Interview #291: Dave Pearce

Trance Anthems 2008 represents a 3 CD all-time stellar package featuring some of the biggest trance artists; from Paul Oakenfold, Chicane, Agnelli & Nelson and Underworld to Mauro Piccotto, PPK, Sash and ATB!

I Like Music caught up with DAVE PEARCE to talk about trance, George Michael’s mini-mix and good old Homelands festival (R.I.P.)

"I Like Music because… I couldn’t live without it.” Dave Pearce

ILM: Your new Trance Anthems album, is out now (7th April 2008). Tell us about that? You must receive so many records, please describe the DAVE PEARCE process of choosing a killer track list?

Dave: Well, it’s quite exciting for me because, I’ve championed trance music on Radio 1 for about 10 years and I’ve never yet done a specifically trance anthems CD. I’ve done quite a few dance anthems which covered all areas of dance music but this is the first time I’ve done one solely based on trance. What was interesting when I was looking at putting it together was that (there are 60 tracks on the album) there were just so many tracks to choose from. A lot of the tracks I’ve put on there are special to me for different reasons, sort of defining moments a lot of people who’ve followed what I’ve done over the years very familiar with certain tracks. It’s a mixture of the really big classics like Delerium - Silence, along with one or two that other people might not know what they’re called; you kind of know them when you hear them. So there’s quite a good mixture on there I think.

ILM: And there’s only so much room on the album to fit a certain number of tracks?

Dave: Yeah. I’ve got lists of tracks that we use on a computer at Radio 1 but, sometimes, I find it easier to go through records physically. So I went through my 12 inches too, and they have a special attachment with you anyway, because you remember the first time you played them. So it was exciting to put it all together and figure out which ones would make it on there.

ILM: You’re the host of Radio 1’s legendary Dance Anthems show and celebrated 10 years of the show in August last year. Any highlights and memorable standout moments/comical moments?

Dave: When we used to do the show on a Sunday it was all the weird phone calls we used to get. A lot of them didn’t make it to the radio, but a lot of people were still on their Saturday night out. So you’d have people ringing us who’d woken up in skips and someone rang us who’d woken up in a car outside someone’s house and they didn’t know whose car or house it was. In terms of highlights of the show, for me personally, having Tiesto on when he started out doing his first mix for Radio 1, and then he went on to become this superstar DJ. We also once did the show live from George Square in Glasgow, with Paul Van Dyk headlining, doing a special free show. Nobody knew how many people would turn up, but 25,000 people did, so that was great, although a little nerve-racking. On our first birthday, we did a party at the Café de Paris in London and Kevin Spacey turned up, which was a bit of a surprise. One of the other things that was quite unusual was when we had George Michael on doing a mix for us. I went to a party once where he was DJing and I got talking to him about dance music and asked if he’d like to do us a mini-mix of some of his favourite tunes. So that was another quite unusual thing that happened.

ILM: What are your plans for the summer – are you in Ibiza this summer with Gatecrasher?

Dave: Yeah. At the moment I’m in the middle of a Dance Anthems tour and that runs until June and I start Ibiza at Eden on June 3rd. This year I’ve hooked up with the Tidy Boys, so it’ll be a mixture of trance and hard dance, right the way through until September 16th, so quite a long run. It’s the first time I’ve worked with them and we’re doing big parties together so it should be pretty nutty I think. And in between that I’ll be in Majorca, Tenerife and Corfu, so there’ll be a lot of visiting the big resorts, which should be a lot of fun.

ILM: I remember when you first started doing the Dance Anthems show on Radio One, a bunch of friends having a barbecue and ringing you up to get a shout out…

Dave: I loved the summer with that show. If it was a nice night you knew that there were probably 100,000 barbecues going on and an amazing vibe, although it always made us a bit jealous because we were always hungry and, at Radio 1 we’ve got a really rubbish vending machine with hula hoops and a couple of mars bars and lucozades. But it’s great in the summer… the whole philosophy of the show has always been to try and make it uplifting in every sense and try and get that extra bit out of the weekend. I meet a lot of clubbers who started listening to the show when they were 15 and weren’t old enough to go to clubs and now they’re going out and experiencing clubs and telling me that we were like a gateway to their interest in dance music. Now with the Friday night show we find people ring in during house parties.

