For Pete Tong, it’s still all about the music

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      Thankfully, hearing Pete Tong on the other end of the line only briefly causes me to babble incomprehensibly. Surely you know his voice well too, as his BBC Radio 1 show Essential Mix has been dance music’s most prestigious platform for over 20 years.

      In addition to his on-air endeavours with the BBC as well as Clear Channel, Tong is also a DJ, a producer, an inspiration for the cockney rhyming slang that became the title of the 2004 film It’s All Gone Pete Tong, and a pioneer who helped shape all of dance-music culture. That’s just the Coles Notes version of his bio, but the point is he’s a busy guy. So the eight-hour-long interview required to adequately delve into his career wasn’t on the table, but the Straight happily settled for 15 minutes as Tong waited to board a flight at LAX.

      Los Angeles has been home for the 55-year-old member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire for a few years now. If his relocating there doesn’t signal Tinseltown is an epicentre for dance music, the billboards emblazoned with Martin Garrix’s face—which are as ubiquitous as ones for studio blockbusters in La La Land these days—surely do.

      “I guess it was just a case of when,” he says of EDM’s popularity in North America. “It’s well documented that the inspiration came from people like myself coming over in the late ’80s and getting excited going to Paradise Garage in New York and seeing all the pioneers of house and techno from Detroit and Chicago. We took all that back to the U.K. and blew it up and invented the club culture that gets talked about today that’s obviously spread around the rest of the world.

      “It was always there in key cities bubbling away in the underground, but it took the kind of perfect storm of certain events and festivals growing to a certain size, like EDC and Ultra in particular, and then the music actually finding a voice on the radio and really cutting through to the Top 40.”

      Aside from bass drops via David Guetta or Avicii on commercial radio, the other big shift since EDM’s unprecedented ascent is how it’s performed in big rooms. On its largest stages, music almost takes the back seat during spectacle-driven sets that put Kiss concerts to shame.

      “Some people, like deadmau5, it’s almost central to their whole act in terms of what they bring with production,” he explains. “If you look at his recording success, it’s not like he’s had loads of hit singles. But his performance and production has kept him at the top of the game.”

      But for Tong, it’s all about the music, and, fittingly, he plays for a minimum of two hours, a format he champions every week with Essential Mix.

      “Essential Mix has always been about bringing forward names and taking them to another level,” he says of his show, which over the years has featured everyone from megastars like Daft Punk and Skrillex to more left-field acts like Caribou and Flying Lotus. “What can I say? The fact that they want to do it and they’re excited about doing it, and put TLC into doing it and coming up with interesting stuff—for them the show still moves the needle in their world, which is probably what I’m most proud of.”

      And if for some inexplicable reason you haven’t heard Tong’s voice cue up an Essential Mix yet, where does he recommend one start?

      “I would say the most exciting one is the next one,” he replies. “Every week it’s still a thrill to put it together, so my show tonight.”

      Pete Tong plays Celebrities on Friday (November 6).

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