Latest / The Bob Lefsetz Podcast / Pete Tong

Transcript

Pete Tong · The Bob Lefsetz Podcast

• 0:08
  Speaker 1: Welcome, Welcome, Welcome back to the Bob Left Sets podcast.
• 0:12
  Speaker 1: My guest today is DJIT Big Clubs on Stage on
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: the Radio, d M entrepreneur Pete Tom Hi, Bob okay, Pete,
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: thank you. You're now doing these stage shows. You even
• 0:27
  Speaker 1: sold out two old two's with Abisa Classics. Tell me
• 0:32
  Speaker 1: about that. Yeah, basically, it's um It's started by me
• 0:36
  Speaker 1: getting invited to curate a prom The Proms are a
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: series of very famous season of classical concerts that have
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: been running in the UK for well over a hundred
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: years at the Royal Albert Hall, and they wanted to
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: do something a bit more contemporary. They were worried about
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: their audience kind of getting older and older and older,
• 0:54
  Speaker 1: and they wanted to kind of engage with the younger demographics.
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: So they reached out to BBC Radio One, where obvious
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: I've obviously been forever, and they said, you know, how
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: about you guys curating you know, coming up with an
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: idea that might work as a classical concert. So they
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: asked me as a bit of a kind of veteran
• 1:12
  Speaker 1: broadcaster there, and it happened to be an anniversary of
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: of me taking Radio One down to a b through.
• 1:18
  Speaker 1: It was like the twentieth anniversary, I think, in so
• 1:21
  Speaker 1: we came up with this idea of um, you know, curate,
• 1:24
  Speaker 1: you know, putting together a seventy minutes show. That was
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: the slot we were given. UM. And I thought, because
• 1:32
  Speaker 1: I've been there but not exactly that exact time here,
• 1:34
  Speaker 1: I thought the proms were outside of the problems inside
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: or the proms are predominantly inside the Royal Album Hall.
• 1:40
  Speaker 1: And they happened over the course of a month actually,
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: and it's pretty much every night, two shows a night,
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: and they might have done some think standalone things outside.
• 1:49
  Speaker 1: So anyway, I've never done anything like this before. This
• 1:52
  Speaker 1: was definitely outside my skill set. UM. But I was
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: introduced to Jules Buckley, who was a kind of contemporary
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: UM you know, UM orchestrator and conductor, and he worked
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: hand in hand with a with a kind of forward
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: thinking you know symphony orchestra called the Heritage Orchestra, and
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: they'd work with like the likes of the Basement Jackson
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: Goldie UM, someone that I was quite close to. So
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: you know, we we you know, we had this blind
• 2:19
  Speaker 1: date on the phone and we talked about the idea
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: and I I kind of got into it with him
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: how how it would work, and then I this, just
• 2:27
  Speaker 1: how long ago this was. This was January of the
• 2:30
  Speaker 1: year we did it, and we had six months to
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: plan it. And I basically thought, you know, why don't
• 2:36
  Speaker 1: we play a minute of each one of like all
• 2:38
  Speaker 1: the greatest records of all time and you know, dance
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: records and the Betha classics. And he said that would
• 2:44
  Speaker 1: take me like five years to to not take for
• 2:47
  Speaker 1: the sixty five players in the orchestra. So we cut it.
• 2:49
  Speaker 1: I cut it down to like twenty tracks. I mixed
• 2:52
  Speaker 1: it together in my studio and I gave it to
• 2:55
  Speaker 1: him and he started to, um, basically take these tracks
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: from the original form and then work out how an
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: orchestra would play them, and um. The interesting thing was
• 3:07
  Speaker 1: what was quite groundbreaking is I was able to get
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: him to mix tracks together, so we were going to
• 3:13
  Speaker 1: play everything live on stage, nothing on tape. Nothing. He
• 3:16
  Speaker 1: wasn't following any records I was playing or anything like that.
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: But we were able to do these segments, like fifteen
• 3:23
  Speaker 1: minutes segments where we worked through like five tunes, but
• 3:26
  Speaker 1: it would be seamless, and even with tempo changes and
• 3:29
  Speaker 1: everything like that. So we did this show on the
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: thirty first of July, I think it was twenty nine,
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: did July UM at the Royal Albert Hall. It was
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: an appointment. It was a one off thing that we
• 3:39
  Speaker 1: were going to do. But within about halfway through the
• 3:42
  Speaker 1: first song, five thousand people in the Royal Albert Hall
• 3:45
  Speaker 1: stood up started going crazy clapping and we looked around
• 3:49
  Speaker 1: at each other, went some some magics going on here.
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: So we got to end at the show, went backstage.
• 3:54
  Speaker 1: It was like, oh my god, what just happened there
• 3:56
  Speaker 1: because literally the entire audience didn't sit down for seventy minutes.
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: They just went mad, and we had we had kind
• 4:01
  Speaker 1: of down tempo, chill out moments in there as well,
• 4:03
  Speaker 1: but they still stood up. Just to be clear, if
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: you only had seventeen minutes seventy seventy, excuse me. So
• 4:09
  Speaker 1: we got backstage and was like, oh my god, you know,
• 4:12
  Speaker 1: like this was amazing. We've got to do it again.
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: But everything in terms of the proms and the BBC,
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: it was all kind of funded and underwritten, so it
• 4:20
  Speaker 1: was like no nobody really ever got a bill um.
• 4:23
  Speaker 1: But so it took a while to plan how to
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: take this show out on the road and it took
• 4:27
  Speaker 1: about eighteen months UM. But we announced some shows the
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: following March and we sold them out in a day
• 4:34
  Speaker 1: and we had one oh two on sale and we
• 4:37
  Speaker 1: worked out there as people don't know that's essentially yes,
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: it's like it's like the big arenas here, like Staples
• 4:42
  Speaker 1: Center or something like that, and we worked out there.
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: If we sold the lower bowl, we didn't know, like
• 4:47
  Speaker 1: eighteen months later what the demand would be like. UM,
• 4:50
  Speaker 1: but we sold it out. We sold the whole place
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: out in a day, and then we were like, oh
• 4:53
  Speaker 1: my god, we got to do another one, but I
• 4:54
  Speaker 1: think Justin Bieber was playing the next day and like
• 4:57
  Speaker 1: someone else the day before, so we couldn't get a
• 4:59
  Speaker 1: string of dates. But we ended up at the end
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: of sixteen with a with a show in Birmingham the
• 5:04
  Speaker 1: O two and then one match to all all arenas,
• 5:07
  Speaker 1: sold them all out. UM made a record that year
• 5:10
  Speaker 1: UM basically going back in the student into the Happy
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: Road studios actually, which was amazing, and we recorded the orchestra.
• 5:18
  Speaker 1: We recorded that set with you know, we redid it,
• 5:21
  Speaker 1: UM did it as a proper record. UM. The album
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: came out went to number one went gold on the
• 5:26
  Speaker 1: pop chart. It was so we were off to an
• 5:28
  Speaker 1: amazing start and here we are UM at the end
• 5:31
  Speaker 1: of we just did nine arena shows in the UK,
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: including to two sold out oh two. So it's um,
• 5:38
  Speaker 1: it's it's me up on stage with with sixty five
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: incredible musicians and Jules Buckley playing a selection of you know,
• 5:47
  Speaker 1: electronic music, dance music that spans back years UM. And
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: for me, it adds. It was it was really about
• 5:54
  Speaker 1: adding gravitas to these compositions. I think in the in
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: the annals of musical history, you know, dance music producers, DJs,
• 6:02
  Speaker 1: we have a bit of a chip on our shoulder
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: because we're not taken seriously like the Rock and Roll
• 6:06
  Speaker 1: Hall of Fame and all that stuff. MS and and
• 6:10
  Speaker 1: it to me it was like, well, this music that
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: was made in Chicago, New York, Detroit, you know, in Berlin,
• 6:15
  Speaker 1: in London, all all over the world, you know wherever,
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: um we can show that you know this one finger
• 6:21
  Speaker 1: wizardry that was done by these Detroit guys back in
• 6:25
  Speaker 1: the late eighties where they had a button on one
• 6:27
  Speaker 1: of the early Roland keyboards that says strings and they
• 6:31
  Speaker 1: played you know this incredible string part that we to
• 6:34
  Speaker 1: actually be able to go and do it with a
• 6:36
  Speaker 1: you know, a massive orchestra. Um. It just lifted people
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: and I think that's that was the magic of it. Okay,
• 6:42
  Speaker 1: So since there are no nothing on a hard drive,
• 6:46
  Speaker 1: we used to see tea what do you actually do
• 6:49
  Speaker 1: on stage? So basically um on the light. On the
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: live performance side, I'm I'm actually also playing along with him,
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: so you'll see me up there with with a bunch
• 6:58
  Speaker 1: of turntables and sheen and some drum pads and basically
• 7:03
  Speaker 1: there there are elements like weighty kind of wishes and
• 7:07
  Speaker 1: bangs and electronica in a lot of these productions that
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: an orchestra can't play. So I'm often spinning in a
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: like a stem um of of some electronics that actually
• 7:19
  Speaker 1: the that they can't provide that kind of adds euphor
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: I'm adding kind of euphoria, and occasionally I'm adding um
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: extra um percussion hits and stuff like that, and then yeah,
• 7:31
  Speaker 1: a lot of clapping. Okay, So what's the press? And
• 7:36
  Speaker 1: I'm kind of playing like the m M right right,
• 7:38
  Speaker 1: what's the press been like? Because you know there's so
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: much press in the UK and it can be vicious.
• 7:42
  Speaker 1: Now it's been it's been incredible. I mean I would say, um,
• 7:49
  Speaker 1: touch would um, it's been great. It's it it's I
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: tell you, I'll tell you what it is. It's it's
• 7:54
  Speaker 1: it's it's experiential. It's it's the orchestra. Is there a
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: back up? Is there? You know? Lee? Are there leasers?
• 8:02
  Speaker 1: What are you doing? Yeah? So on the there's a
• 8:05
  Speaker 1: two versions of the show, the A list version, which
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: is the one we've just done through the arenas. Um,
• 8:10
  Speaker 1: we've built a pretty big production. It's it's it's the
• 8:13
  Speaker 1: idea is we take people to a Betha for one night.
• 8:17
  Speaker 1: You know, we either taken them back because they've got
• 8:19
  Speaker 1: great memories of it, or we're taking them there for
• 8:21
  Speaker 1: the first time because they've never been there. So, um,
• 8:23
  Speaker 1: we've built, it's evolved over the five years and it's
• 8:26
  Speaker 1: got a little bit more dense and layered as we've
• 8:30
  Speaker 1: picked up material um and worked out what ideas work
• 8:33
  Speaker 1: and what ideas don't. So um, yeah, we what's going
• 8:37
  Speaker 1: on up on screen on on screen um compliments what
• 8:40
  Speaker 1: we're doing on stage. And as I said, not not
• 8:43
  Speaker 1: this year, but the year before. It starts with a plane,
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: you know, flying over the audience and we take you
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: to a bether for one night. And we've we've had
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: you know, departure boards up from the airport. We've done
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: all sorts of tricks and and and the show climax
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: is by this pretty special journey, um through the night
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: through a beether and then a bit and and dealt villa. Yeah,
• 9:06
  Speaker 1: the classic shot in a bee the old town um
• 9:10
  Speaker 1: rises up behind the orchestra and like it gives me
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: goose bumps talking about it. But that's like the emotional
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: like punch um. But we're always I'm always looking at
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: I mean for the first you know here, I am
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: like in my sixtieth year. I've been deejaying pretty much
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: since I was fourteen years old, and um, you know,
• 9:29
  Speaker 1: to be able to do this, I mean this, I
• 9:31
  Speaker 1: just didn't see this coming. You know, this was not
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: written in the book. You know. I always had a
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: day job to kind of compensate for my you know,
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: the way my DJ was going. And so it's it's
• 9:43
  Speaker 1: been fascinating so be able to be able to do
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: this stuff on that scale. Um, I'm learning a lot
• 9:48
  Speaker 1: and it's a lot of fun. And you know, you
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: see you you see the technology on stage that you know,
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: Metallic could take out or you know you two or
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: Coldplay or Kanye or someone um where as deviling and
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: we I can, like a couple of years later after
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: they've done it, I can kind of afford it, so
• 10:04
  Speaker 1: we can get a little bit of that. So we're
• 10:06
  Speaker 1: always like looking to push the envelope a bit in
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: terms of every year as the as the show goes on,
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: we we get a little bit more funding and we
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: can add another trick. Okay, so you are the driving
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: business force. It's basically your show. Well it's it's it's
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: my name at the top of the poster, but it's
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: a collaborative effort. It's I'm actually I'm talking about the
• 10:27
  Speaker 1: quick and I'm talking about the business end. I mean,
• 10:30
  Speaker 1: does everybody else you know the orchestra, They basically show
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: up when it's booked, But in terms of talking to
• 10:35
  Speaker 1: an agent, manager, etcetera. Picking out dates, is that all
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: fall on your head pretty much? I mean, um, there
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: there is a there is a little We formed the
• 10:46
  Speaker 1: company as a partnership which is me and Jules Buckley
• 10:49
  Speaker 1: and um Chris Wheeler, who's the principle of the Heritage
• 10:52
  Speaker 1: Orchestra and my management company actually, so a lot of
• 10:56
  Speaker 1: the everything else apart from the show tends to all
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: on me and my management um. And when it gets
• 11:03
  Speaker 1: to actually doing the show then and all making making
• 11:07
  Speaker 1: the records, it's very much me and jewels um and
• 11:09
  Speaker 1: and yeah, yeah, the orchestra turn up to play at
• 11:12
  Speaker 1: certain sessions. When it comes to actually doing the show,
• 11:15
  Speaker 1: obviously the orchestra part increases because we couldn't do it
• 11:19
  Speaker 1: without them. So and we have guests, you know, we
• 11:22
  Speaker 1: have a lot of guests come on. So we'll take guests, vocalists,
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: We've had, I mean, we've had um everyone from you know,
• 11:33
  Speaker 1: John like what I wanted to do because it's because
• 11:35
  Speaker 1: it's just it appealed initially to the kind of relapsed raver.
• 11:41
  Speaker 1: So it was it was quite that way if you
• 11:44
  Speaker 1: were an eight, if you were eight in the eighties
• 11:46
  Speaker 1: and you were going to like the clubs for the
• 11:48
  Speaker 1: first time in the raves, you know, all through the
• 11:50
  Speaker 1: kind of rise of the big clubs in the super
• 11:52
  Speaker 1: clubs in the nineties in the UK. You know, you
• 11:55
  Speaker 1: the interesting thing is by two, you know, the late um,
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: you never stopped loving the music. You you didn't really
• 12:04
  Speaker 1: want to grow older, but you've got families, you've got jobs,
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: you have got older. You don't want to go out
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: till four in the morning anymore, but you do come
• 12:09
  Speaker 1: and see peakes On and relive this this thing. Um so.
• 12:14
  Speaker 1: But I but being with my A and R head On,
• 12:16
  Speaker 1: it was like, I've never really looked backwards and done
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: celebratory greatest hits things, so I've always been trying to
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: push the envelope forward. So for me it was very important.
• 12:24
  Speaker 1: You know, we'll have classic artists back, but I wanted
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: to have young contemporary artists performing these old songs. So
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: from the get go we had John Newman, Um, we
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: had Air Maginade hartnett Um, you know, but I have
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: had Candy Statin, I have had Seal. We just had
• 12:41
  Speaker 1: Maxi Jazz from Faith Fus come out and join us
• 12:44
  Speaker 1: performing his own song, which was kind of took the
• 12:47
  Speaker 1: thing to a whole new level where you start having
• 12:49
  Speaker 1: the original artists whose music we are playing then come
• 12:52
  Speaker 1: back and perform with us. So um so it's a
• 12:55
  Speaker 1: it's a mix, you know, okay some of this so
• 12:57
  Speaker 1: but we had but you know, Becky Hills almost joint.
• 12:59
  Speaker 1: You know, she's a massive kind of contemporary singer in
• 13:02
  Speaker 1: the UK and she's done every tour. Beverley Night is
• 13:05
  Speaker 1: a veteran of you know who went on to be
• 13:07
  Speaker 1: a big star in the theater. Actually she's she's come
• 13:10
  Speaker 1: back and done it with us. But but then there's
• 13:12
  Speaker 1: always be the young ones as well. So okay, so
• 13:15
  Speaker 1: any shows booked for the future, well, the next UK
• 13:19
  Speaker 1: tour is already on sale, so that's. Um, We've got
• 13:22
  Speaker 1: one big date at the isle A White Festival next
• 13:24
  Speaker 1: year talking about glaston Read that might or might not happen,
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: and then what our arena run again, He's already on
• 13:29
  Speaker 1: sale for December. We did do it at the Hollywood
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: Bowl here a few years ago. Um, it was very
• 13:36
  Speaker 1: expensive thing to do. Um, and we haven't quite yet
• 13:40
  Speaker 1: worked out the model of how to bring it back
• 13:41
  Speaker 1: to America. That's challenge. But let's just say forgetting the economics,
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: working out the below the line stuff. Just talking about
• 13:49
  Speaker 1: the audience, do you think there is an arena audience
• 13:52
  Speaker 1: other than in Los Angeles and New York for this show?
• 13:56
  Speaker 1: We're we're were were working on it now, I think, um,
• 14:01
  Speaker 1: I my gut feels it's more like an installation that
• 14:04
  Speaker 1: maybe it's a celebration of the American electronics story from
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: the late nineties all the way through to two now,
• 14:11
  Speaker 1: and maybe it's home is more like something like Vegas.
• 14:14
  Speaker 1: That's having said that, you know, there is this um
• 14:18
  Speaker 1: you know, like k CRW do at the Bowl, you
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: know where they do that kind of it's funded by
• 14:24
  Speaker 1: that kind of season ticket model where people bring their picnics.
