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We talk the art of DJing and all things White Isle with Pete Tong
House | Friday 24th July 2015 | Christina
Pete Tong MBE is perhaps the biggest ambassador for electronic music in the world – he’s a DJ, producer, radio host broadcasting both sides of the Atlantic, label boss and agency man. Continuing his reputation as a leading tastemaker, he’s teamed up with one of the biggest acts on the scene, Hot Since 82, for All Gone Pete Tong & Hot Since 82 Ibiza 2015, the latest instalment in the acclaimed All Gone album series. We caught him for a London – Ibiza chat where we discussed the art of DJing and all things White Isle.
Hi Pete, how’s life treating you at the moment?
Yeah can’t complain, I’m in Ibiza.
Oh nice! Whereabouts?
In the Talamanca area.
Lovely, sun shining?
Yes, yes all good, it’s extremely hot here at the moment.
Oh very jealous! Ok so you’ve been at the forefront of the music scene for decades, so can you tell me what’s changed?
What’s changed? Big question. Well everything and nothing. Obviously things are constantly evolving and changing, and Ibiza certainly looks nothing like it did in the late eighties but essentially what we do is exactly the same, which is trying to find cool music to play to people, try and run great parties and put good music out, and generally do good stuff, so the actual mission hasn’t really changed. I guess it’s a global activity now whereas when I started out it was like south east of England and then spread from there, so I guess that’s the biggest difference of all. From starting out literally DJing at school to be to able to actually do something like that and take that around the world, well it’s a mad life.
I was going to say actually do you think the lifestyle has changed since you started out? Has it got more glamorous or more hectic?
Well it’s definitely got more hectic. I mean to have people invite you to play and pay you to play and effectively fly you all over the world obviously sounds very glamorous and it is, I count myself very lucky to have been able to do that. I’ve been to some amazing places and seen some amazing things, and met some amazing people and played some great clubs and great festivals and great venues, but it does take its toll in another way, the schedule is pretty mad yeah.
You just said that you’ve played all over the world, is there somewhere that you haven’t been yet? Where’s left for you to go?
Antarctica! Either end, either pole. I’ve never actually been to Vietnam, I’m trying to think where else. I haven’t really been to the major part of Africa, I’ve been to the very north and South Africa but not really been to the middle, the main bit. I’ve dabbled in China, like a lot of people have, just in Shanghai and Beijing. The world’s a big place, there’s still plenty of other places to go, as the enthusiasm for electronic music spreads deeper and further into corners that we haven’t got to before.
Would you say it’s a big part of your life satisfaction to bring new artists through and support their careers and kind of get them going?
Yeah I mean that’s what I’ve always done, that’s what I’ve always tried to do. That’s what I was doing before I knew what to call it, which was always finding what I thought was great music and then bringing it to the forefront. Initially it came through DJing, then radio, then running a label, then being involved in an agency so the thing I do in all those different roles is similar, that’s why they all glue together. But it’s always been about discovering music, discovering artists and championing them. I think in a way that’s one of the reasons I’ve been able to have quite a long career, because it just wasn’t all about me, my kinda act was always about bigging up everybody else, so yeah that’s kinda the way it worked out.
So who should we be looking out for at the moment? Who’s your tip?
From my own label we’re really excited about Disciples, we’re excited about Icarus, two guys out of Bristol, which we just started working with. We just signed Thomas Jack, his first proper single has just come out, called ‘Rivers’, which is more in tune with Kygo and Matoma and that tropical house sound, that’s doing really well. That’s kinda from the label standpoint and in terms of what I’m playing, it’s kind of a moving feast, there’s always something else, what can I tell you today? Everything I do is so well documented, everything we play on all the shows I do, I don’t really play anything unless I love it, so it’s all there [laughs]. I’m trying to think of dropping another name.
What was the last record you played at the last set you did? Maybe it’s one of those?
I mean we’re just doing the new album, which is All Gone Ibiza 15 with Hot Since 82. I’ve got some new music on there that I actually made, I’ve done a track with John Monkman, which I’m really pleased with, one of the best things I’ve ever done, it’s called ‘Phoenix’, so I’m excited about that. I just did a remix of the Hayden James song ‘Something About You’ with Kingstown, a guy I’ve dome a few remixes for lately, so I’m really excited about that. Disciples have just got a record with Calvin Harris, it’s quite a big thing for them to team up with someone of his stature and it’s a real change in Calvin’s sound, it’s a more straight up house record from Calvin Harris, so yeah I’m excited about that.
