Vaffanculo Magazine: So, you are considered by many as one of the leading figures of the Techno scene.

Laurent Garnier:  Oh god, oh god!

VM: This expression brings a lot of responsibilities towards the public that you deal with.

LG: I can’t say I’m a leader.

VM: No, one of the leading figures. Yeah, that’s what people say about you. That’s why I say that it brings a lot of responsibilities.

LG: Does it?

VM: I would think so, because it’s heavy. So what’s your reflection on that?

LG: I can´t say I´m one of the leaders, I would say I´m one of the actors, from the cast. I know why people would like to say I´m one of the leaders; I think it´s because I´ve been there for a long time and I´m still there; it´s because I´ve been active in the techno-electronic music scene. I don´t like the word Techno, because I find it very narrow minded. So, I’d rather talk about electronic music, but I think I´ve been very active in this scene for a long time because…

VM: More than most of the other Djs…

LG: Yeah, I guess because of all the things I´ve done. I´ve been Djing, producing music, having my own label. Fifteen years ago I had my own record shop, all my radio work, the productions, really seeing music from other people, fighting very hard for the fact that Techno can survive, can live and can move on, working with a lot of new projects. I think this is why people say that I´m very proactive in Techno music, but I would say I´m an actor more than anything, even though I´m one of those old school actors, because I´ve been there for a long time, still there, still defending what I truly believe.

VM: So, what do you believe? Tell me a bit, in music terms.

LG: You know, what do I believe? It´s a funny question. I don´t have a spirit which is only pro-Techno. I´m more a person that likes music. For me Techno…

VM: You don´t like categorizations…

LG: I hate categorizations, and I hate when people say, “Laurent Garnier is a Techno DJ,” but I know that people always need a name.

VM: It´s the industry…

LG: Exactly. Of course they need this, which is a bit of a shame, and I think it´s more representative of what´s happening now than maybe 30 years ago. But as long as we know what Techno stands for, it´s quite good. Techno is…

VM: But it has changed…

LG: Of course, but Techno at the beginning was a mixture of lots of different kinds of music. Why I loved Techno at the beginning? It´s because it was la synthèse, how do you say that in English? La synthèse, which is the mixture, the core of Techno, was coming from all sorts of different kinds of music I liked. You could feel New Wave, you could feel Funk, you could feel the freedom of Jazz, you could feel Blues as well. Yes, because Techno was born in Detroit, and the Detroit guys had Motown, and before Motown they had a very long history with Jazz, a very long history with Soul, and of course the radio in Detroit 25 years ago was playing a lot of European music. So they knew who Kraftwerk was, they knew who Falco was; funny enough, they were big fans of Falco. They knew exactly who New Order and The Cure were. Of course, they had the history of Disco music because they were American, they had a history of Soul and they put all this within the new music which became Techno music. So, as long as we know what Techno stands for, and understand why I became so much of a big fan of Techno, it´s because it was exactly the synthèse of what I loved within the music, which is all different kinds and sorts of dance music and Afro-American music that was very strong in the roots of Techno at the beginning. So this is why, I guess, I dived into this very quickly, and I defended that music.

So I guess my idea in music, and why I say sometimes Techno, I feel that Techno is a bit too narrow minded as a word; it’s because for a lot of people Techno is a foreign flow beat designed to make people dance in clubs and it´s not, it´s much more than this. That is why I’d rather be tagged as electronic music, because I think it’s more, it’s a bigger bag. It has a more open minded idea, the word electronic. But then again, I´m more than that, because I like music, full stop. I guess my task is to defend music in all sorts of forms, you know, there’s no boundaries for me in music. Music is freedom, and sometimes, I guess, my big fighting thing is that I hate the way people narrow-mind music and put music in boxes, and say “a song should be 3 and a half minutes to be played on the radio.” All this absolutely gives me... I hate it, I hate all these definitions, it´s a crappy definition.

VM: Well, that leads to the next question about your musical roots because they’re very much attached to the soul of American music.

LG: What, the music I like?

VM: No, no. Well, the electronic, the music that you make. Have you been constantly travelling to the U.S. for your music projects, your music research, and all that, for the years?

LG: Yes.

VM: How do you perceive your role as a European DJ immersed in the music scene in the U.S.?

