Ewan Pearson

Torsten Schmidt

We welcome a young man here, Ewan Pearson, so this is our chance to give him some backing.

[applause]

Ewan Pearson

I like the “young man.”

Torsten Schmidt

Oh, well, it’s all about the flattery, man.

Ewan Pearson

[laughs] I like it better than “old fart” or “veteran.”

Torsten Schmidt

Veteran, what sorts? Where have you been, Flanders ‘14/’18 or...?

Ewan Pearson

I’m 33 now, and I thought about it the other day, I have been doing this on and off for ten years now. Just a slightly scary thought.

Torsten Schmidt

Oh, but then you are still kind of a late bloomer if you started with 23, kind of. Have you been involved in musical affairs before that?

Ewan Pearson

I did the usual thing, like bands and things when I was a kid, and I’m quite lucky that I come from a family where music was a massive part of family life. My dad has played guitar in bands as a hobby since he was a kid. So I grew up with lots of folk music and my dad playing in guitar bands, pop/rock bands. I actually played the keyboards in a band of his when I was a teenager, so did the whole like going-around-in-a-van thing. Then I had a band when I was in school, but we were kind of synth-pop duo, and I was the singer because I was the least bad. We were quite terrible actually but...

Torsten Schmidt

When about was that?

Ewan Pearson

That was when I was at high school.

Torsten Schmidt

OK. Where on God’s earth is Kidderminster?

Ewan Pearson

Kidderminster is in the West Midlands of England. It’s about half an hour from Birmingham.

Torsten Schmidt

How many times did you play in a club that’s empty?

Ewan Pearson

Actually, I’m trying to think when was the last time when I played in a club that was empty. I played in a club, one of my favourite clubs in Germany called the Robert Johnson, which is in Frankfurt and it’s one of the best small clubs in Europe. Unfortunately, that night Ricardo Villalobos was playing at the enourmous club Cocoon and it was snowing and there were about 40 people there. And I was kind of disappointed about it.

Torsten Schmidt

Yeah, but depending where you put the bar in that one, it could still be a good night.

Ewan Pearson

No, but it’s better to have nobody there than to have lots of people there not dancing, all scowling at you.

Torsten Schmidt

What was the last time that happened?

Ewan Pearson

It hasn’t happened in a while. I am trying to block those kind of nights out.

Torsten Schmidt

How do you identify them when you get requests for booking?

Ewan Pearson

How do I identify?

Torsten Schmidt

I mean, when you say you are blocking them out, you must have found some sort of way to block them out.

Ewan Pearson

Oh no, I mean you rely on your agent, you rely on playing in places that you know. After a while you build up a kind of connection with certain promoters and certain venues. Unfortunately, I’m not DJing as much as I could do at the moment just because I’m trying to do more production again. I was DJing a lot last year and it’s time to push the balance back.

Torsten Schmidt

So, it’s probably an interesting thing for most in here, the whole agent thing. I mean, how do you find an agent and how do you develop a relationship? I mean, you have got to develop some sort of trust there, right?

Ewan Pearson

Yeah, it’s an odd thing. I mean, basically I’m a producer that happens to DJ, I’m not a DJ. I did it the wrong way around, I made records for the last ten years.

Torsten Schmidt

Who says it’s the wrong way around to start with?

Ewan Pearson

Well, it was always kind of traditionally the other way around, you know, that DJs would then become producers. These days it tends to be the other way around, so it is really hard for people to break in as DJs exclusively. You know, most of the DJs in my field certainly have been producers first. And it’s certainly a way of getting your head above the parapet. Where as only a few people come through the ranks from being residents and DJing like that. I was just doing a club with a friend of mine in London for awhile. I used to play live, I used to do my music live with an MPC set-up, a little filter and a little effects box. And this was before everybody was using laptops, before things like Ableton. It would have been much more exciting to do the live thing with a program like Ableton.

