It’s been a long time coming, but finally DJ Harvey has broken the fourth wall of DJing and stepped into the Boiler Room, as the headliner of our Ray-Ban x Boiler Room 007 show in Milan. And god damn it was worth the wait: taking things deep down and dirty, slow and sleazy, Harvey smashed it right out of the park and out of sight. If you want to know why he is the definition of a DJ’s DJ, beloved of so many in the game who are legends in their own right, then you only need to start here. And if you want to know more about the outsized personality which helps elevate him way beyond the world of workaday deck-botherers, then check out the Q&A below, from when I grabbed a few minutes with him a couple of days before the Milan show.
(all photos by Paolo Regis)
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JOE MUGGS: Hello… You’re in New York, right?
DJ HARVEY: Yes.
How’s it going?
It’s fantastic, actually. I’m just chillaxing after a fun gig on Friday night. I know it’s Sunday afternoon, but at my age it takes a day and a half to get over these things.
You’ve got lots of friends in New York, I’m sure. You worked with the Rub N Tug guys and so on…
Yeah. Loads of old buddies. I’ve been coming to New York for over thirty years, so in that time, yeah, I’ve got a lot of old friends and disco family are here, so yeah, I’ve been going out for some rather nice romantic DJ dinners over the weekend.
What kind of set were you playing?
A seven-hour-long one [laughs]. It was the five-year anniversary of the Le Bain club, on the roof of the Standard hotel. So I was playing for Le Bain, for their anniversary, and I had a really nice time. They’re having a weekend-long event; Tony Humphries and Merlin Bobb are playing tonight. Tony’s an old friend. I think I might even go upstairs and have a little disco shimmy to Tony this evening. Yeah. It was actually really nice. A lot of my old New York family came out, and we had a great little event until the sun rose on Saturday morning. It was great.
Do you feel that there’s people in New York who share the same idea that you do, that there’s complete continuity in dance music going all the way back to disco?
I think everyone does – or if you don’t, then you’re greatly mistaken. No genre of dance music just appeared. Everything has a lineage, and probably from folk music around a hundred years ago, someone hitting a log with a stick a couple of thousand years ago, it was probably the first dance beat. People have been dancing to music since time began. So I think you can do the anthropological research and link that right through to [grimaces] “K-house” or whatever today.
Sure but what I mean is, if you talk to people about the history of New York, you’ll hear tales of club shutdowns and difficult times for club scenes and so on – but you have a musical family there who do connect all the way back?
Yeah, most definitely. Most definitely. Scenes ebb and flow. I think people always want to go out. I don’t think there’s been – especially in New York – a period where, “Oh, well there’s nowhere to go tonight.” Or, “There isn’t any dance music in New York City.” That’s never been the case. The scene doesn’t really go anywhere. But generations move in and out of the scene. The music may change a little bit as different technology becomes available. And maybe people move on, or they get married or have a family or something, and maybe they’re not going out as much as they were, but in general, I would say people have been dancing in New York for decades… and they still are.
“Some of the greatest dance music and DJs and nightclubs and the whole kit and caboodle of what we’re about is founded in Italy”
Good. And how about Italy? You’re playing for Boiler Room in Milan – how’s your relationship been with Italy and its style of clubbing over the years?
Well, Italy is another place with a very long and exotic dance history and culture. I’m really looking forward to the gig, by the way. It should be a lot of fun, a nice production and everything. Some of the greatest dance music and DJs and nightclubs and the whole kit and caboodle of what we’re about is founded in Italy, with probably the biggest thing being Italo-disco, and in recent times the Cosmic renaissance – which I’d like to take credit for, by the way.
Of course.
We could put “smiles” after that. Grin, pirate laugh. Ha ha.
Winking emoticon.
Yeah. But Italy is just absolutely incredible, beautiful and passionate and wonderful, and most of the things that I really appreciate, those being art and culture and style and good food and hedonism and passion and all of the things that make life worth living, have got a really powerful presence in Italy somewhere, so I really always enjoy and respect and lean toward Italian culture. And somewhere in my deep, dark past, I have Italian roots. There’s parts of my family that are from the Torino area of northern Italy, dating back a couple of hundred years. So I feel that I’m a bit of a blue-eyed Italian prince, somehow.
The nineties were the last ten years of disco, really, as a vinyl-based thing
As well as the Cosmic disco, there was the glorious age of Italian house in the nineties. You’ve never been shy of a piano banger at the right point in the evening. Were you a fan of the Italian stuff in the early nineties?
Most definitely. There was unlimited amounts of wonderful Italian house music during the nineties, and I think probably for me personally as a DJ through the late eighties and the early nighties was really my rise, if you like, I was definitely indulging in Italo-house of all denominations. There was a lot of the piano stuff and the tribal stuff, and labels like Kaleidoscope. Hundreds of labels, and thousands of records. Not all of them were great, but amongst that stuff, there’s some really fantastic music that I think now a whole new generation of kids that were maybe born – my girlfriend was born 1988, so she wasn’t exactly dancing to that music in the mid-nineties, but she’s very interested in it now, and it’s a whole – it’s like, “Oh, what’s that one?” And I’m like, “Well, that’s Soft House Company, and I never want to hear it again.”
