The Secret DJ - An Interview with the secret DJ
What is ‘the secret dj’?
Hi Ian, nice to chat. I guess the short answer is “I am”, but the longer answer is I worked for the UK political satire magazine ‘Private Eye’ now and then in an extremely light capacity but it inspired me greatly to take that attitude and apply it to my own industry. I guess the American version is something like The Simpson, the USA being somewhat light on self-reflection of its darker parts. I get nowadays you have Trevor Noah and Jon Stewart but it is a cultural thing in the UK that goes back hundreds of years. To survive a monarchy and oligarchy working in tandem you need to continually mock both it and yourselves. I started quite low-key as a column of advice for DJs and music producers and after a few years it got popular and working with two friends we started the series of books and started using social media as an outlet for not just satire, news and information but a version of ‘Me Too’ and a place to tackle issues such as racism and disinformation. You may be completely unsurprised to learn Dance Music is rife with idiocy and toxic masculinity.
What is the ‘problem’ in dance music you’re trying to address?
Well as I mentioned before there are specific ones but without sounding too bonkers I’d say we are trying to address every problem. And I very much see my industry and community as a microcosm of society in general. What starts as pretty prosaic technical advice can spread to all corners. For example a dreary and all-too-familiar litany we hear is that politics has no place in Dance Music. It’s laughable to those of us who participated in its origins. It was a protest movement. I was beaten senseless and arrested for raving along with thousands of others. It was used as a stick by the far right to beat the rest of society and in the UK was instrumental in practically destroying the entire subculture of travelers. Just a coincidence of course that they were the tip of the spear when it came to any protests in the UK. They are mostly gone now. The idea that our subculture is some kind of place to hide is madness. If you hide they just come looking for you, as we have seen recently with the new UK laws making protests and strikes all but illegal. I guess we are trying to be the voice in the dark reminding the kids with their fingers in their ears what is happening out there. And of course there is nothing wrong with release and tribal gathering. I am totally here to get wasted and dance too. I can’t polarize it like we tend to do with everything these days. It’s a complex system. If I was forced to say ‘a’ problem it’s probably something like fear, or apathy or defeatism. One of those brown notes. I should add a caveat that since we started all this about 10 years ago, “DJs giving advice” has become a thing and a thing that should be avoided at all costs. DJs are idiots, and I should know, I am the biggest idiot going. But unlike the extremely young people dispensing faux inspirational quotes for clicks, I am an idiot who learned facts by disaster. I am reporting as a casualty of the system and as a cautionary tale. I also have access to lawyers, editors, serious journalists and even doctors. We vet everything we say and can take it to court if needs be. A lot of DJs have books out since ours came out too, completely missing the point about giving something back to the industry that gave them everything and some of those books are like Jack Torrance’s typewriter in the Overlook Hotel but they simply read “Me me me me me me me me me me me etc etc” ad infinitum. I guess another one of those key problems you ask about is ‘ego’. There’s a critical ego mass being reached by performers, egged-on by the demands of social media. A dense singularity that sucks in and destroys all light. I guess sometimes I am just trying to say that if you do something long enough, eventually it will turn around and bite you if you are not careful. The arts are essentially an exploitative model and always have been. Nobody wants to hear it though. Kids are too busy being introduced by the industry to cocaine and being too awesome for buses.
When you play live what are you trying to achieve with the secret DJ live experience?
Ah well that word right there ‘trying’ is key isn’t it? We started off about 10 years ago in the midst of the vortex of MEMEME of people pouting into their phones and the music being very, very much the least important thing, as Guy Debord predicted with such frightening accuracy in ‘Society of the Spectacle’. I wanted to be the opposite of spectacle. The polar extreme as far away from bangers and glitter and miming and sync and Instagram as possible. A place that put the music first again. It wasn’t easy. Some kids started crying when we asked them to leave their phones in lockers. It was incredibly hard to promote something with no line up. The only name was the name of our famous sound engineer, Andy Kayll. We didn’t invent it but we certainly were the only space doing blacked out, screen in front of the DJ booth, no names, no phones, handmade quadraphonic sound system, handmade mixer, acoustic curtains – it was entirely about the audio. But it was SO expensive and SO hard to get across to people, I ended up having to be another dickhead in a mask for a lot of shows while people with more money and more credibility are catching up and using our ideas. Very disappointing. Very. But I am extremely happy just to be working again. Newsflash! man has to do job.
How close to the secret DJ persona are you in real life?
There is no persona. So I suppose it’s extremely close. I’m not as combative in real life but then again I would say no one is as combative in real life as they are online. I’m a jolly happy round fellow. I don’t suffer fools though, not even in real life. I’ve been close to death a few times now and life is WAY way too short to spend any of it kowtowing to the worst people just for the sake of correctness. I’m good fun, polite and kind right up until the moment I’m not. I would genuinely like to be more patient and less judgemental, I don’t think my bad qualities are superpowers like most people these days. I would like to change. But I do very strongly believe that the idiots are winning and we have to fight. And I am incredibly aware that using words like ‘idiot’ triggers some people but surely there has to be a line in the sand somewhere. It’s extremely American to appoint Forrest Gump president and tell every kid they are special but thankfully I am not American, even if most of the world is now. I got good at doing some things because my parents and teachers told me I was shit at them and needed to improve. I got chastised when I did wrong and a dirty look when I sought praise for doing very little. I wasn’t deprived, I also got tons of positivity and support. But I do worry that any and all rational criticism and even reasoned discourse is rebranded as dissent in the Disney resort we are being forced to inhabit.
