Interview – Dave Clarke

Often titled ‘The Baron of Techno’, Dave Clarke is an English born techno producer and DJ. With a brand new Fabric mix CD out now and a recently completed sold out tour of Australia, BBM grabs Dave for a chat about his music and life in general.

Brighton is your birth-place and the town you grew up in. Do you feel that it influenced your musical tastes in any way?
Only in the fact that Brighton was a fairly open city with regards to musical tastes itself. There was a lot of gay music down there, some high energy disco and there were a lot of people into ska music back in the day – that was very influential. When it came to the hip-hop, a little bit but not so much, but when it came to house, definitely because of the gay influence of airport house music, so in some ways yes. Had I lived in London, it might have been more influential.

When creating your new music, what would you say inspires you and how does the process work?

It has to be edgy and from the heart, it can’t really be something that’s obvious, and it can’t be something I’ve heard a million times before so I have to be definitely edgy and it definitely has to be made with integrity. I’ve been in the studio recently doing remixes and when I make music, most of the time it starts off by accidents. When I feel like I’ve got enough happy accidents working together, then hopefully I can form it together into something that isn’t an accident.

As a DJ you must have a lot of records, if BBM was to have a look through your collection, what would we find?
Not very much, most of my record collection I sold. I got rid of a large amount, I’ve only got maybe 800-1000 pieces of vinyl left at the very most, so maybe about 10,000 / 20,000 I got rid of. So what you would find in my record collection itself, a lot of old memories from when I was growing up, so a lot of albums when I was growing up in the 80s. I love my old hip-hop but then if you look through my online collection, then it becomes very vast. You have everything from DJ Harvey to absolutely anything.

Touring the world doing numerous gigs a year must be great fun, but are there any memorable gigs that stick out?
That really depends, some are memorable because I only really played 8 or 12 minutes like in Germany in the 90s because they thought I was going to play trance, but that was a long time ago. Then other gigs are memorable because you put them on yourself, like the outside dance events, you choose all the DJs and you have a really good night. Then you have other gigs that are memorable like New Years Eve when you play 3 different parties on one night, using a private plane. It all depends.

For people who may not have heard of you before, how would you be describe your sound?
Grainy. I never feel comfortable describing my own music. I always find it better when someone else describes my music. It’s like, I don’t know, music and everything is open to interpretation, and to interpret your own art is self defeating really because the whole reason of putting it out there is to show what is.

You’ve recently collaborated with Fabric to create Fabric 60. What makes this different? How did you pick the tracks?
I’ve not really heard many of the others, more of the other Fabric CD’s have a lot of personality from the people who have done them, so that’s what’s different. What’s coming out now, the music I’ve been sent, the music I’ve been looking for. It’s a snapshot of the scene at the moment.

You have your own radio show named ‘White Noise,’ how did that evolve?
It’s been going for on and off 10 years, I took a sabbatical for a couple of years. Before it used to be called ‘Technology’ now it’s called ‘White Noise’. It’s the sixth year of ‘White Noise’. I’ve been doing a radio show for 10 years, and it’s going quite well, people from all over the world listen to it and podcasts are really important now. In the old days, it used to be people sitting down with cassettes recording things and then listening to it, and only being able to listen to it where you were in the actual reception area of the transmitter, now you can listen to a radio show wherever in the world. Podcasts are probably the most important part of ‘White Noise’ and wherever I go people listen to my show, I think it’s important to get the music to the artists.

How do you differentiate between the studio and putting on a live DJ set?
Well I DJ’ed before I started to make music, and I actually stopped DJ-ing after the rave scene, so it was then I started making music – when technology was extremely expensive. Then I started to make music and then I started to DJ again and then I went live for a little while actually playing my own music – it was in 2004, which was fun. It’s all natural steps.

Any emerging talent that you would recommend to us?
There’s a guy that I’m working with called Mr. Jones and I think he’s going to go far.

What’s in the pipeline for you next?
More remixes and then some more production time again. I go abroad every single week.

Where’s next for you?
Germany and Spain. Just Dj-ing clubs and then I have the Fabric party in December in London.

Fabric 60 is available to purchase now.

By David Mahoney