By Jasmine Gardner,
Over the last weekend in August, 40,000 people will head to Clapham Common for the South West Four festival — a daily 20,000-strong crowd made up mostly of twenty-somethings.
Yet look at some of the headline acts, such as Carl Cox, Paul Oakenfold, Judge Jules, Pete Tong, John Digweed, Erick Morillo, Armand Van Helden, Josh Wink — a plethora of old-timer superstar DJs — and the average age on stage will be about 44 years old. It's an old-boys club of the Nineties dance music scene, still striving to be “down with the kids”.
“Anyone who actually likes dance music will be in the side tents,” says a friend of mine, who lists A-Track (28 years old), Skream & Benga (24 and 23) and Boys Noize (28) as the “worth-seeing” acts. “They produce relevant music whereas those main stage acts will just be trading off their past glories and hoping everyone is too pilled off their faces to notice,” he says. Tellingly, SW4 has not yet sold out.
Top of the bill on Sunday's main stage is Fatboy Slim (aka Norman Cook), who comes in just above the headliner average, at 46. These days he's not only a father of two (his second child, Nelly, was born in January) but also teetotal after a spell in rehab for alcohol addiction in 2009. After years tanking up on booze just to get up on stage because, says Cook, “for me it was always part and parcel of being a party DJ”, he now plays big events such as Glastonbury without a single drop.
“I get a bit nervous the hour before but then as soon as you hear the crowd chanting your name before you go on, something goes zzzzzzz' up the back of your neck.”
And Cook rejects the idea that his DJ retirement age could be approaching.
“There has never been a cut-off age for DJs,” he protests. “For pop stars, unless you're someone like the Rolling Stones, there is a cut-off age when you kind of look, or are considered, too old to be a pop star. You can't be a sex symbol when you're too old to be sexy. Whereas with the generation of superstar DJs, none of us were oil paintings in the first place and we never traded on our good looks and sexuality so seem to get away with it.”
The name Fatboy Slim has always brought to my mind a somewhat red face, a lined forehead, a receding hairline. Now those creases are a little deeper, the remaining hair a lot greyer. But otherwise, he's right, he remains the same. Silly shirt, jeans, goofy grin. It's all still there.
But he seems to forget that even Jagger's fans these days are mostly his own age. The job of DJs, whose home is in clubs surrounded by youth, is to appeal to their audience.
Shortly after one of London's most esteemed clubs, The End, closed in January 2009, I spoke to Layo Paskin, one half of DJ duo Layo and Bushwacka!, who ran The End for 13 years. Having called time, Paskin explained: “James Holden and I once had a discussion in which we said that there should be no DJs over 30. I'm not quite sure how old James is now, but I'm 38.” (Layo & Bushwacka! are also on the South West Four bill.)
Billy Reilly, who used to run The Cross, The Key and Canvas at King's Cross, agrees with Paskin.
“What 20-year-old really wants to go and party to music being played by a 49-year-old?” he says. Put that question to 46-year-old Cook and his response is: “Well, they [the 20-year-olds] patently do.” Although I'm 27 and I wouldn't pay to see him play.
“If you look at Carl Cox, Paul Oakenfold, Danny Tenaglia, all the originals from my generation, we're all still going so we don't know where that cut-off point is. It's definitely not over 30, it doesn't seem to be over 40, and over the next five years we'll see where we can push it. As long as I'm enjoying it and the crowd is enjoying it, it seems to work.”
Yet the dance music industry is a different beast from the days of Fatboy Slim's peak. While in 1999 his hit Praise You went to No 1 in the charts, his latest release with the electro house DJ, Hervé (30, by the way), Machines Can Do The Work, had (says his PR) no chart expectation and — as with most dance records these days — was an online-only release. The days of DJs turning “superstar” are over.
Although Cook says “being a DJ, there are no real peaks and troughs”, he lists his career highlights as the second Big Beach Boutique in Brighton, when more than 250,000 people turned up to see him play, which was in 2002, and “one week when my album knocked Robbie Williams off No 1, I got engaged to [Radio 2 presenter] Zoë [Ball] and I won a Brit.” That was 1999.
He also contradicts his “making a living out of doing something I really enjoy is what keeps me going” line when he says: “I don't really go to clubs in London unless I'm working at them so I don't really know what's going on in there … People go there to not be reminded of their boring day job, and when I go there I am reminded of my boring day job.” You can never be quite sure if he does still love it, or if it simply pays the bills.
These days he has different priorities. “I've always said I'm happier at No 9 in the charts than No 1 because you can also be a human being and a husband and a father at the same time.”
So while he's at home being a 46-year-old dad, the twentysomethings will be out in London, dancing to a new beat.
source: www.thisislondon.co.uk
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