Torsten Schmidt

I guess it goes for a lot of people that you don’t actually set out and got your Excel sheet ready to go, but nevertheless you do reach a certain stage when you are feeling that you can’t handle it anymore on your own. And then all these, “Do I need a manager? Do I need an agent? What do these people actually do for me? What do I do for them? Are they just ripping me off and...?”

Ewan Pearson

Yeah, when it comes to taking on other people to work with you, when you get to the point to take things further, I can only speak for myself here and I’m very much of the opinion that I like to work with people that I like and had a genuine relationship with. I mean, my DJ agent is somebody that I have known for six or seven years and she was a really good friend of mine before she started repping me as a DJ. And the guy that manages me now was somebody I met actually, he was a lawyer, he was an entertainment lawyer, and he did the first ever record contract I had to sign. And I got along well with him and just kept in contact with him and then he moved back from the law firm into management. I’m a bit of a control freak, it was interesting listening to Ahmir Thompson yesterday talking sort of being the neurotic anal-potentive one, and I’m like that. I want to be in control of everything I do and so for me, I have to have a really good relationship with people like that before I’m prepared to work with them. I mean, I could’ve joined kind of big management people, but at the moment it seems better to work with people who are kind of tight and close. Also, I think I need help with business side of things. And it’s always good to have somebody saying no on your behalf. That’s kind of basically where you end up paying the manager to kind of block things, basically, but from the creative point of view I kind of make most of the decisions myself.

Torsten Schmidt

So that way you can always keep up your air of being the [inaudible] guy and somebody else can be like, “Oh no, if I’m not...”?

Ewan Pearson

Well, it helps. Yeah, my manager is in many ways kind of a professional asshole on your behalf. My manager is an asshole so I don’t have to be, so I can pretend to be really nice. [laughs] I can be an asshole in secret.

Torsten Schmidt

So obviously, you chose him because you know he is not an asshole and nevertheless something goes wrong and if you now have a personal relationship with that guy, or that woman in that case, how do you go on about that? Obviously, some e-mail did not get sent, some call wasn’t returned, or whatever, some mess-up, and then you dare and then you’re maybe talking to your best friend.

Ewan Pearson

Yeah, you have to be really tight and you have to be up to say when he says when he thinks I’m being foolish or I’m making mistakes. And I moan at him likewise and you have to be able to say these things and then put it to one side and get on.

Torsten Schmidt

When you were in this hand-to-mouth kind of phase and you were struggling for remixes and stuff, how did you go about it? Were you the annoying one going like, “Hello, I am Ewan, and I can do the best remixes ever”?

Ewan Pearson

No, again that’s another reason why it’s good to have people representing you. I’m really bad at self-promotion. You meet different people, you meet the people who are sort of hustlers by nature, and I’ve been always the sort of quietly getting on with it. I mean, basically at the shape of my career has been I started after college off making a couple of independent dance records in the UK for fun, because that was the only thing I ever really wanted to do was just to get a bit of something I do onto vinyl. And then I got an album contract by Soma Recordings in Glasgow, one of the first good independent labels in [England].

Torsten Schmidt

Which were already slightly established at that stage.

Ewan Pearson

Yeah, I think my first single with them was Soma #22. So yeah, and they are up to the sort of #180 or something, #190.

Torsten Schmidt

That was already past Daft Punk mixes and stuff.

Ewan Pearson

It was around the same time with Daft Punk and Slam and Funk D’Void and those people.

Torsten Schmidt

So you were just by association with that label in a position?

Ewan Pearson

Yeah, that’s right. I mean, they were a label I had been a big fan of since they started, I had all their records. And it wasn’t hustling but I just went up to Glasgow, I was going just to a party, actually. A friend of mine from college, and I just went into a record shop with a demo, kind of classic stuff, and then they said, “Have you been in touch with Soma?” Yeah, and I just rang it up and said, “I’ve got this demo, can I bring it around?”, and I brought it into the office and dropped it off and got a call a couple of weeks later saying they really wanted to put it out. So that was as much hustling as I ever did. And then gradually, I did an album with them and some singles and got off little label remixes. But it was just all trickling slowly, slowly until two or three years ago when the remixes for some reason seemed to [come in]. I don’t know, I just happened to be in the right place at the right time, I think. There was a...certain kind of more electronic, electro – whatever you want to call it – influenced sound came in, and a remix that I did as a favor for somebody turned into quite a big record in 2002 and ended up being voted “Best Remix Of The Year” at the German Dance Awards, it was strange. I never won anything before in my life. And I haven’t since.

