Laurent Garnier

Lauren Martin

The man seated on the couch next to me has gone under a lot of guises, and had done a lot of work over three decades?

Laurent Garnier

[affirmative] Mhm.

Lauren Martin

But the short introduction is that he is considered one of the godfathers of French electronic music. Please help me welcome Mr. Laurent Garnier.

[applause]

Laurent Garnier

Bonjour. [Laughs] Bonjour!

Lauren Martin

I guess that was an appropriate “Hello,” seeing as we’re on home soil. So, I would like to start at the very beginning. Not everything in dance music starts in the club. So if I walked into the childhood bedroom of Mr. Laurent Garnier, what would I have seen?

Laurent Garnier

[laughs] Decks, but not these ones. You had to do the speed with your finger, because there was no speed control. It was on a very old mixer, which was in mono, because there weren’t so many mixers [then] and I had no money, so I had to find a way to get something to mix records. It was kind of a small club. It had a disco ball and a strobe… I’ve been obsessed with nightlife, with the club life and club music, actually, since I was 12 or 13. I would invite the neighbors to come and dance on my private dance floor, which was no more [than] three or four people. That was my thing. My friends were playing football, I was mixing, trying to mix records. It was very hard without a pitch, but it was my thing, was music.

Lauren Martin

That was the age of maybe, what, nine or ten years old? It was well before…

Laurent Garnier

It became very clear to me that dancefloor music, so it was disco or whatever, reggae and stuff like that… It was appealing to me, and it became clear that music was my way to talk to people and to be someone. I was doing tapes all the time. In the beginning I had no mixer, so I was doing tapes with the pause on the tape recorder, and I was trying to find records that were going from the slowest to the fastest. It was nothing to do with the intensity of the music, it was more about the beats. I knew exactly the time it took from the time I would pause the tape, and then putting it back on again, putting it back on, to try to do some kind of megamix or something like that. I was doing a lot of tapes and I was sharing it with all my friends at school. It was my way of being who I was.

Lauren Martin

If I got a hold of one of those tapes at the time, what would I have heard?

Laurent Garnier

I have some of them.

Lauren Martin

Oh, you have them?

Laurent Garnier

Yes. I keep everything. I’ve always been like this. So I’ve got my tapes from when I was nine or ten. Mainly funk music, soul and disco back then… Then I had another phase, after that I discovered new wave and stuff like that, but mainly, I always come back to black music.

Lauren Martin

As a white boy living in France, what was it about black music culture from elsewhere that really captured your imagination?

Laurent Garnier

I guess when you were living in France back then, it was all about America. We grew up in a country where there are very strong African roots. We hear African music from the time that we’re kids, and Brazilian music as well, they come to the charts. It was maybe sometimes a bit commercial, but there was some African-flavoured music into what I heard when I was a kid, and Brazilian, and all of these kinds of music. Then there was this big thing about America. When hip-hop arrived, and Miami bass, electro, the beginning of rap and the dance we’re seeing from America and all that stuff… It was a big fascination for America. Either you were listening to rock, or you were listening to black music. America represented black music for me. It was fascination for that music, and then the groove as well. For me, music is all about the groove. Either it talks to my hips, makes me want to dance; talks to my head, makes me want to think or cry, or my heart. For me, music is all about feelings. So that’s it. There’s no good or bad music. There’s just music that talks to you, or just doesn’t, and it doesn’t matter, it can talk to someone else. And black music was the thing that was making me move.

Lauren Martin

So just before you started to move to that beat, as it were, how were you getting a hold of these records?

Laurent Garnier

Well, it was difficult back then. First, it was very expensive, because you had to go to record shops which were providing themselves outside of France. So you were buying what we used to call “Imports,” which is kind of weird now to say that… And imports were very, very, very expensive. 30 or 40 years ago, an import album was maybe 25 euros or 30 euros, just for a vinyl. So it was difficult, but we were buying much less records. But there were a few magazines and, of course, radio shows. My thing is that I grew up listening to and discovering music through the radio. Back then, radio stations were doing their job, playing new, exciting music. The shows were very late, but they had no fear in trying to play interesting music. They really didn’t care about the number of people who were listening to the shows. They cared more about the quality and the content, which I think has all changed now. There aren’t many stations where you can have proper content. Radio was the real medium for us to discover music.

Lauren Martin

Every major city has a hero for the radio, like Detroit had The Electrifying Mojo. Who in France was inspiring you in that regard? Who were you listening to? Because I know you were involved in radio from quite young, too?

Laurent Garnier

Well, I started doing radio when I was 14. Basically, all my things were music, I didn’t care about anything else. I had a group of friends then who were interested in music, and one of my friends was a bit more intelligent than the other ones, and one day, during the explosion of what we used to call “Free radio” stations in France. They kind of built their own transmitters, and my friend had a very basic transmitter. We were doing a radio show called Radio Teenager in his house every Friday night, and we were doing like a four–hour show, playing all different kinds of music. Because I didn’t have enough money to buy the music, I was actually recording other radio shows, editing some of the tracks, and then playing those tracks on our radio. But there was, back then, in the early ‘80s, the FM stations in France became very prolific and a lot of pirate radio shows appeared. They were very specific in music. I was basically listening to shows all night, every night.

Lauren Martin

These radio stations would have a particular remit or style of music that they’d get involved in. You say that your love of black music was born of the early dreams of the disco. How was the radio organized then, since black music wasn’t necessarily massively popular on the radio. Was there a distinction at all of what you could listen to?

Laurent Garnier

No, there was more like funk shows. Those guys were buying imports and playing the music. You could find the records, and then there was a very strong connection between Paris and New York. You have to understand, in the ‘80s, there was quite a lot of money. The clubs were doing super well in Paris. The nightlife was very prolific. You had a lot of people flying over to New York. There was this DJ called Guy Cuevas, I think. This guy was DJing in a club called Le Palace, which was one of the most fashionable and super-trendy clubs in Paris. It was a big gay club. The whole nightlife was following this guy. He had a very strong connection with New York. So each radio station had specific shows. So you could hear two hours of punk, and then two hours of funk, and then two hours or ska or reggae. It was all there. All you had to do was switch on your radio and there was hundreds of radio stations back then. Two years or three years after that, the laws came in and they closed all of them down.

Lauren Martin

What laws affected the radio then, if you could explain to people who aren’t French? They might not be aware?

Laurent Garnier

I don’t know. I’m not sure about what happened, but I was very young and I know that when we did this Radio Teenager thing, we had to stop because basically the government decided that they weren’t going to allow so many stations on the FM, and of course, it was all a matter of money. And then 90% of all these small radio stations just disappeared. asically, there were no rules, so everybody was jumping on top of one another. If somebody had a radio show, somebody else with a stronger transmitter would come along and say, “Well, fu-- off, that’s it, I’m going to take over your airwaves or airspace.” It was a real mess, but it was really good fun because everybody was doing their thing.

Lauren Martin

Messy fun kind of is pirate radio. When you mention somebody to follow, like the DJs from New York, who were you following close to home that you really admired at that point?

Laurent Garnier

I can’t remember their names. I remember the name of the show, the show was called Smith & Wesson. But I don’t know what these guys are doing now. These guys liked music, and there was a lot of other people who liked music. Anybody could have done it. I was following their show because, music-wise, it was just wonderful. It was great. They were the only ones who were playing this new mix-mash of New York-style electro and stuff like that. It was brilliant. It was the only place where you could hear that music. And you know, I was too young to go to clubs.

Lauren Martin

When did you start going to clubs? Did you sneak into clubs?

Laurent Garnier

Yeah. I was very lucky because my brother is six years older than me, and took me to clubs when I was very young. He’s gay, and he would take me to all the gay clubs in Paris. Paris has always been very prolific with gay clubs and the gay scene has always been the scene that was always the first to accept new things, like house music. The first clubs in Paris that just played house music was gay clubs, so I started in gay clubs in Paris. So when I was 14, the deal was with my brother was that, “I come and work for you;” he had a restaurant, so I was just working there for free, but he would take me to the clubs at night. So I was going out all the time.

