more diverse sources now – and I don’t realise how short they are. In the computer I can loop them up and I’m stretching them out and turning them into eight or nine minutes long. Extending the breakdowns. But when I had to DJ with CDs this weekend and the intro’s only eight bars it was really quite all over the place.
And I’ve only scratched the surface of it. People who use it much more as a live performance thing really start to get into the snippets of sounds and the cut and paste element of it. that’s when you can come up with some really interesting stuff. You’re almost writing and composing little hooks in the club and creating. When I was DJing with Josh Wink, he made me play a lot more cut and paste. He was looping up bits of his set over the top of my bit and sampling bits of mine and we were throwing things backwards and forwards and it became this wall of sound, from just snippets. Instead of playing whole tracks. There’s so many different ways to approach it.
The problem that it has is the interface is very much a studio interface. Its not very user friendly. I’m used to it but it took me a good four or five months practising every weekend before it started to feel like DJing. The first few months it didn’t feel like I was connected to it. I can understand that might scare people off a bit. I hope Ableton will listen to all the advice on the forums and come up with an interface that’s much more DJ friendly. They’re still quite off the mark.
The important thing about technology is when it becomes transparent. Like a CDJ1000 it took about two nights for the thing to become transparent. You don’t have to think about it any more. You just reach over and that button does that, and it’s just transparent. With Ableton it took a long time before it became transparent, and you still have to really focus on it. What I’ve realised in the last month or so is that for a while I was just doing pure Ableton sets and its so draining on your head. Every point in your set you could go a thousand different ways, and its quite daunting.
Isn’t that the problem with digital DJing in general – you’re paralysed by possibilities?
I had a couple of weekends where I didn’t have time to load up my computer so I was going 50/50 between the computer and then playing a couple of CDs and I just found my sets sounded a bit more vibrant that way, and also I enjoyed it more. When you’re focusing 100% on that computer it can be quite taxing on your brain.
Just navigating all those tunes. With records you’ve got all those extra cues: the sleeves, the colours, the labels.
Well CD to records is another thing. That’s a whole other argument, looking through a record box and you get shapes in your head and colours, yeah and looking through a browser at names of records you really have to stay on top of what things are called. I mean I know what my records are called now. Three or four years ago I never remembered names of tunes at all.
When I’ve seen you DJ, your box looked like you’d just tipped it in from a dustbin, and then tipped it out again to start, and there’s stuff everywhere, stuff not in sleeves... Have you had to alter that?
Yeah, absolutely. It forces you to be a lot more organised. But it means every time I play out it’s different. I can play different styles of sets for different clubs and not just go on tour with the same box of records for two months. Now I’m getting a DVD of new music every week. That’s 40 or 50 tunes that are going into the pot. It’s allowing me to be a lot more on the ball and be playing new music all the time, and also it’s really fucking important the position I’m in, ’cos sets get leaked out over the internet and you get slagged so much if you play the same record over and over. There’s definitely a pressure to deliver something new and exciting every time you play out.
Cos the way you get so scrutinised...
Right. The fact that I can log into my server anywhere I am in the world and download straight into my laptop and be playing out that night with new music. Before, if I was on tour for a long time I’d have to get sent a box of records from London, I had to make sure I had access to a set of decks. Now it’s like stuff goes straight onto my iPod and I’m in a taxi listening to new music and sorting things through. It’s definitely allowing me much more freedom to be spontaneous and throw new music in, cos I know it, rather than testing stuff out in the club.
What do you say to people who say DJs should play vinyl?
I see their argument. My girlfriend really loves vinyl. She’s constantly having a go at me and I see the attraction to it. I’m not sitting here saying this is the only way forward. It works for me and I like it. I also really enjoyed playing this weekend off CDs, when I was stuck without the computer. At the end of the day it’s DJing.
Someone might have heard me a year ago playing off CDs and then hear a set off Ableton and think Ableton sucks, but maybe they just don’t like the music this year. It’s just a format of playing records, but it’s not the only format. I think Ableton may well be superseded by another technology in the next sixth months. Maybe Pioneer might come out with something that looks like the CDJ1000 that’s got some hard drive in it that loops stuff up automatically. Who knows? As the technology moves forward I’m just embracing it.
To be honest I needed something to help me in my DJing career, ’cos I think I just got to the point where I was a bit, not bored but lethargic. I wasn’t feeling too inspired in 2003. I’d just had whole year of 2002 touring my ass of an not really enjoying it. And 2003 I was scratching my head wondering what I was going to do. And that was when I discovered the Ableton thing. For me it’s given me a massive shot in the arm and I’m really enjoying playing out again. I’m excited every weekend to go out and play, cos I know I’ve got a new armoury of tunes, especially when you’ve got old stuff in there that you haven’t played for years, and you can suddenly chop it about and find new records that mix perfectly with it. It’s exciting to be able to do that sort of stuff.
