Interview with Gilles Peterson
" I couldn’t have found a better home really, anywhere in the world. I feel very, very fortunate to have got myself a slot on there" - Gilles talking about his show for 6Music...
A pair of special ears formed their way around a small body in the city of Caen, France back in 1964. Was it their French birthing ground, their Parisian mother or their Zurich-born father that gave those ears a global sensitivity, that would grow them into the stature they have now, near-permanently adorned with a set of headphones? They were the ears of Gilles Peterson, one of the UK and the world’s most cherished DJs, a man able to gently push the fader up on the music of different continents, mixing it with our own homegrown. We catch up with Gilles before he comes to Norwich this month for a hugely-anticipated set…
We’re very much excited about you coming to Norwich to play next month… And so am I; the last time I played in Norwich must’ve been about 20 years ago, at the university and I think I was doing a Talkin’ Loud tour - which was one of my early labels – with a couple of bands who didn’t really do anything after that! They were a band called K-Creative at the time and er, er… I can’t remember the other band – maybe it was Galliano, but never mind – it was just cool!
Before you get to Norwich though, you’re obviously still a very busy man; you’re going to Austria tomorrow, is that right? Yeah, I’m curating two days at the Spring Festival there; it’s a bit like the Austrian version of Sonar – it’s a really brilliant festival and I really enjoy going there. They’ve asked me this year to put on a couple of different nights, so I’m doing a jazz night on Friday and an electronic night tomorrow night, so that’ll be good, then I’ve got to head back on Saturday morning at the crack of dawn. I’ve got to head straight from the club to the airport to get me back to London so that I can do my show on 6Music on Saturday, so that’ll be quite… It’ll be the first time I’ve had to do that actually, but I’ll have to get used to it ‘cause I’ve got quite a lot of Friday night gigs abroad coming up over the next few months, so hopefully there’ll be a few later flights than six o’clock in the morning.
Yes, it’s a bit of an adjustment period for you going from having a late night show to an afternoon show at the moment – how have you found the transition? Great, I mean obviously being on 6Music, I couldn’t have timed it better really. They’ve spent 10 years building themselves up, they won Station of the Year this week at the Sonys and I’ve managed to sneak myself on there! The funny thing is that for me, and for the kind of thing that I play and the heritage that I like to play on the radio, I couldn’t have found a better home really, anywhere in the world. I feel very, very fortunate to have got myself a slot on there, especially in the afternoon because in a way, it’s opened me up to a whole new audience, I mean, when they first offered me the job I was like ‘great, it’ll be nice; I’ll be on a really cool station’, then they asked if I’d mind doing afternoons and at first I thought, ‘Oh, that’s a bit different’, a bit of a challenge, I thought, but actually it’s been brilliant. It just makes me look at what I do a bit differently, which again is always important to do that in life, to change your habits. So yeah, it’s been good and the response has been, you know, really amazing – I’m really happy.
Do you have to think about your audience in a different way now then, like what they might be doing while you’re listening? It’s going to be different to a late-night crowd, isn’t it? A little bit, yeah, but I’m sort of bedding in at the moment and it’ll take me a little while to get used to it, but I am aware that a whole lot of people are doing the cooking; I get a real cooking vibe going on! I can imagine I’m on in a lot of kitchens, but it’s good! People still want it up-tempo, they still wanna hear some new stuff and some weird jazz stuff and in a way, maybe my energy’s a bit different. There’s more interaction as well because lots more people are emailing in and texting and all that sort of thing, so I’m feeling it, it’s brilliant. To be on a brilliant BBC station in the middle of the afternoon where I can play what I want, I don’t think many people get that chance. I’m just happy and I think one of the things that maybe 6Music were a bit surprised about as well is that I am quite into, and have always played a bit of alternative, 6Music-ish music, you know what I mean?! So playing a Metronomy track, or Django Django, or bands like that, I’d have slipped those in before anyway. Some people might think, ‘Gilles, you’re selling out!’, but I’ve have played those before anyway, you know, amongst what I do. So I think they’ve been surprised that I’m not as jazz and funk as they were worried about, haha!
Yes, but it all goes together as part of the tapestry, like your BBC Sessions vol. 1 album that I bought years ago – I was surpised to see Beck on it, but it fitted so well. Yeah, I’m just loving it at the moment, and the fact that I’ve got an extra hour, you know. At first it was weird ‘cause I had the news and stuff like that to deal with, but it’s good because you can play with things like the news; I use it to play the end of one kind of genre and then after it, the beginning of another and I think it’s good for me to be able to look at what I was doing and see what I could do differently, as you said, at a different time, so it’s given me a really nice sort of boost, I suppose. I’ve been doing radio for… I don’t know, 25, even 30 years now, from pirate radio to what I’m doing now and it’s always good to have a new little challenge, so I’m loving it.
