Interview #258: John 00 Fleming

Seminal DJ, producer and all-round top chap, John ‘00’ Fleming, releases a new cutting edge concept 'Psy Trance Euphoria', reflecting the current power of the Psy-Trance genre globally, released on February 18th 2008. John has already clocked up sales of almost a million albums with his previous White Label Euphoria album series, the last of which was released in 2005.

I Like Music caught up with one of the nicest most inspirational DJs in dance, John '00' Fleming, to talk about Psy-Trance, cars and overcoming the odds with a positive action-oriented attitude.

ILM: Your new album Psy Trance Euphoria is out on Feb 18th, You must receive so many records, please describe the John '00' Fleming process of choosing a killer track list such as this?

John: Tiring! [Laughs] Honestly, I get bucket loads of music. When you put the word out that you’re compiling album then suddenly everyone’s ears prick up and hard drives get emptied and everything gets thrown at me. I suppose that’s what creates the John Fleming sound, I instantly know if a track will fit into my DJ set. I guess that’s how I’ve got my sound and how Tiesto’s got his sound and Sasha’s got his sound, you just instantly know that belongs in one of my sets. It’s like a filter process.

ILM: And I guess over the years you’ve fine-tuned your ear for that sound?

John: Yeah, as I evolve… because if I’d stuck with the sound I loved ten years ago I wouldn’t be where I am today. People would be like, ‘there’s John still playing his old-skool set’. But as I naturally evolve when I play a DJ set I you learn what direction you want to go within your set, and then you go off and hunt for them and know in the back of your mind what you’re looking for. So you hear it and think that’s what I was looking for to fill that gap in my set, so you naturally take another step toward where you’re evolving.

Producers do make music especially for me, which is nice. So they listen to your radio sets or hear you play live and think they’d not have gone in that direction, and they surprise me sometimes. For example, one guy who made music that’s hard as nails suddenly made a more passive track and I said, “I wasn’t expecting that kind of track from you” and he said, “well, you inspired when I heard you play last,” and that’s really cool and really exciting, knowing that you inspire new producers.

ILM: How would you define Psy-Trance as a genre, for example if you were explaining it to someone who knows nothing about it, such as an alien, or my dad?

John: Yeah, parents… they haven’t got a clue. You say trance and they think DJ Sammy, and then the family requests come in for me to do weddings and birthdays, and I’m like, ‘no you don’t understand’

The best way to describe it is, you can’t hide the fact that the regular trance scene has grown and grown and turned into a commercial commodity, and that kind of hurts me a bit because I’ve been with trance for many years, since the very beginning actually, and I sometimes get embarrassed to say I’m a trance DJ because you say trance and people think of DJ Sammy or some of the more commercial guys out there. I’m proud of the word trance, I enjoy playing it and producing it and being involved in the scene, but the trance scene isn’t what it set out to be; it’s a commercial commodity now.

The Goa Trance scene that Psy-Trance is related to, is trying to distinguish itself away from the regular commercial Club Trance scene. So, the word Psy-Trance was made to distinguish itself to say, 'we’re not Club Trance but a more serious take on the trance world'. It’s like that filter again, to say within the Trance family, the boundaries, it’s more underground and a more serious take. That’s what it’s there for. When people hear the word trance people think it’s just hard as nails hippies running round in a field, but it’s not, there’s this great wonderful world that includes chill out music; it’s brave it’s progressive and there’s this whole world within there.

But people are getting so fed up with the regular generic trance world that’s the same sounding; they’re looking for something new. You know if you go to a Psy-Trance event that they’ll be serious clubbers there and that your girlfriend isn’t gonna get hit on every five minutes because someone’s had a few too many pints of lager.

ILM: You’ve recorded your own artist album (under the guise of 00.db with fellow artist The Digital Blonde) for the third CD which is the first time in history an artist album has been linked together with a mix compilation, what made you decide to put them all together as one package?

John: When I make music I kind of want to make stuff that’s missing in my set, but I just had my own take on it, and it does belong in the Psy-Trance world, although it does have lush moments and melodies and stuff, it’s more underground. I don’t make it to be on Radio One or to be a pop success; I make it for the dance floor. I can’t take the credit for the idea; my manager came up and suggested it. We proposed it to Euphoria and Ministry and their ears pricked up and they said, yeah it’s brilliant. Nobody’s ever done this. Nobody can hide the fact that sales are pretty dire out there due to file sharing and artist albums do get lost out there. So putting the two together seems to work, because people enjoy buying compilations and they enjoy artist albums as well, so it makes for a good package.

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

John: The album’s got a second story to it. For the last couple of years, myself and Digital Blonde, we’ve got too many tracks to squeeze on one album, so there will be another artist album on another label. What we’ve been doing is called Heaven & Hell, we’ll keep the name and we’ll possibly release a third one too with a different twist. But we’ve been doing live sets; we did a few festivals last year just as fun, but people wanted more. So we did Gatecrasher on Boxing Day as a live set and from that Gatecrasher have booked us on the Summer Soundsystem for a live set in a prime slot. So that’s wicked.

