NEWS
EVENTS
An Interview with Subb-An at The Social
House | Wednesday 24th September 2014 |
Subb-An is one of the UK's hottest young globetrotting DJs - after moving from Birmingham to Berlin about 4 years ago, his career has been on fire. He was named DJ Magazine's top Breakthrough DJ in 2011 and since then has been playing regularly in some of the best clubs in the world: from Panorama Bar and Watergate in Berlin, to Fabric and Warehouse Project in the UK, gigs across America and a regular slot at Ibiza's infamous DC10. We found him at The Social, a relatively new one-day festival in Kent with a surprisingly huge line-up of dance music royalty: Carl Cox, Seth Troxler, tINI, Nic Fanciulli, Secondcity, Dixon and Ben Pearce to name but a few. Luckily, he had enough time between his jetsetting lifestyle to chat to us in a field in Kent about relevent topics like pistachio ice cream.
It’s really great to talk to you here, and obviously you’ve played loads of crazy festivals so far, so I suppose this one’s a bit of a smaller one for you… Do you have any highlights out of the UK festivals you’ve played so far?
Yeah! Glastonbury was amazing this year. I mean I love going to Glastonbury anyway but… I was on the Genosys Stage, its incredible, its like the huge one with all the like lights.... that whole area, Block 9, is like 4 of the best venues, in essentially one field! I’ve been to Glastonbury like 3 or 4 times, but this year I literally didn’t go to any other set, I was just in that whole area. Actually that was my birthday weekend - I did Panorama Bar on Friday, then went straight to Glastonbury.
Wow, intense! Good birthday??
Yeah it was a really good birthday! I mean that was a huge highlight, but it was quite a difficult one - I was playing after Francois K and he’s quite a um…
Tough act to follow?
Yeah, and it was also closing the stage on the last day of the festival so…
Did you go in hard then?
Noo, I didn’t go in hard, I just played live and if anything I went in a bit more subtle because the previous act I watched, Virginia closed that stage and I literally saw one of the best sets I have ever seen. She was absolutely incredible, she was like singing over her tracks but the mixing was so tight. And she’d closed it the night before and I was closing that night so I was like no pressure, after Francois K, here we go, but it went really amazing you know and that was a huge highlight from the UK festivals.
Yeah, Glastonbury’s always gonna be the big one.
Yep, and it wasn’t even raining!
Impressive!
So how is this whole live thing going because I know you made the switch relatively recently, after a few years of just kind of doing the standard DJing thing, is it more of a challenge? Do you find it gets crowds a bit more receptive?
Yeah, well I originally started off about 3 or 4 years ago mainly playing live shows, and I stopped doing the live shows coz you know, there’s only so many times you can do it, and I was like I just wanna go to gigs and just DJ and have a bit of fun, coz you know there’s a lot to think about, there’s a lot to do, and an element of playing live you can’t necessarily just loosen up and have a lot of fun with the crowd coz there’s so much that you’re doing at one time. So I wanted to have a bit more fun but after a few years passed, I’d written a lot more new material I wanted to do a few more live shows again, but they have to be in the right place where people are gonna appreciate them, and they’re gonna get the attention they should do because when you play live at the wrong place… it’s quite a personal thing,its all your own music, and if you get the idea that people aren’t feeling it then it’s gonna affect the way that the live show over that duration progresses. So it has to be in the right situation. But I’ve had some good ones this year like I said Glastonbury, Panorama Bar, and today was really great.
On that note, how did you approach your set here, how did it go? Was the crowd pretty good?
Yeah, the crowd was good, it was busy when I got in there and yeah, it seemed like people were having fun, tINI played after and so many people were dancing, I was into it, I generally thought it was pretty good
So have you been doing it live when you’ve been playing at DC10?
No I’ve just been DJing there
Yeah that would’ve been quite unusual! How do you find like, how do you approach your sets differently between playing like Ibiza, in a club like DC10 where you’re playing quite regularly and these one-off festivals where a lot of people are from like small towns in England… do you approach your sets differently?
yeah, I mean it’s a very valid point and I think like it’s interesting, I remember having a chat to Seth about this, and you know your job as a DJ is to tailor your sets top whatever situation you’re in and that is the essence of being a DJ. I think there’s a lot of people that don’t do that, they go to gigs and they just play what they play, and it’s almost the wrong way around it because if you go to a more regional town where like you say people may be not as edgy….I wouldn’t say its necessarily like that here but if you move that to other certain towns its essentially like, you have to play slightly different but it still has to be what you wanna play, so I think you just have to be prepared, have a lot of different playlists, and different music for different situations and as long as you’ve got that its gonna be cool. You just need to know when to play certain records. I’ve learnt that the hard way, sometimes I’ve played a bit too edgy records where there that just doesnt work, and sometimes you have to realise, hang on a minute I shouldn’t play like that.
Well talking about how you approach your different sets in different places, I was wondering how it was for you moving from Birmingham to Berlin? Because I can imagine in Berlin its perhaps slightly more experimental, and how was that move? What influenced that decision?
Well Berlin was like a really amazing thing for me, yeah I did it like 4 years ago, and I lived in Birmingham at the time and wanted to move out of Birmingham, and the options were either London or Berlin, but London, you know, two of my previous relationships were both based in London so it was always like I lived there anyway, so I was like for me to move to London, I fell like I’m not really gonna be like meeting anyone new that I don’t already know, you know I’ve been to most of the club nights there and I met a lot of people and had a lot of fun there, but I thought you know Berlin excites me because I don’t know anything about it. You know I don’t know who runs what party, I don’t know who’s living there, I don’t know what music I’m gonna hear, so I was like I’m gonna go to Berlin because it’s exciting and it’s new, and I went there and it really just opened my mind to a lot of other music… Berlin’s quite a cool place, if you’re going to Berlin you need to really like be on top of it all.
Where do you play in Berlin?
I mainly play in Panorama Bar, but I’ve done quite a few other spots like Watergate,...
It must be pretty incredible to be able to play there on a regular basis
Yeah I mean I enjoy it a lot, it really helped me when I moved there to meet new people and expose myself to stuff that I wouldn’t necessarily be exposed to if I lived in say, London. And that’s not to say that London’s not an amazing city because it is, I love going to London, the scene is really amazing in London, but moving to Berlin for me just really opened me up to some things that I wouldn’t have been exposed to.
Yeah totally, sometimes you just need to open your mind up to things that are just like totally different.
Exactly, yeah, and you might not like it, you might like it, but at the end of the day you’re seeing stuff that’s new and different.
Final question, most important one, if you were an ice cream, which flavour would you be?
This is our standard question by the way…
Pistachio.
Why pistachio?
Because I just love pistachios.
Yeah but I do this too where you can’t dissociate what you like with what you are…
Yeah well I love nuts, I am nuts, I have really big big nuts which I’m not gonna get out but that is the truth! Pistachio with vanilla, because it has to have the smoothness.
Toppings, er, what would you have with pistachio and vanilla?
Hazelnuts? More nuts on nuts?
Yeah nuts on nuts on nuts… yeah pistachio and vanilla, definitely. It’s a winning combo.
That was a really good answer actually.
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