S9, Ep3: Pete Tong, DJ

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:07I'm Grace Dent and this is Comfort Eating from The Guardian a podcast where we pay homage to the lesser celebrated foods in life because even as a restaurant critic I believe the food that matters most is often that snack you cobble together when you're curled upon the sofa Each week, I ask my guest to lift the lid on what comfort foods have seen them through their lives. Because you can tell a lot about a person from what they eat behind closed doors.

0:45Friends, hello. You find me adding organic baba ganoush and 60 lemon-scented bin liners to my online shopping. People talk about rampant consumerism, how it's buy, buy, buy, and how we're all dopamine-seeking missiles at heart. But I get exactly the same dopamine hit from just clicking add to basket. My basket regularly sits heaving full for honestly weeks. It's not about buy-in for me. It's simply about putting luxurious, but frankly, unneeded items in my shopping cart. Talking of dopamine, today's guest has surely released more dopamine in more brains over his 50 years of being a superstar DJ than almost anyone else.

1:37He is the king of Ibiza, the record spinning legend, the star of the catchphrase. It's all gone. Yes. Yes, siri. It is Mr. Pete Tong. I can't believe I'm saying that. In my house. Pete Tong is beyond doubt one of the most influential figures in dance music. Without him, I reckon, house music would not have spread throughout the UK like it did. And he has played a huge role in shaping modern club culture. Pete has been a pillar of Radio 1 for over 25 years and his show has soundtracked countless people's Friday nights. For years, he had a residency of passion in Ibiza and in 2014, he got an MBE for services to music and broadcasting.

2:28He is about to go back on the road in the UK with his 10th year of Ibiza Classics, described as an event for the relapsed raver. Right, I think I'm going to be adding some Red Bull and a pack of Alka-Seltzer to my shop just to get in the mood to host a man who is the human personification of a party. I don't even drink anymore, but this just feels right.

3:20Thanks, Tara. I'm Myra Ameth, founder of Mochi Health. To find your Mochi moment, visit joinmochi.com. Tara is a Mochi member compensated for her story.

3:50But we only have like 30 seconds. Go to Bombas.com and use code AUDIO for 20 % off your first purchase. That's B-O-M-B-A-S.com and use code AUDIO at checkout.

4:05Pete Tong, welcome to Comfort Eaton. Oh, thanks for having us. It's a pleasure. It's quite strange to see you across the table in daylight. I didn't think you went out in daylight. Can we tell the truth, actually, that this was meant to be a Zoom? And then I kind of got intimidated by the fact that everyone else came here. I was like, oh, I should come here. Obviously, I want to meet you. You have built your life at being at the helm of banging parties. Now, you more than anyone must know how you make a party pop. And it might not just be the music. So I'm going to test you on. It's a 60th birthday party at a village hall.

4:47what is the one thing that you need to make it work and what is the one thing that when you turn up and you see it you think oh my god this party's not happening decent sound system if you can't if people can't hear what you're playing or it doesn't it doesn't impact the room to get their attention then you can't you can't control the environment so you're just a kind of a box in the corner making a bit of a racket it's a bit it's a bit like trying to run a party with one those Sonos speakers you know like it's a good idea in theory but usually once you get about 30 people around no one can hear the music and it's game over I mean funny enough I do a few 60th birthday parties so usually by the time I get there they're they're they're kind of flying I was gonna say halfway to heaven that's the wrong way to say it but um yeah they're normally pretty raucous someone asked me to do one and then kind of never really confirmed it and then I got another gig the same day and then they they kind of said oh so i'll see you you know and then a couple of weeks out i'll see you at the weekend and it was like well no because i've got this other gig and you never came back to me it's oh my god i promise this this is the big surprise bye bye guy got me a helicopter and um is this a famous person no the person that got me the helicopter was you know in the music business very successful it was a lovely thing to do because it was his childhood friend kind of thing.

