c/o DJ Mag No66 Vol12 1-15 Jun 2000

 

Fucking bananas as your friendly fruit fetishist might say with a glint in his eve. The whole place has frighteningly, euphorically gone fucking bananas. It's early Saturday morning in manhattan's westside chelsea district and the Twilo crew are thrashing the last life out of an incredible night to the elated strains of ‘alive', the last track on Paul van Dyk's new album, ‘Out there and back'.

The dancefloor turmoil is no fresh occurence, though. For the past seven hours, the German trance overlord has taken us on a stately journey through the darker quarters of his record box, a set which, like the new album, broke free of a few constraints of dance music fame. On an expertly woven and often tripped-out expedition through deep house, tech house, new school breakbeat and his thumping trance trademark, tonight Paul Van Dyk showed us a deeper and at once broader side to a DJ and musician who, perhaps more than most globally dominant scenesters, is perceived to be tightly focused on one rigid sound - the exquisite, powering, soulful trance of anthems like 'For An Angel' and 'Another Way'.

It is for this sound that he is best loved, from his pivotal Love Parade sets in his home town of Berlin, to six-hour UK marathons at Gatecrasher and Cream, to his globe-trotting on the world DJ circuit. And it's this sound which has taken him up the British charts, to No6 to be precise, where the Saint Etienne-featured 'Tell Me Why (The Riddle)', had entered that weekend. And it is for this sound that Paul Van Dyk has been voted No.1 producer in DJ Mag's Music Maker poll, as well as No.5 DJ in the world. The previous night, as DJ joined Paul in the ultra-hip, neo-gothic lounge of New York's Soho Grand hotel where he stays each time he's over for his Twilo residency, we talk about communism, court battles, and being a newly-wed.

You had come good news last month, when the court judgement over your 'lost' album for MFS went In your favour. Are you relieved?

"Very much. There was definitely one point when 1 thought, why are there people trying to destroy what I made? It took me a year to start making music again. Just imagine you work on an album for ages and then someone's saying, 'Well, actually it's mine'. I was disappointed about the whole situation with Mark Reeder [MFS label manager] - obviously when you work together on a friendship basis for years and then you find out he's not very cool, it makes you sad. But it's my album now. I can do whatever I want with it. I might rernix and release them as b-sides, or maybe do something completely different. But to me the new album is much more important because it's a very personal album. This is what I am concentrating myself on now. Concentrating on my new music rather than going backwards."

Your new album, it's not all full-on trance is it? There's some jazzy breaks and a deep house cut...

"I think it's very important for an album. But it's very important for my DJ sets as well - it's never going to be all the time full-on trancey or techno-y. It varies from housey techno to trancey breakbeat, into something banging, then going deeper. It's very important."

Is that why you like to play long sets?

"Yes, 1 like the freedom to play a variety of music. The longer a set goes, the more important the interaction between the people and the DJ and the more intense it gets too. Sometimes I'll play ten hours like last Tuesday for one of our own parties in Berlin."

What's the most awe-inspiring location you've DJ-ed?

"It was an open-air event an ecological park surrounded by volcanoes to the south of Mexico
City. There were six thousand Mexicans going mental while steam was coming out of this volcano and the sun came up from behind the volcanic hills."

Did you enjoy your Twilo sessions?

"It's getting more and more crazy there. I have to say sometimes I feel I can go further with the music in New York than in England. I can get more tricky and more trippy. I would say it's easier to lose the crowd in England than it is in New York right now."

Does that mean you play it safe in Britain?

"I'm just saying that the last two or three times in New York, I think it's a bit better the ability of the crowd to follow you as a DJ, whatever you do. In New York this is their education in
European music so they completely go with techno, breakbeats and deeper stuff as well as the usual banging me. It's definitely not that I'm playing safe when I play Cream or Gatecrasher. It's just that now in New York you can be more experimental."

Often labelled ‘king' of trance, do you ever feel the need to excuse yourself for trance's crimes?

"No, because it's not the music style trance that's made the crime, it's basically been producers like ATB who are doing bullshit music, and the record labels coming up and labelling it as trance. I don't like labels, there's just good and bad records. Some of them I can't stand and, funnily enough, most of them last year got labelled trance. So obviously I don't want to be the leader of the trance nation when all the records that I actually hate get labelled as trance music. But I don't have to excuse myself because I always say what I want to say and I always play the music I want to. I've never made any compromises."

