A few weeks ago I had a chat to Pete Tong, it was early on a Saturday morning, my head hurt, I could barely hear him due to poor reception, but I still got through the interview. I was obviously pretty nervous, I was about to talk to THE man in tech house/prog house. It was a pretty good opportunity to get some opinions from a long time member of the electronic music scene, and as always the interview didn’t start so well… Don’t forget Pete’s playing Villa on the 2nd of January. Full interview after the jump.
Upon calling Pete Tong, he informed me that ‘interviews had finished an hour ago,’ and that I wasn’t on his list of interviews. I said that I didn’t want to be a bother, but he said; ‘nah it’s okay I’ve got a few minutes, although I am meant to be getting ready for a gig.’ Even though he’s one of the world’s best djs he’s still a nice guy, taking time for the small time journos! When we started talking about all these interviews he was pretty relaxed about having to do so many, and even after years of this crap he still didn’t mind.
I was desperate to know what has kept him in the business for so long, and he said it really was for the music. He said when he started you were a big shot dj if you went out to the east or west of the UK to play a gig. A far cry from the travelling he does today in a completely different djing world. He says one of the keys to staying with a fresh sound is not getting locked in to one genre. ‘Genres die, when I started in it with my circle of friends we were into completely different music compared to today.’ This is a great comment as I can see the Perth scene has gone through radical changes in music style over the short time I’ve been involved in electronic music. (There you go Jackattack and Boy Crazy Stacey, a big dj is down with people changing genres! Despite my slight protests it seems so far you’ve got someone on your side!)
We went on to talk about moving around and not have a base in one spot ‘it keeps your music more diverse if you don’t just stay in one place, with Ibiza or the US relatively close it’s good to play plenty of gigs there.” As I pointed out being in England does make that a fair bit easier than being somewhere like Australia! I added the internet must help with keeping a fresh sound and guess what, Pete agreed. Yep I know, I’m pretty knowledgeable!
With my current articles about what makes a good dj sitting on Perthquake, I couldn’t resist asking about using Serato etc… ‘yeah I used Serato for a while, then I went to tractor but that broke a few gigs ago. I don’t think it matters what you use and it changes from style to style.’ He seemed pretty confident that it didn’t really matter what people use, as long as they’re getting it right. Of course song selection was something he did believe was part of ‘getting it right.’
I haven’t yet interviewed an artist with the status of Pete Tong so I asked about whether he liked playing to small crowds. Pete responded by explaining the other part of being a good dj, by reading the crowd. ‘Big crowds are harder to read, with 25000-30000 people it doesn’t equal bigger is better!’ Getting the feel of the crowd seemed to be something he was stressing, so obviously playing somewhere like Ibiza with the 25000 or more people makes that pretty difficult!
After thanking Pete maybe five times, I thought it’d be a good idea to let him get ready for his gig, since he was very kindly allowing the ‘unplanned’ interview to go ahead. Although I was stressed out about this interview, I think it worked out okay, thanks Pete!
