Page 27 - Zone Magazine Issue 013

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And then hopefully that luck then takes over by ‘oh I know this person let’s listen to this track’. So, you have to have luck and you have to be able to make your own luck and I think those two things are really, really important. It’s not just about...well if you want to be EDM it’s not just about how plastic you look, it’s not just about how marketable you are, it’s also about luck.
The more you do within the industry, the more people are seeing who you are. For instance, we run record labels as well, we do reviews for magazines and obviously these interviews and it’s all about that bigger picture, being a part of the industry more than just being a producer or...
And not being frightened, I mean I just approached it two ways and I just approached it just by being me which was being opinionated.
You can approach it by being anodyne and malleable and do that. And maybe it gets you into the pop world easier because you’re seen as someone that’s containable and marketable. But again, you just have to be yourself. Really important because if you’re on stage and you’re not yourself, eventually it will catch up with you. Maybe you’ll be sitting in your castle thinking oh I’ve got loads of money but I feel really sad I don’t know why, that’s when it will catch up with you.
And as you get older you realise about money is whilst it gives you freedom, it doesn’t give you happiness.
The trouble is with pop; you can have the success and it can be over so quickly can’t it. I mean with...
that can mean years of poverty, insecurity, unhappiness. I had a few of those years. And I didn’t want to do anything else. But there’s lots of people that you don’t get to interview that sit in this chair that also have years of insecurity, years of poverty and believe and don’t get to sit in this chair, so then the luck comes in as well and you can make your own luck, it’s so important to say that.
So, my next question basically was going back to DJ’ing. Resident DJ versus touring DJ? Which would you say was the most rewarding?
I think resident DJ is done in many, many clubs. I mean I used to be resident at Fuse, play four or five times a year, I now play once a year which technically still makes me resident but it’s not resident DJ’ing. And I think you cannot be a headlining, international DJ if you’re a resident.
I think you should have a residency to start off so you learn how the crowd reacts, how you can tease the crowd. I mean I was watching a documentary on DJ AM after my car accident actually because some of our lives are quiet parallel, although he was a drug addict, and he could play with people’s emotions just with lyrics of tracks. So, he’d be bored and he’d start a fight with loads of bro’s in America just by having these heavy tracks on. So, you have to learn if you’re resident how things happen, how things work.
So, when I first started I was a resident, I was playing in small clubs in Brighton every single week, Friday and Saturday, and you learn, you learn things.
there’s no I do a club and I hadn’t and in those days, you had to find the 12 inch records and I’ll get them before him perhaps, maybe he’ll get some before me. And then you grudgingly sort of give a compliment when they play something that you didn’t think of. But that’s how it was and that’s how we all started. And Brighton was a really good place for that.
I wanted to ask you a bit about your love for Hip Hop. I understand that in the early days you found a lot of influence from it?
Yeah a lot of education. Because what people aren’t perhaps aware of, no matter what schooling system you enter into, history is generally government sponsored. So, the way that we grew up in England was that you know we sort of won the war alone. And the Americans came along maybe three days before the end of the party and came in there, neatly forgetting that Stalin perhaps provided millions upon millions upon millions of cannons fodder that overwhelmed the Germans from the other side.
So, you learn that history and its government sponsored, it doesn’t, no one really, I think they should actually, at least when you’re young, definitely teach domestic science so that us guys don’t have to be dependent upon women on a way that is unnatural for both sexes. But I also think that they should teach philosophy so you get given what are called the facts and then you try to determine is it a fact, is it representative of something. And then when Hip Hop came along it was the underdog.
I didn’t really know anything about American policy, I didn’t really know anything, because there was Alistair Cook’s America which was very, very nice but as a gentleman’s rendition of what America was and almost like it still was a colony of England for some reason. But you got some sort of idea. But Hip Hop really showed the social imbalances that were prevalent in the system and then you look into it and then you discover that actually the American white political system would make sure that buses couldn’t get over bridges cos they built the bridges too low for the busses so that it kept the blacks and whites separated, but of course it wasn’t apartheid which everyone realised was evil cos it’s indefensible because it wasn’t subtle. Whereas the American
I read somewhere that John Digweed was around at the same sort of time and he was DJ JD.
Exactly that’s the other thing. So, it
depends what type of career you want, if
you want to be a flash in the pan, earn
millions and then fuck off and be a lawyer
or accountant because you actually studied
other things, fine, do that, be clever. But if
you want to be in this for the full term...I
mean I did an artist panel yesterday and
I’ve always thought I was one of the few
people that put all their chips on red or
black and just hope it would carry through
for the rest of your life, but every single
artist that I was interviewing, so if I said
‘so what you going to do after this?’ ‘I don’t
know’. They are fully invested in
themselves and that’s what you also have
to do, you have to be fully invested. Now __________________________________________________________________________________
Yeah he was outside my club giving out flyers for his nights.
Oh, really?
Yeah. But that’s how it was in those days. And people look back with romanticism and say there was a camaraderie but there was, there was a camaraderie to a degree but we were the original outsiders, well I definitely was, and we didn’t like to talk to anyone else. It was like ‘no I’m a DJ you think you do but’...and I love John now, he’s a super cool guy. I didn’t not like him then but it was like
" You have to have luck and you have to be able to make your own luck and I think those
two things are really, really important. "