Trading Words With Laurent Garnier

Laurent Garnier is a name which has gracefully battered dancefloors around the world for more than a quarter of a century.

His diversity of sound traverses the musical spectrum, whilst his enigmatic yet humble character, and continual search for new and intriguing projects, are attributes which earn this Frenchman the respect of a truly global audience.

Ahead of his performance at The Social Festival, Garnier reveals his secret of maintaining a seemingly immortal dancefloor presence, whilst drawing similarities between DJing and his passion for fine wine.

You are one of the most well-respected and genuine artists out there, approaching every project and every set with such energy whilst garnering support from both the younger and older generations of listener, how have you managed to keep yourself going at such an intensity for over a quarter of a century?

‘Trying not to drown myself, making sure I don’t do anything for the wrong reasons, and being as honest as I can. Playing honest records that I feel good with, so i feel comfortable with everything like my body, I mean I aren’t 20 anymore, i’m just taking it a bit easier you know. I never did gigs for money or anything, I just do it for pleasure, otherwise I think that is where things start to go wrong’

Your book Electrochoc, published in 2003, with an updated chapter in 2013, describes your journey through electronic music history. Recently you have been working on transferring it to the big screen, how is that coming along?

I’ve been working on it for 10 years, it’s not going to be the adaptation of the book, I don’t want to repeat myself, the book exists, it’s really a proper fiction. The book is about the story of my music, you know, someone who fell in love with the music and dived in it 100%. So the book is like how can I move forwards and tell a little bit more about what the dj life is like. Maybe not the most glamorous parts of it, not that i want to make a dark film, djing is about more than the obvious things that people see, you spend a lot of time on your own, it can be a lonely life, and to stay alive you have to refresh instead of drowning yourself in your job. I tried to work on that idea, not myself, but another dj who starts off with a super passion for music but maybe goes down a different path and i thought this was the most creative way to do this. Because there is already a lot of very good documentaries about techno music and the whole story of it, so i thought what else can i do, not a documentary I’ll do something people wouldn’t expect me to do and write a story and use me and my thoughts to create a different character, it was very introspective time to write this. We have the cast, we couldn’t finance it until we have the cast, that’s how French film works, now we can do the financial bit and find out if we can make the film or not, so in three months time I will find out if I have worked ten years for nothing, which is a bit tough, but that’s the game. It is based in England and France and a little bit of somewhere else.

During your earliest years as a DJ, you played the Hacienda which must of been a great experience, but you played under the alias ‘DJ Pedro’, what is the story behind that name?

At the time i was a completely unknown DJ, I’d never played pro before that, and in the summer of 87 they wanted to start a new party in september and the name of the party was called Zumbar, which is a spanish name, so they wanted to use spanish names for the djs and they asked me to go under the name of Pedro because i wasn’t known as anything else. Then in the summer of 88’ I had to go back to France because the army was still compulsory back then, and this is when i started using my normal name.

You are an artist who absorbs sounds from all over the globe, but you went to America very early in your career, spending a lot of time in Detroit, were the ‘Belleville Three’ one of the biggest influences on your early sound?

Yes, I spent a lot of time with the Detroit guys; Jeff, Derrick, Kevin, i was very close to Kenny Larkin, and of course ‘Mad’ Mike Banks from Underground Resistance. I was so obsessed with Detroit and in particular Derrick May’s music, for the first 10 years I was actually obsessed. This was because I think he was the funkiest one of them all in my eyes, his way of programming the beats and the accident in his music is very different from what you used to hear back then, he had his own way, I felt the funk, the warmth in his music, I was very moved by his music. But as he produced less, and more and more artists came along, I widened my range of music I wanted to do, but i guess when you were young back then you were less open to things. Whereas now you have access to everything, back then you had to go to record shops and it was time consuming and there wasn’t that many magazines to read about everything, it was just more difficult so i think we were specialising more back then, it was more ‘I’m a techno boy i’m going to listen to techno.’ It took me a while to open up to other things, apart from disco which I loved before techno of course, but it took me a while to open up yes, and it made me who I am today I guess.

I have to ask, did you ever experience why Mike Banks was called mad?

I didn’t quite experience why Mike was called mad no, thank god! But Mike has always been an elegant warrior, he’s a very nice man in fact.