Lauren Martin

When we were talking about the radio briefly there, different styles of music having their own shows... Clubs also kind of had a separation of what kind of night would have what music.

Laurent Garnier

Oh yes, for sure.

Lauren Martin

Could you elaborate upon that and what the scene in Paris was like at the time?

Laurent Garnier

I guess it’s the same as now. They were very specific in their music. If you used to go to Le Palace at one point, reggae became massive. They were playing a lot of reggae and a lot of disco at the same time. The strictly boy gay clubs were playing a lot of Hi–NRG, which was like a faster version of disco. Then you had clubs like La Piscine that were playing only new wave, which was becoming very big as well. France is a very big nation for rock & roll, for rock, and pop, and punk, and stuff like that. We had tons of clubs which were fighting against “The gay stuff,” which was more the black music, like funk, soul and disco. So they were just playing a lot of rock & roll, and you could not hear black music in there. It was very closed-minded, in a way. The good thing was that I was going everywhere, because I was interested in music.

Lauren Martin

I’m sure that would have informed your style of mixing and the selections that you were playing. How did you draw these musical maps in your mind early on?

Laurent Garnier

I don’t know. For me, it’s all to do with pleasure. Music should be pleasure. Again, there’s no good or bad music. There’s great stuff in punk, there’s great stuff in house music or in techno, but there’s a lot of sh-- as well, and everywhere. It’s true. Not everything is good. I’m just looking for what satisfies me. So, it’s nice to go to different places. I hate eating the same stuff. I mean, you don’t eat chicken everyday, right? So you don’t only listen to house or techno. At one point, you will get bored. You need to go and listen to hip-hop, or something different. And there’s good things everywhere. For me, it’s all to do with pleasure, that’s it.

Lauren Martin

When did you start to DJ in clubs in Paris? When did you get that big first shot?

Laurent Garnier

I did my first proper DJ thing in Manchester. I actually moved… Basically, you have to understand, when I was 18, DJs were not existing. There were a few DJs, but they were not travelling. It was not like it is now. Basically if you were a DJ then, you were playing in a club five nights a week, and you were starting at 11, finishing at seven in the morning. You were doing the whole night. There was no guest spots or whatever, which is the way I learned to play music. This is why I usually play five to six hours, because I like doing the whole night, I found that interesting. Basically I moved from France to England when I was 18. I was listening to music, music was my life, but my job was not that; I was working in catering, I was a waiter. If you want to be successful in France, in waiting, you need to speak English, so I went to move in London. I got a job for two years, and I was going out every night, of course, and spending all my money on records. And then I got a very good job in Manchester, so I moved up north. Again, I was giving tapes to everyone because that was my dream. And then one day, I met the right guy at the right time, and I gave him the right tape.

Lauren Martin

Who was the right guy?

Laurent Garnier

The guy was cool, he was the lights jockey of The Haçienda. He became a friend, and I kept giving him tapes. Then one day, he rang me and said, “Listen. There’s this new party we want to do on Wednesday at Haçienda. They’re looking for this new DJ, and I gave the tape to the boss, and he thought it was kind of interesting. Would you like to meet him?” So I went to meet this guy and he said to me, “Alright, I’ve heard your tape. Sounded OK. We want to do this new night, attracting a gay and mixed crowd, like a fashion crowd.” Remember, house music was not even there yet. Then he said to me, “Could you do me another tape? There are about ten of you and I’m asking the same of everyone, so you need to convince me.” I was like, “Fu--, I don’t even have a proper record player in my place.” I went back home and I think it took me three or four days… I just worked 24 hours a day to get this tape right. Again, I was working with the speed of each record. I did a mix like that, trying to speed up [mimes speeding up a record] with my finger. And then of course I did it 100 times and then I gave him the tape, and then I knew I was going to get it, because the tape was good. I think the tape was quite good! I knew the music he liked, so by playing some New York classics, a bit of hip-hop and a bit of whatever else. I don’t have a copy of that tape… I always knew I was going to get it, because I always knew that some way, somehow, I was going to get there one day. Since I was very young… I didn’t know that I wanted to be a DJ when I was eight or ten, I just knew that I wanted to do something with music to express myself. So the first thing I thought about when I was a kid was radio. I want to be a radio DJ, because this is where I discovered music. From there, I discovered the turntable, the mixer and then the club, nightlife, which I thought was actually wonderful, I wanted to spend my life there. So I started doing tapes, and you know, sharing tapes. And then you know, I decided that I wanted to be a DJ, but it took me a few years to understand that. I knew that, one day, I was going to get there. If it wasn’t at The Haçienda, I would have done it somewhere else, for sure.

Lauren Martin

Well it’s was probably a good thing that it was The Haçienda, because it was all right, wasn’t it? It helped. It wasn’t bad.

Laurent Garnier

It helped me, yes. The Haçienda, for those who don’t know, was a very, very big club in Manchester that was owned by some of the guys from New Order. It was a very, very famous club, amazing… Which was not very successful for quite a long time, and then one this guy called Paul Cons, which is the guy I met, decided to throw different parties. He was just the clever man who just made The Haçienda.

Lauren Martin

When you walked into The Haçienda for the first time… The general perception of The Haçienda is the smiley-faced raver with the baggy clothes, but The Haçienda didn’t really start like that…

Laurent Garnier

No of course not. I was there before that. Haçienda was more of a rock club than anything. You had a guy called Dean, and he was playing a lot of Northern soul, because when you live in Manchester, there’s a very strong history of Northern soul. The history keeps repeating itself. The story of rave is exactly the same as Northern soul. It’s just guys travelling for hours to go and dance for 24 hours in some kind of warehouse. This is what happened in the ‘60s with Northern soul. So there’s a very strong influence of that music still in the walls of Manchester. It’s there. So of course, Dean was playing a lot of that. And then Friday night, you had Mike Pickering with another guy, and they were playing a mixture of electro, and the beginning of house… And then I think Thursday’s was Temperance Club, and that was only strictly rock, because of course Manchester, the number of pop-rock bands from there… They had lots of different nights.

Lauren Martin

When you left Paris to come to Manchester, what kind of a culture shock did you get with the clubbing? Because if the Parisian scene had its black music nights, its rock nights, and people didn’t really mix… Did you see that culture change in The Haçienda?

Laurent Garnier

It’s not The Haçienda. It’s an English thing. In England, you can do whatever the fu-- you want. Nobody is looking at you and judging you. It’s very free and very easy. That’s the way I saw it. I went to live in London for about two years before I went to Manchester, and it was complete freedom. I left my parents to move to England. I was actually living in a small suburban town in France, which was boring as hell, and then I went to London and was going out every night and everybody, you know, all colors, whatever, they way they were dressing and whoever they were, were mixing together in clubs. It was wonderful. I was going to clubs that were playing funk, reggae and then rockabilly, they were playing everything. Everybody was there. You had some psychobillies in there, mixing with funk people, and nobody cared. Everybody was just dancing under the same roof. That was a real shock. That was different, because you couldn’t have this here [in France]. I remember, when I grew up, when I was going to school, either you were a disco boy or you were some guy who was listening to AC/DC. You couldn’t listen to black music because it was hell [to them], or you were into ska. Nobody was mixing everything up.When you go to England, in the same shop you can buy black music, white music, whatever; as long as it’s good, just do it. That was great. And the whole thing was the same, when we did The Haçienda. I was playing more hip-hop and house, than rock music. You can play New Order, Public Enemy and then play Marshall Jefferson after that. No problem.

Lauren Martin

You started your own night, as you mentioned; the Wednesday nights at The Haçienda, it was called Zumbar. It was in late 1987, if I’m correct?

Laurent Garnier

Yes.