6:08So they flew me in by helicopter to the back garden and it was near Birmingham in the suburbs or in the countryside and I kind of landed and everyone was just like they were peaking, put it that way

6:32It is not every day I invite a world renowned music name into my house but when i do i ask them to bring their comfort food now this is the food that fuels them to sustain a 40 year career as a dj then get an mbe for it pete tom what snack have you brought can you take off the tea towel please okay oh yes please thank you so much pete tong please this is explain your lovely glossy this is a bacon sandwich it very much is a bacon sandwich and it's done in a certain way because it has to be on kind of um yeah white bread with the hp sauce okay explain the instructions for anybody wanting pete tongs bacon sandwich what do they need to do well i prefer a roll over bread some people are really purists would do it with white bread and then basically the best kind of back bacon you can buy so you're meant to wait i can't i'm sorry i can't sometimes i just gotta go in there um so i love it you want back bacon yeah so then bacon in the frying pan and then and then cook it quite slowly not not too fast whereas it will just burn and then towards the end i put i tend to put the roll into the um frying pan just to give it a little grill see you're all about the bacon fat aren't you exactly like the bacon fat some people would take what obviously just plaster that with butter and then put the bacon on top you don't really need to you really don't like crispy bacon do you i do but um i had a bacon i allow myself by the way it's all that comfort food but i don't you're not going to last too long if you live on this you are looking magically useful in front of me i are you you're not you don't eat a lot of bacon sandwiches do you do yoga for about four hours before you have yeah no i've kind of let allow myself to have one once a week or something and if i leave bacon in the fridge a couple of days my wife's got rid of it and not told me for your own good so it has to be a mission like i have to go to the farmer's market in barnes or something or you know can i say a brand name you can say ginger pig we're lucky in barnes with ginger pig and i go there and i have to literally buy the amount of slices I want unless I've got family or friends around.

8:51If I buy four rashers and cook two the other two will be gone. They'll be in the bin. She won't even give them to the dog. She thinks it's bad karma. What's your wife called? Carolina. I love that Carolina is literally she's policing that bacon in the fridge. I have to sneak in the bacon sandwich. You need to get a secret fridge somewhere around the house don't you? HP sauce by the way. It has to be brown it has to be hp preferably you are probably the man behind thousands of the most debauched parties known to man but you're only allowed one bacon sandwich every fortnight and you're only allowed and you're and if you have more to come around just let me in so sometimes you did come in leaving the party everybody everyone's still on the dance floor until 8am, but you're already in your pyjamas eating a bacon sandwich.

9:50Sometimes. Not in hotels. Just sometimes. Hotels usually make the worst bacon sandwiches, honestly. If you're very particular about bacon, a hotel is not your friend. No, not at all.

10:08You have been in the music industry. Now, I'm going to tot it up. Please do not wince. I think it's the best part of 50 years. it's getting there i guess since i started in a school band when i was like 14 15 there's a dictionary definition of what a dj is how would you define it yeah like a chef in a funny sort of way a chef i'd say pied piper but we don't all need people to jump over a cliff i know exactly what you think that was on my instagram tag or somewhere one one time it was like the pied piper of dance they used to call me it's like that's great sounds great until you actually read the story until you realize that he did he not lead children into a river where the cornets got yeah yeah ultimately it's it's picking the right music and playing it in the right order and having good taste it's about you know the ingredients there's so many analogies with being a chef and people used to come up to me it's like well how do i start djing and i would say well what do you want to play and they'd go well i don't know and i went well when you when you work out what you want to play come back and i'll tell you people want to be djs almost now like because of what they see yeah social media yeah a lot of people you know the private jets or the adulation on stage or the chest beating or that you know we're talking about the similarities between being a chef i always say that there are things with being a cook that you can't really teach also going to the market i'd give you another analogy of like looking at the thing and picking up a good potato and a bad one you can't it's kind of obvious to most people us but not necessarily early and it's i feel like that about music sometimes it's like well that's obviously really good and that's really bad yes when you hear something that's good are you storing it away and going i can almost see the point of the night when that yeah yeah definitely i start to think about what goes with it like what goes before it what goes after it can you switch off because surely it must ruin music for you yeah i do like silence actually yeah Now, Ibiza Classics, which is you and conductor Jules Buckley on stage with a 65 strong orchestra performing an array of Ibiza Classics, is about to hit 10 years.