Talking of when you started off on pirate radio stations, you couldn’t get a more different situation nowadays because people can podcast themselves from the safe, legal boundaries of their bedroom; do you think it’s a whole different ball game now? Yeah, I think that in a way, if you’re curious about music or something and you want to know more, you can get into things a lot quicker now, right? It’s a lot easier. But for someone like me, in a way, I’m in a position where I’m from a more old-fashioned place in terms of arrangements – even though 6Music isn’t even on FM, it’s already more modernised in approach – but I see myself as a channel to really introduce people to the deeper stuff, you know. I like that place where I am, where I can be… like, people say ‘I don’t quite know what I’m in to’, and they might just fall upon me by accident and I’m gonna open up a few doors to them and if they want to go deeper, they really can go deeper, deeper! If you want to find out more about, I dunno, say… 21-year old boys who make electronic music from Dorset, there’s probably a website that’ll cover that! That’s what I think is brilliant these days and the do-it-yourself aspect of it as well is such a great boost for music and for bands. It’s funny ‘cause I was just talking today in my office with my staff, ‘cause I run a little record label, and they’ve just set up a little iPhone app for me and it had all kinds of amazing little things on there! It’s not out yet, but it had pictures of literally every single album I’ve done, then there was a hook up with iTunes and I was like ‘Oh my god, these days you can do literally anything! It’s exciting, you know. In that sense it’s brilliant, but then there’s another part of me that’s like, ‘oh, I remember the days when you could buy a record and there was only 15 records coming out every week!’ It was a lot easier to control what you were doing and cut your acetate; it was more special and not everybody could just have it, so it gave you a sense of, you know… In a way, I love both bits and you’ve just gotta take what you can out of it, but I think if you’re a young band nowadays, or a young producer and you’ve got what it takes and you’ve got passion, you can create – you don’t need a bog machine to break you these days. Before, you may have spent a lot longer getting to that point before, but now, if you’ve got the talent, confidence, or whatever it is, you can really do it yourself, which is quite fun.
You’re synonymous with new music and like you said, if people stumble upon you, they’ll probably stumble upon new artists that they haven’t heard before. I got to hear about Amp Fiddler and NuYorican Soul because of you… Has that always been a trait of yours? Were you always bugging your mates, saying ‘you’ve GOTTA hear this’?! I don’t know, it’s weird; people say I’m a tastemaker, but I know people who’re worse than me, you know! I’ve got my own tastemakers who inform me, but I’ve always been hungry, whether it’s new or old music. I think I probably came more from the old music, in a way. I kinda came from that old tradition of DJs collecting rare grooves and I suppose there was part of me that was in to having the record that no-one else had, and I suppose that continues into new music. Obviously I’ve always done A&R, and had record labels and that goes back to sort of the early 80s; I had a label called Hardback, then a label called BGP, then Acid Jazz, Talkin’ Loud and Brownswood, and all those times I was releasing new music as well as searching out old stuff and doing compilations of it, so to answer you’re question, yeah, I’m always at it – it’s like someone collecting stamps or something else that boys collect!
A bit cooler though…! Yeah, but there’s an aspect of it that’s a bit of a game, and DJing’s a bit of a game as well, you know, it’s a bit competitive, it’s a bit of a sport and you’ve got to be aware of that when you play. Some people get a bit freaked out ‘cause they’re like, ‘oh, I just want to play music,’ then it got a bit intense; people started having rivals, you know, and I didn’t think music was like that, but music’s like anything, you know and you have to deal with that and accept it, and find a way through it.
So Gilles, did you use mixtapes to woo girls? Were you that guy? I don’t think I did actually! I think I just told them to listen to my radio show, haha!
Yeah, that’s a bit more impressive! Yeah, I have done a few tapes for girls but I haven’t done so for a long time; my wife, she… she has her own taste!
Maybe you should give it a go though, keep the romance alive and make her a tape? Yeah, you’re right actually, you’re right. Every now and then I catch her listening to one of my old albums – she likes my Brazilian records and all that, so I do catch her secretly listening to a Gilles Peterson compilation!