Is this a revolution? is there going to be a real split between people who use things like this – studio techniques live – and people who don’t?
I think it’s a huge change. Not everyone’s going to embrace it. But what it will mean is people are going to start getting used to hearing these kind of sets in clubs, and they’re going to start demanding it. So if you turn up with vinyl and start train-wrecking mixes, you’re gonna get hammered for it. With DJs like James Zabiela coming through who are really embracing the CDJs and sampling stuff live and really turning a DJ set into something more than just playing two pieces of vinyl, it definitely means the crowd are going to start looking for that sort of stuff.
I’m approaching this from my angle of having DJed for the last 17, 18 years. You give this new technology to an 18-year old kid who’s gonna approach it from a completely new set, that’s when fireworks will happen. That’s when maybe the next sound, the next generation of what a DJ performance is will come through. It probably won’t come from me, it’ll come from some 18, 19 year old kid who’s sat in his bedroom right now who’s downloaded it from the internet. Who’s approaching it from a different musicality sense. A completely different angle.
Ours is probably the last generation that thinks of music as objects. Teenagers now don’t have that. So someone with that conception and this equipment is going to be a very different DJ.
Absolutely. They’re gonna be a very different DJ. They’re going to approach it a very different way. Bring it on. It’s exciting. but still there are certain DJs who watching them spin records is mesmerising. Carl Cox, Jeff Mills. Watching DJ Shadow. I think he’s starting to embrace digital as well. Watching the turntablists do their stuff with vinyl. I can’t imagine them switching over to a keyboard and a mouse. But I think the technology, the interface of it will catch up.
Someone will come out with an interface where you hardly have to look at the computer. It’ll be all in one box and that’ll be that. It’s definitely the early days for the technology but it is the way for the future. Five years time computers in DJ booths will be completely normal. The idea of having 10,000 records on a hard drive sounds daunting to us now but in five years time that’ll be the norm. Everything that’s every been made will be catalogued in the DJ booth. So it’s gonna be about taste and programming.
And that’s really the thing I like. It takes out that whole thing about “Ooh he can beatmatch, isn’t that amazing.” he can mix things in key. Maybe in ’94 ’95 when we started doing those really long seamless mixes and everyone would be stood around the booth really buzzing on the fact that you’re holding mixes together for ages, that doesn’t really happen any more. Those kids don’t sit there going oh he’s mixing in key. The only time your mixing is noticed is if you fuck up. Mixing in key is like being able to kick a football if you’re a footballer.
This software takes it out of the equation. It takes it back to your ability to programme a night and where to drop a specific record. And also sourcing your music. As I said I’ve started buying records from all these weird and wonderful record shops. Where I didn’t do that before. And it doesn’t matter if I’ve only got a two-minute piece of music. It’s going into the computer I’ll just use it and stretch it out and utilise it in my set. It’s allowing me freedom to do stuff like that rather than wait for my next box of records.
It’s blurring the line between production and DJing.
I think at certain points in your set it can get like that. If you’re doing a 45 minute live set and you’re approaching Ableton like that, as a hybrid of a DJ set and a remix thing, then I think you could do something really exciting. Playing in a DJ Shadow sort of way, grabbing snippets of other peoples records. But you could only keep that up for 45 minutes or an hour maximum, or your head’d be fried. When I play a six hour set it’s only really the last hour or so when I start really getting four or five or six channels going. You really start remixing. For most of my set up to that point I’m just playing a track after a track.
Will it help convince people that the DJ is an artist?
I think this goes some way to maybe separate the men from the boys. People who are really into that producing side of things are really going to gravitate towards this. People that aren’t interested in it I don’t think they’ll find it useful. It just blows my head off sometimes when you have these spontaneous ideas and you grab an old record and layer it, and mix in an old classic. I love doing that sort of stuff.
It seems like it’s really given you the buzz back.
It has, absolutely. I was definitely in a bad state in 2003. I think I’d achieved in 2002 a lot of goals I’d been heading towards. Touring the states with the Delta Heavy thing, releasing my album, a lot of things happened in 2001, 2002. I got to 2003 and I was, right what the fuck shall I do now?
I definitely spent the summer of 2003 treading water I think: musically, and DJing. Not really knowing what to do with myself. And I think in general that year was a big breakpoint for electronic music. We’d been talking about the internet a few years beforehand, but 2003 was the year when the music industry took its first kick in the nuts. And especially for electronic music. Where the fuck is this going. What are we doing now? How’s this going to develop? And the software came along and I grabbed hold of it and it definitely showed me a way to move forward and stay interested. It’s not like I was bored, ’cos how can you be bored getting flown around the world and playing gigs and stuff, but I was definitely looking for something.