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: I mean I got educated to this a couple of
• 14:30
  Speaker 1: years ago that there is actually a circuit of those
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: places like the Hollywood Bowl. You know. Mark Geiger was
• 14:36
  Speaker 1: telling me, um that you can do that. You know,
• 14:38
  Speaker 1: probably could do nine, ten, twelve of those around the country.
• 14:41
  Speaker 1: So we're looking at that as well. Well. I guess
• 14:43
  Speaker 1: what I'm asking is most people agree that this sound
• 14:46
  Speaker 1: started in Detroit, but it is never once it was
• 14:50
  Speaker 1: picked up by the UK and Europe, it is never
• 14:52
  Speaker 1: really faded. We're here, it's going up and down. So today,
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: if you because you're a world wide guy, what is
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: the level of the music in the varying territories? Um, well,
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: I think it went from zero to a hundred over
• 15:10
  Speaker 1: the course of these the you know from from the
• 15:13
  Speaker 1: late eighties. Obviously in the the UK it peaked quickest.
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: It became mainstream, it moved the needle um in the charts,
• 15:20
  Speaker 1: in the pop charts, it moved the needle in the
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: major label business, and then it kind of started to
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: kind of collapse in the two thousand's and the rest
• 15:28
  Speaker 1: of the world started to pick up on it. You know,
• 15:29
  Speaker 1: the French got stronger, the Swedes got stronger, the Germans
• 15:32
  Speaker 1: got stronger, and Low and Behold by coming into two
• 15:36
  Speaker 1: you know, mid two thousand, five, six, seven eight e
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: d M. You know, the roots of DUM kicked in
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: the US and then the whole financial value moved over here.
• 15:46
  Speaker 1: So you know that again in major labels had hits
• 15:48
  Speaker 1: with Vichy and David Gettum Vegascot on board and paid
• 15:53
  Speaker 1: money that was astronomical. It was bigger than any fee
• 15:56
  Speaker 1: anyone had ever seen before, anyone in the world. So
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: we've gone through and that's peaked now but and and
• 16:01
  Speaker 1: and Vegas is still there, but it's not all consuming
• 16:05
  Speaker 1: like it was between two thousand and eight and two
• 16:08
  Speaker 1: thousand and twelve thirteen. So UM, you know, only the
• 16:12
  Speaker 1: strong survive now in Vegas, Like the biggest pop stars
• 16:15
  Speaker 1: are the most current pop stars in the electronic world.
• 16:19
  Speaker 1: But the and but the other right, the the other
• 16:23
  Speaker 1: rising value right now is um all the underground guys
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: that kind of that became superstars in a Betha are
• 16:30
  Speaker 1: now traveling around the world and they've got a slightly
• 16:33
  Speaker 1: different model. They're not really having hits, um, but they
• 16:35
  Speaker 1: are bringing huge value to their live shows from an
• 16:38
  Speaker 1: experiential point of view, and especially on the V I
• 16:41
  Speaker 1: P and the table scene. So that's all moved from
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: gathering around, you know, kind of David Getter to two
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: starting to gather around like Tail of Us and Solomon
• 16:49
  Speaker 1: and Black Coffee and people like that. So that's quite interesting. Um.
• 16:52
  Speaker 1: But I think the general thing with my record company
• 16:56
  Speaker 1: hat on and my agency hat on is that, um,
• 17:01
  Speaker 1: it's it's actually on the rise again. It's actually the
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: the the the economic value around electronic dance music is
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: going back up again and on a global level, and
• 17:12
  Speaker 1: it's time for a new generation. And it's some it's
• 17:15
  Speaker 1: pretty positive. Okay, So you're the major labels by the
• 17:18
  Speaker 1: way back into dance music big time, you know, rightly
• 17:21
  Speaker 1: or wrong. The the investment is flying back into dance
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: music because for the for the first time now the
• 17:26
  Speaker 1: obviously the streaming numbers are actually getting to a significant
• 17:29
  Speaker 1: level where you know, the pouts are bigger again. So I,
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: you know, you know my history with Roger Ane's London
• 17:36
  Speaker 1: Records f r R, I was, I was there at
• 17:38
  Speaker 1: the beginning and where you know where we were having
• 17:40
  Speaker 1: bidding wars in the nineties, you know, a hundred grand
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: for this, two hundred ground for that. It went crazy
• 17:45
  Speaker 1: and that, and you're seeing that again now in the
• 17:47
  Speaker 1: last twelve to eighteen months that those numbers are back out.
• 17:51
  Speaker 1: There are again major labels are battling each other to
• 17:54
  Speaker 1: get the rights to you know, the MEDUSA record or
• 17:57
  Speaker 1: you know, okay originally from the UK, but you live
• 17:59
  Speaker 1: in l A now, yeah, how long? Um, numerous reasons.
• 18:07
  Speaker 1: One one, I already always had too many jobs and
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: there was never a good time. You know, there's never
• 18:14
  Speaker 1: a good time to emmigrade. I think when I was
• 18:16
  Speaker 1: at London Records, UM, I had my first number one
• 18:21
  Speaker 1: record in America because I had signed Shakespeare's sister. We
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: had a record called Stay Um. London Records US had
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: opened guy called Peter Copkey and it's still run by
• 18:31
  Speaker 1: Roger Rams, right, Roger was running the whole thing, but
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: Copy was the head of the US and Osman was
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: in the mix as well with him, and they were like,
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: you know, you're you're the future of the label. Come.
• 18:41
  Speaker 1: You know, now is the time to come to America
• 18:44
  Speaker 1: and you've got a number one records. That would never
• 18:46
  Speaker 1: be a better time. But I got onto Radio one.
• 18:49
  Speaker 1: I had my first child in so that kind of
• 18:52
  Speaker 1: kai bosh that UM, and then I I got basically
• 18:58
  Speaker 1: my my I got remarried. My my second wife used
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: to live in l A. UM so she always wanted
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: to be American or that she's Brazilian, but she she
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: was in that she lived in l A when I
• 19:07
  Speaker 1: met her and UM, and then got deeper into this
• 19:10
  Speaker 1: WMME relationship, and you know, the center WM at least
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: back then was Los Angeles, and I thought, you know,
• 19:16
  Speaker 1: with the d M blowing up in America, and it's like,
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: if I was going to make the most of the opportunity,
• 19:20
  Speaker 1: now was the time. So it was. We went through it.
• 19:23
  Speaker 1: We only I told my mom I was coming for
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: a year. How many kids? How many kids do you have?
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: I've got four and two step kids, so six between us, okay,
• 19:31
  Speaker 1: and how many were the first wife family of the
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: second wife. They're only two ways to only two lives, okay.
• 19:37
  Speaker 1: So the first wife three kids, okay, So the first
• 19:41
  Speaker 1: three three kids. In the second one you have one
• 19:43
  Speaker 1: together and you have two step kids. So what you
• 19:46
  Speaker 1: know if you had your first kid in What are
• 19:48
  Speaker 1: your kids up to? They're all in music actually amazingly
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: and I never really pushed them into it. Um, they've
• 19:54
  Speaker 1: kind of done it by their own designs. And my eldest,
• 19:58
  Speaker 1: Joe um, goes by an name of Joe Hurts as
• 20:00
  Speaker 1: an artist, didn't take my name, which I quite thinks
• 20:03
  Speaker 1: quite cool. And he is kind of making futuristic kind
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: of R and B soulful bit of electronic influence. Um,
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: he's doing pretty well. He's got good Spotify numbers, good
• 20:14
  Speaker 1: Apple numbers, and so he's he's doing that. He's writing,
• 20:17
  Speaker 1: producing for other people and being an artist himself. And
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: he lives where he lives in London, and he is
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: now here's the interesting. But he's managed by his sister
• 20:26
  Speaker 1: who's a couple of years younger. So my daughter as
• 20:29
  Speaker 1: a manager, and she she got an intern job at
• 20:32
  Speaker 1: a sony label years ago and then just grew and
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: grew and grew on her and another guy from the
• 20:38
  Speaker 1: label ended up leaving and forming their own um label
• 20:41
  Speaker 1: and management company and plugging company actually called Juice Box,
• 20:44
  Speaker 1: and they run events. So she's doing that. She DJs
• 20:47
  Speaker 1: as well, and they've employed my younger he's twenty one,
• 20:53
  Speaker 1: and now he's like running like training under her and
• 20:56
  Speaker 1: doing loads of stuff as well. The three of them
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: work together. That's quite And does everybody get along? Yeah?
• 21:02
  Speaker 1: I mean the first wife said the first wave ever
• 21:03
  Speaker 1: get remarried. No, that's okay. So uh, let's ask a
• 21:11
  Speaker 1: general question for the uninformed. The uninformed looks at dance
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: music and they hear all the different genres house, chill,
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: I could go on and on. Can you do your
• 21:22
  Speaker 1: best to explain those different genres? Yeah, how she can
• 21:28
  Speaker 1: dance to chill? You can chill to have about that?
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: Bob okay, I go that. But there are obviously a
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: mob where there's deep house, there's a million other genres
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: and subjects I got. I was always a little bit
• 21:38
  Speaker 1: um spiky about genres because they get they get mishandled,
• 21:42
  Speaker 1: you know. So I don't know if it's if it's good,
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: it's good. If you like it, you like it. I
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: don't know, so, I mean, I guess you have to,
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: you know, label stuff, but I don't like the next
• 21:53
  Speaker 1: question is going to be what's what's happening next? No? No,
• 21:55
  Speaker 1: actually that was not going to be the next question.
• 21:58
  Speaker 1: If anything, I was going to go backward, and I
• 22:00
  Speaker 1: ultimately will, but I guess I will ask a question
• 22:03
  Speaker 1: a different way. Amongst our fans, are fans into the
• 22:08
  Speaker 1: different genres? Where do you find that certain people are
• 22:11
  Speaker 1: only into you know, drum and bass or chill or whatever. Um,
• 22:16
  Speaker 1: drum and bass tends to be a more of a
• 22:20
  Speaker 1: narrow thing. Um. Back in the day, you didn't used
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: to um the drummer bassed crew were very locked into
• 22:29
  Speaker 1: a certain thing. I mean, I I think things are
• 22:31
  Speaker 1: changing now. I think um. I mean I come from
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: time late eighties in the rave era and like going
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: into the early nineties, we played a bit of everything
• 22:40
  Speaker 1: and we're all our eyes all all the guys back then.
• 22:43
  Speaker 1: Eyes were opened by those trips, early trips to a
• 22:46
  Speaker 1: Betha where we saw a guy called Alfredo play all
• 22:50
  Speaker 1: you know, Chicago House, Detroit House, Italio House, German house
• 22:55
  Speaker 1: and Techno, and then he'd play in excess you know,
• 22:57
  Speaker 1: need you tonight. It fights six in the morning with
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: the sun rising, and everyone you know, like off their
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: trolley and I was like, this is amazing. They used
• 23:06
  Speaker 1: to play he'd played like the coolest most obscure underground record,
• 23:10
  Speaker 1: and then he'd play Stockaching and Wortman's production of Mandy Smith,
• 23:14
  Speaker 1: who was Bill Wyman's underage girlfriend. And we again it
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: was like, this is the coolest thing ever. And Chris,
• 23:22
  Speaker 1: you know, get another good example, you know, five underground
• 23:25
  Speaker 1: records and then m Josephing Chris Rear. It's like and
• 23:29
  Speaker 1: that was the blair E spirit. So we and we
• 23:31
  Speaker 1: all came back to London and Manchester back then, and
• 23:34
  Speaker 1: we also opened these clubs and we started doing the
• 23:36
  Speaker 1: same thing. You know, we get to the end of
• 23:38
  Speaker 1: the night and played depeche Mode or Chris Rear and
• 23:40
  Speaker 1: it would be ironic, but it was really cool. So
• 23:42
  Speaker 1: I like, you know, and we used to play a
• 23:44
  Speaker 1: bit of jungle, and we used to play a bit
• 23:45
  Speaker 1: of everything. And then something happened where everyone's got in
• 23:49
  Speaker 1: their lanes and if you ever stepped out of your lane,
• 23:51
  Speaker 1: you got smacked. Over the head. So, but I'd like
• 23:54
  Speaker 1: to think now with a younger audience that have kind
• 23:58
  Speaker 1: of grown up on Spotify and Apple streaming services, as
• 24:01
  Speaker 1: they start to step into clubs for the first time
• 24:03
  Speaker 1: because they're old enough and if they're curious to come
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: that they are actually they're a little bit more all
• 24:07
  Speaker 1: over the place because they've had because they didn't have
• 24:10
  Speaker 1: to buy the records exactly. I'm more I'm more concerned
• 24:15
  Speaker 1: about when I was thinking coming up here. My pet
• 24:18
  Speaker 1: subject really at the moment is like everyone's talking about
• 24:22
  Speaker 1: monetization and music, and like, you know, especially in the
• 24:25
  Speaker 1: electronic area, there's there's been a couple of great podcasts
• 24:28
  Speaker 1: on Resident Advisor about, um, you know, the fact that
• 24:32
  Speaker 1: the you know, these super these underground DJs or commercial
• 24:36
  Speaker 1: DJs are getting you know, tens of thousands, some cases
• 24:39
  Speaker 1: hundreds of thousands of dollars and pounds and euros to play,
• 24:43
  Speaker 1: but the music they're playing, the musicians whose music they're
• 24:47
  Speaker 1: playing are getting nothing, you know. Um, And that's there's
• 24:50
  Speaker 1: a real disparity there. Um. So that's that's a that's
• 24:55
  Speaker 1: a big issue out there in the electronic world. But
• 24:56
  Speaker 1: also and something that we're going to talk about big
• 24:58
  Speaker 1: time at I MS this year here. But I think, um,
• 25:01
  Speaker 1: the other thing for me is like, where is the
• 25:03
  Speaker 1: future of the curators? You know, I come from you.
• 25:06
  Speaker 1: My hero was John Peel. Um my my um my role.
• 25:12
  Speaker 1: I guess some you know, five plus years at Radio
• 25:15
  Speaker 1: one has been as you know, that's been an amazing
• 25:17
  Speaker 1: platform to be a curator. But in the world of
• 25:21
  Speaker 1: streaming and where the streaming services are basically the curators
• 25:25
  Speaker 1: and they seem to run popularity contest is where did
• 25:28
  Speaker 1: where does a curator in the next decade find his voice,
• 25:31
  Speaker 1: you know, to move the needles. There's so many questions
• 25:34
  Speaker 1: and streaming and we can address us. Let's go back
• 25:36
  Speaker 1: to the beginning. So you're in your sixtieth year, so
• 25:40
  Speaker 1: you're born in nineteen sixty. Where they grow up? Um,
• 25:44
  Speaker 1: I grew up in Kent. I was born at the
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: same hospital as Mick Jagger a few years later. Not yeah,
• 25:52
  Speaker 1: a few years later, but he reckons we're related by
• 25:54
  Speaker 1: the way. I finally bumped into him after all these years. Okay,
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: so you're in Kent. How many kids in the family,
• 26:01
  Speaker 1: just me and my brother, So it was too boys, um,
• 26:05
  Speaker 1: and we grew up in a We were born in Dartford,
• 26:08
  Speaker 1: which is a town where we grew up in a
• 26:09
  Speaker 1: village in the countryside. Um, and we I went to
• 26:13
  Speaker 1: boarding school and I was super young. Um, my dad
• 26:15
  Speaker 1: was busy, My mom was stressed. What did your father
• 26:19
  Speaker 1: do for a living? He was a well in English,
• 26:22
  Speaker 1: it's a funny name for it, called a turf accountant.
• 26:24
  Speaker 1: But he was a bookie, so he was in the
• 26:26
  Speaker 1: betting business. So he was have to ask because when
• 26:29
  Speaker 1: I first encountered your name, I thought it was a
• 26:32
  Speaker 1: stage name. But it's really your name, it's really my
• 26:35
  Speaker 1: name tongue, and it's not I'm not My dad didn't
• 26:37
  Speaker 1: run Chinese laundries. Would you have any idea where the
• 26:40
  Speaker 1: derivation is? Yeah, he he um. He did a search
• 26:44
  Speaker 1: and he's passed away now, but he told me that
• 26:47
  Speaker 1: it was actually it was all down to Saxon Anglo
• 26:50
  Speaker 1: Saxon Viking blood and there was a lot of tongs
• 26:53
  Speaker 1: in Scandinavia with like spelt like tongue or with a
• 26:56
  Speaker 1: name on the end, and it wasn't really Chinese at all. So, um,
• 27:00
  Speaker 1: with all these adverts you see now, like for DNA
• 27:03
  Speaker 1: and like the family tree or should My wife said
• 27:06
  Speaker 1: to me the other night we should do it again.
• 27:08
  Speaker 1: I don't want to do it. I don't want to
• 27:10
  Speaker 1: find out that I'm gonna die. Never mind all the
• 27:11
  Speaker 1: crazy relatives. But your brother is older or younger? Younger
• 27:15
  Speaker 1: four years younger? And what is he up to now?
• 27:18
  Speaker 1: He's he's in the UK still and he Um, he
• 27:21
  Speaker 1: works for a cable company putting cables under the ocean,
• 27:26
  Speaker 1: keeping us connected. Okay. And how close are you to him? Um?
• 27:31
  Speaker 1: Not that close? I mean, but close because we've always
• 27:34
  Speaker 1: come together, but it's not like we speak every day
• 27:37
  Speaker 1: now okay. And does he ever ask you for money?
• 27:43
  Speaker 1: Personal question? Um? I can answer you because he hasn't. No, No,
• 27:49
  Speaker 1: he has. And have you just given him money because
• 27:51
  Speaker 1: you were successful? No? Okay? How about your kids? Your
• 27:55
  Speaker 1: kids will sounding like they're doing. Are you the type
• 27:56
  Speaker 1: who says, hey, they have to find their own way?