12:23Yeah, 10 years this year. And you're about to do another set of Ibiza Classics shows. But tell me, what is it like touring with 65 people? I mean, look, you've kind of moved as a bit of a lone wolf for a long time. Do you eat together? Yeah, we do, actually. Yeah, we eat quite a lot together. The catering's amazing. It's cost a fortune. but it's actually one of the loveliest times of um when you do see everybody and it's yeah as you say it's totally different i mean forever you know djing on my own or with a tour manager or my wife sometimes or um a friend now and now you know when we do these tours we're out for two or three weeks just like 12 trucks 65 people on stage but then there's like 120 people in the crew just before we do the last show on the last rehearsal jules makes this speech from the conductor's position and i kind of he leads it i chip in a little bit and literally the biggest cheer always is for the uh the caterers every time every time what is this orchestra eating what are the caterers bringing things that they can cook for a lot of people that are still pretty classy the desserts are always pretty naughty and pretty heavy so it's always crumbles and custard and stuff like that it's not exactly we always were everyone's reckons they put on like two stone or something when they've been on tour when you first put it together and you were thinking will this work and then you all got into a room what was the song that they played and you went oh yeah right because it's so expensive to record an orchestra i couldn't actually hear anything yeah but i was always told by jules trust us trust me it's okay and yeah he'd send me some kind of fake bits back on software so it wasn't until we got into rehearsal then i realized this is like instead of me driving a sports car around you know the streets i've suddenly got a formula one car because i've got this like unbelievable because i've got this army of people with me and behind me so the power was unbelievable and then with the very first song we played at the royal albert hall that first show was right here right now we're slim and literally within 15 20 seconds are get goosebumps talking about it now yeah the whole crowd you know 5 000 people in the royal alcohol just stood up and they basically never sat down well it was that it was an appointment that show it was that was it it was like six months of planning that's that's the gig that's the day as soon as we got backstage like we've got to do that again it was like how are we going to do it again i don't know but we've got to do it again

15:04you um began life in kent in 1960 in a maternity unit in dartford which unbeknownst to you had a history of delivering music legends yeah mick jagger apparently yeah i don't really know him that well but i bumped into him a couple well someone actually called me about 10 years ago and said oh you do realize Mick Jagger's your cousin and I said what do you mean and he said well he's telling people he's your cousin um I said well I've never met him and then I did bump into him at a very swanky party it was the Vanity Fair Awards which you're not meant to get into and we managed to get into somehow really really early and he was he was the only other person in there so I actually had to walk across the room to him and then the first thing he said to me he's like hi pete i'm your cousin it's like what so it turns out that um he'd done a family tree and reckoned that we were related so yeah oh my god he really did think yeah yeah yeah have you let um having mick jagger as a cousin change you as a person is it not really no no i don't get a christmas card you think you'd get like a hamper no hang on a minute was he born in the same place as you or do you think he's just well we reckon my mum reckons it's wrong now it was a different hospital because um so but it was dartford for sure do you know if there's if there's a legend and the truth you should always be the legend exactly yeah every time exactly so british 60s food not known for a lot of flair no what what's happening at in the kitchen of mr and mrs tong and two small mustard tongs yeah pretty basic it was like egg and chips on monday it was there was a lot of pies like mints mints i actually asked my mum who's thankfully still around this morning mum what did i used to eat like you ate a lot of mints like mints with what you loved mints okay so shepherd yeah shepherd's pie cottage pie and fish and chips on once a week my dad would take me out occasionally and the real treat was like angus you know steakhouse well in in going uptown yeah so once in a while we go to a movie or something and the big treat would be to go to the angus steakhouse it was like near leicester square um still there yeah we picked angus over the bernie inn i think that was the choice bernie inn was like 80 pence for like you know steak and chips and a pint of beer or something and we went upscale we went over a pound tongs tongs up west yeah and my scampi and chips was the other thing my dad used to go and get the um going to the fishmongers was the big thing so it was like cockles and whelks which i hated and still do but i liked scampi which you don't really see as much anymore scampi was massive then it was like and it was delicious i always remember scampi i mean to me it's just like prawns that curled but We were a bit smaller.