LG: Do I really have a role? I don´t think so.

VM: Okay.

LG: I don´t feel like I need to deliver something special. It´s funny, because I said I´m an actor, and now you´re using the word role, which I found very interesting. Do I really have a role in this cast? I don´t know…

VM: I think you do…

LG: I don´t like the pressure of that!

VM: That´s why I say, this is a responsibility…

LG: Ok, so my role is to, and it should be the same role with everybody, is to be as honest as I can within the music I defend, to be as open minded as I can, which is my honesty, and to go all the way with that, and to fight for that…

VM: That means evolution also; otherwise, you would be stuck with that…

LG: You can´t, I mean, if you are somebody curious, once you´ve done something, you can´t repeat it on and on, because otherwise you just dig your grave, you are not forcing yourself to move on as an artist. And for me, my task as an artist, is to try to find the truth. I don’t know what I´m looking for. It´s funny, because all my musicians, all the people that I work with, they always say something about me, and I so agree with this: they say, ”You never know what you want, but you always know what you don´t want.”

VM: That´s already everything…

LG: This is so me, this is so me.  And, I guess why my music has changed and moved on so much, since twenty years ago, since I did my very first album which was called Shot in the Dark, why I´ve changed all the time, and I worked with choreographers, and I worked with people in the cinema, and I worked with radio, and then I do very different projects… I guess it is because I´m still looking, and I hope I´m not gonna find the solution. I´m just still looking, and I need for me to be alive and to be excited, I need to carry on looking. So sometimes, I do things, and I always do things very sincerely. I´m very sincere in what I do. So sometimes I lose fans, because they don´t understand where I´m going, but at least one thing people can say about me is I don´t repeat myself. I guess my task is to always be in a constant search, and to always try to redefine and search and do different things, even though sometimes I feel I’m going back to my roots and, from that, I can move on. For me, music is like the wheel of a car, and the wheel always goes back on the ground to move forward, you always need that one point when they’re turning around to go back on the ground to be able to move forward and, for me, my career in music, I always feel like I try to move forward, so I do different projects. And once I´ve done that, I go back to my roots, I go back on the ground. And from that, I go “all right,” “uff” that gives me another, a [break to move forward. You understand?]

VM: Ok, so that´s your creation process…

LG: Yes, but I guess, even though as a DJ it’s the same. I defended Techno and I was playing strictly Techno for a long time. And then, at one point, I felt maybe I need to incorporate some older stuff in my music, and this is when I did a small tour with a DJ called Jeff Mills and we did a tour called Music, and we had this idea…

VM: What year was that?

LG: It´s about seven years ago, and we did twenty dates with Music Tour, and the idea was to play everything but Techno, and Jeff is a very big Techno DJ. I´m a very big Techno DJ. Jeff comes from Detroit. He’s a big Radio DJ, I was in Radio all my life, and we said it will be very good to go and play all the music, and all the music we discovered when we were a kid, for people to understand more about who we are. And we did this tour, and the idea was to do two nights in each city, only two dates in the same country, no more. So we did Paris and then we did London, Frankfurt and Barcelona; and when we did the two nights, we did one night on the radio, four hour set, and the day after we did the whole night together in the club. So the first thing was to make people listen to music, and the day after was to make them dance, so you could play different things. And the music that we played was coming from Salsa to Hip Hop, Reggae, Rock-and-roll, Punk, Soul, Funk, whatever you can think of.

VM: So you saw that people were reacting…

LG: People were reacting, and the funny thing is that it helped us because at the end of course, we were playing a couple of Techno hits, some old classics. And the conclusion, after those twenty dates, was: Techno never sounds better when it´s played along side with other things. And after this tour is when I really started to incorporate a lot of other music within my Techno sets. Because I found out that when you play Techno, only Techno all night, at one point, it´s like anything, it gets boring. But when you just spice it up it´s like cooking with a bit of pepper or something different; you play a disco track, you stay on the beat, or on the beat you play a Soul track or something like this, and then bang, you go back to Techno. It makes the whole thing more digestible, you can digest it better and I started to make things breath more.

VM: So from there, between 2003…

LG: Well it's not just that, it's like 2002 or 2003…

VM: And right after you publish your book…

LG: I was gonna say, and during this time I published a book...