I wanted to ask actually do you have a favourite track on the compilation, other than the one that you did?
Probably Worakls, it called ‘Adagio For Square’. It’s probably been my biggest record all year. This guy’s signed to Hungry Music, which is this little collective of artists from the south of France. He gave me this record as a demo back in January and we signed it to FFRR, and I kinda kept it as a bit of a secret weapon all year so far, I’ve been playing it at the end of my sets and everyone’s going crazy asking me what it was. I kinda kept it off the radio as well, I haven’t really played it that much, but it’s on this album, it’s like the penultimate track. It’s a real, real huge Ibiza anthem in a cool way. It sounds like it should be a soundtrack to a film.
You mentioned that you worked with Hot Since 82 on this album, why did you decide to go with him for this one?
He finally said yes [laughs]. I asked him to do the last two and he was busy. Daley is someone I’ve know for a really long time and I’ve been involved preaching to the world about how good he is. Eventually we ended up sharing the same management company as well, so he’s kind of in the family. He’s a great guy, I’ve got to play with him in all sorts of situations around the world now, he played my BPM stage last year in Mexico. We get on really well so once he’d got his own stuff out the way, because he’d done his own compilations through his own label, he had a gap in his schedule, it fitted with mine, he’s a massive supporter of Ibiza and into the whole vibe, and he’s playing a lot here this summer for different people so it was a good time to get together.
Speaking of Ibiza, you’ve been Djing there since the very beginning so how has the scene on the island changed, from then to now?
Hugely. I guess the biggest change is the fact that whereas it felt more like a bit of a crazy accident, it would be wrong to say it wasn’t a business back in the day, but there was a lot less at stake. Even though there were some pretty crazy parties back in the day it was a bit more of a kind of free for all, a bit more of a hippy vibe, and now in terms of the kind of money that’s generated here and turned over, and the way the clubs are it’s Europe’s own kind of Vegas. It’s big business you know, the stakes are high and it has changed the characteristics of the island. That’s not to say there’s not still room for some amazing parties but as the DJs has got bigger and fees have got bigger and people’s expectations have got bigger and the clubs have invested more money, it’s still a big spectacle here but it’s harder to find that more impromptu kind of thing, the feeling that there was in the early nineties, which I think is why still people are still so attracted to afterhours, they’re still attracted to house parties, they’re still attracted to things that seem to be slightly off piste, off the strip. It’s funny that one of the free parties is one of the busiest in Ibiza now, which is Rumors on a Sunday, Guy Gerber at Beachouse, because it is people just gathering on a beach, they can buy a table but they don’t have to, there’s no admission price. I’m not sure the clubs are happy about that but that’s kind of an indication of how things have changed. The other thing it seems like the EDM sound is restricted, that’s very much a daytime thing, and Ushuaia kind of dominate that and deliver that in a really big way. It feels like I could say as a more generalisation that at night it’s more about the underground, and you don’t see many after midnight things in the EDM space, that’s probably one of the most significant changes this year. There’s a few exceptions, because Pacha has got more of a tradition of running as a seven-night-a-week club going back for a long, long time, so they do have residencies from Martin Solveig and Bob Sinclair and Aoki and stuff, but I think as a generalisation the underground kind of rules at night.
Sometimes it can feel like a bit like a commercial operation especially when some of the clubs are charging like €100 each to get in.
Yeah, yeah, that’s a fact of life. That’s not unique necessarily to Ibiza but it’s polarised in Ibiza, but market forces you know, people get what people want kind of thing, and there’s always someone else down the street that will do it slightly differently. I think that’s testament to why DC10 does so well still, they still operate on more old school rules, and they make that whole formula work, where they keep a cap on DJ fees and DJs wanna play there so badly, so the economic model works differently. If you want all the explosions and all the productions and all the photo ops of Ushuaia then that comes at a price. But one worry for me would be as the more mid- and up-market tourism further and further infiltrates into Ibiza that you do lose a little bit of that youthful energy of the kids coming on their first trips to Ibiza on a budget that used to fill out the dancefloor.
You wrote a piece for Billboard a couple of months ago about the lack of representation of dance music on screen, what prompted you to write that?