• 27:59
  Speaker 1: Are you going to support them till they find the
• 28:00
  Speaker 1: wrong way? Or how does that work? A bit of both.
• 28:02
  Speaker 1: I think I've done a lot of learning in life, um.
• 28:05
  Speaker 1: And I've done a lot of work on myself on that.
• 28:08
  Speaker 1: And I think you're going through divorces really really tough,
• 28:11
  Speaker 1: and as the man who leaves the house. You know, Um,
• 28:15
  Speaker 1: you're torn all over the place in terms of doing
• 28:18
  Speaker 1: the right thing and the kind of guilt trip and
• 28:20
  Speaker 1: then you know, what do you do when you're with them?
• 28:23
  Speaker 1: You know, and you you kind of over you definitely
• 28:25
  Speaker 1: overcompensate at the start. But we've got a really good
• 28:28
  Speaker 1: balance now and there and they are growing ups now,
• 28:30
  Speaker 1: so it's you know, okay, but are they still on
• 28:32
  Speaker 1: the pay roll? Um no, No, one of them actually
• 28:37
  Speaker 1: actually does work for me a bit. So my oldest
• 28:40
  Speaker 1: does actually great that they find the wrong way I stop. No,
• 28:43
  Speaker 1: they don't know, they all, especially my daughter, Um, she's
• 28:47
  Speaker 1: quite entrepreneurial. But my son actually does work for the
• 28:50
  Speaker 1: BBC a year. He helps actually behind the scenes on
• 28:53
  Speaker 1: my show in terms of some of the engineering and
• 28:56
  Speaker 1: stuff like that. So so you go away to school
• 28:58
  Speaker 1: what they call on the UK public school? How old
• 29:01
  Speaker 1: are you when you go super young? Like ridiculously was
• 29:04
  Speaker 1: I was like seven or eight or something and I
• 29:06
  Speaker 1: went to boarding school and I can't I kind of
• 29:08
  Speaker 1: blanked out a lot of it. I have fond memories
• 29:10
  Speaker 1: of some of it, and then apparently I was very unhappy.
• 29:13
  Speaker 1: And how long did you stay there UM till I
• 29:17
  Speaker 1: was old enough to get the train on my own.
• 29:19
  Speaker 1: And then so I think till I was about thirteen. Well,
• 29:24
  Speaker 1: then I was old enough to get I could there
• 29:26
  Speaker 1: was because it actually wasn't that far away. Some kids
• 29:29
  Speaker 1: bored because you know, they board in Scotland because they
• 29:32
  Speaker 1: live on the south coast. But I actually lived very closely,
• 29:36
  Speaker 1: you know, twenty miles from the school, maybe not even
• 29:40
  Speaker 1: that UM. So I was a weekend border so I
• 29:43
  Speaker 1: would board during the week and go home at weekends
• 29:46
  Speaker 1: most of the time. But I was so when I
• 29:49
  Speaker 1: got to twelve or thirteen, I was I was old
• 29:51
  Speaker 1: enough to do the train journey on my own. Until
• 29:54
  Speaker 1: did you stay at that school? Yeah, all the way
• 29:57
  Speaker 1: through till um what they called a levels eighteen. Then
• 30:01
  Speaker 1: I never went to UNI. I was straight into UM.
• 30:04
  Speaker 1: You know, I was a pretty studious student until I
• 30:07
  Speaker 1: was sixteen. I got all my exams, and then I
• 30:10
  Speaker 1: was definitely a more distracted UM student in the last
• 30:14
  Speaker 1: two years because my music thing was starting to happen. Okay,
• 30:17
  Speaker 1: your father was a terrific account you were, I know,
• 30:20
  Speaker 1: I like terrif ac count I've read before, but I
• 30:22
  Speaker 1: wouldn't been able to pull out my reran. Were you
• 30:25
  Speaker 1: were aware of that? Yeah? I mean I was actually
• 30:27
  Speaker 1: my best subject at school was maths. So he I
• 30:30
  Speaker 1: would work in the back office of his bookmakers, which
• 30:35
  Speaker 1: is all legal in the UK, well as long as
• 30:38
  Speaker 1: I wasn't out front. Yeah, so I was being a
• 30:40
  Speaker 1: bookie in the UK legal where you had you had
• 30:44
  Speaker 1: tracked bookies and you had shot books. You have to
• 30:47
  Speaker 1: have different licenses, so you could be a bookie at
• 30:49
  Speaker 1: the track for the dogs or the horses. Um, and
• 30:52
  Speaker 1: that was a certain type of license. And my dad
• 30:53
  Speaker 1: didn't do that. He didn't he didn't do it for horses.
• 30:57
  Speaker 1: He did do it a little bit for dogs racing
• 30:59
  Speaker 1: gray hounds, but um, I I would go so on
• 31:03
  Speaker 1: the big race days like the Derby and the Grand National,
• 31:06
  Speaker 1: um and the Choltenham Gold Club, I would often go
• 31:10
  Speaker 1: in and work at the back office, probably when I
• 31:12
  Speaker 1: was thirteen fourteen, and I'd have to you know, work
• 31:16
  Speaker 1: out you know, someone bet fifty quid at five to
• 31:19
  Speaker 1: four and I do the bet calculations. So really, well,
• 31:23
  Speaker 1: how many people were working for him, I don't know,
• 31:25
  Speaker 1: five or six. Yeah, he had like three shops and
• 31:30
  Speaker 1: but it put me off gambling forever for like the
• 31:33
  Speaker 1: next question, it did because it was it did him
• 31:36
  Speaker 1: in basically, I mean he was There was an era
• 31:39
  Speaker 1: in the in um so we're talking about the late
• 31:42
  Speaker 1: seventies where the independent bookmaker could still make a good living.
• 31:46
  Speaker 1: But um, the the the chains or the conglomerates started
• 31:51
  Speaker 1: to rise. So there was there was two big companies.
• 31:53
  Speaker 1: One was called lab Brooks and the other one was
• 31:55
  Speaker 1: Joe Coral. And the fact that they had, you know,
• 31:57
  Speaker 1: once you start having thirty shops, forty shops, a hundred
• 32:01
  Speaker 1: shops in the UK, you could just offset your you know,
• 32:04
  Speaker 1: you just balanced the box where it's really really hard
• 32:07
  Speaker 1: for a guy with three shops to have a bad. Um.
• 32:10
  Speaker 1: Grand National where the favorite one, you know, and it
• 32:13
  Speaker 1: was always it was red There was his famous horse
• 32:15
  Speaker 1: called red Rum. And my mom will always and she's
• 32:17
  Speaker 1: still alive, um and whenever it gets the Grand National
• 32:20
  Speaker 1: Day and I call her from here and say what
• 32:22
  Speaker 1: we're gonna it was it's the one time I'll still
• 32:24
  Speaker 1: have a bet because I wanted to get my daughter
• 32:26
  Speaker 1: into it just to see, just to show her what
• 32:29
  Speaker 1: we used to do. And I rang her this year
• 32:32
  Speaker 1: just before the race started and she's still you know,
• 32:35
  Speaker 1: she's nine now, um, but she's still. I can't do that,
• 32:40
  Speaker 1: you know. It's like it's that's that's what he brought
• 32:41
  Speaker 1: your dad to his knees, that bloody race. Okay, so
• 32:53
  Speaker 1: he literally set the yards himself. I guess so. I
• 32:57
  Speaker 1: mean I think there was some kind I don't know,
• 33:00
  Speaker 1: I forgot now it worked. There was some kind of
• 33:02
  Speaker 1: correlation with what was going on on the track because
• 33:06
  Speaker 1: back then on TV you'd see the odds at the
• 33:09
  Speaker 1: course and I think, you know, they it was literally
• 33:12
  Speaker 1: people going around going, you know, has this horse got
• 33:14
  Speaker 1: all its shoes on? Is this one got his tail on?
• 33:16
  Speaker 1: You know? Is the jockey drunk? Is you know? Is
• 33:20
  Speaker 1: there information? You know that when we're not knowing? And
• 33:22
  Speaker 1: that would that would how someone would go around and
• 33:24
  Speaker 1: right the odds and then he would have to look
• 33:26
  Speaker 1: at those odds that were on TV because it was
• 33:28
  Speaker 1: before betfair or internet or anything like that, and he would, Um,
• 33:33
  Speaker 1: I guess, yeah, he could. He could give an extra
• 33:35
  Speaker 1: point or take a point away. Here they all do
• 33:37
  Speaker 1: what he wanted to do. So how did he do it?
• 33:40
  Speaker 1: In the end? It ended horribly. It was some he's
• 33:43
  Speaker 1: started having to bet. He was a gambler as well,
• 33:45
  Speaker 1: so he would he would take a load of bets
• 33:47
  Speaker 1: on and then have to kind of bet against the
• 33:49
  Speaker 1: book to books, and it just it started to unravel.
• 33:53
  Speaker 1: In the end, he was a very proud man and
• 33:56
  Speaker 1: he sold he sold out to um two lab Brooks
• 34:00
  Speaker 1: or Joke Corals, I think it was Labrook's, and then
• 34:02
  Speaker 1: he went um. He never really recovered from that. Actually
• 34:06
  Speaker 1: he went into he then him and my mom bought
• 34:10
  Speaker 1: a hotel and they went into the hotel business. Just
• 34:13
  Speaker 1: one big, big, quite big hotel in the town Gravesend,
• 34:18
  Speaker 1: and um, but the idea of serving other people and
• 34:20
  Speaker 1: just he just got very depressed about it, and he
• 34:22
  Speaker 1: was he was drinking too much. So okay, did he
• 34:25
  Speaker 1: sell out whichever one of the two couples it was
• 34:28
  Speaker 1: because he saw the future coming or because he'd lost
• 34:32
  Speaker 1: so much Okay, but there was enough money to buy
• 34:35
  Speaker 1: this hotel. Yeah yeah. And how long did they own
• 34:38
  Speaker 1: the hotel? Um? He he died in nineties three, so
• 34:45
  Speaker 1: um we probably had another year like we were winding,
• 34:49
  Speaker 1: had to wind it all up, so from from yeah,
• 34:52
  Speaker 1: late seventies to four probably and other than him disliking it,
• 34:56
  Speaker 1: was a good business. I think it was good for
• 34:58
  Speaker 1: a while. And he's grand his father did it and
• 35:01
  Speaker 1: it was so I think from the you know, after
• 35:03
  Speaker 1: the Second World War there was probably twenty years where
• 35:05
  Speaker 1: that was a very good business to be in. Yeah, okay,
• 35:09
  Speaker 1: So what exactly put you off gambling? It's just it's weird.
• 35:16
  Speaker 1: I just there's not I could. I mean, I've worked
• 35:19
  Speaker 1: in Vegas so often I've gotten it's just weird, you know,
• 35:23
  Speaker 1: like people talk about addiction or like, you know, people
• 35:27
  Speaker 1: always want to drink. It's just weird. It's it's not
• 35:30
  Speaker 1: it's gambling to me. It's just like I don't it's
• 35:33
  Speaker 1: like in my DNA that there's fear. There's somewhere I might.
• 35:36
  Speaker 1: I might. I'm quite curious about blackjack, and I might
• 35:39
  Speaker 1: occasionally go and throw, you know, you know, throw something
• 35:42
  Speaker 1: on a roulette table, just for a laugh, like I'm
• 35:43
  Speaker 1: talking about like once every ten years. But I got no,
• 35:46
  Speaker 1: I just don't have any. The only time I ever
• 35:48
  Speaker 1: bet is when I go to football matches in the UK,
• 35:52
  Speaker 1: and if I'm lucky enough to be invited to someone's box,
• 35:55
  Speaker 1: they bring when you're having dinner, they bring around a
• 35:58
  Speaker 1: sheet and you actually bet on the result. So I
• 36:00
  Speaker 1: actually do that because it's football and I'm mad. I'm
• 36:03
  Speaker 1: mad about football. Um, but there's no I just don't know.
• 36:06
  Speaker 1: It's just I think watching my dad obviously when from
• 36:08
  Speaker 1: when I was very young at seeing what it did
• 36:10
  Speaker 1: to him. Um, it's obviously just closed off that door.
• 36:15
  Speaker 1: And what about alcohol and drugs, Um, well, yeah, I
• 36:19
  Speaker 1: mean I've I've had periods of um of drinking not drinking.
• 36:23
  Speaker 1: So I think I think everything in you know, moderation
• 36:26
  Speaker 1: really Okay, So it's not that well I'm not sure.
• 36:29
  Speaker 1: It's not that you don't have an addictive personality. It's
• 36:32
  Speaker 1: like gambling is the thing too itself. Push that aside. Okay.
• 36:36
  Speaker 1: So if you are going to school and it's late
• 36:39
  Speaker 1: seventies from the US perspective, this is pub rock, Graham
• 36:45
  Speaker 1: Parker in the Room or whatever. Okay, wretch a little earlier,
• 36:50
  Speaker 1: like ninety two. Okay, So when did you get into music?
• 36:55
  Speaker 1: Very early age? I was My dad did get a
• 36:58
  Speaker 1: lot of albums and single and um, so I just
• 37:01
  Speaker 1: he was there was always records around the house and
• 37:03
  Speaker 1: I just became So he did get a lot. Yeah,
• 37:05
  Speaker 1: he was into music, so he bought a lot of albums,
• 37:07
  Speaker 1: and he had quite an eclectic taste. There would be
• 37:09
  Speaker 1: the Beatles and the Stones, but there would be um,
• 37:12
  Speaker 1: then there'd be the crooners like Dean Martin and Frank Snatcher.
• 37:15
  Speaker 1: But then there'd be Santana and like more exotic kind
• 37:18
  Speaker 1: of music, and like a lot of he'd buy like
• 37:20
  Speaker 1: a lot of like African drumming albums and stuff like that.
• 37:24
  Speaker 1: So he was always had these mad gatefold sleeves. Um
• 37:28
  Speaker 1: so I and I've still got some of them actually.
• 37:30
  Speaker 1: So there was music always around. I was always banging
• 37:33
  Speaker 1: things as a kid apparently, and then um, you know,
• 37:36
  Speaker 1: I had my piano lessons and stuff like that, but
• 37:38
  Speaker 1: rum drums is what I settled on. Okay, So how
• 37:40
  Speaker 1: long did you play the piano? Well, on and off
• 37:45
  Speaker 1: a few years, but but it never really stuck with
• 37:49
  Speaker 1: which I gratefully greatly with regret lessons. How long did
• 37:54
  Speaker 1: you take drum lessons or played drums? Probably from eleven
• 38:00
  Speaker 1: or twelve till till DJing really kicked in, which was
• 38:03
  Speaker 1: about fourteen fifteen. So I had a drum kit, a
• 38:06
  Speaker 1: Ludwig drum kit that you got me, and I used
• 38:08
  Speaker 1: to sit in our front room with the headphones on,
• 38:10
  Speaker 1: trying to play, trying to follow along with Keith Moon
• 38:12
  Speaker 1: and John Bonham. Okay, did you ever the first thing
• 38:15
  Speaker 1: I could ever play when we formed a school band
• 38:17
  Speaker 1: and we used to do Smoke in the Water by
• 38:19
  Speaker 1: Deep Purple and we could do hold your Head Up
• 38:21
  Speaker 1: by Argent. Of course, Um, I could play. I could
• 38:24
  Speaker 1: play almost every instrument on that song, and so yeah,
• 38:28
  Speaker 1: it was it was fun times. And we used to
• 38:31
  Speaker 1: we did some school concerts and we did a like
• 38:33
  Speaker 1: village hall concert and but one day I saw a
• 38:38
  Speaker 1: DJ at a school disco for the first time with
• 38:41
  Speaker 1: two belt drive turntables a little old at the time.
• 38:45
  Speaker 1: This is like, okay, so that's nineteen seventy five. Okay,
• 38:52
  Speaker 1: that was not happening in the US and the early
• 38:54
  Speaker 1: seventies we had a DJ. Well, this was not cool.
• 38:59
  Speaker 1: This was like wedding. So we had to turn tables
• 39:02
  Speaker 1: just so he didn't have to worry about a break
• 39:05
  Speaker 1: or was he mixing the two together and I'm mixing it?
• 39:08
  Speaker 1: Just just two turntables and like what looked like a house,
• 39:11
  Speaker 1: you know, a lampphraids taken from his house, and um, yeah,
• 39:16
  Speaker 1: it was a microphone. He was like, now and now
• 39:18
  Speaker 1: this is number two in the charts. It's like, you know,
• 39:21
  Speaker 1: and this was like a school dance. Was your school
• 39:24
  Speaker 1: boys only or girls too? It was boys only at
• 39:27
  Speaker 1: that stage, and just when I left in the sixth
• 39:30
  Speaker 1: form they started to introduce girls finally. So um, this
• 39:33
  Speaker 1: would have been just in the in the middle school
• 39:36
  Speaker 1: that what we called the O level years the GCSC
• 39:39
  Speaker 1: is so um, I can't remember exactly. Okay, so you
• 39:44
  Speaker 1: see the guy with the two belt driven turn tables,
• 39:46
  Speaker 1: and then I just thought, well, my dad's got loads
• 39:48
  Speaker 1: of records. This makes a much better noise than I'm
• 39:50
  Speaker 1: making with my band. I see much more in control
• 39:53
  Speaker 1: with that. So firstly it was me and a friend
• 39:55
  Speaker 1: of mine and my school friend. So we did a
• 39:58
  Speaker 1: bit of a double act of like what what what
• 40:01
  Speaker 1: you decide you're going to do it? There's no rehearsal
• 40:05
  Speaker 1: because you think you know everything kind of yeah yeah,
• 40:08
  Speaker 1: So then when do you say, I'm gonna go out
• 40:10
  Speaker 1: and get gigs? Well, then I took over the school
• 40:13
  Speaker 1: this go so I can't remember. We had one at
• 40:15
  Speaker 1: the end of every term. So what do you said?