Lauren Martin

You keep bringing up that it was at very start of house, it was the beginning of acid house… How did you see the room change once house really started to move in? And I’ll ask that politely, because I knew what the punters might have been like.

Laurent Garnier

I can only talk about what I saw in Manchester. I’m not talking about what happened everywhere else. The very first people that started house music in Manchester was Mike Pickering with his Friday nights. They very quickly went from playing Mantronix and Go-Go music like Trouble Funk and stuff like that, and they started to play house music. And when they saw that house was doing something to the crowd, they changed quite quickly to only playing house music. But it was a black thing, and it was a dance thing. So the way that we all say, “Jack built a house.” People were coming and they were jacking, and jacking was a serious fu--ing business. You had to know what to do. You had to know your moves. And first if you were white, it was difficult to get into the circles. But those guys were dancing, it was like a proper, serious dance club.

Lauren Martin

To possibly elaborate on what jacking is for those who might be too young to be familiar, perhaps, could you explain what jacking is, and what its relationship with The Haçienda is?

Laurent Garnier

I don’t know who Jack was. I think it came from a kid’s story, didn’t it? “The House That Jack Built?” Is there anyone in the room who knows that? Mike, are you here?

Mike Banks

[off-stage] It’s just a style of dancing that’s called jacking.

Laurent Garnier

I think they were playing with a kid’s story. They were playing with the words “House” and “Jack.” You have to understand that a lot of the first records used the word “Jack” all the time. And Jack was the guy who invented house music, which is not true, who really invented it, but whatever. They said it was Jack, and then the dance was a very, very specific thing. That’s the first thing I saw with house music. And then straight away, you had a DJ in England, who I think he was called Stu Allan, who played a lot of house on his show. He was playing a lot of hip-hop first, and then he started to play house. And then house arrived from Chicago. But then when you wanted a house record… I remember when I discovered Farley “Jackmaster” Funk, that was the first house record that I ever heard in a club, and it was at Haçienda. I heard this track, and it was a thump in my face. When you get into the club, you think that you know all of the music that they play, and then the DJ, Mike Pickering, stops the music and plays this thing which comes out of nowhere, which has such a strong beat. It kicks you in the face. So what I did is, I ran straight up there and banged on the door. Mike Pickering opened the door and I said, “What the fu-- is this?” He was just laughing and said, “I’m not telling you,” [laughs] and then closed the door. I found out what this record was. It took me a month and a half to get a copy. I was living like a half an hour away from Manchester and every time I would call this record shop called Spin Inn and say, “Do you have a copy of Farley?” “Yeah, we’ve got three, but be fast.” I would just jumping in my car, drive half an hour to get there – and the three copies would be gone. And it took me a long time to get these records. You have to understand, it was hard to get these records, because there weren’t many copies. It took me months to get a copy of Derrick May’s “Rhythim Is Rhythim.” We were not flooded with this music. It was a small thing back then. Within six months it went from a black crowd who were dancing, to a rave crowd, which was nearly strictly white, which were taking tons of drugs because house music in England, acid house, arrives at the same time as a new drug. And then everybody takes this, and the whole thing changes completely. It was such a big wave. And in six months, all the clubs were playing house, all the raves were playing house, and everybody just dived in it. It was crazy. It was a real mad time, because we really saw the change in six months where, it was kind of a specific thing where, there was no more dancing, it was all about just jumping in the air and going crazy.

Lauren Martin

I appreciate the footnote from Mike Banks. That’s pretty big. I enjoyed that. Actually, when you’re speaking about the competitiveness of trying to get a hold of these records; do you think that was a hangover of the Northern soul scene? Where they would scratch off the label information?

Laurent Garnier

No, house music was about sharing. It was very different from northern soul, because I know that Northern soul, these guys, it was even harder for them to go and get the records, and I know they were hiding all of the labels and stuff. There’s a great movie, I don’t know if you guys saw it, if you haven’t you need to see this movie called Northern Soul, which is really, really interesting. It’s a fiction movie, but it’s really brilliant. It came out last year in England. Something to see. But house music was all about sharing. It was not about keeping information for you. I mean, some DJs did that, but it was very much about, “I like this, we are discovering this all together.” And it was not about old music. It was something fresh. Northern soul was digging for old records. House music was the thing of the moment, because [house] was being made by 20-year-old guys in Chicago and Detroit. Everybody was living the same thing together. We were writing the book back then. We were writing the story. It belonged to us. It was our generation, and it was our thing. There was no real competition. I didn’t see the competition. We were all jumping on the same train, and going wherever the fu-- we are going. I didn’t know where, but I knew that we were going straight forward, that’s for sure.

Lauren Martin

Speaking of going straight forward; you had a bit of a following yourself then, but maybe not in a classic DJ sense. Didn’t you use to drive people from one country to another?

Laurent Garnier

[laughs]

Lauren Martin

Could you elaborate upon just how intense those times were without incriminating yourself too much?

Laurent Garnier

I did a year in Manchester, but I had to go back to France because back then the Army was compulsory. I had to come back here. And I did one year in France between ’88 and ’89, and I missed the real explosion of the rave culture. I missed the first Summer of Love. When I finished the Army in the summer of ’89, of course I went straight back to England, and I discovered something that didn’t belong to me anymore. Because I was there just at the beginning, and then left Haçienda, I remember so well the last party that I did at The Haçienda, something was changing. We all knew it. Even Paul, the guy who got me the job there; I remember him coming into the DJ booth and saying to me, “I think Laurent you are going to miss something very strong, because I think something is about to happen.” And it’s true, I left and within two months, the whole thing just went fu--ing crazy. I didn’t see any of that. I heard about it because all of my friends were still in Manchester, but I didn’t see any of that. When I came back one year after I felt, “Sh--, I missed the train.” I missed the train because I was not there at the time that it really exploded. I thought that maybe it would be wiser for me to go back to France and do it there; to represent that music over here, because there wasn’t much going on here. There were no clubs playing this music or anything. The only place that was playing that music was Le Palace, and it was an English promoter who used to come every Tuesday to Le Palace to do a party. And then there was The Rex Club, where every Friday there were doing a party there with house music, but that was it. So I decided to come back here [to Paris]. I came back here in late ’89. This is when I started travelling all the time between France and England. So basically, I was playing in a party on Wednesday here, and then by six or seven o’clock in the morning, I used to get on the mic, and there were only ten people on the dance floor left, and I used to say, “All right, I’ve got a car, I’ve got four spaces. If you guys are ready, jump in my car, and we go to England to rave. Tonight, we are in Brighton. Tomorrow, we are in London. Then we come back on Sunday.” And I did this for about four or five years. We were not sleeping whatsoever, just jumping in the car and driving to England. So yeah, I shared all these moments with people I’d never met before, and that I never saw after that. No shower, no hotel, no food, just crisps and water and then that’s it, and we go. We were raving. [laughter] It was fun. It was good fun.

Lauren Martin

Once you did those kind of pit-stops for partying, you weren’t just going to do an hour or two, just to turn up. These were long, marathon DJ sets that you invested in from early on.