We’ve not really advertised what we’re doing but word’s going around and we’re getting enquiries from The Love Street Parade in San Francisco, the Electric Daisy Festival in LA, some of the big festivals in Holland and Europe, so this live thing seems to be a go-er. And I’m happy to do live stuff because we’re really enjoying it.

ILM: It must be good to have a comrade to do it with you instead of being behind the decks on your own?

John: Yeah, and if it goes wrong I can just point at him [laughs].

ILM: You’ve followed your dreams. What advice would you give to young people on following their dreams to get the career they want for themselves?

I think people naturally, when they have a dream, they know what they’re into musically but what they’ll do is… thinking it’ll fast track their career, they’ll look at the top guys and think, ‘oh that bloke is doing well, I’m gonna do what he does and make music like he makes and get to the top quickly and I’ll then do what I want to do afterwards’. Why people do that I don’t know and it’s not one or two it’s the masses. But it’s not the way to break your career; how many other Tiesto’s have there been in the last few years? None, it doesn’t happen like that.

Do your own thing and you’ll get noticed. Go off and do your own thing, go and do your own thing musically and you’ll stand out. Sander Van Dorm, he did that. Now he’s created his own niche, this sound that he believed in and stuck with and there he is with a thriving career.

ILM: Yeah that’s like a friend of ours from Canada, Deadmau5…he was making music for a while and it wasn’t getting out there, but he just stuck to his guns and now he’s doing remixes all over the show and he’s huge now.

John: Yeah I’ve heard of him too, he’s done his own thing. People are hungry for new styles of music. When you shop on Beatport, it’s packed with generic releases and pages of all this samey stuff, so when you do come across something like Deadmau5, you’re like, oh, this is a breath of fresh air and it gets noticed. It may seem like a gamble and for months or years you might be cracking away unnoticed, but it will happen eventually. You’ve got to be constant; you’ve got to make them quite frequent. It’s like Deadmau5 is knocking these tracks out left right and centre now and he’s got noticed from it.

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

John: Designing cars. I adore cars, and still do today. I’m mad on cars. It’s my second passion. Everything was going in that direction to become a car designer. My father was a design engineer in the marine industry. I went to college and learned all the technical side of cars so it was all creeping in that direction, but the music came to a point where I had to decide which one to pursue. So I did the sensible thing, and thought well, ‘I’ve got the car thing to fall back on, because I’ve got my qualification, just in case.’ I did all the horrible car jobs that you have to do to learn how the cars work; you’ve got to start from the bottom, that’s the only way you can learn. But I got to the stage where Ford were interested in taking me on. IT was a big decision at that point. I would have liked designing cars, but the music side I enjoyed better, but it was a tough call at that point because I had Ford offering me a good job and a company car and all stuff but I said no to them.

Now I enjoy cars in a different way. I customize and personalize my cars in my own way, not in a boy racer way though. I’m a member of this car club and get invited to events but have to say no because I’m working at weekends and miss all the Formula One’s and stuff. I’d like to go to Le Mans one day though [like the ilikemusic.com chief does every year].

ILM: You’re an inspirational guy. I mean, you’ve been injured in a boating accident, battled cancer, but you’ve come out of it smiling, stronger and successful – what’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned about life and having this strength that you can pass on to others?

John: When you go through stuff like that, I have this motto which gets me through life. “Turn every negative into a positive.” And I always do that and it gets me through stuff, instead of sitting there moping, which people do, you can just spiral out of control if you do that and you can get yourself down and worried.

Even when I was battling cancer and thought my life was going to be taken away from me, I thought, ‘How can I turn this into a positive?’ So I thought I need to get myself through this and turn it into a positive at the end of it, and I did, despite everything. Like all of us, naturally you have bad days and bad things happen. What’s the point in getting upset?

If you’re sad and de-motivated what do you achieve? Nothing, you’ve lost those three days. So I think what can I do about this, what can I do the next day? And then I’m all happy and the motivation is there and I’m driven, even though something terrible has happened, to turn that into a positive and take something from it and plough on with the next thing and that’s how I do it. Every day is important to me. It’s a gift of the day, every day. That’s how I look at it. I nearly had everything taken away from me, so every time I wake up it’s a new day and another gift, because some people don’t have those chances.

ILM: Totally, I agree. There’s no point wallowing. It’s far better to get on with things and make the best of it.

John: Yeah. Some people sit there and say, ‘I want to be a DJ, how can I be a DJ?’ Well make it happen. Think of ways you can take action. Just sitting there dreaming about it day after day, before you know it a month has gone by, years have gone by and you’ve done nothing about it, nothing’s happened because you’re still sat there dreaming. You have to make it happen. Here I am doing compilations for Ministry of Sound. I had to make things happen many years ago, you have to reach out. If you reach out to 100 things one of those things is gonna happen and once you’ve got that one thing, you do it again to push up to the next level.

ILM: Yeah, you’ve got to be active. It’s better to try and fail than not even try, because eventually you’ll win and you won’t look back and think, ‘oh I wish I’d done that.’

John: Yeah, you’ll get knock-backs that’s just part of it, but by turning a negative into a positive, getting a knock-back makes you stand up higher and stronger and learn from each one. And that’s how I’ve got to where I am today.