Ewan Pearson is probably the best educated man in dance music (though the guy who used to be in D:Ream might disagree). He is also one of the most in demand DJs, producers and remixers in the world, working with the likes of The Revenge, The Rapture and Tracy Thorn. He has even turned down Shakira.

DJhistory sat down with the man with a 1st class degree from Cambridge University and current Berlin resident to discuss what makes him feel proud, his initial dislike of house music and his favourite philosopher. Be smart, stay in school.


Can you remember when you first heard house music?
I didn’t actually like it! I remember when 'Jack Your Body' got to number 1; I thought it was a bit of a novelty record and really annoying. The first dance records I really liked was when a lot of really gay hi-NRG records like Man To Man meets Man Parrish became a top five record in the UK and you ‘Spin Me Round’ and I suppose ‘Blue Monday’. I didn’t think about them as dance records though, I thought about them as pop records I liked synthesiser-heavy electronic stuff at that point. I wasn’t that fussed about house and it took until acid house kicked in and Detroit techno. When that percolated into the UK and people like Warp started, that and also indie dance and the stuff that was Balearic-y and then people like Andrew Weatherall, who is the person I always cite as my main inspiration in terms of both his DJing and his production. I saw him first when I was 17 or so and he is still one of my heroes, I even voted for him in the Mixmag best DJ of all time thing, which I never do!

You were supposed to vote for Jimmy Saville!
(laughs) Yeah Jimmy Saville in historical terms maybe but in terms of my direct impact, he (Andrew Weatherall) is someone who has stayed interesting, has never got predictable and when he’s got bored of something he has gone off and done something else. Yeah, he makes a fair living from it and I know it sounds crass to say oh he’s never sold out but he has just remained interesting. It isn’t like he had two years when he was good and then has spent the rest of the time just cashing in, he has always stayed relevant and he is still a superb DJ and really good producer and a continuing inspiration. Listening to him DJ and also his productions when I was in my late teens were a twin inspiration.

What was the first record that you bought?
As a kid I bought 7-inches, the first one I can remember buying is Ray Parker Jr. the theme from 'Ghostbusters'. Actually, I still have all those 7-inches from that period and they are not toooo…. bad, there are definitely a few shockers in there but there’s some good ones as well. I remember having ‘Hounds Of Love’ by Kate Bush. The first 12-inch I bought was Laura Branigan ‘Self Control’ which is a really great record. Thinking about it now it now I went through plenty of pretty awful musical choices at that stage but they all sort of fed in, in different ways, to things. I mean we had things like the Fame movie and there was the character with all the synths, loads of analogue synths in his basement, I’m sure that fed in somewhere.

Also when I was learning to play the piano, I really liked Billy Joel and had the Billy Joel songbook and if I’m very drunk I can probably still remember how to play ‘Just The Way You Are’ and ‘Uptown Girl’ is a killer wedding record, an absolutely killer wedding record, I played at a friend of mine's wedding in Spain on the beach and that was the one that got all the parents going absolutely crazy. I am sure then that I have lots of records that I could be embarrassed about from that period but there are lots of good ones as well.

Did you have a musical upbringing?
I did in the sense that my dad has played guitar as a hobby since he was a teenager anyway and I‘ve got a press clipping of him from the Wolverhampton Evening News or something, him and his skiffle band. When I was young he was in a folk group where he was singing and then he was in various blues and pub-rock bands and my mum loves music too, so yeah, there was always music around.

Did you like the music your dad played?
Some of it, not all of it but at the time I went to a lot of folk clubs and the folk music scene is interesting, it’s a kind of network and in each little place there would be a little folk club and like-minded people and people would do the folk circuit and come and stay with the people that were putting on the folk clubs. In many ways it reminds me of the early days of acid house and things like that in the UK. When things like that are fairly small and run by a few enthusiasts and like-minded people, you get this little kind of network, so when it started off in the UK you had a club here and then a club there and you ended up with a circuit. So you had Slam in Glasgow and Basics (in Leeds) and Flying in London and the residents from one club would become friends with the people that ran another club and then they would end up travelling and playing at these other clubs and they became touring DJs in a way.