Torsten Schmidt

Thinking back to that Soma stage and you are there, you are a fan of the label, you’ve got something in it like, “Oh, wow, I want to be part of that kind of thing, and uh, that you like what I do.” Now, there comes this lawyer guy and you are like, “Oh, what is all this nonsense?” And to most people a contract is a pretty scary thing. How did you go about that then?

Ewan Pearson

I don’t know. It helps to have a manager who is also a lawyer as I did, but also after a while – I am great believer in self-sufficiency, I kind of think that you ought to, if you are a recording artist or a remixer and you are getting contracts all the time, then it takes a while, but after a couple of years you begin to learn how to read them. You can’t do everything yourself, but it helps to be as informed as possible. And it’s a good idea to read these things and not just to hand them on to somebody else. It’s a good idea to take a bit of responsibility for yourself. So you have to rely on other people when you are starting and you have to take people’s advice. But my approach was, it was a modest two album deal, two albums, eight singles. It’s for a little independent label, there is no great space for con...

Torsten Schmidt

Advances?

Ewan Pearson

Yeah, their advance was pretty small. So, you know, there is no enormous room for arguments. It was fairly standard. The one thing we get about is publishing, and I would strongly advice anybody who is signing a deal with an independent with stuff that they are writing themselves, don’t sign the publishing to them. Just don’t across the board. Lots of people will expect you to as part of it. Don’t do it, don’t ever do it. Because the agencies that are responsible for collecting publishing like PRS and MCPS in Europe and the equivalent ones in America do a fine job of collecting the basics. And basically once you have something, once you have a body of work that is worth something, you can get a publishing deal. And you can get your own publishing deal with a publisher whose job will be to then maximize the collection revenue for you.

Torsten Schmidt

There’s a lot of complicated and big-sounding words in there. What is it in a nutshell that the publisher does in the first place?

Ewan Pearson

There’s two types of publishing. There is copyright and music in two places, that’s in mechanical and broadcast. So basically, for every single copy of a record of yours that gets made, the record company has to pay a mechanical royalty. Basically, they are paying for the right to reproduce the actual sound recording you have made. And that comes to you, eventually. And then there is broadcast royalties, radio play, TV licensing, and so forth.

Torsten Schmidt

Speaking of remixes, [if] I want you to remix my track, or probably the other way around because it might be more interesting for me, what can I expect as an upcoming artist to get out of it apart from exposure?

Ewan Pearson

To get out a remix? I think you can look at it from a commercial point of view, or you can look at it from an artistic point of view. I think it’s a valid art form, certainly, in its own right and the idea of versioning and making new and cross-pollination and getting new people’s interpretations of your material. Or you can look at it from a hard-headed business point of view and say that it’s about putting a piece of music in a new context and then getting it more exposure and more publicity through making into a club hit, from changing it from one form, from a hip-hop or rock track to a house track or whatever. I mean, you can look at it from a hard-nosed business point of view or you can look at it from the artistic point of view.

Torsten Schmidt

Let’s do both then.

Ewan Pearson

OK.

Torsten Schmidt

I mean, obviously especially in places where there is a heavy concentration of music in the street like London, you got micro-genre X,Y,Z comes around and whatever major will make sure that whatever major artist they have at the time will have to do a remix by the hot kid on this and that pirate station and so on. Can you explain that mechanism a little bit?

Ewan Pearson

I mean, that element of remixing is just buying some cool, basically. It’s buying some cachet from somebody else’s. It’s using whoever is the hot person at the moment to make your major label artist look or sound cooler than they are...which sounds very cynical [laughs].

Torsten Schmidt

It sounds very cynical, but on the other hand some people got cars out of it and other people got their labels and infrastructures and stuff.