Well basically that given the impact of dance culture and electronic music around the world, and the impact of DJs on entertainment, that there’s an imbalance that I don’t think we’ve seen a proportionate presence in television and film in the same way that urban music, hip-hop and R&B have, in particular. And certainly if you look at the days of disco in the late seventies, disco was really well represented in Hollywood and maybe that’s part of the problem [laughs], an element of Hollywood that’s ruled by the old school that just think that what we’re doing now is another re-hash of disco, I don’t know. But there are obviously some stellar cases where it has worked like Daft Punk doing the soundtrack to Tron, and Junkie XL now is becoming a bigger and bigger recognised composer in his own right, working under Hans Zimmer, but he’s making more traditional score, he’s turning into a really good Hans Zimmer, it’s not all electronic. But there’s not enough stories, we haven’t had our Do The Right Thing like Spike Lee had for hip-hop with Public Enemy, we haven’t had our Fresh Prince Of Bel Air like Will Smith had, and that was why. And I’ve been at the forefront of it, living in LA, working at an agency where we’re pitching these things all the time and there’s been resistance to it. Maybe it’s because the ideas aren’t good enough, that’s fair enough, you’ve just got to strive to keep trying to come up with better ideas and better stuff, but that’s why I wrote the piece.
Surely it’s going to change though with how popular dance music has become in America.
Well it should have changed already because now the story is six, seven, eight years old, so it’s almost like have we missed the moment? That was the worry. We’ll be onto the next thing and we haven’t really got much to show for it in terms of how you left your mark on TV and film, so that’s where I was coming from on that.
We kind of touched on it a bit before, there’s been a lot of debate about DJs playing these huge shows at festivals with all the lights and the fireworks and all of that but they pre-record sections of their sets to make sure all the effects go off properly but they’re not building a set according to the vibe of the crowd or the event. So how do you as a DJ walk the line between putting on a massive show for everyone but not losing the essence of what a DJ is or a DJ does?
When you actually really know about the technical side of it, it’s just two different things you know. One type of performance demands that kind of discipline and that kind of rigidity, and another type of performance encourages complete free-form style. So I think a lot of the people that get accused of sequencing sets and set orders, playing the same songs in the same order to make the stage show exciting and stuff like that, a lot of them are actually making that music, or at least doing the remixes, so they’ve produced the music for the show. I think it just kind of fits in that world, that’s been the kind of model that works especially in the EDM space, and it’s a winning formula you know, but it isn’t really the art of DJing but that doesn’t really matter because if people want to see that, that’s what you’re gonna get. And if you want to see the art of DJing then you either see those people without all that production where you can see them DJ, and that’s why there’s a debate because some of them don’t even do that anymore. That’s not even a problem either, because in the underground world and that still involves some very, very big DJs, you’ll always see people DJing because that works with that kind of music. So I think my only comment about that is that let’s not lose the value of what DJing is all about. Just the term DJ, like every specific term over time, becomes a very blurred term. What’s relevant I guess if you’re 13 or 14 and someone asks you the question “what’s a DJ?”, you’re just as likely to say, it’s the guy, like Martin Garrix, that makes the music, as you are “oh it’s that amazing guy that can spin for eight hours and play you all this amazing music you’ve never heard before”, so I think it’s just the term of what a DJ is that’s become a bit confusing. But I’m not one of these outraged Daily Mail readers like “how dare they?” because it is what it is. If you’re gonna put £300,000 worth of production on stage and it relies a lot on visuals and explosions then there’s gonna be some rules behind that. I think the way between the two is obviously acts that play live. When you actually see acts that play live then there’s that whole grey area in between, because you do get much more performance-oriented stuff, it’s not quite so locked to the visuals but it depends what acts you’re talking about.
Do you prefer playing those kind of shows?
I don’t really make that kind of music, so I don’t really have that problem because I don’t really do those types of shows, so I’ll always be a DJs DJ. When you see me play it’ll always be I don’t quite know what the next song is till I play it kinda thing and it will depend on the song I’m playing, the reaction it’s getting, the venue I’m playing, the people I’m in front of and how they’re reacting to the record before the record I’m gonna play and all that stuff, so I am doing it in the old school way. If I made an album though and suddenly five singles blew up and that other door was open, I would find myself in a different situation. Personally I’m not in that game, so I don’t really have that problem or issue.
Follow Pete Tong on Twitter. Get your copy of All Gone Pete Tong & Hot Since 82 Ibiza 2015 here.