• 40:17
  Speaker 1: It said hiring somebody you know? Volunteer yourself, because I
• 40:20
  Speaker 1: think there was a student's union school something like are
• 40:23
  Speaker 1: you that type of person? Entrepreneurial like that. I would
• 40:26
  Speaker 1: never have used that word at the time, but I
• 40:28
  Speaker 1: clearly was more than I give myself credit for so.
• 40:32
  Speaker 1: And back then being a DJ meant having the gear,
• 40:36
  Speaker 1: so like you could be a DJ if you had
• 40:39
  Speaker 1: the gear. So it was all about getting the gear.
• 40:41
  Speaker 1: So with a bit of money that my dad gave
• 40:44
  Speaker 1: me and like scrapping together stuff, I managed to get.
• 40:47
  Speaker 1: You know, you get the two speakers, you get an amplifier,
• 40:50
  Speaker 1: you get the turn tables and it and it went
• 40:51
  Speaker 1: from there and my my formative years as a DJ
• 40:55
  Speaker 1: was all about being a mobile DJ, because which meant
• 40:57
  Speaker 1: you had the gear. And then I had I had
• 40:59
  Speaker 1: the transit van quite early. But you said it was
• 41:04
  Speaker 1: a duo, a guy called Nigel Burns, and I lost
• 41:07
  Speaker 1: track with him thirty four years ago, but he at
• 41:11
  Speaker 1: the beginning there was two of us, and I can't
• 41:13
  Speaker 1: remember quite why, but it's probably to do with the
• 41:16
  Speaker 1: fact that he probably put some money and got one
• 41:18
  Speaker 1: of the speakers and I got the other one, and
• 41:19
  Speaker 1: we had we had the boxes like with the flashing
• 41:22
  Speaker 1: three lights and it was total you know, classic kind
• 41:25
  Speaker 1: of cliche stuff. Um and it was you know school
• 41:29
  Speaker 1: dis Guy's where we play t Rex. But then I'd
• 41:32
  Speaker 1: learned I, you know, play funkadelic, you know one colation
• 41:35
  Speaker 1: under a groove or get up, you know Casey and
• 41:39
  Speaker 1: a Sunshine Band disco text and the sex Alex James Brown,
• 41:43
  Speaker 1: and I realized that these this music made the dance
• 41:46
  Speaker 1: for move more than me playing Mark bolan Um and
• 41:49
  Speaker 1: I kind of that's where my formative my taste starts
• 41:53
  Speaker 1: to come together. There's a fifteen sixteen year old that
• 41:56
  Speaker 1: really sould music was my thing. Um. And I've spent
• 42:01
  Speaker 1: a lot of time around Gravesend, even though we lived
• 42:03
  Speaker 1: in this village. A few miles outside there was a
• 42:06
  Speaker 1: record shopping grays And called Chris's Records, and I got
• 42:08
  Speaker 1: myself a weekend job there and I just loved the
• 42:11
  Speaker 1: idea of like, you know, filing the records away in
• 42:14
  Speaker 1: plastic covers, like obviously the covers in the shop were empty,
• 42:17
  Speaker 1: and then you'd take them to there and they and
• 42:20
  Speaker 1: this this shop had quite unlike the unlike the US,
• 42:24
  Speaker 1: the records were not shrink wrapped, no, no, everything was
• 42:27
  Speaker 1: like it was in self. It was in an open
• 42:29
  Speaker 1: plastic cover. But but this because this this town I
• 42:34
  Speaker 1: grew up around had a strong West Indian community, an
• 42:37
  Speaker 1: Indian community and England you know white community, and they
• 42:41
  Speaker 1: like reggae and they like soul, and a lot of
• 42:43
  Speaker 1: the kids were going up to London to like early
• 42:46
  Speaker 1: kind of underground from London. It was it was an
• 42:50
  Speaker 1: hour on the train miles outside London on the Thames
• 42:54
  Speaker 1: South Thames coast um and so I started hanging around
• 42:59
  Speaker 1: with a load of pop at like music like like
• 43:02
  Speaker 1: music that wasn't the music that was top forty UM.
• 43:05
  Speaker 1: And back then growing up even then, there was a
• 43:09
  Speaker 1: lot of specialist radios, state programs. On Radio one UM,
• 43:14
  Speaker 1: there was a very eccentric American guy called Roscoe Emperor
• 43:19
  Speaker 1: Roscoe w n Work. So he used to play you know,
• 43:23
  Speaker 1: white boys soul records that the first time I've heard
• 43:26
  Speaker 1: anything like the average white band or anything like that.
• 43:29
  Speaker 1: And then there was the guy called Tony Prince who
• 43:32
  Speaker 1: was on Radio Luxembourg. And then eventually Robbie Vincent and
• 43:35
  Speaker 1: Greg was they were my you know, and it was
• 43:38
  Speaker 1: like it was like the window to another world hearing
• 43:41
  Speaker 1: this music and everything was very rare and like you
• 43:43
  Speaker 1: have to really hunt around. Yeah, complete opposite, and I'd
• 43:48
  Speaker 1: have to go up you know, I've would send people
• 43:49
  Speaker 1: up to London. I'd I'd start going to London on
• 43:51
  Speaker 1: the train and going into Soho or to Holburn and
• 43:56
  Speaker 1: then finding these records in these record stores, and then
• 43:58
  Speaker 1: you have to build your relationship with the person behind
• 44:00
  Speaker 1: the counter because there'd only be five copies and if
• 44:03
  Speaker 1: you weren't cool enough, you weren't going to get one
• 44:05
  Speaker 1: of the five copies. So it's all this thing of
• 44:07
  Speaker 1: searching music. And then when I get it back home
• 44:09
  Speaker 1: and i'd play it in Kent, you know, around these
• 44:12
  Speaker 1: shows that I started doing, I'd cover up the labels
• 44:14
  Speaker 1: so that other people couldn't steal it off me or
• 44:16
  Speaker 1: find out what it was. So it was all very
• 44:18
  Speaker 1: um it was. It was cool. Okay. So you're in
• 44:21
  Speaker 1: what we would call high school. How many nights a
• 44:23
  Speaker 1: week or how many nights a month are you're working? Um, well,
• 44:28
  Speaker 1: once it left school eighteen before you left school, because
• 44:31
  Speaker 1: you did at school, it wasn't I mean, how you know,
• 44:34
  Speaker 1: like once I can't even remember, like once or twice
• 44:36
  Speaker 1: a month probably and we did did yeah, okay, and
• 44:40
  Speaker 1: then no I did what I was doing mobile, No,
• 44:42
  Speaker 1: I was getting hired to do weddings and stuff like that.
• 44:44
  Speaker 1: And okay, so you're you're making decent money. I'll start
• 44:47
  Speaker 1: making decent money. What are you quickly? What do your
• 44:49
  Speaker 1: parents say about you're not going to university? Initially they were, Um,
• 44:58
  Speaker 1: there was a little bit of resistance, and initially they
• 45:00
  Speaker 1: were pushing me, but um, they saw it was my
• 45:05
  Speaker 1: passion and didn't really stand in my way. I think
• 45:08
  Speaker 1: they kept thinking it would wear itself out and just
• 45:11
  Speaker 1: be careful that you don't get too old and it's
• 45:13
  Speaker 1: too late that if you want to go to university
• 45:15
  Speaker 1: or you want to do this stuff. But my dad
• 45:17
  Speaker 1: didn't really go to UNI, um and my mom didn't
• 45:20
  Speaker 1: go to UNI, so it wasn't a UNI tradition in
• 45:22
  Speaker 1: our family. So that probably helped. Okay, some things started
• 45:26
  Speaker 1: to happen quite quickly, but I always, um, you know
• 45:30
  Speaker 1: DJ's didn't no one dj for a living back then.
• 45:34
  Speaker 1: This is the big point to make. So you even
• 45:37
  Speaker 1: you know, mobile DJs had day jobs. You know club DJs,
• 45:41
  Speaker 1: the early ones that I first heard about, they had
• 45:43
  Speaker 1: day jobs. Um, unless you were literally the breakfast show
• 45:47
  Speaker 1: DJ on the BBC or Radio one or something like that,
• 45:50
  Speaker 1: which I didn't ever want to be. I'd worked out
• 45:52
  Speaker 1: quite early on that I didn't want to play other
• 45:54
  Speaker 1: people's music choices. If I was going to be on
• 45:56
  Speaker 1: the radio, I wanted to play what I wanted to play. Um,
• 45:59
  Speaker 1: So I got day job. So nine nine, Um, what
• 46:03
  Speaker 1: was your day job? I joined a music magazine called
• 46:06
  Speaker 1: Blues and Soul, which was the mixed you know, the
• 46:11
  Speaker 1: dance magazine of the day, although it was Could you
• 46:13
  Speaker 1: make any money working from Yeah, I got a salary,
• 46:15
  Speaker 1: I got a car. Really yeah, it had so as
• 46:18
  Speaker 1: you know, and I and I I don't know if
• 46:22
  Speaker 1: you remember in the UK, they used to be a
• 46:25
  Speaker 1: Pauli Yates was a writer for Record Mirror and she
• 46:28
  Speaker 1: was the first one that ever wrote about like pop culture,
• 46:32
  Speaker 1: stroke gossip. So I I was obsessed by what she wrote,
• 46:37
  Speaker 1: and I thought, I want to write something. I want
• 46:39
  Speaker 1: to write about the scene and the gossip in a
• 46:42
  Speaker 1: cool way and the music, and so that was what
• 46:45
  Speaker 1: I thought my job was going to be at Blues
• 46:47
  Speaker 1: and Soul magazine. The day I got there, the publisher
• 46:49
  Speaker 1: said to me, yeah, that's just that's just laughing. You know,
• 46:52
  Speaker 1: your real job, you're gonna have to go and sell advertary.
• 46:55
  Speaker 1: So if you want to do that, you can do that.
• 46:56
  Speaker 1: But you've got to go and sell some ads. So
• 46:58
  Speaker 1: they gave me a car to go around and sell advertising.
• 47:02
  Speaker 1: So I would have to go around all the record shops,
• 47:05
  Speaker 1: you know, back in the day. So the record shop ads,
• 47:07
  Speaker 1: they used to list a hundred titles, um, and then
• 47:11
  Speaker 1: you put them in the back of the magazine with
• 47:12
  Speaker 1: a hundred titles mail order, you know. Um. And with
• 47:15
  Speaker 1: the reggae shops, it got a bit tricky because if
• 47:17
  Speaker 1: you made a spelling mistake, they try and not pay
• 47:19
  Speaker 1: your bill. So you know, I had guns pulled on
• 47:21
  Speaker 1: me and like all sorts of things back in the day.
• 47:23
  Speaker 1: So um, but it was it was it was rites
• 47:26
  Speaker 1: of passage. It was a massive experience and it was
• 47:28
  Speaker 1: I started to meet more people in the industry because
• 47:30
  Speaker 1: I was writing this column. So it's kind of the
• 47:33
  Speaker 1: making of me working at Blues and Soul Made and
• 47:35
  Speaker 1: you're living were at the time. I was commuting from
• 47:38
  Speaker 1: Kent into London. Um. I know, I actually got a
• 47:42
  Speaker 1: house really young as well. I got I managed through
• 47:45
  Speaker 1: bits of money from DJing. Houses were super cheap back then.
• 47:48
  Speaker 1: My first house was I got mortgage obviously, but it
• 47:51
  Speaker 1: was like twenty grand or something. I got like three
• 47:54
  Speaker 1: bedroom terraced house. Yeah. Boy, my godmother was quite healthy
• 48:00
  Speaker 1: and she left me a bit of money. And you're
• 48:03
  Speaker 1: talking about like even if you had five grand, you
• 48:05
  Speaker 1: could get because it on a proper house. It was
• 48:08
  Speaker 1: opposite a cemetery, but it was actually quite cool. And
• 48:11
  Speaker 1: so how long you would I left the house. So
• 48:15
  Speaker 1: so the magazine I was three, And then the record
• 48:21
  Speaker 1: companies were starting to kind of, you know, get more
• 48:25
  Speaker 1: and more interested in dance music. And Roger Rames was
• 48:30
  Speaker 1: working at what was called Phonogram, and there was a
• 48:32
  Speaker 1: guy called Tracy Bennett working at a place called Decca,
• 48:37
  Speaker 1: and Tracy had signed Banana Rama to Decca, and Roger
• 48:40
  Speaker 1: had signed you know, Tainted, Soft Cell Dex's Midnight Runners.
• 48:44
  Speaker 1: Roger was killing it and and they to keep him happy,
• 48:48
  Speaker 1: they gave him his own label. So they gave him
• 48:50
  Speaker 1: the Redundant London label which was sitting on a shelf
• 48:53
  Speaker 1: um and said well why don't you reinvent London And
• 48:57
  Speaker 1: that he came together with Tracy and they formed London Records,
• 49:00
  Speaker 1: and then there was a club promotions A and R
• 49:02
  Speaker 1: man Phonogram at the time called Jeff Young who also
• 49:06
  Speaker 1: happened to be a DJ that was a bit older
• 49:08
  Speaker 1: than me and my buddy, and you know, I was
• 49:11
  Speaker 1: almost his protege and he was also on the radio,
• 49:15
  Speaker 1: so I was kind of following his path. And he
• 49:17
  Speaker 1: they assumed he was going to go with them to
• 49:19
  Speaker 1: start this new venture, and he said no, he wanted
• 49:22
  Speaker 1: to stay at phonogram Um and he wanted to retire.
• 49:26
  Speaker 1: Eventually packed up djaying as well. He just wanted to
• 49:29
  Speaker 1: do radio, not club djaying. And they said, well, who
• 49:32
  Speaker 1: else are we going to call? And they said, did
• 49:34
  Speaker 1: you call this guy? Pete Tong? So I had a
• 49:35
  Speaker 1: meeting with them and it was it was amazing those two,
• 49:38
  Speaker 1: you know, rogers, very thoughtful and sensible, and you know
• 49:43
  Speaker 1: Tracy was quite wild and flamboyant and the sexy guy
• 49:47
  Speaker 1: everyone wanted to sign to kind of thing with with
• 49:49
  Speaker 1: great spiel and amazing years. And I worked for the
• 49:53
  Speaker 1: joined them and it was it was, you know, a
• 49:57
  Speaker 1: ride that took I went. I worked with them for
• 49:59
  Speaker 1: eighteen years until early two thousand's, until the label got
• 50:02
  Speaker 1: sold and it was it was an incredible time, incredible period,
• 50:05
  Speaker 1: and um we hit the ground running and the first
• 50:08
  Speaker 1: day ever went into work, UM we were number one
• 50:12
  Speaker 1: in the chart with Candy Girl with new Addition, which
• 50:14
  Speaker 1: Roger and traced licensed off of street Wise off Arthur Baker.
• 50:19
  Speaker 1: And I was given the tapes to the next single,
• 50:21
  Speaker 1: like big half inch tapes, so you're a DJ, go
• 50:24
  Speaker 1: and edit the next single and yet and I was like,
• 50:27
  Speaker 1: and I was walking out the door and like, I'd
• 50:30
  Speaker 1: never cut tape with a razor before, But I went.
• 50:32
  Speaker 1: I went to a studio in Marble Arch which actually
• 50:34
  Speaker 1: eventually became Paul Weller studio called Solid Bond, and there
• 50:37
  Speaker 1: was a lovely old guy in there called Carlos and
• 50:39
  Speaker 1: he he took me under his wing and he said,
• 50:42
  Speaker 1: don't worry, We're going to work it out. Like, well,
• 50:44
  Speaker 1: what do you want to do? You know, It's like, well,
• 50:45
  Speaker 1: I want to cut like eight bars out the interest
• 50:48
  Speaker 1: he showed me, like with the razor. And I had
• 50:50
  Speaker 1: cut tape at home, but nothing like on a master.
• 50:53
  Speaker 1: Did you cut the master? The master? But I guess
• 50:56
  Speaker 1: it was a copy of what they'd sent us from America.
• 50:59
  Speaker 1: Back then. Um so you can't. I started editing literally
• 51:02
  Speaker 1: my first day at work. It was quite funny, so
• 51:05
  Speaker 1: it was a it real writes a passage. But and
• 51:07
  Speaker 1: then you know, I started They started sending me to
• 51:09
  Speaker 1: America very regularly. And it was the days when you
• 51:14
  Speaker 1: you know, walked down the street and bumped into someone
• 51:17
  Speaker 1: and licensed a record off and a bit like I
• 51:20
  Speaker 1: remembering Hurtigan m Urtigan's book he says that about the
• 51:23
  Speaker 1: Rolling Stones, like you know, it was a fantastic tile
• 51:25
  Speaker 1: down the street and I bumped into mid Jagger and
• 51:27
  Speaker 1: I signed him. It was a bit like that with
• 51:29
  Speaker 1: dance music back then. And I signed Rundy m C
• 51:33
  Speaker 1: licensed them from Profile from Corey Robbins for the for
• 51:36
  Speaker 1: the world outside of America, and that got me straight
• 51:39
  Speaker 1: in with with Russell and Leo um And and and
• 51:44
  Speaker 1: Rick Rubin and m I met those three very early
• 51:47
  Speaker 1: on and um And that we and we did and
• 51:51
  Speaker 1: that was the Raising Hell album, you know, so that
• 51:53
  Speaker 1: was hugely successful. En off the back of that, I
• 51:55
  Speaker 1: managed to sign Salt and Pepper from Eddio Lachlan the
• 51:58
  Speaker 1: next Plateau Records in but tween signing like the odd
• 52:01
  Speaker 1: early like Paradise Garage house record or the early house
• 52:05
  Speaker 1: records that were coming through from Chicago, and I was
• 52:08
  Speaker 1: I was on a roll as any and our man.