VM: Electroshock…

LG: Yeah, we were actually doing all the interviews for the book at the same time as Music. I think there was a frustration for all these years because I could not allow myself to play other things than Techno, because I was so tight in Techno, and after Music and after the book, something popped…

VM: Like a revelation…

LG: Yeah, like the cork popped. And I just felt I was completely assuming my choice of wanting to do other things as well. And this is when I started turning the corner and working with choreographers. And I felt very easy to do a quite conceptual album I released back then, which is called The Cloud Making Machine. I don´t know if you heard this, but it´s the first non-Techno in the idea, an album I did which was more like a soundtrack of an imaginary film.

VM: This was 2004?

LG: I think it was around 2004, 2005. And then from that I knew why I did this album as well, because I wanted to work with a choreographer, and funny enough I lost some of my fans.

VM: But then you got other fans.

LG: Exactly, you always say, “you gain some, you lose some…”

VM: The next question is the process of maturation as a DJ…and your motivation…

LG: Or as a musician…

VM: What are your motivations as a DJ now? As a musician? What were the challenges throughout the years? but I would say to create a connection with each generation.

LG: The motivation is to always surprise myself and by doing that, I guess, I will surprise the people, to not sit on a comfortable chair. Because I could´ve done exactly the same that I was doing twenty years ago… people would be very happy with that. But I think my old fans would be very happy, and the kids would look at me like an old fart. Well, I’m working in a business where a lot of people are young. And you need not to stay young in your mind, you need to always make sure you are not becoming someone who is doing the same thing. Because I think if you are only repeating yourself, at one point, you are getting old! Because you are not looking what´s happening around you. So, just to be aware of technology, what´s happening, how the kids are playing now, how the young DJS are playing, which I´m not always a very big fan of...

VM: Because you are not going to embrace everything that´s new, but pay attention…

LG: No, of course not, but you need to know what´s happening, how things are done, and to try to always recreate something and do something fresh; to first excite yourself, because If you keep repeating yourself I think, at one point, you get bored. If I wake up in the morning thinking, “Oh, today I´m going to Barcelona, I don´t want to do the same thing over and over,” how can I give the fever to people if I don´t have it?

My job as a DJ is to try and read the crowd, try to push the crowd, try to excite the crowd, try to understand the crowd. But mainly it is to try and make the crowd dance, and go crazy, and forget all their problems. It´s very silly, it´s very simple. My job is to bring people in a room and then, for the time we spend together, give them a little bit of happiness by playing music, by trying to find the right track at the right time, and trying to push them a little bit more than what they want, you know? And that´s it. That´s my job. My job is to make people happy, but not to just give them exactly what they want. I´m not a jukebox or a radio station. So I don´t play hits, I'm not there to play hits one after the other, but you have tons of DJs who do this, and I´m very happy they exist, it´s fine. We live in a small village and tonight there's a DJ who's going to play here in front of a house, and he's just going to play hits and everybody is going to be happy. But this is not my way of seeing things.

VM: You have a differential, that´s obvious. Let´s talk about your current project. It´s Just Musik, you are about to release this DVD which features the live show in Pleyel. It becomes clear that your work is different from the other DJs, and I think improvisation is a key element…

LG: I've got two hats on my head. I've got it very clearly. I´ve got the DJ thing, and then I´ve got the production thing. I started to make music, making music within the DJ Techno world twenty years ago, which was a very obvious thing. Because a lot of the musicians were making music and records for the DJs So, they were producing music for the DJs, and a lot of them were DJs themselves, you know?

So, Techno music is like DJ music–it´s completely club designed music, in a way. And it was a very short thing, or a very short cut to be a DJ at first, and then wanting to understand how the machine was working, and how it was produced. So very quickly, I went in the studio with one of my friend musicians and I said, “What does this do? And what does this do?” and within five hours we made a track. That track got signed, and then we did another one, and we did another one, and then we did a fourth one, and we did an EP, released the first record, and that was back in 1990. We were making music for fun. Then I started to meet my heroes, and one of my heroes, it's a very clear sentence, this guy said to me “You never make music for fun,, because when you make music, when you produce a record, this record will still be found in thirty years time, and your name's gonna be on it, and you´ve got to understand that if your name is on it and you're dead, or if you've got kids, they want to understand who you are. If you make a record for fun, maybe they're not gonna understand…

VM: They were not going to taking you seriously…

LG: Do you know what I mean? This is when it clicked in my head. I thought, all right, I need to take my production very seriously, and this is when I started working just on my own. This is when I released my first album called Shot in the Dark. And we called it Shot in the Dark because we didn´t know where we were going with an album, I didn´t know where I was going as a producer.

