Interview with Carl Cox

DMA: You've carved out an enormous place in the dance music history books in the UK. How on earth did you get started? How long have you been spinning?
COX: I've been DJing for 25 years, 18 professionally. Basically, I got started because my famiy used to have the records, and when I was like eight years old, my mum used to let me play with the records as a point of getting me out of the way. I would put these records on and me mum, dad, family and friends would all be dancing about. Aretha Franklin, Booker T and the M.G's , Elvis Presley and away we go...from there I caught the bug and here we are today!

DMA: When did you get serious as a DJ where your name attached to the night would be a draw? Is that just something that came about since the acid house scene's rise as well as the DJ-as-pop-star in the UK?
COX: One of the biggest problems, really, is that I never knew the value of who I was until about two years ago. Obviously, you have to do what you believe in, as a DJ entertaining other people. Trying to realise the potential of that is very difficult. I try not to think about it too much. I've realised what I had as aDJ long ago -- I tried playing guitar, the drums and the piano. I also tried to sing but I realised I wasn't very good at any of it. I was however good as a DJ, so I followed that path. I went about DJing as if I were a punter like anybody else. I couldn't find an initial DJ to inspire me to want to become a DJ, so I just went about playing the music I liked. On that basis, everybody else [the punters] came.

DMA: How has your sound evolved? You began playing soul and rock at your parent's house, and the other night at Club Salvation, you were playing house and hard techno records. When were the turning points in the development of your sound?
COX: Well, what you hear now in clubs is basically a progression of disco music. Cut-ups of disco tunes, which just goes to show that the music which was coming out then wasn't so bad to begin with -- it just took twenty years for people to get their heads 'round it...

DMA: Well, the disco backlash didn't hit Britain like it did here, did it?
COX: I'm pretty sure the situation wasn't as bad there is it was here, but, still, there weren't a lot of clubs in England which would play this kind of music. There were two sides of it really, there was a really soul-ly underground vibe with it, and then a commercial end of it where anything would go. Then there was the more glam, gay scene where people like Sylvester would go and do a P.A. and he'd be all queened up standing up on stage singing "You Make Me Feel..." For me, it was like: I love the music, but this guy doesn't do anything for me. Sooner or later, a little bit more funk came into the scene with hip hop, and then disco sort of took a fall and was replaced with this dark hip hop style, which sort of lost it for me until house and acid house music came along, therefore we could say that acid house was a progression of disco music.

DMA: You were basically on the forefront of rave scene in England and played all the big parties. A lot of the big DJs which you played with, like Grooverider and Fabio went onto jungle. Why didn't you make the same progression as they did?

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