So in some ways there is definitely a parallel between how these things were organised and how the folk clubs happened when I was a kid. Though the folk clubs (laughs) never blew up in the same way that acid house did! When I think about it generationally, my Mum moved to London when she was a teenager and she used to be into Jazz and early reggae and went to blues parties and I often think that if she’d been born twenty years later she would have been going to Shoom or whatever, so in that sense it’s simply a question of generations. My mum actually quite liked a lot of the electronic music I played her when I started to get into it in my teens. I don’t think that my Dad was mad about it though.

When did you start learning to DJ?
When I was at college a mate of mine and I both bought one Technics decks each as that was all we could afford. So the two of them would always be in one or the others room, a week in my room a week in his and we would try and learn how to mix. We would try and challenge each other to try and mix one record into another, which we did, very, very badly.

We ended up playing at these parties that we put on at college. They were quite small things, never anything big. You got that thing when you were in your first year and other people already had parties and they were established, you couldn’t get a gig, so we put parties on. Then gradually by the time I was in my third year we got to play at other places. I guess you had gone up the ladder a bit but I didn’t DJ properly, you know professionally for years. When I first started making records for Soma in Glasgow, I was playing out live. That was when I first started touring round Europe a bit but I wasn’t DJing. I DJed for fun but never out properly. This is pre laptop era so I had an MPC2000 sequencer and a sampler, a synth and a couple of effect boxes, it was all pretty crude compared to what you can do now.

It must have been a bit more involved though?
It was more involved in that it took a lot longer to set up! What was annoying about it though was that you were much more set on a path, you can’t change things on the fly like you can with say Ableton, you can open things up much more now whereas then I sort of had to play a set, pretty much in one order and I used to try and add things to it each week or every two weeks to keep myself interested but after a while I got a bit fed up to be honest, just playing my own music.

How do you think changes in technology have affected the way people interact with music in clubs?
When DJing started or at least when the house scene happened, part of the point, at least the way people wrote about it was that it wasn’t supposed to be about spectacle in the way that that rock for example had been. It wasn’t the case that everybody would be dancing facing the DJ, the point wasn’t that you had a DJ as a rock star. At first the spectacle wasn’t that important. It was you on the dancefloor immersed in the atmosphere, dancing with all these other people and the lights and the sound and all these things coming together to provide this whole, rather than just standing there watching somebody. Though there’s always a few of us that will be watching and trying to see what people are doing,

Like at a Jeff Mills gig?
Yeah exactly! I can remember Jeff Mills playing with a friend of mine in a club in Wolverhampton, I stood in the DJ booth and just watched for an hour and a half with my jaw just slack, hanging open and it was incredible, completely incredible.

But in that sense people say "oh it’s so boring when you see people playing live on a laptop" but you know it’s not rock'n'roll, the point is it’s dance music. The dance music that is played on Ableton is about as brutally functional as you get and the point is you’re there to dance, people aren’t supposed to be putting on a show. I sometimes think it’s a bit unfair when people say electronic live acts are boring. If you think about them the same way you think about DJing it shouldn’t necessarily be about putting on a spectacle. It’s functional, it’s body music, It’s about music made for dancing, you’re not even supposed to be standing there watching.

What was it like when you first went to University at Cambridge?
It was interesting, I had a good education there and I was lucky enough to meet some people that were very down-to-earth, people that were into music and we used to travel out to London, to Flying and Venus in Nottingham. There were also a few people in Cambridge and a few parties round there, so I got to hear people like Weatherall and that play. We went outside of the University to find that stuff so in many ways it’s just like another university and I had a good time there, especially where it was, it was a good base, as being close London you could get out and listen to stuff.

When you finished University did you move to London?
I moved to Royal Holloway, near Windsor in Surrey to do a Masters degree, so not actually in the middle of London. But by then I had made my first couple of singles and released a couple of things on an independent label from Birmingham called Bostin Records, which was Birmingham DJ Lee Fisher’s label. He had a record shop in Birmingham which is where I took my first demo. It was the first thing I thought OK I’ve got something that is good enough for someone to consider and I took it in to the shop and pretty much got it signed on their label.