VM: Well, you told me that you still don´t know, right?

LG: I still don´t know, but I really didn´t know. I was just trying things, but I was trying to be very honest.  And since that day, I´ve been working with a guy named Eric for nearly twenty five years. Eric said to me, “Laurent, now, you´ve got to understand that you've got two hats on your head, you've got the DJ one, which you know exactly what you are doing, and now you've got the producer one. So, you got to take production quite seriously. And we've got to bring you on stage, with a live show if you want, to be successful as a producer. You need to do a bit more than just produce music, so you need to think about bringing your music live.” And it was a time when a lot of people were saying, “DJs are not musicians, musicians are not DJs.” That was a big thing. People were very confused with Techno music. They didn´t know what the hell was going on. So Eric said to me, “you need to put a band together. You need to go on stage to defend your production side, your musician side.” And he said, “But there is one thing: you should never bring a turn table when you go on stage. If ever you go on stage live, do not bring a CD player, a record player, or even a scratcher, because people will still, in their heads, think about the DJ thing. ” And I said, “All right, that´s very clear.” And I never ever put a DJ on stage, until Pleyel twenty years after. So, this is when I started putting a band together. At the beginning, I had a drummer, I had a violinist, and then very quickly I found a keyboardist. And the four of us went on stage and did a live show.

VM: So Pleyel was a stepping-stone in your career…

LG: What you do mean a stepping-stone?

VM: Well, because you incorporated all those things…

LG: Yeah, but straight away, like fifteen or seventeen years ago, I started doing live shows with musicians. And, I didn´t know what doing improvisations with musicians was. I didn't know how to work with musicians. So, the first two years was very hard because I needed to make space in my music to incorporate the musicians. It took so long! And then I met my saxophonist, Phillip Nadot. The guy who played, “The man with the red face” and the first person I had a very strong link with, as a musician, and he explained to me how to make space in my music, how to give them more freedom, and we started to have a very strong relationship together. This is when I changed, the drummer went, the violinist went, and then, I got another keyboardist, and this is when I started to have a long term relationship with my musicians. Once you find the right one, you keep it, because the more you work together the more freedom you have.

I really wanted to incorporate Jazz, because Jazz was the most free kind of music I could incorporate in my music. And I thought, “if I want my music to go further, I will need to leave space, and I will need to start directing those people for them to surprise myself as much as I can surprise them and make it very organic,” and this is when I started forming some bands, and starting to take my live shows very seriously, and this is when we went to the Olympia, about ten or twelve years ago. We did the show at the Olympia, and from then onwards we started touring all the festivals. And you know, I moved, I came to live here (South of France) six years ago, so this is when I met different musicians. Before I met Ben, my keyboardist, I had a keyboardist named Bugge Wesseltoft [who] is a Jazz musician quite well known from Norway, Phillip, the saxophonist was still there. We did live shows after live shows, and we started to go and play in places like Montreux Jazz Festival, Nice Jazz Festival, but without loosing our Techno roots, and Jazz became a bit of an obsession for me, because I heard so many times “DJs are not musicians,” “you are not a musician.” I heard that from hard people and it was kind of hard, I guess I just put a plug in my head, and I needed to prove something. And now I´m coming to Pleyel. Pleyel for me was the biggest turning point in my career as a live show.

VM: Ok, so it was a turning point…

LG: For me? As a live show, it was a complete turning point. I did Pleyel, it was real hard, it was a real baby blues, because I searched for about ten years, live, to get to this show. So the show was very special, ten people on stage.

VM: Tell me about what was one of the bliss moments.