Ewan Pearson

But then, if you are careful about it, I do a lot of remixes for major labels, but I try to be really, really careful about the things that I do. I try to pick things that are going to produce a result with some merit. I am doing this to make a living, but at the same time I’m not just doing this for the money.

Torsten Schmidt

Can you remember when you first realized, probably as a kid, that a song is not necessarily finished by the time it’s on the record, but that there might be other versions or remixes or whatnot?

Ewan Pearson

Yeah, I think when I first started realizing it, one of the labels I really liked when I was young was Trevor Horn’s label ZTT. They put out Frankie Goes To Hollywood and The Art Of Noise and there was this amazing German group called Propaganda that I really love. They just used to churn out mixes, they used to put out 12” after 12” after 12”. And at the time in the UK, if you put a new 12” out every week of an existing single, and people kept on buying those 12”s, then you could keep the record in the charts because there was no restriction of the amount of formats which contributed to this chart placing. So they just put more and more new 12” versions out. But I loved the music and I used to buy these different versions, and again, this is somewhere where art and commerce kind of [collide], they are up to doing it for cynical commercial reasons but at the same time you can get some amazing creative results.

Torsten Schmidt

But, if I get my maths right and you are 33, by the time Dr. Mabuse came out and that kind of stuff, you were not legit to go into the club while a lot of the music was specifically designed for particular club environments.

Ewan Pearson

Yeah, the first dance music that I really loved was basically like Hi-NRG and Italo disco. And I didn’t realize when I was a naive young man. Basically, my first love was kind of really gay electronic disco, which I still love to this day. And I had no idea about the contexts, I just heard these records. I heard the records that made it across to the charts in the UK – the ones that crossed over. Obviously, I wasn’t hearing them in a club context, I was hearing them first and foremost as pop records. And then it was later when I got older and started going to the clubs myself that I started to understand dance music in its actual context.

Torsten Schmidt

What did you like about Trevor Horn’s aesthetic approaches?

Ewan Pearson

For me, Trevor Horn, I think I liked the scale of it. You know, this was the time in the mid-’80s when people were...Technology has sped on to such a degree now, but then samplers were incredibly expensive and you got like a Fairlight musical computer that cost the best part of a million, and this laptop will do [points at his laptop] 20, 40 times what these things could do. You would have these people, you should have an operator for that, and there is another one of the machines called Synclavier, which was similar. You would have all these people, and basically, only really, really successful producers obviously could afford this stuff. But you would have this concentration of this kind of cutting edge technology and these really talented musicians who could operate them. And I liked the fact that Trevor Horn is just epic stuff. And aesthetically I still love the maximal, you know? It’s hard to call it dance music at the moment is going through this kind of love affair with all things minimal. I don’t know, I like some stuff sometimes which is a little bit bigger-sounding, a little bit more in some ways bombastic or epic in some way. I just had my love of Trevor Horn tested somewhat because I did some work on a track for the Pet Shop Boys’ new album this summer, and then he basically got the job of producing the whole record, so I just lost a job to him. But he is one of my all-time heroes, so I can’t complain.

Torsten Schmidt

So it was alright.

Ewan Pearson

Yeah.

Torsten Schmidt

But nevertheless when you say “maximization” and “bombastic sounds,” when you take it back to the second time where house music was around and take a track like Adamski’s “Killer” remix, you got whatever kind of noodely thing in the beginning with some sweeps and then the 909 kicks in, and just the sheer impact of that bass drum is just sending everyone into a frenzy.

Ewan Pearson

Yes.

Torsten Schmidt

Now, with the way you would use a bass drum in your mix, it’s slightly different, right?

Ewan Pearson

Yeah, I mean there was a rawness, especially about Chicago house and acid, and there is an energy and an excitement behind that rawness, which was incredible, which is electric. Some of those records stand up today but things move on, and I think just production standards are much higher, and the technology available to people again at this level is so much further. I don’t know, production values are much higher these days. Then you got this excitement you got from the rawness and the energy and the freshness, this was something new. And it was stripped down, it was previously unheard.