I put out a couple of records on that label and then I started to make more deeper house and techno stuff and it wasn’t really their kind of thing and someone suggested Soma and I was going up to a party in Glasgow run by a friend of mine from college. I was cheeky enough to just ring the Soma office up and spoke to Dave Clark and said that so and so said you might be interested in my music and could drop into the office and play you it and he said yes. So I did. A week later Orde (from Slam) rang up and said we love it and want to put it out, have you thought about doing an album and I thought, “Bloody hell”. So I did an album for them and my masters at the same time and then playing live and touring.

What made you move to Berlin?
A lot of the reasons I wanted to leave London as opposed to things I positively chose Berlin for. I’d spent most of my twenties in one relationship which had ended, I left about eighteen months after that had ended, so a little bit of a delayed reaction to wanting to be in an new place for a bit. Also I had got into travelling with music and had got a bit of a bug for it, I had I lost my studio space and all these things just changed and I’d just turned thirty. They all happened close together and I was pissed off but then later on I realised that actually I had an opportunity to go off and have an adventure.

It wasn’t like I had to find a job and an income, it wasn’t really a risk in that, if I went somewhere for a bit of a break and to try something else and it didn’t work, I would just come home again. As long as I had an airport and a post office I was fine. Music work, remix work and DJ work would continue and I’d DJed in Berlin a couple of times in the summer of 2003 and just liked the atmosphere of the city. It was a little bit before it started getting this hype also it wasn’t really a musical decision. It was everything else, so my decision to move to Berlin was because I liked the atmosphere of the city and not because I was looking for anything musically.

I just like the way that people live in the city, it reminds me of the Mediterranean. It’s the way that people inhabit the city, the time they go out and the generally enlightened attitude to music and parties there, which is that as long as it is monitored sensibly it isn’t actually doing any harm. In some ways it is actually incredibly sensible and there aren’t rampaging hordes running through the streets, it’s extremely secure and a safe and comfortable place to live. Clubs and the culture around them is a big part of the economy of the city. It’s just not a big deal though, it’s not a moral panic, it’s not something that people try to make political capital out of they just get on with it and that’s just something you wish you saw in other places.

Has living in Berlin affected the type of music you make?
I think if you love electronic music then you love lots of German music but the people I followed and the labels I followed, none of them were based in Berlin, they were either in Frankfurt like Playhouse, or Kompakt who are in Cologne, so I wasn’t massively a fan of Berlin’s own music but I used to go to a lot of after-hours parties and I met a lot of the people who now have become famous names from Berlin. I was lucky to go to a lot of these Sunday or Monday parties and really enjoyed it. At the same time though I always sort of wander around musically and would never want to be perceived as being on a band wagon, I tend to do the opposite really. When I moved there I kind of decided that it was definitely not going to in the sense that I was already doing my thing.

What’s your favourite club to DJ in?
On a good night I would have to say the Robert Johnson in Frankfurt. It was started by the people who run Playhouse, Ata and friends of his, it’s this little space that they adapt and change every few months, it’s just a perfect small club and I’ve had some really, really great nights there.

Do you prefer playing smaller clubs?
No actually, I mean I am lucky as I get to do both. I play fairly regularly at Space in Ibiza and when it’s good, it’s phenomenal. What I prefer is being able to play a long set, I played at Robert Johnson four times last year, I always have a guest but last time at the end of last year, I did it just me and I played for like six and half hours and I had so much fun because in a small club you can just meander around, there is no sense of being like a guest DJ when you’re being parachuted into your prime time slot and you have to just bring out the sort of big guns.

Harking back to the true idea of having a residency almost?
Exactly! And actually the most fun that I have ever had is when we used to do Come Shake The Whole at Cargo. It was only once every month and I used to play there with my mate Stan and we only ever had guest DJ’s when one of us couldn’t make it. We had Ivan Smagghe and DJ Koze filling in for me when I was away, so I missed loads of amazing nights! I think we were the first people to book Koze in the UK and he was an outstandingly amazing DJ. So apart from live acts it was just us DJing the whole night. It’s a serious education and I miss doing proper warm up sets and that’s what I like about the Robert Johnson thing. Sometimes in Berlin if I’m playing at Cookies or somewhere like that I’ll ask if I can play the first three hours so that I can play from the start. I actually love playing warm up.