18:01My other big thing about food when I was young was I went to boarding school. Yeah. And that kind of traumatised me. I was super young, like seven years old. And I think I blacked some of it out, actually. I can't eat. But to this day, I can't eat beetroot. Sorry, darling. How did you end up at boarding school at seven? My mum had a nightmare with my brother's pregnancy and couldn't handle it. And it was weekly boarding. It was quite close. It was in Rochester. But it was still super young to go. I can't eat mac and cheese my whole life because I think that's all I served. Yeah. How did you get...

18:39Anyway, I survived. Yeah, yeah, you've done me very much. And obviously I know Pete Tong and his glamorous lifestyle, so I do need to talk about Pete Tong on a caravan holiday. A caravan holiday, yeah. Where did you go? I think it was like Great Yarmouth. Then years later you find yourself back in a caravan. Yeah. As a case to soul weekenders. What was that like? And it's quite weird when the soul scene really kicked off, when I started DJing the soul and jazz funk scene. So there I am back at a bad caravan site, like 10 years later or something. It was like, I'd escaped these and I'm back at a caravan site.

19:14Yeah, absolutely. Did they make you stay in a caravan? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I used to do a breakfast show. Like we had 24 hour radio station, like piped around the camp as well. And then me and Jeff Young actually was a DJ on Radio 1 before me. And we had this naughty kind of radio show. like you couldn't play it now it's what you i got that's what we got up to it was like everything from like yeah kind of sex advice to kind of like the most bizarre cooking of like you know do you remember when those baked beans used to you get the cans with the sausages in yeah we used to do the most like we'd have live cooking it was like breakfast television but it was actually on on the radio you'd never nobody had had any sleep yeah and um so yeah it was coffee and like vodka or coffee and the party seven how does um how do those little tins of beans with like two little sausages how do they taste after you've been up for three days pretty gross i could actually it's funny because you know memories taste memory i can taste them now like just with you saying they had a very distinct taste your dad was a bookie he ran a chain of betting shops small chain yeah did you did you spend a lot of time in the betting shops um a bit and i ended up um i was quite good at maths so i i was too young to be front of house but he had me in the back yeah so um i'd be working out the bets on the on the big race days but like the grand national was like always traumatized our family because like he because being a small bookmaker you couldn't you know you either won big or you took a massive hit so we never knew it was always like yeah my mum always says it was like she can't watch the grand national because of what it meant to her back then because probably you know one year we'd win and then for four years we'd lose and he'd be miserable um you know if you everyone's betting the favorite and it comes in you're kind of screwed it feels like you've got kind of bittersweet memories of the bookies yeah totally Yeah, I do.

21:11I don't have, yeah, it was a tough business to be in. He wasn't a trackside bookie. He was in the shops. But he did run his own business. He was a very proud man. So I think he was, and he was quite a stylish man. He never really recovered when he, he had to sell them in the end because of, he was kind of gambling to kind of, to balance the, he was actually almost having to take bets himself to kind of raise money to pay off. So it was, it wasn't a great business model. Do you, do you gamble now? No, hardly ever. That completely killed that gene in me actually. So I go, I've been to Vegas obviously millions of times for DJing and I, I can literally walk through and just, you know, I think I've probably had two games of 21 in my life, you know, because I can play that without the money involved.

