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‘We’re on borrowed time after four or five years,’ says DJ, producer and songwriter Diplo in a low, baritone voice.

‘Primetime football players have three years max and musicians have an expiration date.’ The 40-year-old pauses, and laughs. ‘Well, we should.’

So far this year he has — deep breath — released a single with Charli XCX, launched a country-influenced single, remixed Lil Nas X’s global smash ‘Old Town Road’, issued an EP of house tunes and collaborated with MC, Octavian. Add to that picking up a Grammy for one of his two supergroups (Silk City, with Mark Ronson), plus a debut album in May with the other, LSD, alongside Sia and Labrinth. Then there are the new singles from Major Lazer, the outfit he formed in 2009 whose 2015 megahit, ‘Lean On’, set a record for the most streamed song of all time.

To reiterate: that is only the first six months of 2019, and doesn’t include the dozens of live shows and festival appearances, a Vegas residency and the ongoing endeavours of his label, Mad Decent. Despite believing he’s on ‘borrowed time’, it seems there’s really no reason to stop.

Rather fittingly, our interview is taking place in the back of a taxi, ferrying Diplo from the ES cover shoot in south-east London to Tottenham, where he’s about to perform at Field Day. Despite landing early this morning, he has been in a chipper and mischievous mood all day, demanding country tunes on the stereo, knocking out ‘Chopsticks’ on a piano (impressive), attempting to play the same piano with his buttocks (more impressive), and proudly flashing his latest body modification: his new gold tooth. Despite hits as a musician, producer and songwriter, he still insists on billing himself as a DJ first and foremost. But the way Diplo’s energy fills even a cavernous photo studio leaves little doubt that he is, in the best possible way, a total pop star.

Mississippi-born, Miami-raised Thomas Wesley Pentz Jr’s relationship with music started early. As a teenager, his family moved around a lot. ‘I didn’t have a set of friends, I didn’t grow up in a crew of people. All I had was music,’ he says. Later he was able to reframe the rootlessness of his teens as ‘being a nomad’. The first step was a move to Philadelphia, working in a zoo and teaching teenagers, which funded music, plus excursions to Brazil, Jamaica and India. As his mixtapes picked up heat online, he’d DJ around the world; at one London date he met MIA, which led to his first major production work, including her superhit ‘Paper Planes’, and, for a while, romance.

Diplo could talk endlessly about the stars he’s worked with — Beyoncé, Usher, Bruno Mars — or just the ones he sees regularly (he and Calvin Harris use the same gym in LA). But it was working with Madonna, who recruited him for 2015’s Rebel Heart, that felt like a major tipping point. ‘Even on the first day she was not having my bulls***,’ he smiles. ‘I could not be on my phone — with Madonna, it’s serious work.’ It seems to have paid off, however: Madonna recruited him again for her latest album, Madame X, released earlier this year.

I ask whether Diplo, whose name began to dominate the underground in the mid-2000s, would have thought that, by 2019, he’d be teaming up with an artist like Charli XCX — she was six when Diplo started DJing — for a pleasingly absurd reimagining of the Spice Girls’ ‘Wannabe’, riding CGI dolphins in the video. ‘No,’ he laughs, ‘but I can go pretty far in any direction. I know people are like, “Woah, Diplo’s over”, but anyone who’s critical will like a song I put out a year from now… Hopefully.’

This spring Diplo also veered into country music, under the name Thomas Wesley. It tied in with being booked to play US country event Stagecoach (‘almost as a joke’). ‘The show was one of the best of the past five years,’ he says. ‘And I got to dress in a really cool outfit, which is my favourite thing.’ As anyone who follows him on Instagram will know, he has a penchant for both distinctive threads, currently dwelling on garish cowboy get-ups, as well as extreme shirtlessness. Was he not worried about resistance from the country community? ‘Not at all. That’s every other genre. With hip-hop or whatever, you’ve got to play by “the rules”. With country, everyone can come join.’