Something which distinguishes your music from bog standard trance is the honest, rather than cheesy, emotional content.

"That's for sure. Very personal and intense. There are some tracks on my new album which I did in very sad moods because of the whole bullshit with MFS. But it's not a very down kind of album, you listen to it and feel the moving on thing, the whole positive power."

Do you channel your emotional life into your music?

"Well, obviously I can't take it out. But I'm not using it as a psychic cure or therapy or something. Obviously you are in some kind of mood when you work and you're in the studio and this is coming through. When I'm really sad I don't go into the studio to help me to get through it, because you do that with people you love. And when I have problems basically my therapy is my wife."

So how is married life?

"Great. It's pretty strange, within our normal lives, nothing has really changed because we've
been living together before we got married. But it's even more sort of bonding us together; on a mental basis, you belong even more to each other. And when I check into hotels with her, I'm still excited about us signing in with the same name - Mr and Mrs Van Dyk! Yeah, it's great. Nothing bad to say about it."

While you've never taken ecstasy, the drug's emotional experience is well served by your music, how would you say you plug into that state of mind?

"I wouldn't say that I plug into that it but since the feelings in there are very honest, they are actually what I felt, because of this you can probably recreate your own little cosmos with this atmosphere, when you are on drugs. I don't know, I can't tell you. I can't tell you how the record feels when you heard it on ecstasy. And I don't want to actually because maybe I'm losing this ability to be that honest."

You've said you wished clubbers would listen to the music and take less drugs. Are you ever uncomfortable in a room full of drug users?

"No. The thing is, I've always made my point of view very clear and I think this is as far as my responsibility goes. Because I'm not there to tell them what to do or not to do. When they look up to me, I see my responsibility to say, okay, this is how I feel about this drug. There are more than enough people going out there for the music rather than for the drugs. You know some of the kids come up to me and say they normally take drugs but out of respect for me they don't take any when I'm DJing and they say that what they experience then is even more intense because they are on a trip, on a flow, on a mental flow for like six hours, rather than an hour up, an hour down, an hour up, an hour down, the way drugs go."

You avoid the Judge Jules' trick of dissing the cyberkids - do you sympathise with them?

"I've always thought, we can easily be very arrogant sitting here, having partied for ten years, running around in grey and black which to them is probably very boring, and they never moan about it. And I remember when I first discovered clubbing, with my red hair and colourful running around kind of thing. It was a bit unfair to slag those kids off so badly. And also the whole glow- stick kind of thing - it was our generation which brought this diving gear into clubs in the first place."

Could you make a living if you weren't in music?

"My wife says whatever I cook it always tastes the same because I use tomatoes, garlic and onions, whatever I make. So if music went kaput, I could be an Italian chef!"

Paul Van Dyk was born 28 years ago on the wrong side of the Berlin wall and spent his teenage years acquiring a trade in carpentry and enviously making tapes of 80s pop and early dance tunes which floated over the checkpoints on West Berlin radio. Maddeningly, after years applying, Paul and his mother were finally allowed to settle in the west a week before the wall came down. But it didn't take an eager youngster long to learn how to DJ and bag his first gig at the now legendary Tresor club, before gaining his first residency at the now defunct E-Werk and becoming a key player in the city which gave the world the Love Parade. His early recordings as Visions Of Shiva (alongside trance has-been Cosmic Baby) showed the way for Van Dyk's quality-conscious strain of glacial trance and super-smooth techno, a style he stuck to his guns with through mid- 90s trance-snobbery while Germany's old guard - Sven Vath, Jam & Spoon - either jumped ship or simply lost the plot. His mastery of lush, melancholy tunes, sweet chord changes, dreamy echo and stately acid lines became the exception to the rule that trance isn't very good. Releasing two albums on the German MFS label - '45RPM' and 'Seven Ways' - he ran up against a wall of litigation with his third, still unreleased, album which became the centre of a long court battle. Things were going better in the UK, however: signing to Deviant in I996, he began his chart climb through the singles 'Beautiful Place, 'Forbidden Fruit' and 'Words' before cracking the Top25 with his reworked, much copied classic 'For An Angel'; the Top20 with his, er, much copied remix of Humate's 'Love Stimulation' and reaching 13 with last years invincible, copied, double-header 'Another Way/Avenue'. Now, with his high-flying new single and his awesome new album on the cusp of greatness, the world is properly Paul Van Dyk's.