Playing the stuff you don’t normally get to play?
I love and buy a lot of slower music not just banging stuff and it’s really nice to be able to build things up and in many ways you’d like to be able to do your own warm up sometimes! So at Cargo we had to do that and because it was our residency we basically just had a complete laugh, I’ve DJed in more states of… abandon… there than, I mean I would never get in anywhere near the mess we got in there anywhere else as I would consider it unprofessional. But it was just a riot it was really good fun, I am definitely slightly nostalgic for those times.

What do you find the most depressing thing about modern dance culture?
It’s not exactly depressing but I think the people who say “Oh it used to be this” or “It promised us that and it failed to deliver” are people who have hopelessly over-stated what it was ever capable of. I mean it’s a musical subculture, a leisure pursuit that is wonderful and can be incredibly transformative and liberating in many ways but is a temporary pleasure, a temporary escape and obviously it can fill a life with stuff your fascinated by and amazing activities and people and amazing music.

I remember for example when acid house first started, people wrote the most ridiculously over the top stuff about it and how it was going to change the world. The same people who had probably just been taking a lot of ecstasy (laughs) and although there were some interesting side-effects that came out it, things like football violence going down the year that ecstasy really hit the terraces; those sorts of things were only ever interesting side-effects. They just happened for a little while, that is the beauty of popular culture and cultural forms like that, things coalesce for a little bit that you can’t really predict and they have their moment and then they disappear and I think that the criticisms that people have are nostalgic, they are nostalgic for their lost youth or whatever. Nothing lasts forever you know, and who’d want it to, I mean the great thing about dance music is that it does keep regenerating. The most difficult question that people ask me is “what is going to happen next?” Well I have no idea. I wouldn’t be doing this if I knew what was going to happen next that is the whole point, it’s art, it’s supposed to surprise you!

I mean who would ever have imagined that minimal techno would become so massively popular, something so that is so peculiar in many ways, something that is so strange, this kind of raw, weird, functional, electronic, just drums almost, would become so popular? The way things develop then, the genres that emerge, it’s completely fascinating and I think that you can’t overload it with significance, it maybe something you do for a little bit of your life or it may be something that you do for twenty years but it’s still music and booze and dancing and that’s not to underestimate what those things can be. It can be wonderful and transcendent and it can be amazing and many of my happiest memories are associated with it and most of the friends that I’ve made.

Can it ultimately change your life then?
It can change your life. I guess if you discover it and you realise that it is something that you absolutely love and then it will change your life for the better. It will, and you’ll meet nice people and all that comes with it but… that could happen from a number of different sources and the things that one loves, one tends to sing to the heavens about but people can find that from stamp collecting.

I guess what I am trying to say is that a lot of political claims that were made for dance music, especially early on, that it could free people and that people would think differently about how we organised ourselves socially, none of them have come to pass and I guess of course not. I don’t want to sound too cynical but it’s escapism, I think that big claims were made for it as some world changing thing and I think you’re asking just far too much for it.

Do you think that as dance music has become more main stream the idea of an ‘underground’ has become a meaningless concept?
I think that it has always been a problematic concept. Because how do you hold on to something like that? Things always start off small, but they have an effect and they have ripples and dance music found its way into pop all the way through dance music’s history, disco being the prime example or Madonna taking sort of mid-eighties post-disco forms and making them into massive pop records. Things have always gone from obscurity to mainstream in one way or another. These things are always the source of inspiration for people and there will always be those who see it and then expand upon it and put it somewhere else and I actually don’t necessarily think that it’s a bad thing. People always plunder whatever obscure popular cultural forms they can find and popularise them and I have absolutely no problem with pop music full stop. I mean, I really like good pop music.

