Page 24 - Zone Magazine Issue 013

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Dave Clarke is a DJ with an anarchist streak a mile wide and punk in his soul. Technologically, he’s an early adopter with the studio to prove it, but he also embraces sounds outside the staunch electronic dance remit, from Nick Cave to Savages to old favourites Bauhaus. Such music informs his attitude as, using Serato on a 13” MacBook Pro Retina for his ruthlessly effective, fat-free club sets, he pushes the worldwide boundaries of what techno and electro can be. After a break, recent years have seen him make his presence as a producer felt again, working with Dutch partner Mr Jones (Jonas Uittenbosch) as _Unsubscribe_ and dropping remixes ranging from John Foxx’s seminal synth-pop gem ‘Underpass’ to Gesaffelstein, Detroit Grand Pubas and Octave One. Not a week passes when he doesn’t live up to his nickname, the Baron of Techno, a moniker given him by the late, great BBC Radio DJ John Peel.
Dave Clarke was born and raised in Brighton, England, but currently resides in Amsterdam in the Netherlands. The offspring of a technology loving father and a disco-soul loving mother, it was always evident that Clarke would cut a swathe through music. As a youth, he ran away from home, sleeping in car parks and on beaches. He took lousy jobs in shoe shops, living off £5 a day, to subsidise his income from badly paid local DJ gigs - anything to further his involvement with music. “I didn't really engage at all with the outside world,” he recalls, “I was your typical disenfranchised JD Salinger-inspired young adult that used to hide in and behind music.”
Clarke’s debut release was in 1990 on XL, around the time the label was launching The Prodigy. He used the name Hardcore, a guise he then took to the legendary Belgian techno-rave imprint R&S where he released various EPs (some as Directional Force). By 1992 Clarke’s own label, Magnetic North, was on the rise and he unveiled the classic ‘Alkaline 3dh’ (as Fly By Wire), among others. A next level career boost was around the corner when his ‘Red’ trilogy were unleashed in 1994. These catapulted Clarke into a different league and he suddenly found himself remixing the likes of Kevin Saunderson’s Inner City, The Chemical Brothers, New
Order, Depeche Mode, Moby, Leftfield and Underworld. Undisputed landmarks in techno, DJ Mag rightly incorporated ‘Red’ in its All-Time Techno Top 100 list.
As a DJ, Clarke plays out most weekends across Europe and the world. There’s the same attention to detail each time, his sets swooping whip-smart along the cutting blade of techno and electro, backed up by a seasoned bag of DJ tricks in which his early hip hop roots clearly show.
He’s played Awakenings, I Love Techno, Lowlands, Pukkelpop, Glastonbury and Nature One, and developed a special relationship with Tomorrowland where he has his own stage.
Here he has showcased names such as Green Velvet, Chris Liebing, Jeff Mills and Ben Klock. Clarke also continues to be an absolutely key player in the Amsterdam Dance Event where his Dave Clarke Presents event at Melkweg has sold out consecutive years running.
So, that’s where we caught up with Dave, grabbing 20minutes of his time in between his busy schedule at Amsterdam Dance Event. Waiting in one of the apartments above the Dylan hotel wondering what Dave Clarke is really like. For 10minutes before he arrives, the anticipation kicks in, as you hear so many different opinions of these guys who are in the limelight. But, of course, those opinions must be put aside so that you focus on the interview and you make up your own mind.
Within a minute of Dave’s arrival, he was welcoming; interested in who Zone magazine are and where they’re from. I’ve met many of the people who have been at the top of their game in the music industry and it was immediately evident Mr Clarke was a gentleman, highly intelligent and extremely passionate about what he does.
Being at ADE (Amsterdam Dance Event) is what prompted my first question; Many of the producers and artists reading this are interested in how you get to this position that you are currently in. Obviously, everybody comes here to learn from guys like yourself. So, what mistakes do you think budding artists make trying to further their career?
I think the first mistake any, I don’t want to use the word artist because if you make those mistakes you’re almost not an artist I think. But the first mistake people do is try to emulate other people. So as opposed to...we all of us have influences and we wouldn’t be where we are without those influences, but we don’t try to become the influence itself and the best thing is to have multiple influences and try and assimilate all those different influences with a little bit of your own personality and then eventually with that, after a year, two,
three, four, five years, you become who you are. Now the problem is, this problem I don’t think really happens so much in techno, but within the EDM world the trans world I think it happens more because it’s much more about being a pop star...
So, when you have those questions asked to you when you’re at school, what do you want to be when you grow up, you say ‘I want to be a fire engine driver, a train driver’ no one says techno because, well maybe they’re not into it, but it’s such an interesting and deep thing. But if you say ‘pop star’ then that’s an easy thing. ‘I just want to be a pop star’. And a lot of these EDM guys are pop stars because of the marketing and everything that’s behind them, they’re very, very young, they got caught at a certain time and they could be marketed because they fulfil certain marketing potential. And so, a lot of these people that want to do that will try and emulate that so they’ll just be twitching knobs without realising what they’re doing because they think that’s what they should be doing. And when I was a kid I would build a guitar out of Lego and be in front of top of the pops and then smash it up afterwards without realising Pete Townsend had already done that. So, I was just trying to be me and I think the biggest issue is that a lot of people don’t try and be themselves because they’re not even aware what their own potential is, they just want to be that guy, on stage, with that amount of money and all the other things it comes with.
The trouble is, people relate that success with that particular sound without realising that people are actually buying into that person’s personality. Because what you put into that music is your personality at the end of the day. So, that’s my next question really; what are the beneficial things that you would say are the best ways to further someone’s career?
That’s really tough because no matter how talented you are. No matter how talented you believe you are, or no matter how talented people tell you you are, you need to have luck. Or some catalyst that you’re not even aware of. And I honestly believe that my catalyst and luck was John Peel. And Nick Hawkes actually from XL Recordings back in the day. But what people don’t tell you is you can make your own luck. At least try to facilitate it happening. So, I was trying to make my own luck, ironically writing for Mixmag Update for Generator Magazine, to get in the industry somehow so that people already knew who I was.
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feature interview [uk]
26 ZONE-MAGAZINE.IE