LG: I think Pleyel was the peak point of what I was searching for, and not knowing exactly what I was searching for, but I guess when I did it, there was a real baby blues after. It was the only concert I did that it was so violent afterwards, I could almost cry; it was like a real real downer.

VM: Yeah, you showed me one of those moments of Pleyel.

LG: I mean, there was tons of moments at Pleyel. I think six months after Pleyel, I realized that Pleyel was a turning point. This is when I thought, “now I can change the band completely and go in a different direction.” And, I´m coming back to what I said to you before, this is where I went, “All right, I'm just gonna get a smaller band now, just Ben and Stephan, and go back to my roots.” So, at the moment, I´m back to my ground, and making more Techno in the way, in image, a more Techno show, and we are working for the show for next year. And, I´m not going to have this big Jazz band anymore. You know, I feel like I've done my Jazz thing, I´ve done it. I went all the way I wanted to go. I didn't know I wanted to go that way but I went all the way.
V: You did everything that you could possibly do…

LG: To me, for my level, which is a very small level, I´m not a Jazz musician, but to my level, I think, I don´t know we are going to reach every night what we did at Pleyel, so I better leave it Pleyel the way it was.

Peak moments at Pleyel... The whole show. Pleyel was seven or eight months of constant every day thoughts. From the first day Christian, my tour manager called me and said, “We´ve been approached by the Salle Pleyel to do a live show. Would you like to do it?” And I said, “Salle Pleyel, are you mad?” I mean, it´s the place where they play classical music. For people to understand who don´t know what Pleyel is, it is the equivalent of the Royal Albert Hall in London, or, what’s it called in NY?

VM: The Carnegie Hall…

LG: Carnegie Hall. When you do Carnegie Hall…

VM: That´s it… that´s the epicenter…

LG: That´s it. You've done it. Look at the albums that've been released at Carnegie Hall from any artists. You can´t do better in Paris, if you want to do a super classical room you do Pleyel. It was a big fucking big, because I know I´m doing this for Vaffanculo, so I can use fucking, it was a big fucking thing, right?

VM: That was your Vaffanculo moment…

LG: Exactly, it was a big fucking thing.. and saying “yes” was a bit mad, and I went, “Yes,” and for nine months, every single day, I spoke to Christian and I said to him, “Yes but, and I said this in French every single day, you don’t do Salle Pleyel like any other room.”  So we've got to change absolutely everything, so we've got to have video, we’ve got to have new décor, we’ve got to have guests, we’ve got to do tracks we never did before and will never do again, we need to do something special for my fans, for the people of Pleyel, cause we have to understand that it is people who go to so many concerts a year. So we had a lot of people who came to listen to us not knowing what the hell we were doing , so we had as well to do something for them because you have to as well respect the room where you are going, when you accept something you need to respect the place, you can’t go as a punk and say “Well, fuck off. I do what I want.” No, you've got to do your thing, you have to be who you are, but then you've got to force yourself to give a little bit more because it’s a special place. We worked every single day making new tracks, redoing some more tracks we could do at Pleyel. Trying to find the right guest, which was very hard; finding the visual artist to do the videos, and finding the girl. It was a massive production, I mean, Pleyel cost us so much money. We didn’t make money out of it, but it doesn’t matter we did Pleyel. And then of course finding to film Pleyel as well, so Pleyel was like 9 months long, like a women having a child. And it really grew in my stomach and Pleyel was the birth, was like..

VM: Was it a revelation for you?

LG: The revelation came after. I think when we went on stage, you got to understand we rehearsed for five days before Pleyel nonstop, of course I did all the music before and it was like a nine months, everyday job where I made everybody’s life hell. Delia, my wife, hated me for months. I could not sleep anymore, I was just waking up at 4 in the morning working for Pleyel. And we got to it, and we rehearsed for five days, met the guests, cause I didn’t know them, didn’t know all these guys very well.