Torsten Schmidt

I find it kind of interesting that whereas especially in 4/4-based techno kind of stuff for a lot of times it was about the pure sonic sensation the shock factor, the crassness, the harshness of the sound, and if you take just that sheer energy, to some degree a lot of that’s trying to maximize the impact on one particular sound happens on Top 40 Radio these days with The Neptunes, Timbalands, Scott Storches and all that kind of stuff.

Ewan Pearson

Yeah.

Torsten Schmidt

And then when you go and see let’s say, hear your music in the club or the Mathew Jonson or whatever, it starts to somehow fade away or suddenly it’s a different sonic tactic working there.

Ewan Pearson

Yeah, I guess, I kind of want to have my cake and eat it in the sense that I like to stuff as much in there [laughs] as possible without detracting from the fact that you got to be insistent, and it’s got to move the crowd. I want to have the song in there, I want to have development, I want to have chord structures. And sometimes you do overcook it, and you do put too many things in, when sometimes it’s better to keep things simple or keep things more stripped down. But yeah, I suppose it’s an aesthetic. The thing you do first and foremost is please yourself and then you got to square that with pleasing other people as well.

Torsten Schmidt

Probably, to take it out of that theoretic realm, would you have an example of something where you had the feeling you were pleasing yourself and people were still liking it?

Ewan Pearson

Let’s see what I’ve got. An example of this notion of doing a remix as an extended mix and not throwing out the baby with the bath water, I did a remix for Depeche Mode last year when they did their remixes project, that big remix album, and I did a remix for “Enjoy The Silence”.

Torsten Schmidt

What was your favourite Depeche Mode remix before that?

Ewan Pearson

Remix? I really liked the Francois Kevorkian stuff. I mean, he did lots of this, he did a remix of “Policy Of Truth,” which I used to play when I was younger.

Torsten Schmidt

I was totally disappointed by that one.

Ewan Pearson

I mean, they do have an amazing history of remixes, and there’s a really good Adrian Sherwood mix of Master And Servant as well.

Torsten Schmidt

The On-USound dancehall classic thing?

Ewan Pearson

Yeah. But basically, when I got back the job I was thinking how can I do a remix, because “Enjoy The Silence” was one of my favourite records of all time. And I always said that I would never do it. I said that if somebody offered me like a real classic record like that to remix that I wouldn’t touch it. I remember DJ Hell did a remix of “West End Girls” for Pet Shop Boys, and I remember writing a slightly rude DJ reaction-sheet to it, saying: “You shouldn’t mess with the classics.” That sort of thing. And then, of course, as soon as I get Depeche Mode on the phone, like 20 seconds later I am like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” panting like a dog. And when I got to do the mix, I tried to do a remix which would sound like an extended mix, it could have been almost made at the time but would still work in a contemporary club context.

Torsten Schmidt

Even when you say you wanted that 1989 feel, it definitely is not a 1989 303 use. It’s like you put it behind a digital chastity belt more or less, and I think the Trevor Horn bit probably explains it, it’s somehow put into a different realm.

Ewan Pearson

Yeah, I suppose it... I don’t know, one of the great things things about 303, it’s an absolute bastard to program. I don’t know if any of you have ever used a 303. One of the weird, weird things about it, one of the interesting things, the connections between technology and the aesthetics it ends up producing is that this machine was a failure. This was designed as an accompaniment for guitarists and musicians who wanted to make a sort of self-accompanying thing with this little other drum machine called the Drumatix. Basically, it is incredibly difficult to program, and if you want to program it, in order to program a bassline into it, you need to program it three times. You have to program the pitches in first, and you have to program the rhythm in second, and then you program the succession of accents and slurs in, and you did all of this with a little keyboard with these little silver keys in this box. So you had to program it three times, so nobody did. [laughs] Nobody could be bothered to learn how to use it. So it just became this kind of weird failure, until guys like Marshall Jefferson, people like that in Chicago started using it and they started programming it at random. So they just be kind of putting patterns into it and putting pitches into it. And so one of the reasons why acid house, when it started, was just such a weird, avant-garde-sounding music because it was basically really inharmonic, you know? It was just like 12-note-series or something, it was just weird. And it was basically because of this machine, it was because of people messing around with the machine, which is so hard to program produced this kind of crazy randomness and then, you know, getting on with filters and stuff. And so the aesthetic and this whole strange new dance form was born, basically out of the fact that somebody made this machine in many ways so badly [chuckles] that it was impossible to get it to do what it was originally supposed to do.