Laurent Garnier

It’s funny how people find it weird when you ask a DJ to play a long set. I find it very strange that today people fight to only do two hours. You can’t do fu-- all in only two hours! You play, what, 20 tracks? 18 tracks? That’s nothing. There’s so much good music to be played, and sometimes, when you get to the position where I am now, I don’t DJ that much. Maybe sometimes people have been waiting to see me for quite a while. And I think it would be very disrespectful for me to go there and just do an hour and a half set, because I want to give them as much as I can. Because I like telling stories, I like playing records. There’s so much music. I always have so much more than what I can play even if I do a five-hour set. And I’m coming from a time when I used to open clubs, and I used to close it. And for me, playing as a DJ is not about getting the crowd and driving them crazy. It’s fun to do that, but what I love is getting the club when it’s empty. I love opening up a place when there’s no one. Then people come down, they have a drink, and then you can play some really deep stuff, or really slow music. I’ve never understood a DJ who comes into an empty place and start at 128 [BPM]. I’m thinking, “Come on man, this is stupid.” It’s true, you get to an empty place and go “BANG BANG BANG,” already, and it’s like, “Come on, wake up.” You need to take your time. And for me, a DJ set is a ride, and you can’t always be “Up there.” You need to go up and down. It’s like a meal. It’s true. It’s all about feeling and seeing people in front of you, and if you have no-one, just guide them slowly. The lights should be the same. I always talk a lot with the guy with the lights. I’m like, “Don’t flash the thing now. Just take your time.” They don’t want to be over-attacked, or whatever. I like playing very long sets because it allows me to have a stronger relationship with the crowd, it allows me to play music that maybe I wouldn’t play for sure if I had a two-hour set. For me, DJing is all about surprising people and with an hour and a half, you can’t really do that. I think you need time. It’s nice to take people on a journey. They might like you or not, but at the end of the day, they got a good slice of it.

Lauren Martin

When you are going on these journeys, on the dance floor, back and forth from France and England, you’re obviously observing electronic music explode. It’s all in an underground context, but in two very different countries with different altitudes and different crowds, and different tastes. Once you get to the late ‘80s, acid house has exploded. Also, electronic music was also coming into pop and rock music in the UK, with stuff like Andrew Weatherall remixing Primal Scream, and all of that sort of thing. How did you observe electronic music moving into the pop realm? I think it’s something that we take for granted as a norm, now.

Laurent Garnier

Very quickly, whatever style of music you want to talk about, pop music or the people that are more about the money than the content, or the real heart in music... You’ve always got people that will take whatever is on the ground, or whatever is interesting, and make it on a more commercial basis. England is great for that, because it’s very different than France. We don’t have… If you take somebody like David Guetta, he’s not playing that much in France. He’s playing much more abroad. We don’t have huge raves in France like Cream, or places where you have a super commercial EDM DJs and stuff like that. Over here, it’s never really happened, where in England music has been a business for a long time. It’s very very different in England than in France. Pop music is always taking whatever is interesting and making it more commercial, but I think it’s a normal thing. It was bound to happen to house music, but it happened straight away. Very quickly. Take Snap, “I’ve Got The Power”; it’s a great track, but again, it was a more commercial side of electronic music. Nothing wrong with that.

Lauren Martin

What did you observe of that change that you did find interesting? You mentioned Snap, was there something else that caught your imagination?

Laurent Garnier

It depends what you call “Commercial,” but I must say, if you were living in Manchester, it’s very grim up there, they became… They absolutely love piano house music. If you take something like “Ride On Time” by Black Box – I remember that this tune was so big in Manchester. If you were playing this in any raves, anywhere, even in a super underground place, people would going so fu--ing mental. It was beautiful. The power, the energy… No it’s true, it was beautiful. I must say, I brought this record back here and played it in Paris, I got absolutely slaughtered here. Of course, it was a different kind of room. I didn’t have a thousand people completely off their heads on Es waiting for piano house. In Manchester, it’s true that they had a history with it, they didn’t have it here. You were better playing Loleatta Holloway, the original track… At least the original version did quite well here. But Black Box, it was seen as a record from the devil. You couldn’t play it here. It was too commercial. It depends where you are playing things.

Lauren Martin

When you are talking about E; what come after E?

Laurent Garnier

F.

Lauren Martin

What does that stand for?

Laurent Garnier

It was a label that I did. I think we started it in ’92 or something. Basically, what happened was that when house music was starting to get popular in France, I met a guy called Eric Morand. For the first time in France, he wanted to sign French artists. The idea was to focus on selling this music outside of France. None of the record shops and none of the record companies in France were doing that. They were signing artists to actually sell music in France. The first one which did that was Cerrone. Cerrone was very clever, because he had a record shop, and then he made his music, and his music was not doing anything, and then one day – he was actually buying imports for his shop from New York – one day, he got a whole lot of imports in, took 20 records out of the box and put 20 of his Cerrone records in. Then he closed the box, rang the company in America, and said, “By the way, you sent me too much of this one record. The actual order is wrong. I’ll send you the box back.” He sends the box back to America, and these guys open and say, “What the fu-- this record?” They play it, they think it’s good, and straight away this record becomes a hit in America. It was very clever.

Lauren Martin

That’s very clever.

Laurent Garnier

It is very clever. He’s the first one who did it. Anyway, no record company was doing that, so Eric said to me, “We’re going to approach the Fnac shop,” which is like a retailer for CDs and vinyl. Back then, Fnac was selling a lot of records, but they didn’t have a record company. So we went to sign as a label in Fnac, before F Communications, and I was the first artist that he signed. He kind of forced me to make music. Eric pushed me to do a lot of things. He was always there. He is still working with me. But we did Fnac for two years, which was the first step before which was the first step before F Communications, but then some problems happened with Fnac and then we had to leave. What happened next was that we wanted to start a new record label. We were at a big rave in England, and we were just watching it from the first floor, and there were a lot of guys completely off their heads on the dance floor with all the t-shirts with an “E” on them. They didn’t look too good. It was a bit too much. “I think you had one too much, mate.” It was not a very nice sight. For me, drugs has never been the thing. It has always been about music, and it was a representation of exactly where I didn’t want to go. As we were watching this guy, Eric said to me, “Well there you go. We’ve got the name for the label. Look at this guy with his E, after E comes F, after the drugs come back the music.” I’m like, “Yeah, OK, let’s go.” We started F Communications, and we focused on French artists and we wanted to sell music outside France.

Lauren Martin

How would you go about that as an independent label in France at the time, selling instrumental electronic music?

Laurent Garnier

Fnac was harder, because it was two years before. But you have to understand, we did a deal with the guys from PIAS, which is a big indie distributor. Basically, we said to them: “We want to be distributed by you, but you are not to interfere with the music. The music is our thing. It’s me and Eric.” And the way we were worked was that Eric was in the office every day, and I was raving every night, everywhere. So I was travelling the world giving people these records, and then on Monday, of course, there was somebody in the office. So F Comm did very well, very, very quickly. This is where we signed Saint Germaine, you know, Ludovic Navarre, and then we had Scan X, and then all sorts of different kinds of artists which did quite well. But the idea was really to sell music outside of France, because we were still not selling anything in France. So we wanted to have a hit outside, which we did with a track by a guy called Lunatic Asylum, which became number one in Germany, which was massive. And then I did “Wake Up”. And after that, it basically came back like a boomerang. In France, people thought, “Wow, these guys can do it, why not us?” Then they started to make music. After that you had people like Daft Punk, who started the second chapter of what was happening with French music. When Daft Punk came, when they signed on Soma and then after that they did a big hit, all the kids in France just went, “Well if they can do it, we can too.” This was when others really started to go in the studio. This is when it all started to happen in France.

Lauren Martin

I’ve heard you mention before that you feel that the prevailing French attitude to success within any creative field is kind of suspicious.

Laurent Garnier

Success is super suspicious in France.

Lauren Martin

Do you think that’s partly why things took a long time to have happened then? That outside success was like a validation of what you were doing?

Laurent Garnier

I don’t know. First we were dealing with black music, which was not the most popular thing. We were not focusing on France. We were not focusing on me, myself and I, and it was a different kind of policy for them. It was very strange for them to understand. And then, of course, it was instrumental music. I remember the first record I did, the very, very first single. Eric went to see Emmanuel de Buretel, which is the guy who, has he got Virgin or something? I don’t know what he is doing now. He listened to it and went, “This sounds like Jean Michel Jarre, I’m not interested.” For him it was old kind of music, it was kind of old. Because during the disco days, we had quite a lot of French producers who made synthetic disco music. Bands like Space, and stuff like that, which was quite big here. For them, it was just something which sounded a bit old. It’s very strange.