ILM: What’s your best festival moment? What makes a good festival?

Dave: I used to really like the Homelands ones.

ILM: Yay, that was ilikemusic’s local festival …

Dave: I used to love doing that. We had a few wet ones, but there was one year where the sun really came out and I think I was on after Eddie Halliwell and we had an amazing crowd and it was such a good vibe. Trance music is ideally suited to a really big crowd because there are moments when everyone gets the record at the same time and you have this shared moment. It’s quite tingly really and the hairs stand up on the back of your neck. So I always remember that day, and there was a lot of new stuff I played there that I hadn’t played out before, so seeing 10,000 people go mad to that was great.

It’s that shared moment and hands in the air thing and the great energy you get from people listening to trance. With trance and the instrumental breakdowns it’s quite spiritual and uplifting anyway and there are euphoric moments which I like.

ILM: You began your broadcasting career in 1981 on pirate station Radio Jackie, in South London, whilst still at school, then worked behind the scenes at BBC Radio London. You’re living your dream, career wise, what’s your advice to young people on pursuing their dream career?

Dave: Well, I’ve probably made about 5 million cups of tea throughout my career, doing all the donkey work, but that’s all part of it. I would always recommend to anyone to go in and do all the voluntary stuff and learn that way, because you can see lots of people at work and see how everything is connected. Anything that’s on the creative tip where… some days, for example, I’ll work for 24 hours solid or two days or work through Christmas, so you have to be completely dedicated and a bit nuts but if you can get through doing loads of work for nothing because you love it, you’re probably on the right track, because when you get it, you’ll appreciate what you got and still be prepared to put in 100%. To be successful you have to be dedicated and go the extra mile. Just stick at it and do what you believe in. I stuck with the trance thing which went out of fashion but now it’s coming back again.

ILM: If you weren’t a DJ, what would your second career choice have been/what would you be doing if you weren’t a DJ?

Dave: Probably a promoter or something connected to music in some way.

ILM: You’ve sold over 1million mix compilation albums – what for you makes a best selling stand out mix album?

Dave: What’s interesting about the albums I’ve done is that they are hand-picked, they’re not corporate. There are record companies who put out albums and they’re done by someone in an office and it’s what they’ve got lying around, so they’ll stick on loads of their own old tracks on. With this one, you can tell it’s got a personal selection on it, from the obscure records on it, even to the newer tracks like John O'Callaghan with Big Sky and the Nu NRG Last Experience Digital Nature Remix track, which is my big new tune at the moment, so it is a personal selection rather than being done by a corporate. And that’s what people would expect, so it’s different from the norm and what people would expect.

ILM: Also, as well as reading the crowd when playing out you’ve also done the whole A&R thing (became an A&R director for Polydor Records before moving setting up Reachin Records and NuLife and have signed many a dance hit), so you obviously know what makes a top selling dance tune?

Dave: Yeah, I mean, when I was doing the record label, we’d develop the track and play it in all these clubs and we’d see which bits of which tracks worked best and in those days road testing records like Castles In The Sky was one that we did and stuff like that was an amazing feeling… watching them build over a year or so and then release them, that was a lot of fun. It is about seeing how people connect to records. And I’ve tried to bring that in to Radio One as well, because I was out every weekend and at least you could go in and say, ‘you really should be playing this record because people are genuinely going mad for it, so it’s a real experience, a real record, rather than being told by a record label, you should play this, I could put my hand on my heart and say I’d seen it working to get things on the playlist.

ILM: How many baseball caps do you own?

Dave: I’ve got about 60 or something. I started collecting them from Hype Baseball Caps in New York. I get given them as well, because they’ve become my trade mark.

ILM: Finish this sentence… the best things in life are…

Dave: … music, friends and family.