What genres would you say you were attracted to when you used to dance around your room with your discoball and strobes as a ten year old, as you state in your book?

It was always disco, disco and funk from such a young age, and reggae actually because reggae was very big in France back then too, but disco and funk for sure were my first experiences.

Some of your tracks have very intriguing and vague names to the unassuming listener, like ‘Crispy Bacon’, ‘The Sound of The Big Babou’, and ‘The Man With The Red Face’ to name but a few, what are the stories behind some of these names?

Well Crispy Bacon, this is actually linked to Jeff Mills, and back then my English was not so good, and when I listened to the bassline I thought it sounded like some bacon in the frying pan sizzling, but I fucked up and used crispy as the name. Then the first person I ever played the track to was Jeff, and he came to my house and I said ‘Oh, I did this new track and I want to play it to you’, so I played it to him and he really liked it and asked me how I named it, and I said Crispy Bacon and he looked at me very surprised and said, ‘this is the stupidest name I’ve ever heard’, and I found this so funny so I said sorry man i’m gonna keep it just because of your reaction, even though I fucked up and meant for it to be sizzling bacon.

The Sound of Big Babou, basically when used to do a show on Radio Nova, the guy producing the show called David, who is the guy I wrote my book with, he used to come in on the microphone to present the track and spoke to me on the headphones and every time he used to hand me the microphone saying ‘go on Big Babou, go on’, and the track’s sound is quite huge and quite nasty, so I just called it The Sound of Big Babou, because I am Babou.

The Man With The Red Face was originally called jazzy track, because i was asked to go and play live at the Montreux Jazz Festival, and because I didn’t have any jazz material in my live show i thought I can’t go to Montreux without a jazz-sounding track, so I made a saxophone track which had no name which we performed in Montreux. We then tried to record it when i came back from the festival, so I put a pair of headphones on my saxophonist’s head and said look i’m just going to play you a loop and you just go with it, just play play play. And I was with my sound engineer back then and we were talking to the sax player via headphones saying ‘oh nah you’re crap, no this is really bad,’ because it is quite hard to play saxophone and it takes a lot of breathing, and we kept on dissing him saying, ‘oh no we have nothing it’s all going in the bin, you can’t play to save your life, this is really shit.’ So the guy kept on playing but harder and harder for like 30 minutes, then i stopped the computer and the guy looked at me staring at me and i said, ‘I have got everything you can go home now,’ and he said ‘oh you motherfucker!’ and so I replied saying, ‘Oh i know the name of my track now looking at you, you are the man with the red face!’ He had gone red as a fucking pepper!

But yeah, a lot of the names of my tracks are a bit stupid, I know I have a serious side to my job, but a lot of people don’t know the other side, which is a bit crazy. I organise a festival (Festival Yeah!) in the south of France and the way we promote it is always a bit crazy, I don’t like to be serious all the time!

Does music still give you the elation that it once did when you were a child listening to disco in your room?

I mean I think I am less naive for sure! Luckily! But it is a really interesting question, I mean sometimes I am playing a record in a club or a place, and the vision I get in the DJ booth, the lights, the way the crowd is responding to a record, I feel hit with these thoughts about what I was dreaming about when I was a boy in my bedroom, and this is when usually i may dig out my old ‘You Make me Feel’ from Sylvester, or maybe a little ‘I feel love’ (Donna Summer) or something like that. Usually when I play these tracks it’s because these thoughts come into my head, and really, it is like this is what I was dreaming of so hard when I was a kid, and I’m there, and really I feel very happy, very lucky. So yes, I never forget that time from when I was young, it’s very powerful.

You have written pieces for theatre, ballet, and film, and I can’t help but draw similarities between yourself and Jeff Mills, both being veterans within the electronic music scene but constantly reinventing and shaking up what is expected of you within electronic music. You both undertook the ‘Expect the Unexpected Tour’ twelve years ago, have you both thought of a future collaboration once again possibly?