Lauren Martin

What did sound new though, was a sound called the French Touch, which is partly what Daft Punk was involved with. As someone who has observed electronic music for many years, what did you think about the French Touch at the time, and did you think it had a positive impact on the culture?

Laurent Garnier

It’s very strange to call it the French Touch, because these guys were only focusing on Chicago. If you talk to Thomas [Bangalter], all these guys from the French Touch, the music that they absolutely loved was the music from the ghetto from Chicago. They were taking disco loops, and copying them really well, great records from Chicago. Their music was already American, so it was a strange thing to call it French Touch. I think it was more like a journalist’s word they used to market it. “OK, it’s coming from France, it’s the French Touch.” At one point, everybody was The French Touch. Whatever record was coming out of France that was selling a little bit somewhere else, it was French Touch. It didn’t mean very much to me, the French Touch thing.

Lauren Martin

It was definitely a journalist that coined it. It was somebody from the Melody Maker.

Laurent Garnier

For sure, for sure. I don’t like marketing music too much. I like a lot of these records, but for me, it’s just house music. House or techno.

Lauren Martin

It seems like we are talking about music a lot, and we have not played anything. I think it would be really good to play a short video of yours. It’s at an important time in your career, in 1997.

Lauren Garnier

What are we playing?

Lauren Martin

It’s a surprise.

Laurent Garnier

OK. Sorry, it’s so stupid.

(video: Laurent Garnier – “Flashback”)

Lauren Martin

That was the video for your track, “Flashback.” There’s actually a lot to say about that video, but one of the main things is that it has a very particular sense of humor, and it was directed by someone quite special as well.

Laurent Garnier

OK. Of course, it’s very stupid, because it’s directed by Mr. Oizo, aka Quentin Dupieux. I was living just across from that garage, because we shot it in his father’s garage. The way I met him, I was going out of my flat every day, I would see his father. His father is a funny man. When you meet the father, you understand the son. His father is always like this, with his cigarette in hand, “Are you going to buy me a fu--ing car or what?” Like, everyday. One day I start talking to this guy and he says, “My son makes videos,” so I said, “Well, tell him to drop off some VHS tapes to me, I’d love to see his work.” And then Quentin did, came to my house and dropped some tapes, and I saw the most amazing video-maker of short films. They were completely wacky. Super crazy. So I go and see the father and say, “Well, I would like to meet your son. It would be nice to do something together.” We did two videos together; we did a 13-minute film for “Crispy Bacon,” and some kind of weird short film called “Nightmare Sandwich.” And inside that you have a short film and two videos, and this is the second video we did, at his father’s place. Why when we talk French at the beginning, and cut the thing in the middle, and talk French at the end... You have to understand, in France, there’s a percentage of French words you can put in your music to be considered as French music. So I live in France, I pay my tax in France, but because my music because is instrumental, is considered not European, but “Worldwide music.” It’s not French. So I’m not a French artist. Especially when you talk English. If you want to be played on French TV, you have to have a higher percentage of French talking than English. Because the song was in English, I had to find ways to talk at the beginning, cut it in the middle, speak French in the middle, and then speak French at the end, to have a higher percentage of French talking, to be able to be played on TV. So the guy coming in the middle, coming in and being funny, saying, “You can’t sing in English if you are French;” we did it because we just wanted to be played on TV. Because otherwise we would be completely shut out.

Lauren Martin

It’s also quite sarcastic about the idea of the French media and the perception of that [music].

Laurent Garnier

It is. Also, this is a time when techno music was very stuck with the imagery of fractal, and all this imagery that was kind of techno… I always want to do things in a bit of a different way. I’m in two short films. I like cinema a lot and we thought, with Quentin, “How can we do something different? Does it make it look like a techno video? Do we want to appeal to different people?” We just want to do something differently. He came up with this scenario and I said, “Are you sure that you want me to, like, eat food and do this stuff?” He said, “Yeah, it’s going to be very funny.” We did it and we just laughed so much. We thought it was really funny when we shot it. I said, “Yeah, just go for it.” Yes, we wanted to be a bit satirical about what was happening in the media back then.

Lauren Martin

What was your perception of what was happening with techno music at that time? Your own particular vision for your music is obviously personal, but what were you observing that you weren’t so happy with?

Laurent Garnier

Back then, rave became another way to make money. This is when the DJs started to really structure themselves, which is a good thing. You’ve got to understand, in the beginning, when we didn’t have a manager, I got into some pretty awkward situations travelling the world without having a ticket to fly back home, or a bedroom booked. I actually found myself on my own, sitting on my record box at four o’clock in the morning outside a club in New York, and not having a place to sleep or a ticket to go home, because I wanted to go to New York so much. The actual promoter completely fucked me up. I had this a lot in the beginning. I had some weird ones. I think this is back in ’96 or ’97. This is when you have the agents coming in, and we’re doing contracts to start travelling and becoming politically quite correct. But then again, it’s making a lot of money, and I’ve never been into the money side of it. I don’t like that. For me, you have to talk to me about music, then maybe we will talk about something else, but music is the first thing I want to talk about. And it was a time when a lot of people were making a fu-- of a lot of money out of the word “Techno.” It was becoming a bit nasty. It was a bit of a funny time in the techno world. I didn’t like that. I just wanted to go somewhere else, to do different things. And actually, after this album, I started to make very different albums. I left dancefloor music for quite a while to start working with contemporary choreographers, and doing things for films, and stuff like that, because I always to create things, I don’t want to repeat myself. I felt I was repeating myself back then. I just wanted to go and explore different things. I like exploring.

Lauren Martin

You certainly explored a lot more than the dancefloor. I think we can demonstrate that quite nicely with the second video.

(video: Laurent Garnier – “Acid Eiffel” (Les Victoires de la Musique '98))

Laurent Garnier

This is a weird one. I haven’t watched it since I did this, which is nearly 20 years ago.

Lauren Martin

It’s a really interesting clip for a few reasons. It was a year after the “Flashback” video, so quite the visual contrast. It could not be more different from the clubs that you’ve played over the years...

Laurent Garnier

That was not a club. [laughs]

Lauren Martin

It was not at all a club. Perhaps most pertinently to the conversation that we’ve had so far, is that this was basically the first time that that style of live electronic music was ever performed in France.

Laurent Garnier

This is at L’Olympia, which is a very famous, old school concert hall in Paris. This was for the Victoire De La Musique which is… I don’t know what’s the equivalent outside of France, but it’s the nomination for all the artists from French songs to, whatever kind of music. It was the very first year for these kinds of awards, there was an electronic music thing, a category for electronic music. There were five nominees, we all set our gear backstage, we didn’t know who won. We were all ready to actually go onstage and play, and I didn’t even know that I’d won it. So I played in front of an audience that was only the music industry of France, which is more like the pop, rock, the songs, the classical music. I’m on my own, playing this kind of music, and back then… I remember I was super stressed. There had been a lot of problems in France with rave music. First, they thought it was gay music. Then we became all drug addicts, according to the press. All the raves were getting banned and closed down. We couldn’t do anything. We couldn’t even talk about it. This is the first time I went on TV. And I have the French Culture Minister in front of me, and this was the first time I could actually speak to her. I’m looking at her, and I win this award, so I took the award and said, “This award is not for me. I want this to be for all of the French techno scene. And I’m glad I’m getting something today, but I would like you to stop putting so much pressure on us. It would be nice if we could actually make parties and do stuff and move on, and for you could leave us alone. So if this trophy is for the future in techno music, thank you very much.” And then I went to actually play this track, that was not even on the album that I won the award for. We did “Acid Eiffel,” and it was very strange. You can see everybody is sitting down, looking at us thinking, “What the fu-- is he doing here?” And you’ve got to understand as well, when we went the day before to rehearse, we arrive at a place with a history of French singing songs, you know, Edith Piaf and everybody played there. The drummer with me is the son of Sidney Bechet, the famous jazz player. And we get to this place to actually do rehearsal, and everybody who works there greets us like, “Why the fu-- are you coming here with your sh-- music? You are not going to perform on the stage, are you?” And this the way we got greeted in this place. We get there and everybody is like, pushing us, like we are the devils. It was very, very strange. It was a very, very hard day. I did the song and it was lucky that I did it, because six months later I actually did a live show in that room. So you know, it meant a lot for us to actually have a two-minute or a five-minute slot on TV, on a Saturday night, prime time. I did my thing and then yes, things went a little bit easier afterwards. It helped the whole techno scene, it did.