Torsten Schmidt

Nevertheless, the second you make the decision to use that machine, you are entering this whole world of references. It’s like being a guitar band and trying to replay Gang Of Four, which one or two bands do at the moment.

Ewan Pearson

A few people do that at the moment.

Torsten Schmidt

I mean, if you use a certain riff, you are definitely putting yourself into that block like, “OK, there has been all this music that has been created with that particular sound, that particular feel, that shuffle, that rhythm, or whatever.” So, how do you go on and walk that line of creating something which is now, which sounds like 2005 or whatever the time is at that stage, and still keeping up? You could think that almost for the first time in electronic music it’s a heavy time where people have to decide whether they are going to be a Led Zep cover band or not.

Ewan Pearson

It’s a difficult decision. I mean, you can go for this sort of modernist/avant-gardist approach, where the idea is always that it’s got to be new, that it’s got to be new, it’s got to be new. But at the same time, music has other functions. And one of the things that I like about remixing is one can be a little bit more playful. So you can do it. Like, I can decide to do an acid thing, Depeche Mode remix or something. Because it has this kind of commercial element to it, I suppose, I feel the ability to be out of place slightly and not have to think about that kind of big-A artistic point of view. But at the same time I do my best to make music that I love and that moves me. I think one can be more playful in the remix field. Some people will choose to do one thing and appreciate a kind of narrow way, and some people might choose to be more playful or referential. I mean, all music refers out and refers to other things. It’s very rare that you get the complete shock of the new [style].

Torsten Schmidt

Nevertheless, if you take, for example, another current album like the recent Isolée thing, it refers to a lot of similar things but you draw totally different conclusions in the way you go on about sound design, for example.

Ewan Pearson

Yeah, but that’s one of the great things as well, it’s like how you process your influences. You can give people like ten records, ten samples and then ask them to put it together and they can still express themselves whatever way, do it in a different way, too, and whatever else. Yeah, it’s what you make of your influences and how you manifest them.

Torsten Schmidt

How do you go about sound design?

Ewan Pearson

I suppose, I take what I can from wherever, really. I go through stages where I actually have a session where I just make sounds. Like, I sit with a plug-in like Reactor and I make a load of patterns, and I print them off as audio, and so I am making kind of material for future use. Or I’ll do the same thing with sampling beats, noises, mostly random, or I program something. I have a SC-1, like a Minimoog, sort of an analog synth, so I have a session on that for later on. But then I am happy to admit using presets, I do use anything that works in the context, really. Sometimes you need things quickly and need looking through a band of presets. Again, certain people have an aesthetic where they say that they never use samples or they never use presets. They only use sounds that they created themselves or programmed themselves and that’s great. I kind of tend to think it’s the end result that matters, not necessarily the manifesto or the rubric by which you get there. It makes for entertaining reading.

Torsten Schmidt

When you get the commission to do a remix, how do you match the different aesthetics of the sounds of your sound bank and whatever you got in your studio and the raw material that you are getting?

Ewan Pearson

I think you have an amazing wealth now with the advent of plug-ins. Within something like Logic, I’ve got an amazing amount of mixing tools.

Torsten Schmidt

How do you prevent yourself from getting lost in that wealth of possibilities?

Ewan Pearson

Well, you could be there for weeks. I have been, at times [chuckles]. But yeah, if you are careful about the way you pick your sounds – you’ve got the resources there to marry new stuff and old stuff. I think it’s about the choices you make. I suppose, a lot of the reasons why people like the mixes that I do, is that I’m careful about the sounds that I choose and how to put them together. Hopefully, it doesn’t just sound like some modern plug-in slapped on top of some other.