• 52:10
  Speaker 1: I mean, we just we sounded push It and that
• 52:11
  Speaker 1: was like a massive, massive hit. UM and eventually Salt
• 52:15
  Speaker 1: and Pepper we stuck with them UM and we ended
• 52:19
  Speaker 1: up becoming the label in America eventually as well, during
• 52:21
  Speaker 1: the kind of the en vogue what are man at times?
• 52:25
  Speaker 1: So it was it was it was great fun. And
• 52:27
  Speaker 1: then they gave me my own label. So dance music
• 52:30
  Speaker 1: was like blowing up. So in six eighty seven, just
• 52:33
  Speaker 1: as house music was starting, we started f I started
• 52:36
  Speaker 1: ffr R, which was actually a little symbol on the
• 52:39
  Speaker 1: top of the old London logo that just stood for
• 52:41
  Speaker 1: full frequency Range Recording, so it was like a mono
• 52:44
  Speaker 1: stereo Dolby. It was an old symbol from the deca
• 52:48
  Speaker 1: days about the quality of a recording. I thought it
• 52:50
  Speaker 1: would be quite nice because we were obsessed by deaf
• 52:52
  Speaker 1: jam so like Black Silver wanted something like death jams,
• 52:56
  Speaker 1: so FRR looked quite good. Okay, so you're working London records,
• 53:00
  Speaker 1: you were successful. Sounds like you're making a good paycheck. Yeah, okay,
• 53:04
  Speaker 1: and and then I was still all the way doing
• 53:07
  Speaker 1: that's my question. How much were you DJing? Well then,
• 53:11
  Speaker 1: like every week it was some you know the club scene. Okay,
• 53:15
  Speaker 1: let's let's start there. Okay. There's a lot on how
• 53:18
  Speaker 1: it did it. It's a long tradition of the Brits
• 53:21
  Speaker 1: going to a Betha. But when did it turn into
• 53:23
  Speaker 1: a whole dance stay up all night environment Betha. Well,
• 53:28
  Speaker 1: it was that from the very beginning. We just weren't
• 53:31
  Speaker 1: welcome as Brits in the late eighties, so um, you know,
• 53:35
  Speaker 1: we the Britgs used to go there is like a
• 53:38
  Speaker 1: cheap tourist package holiday destination in the early eighties. And
• 53:42
  Speaker 1: it wasn't till the late eighties, like specifically where I
• 53:48
  Speaker 1: kind of discovered Alfredo and Amnesia and Passia and started
• 53:52
  Speaker 1: seeing these parties that went through the night and then
• 53:54
  Speaker 1: carried on going when the sun came up. And that
• 53:57
  Speaker 1: was totally unique because we had the licensing laws of
• 53:59
  Speaker 1: the UK um and that's when everything started to really
• 54:03
  Speaker 1: really change. But I mean, so Betha um from I've
• 54:08
  Speaker 1: been there every year every ever since. But the yeah,
• 54:13
  Speaker 1: the nineties, you know, it started to really kind of
• 54:17
  Speaker 1: shape itself that it really really blew up in probably
• 54:21
  Speaker 1: the two thousand's is when Oka. But the clubs there
• 54:25
  Speaker 1: were they existing or did the Spianiards have a vision?
• 54:30
  Speaker 1: They had a vision for sure. It just by accident
• 54:33
  Speaker 1: or design or this vision. Um, it happened to be
• 54:38
  Speaker 1: this small island you've been, you've been and it you know,
• 54:42
  Speaker 1: there happened to be there for four or five clubs,
• 54:46
  Speaker 1: all very close to each other. That happened then went
• 54:49
  Speaker 1: on to become some of the most famous clubs in
• 54:50
  Speaker 1: the world. And I think it was the mix of
• 54:54
  Speaker 1: the audience and then the liberalism of the licensing laws
• 54:59
  Speaker 1: that enable about to happen. So obviously it's changed a
• 55:02
  Speaker 1: lot over the years because that that idea of going
• 55:05
  Speaker 1: through to the morning and carrying on, that's kind of stopped,
• 55:08
  Speaker 1: you know, the idea of the big superclubs like Amnesia
• 55:12
  Speaker 1: Um and Passia in particular, going on until they wanted
• 55:16
  Speaker 1: to like ten in the morning. That that's gone, you
• 55:19
  Speaker 1: know that. So in the last ten years it's been
• 55:22
  Speaker 1: much stricter about you must finish it six, when you
• 55:24
  Speaker 1: must finish at seven, or you must finish it eight
• 55:26
  Speaker 1: or whatever. And then often the after and then there's
• 55:28
  Speaker 1: no carry on like officially the after party seen often
• 55:32
  Speaker 1: starts after lunch and it's actually a bit more organized
• 55:35
  Speaker 1: and you know, so, but the the idea of going
• 55:39
  Speaker 1: through the night get a long answer to your question,
• 55:42
  Speaker 1: but actually it's it's probably been more curtailed. It was
• 55:45
  Speaker 1: like that where it was like twenty four hours, you know,
• 55:48
  Speaker 1: and now it isn't. It's okay, you can, but you
• 55:50
  Speaker 1: can find somewhere to dance pretty much twenty four hours.
• 55:53
  Speaker 1: It's not in the same place. To what degree do
• 55:55
  Speaker 1: you believe it was fueled by drugs? Um, Well, clearly
• 56:00
  Speaker 1: really had a massive influence on it. Um that's that's okay.
• 56:06
  Speaker 1: I mean it was at a combination of things. I mean,
• 56:10
  Speaker 1: it's so it's easy from a tabloid non you know, educate.
• 56:16
  Speaker 1: You know, if you if you don't know anything about
• 56:18
  Speaker 1: the music and you just want to write a certain
• 56:21
  Speaker 1: type of history about it, you could you could lean
• 56:23
  Speaker 1: in it that way. But to but to think that
• 56:26
  Speaker 1: it wasn't artistic and it wasn't about the music, you'd
• 56:29
  Speaker 1: you'd be completely missing the point, which comes right back
• 56:31
  Speaker 1: to the beginning of our conversation, which is why a
• 56:33
  Speaker 1: beether classics works because the music was great, and maybe
• 56:36
  Speaker 1: it didn't necessarily get the the props it deserved back
• 56:40
  Speaker 1: in the day, because that's what a lot of people thought.
• 56:42
  Speaker 1: You know. The very reason we started the I M
• 56:44
  Speaker 1: s was because people thought all that happens in a
• 56:47
  Speaker 1: Beth was it was a party. Okay, So how important
• 56:50
  Speaker 1: is me and Chester of the hut Yanda and the
• 56:52
  Speaker 1: acts there? Hugely important? Um, you know, that's a whole
• 56:59
  Speaker 1: another thing. I was. I was an observer and occasional visitor.
• 57:02
  Speaker 1: And I wasn't part of that because I was I
• 57:05
  Speaker 1: was a London guy. Um, but you know, phenomenal apportment.
• 57:10
  Speaker 1: And you've got to remember back in the late eighties
• 57:14
  Speaker 1: when that started, you know, the country was much more disconnected.
• 57:20
  Speaker 1: You know, just the idea of like, you know, having
• 57:22
  Speaker 1: these things and the way we all travel now, you know,
• 57:26
  Speaker 1: being in London and like making a trip to Manchester,
• 57:28
  Speaker 1: it was a massive thing. You know. It's like this
• 57:30
  Speaker 1: did not happen on a regular basis, you know. And
• 57:33
  Speaker 1: it was before DJs even traveled up and down the country.
• 57:36
  Speaker 1: So I was a big DJ in in the southeast
• 57:39
  Speaker 1: and I was virtually unknown in the rest of the country.
• 57:41
  Speaker 1: But what was the night worth to you back then?
• 57:47
  Speaker 1: Probably um, but in the eighties I don't know there was.
• 57:52
  Speaker 1: It definitely starts with hundreds and then it becomes thousands.
• 57:56
  Speaker 1: So in any event, but you're aware of the scene
• 57:59
  Speaker 1: in the Anchester totally. By then I was in the
• 58:03
  Speaker 1: record company and Mike Pickering quite a grand part, quite
• 58:07
  Speaker 1: rapidly became rival A and r Men as well. I
• 58:09
  Speaker 1: mean Pickering went close in with Deconstruction, and Deconstruction became
• 58:14
  Speaker 1: the label of the North. Even though it was run
• 58:16
  Speaker 1: by one guy from Liverpool, it was actually always seen
• 58:18
  Speaker 1: as it was, you know. And then obviously Factory was
• 58:22
  Speaker 1: most of those Factory acts, I mean Joy Division had
• 58:27
  Speaker 1: purchase here and has maintained as bigger than it's ever been.
• 58:30
  Speaker 1: But the Happy Mondays a lot of those acts never
• 58:33
  Speaker 1: made it here. How big were they in the UK?
• 58:36
  Speaker 1: Absolutely massive and more than massive, they were hugely um
• 58:43
  Speaker 1: you know, they carried an awful lot of gravitas, particularly
• 58:46
  Speaker 1: new Order obviously coming from coming out of Joy Division
• 58:49
  Speaker 1: less so something like Orchestral maneuvers in the darkest that
• 58:51
  Speaker 1: the fact Factory was an amazing thing, you know, and
• 58:55
  Speaker 1: I was I got deeply involved with them towards the
• 58:58
  Speaker 1: end because London one kind of started to bail him out.
• 59:01
  Speaker 1: You know. We started by licensing the Happy Mondays and
• 59:04
  Speaker 1: having their records around the rest of the world. And
• 59:07
  Speaker 1: then as the financial troubles got worse, Um, we got
• 59:11
  Speaker 1: we got further and further into factory to the point
• 59:13
  Speaker 1: where we bought it. Yeah. So, and then I used
• 59:15
  Speaker 1: to work a lot with Tony in the city and
• 59:18
  Speaker 1: um Tony Wilson and um them. From an A and
• 59:23
  Speaker 1: R perspective, I actually ended up looking after New Order
• 59:26
  Speaker 1: and became their A and R man when they came
• 59:27
  Speaker 1: over to London, and so I worked very closely with
• 59:30
  Speaker 1: you know, with Bernard and with Rob Grettan. Okay, so
• 59:40
  Speaker 1: you're a DJ, at what point do you start playing
• 59:44
  Speaker 1: individual records and start mixing the records together. Um, late
• 59:54
  Speaker 1: late I'm just think this, but through probably early eighties,
• 1:00:00
  Speaker 1: what was basically what happened is, um, you know, when
• 1:00:04
  Speaker 1: the soul scene was blowing up, the underground soul scene,
• 1:00:07
  Speaker 1: and it was a northern soul scene in in in
• 1:00:09
  Speaker 1: the North. Um. One of the guys in our gang,
• 1:00:13
  Speaker 1: you know, the biggest, one of the biggest DJs of
• 1:00:16
  Speaker 1: that time, was a guy called Froggy, and he was
• 1:00:18
  Speaker 1: my mentor when it came to DJ equipment, So he
• 1:00:20
  Speaker 1: was always the geek with the DJ equipment. Had this
• 1:00:23
  Speaker 1: Orange sound system which was incredible, and I bought decks
• 1:00:25
  Speaker 1: off him when he was re upp into the to
• 1:00:29
  Speaker 1: the newest model. So I got all his old equipment
• 1:00:32
  Speaker 1: and became like an understudy to Froggy almost, But he
• 1:00:35
  Speaker 1: started going to New York before and you know, one
• 1:00:38
  Speaker 1: of the first guys to ever go to New York
• 1:00:39
  Speaker 1: and see Larry Levan. Um. There was a very famous writer,
• 1:00:44
  Speaker 1: a beautiful guy called James Hamilton as well that was
• 1:00:46
  Speaker 1: like that used to review all the music for Record Mirror,
• 1:00:50
  Speaker 1: and he was the first one to actually issue bpms,
• 1:00:52
  Speaker 1: so he every review came with a bpms per minute.
• 1:00:57
  Speaker 1: And then and Froggy went over and like saw the
• 1:01:00
  Speaker 1: early um you know, David Mancuso, and saw Larry Levan
• 1:01:04
  Speaker 1: in action. And so when he came back from New York,
• 1:01:07
  Speaker 1: like it was like he had two copies of everything.
• 1:01:09
  Speaker 1: It's like what you know, what you're doing. It's like, oh,
• 1:01:12
  Speaker 1: I can make I can extend this. And he literally
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 1: came back. He literally it was like, you know Moses
• 1:01:17
  Speaker 1: coming down from the mountain. It's like I've been to
• 1:01:19
  Speaker 1: New York, I've seen Larry Leavan, and I've bought two
• 1:01:22
  Speaker 1: copies of this from the vinyl factory or whatever. And
• 1:01:25
  Speaker 1: now I can play this record and make it like
• 1:01:27
  Speaker 1: twice as long. And I was like, oh my god.
• 1:01:29
  Speaker 1: And and that's because you work out what tempo it
• 1:01:32
  Speaker 1: is and you match the tempo. And it was it
• 1:01:33
  Speaker 1: was just it was before you know, it's just just
• 1:01:35
  Speaker 1: as very speed turntables were coming in that in fact,
• 1:01:38
  Speaker 1: you could even do that. So he opened He was
• 1:01:41
  Speaker 1: definitely the gateway to open everybody's eyes to mixing, and
• 1:01:44
  Speaker 1: we were we were edging towards smooth segways. I mean.
• 1:01:47
  Speaker 1: The other biggest DJ of the day was a guy
• 1:01:49
  Speaker 1: called Chris Hill. I actually used to run Ensign Records
• 1:01:52
  Speaker 1: with Nigel Lucy and Granger's brother and and they say
• 1:02:00
  Speaker 1: of Boomtown Rats and shined O'Connor and and so Chris
• 1:02:03
  Speaker 1: had a day job, but he was the biggest DJ
• 1:02:05
  Speaker 1: at the time, and he used to sing over the
• 1:02:06
  Speaker 1: records and talk across the segway, so it would like
• 1:02:09
  Speaker 1: blurred everything together. Um and Froggy kind of brought in
• 1:02:13
  Speaker 1: this more like modern way of doing it. Obviously we
• 1:02:16
  Speaker 1: were aware as well as like Africa Bambarto and the
• 1:02:18
  Speaker 1: hip hop guys and what they were doing in terms
• 1:02:20
  Speaker 1: of turntable ism. So it kind of that's when it
• 1:02:22
  Speaker 1: all changed. And then suddenly, I don't know, there must
• 1:02:25
  Speaker 1: have been one day where it just wasn't cool not
• 1:02:28
  Speaker 1: to mix. You know, you just had you just you
• 1:02:30
  Speaker 1: just assumed you had to mix. And by the time
• 1:02:33
  Speaker 1: the house music kicked in, um, you know, like you
• 1:02:37
  Speaker 1: just you just had to be doing that. It was
• 1:02:39
  Speaker 1: just the thing to do. Okay, did you practice or
• 1:02:41
  Speaker 1: did you practice? No, definitely practiced. I had the whole
• 1:02:45
  Speaker 1: set up at home and it um. And then and
• 1:02:49
  Speaker 1: then they became people that were the best at mixing,
• 1:02:51
  Speaker 1: you know. But there was melodic mixing, mixing and key mixing,
• 1:02:55
  Speaker 1: beautiful transitions, you know, taking people on journeys, and I
• 1:02:58
  Speaker 1: was you know, so it just raised the game. There
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 1: was a guy called Sasha you know still around today,
• 1:03:05
  Speaker 1: a good friend of mine that really it was another
• 1:03:07
  Speaker 1: one that really raised that. There was another real you know,
• 1:03:11
  Speaker 1: raising the bar moment, like when he came on because
• 1:03:13
  Speaker 1: he could just do it in his sleep, and he
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 1: just everything always seemed to being key, and it just
• 1:03:20
  Speaker 1: you know, not just about mixing out of the drum
• 1:03:23
  Speaker 1: break of one into the drum break of the other,
• 1:03:24
  Speaker 1: but actually thinking about, well, now this baseline is going here,
• 1:03:27
  Speaker 1: I'm going to get this baseline to go there. And
• 1:03:29
  Speaker 1: that was yet. So its just the whole skill set
• 1:03:32
  Speaker 1: around it and the the learning curve just increased hugely
• 1:03:36
  Speaker 1: in the late eighties. Okay, so London record has assolted
• 1:03:40
  Speaker 1: around the turn of the century. Where does that leave you? Um,
• 1:03:44
  Speaker 1: weirdly at forty plus years old and sitting around going, um,
• 1:03:49
  Speaker 1: oh my god, you know, for the first time in
• 1:03:51
  Speaker 1: my life, even though I've done it my whole life,
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 1: I'm i am a full time PJ. So um and
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 1: I went. There was no thought of adding another record
• 1:04:00
  Speaker 1: company job. I was kind of over it by then.