22:01Slot machines, not, not my thing. The only thing I do now is I go to, I'm a massive Arsenal fan. So, and I go often with my son. um so we'll always have a bet on you know first score last score um you know once in a while we win yeah that's the only thing i'll do i'll bet on football i've actually i've downloaded one of those apps for the first time they're dangerous because then you can bet on literally everything yeah literally everything like will i arrive at your house on time it'll be in there somewhere the betting shop in the late 60s early 70s was really a hangout and they smelt because everyone could smoke i remember that as well and my dad used to have a have to have a bouncer a large intimidating gentleman just to keep order in there when things went wrong and it finally finally have my first ever gig i ever did at a village hall i used him to run the door eric i haven't really nailed what you were like though as a kid i still i think i've always been quite introvert which kind of DJing suited me I was very when I because when I got into music I was too young to go out anywhere so my connection to music was the radio so I fell in love with radio at boarding school I used to get lonely at night I don't want to make this a sob story about boarding school but I had a little pocket transistor radio so I'd listen under the covers to radio Luxembourg or whatever it was at the time where the signal would be like going in and I think it was on a long wave or short wave or something But was your dad, your dad was into music at home?

23:33Yeah, yeah. So my dad did love music and bought a lot of very exotic looking records. I mean, we did have the Beatles and the Stones, but he, he'd have Frank Sinatra, he'd have jazz records, he'd have Santana, which was quite exotic back then. I had a good kind of influence and my, um, kind of swinging sixties of my, my, my family was, um, every weekend the families would get together and that the cocktails would come out. It was, I say to people, it wasn't like mad men. it was like the crate going around the crate twins for an afternoon i think that was our style icon and it was just all those 60s snacks and for me it was twiglets and cream soda and i'd just be listening to the music and watching what they were playing and like trying to kind of the record player was a you know a gramophone like a chest like a coffin mostly yeah um so i'd just be parked up next to that so little pete tongs got his cream soda he's got his twiglets yeah and you must be seeing then somebody who's kind of making the party exactly like learning what yeah starting to feel it yeah i wanted to be a musician or something so like banging drums stroke strumming a guitar and my dad did eventually get me a drum kit how do you start kind of first buying records and kind of putting together rudimentary and that rudimentary idea of a set well you start to form opinions obviously about what you liked and i was kind of um always drawn to rhythm so my dad had these like african drumming records that i really liked it was like pre-disco but like james brown and stuff stuff like that george mccray the first album i ever bought was slider by t-rex where are you going to get these is this is this a local what's the local records shop at that time in gravesend called chris's so i started to build up you know i started to collect records every penny i was given for pocket money it was record tokens back then was the thing so i always asked for record tokens and then by the time um i did my first ever disco which was a school disco it was kind of combination of what i'd collected and it was music to make people dance i guess

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26:51you've been going to chris's records you've been building up records that you like you've done a school disco when is the very first pete tong night yeah i rented a village hall it's quite entrepreneurial looking back at it i must have been 15 16 and i went around on my bike i've made posters with with um felt it pens had the mind had the wisdom to put them in plastic bags because I stuck them on telegraph poles with drawing pins. People came, and I remember sitting at the kitchen table at the end of the night, and we had like£100. And off the back of that, quite quickly, I got a residency. Well, I got asked to play at the Ashes Restaurant, because New Ash Green was kind of our little version of Milton Keynes next to Hartley and Gravesend.

27:41It was like a new town. Hang on, what's Ashes Restaurant like? Tell me, is it Mediterranean? Mediterranean. It was upstairs in a kind of new shopping centre and it was a lot of red brick, bare brick walls. And what was the food? Prong cocktails and steaks again? And probably scampi and chips. Scampi. That's probably it. Are you playing while people are eating? Yeah, I probably got free scampi and chips while I was playing. Yeah. Yeah. I think I was meant to be playing like towards the end of dinner and it became a bit of a club. And from there, then I got into a pub in Gravesend which became quite influential called the Nelson.

28:15I was too young to be, I couldn't drink by that time. I think I was like, this all happened before I was 18. There was a lot, there was really strong West Indian community and they'd be bringing me like reggae records. It was really, really cool. And then all my friends were dancers and they'd be going up to London and coming back and bringing me like the first ever kind of American imports, like records that were shipped from America that hadn't come out yet. Is there a big part of like being your father's son? Clearly he was a businessman and you've seen it from a very business point of view.