Lauren Martin

It has gotten easier for you over the years, but I’m guessing that over the past, what, 15 years since that show, the live performative element of your music, it’s been something of a revolving door of trial and error, and of trying to find people that fit. Could you elaborate upon building a show like that?

Laurent Garnier

For me I approach a live show more like a jazz musician than a techno musician. The techno side of my work would be me on my own, in my studio. If I had to just come with my computer, plug it in and look like I’m just sending emails from the stage, I don’t find that very interesting. From day one, I decided I was going to defend my music live on stage, I decided to go with musicians. This was my very first band, and this is a long time ago. After that I started to have keyboard and sax players, and I even went to having a ten-piece band. And I was also approaching live more like me being a conductor. So I had a lot of different elements which I could loop. My tracks were absolutely not built. It’s just loops. I could play a track for three minutes, or as long as 25 minutes. And I was directing all my musicians from the stage. So we kind of knew the themes, but then outside of the themes I was letting each of my musicians have space to be able to improvise. Because when I’m a punter, when I go see a show, I hate watching the same thing that everybody watched the day before, and even the day before that. For me, that’s really boring. For me if you just go on stage just like DJing, you need to perform and you need to change every night something, something needs to happen and then sometimes it doesn’t, which is the risk, that’s fine. But when it’s magical, it’s super magical. I had amazing shows as much as I had a lot of really bad ones. But my way of building a live show was more like that of a jazz guy. We didn’t really rehearse too much. When we were rehearsing on stage, we were working. I was just giving signs for everyone else: bringing out all sorts of instruments, with my guys are playing with me. It’s like a band. I always saw it like a band.

Lauren Martin

It’s really not difficult to see the connection between techno and jazz music. What of that relationship did you pull into putting a live performance together?

Laurent Garnier

For me, jazz has always been about freedom. Do your thing, with no rules. The rules come after, but the beginning of jazz was a freedom of expression. It has all this thing about space and the other, different worlds. Mike Banks can talk to you about. He knows very much about that. A lot of the great jazz musicians were very obsessed with the other world; something that we don’t know, it might be better, so we like to dream about this. For me, jazz has always been an expression of futuristic things, and a futuristic way of making music, and techno is exactly the same for me. For me, techno is not about the past, it’s always about the future. Now, unfortunately, I think that because this music has been here for a long time, I see quite a lot of people looking a lot more into the past than the future, and it’s a shame. This has been the big change in the techno world. I found a lot of people are now looking very much into the past, where I think they should look forward. This is only me saying that.

Lauren Martin

Well we’re talking to you, that’s important.

Laurent Garnier

But I’m the past.

Lauren Martin

You are the past. Looking forward then, I know that you have chronicled your own life in music, and the life of the culture of music that you have lived in, with your own book. I know that’s being also turned into film. Could you develop up on that?

Laurent Garnier

OK. Well I’ve done a lot of different things because, as I was saying before, I don’t like repeating myself. So besides making music, running a label and DJing, I’ve been running some kind of a radio station for the last ten or 12 years called PBB, where I just play all of the music I like, so at least I can use my record collection for something useful. And then, I work with contemporary choreographers and stuff. And then I wrote this book back in 2003 called Electrochoc. And then, we did a new chapter about two years ago. The book now is like 250 pages long, a big book talking about the last 25 years of electronic music. That book has just been translated to English, it just came out in England. And now, I’m working on a film, but the film is not the film of the book. Basically, we signed the book to make a film and then I said to the producer, “I don’t want to do a documentary. I’m not interested, because I’ve done that before. I wrote the book, I don’t want to tell the story over again. I want you to do a fiction.” I started to work and write a fiction about someone who’s extremely obsessed with music, who kind of looks like me. He’s very obsessed with music. I wanted to go a little bit deep into where those obsessions can take you. They can put you aside, as well as, you can meet people. When I was a kid I was sharing music with everybody, but sometimes I’m asking myself, “Haven’t I lost some friends? Have I put too much time into my passion? Have I left people on the side? Did that passion push me away from some people?” I’m working on this scenario. The scenario is finished, and now we are looking for finance to actually shoot the movie. It looks like we are going to shoot next summer. But it’s not finished, so I can’t say it’s done yet. I hope we are going to do it. It’s my next project.

Lauren Martin

There’s always a next project.

Laurent Garnier

Yeah, always. You always need to get out of your comfortable zone. I hate being too much into my comfort zone, so I always try to do different things. Maybe sometimes I make the wrong decisions, but at least I’m trying.

Lauren Martin

You’ve been a DJ, a producer, and involved in so many performative elements of it, but dance music always likes to position itself of the moment. You’ve done quite a lot of work to chronicle it, and now you are going to do this film. Is there anything that you’ve observed that is universal of your experience within all these different worlds of music?

Laurent Garnier

I don’t know. It’s a tricky question. I don’t know how to answer that.

Lauren Martin

It’s the only one that you’ve not been able to answer, so I think that’s pretty great.

Laurent Garnier

No, I can’t answer that. What’s universal would be the love for music. Music speaks for itself. That’s it for me. That’s what’s universal. It’s as simple as this.

Lauren Martin

Well, that’s a simple note to end on I think. Can everyone please help me give a hand to Laurent Garnier.

[applause]

Laurent Garnier

Merci. Merci beaucoup.

Lauren Martin

I know that some people will want to ask questions. Does anybody has a question for Mr. Garnier?

Audience Member

In the second video that we watched I noticed that you had a laptop on stage, which I didn’t really think was a thing back in that time. It’s kind of a basic question…

Laurent Garnier

I don’t think it was a laptop. I think it was a big computer. It was a screen, and then like I had a huge, 20-kilo thing carrying with me. No, there was no laptop back then.

Audience Member

Okay, so it was a computer either way. What sort of live performance were you doing with a computer back then?

Laurent Garnier

Basically it’s the same as now. If I would go live, I would work with Ableton Live, and I would just have loops and have a mixer and do it live. I did the same, but back then I think I was with Steinberg… Cubase, exactly. I was using that back then.

Lauren Martin

You’ve shown your age there.

Laurent Garnier

Yeah, I know. Nobody works with Cubase anymore?

Lauren Martin

Actually, as a follow up to that: I read that you made a specific instruction to not use any turntables on stage for your live shows. Is that correct?

Laurent Garnier

Yeah. You’ve got to understand, it’s a time when Eric, we’re trying to do different things, and when we do them, we need to prove a point. In France, again, techno was seen as something really bad. It was really, really tough in France. It sounds a bit weird today, where techno is established everywhere, but you could not go to a party without having the police come and check your ID, or stopping the party. It was tough. So when you had to do something, you had to do it the full way. The thing is that people would not understand what the hell we were doing. “Techno artist, what the fu-- is that?” When Eric said to me, “I think you should perform live;” first he kind of made me do an album, and then after that he said, “Well I think you should go and perform live” and I thought, “OK, so what should I do?”, he said, “The first thing is, don’t take any turntables,” because back then a DJ was not a musician, and a musician could not DJ. This was what everybody thought. Then some people proved it wrong. But, back then, it was very strong in people’s minds. For a DJ to make an album and to go live on stage… If I would have taken a turntable with me, the message could have been completely wrong and nobody would understand what the hell I was trying to do. So I thought, the first thing was, no turntable. And I don’t know what I could have done with a turntable anyway, because I had my bits in my computer. I couldn’t do anything with that. And this is why I actually took musicians with me as well. At the beginning I didn’t have any visuals. It was just the musicians and myself at first and then after that, again, I changed the band. And I never took a turntable on stage, no. It’s because the message would have been wrong. That’s it. It’s as simple as that.

