What do you say to people who say DJs should play vinyl?

I see their argument. My girlfriend really loves vinyl. She’s constantly having a go at me and I see the attraction to it. I’m not sitting here saying this is the only way forward. It works for me and I like it. I also really enjoyed playing this weekend off CDs, when I was stuck without the computer. At the end of the day, it’s DJing.

Someone might have heard me a year ago playing off CDs and then hear a set off Ableton and think Ableton sucks, but maybe they just don’t like the music this year. It’s just a format of playing records. It’s not the only format. I think Ableton may well be superseded by another technology in the next six months. Pioneer might come out with something that looks like the CDJ1000 that’s got some hard drive in it and loops stuff up automatically. Who knows? As the technology moves forward, I’m just embracing it.

To be honest, I needed something to help me in my DJing career because I got to the point where I was a bit – not bored, but lethargic. I wasn’t feeling too inspired in ’03. I’d spent the whole of ’02 touring my ass off and not really enjoying it and in ’03 I was scratching my head, wondering what I was going to do. That was when I discovered Ableton. It’s given me a massive shot in the arm and I’m really enjoying playing out again because I know I’ve got a new armory of tunes, especially when you’ve got old stuff in there that you haven’t played for years that you can suddenly chop up and mix perfectly with new records.

Is this a revolution? Is there going to be a real split between people who use things like this – studio techniques live – and people who don’t?

I think it’s a huge change. Not everyone’s going to embrace it. But what it will mean is that people are going to start getting used to hearing these kind of sets in clubs, and they’re going to start demanding it. If you turn up with vinyl and start train-wrecking mixes, you’re gonna get hammered for it. With DJs like James Zabiela coming through, who are really embracing the CDJs, sampling stuff live and really turning a DJ set into something more than just playing two pieces of vinyl, it means that the crowd are going to start looking for that sort of stuff.

I’m approaching this from my angle of having DJed for the last 17 or 18 years. If you give this new technology to an 18-year old kid who’s gonna approach it from a completely new angle, that’s when fireworks will happen. That’s when the next sound, the next generation of what a DJ performance is, will come through. It won’t come from me. It’ll come from some 18-year old kid who’s sat in his bedroom right now, who’s downloaded it from the internet and approaching it from a different musical sense.

Ours is probably the last generation that thinks of music as objects. Teenagers now don’t have that, so someone with that conception and this equipment is going to be a very different DJ.

Absolutely. They’re going to approach it a very different way. Bring it on. It’s exciting. But still there are certain DJs who spin records and are mesmerizing to watch: Carl Cox, Jeff Mills. I can’t imagine them switching over to a keyboard and a mouse, but I think that the technology, the interface of it, will catch up.

Someone will come out with an interface where you hardly have to look at the computer. It’ll be all in one box and that’ll be that. In five years time, computers in DJ booths will be completely normal. The idea of having 10,000 records on a hard drive sounds daunting to us now but in five years time that’ll be the norm. Everything that’s ever been made will be cataloged in the DJ booth.

It’s gonna be about taste and programming and that’s the thing I like. It takes out that whole thing about “Ooh, he can beatmatch, isn’t that amazing.” Maybe in ‘94 or ‘95 – when we started doing those really long, seamless mixes, and everyone would be stood around the booth really buzzing on the fact that you’re holding mixes together for ages – but that doesn’t happen any more. Those kids don’t sit there going, “Oh, he’s mixing in key.” The only time your mixing is noticed is if you fuck up. Mixing in key is like being able to kick a football if you’re a footballer.

This software takes it out of the equation. It takes it back to your ability to program a night: where to drop a specific record, sourcing your music. I’ve started buying records from all these weird and wonderful record shops and I didn’t do that before. It doesn’t matter if I’ve only got a two-minute piece of music – it’s going into the computer for me to stretch it out and utilize it in my set.

It’s blurring the line between production and DJing.

I think at certain points in your set it can get like that. If you’re doing a 45-minute live set and you’re approaching Ableton like that, as a hybrid of a DJ set and a remix thing, then I think you could do something exciting. Playing in a DJ Shadow sort of way, grabbing snippets of other people’s records. But you could only keep that up for 45-minutes or an hour maximum or your head would be fried. When I play a six-hour set, it’s only really in the last hour or so when I start getting five or six channels going. For most of my set, up until that point, I’m just playing a track after a track.

Will it help convince people that the DJ is an artist?

I think this goes some way to maybe separate the men from the boys. People who are into that producing side of things are going to gravitate towards this. For people that aren’t interested in it, I don’t think they’ll find it useful. It just blows my head off sometimes when you have these spontaneous ideas and you grab an old record, layer it and mix in an old classic.

It seems like it’s given you the buzz back.

It has, absolutely. I was in a bad state in ’03. I think I’d achieved a lot of goals I’d been heading towards in ’02: touring the states with the Delta Heavy thing, releasing my album; a lot of things happened in ’01, ’02. I got to ’03 and I was, “Right, what the fuck shall I do now?”

I definitely spent the summer of ’03 treading water musically, not really knowing what to do with myself. And that year was a big breakpoint for electronic music in general, too. We’d been talking about the internet a few years beforehand, but ’03 was the year when the music industry took its first kick in the nuts, especially for electronic music. “Where the fuck is this going? What are we doing now? How’s this going to develop?”

The software came along, I grabbed hold of it and it showed me a way to move forward and stay interested. It’s not like I was bored – how can you be bored getting flown around the world and playing gigs and stuff – but I was looking for something.

The cultural role of a DJ: you’ve seen it change from being someone who doesn’t get paid very much and does it for a laugh, then become this huge thing, and now it’s coming back down to earth...

It’s come down to earth in this country. I would understand if you don’t travel how it would seem. From this point of view, standing in this country, it looks like its all turned to shit, but I travel and it’s fucking vibrant everywhere.

You don’t get a sense that it’s changing? It’s still on a high everywhere else?

It is on a high, yeah. It might not be that frenetic madness that was happening around ’00, when there was ridiculous money being offered and everybody was fighting each other for gigs, but it’s still keeping me really busy.

What’s the most preposterous treatment you’ve ever had as a DJ?

I think getting flown around in private jets is ridiculous. That’s happened a couple of times. It’s nice, though, when people roll out the carpet for you.

Didn’t you have a police escort somewhere?

Yeah, I’ve had police escorts in the Philippines. That was brilliant because the traffic was literally not moving for 30 miles, and we got into the town center in 15 minutes when it would normally take two or three hours. I wish I could request one of those everywhere I went.

What are your ambitions now?

I don’t know. I’m scratching my head about that at the moment. I always had plans to move into production and film scores, that sort of stuff, but I’m not sure now. I spent some time in Los Angeles and I don’t really see myself living that life. To become part of that whole film world, you have to live there and it changes people in a really weird way.

There are the famous Nick Gordon-Brown sleevenotes where he sets you up as an artist. How did you feel when that happened?

I think that unless you’re making your own records, or doing remixes, it’s very difficult to put your hand up and say that’s what you are. But if you’re making your own records, producing your own stuff and getting into these new technologies – where you can be doing your own little re-edits and remixes of songs in the club – it’s still a difficult argument to call yourself an artist, I guess. But, again, you are putting so much into it. It is a real creative expression. I do think what DJs do is a creative expression. It is art, it is an artform, so I guess we are artists, but I wouldn’t really wanna be standing on a soap box shouting about it.

Where do you think the whole trance sound has its roots?