28:45as well do you think that you had an entrepreneurial side that maybe other djs didn't i wouldn't rewrite history and say i had a plan yeah to be honest it was i was really good at school up to my o levels and then by the upper six i was totally distracted i wanted a transit van i wanted to be buying equipment you know there was a minute probably where my mom and dad thought i was going to be a civil engineer or something that just went out the window i wasn't an academic and neither were so I didn't grow up in a kind of university household or anything and I would do anything to buy records I worked at a petrol station like petrol pump attendant for a while what was the best thing you ate at the petrol station when you were working there it was marshmallow in in some kind of like sandwich wasn't it do you remember those with two wafers so and then you did get a transit van and you're trying I got a transit van and then I so literally left school and I was working for myself but you've got the transit van you're going up and down all around Kent and the southeast yeah so I have to ask you're eating on the motorway is there a specific place that you might chef I think I got the I think I got in if there was a platinum club of little chef I was in it if I was it was a member for life so we would always and obviously back then when things were safer these things open 24 hours a day and the restaurant you know now like the petrol station sometimes open 24 hours a day but yeah but you've got a bit behind glass obviously back in those days not only was the petrol station open but the restaurant was open and you could just walk in there so we would we'd be in there at two or three in the morning you know coming back from margate or somewhere i was i tend to be probably full english at two or three in the morning yeah rather than the hamburger what was it about the little chef though like there was something that's that was really comforting about it that it was just a cafe but it felt a bit like a special occasion it was a restaurant with a look like a influenced probably by like american diners or something but that was if you were out every night for a year then you must have had fried food every night for a year yeah my cholesterol was not so good it wasn't and it's better now i can't think of what else they served yeah i know i can't is it did they probably they probably had chili con carny and stuff like that that they could just mass produce um and stick in the corner i don't know anyone out there has got the little chef menu from the late 70s apparently sources are telling me that there was a banana split yeah i do remember those yeah yeah when you were 20 do you know what a banana split looked like back then it was a banana it's just a banana with some squirty cream that's all it was with lots no lots of cream yeah the squirty thing that's all it was there was nothing else there was maybe like one yeah one glassy cherry like yeah and the chocolate something some kind of very sweet sauce when you're 23 you land a massive job at a record label you are used to discovering music you know in your heart that you are you know you know your own mind but now it's your job to find new talent and sign it do you ever doubt yourself at the beginning the pure innocence is wonderful i joined a record company just as it was starting but i i was just like oh my god all you have to do is find things that are really good and sign them and put them out and for the first few years that worked i got off to such a flying start the first thing was run dmc for sure yeah they were on an independent label called profile in in america and then we signed them for the rest of the world and we had that second album with raising hell on it and walk this way yeah and so straight away i met all those guys um hang on so you've gone from pete tong at the little chef yeah now having to basically wine and dine run dmc yeah you don't take them to little chef no no there was this famous time they they came to um they never really liked coming here um they didn't want to leave queens and new york but we got them over here we took them to an Indian on the on Westbourne Park Road we're halfway through the meal and the band just got up and left and then we were we were kind of like well what what what's happened I mean we are we blowing it you know what's what's going on it's like no don't worry about it they've just finished it's like they don't want to listen to you lot they're it's like well where are they should we take them somewhere else no no they're fine and then I poked my head out the thing and they were sitting on the pavement so it's like you sure you don't want to come back in no no no it's Anyway, so that was, yeah.

33:15But it was, yeah, they liked the food, but they didn't want to, they didn't like our company and they just wanted to sit outside. Did you sign Salt-N-Pepa? Yeah. Salt-N-Pepa, I got to know a lot better. And yeah, they were very personable and really, really embraced the UK and Europe. Salt-N-Pepa stayed for the whole dinner, did they? Or did they, did you get as far as dessert? When I took them for dinner, they definitely stayed, yeah. They were fun. I have to ask about your work with Goldie. because Goldie is a friend of the podcast. He has been in here. And I mean, even at this later stage of his life, he still managed to cause complete chaos.