You’ve remixed some mainstream pop records, do you have a different mindset than when you make a straight up club record?
A little bit but it’s hard to compartmentalise in that sense. With the remixes I have done I try and do an almost eighties style of remixing where I change just enough to make it work in a club, rather than doing a radical over hall but that would mean picking things very carefully that would suit that kind of treatment. I’ve turned down a lot of pop stuff because I just couldn’t work out a way to do it that would please the artist but would also please myself. So I‘ve turned down all sorts of people like Shakira, just because I didn’t want to do a token type treatment, I wanted to do a record that would somehow work both ways, it would work for the original artist but would also work properly in a club context and I never really like those remixes where you just get like a burp from the original song and just put that into a new track. The records that I first heard in the eighties were essentially how can we make this work in a club by extending it or perhaps changing the drums a little bit and they weren’t these radical overhauls of the original track.

Like the Duran Duran night versions?
Exactly and the remixes by people like Shep Pettibone and Arthur Baker, people making good 12-inch versions that were tweaked just enough. When I started to do these vocal remixes, I didn’t even realise I was doing it at first and it actually took a friend to point it out but that was sort of the model that I was using and I think there was definitely some truth in that. When I am doing production for people, then obviously I am thinking in a different way because we are not necessarily thinking of the dancefloor, although I have worked with some artists like The Rapture and Delphic who are people that obviously love dance music in lots of ways and who are influenced by it. You are not necessarily thinking from a club perspective, you are thinking form a song and a pop perspective.

What are you most proud of?
(laughs)What am I most proud of? (Laughs)!

Apart from being interviewed for DJhistory?
I can die happy now! I can remember very, very strongly what it was like when I heard certain records for the first time that I really loved, like the first time I heard ‘Touched By The Hand Of God’ by New Order. It was at Christmas in a Birmingham shopping centre. I was shopping with my mum and dad and I heard this bassline start and I ran up to the counter of the shop and I asked what it was and I bought the record and I played it and played it. When you’re making records yourself you can’t really, I don’t know but I can’t get that sort of pleasure from a record that I’ve made myself because in the process of making it I’ve normally squeezed a lot of the joy out of it because I've heard it so many times. But then when a little bit of time elapses and you hear it again with a bit distance and occasionally you hear it, or perhaps someone come up and says "I really love this" or "this track is really important to me" or whatever, then you realise that something you have done has had a similar effect on them as hearing New Order had on me.

Those are the moments when I kind of feel proud because I think you know, I made something and it went out into the world , it may sound a bit soft but it’s kind of nice to be making a living out of doing something that is essentially not hurting anybody or raping the planet or God knows what, I mean it’s essentially a fairly benign activity. It’s just quite nice to be making a living out making people happy. It sounds a bit ludicrous doesn’t it but I don’t think it should be?

Trying to impart a happiness that has stemmed from the happiness you originally got from music?
Yeah exactly! It’s kind of a weird desperate attempt to recreate that thrill you got from hearing other stuff and you can’t, that’s the thing, you can’t, well I guess there are some people who sit in their studios and just go "I’M AMAZING!" But I just sit there and think why doesn’t my mix sound like so and so, I mean I spend most of my time wishing I was better at my job but that’s good because that what makes me want the next one to be even better.

Is that what drives you to go into the studio again and again?
Of course I think with a lot of people that make stuff, they spend a lot of their time listening to it and going “shit I wish I had changed that bit or not changed that bit” of course you can’t and you have to do something else instead. The other thing, with the production side of things which is the thing that it’s taken me the longest to sort of get towards, that is when I feel incredibly lucky rather than proud because there are certain times when I have got to work with some amazingly talented people, like hearing Tracy Thorn, I’m the first person to have heard lots of her songs, probably before she has even demoed them, not even Ben had heard quite a lot of them. And being the first person to literally hear her sing these songs and experiences like that is amazing.

