RS: Do you think there'll ever be a CD of all your different productions, like of all your Raven Maize, all your Jakatta, all on one CD?
Dave Lee: I doubt it because it would be more than one CD. I've had a couple of compilations, one on Azuli called "Can't Get High Without You", and I've got three compilations of just my own stuff, one called PLEASURE HOUSE and one called BACK TO THE SCENE OF THE CRIME. But all of my stuff on one CD? It would be more like fifteen CDs. I don't know if that'll ever happen, but in the future with illegal downloading it would be possible to make a CD of your own favorites. I'll be putting a CD out soon of older stuff from the late 80's and early 90's, some of the stuff I own and some remixes I did for friends that I can get pretty cheaply and license. I don't know what it's going to be called.
I was playing some of that about five years ago and I thought it sounded really dated now, but I played it more recently and it sounds okay again. The really disco-y disco like Musique's "In the Bush" sounded pretty crappy to me in the mid 80's, but by the late 80's it sounded all right. Sometimes old music has to go through a stage of sounding dated before it comes full circle and sounds relevant again. Some of the old house stuff maybe sounded a bit crap five or six years ago in the 90s, and now it's a part of that era instead of just dated.
RS: Do you think there might be music out right now, records by Stonebridge, Martin Solveig and Shapeshifters, that disco stuff would sound more current when compared to?
Dave Lee: The old disco records have sounded fine for about ten years now. There was a point in the mid 80's when stuff was going electronic for the first time and you'd hear records like D. Train's "You're the One for Me," or the disco from the late 70s with the really loud base drums. They sounded a bit shit to me at the time. Music goes out of phase and comes back in again. It doesn't just sound great forever. Things like the Shapeshifters? It's just a modern disco record. Most of its musical input comes from the old style, so those things sound fine up against old disco records.
RS: I've got one last question for you, it's the cruelest question I can ask. What is your all-time favorite disco song?
Dave Lee: I don't know. Sometimes I'll play Shalamar's "Right in the Socket" and think, this is a great record, I love this, and then another time I'll play something like "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," and it's brilliant. There's so many records of that era. It was a particularly rich era for everything, not just music--for films, for loads of things. So it's very difficult to pick one record, but I say it's "Ain't No Mountain High Enough," the Inner Life Version. Every time I hear that I love it. Even something like Michael Jackson's "Rock with You" is a great record. I've heard that so many times and I'm still not sick of it. I don't groan when it comes on like I would other records which I've heard less. So yes, one of those two or "Right in the Socket" or.… I could go on naming songs, but they'll do.