Back to grimmer times, then - was communist life really as repressive as it looked in the West?

"Yes, it was. It was a dictatorship so you didn't have the freedom to do what you wanted to do, or say, or sing. It may sound really small, you know with all the trouble in the world, but just imagine you're 16 years old, you hear on the radio you're fucking favourite DJ is playing two miles away and there's no fucking way in the world that you'd ever go there. It forms you and hurts you."

If you'd grown up In West Berlin, would you be a different person now?

"Probably. It wasn't that the system was so great, it made me a great person or something, rather the system being so shit, I really appreciate a lot of small things much more in life, and I don't take things so easily for granted. I appreciate things more because I didn't have them once."

Was it frustrating finally being allowed to leave the week before the wall came down?

"For me it wasn't so bad. I was I6/I7 years old, I didn't have many personal belongings, whereas my mother lost everything. We were allowed to leave with a suitcase each and our dog. My mother lost her apartment, everything."

Was it a culture shock?

"The first thing I noticed were the roads - they were all really smooth and well kept. But imagine that having a Mars bar is a once-a- year experience for you, and going for the first time into a supermarket in West Berlin, and being speechless because fifty Mars bars are just laying around on the shelf, and no-one is fighting over them - and trying to realise that this is normal."

What was the first club you went to?

"UFO, one of the first proper clubs in Berlin. Firstly, I was surprised that it wasn't really crowded and secondly that everything was very unprofessional. My first really good clubbing experience was in the spring of 1990: just after the wall went down they started doing this huge - huge for the time: 2/3000 people - event called Technoseed which were the early Berlin techno parties; definitely an experience."

And your first DJing experience?

"Tresor. Before it was just me in my house with two old turntables with a little wheel to adjust the speed and a completely fucked up system. It was scary because it was the first time that I'd actually played with such a big bass. Also the first time I'd played with a Technics turntable. It was so loud, I was just fucking scared."

Obvious Love Parade question: were you over daunted playing for 1.5 million people?

"The thing is, the day leading up to that is so stressful. Usually we do our parties on Friday nights so we have our guests that we take care of and everything. Then you're playing on a float throughout the day, so it's like on and on all the time. So when you finally get up there to the victory column, you have basically 20 minutes to yourself - the first time you've been able to chill in days, finally you get a cold drink and basically you chill out. It's really weird, you just chill out up there. So I'm not nervous. I'm usually relieved."

You do tend to get mobbed after gigs, though. Is that a pain in the arse?

"I'm rather embarrassed when I finish my set and they all scream and the lighting guy shines the light at me and I've got to sign all this stuff, it's more embarrassing than enjoyable. But it's cool, it's an honour as well when people take the effort to make little puppets and little gifts to give you. So the one way to say thank you in my way is actually play good sets and make music that they are going to enjoy."

With all the hero worship, how do you avoid becoming big-head?

"It's probably, I still know why I'm doing what I'm doing. I'm not doing it to be known or rich or whatever. When I started, DJs weren't in the media, electronic music wasn't in the sales charts and a DJ was the freak in the corner who provided the music while other people had fun. So to do it, you must have been a freak and a music lover. And I still am: this is still the engine which drives me."

The final kick, snare and life-affirming vocal of 'Alive' peter out on a haunting note and the lights come up in Twilo. Clubbers stretch their eyes in the false dawn as Paul stares, apparently a little dazed across the crowd, many still jogging up and down, chanting for more. It's past 6am in New York; back home in Germany it's early afternoon. The global time-zone merry-go-round is relentless - sometimes this shit looks tougher for non-drug-takers like Paul.

The music and vodka-Red Bull have kept him in shape for the set, but you can see it in his eyes, Paul Van Dyk is very tired. He's reached the end of another of his prized, though draining, six-hour-plus sets, in the middle of an even more breakneck than usual schedule of gigging and promoting what is sure to be the album of the summer. With a last smile and a wave to the crowd, he is whisked out of the building.

 

Reproduced without permission

(Permission was requested - but no reply recieved)

 

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