Torsten Schmidt

Obviously, lots of things that you have been commissioned to do would be a three-and-a-half minute song and you have to turn that into something which is fit for a totally different environment. Obviously, you have got to totally change the scale and the timeframe of what happens within the track. For something, which should work at Berghain, you need to take it totally out of the original world of the song context and restructure it.

Ewan Pearson

It’s kind of unfolding, really. In the original there are so many elements packed so tightly and arranged in a miniature [fashion] and you are kind of unfolding. It’s opening up, basically. Obviously, in a club context repetition and boredom, and the tension and development – this is where it is made. It is not about getting everything across in three minutes. It’s about creating tension, teasing, satisfying, and building up and breaking down and so forth.

Torsten Schmidt

How do you prevent yourself of becoming an Armand van Helden type of conveyer belt remix machine?

Ewan Pearson

Erm, say no? 2002 was this really good year for me and then it crescended into 2003, and by the autumn of 2003 I was being offered three remixes a day.

Torsten Schmidt

How does your girlfriend get through on your phone when there are always these people?

Ewan Pearson

[chuckles] That’s why I have a manager. I was being offered absolutely loads, and to be honest, a lot of it I said no to straight away. A journalist was writing about this and got it wrong and said I have done 80 remixes in a year. No, I’d been offered like 80 or 90 in a year and I have actually done seven.

Torsten Schmidt

You must have been Madlib if you been like...

Ewan Pearson

Ahmir was talking about this last night. You get to the stage where you can make a choice. You can either say, “Right, I am going to become a production line, and I am going to become Ewan Pearson, the brand.” I could have hired some engineers and set up a couple of studios and use late signature sounds.

Torsten Schmidt

Def Mix.

Ewan Pearson

Yeah, I mean, that’s how it has been done. But I want my work to be me and I am not interested in empire building. I am not Sean Combs. I just want to make a living doing stuff that I like. I am happy to be able to be picky and do seven remixes a year, and do seven remixes that I am proud of. And so far, you know, I am making a decent living. I could have really rinsed it in 2003, but I am more interested in having a longer career and staying interested. The danger is, if you are lucky enough to get to that point where you have a successful period like that, you go for it, and you either burn yourself out or get really stale and everybody gets bored. Whereas in 2004, I basically threw away the – not that there was a blueprint – but I made a really, really conscious effort that nothing I did in 2004 sound anything like what I did in 2003.

Torsten Schmidt

Obviously, Cedrick [Academy participant], I think yesterday talked about Francois K going to New York at the end of the ‘70s, and people who want to move from one country to another. What happens to you psychologically when you start living abroad, you don’t understand the language per se?

Ewan Pearson

I think for me, it had started a little bit earlier when I started to DJ and travel a lot. And I think a lot of people experience this. You start to feel a bit dislocated when you have moved away. London stopped feeling like such a home for me, to be perfectly honest. There are lots of personal things that changed my life within that two-year period, including splitting up from a long-term girlfriend. So I suppose, if I psychoanalyze, a lot of it was a delayed reaction to that as well, and I wanted to make a positive out of some of the things that happened. I thought I got to the age of 30, and I have no responsibilities, and I have just got to this stage where I have this job where I can do wherever. So I thought I would have an adventure, go somewhere else.

Torsten Schmidt

When you say “adventure,” most people will have the feeling living in a place like Kidderminster or wherever, you never are going to get anywhere by staying here. And what sometimes happens is they just get on the road and start moving around and they get to Barcelona for two years, and London for two years, and New York for a year and so on. How do you prevent yourself from...?

Ewan Pearson

I dont know. It’s been only two years into my wandering stage. And I lived a very boring, sedentary life in London for eight years. I don’t know if I will settle or whether I move back to the UK yet.