We did the show and we were basically flying on a little cloud, when we got on stage, we knew exactly what we had to do. The thing that Delia kept telling me, “enjoy your show, because otherwise if you're stressed, you know you’re not going to enjoy it and then you’re going to come home and you’re going to think 'I’ve missed something.'” And I said it on stage, it’s on the DVD, “my wife told me I should enjoy the moment,” and I do. We came on stage thinking, we are going to conquer and we will do it because nothing should go wrong, we've rehearsed so much, that we shouldn’t be stressed, just enjoy ourselves, and we did. And from the moment I walked on stage, people clapped and it was very calm, we did a really really dark track, which is not on the DVD but, we did a super dark track, it actually is on the beginning of the DVD. And I did this for the Pleyel people, for them to understand, we’re not here to party, party, and do something cheesy, we are taking this very seriously. And the second track was a piano track, which is on the DVD as well. Just for people to understand, knock, knock, knock, we’re here and we’re doing our thing, but we’re taking it very seriously.

I think my fans didn’t know how to take this, it was the first time we did a sitting-down room, first time we were so produced, and first time for us as well to have other people than our fans. Very strange, so everything was different so, the first track was just on my own and I thought, “It's under my name, I need to be on my own at one point, you know? Knock, knock, here I am, BAM!” Serious, super serious, super dark, not danceable, really mental, two tracks, and then, I think this, weirdly enough, kind of broke the ice. The tracks were so cold, so sonic, people, felt, “Alright, he's done this, he's said hello to us, the musician coming in, the show can start.” And then we did this track called 63, which has two parts, the first part is very Miles Davis, in a way, and really builds up. And then second part is a reggae track, which we never performed before that way and we will never perform it again. I think the reggae track just got everybody together. When they went, “Alright this is gonna be nice, and warm, and funky.” And then from that onwards it was just going up and up and up, and I think the two peak points were a track where you know in the middle of the track there is like a brass section and I went in front of stage and I said, “You know the people from Pleyel, they would love you to stand up and dance, cause this is why they invited us for,” and the whole room went, “whachu [got excited].”  The whole room stood up and I could not believe it. I just went, “pheew I've got it, I've got 'em.’’ It was so strong. And then after that we performed a track called “Dealing With The Man” which is a blues and something happened, something so strong happened.

At the end, I had tears coming...

VM: You cried?

LG: Yeah, I nearly cried. And talking about it, one year after I went back to Pleyel, I did an interview and the guy said to me “what happened?” and I couldn’t speak to him, I couldn't tell him. Something happened...

VM: You still get emotional?

LG: Yes, I don’t know what happened but when I see the video my heart is completely locked in.

VM: I think it has to do with the whole purpose, the music which has this magic moment…

LG: Well the actual track has something, has a very strong meaning to me and I did the vocals on the album for this track and I wrote the text. It means much more than what people can think. It’s a very special, very, very personal song. And it was completely changed because Anthony Joseph, he slammed on it, so he didn’t use any of my words. I guess it way the result, the pure result of what I wanted when I did that track. So you know, I think it has something really special, which I can’t explain, it's deeper than just the fact that it was a beautiful track.

VM: Where there any reactions?

LG: I think the room understood really. Something happened and you know it’s funny because I worked with some choreographers and I said to them, “Do you as a choreographer, when you dance on stage, usually the room is quiet for two hours, can you feel the emotion of people, or the concentration of the crowd?” and he says “Yes we can,” he says “if people are starting to clear their throats too much, you know they're not concentrating and he says sometimes the room becomes absolutely silent.” And he says, “Even when we dance and the music is on stage we know something is happening,” and on that moment we were very loud on stage  but I know something happened in peoples' hearts, in peoples’ heads.  It's unbelievable. Just watch the track and I think even with the DVD we are going to be able to feel this, to feel this moment. There was a before and an after, really. For me that was the peak point of what I've searched for.

VM: You are doing well, but that is your search,

LG: Yes..

VM: One last thing, you told me once, the social projects in Detroit.... the kids and Detroit..

LG: It’s not something I do personally; I've been very involved with Detroit for a long time because Detroit was the turning point for Techno music. They were the first ones to use that word and to invent it, if we can call it like that, Techno to its form we know now. Detroit was making dance music, but those guys were living in a very rough city, in a very hard place, and their only way to survive was to make music. And to feed their families. So their music had a little bit more than anybody else around the world, who were making just dance music. So it’s a different thing. Now I always felt there was a lot of emotion in Detroit music and I became very close friends with a lot of Detroit people. One of them is called Mad Mike which runs a label called Underground Resistance and he’s got like a distribution company. And Mike has always been working in social things. So Mike is a team leader for a baseball team and he goes a lot to prisons and talks to the kids who were dealers or whatever and he says to them, “When you come out, come and see us at the building and come and make some music, we’ll help you, you’ll be able to travel and you’ll make a better life for yourself.” He’s always been trying to help out the kids in Detroit so he’s very involved in Detroit.  He only presses his records in Detroit, he only releases his music from Detroit people, sometimes it’s almost a bit too much. But, at least he’s got a very wonderful side to him and does all these stuff.