Now being an A&R man for so many years, what’s it like recognising that you’ve discovered someone who could be a great new artist? Is there a feeling in the pit of your stomach, and how do you know that you want them on your label? Well with this kind of A&R, signing a group kind of thing, I’m not ruthlessly searching for stuff like some companies might be. I prefer to sort of fall upon stuff and usually the stuff I find hasn’t either been interesting to other labels, so therefore I don’t think I’ve got to fight anyone for it, or it just comes. Like with Ghostpoet, I got the demos and I loved it, I played it on the radio, then we signed it. But when I was doing Talkin’ Loud, which was more the Golden Age of the music industry, when there was more money and more A&R and more record labels, sometimes you’d, erm… well, for example with Portishead, I didn’t have a chance with them because I didn’t know about them ‘til they’d signed, but that’s the kind of thing that I would have gone for if I’d have known that was available, and there was another record label involved looking at them, I’d have done everything possible to to sign them. But in recent years, I’ve been a bit more Zen about it; I’ve been more sort of relaxed and things have just come and if it feels like there’s a lot of other people looking at it, I don’t really get caught up in it -I just go ‘fine, it is what it is’. The record I’m really looking forward to right now is an album that I did with a producer called Mala, who’s a dubstep producer with his own label, DMZ. He’s not really just a dubstep guy in a Skream way, he’s more dubstep in a roots reggae kind of way; he’s one of the pioneers of the sound and I’m a big fan of his, so I just took him to Cuba with me last year when I made my last album out there, the Havana Cultura album. I just wanted him to be there and rather than him do a kind of remix album of my album, I wanted him to do a reinterpretation – his own interpretation of our time there together. He spent a year working on that record and that’s coming out in September. For me, at the moment, that’s the record that I remember… like, I’ve always enjoyed people like Reprazent, Roni Size and like you said, NuYorican Soul who have come out of a specific culture but who’ve made more than just dance music records. With this album, the Mala record in Cuba, he’s come up with definitely the most amazing record that I’ve heard coming from dance music in a very long time. That’s really exciting; I wish I could play it on the radio, but I really am on lockdown about it because my people who work with me would kill me!
It must be a hard thing to curb that temptation when you have airwaves at your disposal! Yeah, especially these days when people just bite it and it’s out before it’s even had a chance, so you’ve got to be careful, but yeah, I’m really up for this – I’m really pleased about it.
You’ve dived so deep into the Cuban music scene – I remember going to Havana and feeling like someone had just given me an extra five senses or something, so vibrant was it as a city – what was it for you about the place that made you want to embark upon this journey? Well this was something I naturally did because I wanted to do it; I had wanted to go to Cuba for years and I was interested in Cuba because of the music and the influence it’s had on the world over the years, but I was just fortunate that the people from Havana Club, the rum company, wanted me to do a comp really, to direct people towards their Havana Cultura website. Being a French company, with Havana Club rum being Cuban, to keep a partnership with the Cuban government, they have to kind of put a bit of energy into promoting Cuban culture. They have this side of them, which is a bit dangerous when you’re dealing with corporates and stuff, but they have this guy who runs their Havana Cultura website, a guy called Francois Renié who said to me, ‘Gilles, let’s go to Cuba and find out what you can discover.’ That led to us producing our own record there and we have this amazing story now and I’ve managed to work with all these young, killer, new generation Cubans and they’re all sort of really appreciating it and we’ve toured round the world. Last weekend we were back there and this is the great thing – we’d been asked to perform in Cuba, so the band performed and I DJed and a couple of thousand people came and it was an amazing event. For me, it’s like doing a full circle in a weird sort of way, having gone there, made the record, taken the sounds out of Cuba and made them international, to then being invited back into Cuba to actually present Cuba with its own sound by a bunch of European DJs, it was quite unique in a way. So yeah, it was great and I’m gonna do another volume now; we’ve just been talking about what to do on the 3rd volume, so that’s something we’ll probably do next year.
Have you come up against any restrictions? If Havana Club have a relationship with the Cuban government, have there been any issues, because there’s not a complete freedom of speech still in Cuba? No, there haven’t been and even on the last record, we were working with quite radical rappers Los Aldeanos, who’ve got quite a big history of being the most outspoken of the singers and rappers in Cuba, but I think everything’s really calmed down over there; you can really see that the change in the last three or four years in Cuba has been amazing in terms of the amount of new buildings and development, and the changes in the rules of commerce – you can now invest in Cuba, so it’s changed a lot – it’s a different time. It’s a nice time to be working there because it’s given the people a sense that they’re not stuck in a routine; there’s room to build, and for growth.
Yes, it’s an important heritage, but you have to be able to move it on somewhere as well. The last thing I need to ask you Gilles, is when you come to Norwich, what do you want from us as an audience? Oh, just bring your dancing shoes and be prepared to listen to and dance to different styles: that’s what I love. With me, sometimes it’s difficult because I’ve been around so long and people who haven’t seen me play for about 15, 20 years still expect me to be playing what I was playing then and some people want me to play jazz, other people want me to play electronic stuff, or the Cuban or Brazilian stuff, so really all I need is a really open minded crowd who are really prepared to go in all kinds of directions, who’re fundamentally there to have a good time… and dance.
Emma Garwood
The Plugg presents Gilles Peterson at OPEN on Saturday 9th June. For tickets, go to www.ueaticketbookings.co.uk or buy instore at Seven Wolves / Dogfish.