• 1:04:03
  Speaker 1: It got if you remember the naps to you know,
• 1:04:06
  Speaker 1: two thousand, two thousand one, I mean, the dance music
• 1:04:08
  Speaker 1: bubble had burst, you know, we all the way through
• 1:04:11
  Speaker 1: the nineties, like the ecosystem, the economic value of dance
• 1:04:17
  Speaker 1: music every year just kept going up like a stock
• 1:04:19
  Speaker 1: price out of control. So everything you know, and the
• 1:04:22
  Speaker 1: infrastructure about dance music got fatter and fatter and fatter,
• 1:04:27
  Speaker 1: and inevitably, after ten years of like fattening this giant
• 1:04:31
  Speaker 1: cow bull um, people start to take their eyes off
• 1:04:34
  Speaker 1: the ball. Things definitely aren't as good as they used
• 1:04:36
  Speaker 1: to be, but everyone's making loads of money. And and
• 1:04:39
  Speaker 1: I wouldn't say that it didn't pop around the millennium,
• 1:04:42
  Speaker 1: but it got punctured somewhere along the way. And as
• 1:04:45
  Speaker 1: we came into the new decade after a couple of years,
• 1:04:49
  Speaker 1: like the tires are deflating, um, you know, magazines are closing,
• 1:04:54
  Speaker 1: major record companies are starting to either you know, make
• 1:04:57
  Speaker 1: people redundant or tighten up. Budge. It's you know, doing doing,
• 1:05:01
  Speaker 1: doing all sorts of stuff to dance labels. And by
• 1:05:04
  Speaker 1: then my career at London, I was kind of head
• 1:05:07
  Speaker 1: of a and r of the whole thing. So I've
• 1:05:08
  Speaker 1: kind of outgrown the dance bit and I've replaced myself
• 1:05:13
  Speaker 1: with people, you know, many great people worked with me,
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 1: and John Niven wrote the book about us with you
• 1:05:18
  Speaker 1: know Killy your friends, but you know people like Nick
• 1:05:21
  Speaker 1: Raphael who's very senior now at Capital, signed Sam Smith,
• 1:05:25
  Speaker 1: you know, Christian tatters Field, and you're well aware of.
• 1:05:27
  Speaker 1: UM used to work for us at London Records. UM.
• 1:05:30
  Speaker 1: Even Patrick Moxley worked at London Records. You know, there
• 1:05:32
  Speaker 1: was like there was loads of people UM that have
• 1:05:35
  Speaker 1: gone on to Paul McDonald. Funny enough, he was a
• 1:05:38
  Speaker 1: manager of you know, James Bay and George George ezra Um.
• 1:05:42
  Speaker 1: He was a London Records. You know, there was amazing
• 1:05:45
  Speaker 1: It's sold basically, but I'd become head of an R
• 1:05:49
  Speaker 1: and it was like the game. I remember that signing
• 1:05:51
  Speaker 1: some kind of pop things because everyone you start sign
• 1:05:55
  Speaker 1: you end up signing things because you think they're going
• 1:05:57
  Speaker 1: to be hugely successful economically and you kind of but
• 1:06:01
  Speaker 1: you don't really love them. But like I remember there
• 1:06:04
  Speaker 1: was one I can't remember the name of it. UM.
• 1:06:08
  Speaker 1: Oh god, I remember being involved in signing this pop
• 1:06:12
  Speaker 1: act and it was only Smallman and Dennis Inglesby were
• 1:06:14
  Speaker 1: the managers, and I and UM and and every you know,
• 1:06:18
  Speaker 1: it's one of those ones where like Roger was sure,
• 1:06:21
  Speaker 1: everyone was sure, Like the dorman of the building was sure,
• 1:06:24
  Speaker 1: everyone at Radio one was sure. Like I've made it
• 1:06:26
  Speaker 1: about as sure as you could possibly making. It was
• 1:06:28
  Speaker 1: hugely expensive and UM and we spent about a year
• 1:06:34
  Speaker 1: doing this deal and six months making the record and
• 1:06:37
  Speaker 1: then it was like and then we took it to
• 1:06:40
  Speaker 1: Radio one one day and it was Alex Jones. Donnelly
• 1:06:43
  Speaker 1: was the head of programming at that time. It was
• 1:06:45
  Speaker 1: like and it's like literally within about a month they
• 1:06:51
  Speaker 1: were dropped. You know, we wrote off like half a
• 1:06:53
  Speaker 1: million quid and um, you know, people would get you know,
• 1:06:57
  Speaker 1: it's just like, no, I don't like this anymore. It
• 1:07:01
  Speaker 1: was so and then so I started my full time role,
• 1:07:05
  Speaker 1: started to be a bit of a consultant, and I
• 1:07:07
  Speaker 1: remember when it got sold out and if you remember,
• 1:07:10
  Speaker 1: Roger went into the kind of heavens like working with
• 1:07:12
  Speaker 1: Dick Parsons at Warners. You know, John Reid took over
• 1:07:16
  Speaker 1: on a day to day basis. We moved to Kensington.
• 1:07:19
  Speaker 1: You know, me and Tracy were like, everything from our
• 1:07:23
  Speaker 1: kind of indie beginnings have changed so much. We kind
• 1:07:25
  Speaker 1: of lost a bit of interest and I got more
• 1:07:27
  Speaker 1: and more distracted by DJ and my DJing in the
• 1:07:29
  Speaker 1: early two thousands. As as what happened to a lot
• 1:07:32
  Speaker 1: of DJs. Then this is the economic value from recorded
• 1:07:35
  Speaker 1: music collapsed. All the value went into live suddenly. Though
• 1:07:39
  Speaker 1: with the Internet, we were getting calls from Peru and
• 1:07:42
  Speaker 1: Chile and Australia for the first time, and you know,
• 1:07:44
  Speaker 1: we could start traveling and migrating like birds to where
• 1:07:48
  Speaker 1: the money was. So two thousands to probably two thousand
• 1:07:51
  Speaker 1: and five, I just did an awful lot of touring.
• 1:07:56
  Speaker 1: So you at what point do you start working as
• 1:07:58
  Speaker 1: a record executive. Well, two thousand one, two tho two
• 1:08:01
  Speaker 1: starts to kind of filter out. There was a little
• 1:08:03
  Speaker 1: flirtation with Universal Um where I was going to I
• 1:08:09
  Speaker 1: kind of did a deal to do some compilations, and
• 1:08:12
  Speaker 1: I was going to consult with a dance label and
• 1:08:15
  Speaker 1: some ex staff from London Records were working there and
• 1:08:19
  Speaker 1: funny enough, six months ago to negotiating that, and um,
• 1:08:24
  Speaker 1: the guy that did the deal I did. I signed
• 1:08:27
  Speaker 1: a deal on a Friday, and then on the Monday
• 1:08:29
  Speaker 1: he got pulled out and it was it was it
• 1:08:34
  Speaker 1: was Matt Jagger and and that Jason ially came in
• 1:08:37
  Speaker 1: to take over and we got on fine. He said,
• 1:08:39
  Speaker 1: it's just not my vision, you know, It's like I've
• 1:08:41
  Speaker 1: got I've got enough things to fix here. That's not
• 1:08:43
  Speaker 1: going to work. And um, so I went back out
• 1:08:47
  Speaker 1: and did other things. I was doing radio and I
• 1:08:49
  Speaker 1: had a radio production company and stuff different to buses
• 1:08:51
  Speaker 1: and pieces, and then um, around that same time I
• 1:08:55
  Speaker 1: changed managers and then w m ME for the and
• 1:08:59
  Speaker 1: I knew Tiger because Geiger was our agent for New Order,
• 1:09:05
  Speaker 1: and so w ME opened in London, if you remember,
• 1:09:08
  Speaker 1: it was Ed Bicknell, strangely stret manager, David Levy, Solomon
• 1:09:13
  Speaker 1: Parker and they were the three that's opened and it
• 1:09:16
  Speaker 1: was that was their first office. And my manager was
• 1:09:19
  Speaker 1: Gary Blackburn, who was the manager of Fact Boy Slim,
• 1:09:21
  Speaker 1: who's David Levy's long term client. And Gary said, you
• 1:09:24
  Speaker 1: should be with David. He's the best guy. And David
• 1:09:26
  Speaker 1: was the first ever DJ agent anyway, literally in the world.
• 1:09:29
  Speaker 1: He was the first, you know, dedicated agent for a
• 1:09:33
  Speaker 1: DJ and that was Paul Oakenfold, so I knew about him. Um,
• 1:09:37
  Speaker 1: so I moved to w m ME. And at the
• 1:09:38
  Speaker 1: same time Geiger was like, you know, well, he knew
• 1:09:41
  Speaker 1: I was an out of work record company guy and
• 1:09:44
  Speaker 1: he always saw me as that. He said, why don't
• 1:09:45
  Speaker 1: you come and do an n R for an agency?
• 1:09:47
  Speaker 1: So it was quite visionary thinking and I said, what
• 1:09:49
  Speaker 1: do you mean, how's that going to work? So we'll
• 1:09:50
  Speaker 1: just tell us what we should sign, you know, help
• 1:09:53
  Speaker 1: us introduce us. You know, you know I love dancing music,
• 1:09:56
  Speaker 1: love electronic music. He always did. He was obsessed by
• 1:09:59
  Speaker 1: Moby Um, obsessed by factory, and he said, why don't
• 1:10:03
  Speaker 1: you come and do it here? So that's how that
• 1:10:04
  Speaker 1: relationship started. And I'm still with him, you know. Okay,
• 1:10:08
  Speaker 1: So now when you're on your own, how many nights
• 1:10:10
  Speaker 1: a week or how many nights a month are you
• 1:10:11
  Speaker 1: working back then? I mean, because I don't know like
• 1:10:20
  Speaker 1: the average gigs is. I think my averages have gone.
• 1:10:25
  Speaker 1: I think the peak was like a hundred gigs a year.
• 1:10:28
  Speaker 1: I was never like a dead mouse or you know,
• 1:10:31
  Speaker 1: so you're never one because I was never. I was
• 1:10:33
  Speaker 1: never two hundred gigs here. I mean, funny I've I've
• 1:10:34
  Speaker 1: always had, you know, you know, I've gone through that divorce.
• 1:10:37
  Speaker 1: I've gone you know that I'm definitely deejaying didn't help um,
• 1:10:42
  Speaker 1: and that that early period of the two thousands where
• 1:10:44
  Speaker 1: it all fell apart and me traveling, you know, more
• 1:10:47
  Speaker 1: away from home. Insecurities probably, I mean all sorts of stuff,
• 1:10:51
  Speaker 1: and then um, but I've always cherished this other. I've
• 1:10:55
  Speaker 1: never I think the reason I'm still dejaying to this day.
• 1:10:58
  Speaker 1: Is simply because I never could do burnout because I
• 1:11:00
  Speaker 1: always had you know, I see it as an artistic thing,
• 1:11:04
  Speaker 1: and I definitely do do it for the money as well.
• 1:11:07
  Speaker 1: But um, I've always managed to never have to do
• 1:11:11
  Speaker 1: it as much as everyone else has had to do
• 1:11:12
  Speaker 1: it because you've had other income streams. But assuming you
• 1:11:16
  Speaker 1: did want to do it, there's enough workout there for
• 1:11:19
  Speaker 1: you to work do hundred nights a year. Not now,
• 1:11:22
  Speaker 1: I wouldn't think, not unless I want to do some
• 1:11:24
  Speaker 1: really rubbishy things that um that wouldn't enjoy. So I
• 1:11:27
  Speaker 1: try and try, and I mean it's there's always this
• 1:11:30
  Speaker 1: thing of and it's it's the same for if you're,
• 1:11:34
  Speaker 1: you know, a musician in any genre of music doing
• 1:11:37
  Speaker 1: it as long as I've done it, you have to.
• 1:11:38
  Speaker 1: There's a certain amount of reinvention you have to go through.
• 1:11:40
  Speaker 1: But I think I've been lucky that my curiosity for
• 1:11:43
  Speaker 1: the new and the next, and the fidgit nous of
• 1:11:46
  Speaker 1: always thinking looking around the corner um has kept me
• 1:11:52
  Speaker 1: current like that. It's just it's just the way I am,
• 1:11:54
  Speaker 1: you know. Okay, So have you been one of those
• 1:11:57
  Speaker 1: DJs you know, I travel with a USBs Dick, I
• 1:12:00
  Speaker 1: get on the private jet. I'm going somewhere else. Has
• 1:12:03
  Speaker 1: that been your Have you lived that lifestyle a little bit? Nothing?
• 1:12:07
  Speaker 1: I was a bit like um my, my era of
• 1:12:11
  Speaker 1: true superstardom came a time where the money was still
• 1:12:18
  Speaker 1: pretty crazy, but the travel wasn't. I was just before that,
• 1:12:23
  Speaker 1: like so I'm talking about like mid two mid nineties
• 1:12:26
  Speaker 1: to mid two thousand's was probably the purple patch for me,
• 1:12:30
  Speaker 1: when I was like number one on poles and all
• 1:12:32
  Speaker 1: sorts of things, and then the money. Don't get me wrong,
• 1:12:34
  Speaker 1: the money was still good, but we weren't doing what
• 1:12:37
  Speaker 1: they It's a bit like football, you know, if you're
• 1:12:40
  Speaker 1: George Best, you know it's amazing, right until like twenty
• 1:12:43
  Speaker 1: years later there's David Beckham and you realize that you're
• 1:12:45
  Speaker 1: earning like a tenth or a hundredth of what they're earning.
• 1:12:49
  Speaker 1: And it's been a bit like that for me. So
• 1:12:51
  Speaker 1: I still, you know, you still do well out of it,
• 1:12:54
  Speaker 1: and yes, I've used I used private jets when I
• 1:12:56
  Speaker 1: have to do. But for me, you know, there was
• 1:12:58
  Speaker 1: there was some times in a beef during the residency
• 1:13:01
  Speaker 1: period when I before I moved to America. Um, there
• 1:13:05
  Speaker 1: was one year, two years actually where I I was
• 1:13:08
  Speaker 1: given a private jet every week for eighteen weeks for
• 1:13:11
  Speaker 1: two years, like to do the whole season. So they
• 1:13:13
  Speaker 1: would would be on Radio one until at nine o'clock
• 1:13:16
  Speaker 1: at night on a Friday, and then I would we
• 1:13:20
  Speaker 1: drive to the the airport and get a plane, do
• 1:13:24
  Speaker 1: the gig, and then yeah, come back the next day.
• 1:13:28
  Speaker 1: So UM, that was how when did you get and
• 1:13:31
  Speaker 1: how did you get the BBC gig? The BBC gig
• 1:13:35
  Speaker 1: was so we're going back to We're wind back to
• 1:13:39
  Speaker 1: the eighties again. So again I didn't use that word
• 1:13:43
  Speaker 1: entrepreneurial at the time, but I guess looking back I
• 1:13:46
  Speaker 1: was because it was like, well, how am I going
• 1:13:47
  Speaker 1: to get involved in this music? I don't want to
• 1:13:49
  Speaker 1: be UM, I don't want to be a breakfast show
• 1:13:52
  Speaker 1: DJ playing pop records. But I love this music. So
• 1:13:54
  Speaker 1: I just want to share this music with as many
• 1:13:56
  Speaker 1: people as possible. And the people are in for It's
• 1:14:00
  Speaker 1: me the most in terms of shaping who I was
• 1:14:02
  Speaker 1: as a DJ. With these guys, I was hearing on
• 1:14:04
  Speaker 1: the radio playing specialist music, so it was a natural
• 1:14:07
  Speaker 1: thing for me to like, well, I I want to
• 1:14:08
  Speaker 1: do that. I used to sit at home listening to
• 1:14:11
  Speaker 1: the radio, writing down what people said, writing down their names,
• 1:14:14
  Speaker 1: of all the records, and I just got obsessed with it.
• 1:14:17
  Speaker 1: So I got when I was at the magazine, I
• 1:14:20
  Speaker 1: was already I was dabbling with like local radio, pirate radio, UM,
• 1:14:24
  Speaker 1: anything I could do to get on UM and a
• 1:14:28
  Speaker 1: weird twist of luck fate. Whatever is This guy Froggy
• 1:14:32
  Speaker 1: I told you about, had the equipment he used to do.
• 1:14:35
  Speaker 1: He used to provide the equipment for Radio one road shows,
• 1:14:38
  Speaker 1: so when Radio one did an outside broadcast, he'd be
• 1:14:41
  Speaker 1: the guy that would do the equipment. He then got
• 1:14:43
  Speaker 1: to know some of the producers there and some of
• 1:14:46
  Speaker 1: the DJs there, And there was this DJ called Peter
• 1:14:48
  Speaker 1: Powell who was the drive time DJ, and he was
• 1:14:53
  Speaker 1: very progressive with the music policy, very curious about you know.
• 1:14:56
  Speaker 1: He was the one that broke Spandel Ballet and Duran
• 1:14:59
  Speaker 1: ju around and Malcolm McLaren all these things. And he
• 1:15:04
  Speaker 1: wanted to have a proper street DJ come onto his
• 1:15:07
  Speaker 1: show on a weekly basis and give them some tips.
• 1:15:11
  Speaker 1: That was a feature he was doing. And it turned
• 1:15:14
  Speaker 1: out that UM Froggy was was very technical and he
• 1:15:19
  Speaker 1: was very good with with with mixing records together, so technical,
• 1:15:23
  Speaker 1: but the content like sometimes he didn't have the time
• 1:15:27
  Speaker 1: to find the records. So who did he call me?
• 1:15:29
  Speaker 1: So I was at the magazine getting all this music
• 1:15:31
  Speaker 1: and going around all the shops. So his feed fun
• 1:15:34
  Speaker 1: froggy music. But lo and behold, what quickly happened is
• 1:15:37
  Speaker 1: that they start inviting me as well to go up
• 1:15:39
  Speaker 1: to Radio one. So there I am at night and
• 1:15:43
  Speaker 1: I'm going on to primetime BBC Radio one, giving them
• 1:15:47
  Speaker 1: tips of my records. And I thought, this is like,
• 1:15:51
  Speaker 1: literally I've literally gone from zero to and I literally
• 1:15:54
  Speaker 1: after a couple of years of that, it was like,
• 1:15:55
  Speaker 1: will give me a job, giving me my own show?
• 1:15:57
  Speaker 1: It's like no, tap me on the head. So you've
• 1:15:58
  Speaker 1: got to go away and get some more experienced son.