33:50What was that like? I was told about him by someone else that worked at the label, but they were scared of him. And they said, you meet him. We don't want to do the meeting, but he's got this amazing music. So he came into my office with his pitbull terrier and he proceeded to play me Timeless, which I loved, which was amazing. but he tells the story the only reason he signed to me is I was the only one that um didn't kind of jump on my palm pilot or blackberry at the time or look at my newspaper because it was 20 minutes long and he was just like this with his dog looking like this and I was just scared

34:29yeah obviously I like the music but yeah I kind of got the vibe that this wasn't the person that you start getting um you start looking reading reading the enemy while you're playing his music Now your life now is very, very different to how it began. It's the mid-90s. You're friends with Goldie. So this is the whole Noel Gallagher, Groucho. This is the height of 90s, Cool Britannia debauchery. How do you remember the eating around that point? Yeah, not a lot of eating. Did you spend a lot of time at the back of the Groucho in the restaurant? Yeah, I did actually. The Grouch Show was good because it had shepherd's pie, which I love.

35:11I'm a sucker for shepherd's pie. Like the Ivy number one meal. I mean, the 90s was crazy. I mean, it was a decade that just flew by from 90 to 99. There was clearly a part of you that was still very focused on business because you didn't let the party take over. Yeah, because I still had to be at work. Then I was still very much at the record company, so it was a day job. And as much as those stories of going missing for days, I was never really that person that went missing for days. I had staff that went missing for days and it was fine as long as they came back with a hit. I mean, the whole of All Saints was really put together at Browns.

35:49Goldie said that he went to Noel Gallagher's and he was there for about three days. And at one point he opened the blinds and there was like a Ferrari just being delivered on the back of a truck that Noel had forgotten it. he'd ordered yeah it was crazy days i took him there sometimes then i'd leave i always remember the fish tank that nolan makes how the fish survived the weather they even did what went on in that house they probably got overfed put it that way i love the fact that you delivered goldie there i did i did deliver thank you and yeah or smuggled him in sometimes yeah

36:36you work at 90s you are working in the music business you're running your own label you're a dj and it is a very prolific work ethic i do think back and wonder how i did it all to be honest i often think that because i get kind of overwhelmed nowadays quite you know i find myself getting overwhelmed because i i've always had this thing of like i always did a lot of different things which i guess was a special power in some sense but then up then the old the flip of that is like i wish i could just do one thing yeah at one point i was head of the whole of the anr department it wasn't just dance i was doing all the rock and pop stuff as well so it was like i don't know so basically the job of four or five people you were doing kind of yeah at once um yeah were you happy maybe yes and no i'd like to think so yeah in most departments yeah yeah it took its toll definitely in some ways so something you just said earlier and i never finished it which was you asked me about um you know signing things and being and i think there was a real innocence at the beginning because you signed i signed what i wanted and it became successful and the same went for run dmc and salt and pepper and that sounds easy now looking back at it but then something happens you know you get more successful and then you start signing things to stay successful or you start signing things to keep to pay the bills or to keep the lights on and you do find yourself at the end signing things that basically you don't really like you kind of kid yourself that you do like them um but the minute nobody else likes them it's like well i never liked either and i mean it's but you imagine cooking i guess like cooking food for people you don't like or meals you don't like to be imagine cooking just to be popular as opposed to cooking because you love it i guess that's that's what i'm getting at the term superstar DJ was coined by the Chemical Brothers in the late 90s.