VM: And people are not aware of this?

LG: Well, in Detroit they are. But the thing is now, nobody gives a fuck. The kids don’t care anymore which is a bit of a shame. But, you know, he has a very beautiful side to him, they were going on stage, they were always were wearing balaclavas because for them music it’s all about music. It’s nothing about how you’re dressed, or who you are. Mike was one of the session musicians for Motown, so he saw and he lived that kind of story of soul music where some fat producers were dressing up black people, putting them in front of stage and making them look like monkeys. Mike has very hard words regarding this, he’s black, and Mike says they were, “Show Niggas” and to think, “The package will sell. We’ll make money out of them.” So he was really against this and I always understood that and I always thought about this. Music first, it’s not the way you look. Which is a bit of a shame because now things have completely changed.

Now, today, kids they sell package they don’t sell content, which is a real problem for me. The kids care more about how things are marketed and how it’s packaged and they don’t really care about what’s inside, the true soul of the thing. It is a bit of a shame. So, coming back to Detroit, there is a lot of things happening in Detroit, there is a place called the Heidelberg Project, it’s in the middle of a really bad neighborhood. This guy, some kind of a preacher, and he got these few houses, which are completely under destruction, and he is doing art, he is recuperating some things from the street and using this to make art. So, he is sticking all this art around the houses and the funny thing is, all the gangs when they drive inside the Heidelberg Project, they’re dropping their guns down and everybody says, “Hello.” It’s like one little island in the middle of hell, which is free.

Detroit is very strange. We went there a few times and it’s kind of amazing, it’s really inspiring this place. As well, there is a pressing plant which has been used over the years to press all of the records in Detroit and it pressed all of the Motown records. And the guy, [he] was called Ron Murphy was mastering all those records for years, I think he did it for fifty years, died about five years ago. This pressing plant was there so I helped them to buy the pressing plant, so at least it stays in Detroit. And then Mike bought it, and he’s got the pressing plant. It’s just little things where when you work with them you’re trying to do social things. We’ve done some compilations where I’ve put some Underground Resistance music on and then always we gave a percentage of money back.

VM: That’s great!

LG: You know it’s just the way Mike is and working with him opens your eyes regarding that.

VM: And you’ve been traveling recently to the United States and you performed to different crowds also, what was your impression about the reception of your current music?

LG: The States is maybe the hardest country to go and play. Really! It’s tough. Over the years, I’ve never really super enjoyed a gig in the States like I do in Japan or Europe. I think it’s changing now, but for the last twenty years the scene has been very small. Young Americans have a different preoccupation, I guess, than we do. And they consume music differently. I don’t know. The parties in Detroit only attract like 200 people, Chicago never happened for me, it was always very small. Even though they have big raves... It’s strange... It hasn’t got the same power, the same energy, the same love for music... it’s different. But Americans are different, like Japanese are different, Chinese are different.

And its true, in the States I’ve done some great gigs. I’m very lucky. If I see all my career and all the gigs, in general, I’ve done, the States is definitely not the place where I had my best gigs. But saying that, I went to New York and Miami three months ago and I really went to Miami thinking, “Oh, this is going to be really hard.” It was the best in gig I’ve done in the States and it’s going to remain one of my top hundred gigs in my whole life. So you see, as we say in France, “It’s the exception that confirms the rules.” We played for the Ultra Music Festival, it was really strange because we don’t like performing with the formation I have at the moment called LBS, the trio; we don’t like doing big places, because it’s more designed for clubs. In the room was like 10,000 people. We thought, “Oh my God. This is going to be full of cyber kids, used to listening to trance, or really hard Techno. We are going to come in with some musicians playing some funky stuff. Ten thousand people? How the hell are we going to do it?” And from the first minute we got in, we opened up the room, people walked in and they just wanted to dance, just wanted to have it. And I don’t know what happened, we went crazy on stage, they went crazy down there. The room completely exploded and definitely it was one of my top gigs in all my career. It was unbelievable. So maybe things are changing, maybe things are changing in big ways because New York was great. The time before I went to the States, I had a great gig in Miami, a great gig in LA, so I had some good gigs, the last two tours I’ve done the gigs were very good. So, maybe things have changed.