I mean it’s more like trying to stay alive, you don’t want to be doing the same thing over and over otherwise you start to get bored, even though djing is very exciting, at one point you must get bored, so you have to get out of your comfort zone, try to push yourself to do different things. Because i’m somebody who is interested in lots of different things I kind of refresh myself, always doing different projects. I mean me and Jeff do very different things because he has gone into contemporary art. Jeff has always tried to look a bit further, and yes I feel quite close to the way in which he is managing his career. We haven’t spoken for quite a while, I asked him to do something for the movie but he never came back, I think he’s very busy doing a lot of different projects like he has always been. The thing with Jeff is that we can be very close for two years, and then not speak for the next two, and then the night we see each other and go for dinner, we speak for six hours. So it’s like that really, there is a lot to be said, it’s always a matter of the moment you know, but i haven’t seen him for quite a while i must say, I know he lives in Paris actually, so I should hook up with him more often.

You were an obvious driving force behind the Paris nightlife scene from the 80s and 90s and through to today, how are you finding the evolution of the Paris and Lyon music landscapes today?

Paris has never been as exciting as what it is now, Paris is vibrant, super exciting and super underground, loads and loads of new clubs and labels and musicians, it’s never been as good. I run a club in Lyon so know Lyon very well, but Paris is amazing, it’s really underground so doesn’t come out as much in the press but there is so much happening.

Is there a particular young artist that we should be watching out for and you expect big things from pretty soon?

Man there are so many new labels, so many new labels, its unbelievable, as you were saying in Lyon, there is a new distributor in Lyon who distribute tonnes of super exciting stuff, to name one guy would be silly because there are so many of them, it’s crazy. However one guy who I find really exciting is called Voiski, he is very musical, and on the house side, Jeremey Underground, he is cool.

On your Resident Advisor exchange, you said you could see yourself working with rappers in the future, have you followed that up at all?

Yes yes, I produced an album last year with a French rapper called Abd Al-Malik, he’s not a young guy now, but i’ve just approached a new guy, a guy who is very successful in France, and we are talking about maybe doing something together. Yeah I mean hip-hop, I am very into hip-hop and I absolutely love grime, and i’d like to do some stuff with some guys like that. And I’d love to work with a band, I would love to produce a more rock band focussed thing because I think there is quite a lot to be done there. I mean when you listen to Radiohead, to me the best albums from Radiohead were when they were made with someone who knew shit about electronic music, and for me this is where Radiohead were absolutely magic, so that’s the direction i would like to go.

So we are to expect a Thom Yorke collaboration soon?

I don’t think he needs me at all to be honest! He is so creative and so amazing he wouldn’t need me! It would be wonderful to meet him for sure I’m a big fan of Radiohead, and if he comes to me tomorrow and say let’s do some shit, I’d be like wow yes of course! I’d love to start working in that direction though, keeping the techno ideas and my way of making music, and bringing it more into the rock aspect, keeping it with a techno feel, it doesn’t mean fast and it doesn’t mean dancefloor, the best example would be one of the EPs I released last year on Musique Large, one track, The Rise & Fall of the Donkey Dog, and another Revenge of the lol cat, these two are more of the sound I want to adopt one day, which I think adds a more pop vibe. I mean I run the pop-rock festival, Festival Yeah! in France, and besides the festival we have a label which we only release bands on, there’s a lot of things that people don’t know actually, because we don’t really talk about it that much! I mean we had Fat White Family, and the Night Beats, and bands like that which I think are great, Suuns also, Suuns were great I think they are exactly the type of band I’d like to work with.

I often stick Pedro’s Broadcasting Basement on when I am cooking, the diversity of sounds are incredible, are you continually adding to it as your record collection grows?

Oh Good! Yes I continually add to the collection, it’s so time consuming, as I also do my radio show which you can find on my Soundcloud page, all this takes a lot of time, but yes i still add a lot of new stuff as well as the old stuff.

You cover such a wide spectrum of genres, evident when listening to PBB, but is there a genre which you tend to avoid or cannot stand?

I think country music, I mean I love Rockabilly, but I can’t seem to find many country records that I like, which is weird because I love blues and they’re kind of similar, but yeah also EDM but i won’t get into that. I love hip hop, i love jazz, soul, funk, classical, reggae, whatever, I love all this, but country no, i can’t dig it, i can’t understand it.