• 1:16:00
  Speaker 1: You know, you can't just jump to the you know
• 1:16:03
  Speaker 1: the Manchester United, Real Madrid, you know l A, you
• 1:16:06
  Speaker 1: know the forty nine. The biggest football club is um
• 1:16:11
  Speaker 1: and so I I went back out and I U
• 1:16:13
  Speaker 1: but I used that calling card of having been on
• 1:16:15
  Speaker 1: Radio one. It's kind as leverage to get onto commercial
• 1:16:19
  Speaker 1: radio and Kent and then I was on Radio London
• 1:16:21
  Speaker 1: which is a BBC station. And I got into Capital
• 1:16:23
  Speaker 1: with Richard park Um just as house music and the
• 1:16:27
  Speaker 1: rave scene exploded. So I was the Saturday night dance
• 1:16:30
  Speaker 1: guy on the biggest radio station in London and I
• 1:16:33
  Speaker 1: was there for four years um and then I was
• 1:16:36
  Speaker 1: like the number one draft choice when that guy Jeff
• 1:16:39
  Speaker 1: Young I told you about, retired and I then got
• 1:16:43
  Speaker 1: moved to Radio one. So I joined Radio one in
• 1:16:45
  Speaker 1: one and been there ever since. Now in America, nothing
• 1:16:48
  Speaker 1: likes a lot. Is that the age? Is that you?
• 1:16:51
  Speaker 1: Or is that BBC? I think it's a bit of both.
• 1:16:54
  Speaker 1: I think, um, there's nothing like the BBC globally unfortunately. Um,
• 1:17:00
  Speaker 1: you know, just public service radio that wants to be
• 1:17:04
  Speaker 1: popular is an unusual thing. You know, you've got these
• 1:17:06
  Speaker 1: Triple j's in Australia and things like that, but and
• 1:17:09
  Speaker 1: you've got an MPR here, but nothing nothing like what
• 1:17:13
  Speaker 1: the Radio one have done, you know, from and they
• 1:17:16
  Speaker 1: get battered, you know, they get battered on a annual
• 1:17:19
  Speaker 1: monthly basis by the conservative press that they shouldn't be
• 1:17:22
  Speaker 1: there on across all disciplines of the BBC, from you know, news, sports, drama,
• 1:17:28
  Speaker 1: everything but radio. Thank god, it's been there and it's
• 1:17:31
  Speaker 1: been you know, it's still it's brilliant, but it's still
• 1:17:34
  Speaker 1: saddens me a little bit. I mean in terms of
• 1:17:36
  Speaker 1: moving the needle in in UM, especially for dance music,
• 1:17:40
  Speaker 1: electronic music. It's still does it better than anything in
• 1:17:43
  Speaker 1: the world, which is great but actually also kind of
• 1:17:45
  Speaker 1: a bit weird. But you also have a show on iHeart,
• 1:17:49
  Speaker 1: right what I did actually that ended, that ended, and
• 1:17:52
  Speaker 1: it was you know, it was enjoyable. I got introduced
• 1:17:55
  Speaker 1: to UM that I met all the senior people in
• 1:18:00
  Speaker 1: Bob Pittman, right, and in a bether actually through Pino Sagliocca,
• 1:18:05
  Speaker 1: remember there doing a very famous live Nation promoter and
• 1:18:09
  Speaker 1: they and they would you know, I think Bob's sun
• 1:18:13
  Speaker 1: was enjoying a beether and everything like that is anyway
• 1:18:15
  Speaker 1: that Pete Songs, your guy like Pete Songs should do
• 1:18:17
  Speaker 1: a dance show. And I did it for a while,
• 1:18:19
  Speaker 1: but it was a bit it was, you know, good
• 1:18:22
  Speaker 1: people around me, but it was a little bit soulless.
• 1:18:24
  Speaker 1: I just found it. I don't know, no disrespect to
• 1:18:26
  Speaker 1: our heart, but it's that it's just that thing of
• 1:18:29
  Speaker 1: like it's a commercial radio station, commercial model, and it's
• 1:18:33
  Speaker 1: the commercial model for music. It's always been a struggle
• 1:18:37
  Speaker 1: in this country to do specialist dance radio. And I
• 1:18:42
  Speaker 1: want to point out the read and the simple thing being.
• 1:18:45
  Speaker 1: You know, I used to go to New York City,
• 1:18:47
  Speaker 1: as I said, it's a sitting hotel rooms and I
• 1:18:49
  Speaker 1: would listen to Frankie Crocker, w b Less, Timmy Registered,
• 1:18:53
  Speaker 1: Massive Respect, Merlin Bob. You know, these guys trained me,
• 1:18:58
  Speaker 1: taught me so much when I was a kid about
• 1:19:01
  Speaker 1: dance radio and mixed radio, and I wouldn't be here
• 1:19:04
  Speaker 1: without them, and they were. They were on American stations,
• 1:19:06
  Speaker 1: but um sat sadly most outside of obviously, you know,
• 1:19:12
  Speaker 1: the metropolis of New York City being so big, no
• 1:19:16
  Speaker 1: no other you know, mixed show radios on the American
• 1:19:19
  Speaker 1: radio tend to happen after midnight or super you know.
• 1:19:22
  Speaker 1: The whole power of Radio One was like Pete Tong
• 1:19:24
  Speaker 1: was on at six pm on a Friday night, you know,
• 1:19:28
  Speaker 1: and they and he stayed there for you know, I'm
• 1:19:31
  Speaker 1: still on a Friday night. I'm on a bit later now.
• 1:19:33
  Speaker 1: I start at nine and two hours for my show
• 1:19:37
  Speaker 1: and two hours hosting the essential mix later in the night,
• 1:19:41
  Speaker 1: and it's all gone to like listen again and BBC
• 1:19:43
  Speaker 1: sounds and you know it's like it's a different model now.
• 1:19:47
  Speaker 1: But to be on basically at six o'clock at night
• 1:19:49
  Speaker 1: for twenty years at least, Um, that's what made it
• 1:19:52
  Speaker 1: so powerful. That's why it moved. You're living in l
• 1:19:54
  Speaker 1: a oh that's prerecorded now now it's I do it
• 1:19:58
  Speaker 1: at home. You know, it's smoke and mirrors and technology,
• 1:20:01
  Speaker 1: thank god. And when I'm in London, I do it live.
• 1:20:03
  Speaker 1: So I'd still got back quite regular. Okay, best gig
• 1:20:06
  Speaker 1: you've ever had foo Probably Love Parade um was one
• 1:20:12
  Speaker 1: of them, doing in Berlin when it still happened, you know,
• 1:20:14
  Speaker 1: being I was one of the first ever Brits to
• 1:20:16
  Speaker 1: be invited to play at the monument Um and there
• 1:20:20
  Speaker 1: was a million people on the streets. So that would
• 1:20:21
  Speaker 1: Love Paraders where they had the accident all the people
• 1:20:24
  Speaker 1: died right um in Germany where they were ultimately going
• 1:20:28
  Speaker 1: through the tunnel. I don't know if it was still
• 1:20:30
  Speaker 1: the Love Parade then, but maybe okay parade was an
• 1:20:35
  Speaker 1: open street in what year was that, um? That must
• 1:20:39
  Speaker 1: have been early nineties. Um, So what made it a
• 1:20:42
  Speaker 1: great well being playing to so many people and it
• 1:20:47
  Speaker 1: being a kind of historic thing and we did we
• 1:20:50
  Speaker 1: we we recorded it for Radio One as well. Um
• 1:20:54
  Speaker 1: so it's just I just obviously one of those things
• 1:20:56
  Speaker 1: that will never happen again. And we tried to replicate
• 1:20:59
  Speaker 1: it in UK. We did a UK Love Parade and
• 1:21:03
  Speaker 1: there was one in Leads in a place called round
• 1:21:06
  Speaker 1: Hay Park and that we got two fifty people and
• 1:21:09
  Speaker 1: it was me and Sasha and Darren Emerson from Underworld
• 1:21:12
  Speaker 1: on stage at the end. That was that was truly special,
• 1:21:15
  Speaker 1: but unfortunately a lot of people's gardens got trampled and
• 1:21:18
  Speaker 1: like people were and then We've Got We've Got moved
• 1:21:22
  Speaker 1: to Newcastle the next year and it was a very
• 1:21:24
  Speaker 1: toned down version and it never quite worked. Um Space
• 1:21:29
  Speaker 1: a beefing, you know, all those beef clubs, having got
• 1:21:32
  Speaker 1: to play them, all of them at some point, will
• 1:21:34
  Speaker 1: always be special. South America is really good. Argentina in
• 1:21:38
  Speaker 1: particular in my wife's Brazilian but Argentina is probably the
• 1:21:41
  Speaker 1: most the true natural home to kind of electronic music.
• 1:21:46
  Speaker 1: You know, it's I've played some pretty special shows in
• 1:21:49
  Speaker 1: Chilean and Brazil, but Argentina is something about that the
• 1:21:52
  Speaker 1: kind of mentality down there and then America. You know,
• 1:21:55
  Speaker 1: the US has been pretty amazing as well. I mean,
• 1:21:57
  Speaker 1: Miami might as well be another country as that's it's
• 1:22:02
  Speaker 1: that's you know, so mixed down there, especially during conference time,
• 1:22:05
  Speaker 1: you know, in that Miami Music Week. That's that. You've
• 1:22:07
  Speaker 1: got some great memories there. And Space in Miami is
• 1:22:11
  Speaker 1: probably the closest. Who was the first club to ever
• 1:22:14
  Speaker 1: be remotely like a beether And to this day, funny enough,
• 1:22:18
  Speaker 1: it's more like a beether and the bether is now
• 1:22:20
  Speaker 1: because Space Miami does go pretty much twenty four hours.
• 1:22:22
  Speaker 1: So okay, most exotic place you've ever played, um Borakai
• 1:22:28
  Speaker 1: maybe in the Philippines. Um you got to look it
• 1:22:31
  Speaker 1: up and yeah, I don't even know what that is.
• 1:22:33
  Speaker 1: That's like a very long plane ride but followed by
• 1:22:36
  Speaker 1: two small planes in a boat, so you get to
• 1:22:38
  Speaker 1: like desert island. And I did this party in the
• 1:22:43
  Speaker 1: days when cigarette companies were still allowed in some corner
• 1:22:46
  Speaker 1: of the world to sponsor parties. And it was me
• 1:22:48
  Speaker 1: and Almond van Helden Todd Terry funny enough, and it
• 1:22:52
  Speaker 1: was on a beach, sand in your shoes, you know,
• 1:22:55
  Speaker 1: and it was that was pretty exotic. So what's the
• 1:22:57
  Speaker 1: biggest p day you've had for a d G gig
• 1:23:01
  Speaker 1: Um New Year's Eve, Um probably seven figures. No, No,
• 1:23:12
  Speaker 1: I think back then it was it was six figures,
• 1:23:14
  Speaker 1: but it was, which is still pretty big. But um, yeah, okay,
• 1:23:19
  Speaker 1: now I'm not Yeah. I mean does the music excite
• 1:23:21
  Speaker 1: you as much today as it did back in your
• 1:23:24
  Speaker 1: formative years in hey day? Hard to yes, yes and no. Um,
• 1:23:35
  Speaker 1: I worry something, you know. I was talking to the
• 1:23:37
  Speaker 1: guys that Splice about this this morning about how, you know,
• 1:23:44
  Speaker 1: the ultimate you know, electronic music probably more than any
• 1:23:48
  Speaker 1: other form of music. It's been so democratized, you know,
• 1:23:51
  Speaker 1: every you know, the barriers to entry and completely removed
• 1:23:55
  Speaker 1: so everyone can make music. It's amazing. Everyone can publish
• 1:23:58
  Speaker 1: their music on SoundCloud and obviously we talked about all
• 1:24:01
  Speaker 1: the streaming services um and the keys have been handed
• 1:24:05
  Speaker 1: over of the asylum as they used to say. But
• 1:24:07
  Speaker 1: the downside of it is it almost seems harder and
• 1:24:11
  Speaker 1: you know, to get to the Triple A list at
• 1:24:13
  Speaker 1: the very top. That that worries me a little bit.
• 1:24:16
  Speaker 1: You know, it's very easy to make a very good
• 1:24:18
  Speaker 1: record now you know, it's it's it's almost impossible to
• 1:24:22
  Speaker 1: make a genius record, you know that dance music with
• 1:24:26
  Speaker 1: the sample packs and like if you know you can
• 1:24:28
  Speaker 1: make you can make that something sound pretty convincing forgetting
• 1:24:32
  Speaker 1: the people who get in at the bottom, you know,
• 1:24:35
  Speaker 1: the semi pros. Uh, if you are at the top tier,
• 1:24:41
  Speaker 1: are there fewer genius records than before? I think so? Yeah,
• 1:24:45
  Speaker 1: I think so. I mean there's no disrespect to some
• 1:24:47
  Speaker 1: you know I did. Yeah, we haven't had you know
• 1:24:49
  Speaker 1: that that era of the Prodigy and Underworld and you
• 1:24:52
  Speaker 1: know Orbital and um, you know we staft punk even
• 1:24:57
  Speaker 1: now is a long time ago. Um, so I think
• 1:25:00
  Speaker 1: the yeah that you know, I'm I'm kind of waiting,
• 1:25:04
  Speaker 1: you know, we're all you know, the fishing nets are
• 1:25:06
  Speaker 1: out in all stripes of music. I would use a
• 1:25:09
  Speaker 1: similar description. And uh, and what I would label popular
• 1:25:13
  Speaker 1: music the Spotify top fifty especially certainly a narrow genre.
• 1:25:18
  Speaker 1: So who do you believe are the most artistically successful
• 1:25:23
  Speaker 1: DJs working today? It's a big question board. Um whoa
• 1:25:35
  Speaker 1: that that there's a there was a fork in the
• 1:25:37
  Speaker 1: road somewhere during the E d M era where the
• 1:25:42
  Speaker 1: the what the ranking system from success it was was
• 1:25:47
  Speaker 1: two different paths. So you've got the music makers, you know,
• 1:25:51
  Speaker 1: the pop producer writers, so and whether you like their
• 1:25:55
  Speaker 1: music or not, you have to give them credit. And
• 1:25:57
  Speaker 1: you know, from David is a good friend of mine,
• 1:26:03
  Speaker 1: even you know, Marshmallow as well to Sathing did come
• 1:26:06
  Speaker 1: from our world and gone and gone into the stratosphere
• 1:26:08
  Speaker 1: of another world. And I think, you know, I wasn't
• 1:26:11
  Speaker 1: particularly a Marshmallow fan at the start of what is music,
• 1:26:14
  Speaker 1: but I'm a big fan of what he's achieved in
• 1:26:17
  Speaker 1: terms of the impact and influence and consistency that he's
• 1:26:21
  Speaker 1: been able to have at the very kind of top
• 1:26:22
  Speaker 1: tier of the pop table. So I think that's worth
• 1:26:25
  Speaker 1: the props. Um. On the underground electronic side, there's there's
• 1:26:31
  Speaker 1: some amazing you know, the highest paid, I should say,
• 1:26:35
  Speaker 1: and that's because they sell the most tickets. Um are
• 1:26:38
  Speaker 1: people like Solomon and Black Coffee and Tail of Us
• 1:26:42
  Speaker 1: and Marco Corolla, UM and the and the Rise of
• 1:26:46
  Speaker 1: the Girls. You know, it's it's amazing to see you know,
• 1:26:49
  Speaker 1: Peggy Goo, Charlotte de Witter, Emily Lens, Nina Kravitz, Um.
• 1:26:55
  Speaker 1: We've probably seen the biggest game change in the underground
• 1:26:59
  Speaker 1: world in the last five years, you know, truly the
• 1:27:02
  Speaker 1: the the key, you know, the batons being moved on
• 1:27:07
  Speaker 1: to a new generation and a new and a new
• 1:27:09
  Speaker 1: and a new look, you know. And the fact that
• 1:27:11
  Speaker 1: female DJs and and female electronic musicians are having such
• 1:27:14
  Speaker 1: a massive impact is is great. Now do you equate
• 1:27:17
  Speaker 1: those people who are getting the big paychecks, are those
• 1:27:21
  Speaker 1: also the people pushing the envelope artistically? Yeah? I think so.
• 1:27:25
  Speaker 1: I mean with the underground, you don't get there by.
• 1:27:28
  Speaker 1: You get there because you earn the right to be there.
• 1:27:30
  Speaker 1: It's like so it's like being in the trenches. You know,
• 1:27:32
  Speaker 1: it's like being a stage actor. Um, you have to
• 1:27:35
  Speaker 1: go and press the flesh, tread the boards, do the work,
• 1:27:39
  Speaker 1: and you get to the top of the tree because
• 1:27:41
  Speaker 1: people think you're really really good and you and you
• 1:27:44
  Speaker 1: continue to innovate with your sets. They've all got their
• 1:27:46
  Speaker 1: own labels, they're all championing another generation of musicians. They've
• 1:27:50
  Speaker 1: all got their own sound. Um. So I think that's
• 1:27:53
  Speaker 1: a very healthy ecosystem, except for the actual person doing it.
• 1:27:57
  Speaker 1: I mean it's hard. It's it's frontline, you know, in
• 1:28:02
  Speaker 1: the trenches work and and the underground is not, Um,
• 1:28:05
  Speaker 1: it's not it's not turning up and playing an hour
• 1:28:07
  Speaker 1: at E d C. It's often playing you know for
• 1:28:10
  Speaker 1: ten hours, um, seven hours, six hours, you know, the
• 1:28:14
  Speaker 1: big long sets and after parties, and you know, the
• 1:28:17
  Speaker 1: legends around those guys is almost dude down to their endurance.