What made you decide to write Discographies?
Being slightly afraid of Jeremy the guy I wrote it with, who is a very, very lovely man with extremely large amounts of drive and enthusiasm who I met at a conference and had a big chat and he was like “we should write a book” and I was just “yeah, yeah” and then he just kept on saying “no no I’m serious we should write a book” and I never really thought anything of it and of course he said we should write a proposal and it was accepted straight away and I was just “ohhh fuck! I’ve actually got to do it now” and I kicked myself so many times during the writing of it. I mean writing an academic thing is hard work and turning it into a book is really hard work.

What it’s about?
It came out about 11 years ago and it was a fairly earnest cultural studies attempt to write about dance music in terms of theoretical approaches. We wrote about it in terms of subculture and the failings of academia to write about youth culture. The idea was each chapter would have a different theoretical slant to show you can write about this stuff using culture theory and do it in a way that isn’t embarrassing. I am really proud of it! There is something else I am proud of! Because it was a proper attempt to do something like that and a lot of people read it and said nice things about it. When I look back at it now, it comes across as a bit earnest but then I was straight of University and as an academic book it has to exist in a certain discursive sphere.

At the time you already had people like Matthew Collin writing very good cultural histories, so our job was not to do that, nobody needed to hear the story again. There will always be people writing very good and really interesting analytical histories but we were trying to argue essentially that you shouldn’t only be able to use Critical Theory to write about literature or fine art or classical music or whatever. You should be able to, if you’re smart enough, apply it to other stuff and it works.

Did writing it give you any insight or inspiration for your music career?
Every day I was in the library writing it I wished I was in the studio. Literally every time I sat down at my computer or went to the British Library. It was in many ways, lots of fun as I read every single book that was on disco in the British Library, other people were sitting there with these huge volumes I was reading Jack Villari’s Official Guide To Disco Dance Steps, I’m looking through all these picture books showing me how to do the hustle. When I was younger people thought maybe I would be involved in journalism or writing. I did some writing, you know reviews and stuff for the college paper. I found a lot of the time when I was writing about music it made me want to make music and I wished I was in the studio. Whereas now I've sort of gone the other way and I’ve started writing a column for Groove magazine in Germany which is fun even though it’s only a little short column every couple of months, but I missed writing actually so it’s nice to do a little bit now and again.

Any plans to write another book?
Absolutely no at the moment, that’s not to say “never” but to write an academic book would be hard as I haven’t been in academia for ten or eleven years which is an enormous amount catching up to do in terms of basically reading everything that has been written since I wrote my book. It’s going to take a while, so no there are no plans for a second edition.

Who’s your favourite Philosopher and don’t say René Descartes!
No I am an anti-Cartesian definitely, I am materialist I don’t believe in the mind body split! Recently I read some stuff by a Canadian Marxist philosopher called Gerald Cohen who died last year sadly. When he was a kid he was brought up in a hard-core working class, Communist family in Montreal and I read a book of his that talked about his childhood as well as being a philosophy book and he was quoting these bits of socialist youth hymns, from when he used to go to what was a sort of a Communist youth camp in the forest outside of Montreal and I actually used a line of his for the title of my Kompakt mix CD that I put out this year, which is called We Are Proud Of Our Choices because I like the existentialist tone of that.
But, what’s my favourite philosopher? It’s too hard to pick one!

You got a first from Cambridge and you got a Masters, are you the world’s best educated DJ?
Almost certainly not! There are quite a few but people seem to keep quiet about it, I mean I kept it quiet for years. I think when I was starting there certainly used to be, in the UK at least a strong anti-intellectual vibe especially in pop culture, so you didn’t want to stick out in anyway, I just didn’t tell anybody. I remember John Burgess from Jockey Slut interviewing me and I ‘d known John for years and he was like, “You never told me you went to Cambridge”. It’s sad really, I mean it’s just a middle class university.

There are quite a lot though, I just read that Peter Daou who made loads of deep house records in New York in the ‘80s, he was Danny Tenaglia’s keyboard player, he’s now an advisor to Hilary Clinton and all sorts of people and is working in politics. He went back and did a PhD and gave up his house music career so there are other people knocking about.

© DJhistory.com 2010
Interviewed by Mark Treadwell in London 25.09.10


Check out Ewan Pearson tracks here >