38:28And this is like a comment on how the role of the DJ has gone from the bloke in the corner to the king of the club. Yeah. Do you remember noticing that that status had changed? The big shift was in the raves, the party was the king. And at the start, all these clubs I told you about opening like Ministry of Sound, Cream, the clubs were the star. And then through the 90s the DJ started becoming the star and instead of the resident DJ being the DJ DJ started traveling around the country and being on tour so you so you could see your favorite DJ in Newcastle or Middlesbrough because I'd come up there next week Roger Sanchez would come up there next week Frankie Knuckles David Morales Paul Oakenfold and so you had people you had this massive rotation of DJs through the mid 90s you know a few magazines stop seeing DJs on the front of magazines music magazines first so that was a shock like even that dj instead of an art a musician being you know and it wasn't keith flint anymore it was suddenly it was sasha or paul oakenford or car cox or me yeah and then and then obviously djs started appearing on the front page of the sunday times or the evening standard magazine how can how can you stay sane you've got suddenly flying the globe enormous paychecks private jets i'm sure concord yeah i managed to i used to have been on concord a few times that was kind of with the um more with the record company hat on than the dj hat on but i got very very good at um sussing the system out of like air miles upgrades but once in a while you do you know the captain was at your gig or i've had that before you know you changed my life um i was at the abe for classics or i used to go to cream you know and now i still i used to go to the cream and now it's like great and now i'm flying this jumbo jet that's not so great because the last time i saw you were melted on the stairs i know you're flying yeah but come to first class anyway so yeah so that's happened tell me about the food on concord terrible it was all too quick you what i do remember they used to give you like a little certificate or a little a little toy concord things like that like the gift pack was better than the put it this way i remember the gift pack i don't remember the food but it's but at some point you are you're kind of you're in passion you're at broadcasting house you're doing this you're doing that um there is a point where chris moyles is making open jokes saying that like are you coming back to work actually yeah yeah that's great somehow i wangled it for one year that um radio one let me do my friday night show every single week from cafe mamba say from may till september end of september they kind of went with it because they used to say to me don't play it up too much that you're in Ibiza just just talk about the fact that the whole station is going to be there at the beginning of August.

41:27But then after the Radio 1 weekend, the Elastic Band, the patience was getting stretched as the journey went from the beginning of August to the end of September. And, yeah, by September, and we'd always have these live links. It's like, so, Tongi! So, when you're coming home, the Christmas decorations have gone up in Woolworths. What the hell are you doing in a beefland? It's like, and he would call it out. It's like, BBC bosses, do you realise what you're doing here? It's like, so we didn't do that again. Yeah. You're one of the biggest DJs in the world at this point, but you're also a dad. How does having children fit in with being a superstar DJ?

42:12Well, amazing and challenging, but more challenging probably for my first three when I was younger. But I think it grounded me in many ways. Maybe that's partly why I'm still here, in a funny sort of way. as i had a lot of friends in the um 80s and 90s that kind of got burnout or got unwell but you're in the height of the party wherever it is and then you just drive all the way home and you get there and there's a baby that's got colic or something yeah i had that on new year's eve 1999 it was meant to be the greatest night ever the most gigs ever you know the obviously the fees were crazy It started off with Radio 1 in Liverpool.

42:53Somebody kind of made this ambitious plan that I was then going to go and play in Cardiff and London the same night. But on the way to Cardiff, Nat actually got really ill and he would have only been three, two and a half. So I had to go home. So Nat is your third child? Third child. My eldest is Joe, who was born in 1990, Becky in 92. He was also a DJ in the music business. and then Lily, who's 18 this year. There was so much hype around 1999, such a build-up. It was a Friday night. I think New Year's Eve's in a funny sort of way, as a DJ, are always a little bit of a letdown. They're never quite as good as they're cracked up to be.

43:34And it's a funny old gig to play because you do get crazy offers to play them. But rarely are you with the people you love or your friends. Are the offers still as crazy? I've had some mad ones where I've left. and I really kind of pick and choose what I'm going to do now on New Year's Eve because I really would rather be with my wife and with family. So it takes a pretty crazy offer to... How much is going to get you away to go and spend it in one of the worst places in Las Vegas? How much? How much is going to get you? I'm offering you... I can tell you, by the way. I'm offering you half a million.

44:14All right, we'll see. Vegas is... I'm offering you£750 ,000, but you have to stay. Weirdly, Vegas. You have to stay in Circus Circus in one of the worst rooms. I mean, to be honest, there's a lot worse places than Vegas. I've had to go to the Philippines for a night, and that was the most impersonal. I mean, nothing against the Philippines, but that was in kind of a Vegas-like resort. It was just absolutely... And it was also the most bonkers thing, that sometimes you just get booked to play things that are so inappropriate. It was like DJing inside Westfield Shopping Centre with no one in it.