Audience Member

Hey, I was just wondering... Like, you said that you consider yourself “The past.”

Laurent Garnier

I am!

Audience Member

Yeah. I was also just curious. Maybe this is a silly question. You said that we should be looking forward, and I really agree with that. What do you think the future holds for you?

Laurent Garnier

I don’t know. That I don’t know. But I feel that I love the music I’m playing now. I still DJ a lot. I play a lot of new stuff. I totally disagree with being a DJ who only plays old music. A lot of the new stuff I play today sounds old. It sounds very old. There’s a lot of techno today which sounds exactly just like what Jeff [Mills] was making on Purpose Maker 15 years ago. There’s a big revival with Chicago, and I love it. Of course, this is where I’m coming from. So I’m super happy to play these records, but then sometimes I feel that, when I’m DJing, I would like to have something a bit different. I would like to take it forward. And sometimes, there’s a big revival in France, I don’t know of anywhere else, of this hard, loopy techno. This was what Prime Records were doing 15 years ago. I don’t see what is super different and new today in the techno world, in electronic-music world. I haven’t got a clue where we are going. Is the machine going to dictate what we are going to listen to tomorrow? Are the developers the people who are going to make us, make different music? I don’t know. But house music was made with old piece of material, but the music was fresh. I don’t know where it’s going to come from and I haven’t got a clue where the hell are we going, I don’t know, I don’t know.

Audience Member

Thanks.

Laurent Garnier

I don’t think anybody here knows where are we going.

Audience Member

Before you were talking about making wrong decisions. What are the wrong decisions that you are most happy about?

Laurent Garnier

You know what? I always did everything with my heart, so for me, I don’t think I took that many wrong decisions. Even if I did, I must have learned from my mistakes. You should always think about what you want to do. For me, it’s always been one, very specific thing. I remember after the album which I won for this award for, I did an album called The Cloud Making Machine. Eric came to my studio, and I didn’t say anything about the album. I had ten or 12 tracks. He came to my studio and I knew his reaction was going to be weird, because there was not one track which was dancefloor on it. I played him the album and he remained completely silent while listening to this thing. At the end, and Eric can be quite tough, he turned around and he said to me, “How many copies of this do you think you are going to sell?” I’m like, “If I do 10% of what I did before, then I’m happy.” He said to me, “As long as you know, it’s fine. As long as you are aware what we are going to do with this, I’m fine with it.” So I did it because I had to do it. If I would have listened to everybody else, I would have done another “Crispy Bacon.” What’s the point? There was no point in me doing that. I wanted to go somewhere else. I want you to work with contemporary choreographers. I actually got dissed by a lot of my techno fans, but you know what? My album took me to work with two of the greatest French choreographers. I actually got exactly what I wanted from that album. So for me, it was not a mistake, even though a lot of people think that album was a mistake. I did it for me. You should always do things for you, always. I don’t think I’ve made that many mistakes and if I have, what the hell. It proves I’m human, or it proves that I’m a normal person, very normal. Nothing wrong with making mistakes.

Audience Member

Hi there. You gave some pretty clear reasons as to why France held back techno and house in the late ‘80s. But I was wondering, in terms of why other countries in Europe flourished, like Belgium with R&S in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, what is the deciding factor for neighboring even countries to be really pushing house and techno music, and why France cannot be one of those countries?

Laurent Garnier

If you look at Belgium or Germany, they have a very strong history in synthetic music, whereas France was very much into guitars for a long time, except the disco thing, because disco was very big in France. Belgium and Germany already a knowledge of that music. If you look at the history of techno music in Belgium, new beat came first. If you look at R&S, the beginning of R&S, and all of these Belgian labels, they were just carrying on the music they were making. When you look at Germany, they had Falco, they had Kraftwerk, for God’s sake. We didn’t have a French Kraftwerk. They were already in that music. So it’s normal, these countries were the first to be into that music. It make sense. For me, I think it’s coming from that. We were into guitars. We had Téléphone and Trust, and these are very, very different bands.

Audience Member

Hi. Kind of a follow-up to the future question.

Laurent Garnier

Ah. Tell me what’s going to happen please!

Audience Member

I’ll try to say this in the least offensive way. Who’s problem is that that all of a sudden you are playing things that sound old or you are given things that sound old? Is that a DJ problem, a producer problem or an audience problem?

Laurent Garnier

Is it a problem?

Audience Member

For you. You are saying that, all of a sudden, you would rather have things pushing forward. I’m asking is that the audience want old things.

Laurent Garnier

No, I don’t think so.

Audience Member

I feel like, as a DJ, some of that is my fault for not pushing things on people. I’m just curious what your opinion is?

Laurent Garnier

But the thing is that, that I can’t find… And I don’t think it’s a problem, you’ve got to understand me. Believe me, I listen to a lot of stuff. I don’t just listen to techno and house. I listen to a fu-- of a lot of stuff. I don’t find enough projects where I feel, “Wow, this is so amazing that I want to play it five times a night.” When we got “French Kiss” by Lil’ Louis, this sh-- was so damn hot. It was so different that we were playing it five times a night. Nobody was getting bored of it, believe me. It was such a crazy thing to actually slow down the record, have this girl moaning in the middle, and then start again. It was so crazy. We were playing it over and over. It was great. It was crazy. Now, today... I listen to a lot of electronica, some dubstep, and I listen to a lot of English grime and stuff like that. Actually, in grime, I can find where hip-hop pushed it quite further. I find this really interesting. In techno music, if you take Jeff, if you take Aphex Twin, or even Derrick May. What Derrick did with Transmat at the beginning, he said it all compared to a lot of the things I listen to today. Of course, a lot of stuff is sounding like Detroit. Of course, it could be made in Detroit. But it sounds like it was before. It’s great. The new records are wonderful records, I’m not saying it’s a problem. But the thing is that I can’t find anything where I’m going, “Fu--, this is so crazy.” That when I’m going to drop this, everybody is going to look at me thinking, “Wow, where did you get this?” You see this reaction I had when I head Farley “Jackmaster” Funk? I banged on the door. It was there. I had to know what the fu-- was that record. I haven’t had that with any kid coming up to me for the last five or six years, going so crazy. I mean, “Please tell me that this is! I can’t live without this!” I haven’t heard anything where I felt like this for quite a while, and not just in techno.

Audience Member

Okay, that answers my question, so thank you.

Sevdaliza

Hello. While you were talking, I actually came on a question. To be honest, I didn’t know who you were, you are not in my type of genre but because of the stuff I heard, and the people’s reactions, and I’ve seen that you’ve had an amazing career so far and have done a lot of legendary stuff. I was wondering: The way you have lived, in the way you have explained, it’s like you’re a little bit “go with the flow” or something...

Laurent Garnier

I go with my heart, I always go with my heart.

Audience Member

Yeah. Like, you go there, you go rave, you go party. Do you think if you were a lot more strict on yourself and focused, like I have to practice this and this, maybe you were I don’t know, but do you think the way that you have lived has put you in touch with a lot of people and brought you to the place where you are now?

Laurent Garnier

No, because I work a lot. I work a hell of a lot. When I go to do a DJ gig it takes me hours and hours… I actually listen to about six to seven hours of music a day. I listen to maybe 500 records a day. I work a fu-- of a lot when I go and DJ, and if I do a live show it takes me six months to put it together. I put a lot of time into what I’m doing. I’m very, very serious, I’m very, very focused, and then I go and play it out. But I was very lucky to be in a lot of places at the right time, so yes, I did meet a lot of people. Back then we were meeting a lot of people, and raves raves were great. When you were going to a big rave in Germany, there were far fewer DJs back then than what you have now. So it was much easier to meet your heroes and do some stuff with them. But I think what got me where I am now is that I was always very honest. Again, I’m saying that money has never been my thing. Truly, deeply, madly, it has never been my thing. I think that with the people that I worked with, they always understood, I was very honest. So, I met Mike a long time ago, and we became very close friends. I think Mike understood, when we first went to Detroit, that we didn’t want anything from him. We just want to be together and understand each other, and then from there we did some stuff. He came to play live with his band, he played at The Rex, he did Montreaux jazz festival and stuff like that, but I did not want anything from him. It was just because I had to meet him, because his music was my thing.