The cultural role of a DJ, you’ve seen it change from being someone who doesn’t get paid very much and does it for a laugh, and then it became this huge thing, and now it’s come back down to earth...
It’s come down to earth in this country. I would understand if you don’t travel how it would seem, from this point of view, standing in this country it looks like its all turned to shit, but I travel everywhere and it’s fucking vibrant everywhere. It’s kicking off everywhere
You don’t get a sense that it’s changing? It’s still on a high everywhere else?
It is on a high, yeah. It might not be that frenetic madness that was happening around 2000 when there was ridiculous money being offered and everybody was fighting each other for gigs, but its still keeping me really busy.
What’s the most preposterous treatment you’ve ever had as a DJ?
I think just getting flown around in private jets is ridiculous, and it’s happened a couple of times. It’s nice though, when people roll out the carpet for you.
Didn’t you have a police escort somewhere.
Yeah, I’ve had police escorts in the Philippines. That was brilliant because the traffic was literally not moving for 30 miles, and we got into the town centre it would normally take two or three hours and we got there in 15 minutes. Wish I could request one of those everywhere I went.
What are your ambitions now?
I don’t know. I’m scratching my head about that at the moment. I always had plans to really move into production and film scores and that sort of stuff and I’m not sure now. I spent some time in LA and I don’t really see myself living that life. I just don’t see it. To become part of that whole film world you have to live there and it changes people in a really weird way.
There are the famous Nick Gordon-Brown sleevenotes where he sets you up as an artist. How did you feel when that happened?
I think unless you’re making your own records or doing remixes it’s very difficult to put your hand up and say that’s what you are. But if you’re making your own records, producing your own stuff, and also getting into these new technologies where you can be doing your own little re-edits and remixes of songs in the club, it’s still a difficult argument to call yourself an artist I guess. But you are putting so much into it. It is a real creative expression. I do think what DJs do is a creative expression. It is art, it is an artform, so I guess we are artists, but I wouldn’t really wanna be standing on a soap box shouting about it.
Where do you think the whole trance sound has its roots?
It’s an amalgamation isn’t it really. Without those British crowds to egg it on I don’t think it would have quite got to some of the lengths it got to. But it had to come. Superstition and Eye-Q records in Germany. Superstrings and a lot of that stuff was a blueprint for it. There was some really kinda funky trance, quite trancey but funky, records that came out of Holland in the mid ’90s. It wasn’t that sound but it had that element to it. And I think that combined with that German sound, and then with the British edge to it, throwing these ridiculous breakdowns and drum rolls into it, and it just ended up... A lot of it had to do with DJs suddenly starting to travel about in between countries. the Dutch guys and the Germans. It all started, I think, that trans-migration had a lot to do with it.
Paul Van Dyk once cited you as a primary influence in
what he was doing in Germany. But I guess what he does now is quite
different...
Musically we were very close around 1994, ’95, we used to play together at E-Werk, and even though he played a lot faster, we used to do back-to-back sets. We were musically very close. It was only when Paul started playing at Gatecrasher his sound just went off into that area. And that whole trance thing kicked off.
Are there any interesting little scenes that you’ve come across in your travels? Or are we headed for global homogenisation?
No, if anything, that homogenisation is causing more of these underground pockets to happen. Little fucking afterhours parties in Mexico city that are just amazing. Energy levels through the roof. Dirty and seedy. That’s where I have the funnest times. And it’s all stuff that’s off the beaten track, stuff that isn’t written about. And that’s where it’s at, and that’s where it... Those illegal warehouse parties in the beginning, that’s where it all came from.
So you’re conscious that when you go to these places there’s always something very underground and very different?
If I’m doing a big party guarantee there’s some dirty little afterhours going on afterwards and its some...
...and the music will be indiginous?
Yeah. Local DJs playing wicked shit I’ve never heard before. It’s healthy, it’s thriving, it’s out there.
That kind of outlaw attitude, it’s embedded in dance culture really.
It’s the real shit. Those afterhours parties you hear about that are unannounced or unadvertised. They’re the things of dancefloor history and folklore, but they’re still going on and they’re really important. The commercial end of it will live and die by its sword, and we’ve been witness to that in the UK. But still that underground thing is going on. You go to the East end of London any Saturday night I guarantee there are loft parties going on, fucked up acid house music playing. Everywhere. Strobe lights, smoke machines. Everywhere.
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