• 1:28:20
  Speaker 1: You know. I was interloom Um a couple of days ago,
• 1:28:24
  Speaker 1: because that's become early January has become a time when
• 1:28:27
  Speaker 1: all of the underground guys flocked there and there's all
• 1:28:30
  Speaker 1: these big parties um. And as I was leaving, Solomon
• 1:28:34
  Speaker 1: played his party the night before we left. And then
• 1:28:38
  Speaker 1: when I got back here, I heard the guy at
• 1:28:40
  Speaker 1: my hotel said, old Solomon's doing his after party today.
• 1:28:43
  Speaker 1: And when I got back, and then two days later
• 1:28:46
  Speaker 1: someone said it just finished. So it's like it's it's
• 1:28:51
  Speaker 1: it's heavy, you know, and it's some but I guess
• 1:28:54
  Speaker 1: it's about as rock and roll, you know. Well, it's
• 1:28:58
  Speaker 1: kind of the punk end of if you want to
• 1:29:00
  Speaker 1: use that analogy, it's like the punk end of of
• 1:29:03
  Speaker 1: our world. Um. And you know, I hope rather than
• 1:29:08
  Speaker 1: just headonism, good stuff comes out of it, you know. So, okay,
• 1:29:11
  Speaker 1: how about this hasn't been something reading about recently, the
• 1:29:14
  Speaker 1: concept that people are just standing on stage pushing buttons. Yeah,
• 1:29:19
  Speaker 1: I mean some some of them are and they push
• 1:29:21
  Speaker 1: a lot of buttons in the right order and it's great.
• 1:29:24
  Speaker 1: So I think, um, you know that Analogy was all
• 1:29:27
  Speaker 1: about pre pre organized sets. But you know I was
• 1:29:32
  Speaker 1: being you know, having obviously being behind the scenes, I
• 1:29:35
  Speaker 1: can clearly see you know, this was about music makers
• 1:29:39
  Speaker 1: playing their own music and getting booked at bigger and
• 1:29:41
  Speaker 1: bigger and bigger events and having more and more responsibility
• 1:29:45
  Speaker 1: to kind of blow everybody's mind. And in the case
• 1:29:48
  Speaker 1: of Swedish House Matthew who definitely wrote the book on
• 1:29:51
  Speaker 1: it first, um, it starts to get into choreograph shows,
• 1:29:55
  Speaker 1: you know, and you're spending you know, hundreds of thousands
• 1:29:59
  Speaker 1: of dollars on a visual experience. They took it to
• 1:30:03
  Speaker 1: another level, you know, they bought that kind of you
• 1:30:06
  Speaker 1: two level of production into the electronic world. And I
• 1:30:10
  Speaker 1: always say hats off to him because they were the first.
• 1:30:13
  Speaker 1: I mean, Tiesto was going around, you know, Paul Oakenfoll
• 1:30:16
  Speaker 1: was doing it first, you know, to a certain extent.
• 1:30:18
  Speaker 1: Tiesto took it to a whole another level. Arm and
• 1:30:20
  Speaker 1: Vambera and all these guys. But you know, and the
• 1:30:22
  Speaker 1: show has got bigger and bigger and bigger, and and
• 1:30:24
  Speaker 1: they were still essentially djaying and there still was, um
• 1:30:30
  Speaker 1: a sense of Tiesto didn't know what he was going
• 1:30:32
  Speaker 1: to play in what order. You know. He had a box,
• 1:30:35
  Speaker 1: you know, and he had a selection and he had
• 1:30:37
  Speaker 1: his favorites, and he was a smart DJ, so he
• 1:30:40
  Speaker 1: knew how to make the crowd go crazy and stuff
• 1:30:42
  Speaker 1: like that. But but there still was an element of
• 1:30:44
  Speaker 1: free willing what he could do, and he could make
• 1:30:46
  Speaker 1: a last minute decision and change something. And then the
• 1:30:50
  Speaker 1: Swedish House Mafia era where they start doing Milton Keene's Bowl,
• 1:30:54
  Speaker 1: which was unheard of in the UK for a bunch
• 1:30:56
  Speaker 1: of DJs playing to you know, eighty thousand people or whatever. Um.
• 1:31:00
  Speaker 1: You know, then you've got to have a U two
• 1:31:02
  Speaker 1: type rolling Stones stage and you've got to put films
• 1:31:07
  Speaker 1: on and they've got to tie in with the with
• 1:31:09
  Speaker 1: the music you're playing and the lights and the explosions.
• 1:31:12
  Speaker 1: We've got a golf at the right time. So you
• 1:31:13
  Speaker 1: get into that thing that you can't change the order.
• 1:31:16
  Speaker 1: You know, you can change the order maybe before the
• 1:31:18
  Speaker 1: show starts, you know, a couple of days to tell
• 1:31:20
  Speaker 1: the visuals guy but you can't just change the order.
• 1:31:22
  Speaker 1: And that's where that comes from, you know. And I
• 1:31:24
  Speaker 1: think Dead Mouse, to a certain extent, you know, fueled
• 1:31:28
  Speaker 1: that as well, because he clearly was never really playing records.
• 1:31:32
  Speaker 1: But you know, the guy was playing back his own
• 1:31:34
  Speaker 1: music and reinterpreting it in different ways. So okay, when
• 1:31:36
  Speaker 1: you played, you playing it advance? How do you do it?
• 1:31:39
  Speaker 1: You spin records. I've come through the full cycle of
• 1:31:42
  Speaker 1: like vinyl into CDs, into playing off the laptop with
• 1:31:46
  Speaker 1: all of the software when it all started, like Ableton
• 1:31:49
  Speaker 1: and Tractor and Serato and stuff like that, and and
• 1:31:52
  Speaker 1: I've gone full circle back to um. Yeah, I carry
• 1:31:55
  Speaker 1: around a couple of big drives like that, and I
• 1:31:58
  Speaker 1: plug him into CD players and I don't have pre
• 1:32:02
  Speaker 1: planned sets. No, I'll do some sets that will be
• 1:32:05
  Speaker 1: quite similar, you know, two or three days in a row,
• 1:32:07
  Speaker 1: but I'll change things around. So I'm still doing it
• 1:32:09
  Speaker 1: old school. It's with the orchestra that I've got into
• 1:32:12
  Speaker 1: that hole. And we you know, the orchestra week we
• 1:32:15
  Speaker 1: can we can change a few things. We changed songs
• 1:32:18
  Speaker 1: night by night, but we have um that that's more
• 1:32:21
  Speaker 1: like it's not pressing buttons, but its well as they
• 1:32:24
  Speaker 1: has to be, you know, all the York rib so
• 1:32:29
  Speaker 1: so I've you know, so I'm still djening old school
• 1:32:32
  Speaker 1: in that sense. Yeah, all gone thumbs up, thumbs down,
• 1:32:37
  Speaker 1: what the film thumbs up? Okay, But the concept using it,
• 1:32:40
  Speaker 1: it's like, you know, we talked about Howard Stern and
• 1:32:43
  Speaker 1: they have hit him with a high and I know
• 1:32:45
  Speaker 1: John Hind heats it. So I always loved it. It
• 1:32:49
  Speaker 1: was it was a it was meant to be. It was.
• 1:32:52
  Speaker 1: It was a fanzine in the UK called Boys Zone
• 1:32:55
  Speaker 1: who were made some mine actually, but they were very stroppy,
• 1:32:59
  Speaker 1: kind of like angry men, and they started this fanzine
• 1:33:02
  Speaker 1: and the whole point of the fanzine was basically like
• 1:33:05
  Speaker 1: fuck it, you know, it was to get in there
• 1:33:08
  Speaker 1: and like stir of shipped up and so they'd be
• 1:33:10
  Speaker 1: rude about everybody and that. And I was djaying with
• 1:33:12
  Speaker 1: these guys and they were that's the way they were
• 1:33:14
  Speaker 1: rude about me. And it was meant to be a
• 1:33:16
  Speaker 1: way of winding me up at the start because I
• 1:33:18
  Speaker 1: was you know, there was a thing in the UK
• 1:33:21
  Speaker 1: with if you were around before the year zero, which
• 1:33:25
  Speaker 1: was basically when house music started, then you were a
• 1:33:28
  Speaker 1: Dinosaur and the fact that I was in the soul
• 1:33:30
  Speaker 1: boy era before and a bit of the hip hop era.
• 1:33:33
  Speaker 1: They they were like, what are you doing? Is it's
• 1:33:36
  Speaker 1: all gone pizza on? So it was like it was
• 1:33:37
  Speaker 1: this and then it caught on. It became later on
• 1:33:41
  Speaker 1: like cockney rhyming slang and in the Penguin Dictionary and
• 1:33:44
  Speaker 1: all this stuff, and then you know, it's notoriety. It
• 1:33:48
  Speaker 1: was like, you know, it was. It was fantastic. And
• 1:33:50
  Speaker 1: then to end up having a movie made of that
• 1:33:53
  Speaker 1: name was that just took it to another level. So
• 1:33:55
  Speaker 1: now we are now I have my own parties. You know,
• 1:33:56
  Speaker 1: we would call it you know, we do it in
• 1:33:58
  Speaker 1: Miami and we do it around the world. It's all
• 1:34:00
  Speaker 1: on Pete songs. It was good. Okay, So what is
• 1:34:02
  Speaker 1: the future hall for you? What is the dream that's
• 1:34:04
  Speaker 1: like you've obviously achieved so much and unexpected, like you
• 1:34:07
  Speaker 1: know with the BBC at age nineteen, What what would
• 1:34:11
  Speaker 1: you like to achieve or do in the future, whether
• 1:34:13
  Speaker 1: it be music oriented or not. Well, for me, it's
• 1:34:16
  Speaker 1: always come to music discovery and curation. So it's it's
• 1:34:20
  Speaker 1: finding a way, I guess of moving into this next
• 1:34:24
  Speaker 1: decade gracefully and still being out the work. I'm blessed
• 1:34:27
  Speaker 1: with that and be healthy, um and just I guess
• 1:34:31
  Speaker 1: try and use my whole life's worth of experience in
• 1:34:35
  Speaker 1: A in a positive way. UM and hopefully still try
• 1:34:40
  Speaker 1: and not. I'm back into like the A and R
• 1:34:42
  Speaker 1: gig again. I just joined three zero with Mark Llespie.
• 1:34:45
  Speaker 1: It's Calvin Harris's manager, um, and we've rebooted his label
• 1:34:49
  Speaker 1: through Sony. So I was, I was. I did go
• 1:34:52
  Speaker 1: back into the Warner system for a few years. UM,
• 1:34:56
  Speaker 1: but my curiosity is back again about A and R,
• 1:34:59
  Speaker 1: about being act more hands on. I think funny recording
• 1:35:02
  Speaker 1: the albums with the orchestra and being back in the
• 1:35:04
  Speaker 1: studio hands on. I mean, I had this great education
• 1:35:08
  Speaker 1: and met all these amazing people. You know, I was
• 1:35:10
  Speaker 1: at the end of the you know, Tommy Mottola, water
• 1:35:13
  Speaker 1: yet Ni Cough, you know Berry Gordy, you know with
• 1:35:16
  Speaker 1: I've met so many people in my time. You know,
• 1:35:18
  Speaker 1: I worked with Chris Morris as Chris Thomas in the
• 1:35:20
  Speaker 1: studio making records, you know, Um, and I kind of
• 1:35:23
  Speaker 1: missed it. So I think, you know, if I if
• 1:35:26
  Speaker 1: I can help nurture the next generation and champion their
• 1:35:31
  Speaker 1: cause then that I would be happy. But there's no
• 1:35:34
  Speaker 1: intermounting flame or destination something that you would like to
• 1:35:38
  Speaker 1: achieve that you know, stratospheric. I still think this is
• 1:35:46
  Speaker 1: have end endless conversations with people like saying low about
• 1:35:49
  Speaker 1: this of you know, where it's all going. I think
• 1:35:55
  Speaker 1: I worry about music discovery and curation, you know, and
• 1:35:59
  Speaker 1: that's completely broke it. Yeah, I mean there could be
• 1:36:01
  Speaker 1: great stuff that doesn't rise to the time I think.
• 1:36:03
  Speaker 1: I think on a very basic level, on a really
• 1:36:06
  Speaker 1: really basic level. You know, the DJs I talk about,
• 1:36:09
  Speaker 1: especially the underground ones, are still in a sense, um,
• 1:36:13
  Speaker 1: the greatest curators in the electronic world anyway. Um. And
• 1:36:18
  Speaker 1: I was just thinking on the way up here actually
• 1:36:21
  Speaker 1: that um quite. I don't know. Maybe maybe a few,
• 1:36:25
  Speaker 1: you know, maybe if you have the DJ to spend
• 1:36:28
  Speaker 1: less time taking photos of themselves on beaches and actually
• 1:36:31
  Speaker 1: tell us what music they're playing, that's an interesting way
• 1:36:34
  Speaker 1: to put it. I don't know. I just think the
• 1:36:36
  Speaker 1: future curation is it's still up. It's it's still up.
• 1:36:39
  Speaker 1: For the obvious thing that people talk about playlists, I
• 1:36:41
  Speaker 1: never believe I'm trying playlists and streaming services but as
• 1:36:45
  Speaker 1: I say, yes, if you want to listen to the
• 1:36:48
  Speaker 1: pop hip hop, you know, pop songs already on a
• 1:36:51
  Speaker 1: grandde you can find that very easily. Other genres of music.
• 1:36:55
  Speaker 1: I mean, you know, if you go through the genre
• 1:36:56
  Speaker 1: playlists on Spotify, which is the big hood, you know,
• 1:36:59
  Speaker 1: you can't listen to that music, never mind that much
• 1:37:01
  Speaker 1: bad music. But somethin's personality lists. So I think, you know,
• 1:37:05
  Speaker 1: as much as that sounds old school coming from someone
• 1:37:07
  Speaker 1: like me, I just think, you know, it's it's ultimately
• 1:37:13
  Speaker 1: will come down to personalities. You know, Virgil Aublaw does
• 1:37:16
  Speaker 1: a pretty good job turning people onto fashion, and there's
• 1:37:21
  Speaker 1: been certain people, you know, certain musician, you know, certain
• 1:37:26
  Speaker 1: hip hop people back in the day that have turned
• 1:37:28
  Speaker 1: people onto I believe, I think, I think, but I
• 1:37:30
  Speaker 1: believe the culture is totally changed. The culture is purely
• 1:37:32
  Speaker 1: about money, and there's really no money in curation, at
• 1:37:35
  Speaker 1: least as we can see the short way done. There
• 1:37:38
  Speaker 1: never was that at the beginning for the you know,
• 1:37:40
  Speaker 1: not for me, not for John Peele, not but John
• 1:37:42
  Speaker 1: Peel he got they say, and yet she got the
• 1:37:45
  Speaker 1: narcis whatever. He got the great adulation, so without the money.
• 1:37:49
  Speaker 1: But in today's society, where it's bottom line money, everybody
• 1:37:52
  Speaker 1: is driving in another direction, even though it's the artist
• 1:37:55
  Speaker 1: who's honest who ultimately has the most impact. So it
• 1:37:59
  Speaker 1: either takes some one where money is not the number
• 1:38:01
  Speaker 1: one thing, where just as a dream to to fix this.
• 1:38:04
  Speaker 1: And I think we're, you know, across the world, certainly
• 1:38:07
  Speaker 1: in America, we're moving towards that era, income, inequality, etcetera.
• 1:38:11
  Speaker 1: And I think, I mean you you spent a lot
• 1:38:14
  Speaker 1: of your blokes that I've read, you know, and you
• 1:38:17
  Speaker 1: know loyally, I mean all the star I mean all
• 1:38:21
  Speaker 1: the style of Apple music was based on the same frustration,
• 1:38:23
  Speaker 1: right from Jimmy and um from Trent to try to
• 1:38:26
  Speaker 1: actually get skeet curation salted. That was kind of right,
• 1:38:30
  Speaker 1: But I think, you know, I don't want to make
• 1:38:32
  Speaker 1: it about Jimmy specifically. I just didn't think they had
• 1:38:35
  Speaker 1: it right. I didn't think, you know, there was a
• 1:38:37
  Speaker 1: playlist company for you least to hype me all the time.
• 1:38:39
  Speaker 1: We would know as active listeners, we like to pick
• 1:38:42
  Speaker 1: the tracks we're listening to, but we certainly know the past,
• 1:38:46
  Speaker 1: We know that people we know, with the great unknown,
• 1:38:49
  Speaker 1: we have no way to go through and certainly listening
• 1:38:52
  Speaker 1: to radio. None of the radio DJ it's like Apple
• 1:38:54
  Speaker 1: Beach Radio. They announced that I haven't heard a person
• 1:38:57
  Speaker 1: talking about Beach radio Beach one radio and years. Okay,
• 1:39:01
  Speaker 1: that's just not how people listen. But I like, I
• 1:39:03
  Speaker 1: have a guy in Nashville happens to work for w
• 1:39:05
  Speaker 1: m A, and he sends me what to listen to,
• 1:39:09
  Speaker 1: and I always listens to everything and he's always right
• 1:39:11
  Speaker 1: like like it, But I like someone who could do it.
• 1:39:16
  Speaker 1: In general, I think, you know, one of the problems
• 1:39:18
  Speaker 1: is we give everybody a break where in reality is
• 1:39:21
  Speaker 1: we discussed most of the stuff is ship. Just tell
• 1:39:24
  Speaker 1: me what's great and I and I have an unlimited
• 1:39:26
  Speaker 1: don't give me a hundred tracks to listen to, give
• 1:39:28
  Speaker 1: me three. Okay, in any event, that's a different discussion. Beat.
• 1:39:37
  Speaker 1: Thanks for the illumination. Thank you great, great to have you.
• 1:39:40
  Speaker 1: Until next time, It's Bob left Sense