Audience Member

That’s what I was saying. I didn’t mean, like, not hardworking. I meant like interaction and going with the flow; meeting people, and from that meeting coming up with new ideas.

Laurent Garnier

I’m always very open. And if you take… The next thing that’s coming out from me, I just produced a hip-hop album for quite a famous French rapper called Abd al Malik, and the actual album is coming out in two weeks. Again, that was somebody I met, and you know, from talking about movies and books and stuff, and the idea just came and we said, “Why don’t we do something together?” We did the whole album together. Of course, you have to go out and meet people, but you have to say to people, “I would like to do something together. Maybe not now, maybe in five years, but let’s think about something.” Yes, it’s all about meeting different people; being interested. [addressing Sevdaliza directly] And like, actually, I heard you sing, I heard your stuff and I really enjoyed it, by the way.

Audience Member

Thank you, thank you so much.

Audience Member

Hello. You have a very interesting life.

Laurent Garnier

I’m very lucky.

Audience Member

Yeah. Me too. I guess we are all. I noticed that you have a connection with dance, because you started to produce and DJ. The nightlife, it’s very connected to how to make people dance. After a while, you went into choreography and contemporary dance. I’m really interested in that complex relationship between sound and movement. I would love to hear something related to this connection.

Laurent Garnier

The interesting thing about working with contemporary choreographers or dancers is that they don’t need a beat to dance. They can actually use silence to make a move. So working for a choreographer is a completely different thing. If you go to clubs, if you make music for clubs, you need your beat to be quite thumping and stuff, and your mixing in a certain way. What I loved about working with a choreographer was the freedom of not having to do anything. Not having to have a hi-hat to do the offbeat, or stuff like that. There’s a lot of choreographers who, I love their work, because they can dance on just white noise, or just, you know, just elements of sound. It’s a complete freedom, actually. It’s a different world. They don’t read your music or react to your music the same way than anybody in a club. It’s a very different way of feeling the music. So, I don’t know, it was just a different way to work, that’s it; but loving to not having a beat or anything like that, that was just great. That was really, really amazing. So I started to work with silence with them. Using silence for them to do something, it’s great. It’s brilliant. When you are a DJ it’s always nice to have a silence in the club, to create something. It’s true. Silence is a very important part of music.

Audience Member

That’s the best answer that you could ever give us.

Laurent Garnier

Thank you.

Audience Member

Hello. Although having DJed mainly techno, I’m sure that you have a big collection of a wide array of music. You listen to everything that you like. But this dance floor thing of having an expectation of people dancing within a certain BPM these days; I think that’s somewhere where the lock is. You get asked to be somewhere, but then you get confronted with people wanting to have a certain kind of thing, that as a DJ you also want to break it down.

Laurent Garnier

Well, you do. You have to break it down. As I was saying, you can’t listen to the same stuff all night and you can’t open a club with just 124 BPM. It doesn’t work. For me, it doesn’t work. For me, the thing which has changed over the years when you are DJing is that your main purpose is to make sure that the people on the dancefloor abandon themselves to the DJ, can you say that?

Lauren Martin

To let go?

Laurent Garnier

OK, how can we say that in English? Yeah, to let go. What I want from people is not for them to go crazy. I just want them to have their own journey. In French, it works well; to abandon themselves to the DJ, and let themselves go. This is what we are trying to get every night. It’s easy to play hits or to play hard records to make them just go crazy, but it’s much harder, as you say, to break it down and take them on a really different journey. As a DJ, for me, what I have to do is give them what they want for a while, because it’s my job. I’m not here to force-feed them anything, but then at one point when you feel you’ve just got them all, just fu-- them up. Take them somewhere else. Really. You should try to take them somewhere else. This is when the DJ job becomes magical. What I love is that, if I go to Japan, you can go and play in a techno room, but after three hours I can play salsa. I played salsa in a techno club. I played drum & bass, I played hip-hop, I played anything. And that you can only do it, if you’ve got them and let them just forget everything. This is what our job is all about. It’s to always look at the crowd. Look at their eyes. For me, the eyes are very important. I always look at my crowd. How do they feel? How would I feel now? If I just feeling bored by playing the same kind of music, do I need something, if I was dancing, would I need something else? We have to try to see that; to feel that and try to take them somewhere. Again, you are trying to surprise them. It’s all about surprises. How boring to go see someone that plays just the same thing from beginning till the end. I usually go away, I don’t like it. But maybe this is why I’ve been very close to the Detroit guys, because they listen to music. It’s true.

Audience Member

Thank you.

Audience Member

So back to pushing things forward. I love that mindset. I try to operate there, sometimes to a fault, but I find that sometimes my heart and my brain are having a fight… Well, not a fight, but sometimes they diverge a little bit. In this mindset, what role if any can nostalgia play as a DJ and as an artist?

Laurent Garnier

I’m not a very nostalgic person at all. I know what I like, I know where I come from, I know a bit of the story; I know what touches me when I listen to music, but I’m not a nostalgic person. This is why I decided to play new music, rather than become an old DJ that just plays old records. I don’t think that’s my job. My job is to look forward to what’s happening and try to make people discover things. I never really like nostalgic DJs that only play old stuff. I like it for a while and then after that I get bored. I get very bored. I think it’s like everything; if you only play old-school stuff, it sounds old school. It sounds dusty. But it’s nice to play one, once in a while, though. It’s like writing a sentence. You need to have commas, points, exclamation marks and other stuff. For me, playing “French Kiss” or an old Marshall Jefferson track into a set of new stuff, it makes the older tracks sound even better than what it was. Sometimes, yes, for sure. There was some stuff that was just okay back then, but if you play them now you surprise people with them. Maybe because of the mix, the sound or the style, whatever. I did a tour with Jeff Mills quite a long time ago. The tour was called “Music,” and the idea was to do to five cities, five countries, and ten gigs; one night on the radio, and the next day in a club. We did this in Paris, Berlin, London, Barcelona and somewhere else. The idea was to play everything, but no techno. So Jeff played a lot of disco and hip-hop, and he took some salsa; and I took some reggae and some punk; we played everything. And of course, after five hours of DJing, a little techno record came in, “Oh, nice.” Actually, we found out that, playing with other styles of music, techno never sounded as good. It was amazing. You shouldn’t be nostalgic, but it’s nice to have little hints of different things, just to mix things at the right time.

Audience Member

It sounds like it’s about the moment, always.

Laurent Garnier

DJing is about the moment. DJing is about seeing your crowd, trying to understand who’s in front of you, and trying to have a journey with them. If you don’t have a good time as a DJ, you are boring everybody else. There’s nothing worse than seeing somebody behind the decks that can’t even feel the fu--ing music he is playing. It’s true. I see so many DJs that are scared to just move. I dance. I’m the first customer. It’s true. I play music. I play music for me first, and then if I’m happy, maybe it’s going to be alright. It’s about sharing, and you don’t share if you can’t feel. That’s what I think. Maybe I’m wrong. This is the way I feel.

Audience Member

Thank you.

Laurent Garnier

It’s about sharing.

Lauren Martin

Is there anyone else? Perhaps one last one? I think that we’ve got a pretty happy host. Okay, great. Can we give him another hand?

Laurent Garnier

Thank you everybody for staying. Really, thank you. I hope that you guys are going to make some good music. Thank you so much.