But it’s like, young people – I imagine you’re a young person. You’re probably in your thirties or whatever – so that music’s quite exotic and maybe quite new to you. You’ll be like, “Oh, what’s that?” There’s definitely a renaissance, a wealth of nineties music. In fact, the nineties was the last – although we didn’t realize it at the time – was the last period of time where vinyl sales actually determined chart positions. So it was the last ten years of disco, really, as a vinyl-based thing, where records actually swapped hands to determine chart positions and determine record sales, as it were. Really exciting time.
Yes, and we now there’s a vinyl renaissance, but the “vinyl chart” is full of Noel Gallagher and Pink Floyd reissues.
Is that right [laughs]? Why would we ever want to reissue records that aren’t rare?
Well, this is what’s happened with Record Store Day, isn’t it? It’s been swamped by reissues of the “Ghostbusters” theme, and things that anyone could have bought in the charity shop.
Ah yes, I’m aware of that. I still visit record stores, definitely, but it seems bizarre. If you think of the very few rare Pink Floyd records, why you would want to reissue “Dark Side of the Moon” or something, I don’t know. But maybe something like “Dark Side of the Moon” — with those very popular records, a lot of them were actually played an awful lot, and maybe finding a clean copy is quite difficult. You get yourself a nice digitally distorted remastered version.
Extra loudness, to test everyone’s ears. Talking of rock bands, nice segue there. Your rock band is – when I saw you, just a few months ago, your band had been a short-term project, which you just happened to find a label for the recordings. But now I gather you’re turning into a more full-time act, it would seem. Is that right?
Yes. I mean, I don’t know if it was ever definitely a short-term project, but it’s definitely more long-term than it was. Basically, I’m putting the show on the road. We recorded the album as a studio outfit, as just something I wanted to do, and when the record came out on Smalltown Supersound – this is the Wildest Dreams LP – and it was so well-received, so critically acclaimed and all the rest of it, supported by Rough Trade and stuff like that, I’ve decided to take the show on the road, basically, and put a little unit together. We’ve been doing some rehearsals, and I’ve actually got a busy summer ahead with touring Europe and stuff like that, so we don’t have much time to work on rehearsing, but when I get back we’ll get a set together, and hopefully be doing some smaller showcase gigs before the end of the year.
Nice. You’ll be fronting the band.
I don’t know about fronting. I’ll be doing the Karen Carpenter type thing.
Singing drummer.
Sitting behind a drum kit, Phil Collins-type fronting a band.
“I’d be perfectly happy working in a tyre-fitter’s, being in a Cream tribute pub band at the weekend, just banging away some blues standards”
You’ve always been Balearic enough to be a Phil Collins.
Yeah. He’s a very talented gentleman. I think there’s nothing wrong with singing from behind the drum kit. If it was good enough for the Monkees, it’s good enough for me.
Given the profile of the Wildest Dreams album, I imagine that you could quite easily get some big festival shows and so on. Have you played in a rock band on stages of that sort of scale before?
I’m trying to think. I’ve been playing gigs all my life. I was a drummer long before I was a DJ. My first gigs were in the mid-seventies, in pubs, and parent-teacher’s associations, and miltary bases, and stuff around East Anglia. So I’m used to being onstage. I’m trying to think of the biggest gigs that we did. Seems like there was this thing called… what was it called? Strawberry Fields or something like that, in Cambridge?
Strawberry Fair.
Strawberry Fair, there we go. In Cambridge. And it probably had a couple of thousand people. Bits and pieces, nothing of the potential that something like Coachella has, or FYF Fest, or the stuff in the big crossover festivals that they have now, the techno DJs and indie rock bands. So the answer is basically no. I haven’t played the size that – well, hopefully Wildest Dreams will get an opportunity to do some of the bigger festivals around the world. Maybe I can do the EDM tent and the indie stage in the same afternoon.
Ah yes, indie & EDM, both the most important styles. Is there an itch to scratch there? Do you have a yen to get out there on the big stages, or is it more, “Here’s a project that’s going all right; let’s see where it goes”?
It’s a bit of both, really. I enjoy it, but I’m an entertainer. If the DJ thing had never been paying my rent, I’d be perfectly happy working in a tyre-fitter’s, being in a Cream tribute pub band at the weekend, just banging away some blues standards. So I enjoy playing for the fun of it. It’d be really an awful lot of fun to get on a fairly big stage and play on a summer’s afternoon to ten or twenty thousand kids at Glastonbury or something. It’d be a dream come true. It’d be an awful lot of fun to do that.
Nice. Well, for now, we’re having you on Boiler Room for the first time as a DJ. I hope one day we’ll be able to broadcast Wildest Dreams as well. I know you’ve umm’ed and ahh’ed about the ideas of being broadcast before…
Oh yeah. It’s an odd realm. But I’m very glad it’s done well, and I’m glad to finally step into that and into the modern age, in many respects.
We will welcome you to our realm for the Ray-Ban show in Milan. I’m going to let you get on with your New York…
Get on with my laying in bed.
Laying in bed, and maybe seeing Tony Humphries on a roof, which sounds magical.
Yeah, that should be great. I’m actually staying in the Standard hotel, and it has this panoramic picture window staring out over the Hudson River and the new Whitney art museum, and the Statue of Liberty’s in the background, and I’m considering a cup of coffee and a pain au chocolat for breakfast. Thank you so much for considering me and having me on the Boiler Room, and I’m actually really, really excited to do this and to be considered and come to Italy and do the thing. Hopefully I can do it justice.