VM: So maybe the Vaffanculo audience will see you more often?

LG: I would love to go more often. I haven’t been to the States enough to really know what’s happening. So I don’t know that much about the scene there but it’s true, every time I’ve been, there has been some big disappointment. Either you go to a room and the police comes and stops the music, I don’t know. I’ve got this funny thing in Chicago where I don’t think I have done a proper party in Chicago. Every time either there is no one because it has been raining so much, or the police comes, or the security closes the party. In Detroit I had lots of problems. I went to a party where a girl got shot, the second time I went there was no one and then the third time, the police came and raided the party with gas. But then after that, I had a really great party in a really small room.  

Look at the music history, any band which is not from the States difficulty to go and do it in the States. It’s a very hard country as a musician if you’re not American, its super tough. And the States is so big that each city has its own thing so, it’s even harder. I think we feel more connected in Europe because each country is so small. House and Techno, funnily enough, was born in the States, but became a very big European thing. Because in the States, the Detroit guys don’t really go that much into Chicago, New York guys don’t really go in Detroit. And here (in France), Germans are coming here all the time, we’re going to Germany all the time, we go to England all the time, and we help each other, I mean it’s very strong, the connection is very strong.

For seventeen years, every single week you could see me at the Rex Club. I guess this is where I built my fan base. Because anyone who was traveling to Paris and we knew, we knew with the Rex Club, that Thursdays once a month, we had people coming from London, from Germany, from Ireland, those people were coming every two months or every three months, but after seventeen years, we had a roll every single week of twenty people coming from more than 1,000 kilometers away. They were coming to Paris for the weekend, and then they were spending a Thursday to be able to have a party at the Rex, but we built this. You need to build something like this, and this doesn’t take six months, it takes years. But I was very strong with this. All the time I lived in Paris I said, “I want a residency and I want to build my residency.” I think this is why maybe I’m here still because I have talked to so many people around and I have built something very strong. And I feel that sometimes in the States, a lot people haven’t kept this. Now some of them did, of course, but you need to be very consistent. At one point in New York we were traveling to go and listen to some of the big New York DJs, at the Sound Factory. And they were attracting people from Europe to go and listen to them. I went to listen to Junior Vasquez at the Sound Factory. I made the trip just for this and I went as well to listen to Masters at Works. The New York guys had more a thing in their town and New York was happening, and New York is not the States, New York is only one town.

We were traveling the same way as we wanted people to travel for us, but this didn’t last long enough. I went to America to listen to Junior. Because you had to experience this. But this is what I wanted to do in Europe, and this is what I did with the Rex Club. You had to travel to Tokyo, to listen to whoever in the Yellow Club, because Yellow was the place to go once in your life. And it’s funny because I brought a lot of my friends to Yellow and they were thinking, “It’s just a club.” I said,  “Just come to Yellow.” Of course the Rex is just a club, four walls, big sound system, nice lights. But when the Rex becomes the Rex, you know. When Sound Factory was the Sound Factory, at 5 o’clock in the morning, when the crowd was strictly black, gay, listening to the music, and we were going to a different level, it became very spiritual. That was special. When we did the closing of Yellow in Tokyo, we played for three days nonstop, at one point we felt we can all be locked in here and die here, right here, right now because this is the peak moment of happiness. When you reach this it’s special and this is what makes clubs very special. I think residency was very important. And I think a lot of DJs in Europe had their own residency. Sven Väth had his residency in Frankfurt. I had a residency in Paris. Cox had a residency in London. We all had clubs, we all had a place. And, in Europe we built a very strong base. It was a bit different in the States.

VM: Well I hope that you can finally release Electroshock in English.

LG: Well, you have to speak to my wife Delia.. apparently she’s nearly finished.