Torsten Schmidt

There is a time in many peoples life when they have to decide, “Do I have a plan B, C, D. You have a plan PhD already in your pocket, and you had some sort of an academic career. You published a book, which in the academic world is something like your door-opener. What happened to Professor Pearson?

Ewan Pearson

Professor Pearson [chuckles], he decided to be a poor musician rather than a poor academic.

Torsten Schmidt

So you are triple P!

Ewan Pearson

Yeah.

Torsten Schmidt

Platinum Pied Piper.

Ewan Pearson

[laughs] But I don’t know, as I said, I never really had a master plan. My career has been kind of erratic and I basically always thought I would be involved in education. I was going to stay at a college and be a teacher. Music developed its own momentum. So the academic work and the book was actually writing about music.

Torsten Schmidt

A cheeky way in.

Ewan Pearson

It was a good way of bringing together two of my interests. At the same time they did not really meet in the sense that the book was published by an academic publishers, Routledge.

Torsten Schmidt

No one dances to texts.

Ewan Pearson

No, I did my album for Soma around the same time the book came out, and I did not mention the book at all in interviews. Because in the UK there is certainly an inverted snobbery, you know, there is an anti-intellectual or an anti-analytical prejudice in the UK with regards to pop.

Audience Member

When you are working in this kind of ambience you have to behave in a certain way. And I think when you are starting, maybe you think you have to behave in a certain way, but you are wrong. I would like to know, which advices did they give you, and what you think is important for us to know?

Ewan Pearson

I try to think of a good advice I have had...I don’t know, I just say, the best advice that I can give is to be making sure what you are doing, trying to do the best work that you love and working with people that you trust. And if you don’t trust them, then at least people that you respect or that you are clear about what their job is and what your job is. And also, from my point of view, I’m a self-employed musician, I don’t work for anybody else, that’s what I wanted. And it’s sometimes hard to be doing it on your own, but it’s a great job to be able to be making music for a living and not to be working for somebody else. So it is worth persevering, it’s worth sticking through when you haven’t got any money and your friends are doing jobs. I went to college with these people and the next five or six years they were lawyers, governors. I remember, my girlfriend was doing a PhD, and I was a self-employed musician. We could afford to get to the cinema and have a pizza once a week. That was it. And the rest of the time we were just in our flat working. You just fall out of society, nobody is seeing you. But you know, if you really want to do it, it is worth persevering with. And in many ways I am glad that I’ve had my success such as it is when I am a bit older. I am 33 and I did not really start to make a proper living from doing this until three years ago. And I think when it would have happened to me when I was 20, 21, when I have first done it, I would probably have turned into a horrific, egotistical so-and-so.

[cell phone rings, laughter]

Whereas now I am hopefully a little bit more modest about it, and I understand that there is a lot of love involved as well. So, yeah, it’s persevere. Do what you love, and realize that it’s as much about luck as judgment, so try and stick at it.

Audience Member

When you look at the evolution DJs have made, do you think in the future the status of the DJ will be the same? Or is it more going to be like, we are going to go through [a phase] when the people invite those people who make the music instead of letting the DJ play the records?

Ewan Pearson

I think you are right. I think to a degree maybe that has already happened in a sense that lots of DJs now, the new DJs coming through tend to be also producers. So in some sense you are getting the people, the DJs who are also producing the music. I think, certainly from a UK perspective, the age of the superstar DJs, that kind of era has ended a little bit that you sort of had in the mid-’90s. Certainly, people don’t get as big fees as they used to and a lot of the clubs just survived with putting certain people on. I mean obviously, all these people are incredibly well established and make a lot of money still. But I think things have been shaken up a bit in the last couple of years. I don’t think it is necessarily healthy for people to be paid incredible, astronomical fees that they were being paid four or five years ago. Certainly, it wasn’t healthy for the club scene. From the UK perspecitve and from Europe, the places I know best, it seems to be a little bit more sensible again. But at the same time people still do command large, ridiculous amounts of money for that. But then they spend a lot of time on the road and away from home and various things. So I am not going to critisize their payments.

Torsten Schmidt

Well, thank you first of all.

[applause]