Your Instagram seems to have a lot of wine related pictures on it, you seem to be somewhat of a connoisseur, and with watching Moodymann at Dekmantel pouring out free shots, I wondered if you liked to indulge whilst you DJ too?

Well he has always been crazy, always. I mean I love wine! Yeah I like a lot of Spanish wine, but when I play i don’t really drink, for me drinking wine is all about sharing pleasure with your friends and family and is something very close. I can’t drink wine when I’m djing anyway because it makes me tired, I mean I get a beer sometimes, if not, it doesn’t matter, but wine for me is always connected to a good dinner, there’s no wine without a dinner. I mean wine is the same kind of pleasure to djing but on a very different front, you know, it’s something which gives people pleasure and i love all of this in the same way. I’m there to play records and do my job well really.

There is a pretty saturated market of magazines and online publications concerning music at the moment, which is really great for the music lover, but the increase in content and contributors makes it harder and harder for individuals to carve out careers in music journalism, what would be your advice to the budding music journalist?

I mean it is very sad, being a journalist and not being paid for what you do, I mean some of my DJ sets, I choose to go and do them for free because it’s different from what i usually do as a DJ. Recently I went to play for a friend of mine under an alias called DJ jean bon, that is my alias when I go and play funk, soul, disco, afrobeat and reggae, everything except house and techno, and that’s for fun. But you should always get paid for what you do, unless of course it is not deserving of it, you have to give it everything. It’s similar to when magazines started to do compilations, and this is when people stopped buying music. At the beginning of mine and Eric’s F Communications label, magazines wanted compilations from us but we were really against it because we felt it was quite degrading. But it’s very different now, and what I like about the new Paris scene is the guys are fighting for repressing records and putting music back into the professional aspect and making it interesting and creative and important. Ten years ago though, no one gave a shit about music and no one wanted to spend a penny for a record, and music became kind of a free thing, which is what is happening with music journalism, because there is so much on the internet, magazines are getting younger people to write and not paying them. But a lot of these magazines aren’t really talking about music anymore, there is no depth into what they write, depth is what you should get paid for, anyone can take a young guy who’s really into music and tell them to write four lines about what is funky and blah blah blah, but this is nothing. The real stuff tries to go a little bit deeper and do some actual journalism with research and time, so it’s really very sad, the magazines should really fight for content and content needs to be paid, it’s fucked up but the main thing is the content and you can’t accept to do everything for free.

There has been several notable closures of clubs, most recently the temporary perhaps permanent closure of Fabric, all due to fatalities from drug misuse. Drugs are an evident part of the culture attached to music, however, it is a topic which is usually avoided and overlooked by icons within the scene, what would you say is the way forward to avoid club closures? Or is it just a risk that is taken when clubs host music events?

Drugs have been tied with music since day one, it’s not more related to techno culture than anything else, it’s really big in the cinema business for example, I get really pissed off when the press are like ‘you’re bringing drugs into clubs’ and stuff like that, because we’ve been fighting this for a long time, drugs have always been linked with the music business. Authorities need to think about why do people feel the need to get off their face, I mean why in England do you have so much binge drinking? The culture of drugs in England is absolutely everywhere, if you watch any kind of film or series, there’ll always be a reference to drugs, always, it’s part of the culture, and clubs have completely incorporated the culture of the English youth, it’s a normal thing. My wife is English, and when you talk to her mother, there was drugs around in the 70s too when she was listening to The Rolling Stones, it is just part of youth culture. To stop it you need to stop it being such a ‘cool thing’, drugs are not a good thing in clubs because they are fucking up a lot of things, and a country like England should approach the problem with a wider perspective rather than just pinpointing the club and closing them. It’s becoming like that in France too, drugs are becoming kind of ‘cool’. If you look at things surrounding Amy Winehouse and her death, all that media around it is not helping, it makes drugs look cool, it’s a complete cult, stop saying drugs are cool, but shutting clubs is not going to help anything.

Laurent, for some reason you find yourself on a lonely island (with Wifi) and are only able to take three things, what would you take?

Oh a computer of course, so I can be linked into some kind of cultural thing. My wine of course! Fuck I would be so bored, I would have to take my wife, my boy, my twenty friends so then we could get bored as hell on an island but at least we’d be together.

Thank you Laurent.

All the best!

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