Diplo’s breezy belief that ‘nothing’s off limits’ hasn’t always gone down well. His tendency to absorb and adapt genres and cultures has prompted suggestions of all-out cultural appropriation. ‘There used to be so many critics of what I do, as a white American guy, doing whatever genres,’ he says, adding optimistically, ‘People objecting to that has now gone.’ It’s vital, he adds, to ‘have good intentions and try your hardest’.

In 2015, when Diplo teamed up with Justin Bieber on the global smash, ‘Where Are Ü Now’, he says people warned him: ‘This is going to end your career.’ ‘At one point Justin was one of the most unpopular artists. But we thought, the music’s going to cut through all of this, if we make something crazy and loud. And that’s what we did.’ He remembers taking Bieber to Vegas — the first time, he says, that Bieber had performed for adults. ‘We played our song and he was like, “Wow, I’ve never seen people my age enjoying themselves.” That’s what it is with pop music: at some point you have to grow into your own demographic. A lot of artists don’t make it.’

In recent years Diplo has done his own growing. Not long ago he was the villain of the pop world, notorious for wading into online beefs. His misanthropic persona arguably reached its nadir with a petty, long-running Taylor Swift debacle, in which he criticised her music and then told her fans to ‘calm down’. He later described it as ‘the worst decision of my career’.

‘I’m a weird, humorous person, but my sense of humour wasn’t taken well,’ is how he puts it today. ‘Then I thought, do I want to be known as the a**hole?’ He pauses. ‘I wasn’t an a**hole, in my opinion, but I did use social media like it was a joke. Then it became very real. What’s funny now is that I don’t even know my Twitter login. Someone else just Twitters for me.’ Is he relieved not to be pop’s panto villain anymore? ‘Yeah,’ he says, nodding.

There have been other shifts, too. Once, Diplo’s Instagram feed was a cavalcade of women in bikinis, but these days you’re more likely to find pictures and videos of his young sons. Somewhere in the middle of all this was Diplo’s rise to the pop A-list and the general sense that he was growing up. The march of time is not lost on Diplo himself: he peppers today’s conversation with references to his age: ‘I’m 40…’ ‘if you’re older…’ and so on.

Has fatherhood affected his view on life? ‘For sure,’ he says. ‘I spend time with my kids when I can — that’s better than going out, or anything else. Eight years ago when my first son was born, my time management changed a lot. I used to be the biggest procrastinator but now there’s no reason to waste time and what you do as your work has to be better.’ Has there ever been a time when he’s thought: I just can’t do this anymore?

He nods. ‘Anyone who’s creative, who really is in touch with their creative side, is always going to be in touch with depression. Mostly I’m making music and I’m thinking about business, and that drowns out the emotion. But sometimes… The emotion takes over. And I have to deal with that just like anyone else. When I was younger I was diagnosed with ADHD. It’s not a severe case, but I probably had other things [too].’

Diplo has his own approach to managing his mental health in an industry in which highs and lows come hand in hand. ‘The really good feelings? You’ve got to suppress them sometimes. The high you get, it’s just like taking ecstasy. The next day is the worst. You have to always balance that: suppress the great feelings because it will make the lows not have such an aggressive touch on your life. That’s not good advice for everybody, and I know enough adult people, friends of mine, who’ve been suicidal and have committed suicide. I see that it’s so common.’

With all this in mind, it may not come as a surprise that one of Diplo’s more recent passions involves the relaxing, rather down-to-earth practice of keeping chickens. ‘I like the idea that this pet gives back something — not emotional support, but I feel like it’s part of my life,’ he says. ‘Dogs are kind of selfish, to be honest.’ Fortunately dogs don’t use Twitter, so Diplo’s safe in terms of social media meltdown. In any case, Field Day is calling; it’ll be followed by 36 further live dates before the end of August, plus a dozen more with Major Lazer, and a slew of new songs, videos and remixes. Diplo’s the master of refusing to keep all his eggs in one basket — no wonder he gravitates towards hens.

Major Lazer and Anitta’s single, ‘Make it Hot’, is out now