You had a rough time with Covid, which you were very public about – tell us what happened and how your recovery is going?
I was very public because in real time morons were trying to tell me I wasn’t in the ICU and the 8 year old kid in the next cubicle wasn’t dying. I was very public because arguably no one was working harder to spread a killer disease than my own industry. Some of my colleagues were literally one-person individual superspreader events. And proud of it!! Like they were sticking it to the man by going to Zanzibar and they and their entourage infecting an entire nation. It was almost 2 years of illness and then complications for me so I don’t think you have space here for the whole story. Sky News covered it, I will send you the link. I did little work with “5” magazine in Chicago too which might help. Let me dig those out for you. I mean what can I say? If the ‘Culture War’ machine that came straight from deranged Libertarian billionaires in the USA and Russia didn’t invent COVID they sure couldn’t have wished for a more precise and divisive thing to finally globally polarize the world into left and right. And ‘left’ and ‘right’ have almost nothing to do with party politics anymore and everything to do with predator and prey. I’m exhausted just thinking about it. But I got on the Rocky Balboa trail and made a comeback of sorts. I’ll never dance the Tango again but I am alive and very happy about the fact. I’m like a cockroach. Unkillable. Haha – says that and then dies next week!
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How has the Covid experience changed your relationship with your body? Has it changed how you feel about ‘the secret dj’?
Yeah there’s two bodies now! I got fat as fuck two years laid-up. Which is northern English for lying down. The last year has been an eye-opener cos in your mid fifties if you lose something it does not come back. A coma saves your life but it utterly destroys your body. At its worst, or best depending on how you look at it, I could get my fingers and thumb around my bicep. Try it. Most people can’t get theirs round their wrist. It’s actually not the sickest I’ve been but I think it was the closest to death. They had to cut me open and massage my heart. I was dead for five minutes. I have vertigo now, which I never had in my life. And I am a terrible passenger in a car. Fear of death, PTSD, call it what you will. No I can’t say it has impacted the Secret DJ project other than I am now profoundly grateful for it. I don’t know if I took it for granted before but I certainly do not now. I mean what can an elderly corpse do to earn a living!?
You live in Ibiza, a place of hedonism, beauty, queerness, wellness and more than a little laddish excess. How does being in this environment 24/7 impact how you feel about your body?
Ah I have literally zero interaction with any of that. It’s no different from somewhere like New York. You find the New York you are looking for. If you are looking for bright lights and shopping and gossip you will find THAT New York. If you want bondage and crack and pistols that is there too. If you want books and tea and cakes, New York also exists. I live in Ibiza. Which means haunting a UNESCO world heritage castle, rarely going out and chatting to neighbors from all corners of the globe, some of the local families go back thousands of years. I go to my bar about once a month and see enough wacky nonsense there for a few hours to tide me over and remind me what is going on outside my bubble. One thing the environment has started doing to my body is asking it to exist in 45 degree heat for extended periods. Folks who come here with a plan to lie on a beach and lift a cocktail are oblivious to climate change but those of us who have to paint their houses, buy a bag of cement or carry rocks know what is happening. I mean I have to wear long sleeves now because my arms, which have never burned in 35 years of being there, now have blisters and cracks. We are at the pointy end of too-damn-hot!
Finally tell us about the tour and plans for the secret dj in the future?
The tour is just trying like hell to get paid after 3 years of nothing. It’s complex but I’m a species of naturalized alien so I don’t get healthcare or any kind of assistance so during COVID all I got was bills. So I’ve said a large and jolly YES PLEASE to anyone who will have me in the UK and Ireland. Playing places so small you could barely call them venues. Playing a couple of pubs as well as monster venues like Ministry of Sound. Feels good though. Love being back on the horse. The animal, not heroin. The future is all very much dependent on the movie that is currently festering in the 7th fiery level of Development Hell. I’m 100% behind any and all industrial action by any comrades anywhere on the planet. The strikes have hammered me tho. Was just on the cusp of getting a deal. The producers are legit. They had a number one recently on Netflix. It’s all come crashing to a halt. I mean, I have no illusions, the books are cult hits in the UK and that is about it. But there are several million, may I even put forward a billion people worldwide who have been to and understand club culture. And I can say with authority there has been no film or TV series thus far that captures the reality of that life to those many millions that have lived it. I have lived it for over 40 years. The story needs telling and there are people who want to hear it. I know because I still see them by the thousands every week in the clubs. I see them by the millions in Ibiza and Berlin. Fingers crossed eh? I could use some good fortune. Can’t complain though! Will no one free me from this paradise island! Haha.
-Ian Pierpoint