DAVE CLARKE
At last, technology has caught up with his imagination, and The Baron of Techno is back with his first album in 14 years
The Baron of Techno on his latest album, The Desecration of Desire
If you’re reading a magazine like Computer Music, the chances are that you have a keen interest in music and technology. But when Dave Clarke – the Baron of Techno, as John Peel used to call him – was growing up in Brighton, music and technology became much more than an ‘interest’.
This was his place of refuge: a safe haven. They offered sanctuary when his young life was being turned upside down.
“My family situation was pretty hardcore,” explains Clarke. “There was a lot of stuff going on between my parents, and I wanted to escape from that. Even before the invention of the personal stereo, I used to walk around with this giant Ferguson tape machine. It took massive batteries, and only had one tiny earpiece. It was a sort of ‘impersonal’ stereo.
“But when I was listening to that tape machine, I felt free. It allowed me to retreat into my own mind. When it came to thinking about the future and a career, I’d already decided it was going to be music.”
Leaving home at 16, Clarke went through a series of odd jobs, always trying to earn enough to keep those musical dreams alive. A couple of DJ residencies helped him get a foot in the door, and he immediately started bombarding record labels with early demos.
One landed on the desk at XL Recordings – then home to The Prodigy. They liked what they heard, and Clarke released ILikeJohn under the name Hardcore in 1990. It was the start of a journey that’s taken him from underground labels to Top 40 singles, big-name remixes and festival success. Based in Amsterdam since 2008, he’s also heavily involved in the annual Amsterdam Dance Event, home to his legendary Dave Clarke Presents nights.
Clarke has long been associated with all things techno, but his recent album, The
Desecration of Desire, was a beautifully experimental suite of songs that you’d struggle to stuff into any single pigeonhole. One of the guest vocalists is Mark Lanegan, formerly of post-grungers, Screaming Trees, and occasional member of Queens of the Stone Age. His dark, gravel-coated voice sounds perfectly at home amid Clarke’s sinister, semi-industrial grooves. Despite almost three decades in the business,
“I’ve never been interested in synths. I’m not a musician in that sense. I was more interested in rhythms, samples and production”
there are some things that don’t change. Dave Clarke is not afraid to speak his mind. Yes, he’s put a few famous noses out of joint over the years, but that no-nonsense honesty means that sitting down with him for an hour is always… interesting.
Computer Music: I think a lot of people reading this will recognise and immediately identify with the idea of music being a place of ‘refuge’.
DC: “I still feel like that, even after all these years. Everyone has difficult times in their life, but, unfortunately, I’m not someone who finds it easy to lift my mood when the difficult times happen. Music has helped me in those darker periods. it’s helped me change the feeling in my head. I use the music as a catalyst to help lift my mood.
“It’s almost as if you’re DJing with your own emotions. If you’re feeling sad and you know that you’ve got to bring that sadness out, there are tracks that will help. It might sound a bit fake as we’re sitting here talking about it in the cold light of day, but I honestly think that music can influence your emotions. OK, it won’t cure all your ailments, but it can often open a door; it can lift you just enough to give you a bit more perspective. Enough to make you think, ‘C’mon, time to get yourself together’.
“Music has also been part of my education. It’s taught me things about myself. Things about the world. I will forever cherish and value the effect it’s had on my life.”
: Were there certain tracks and artists that stood out in those early days?
DC: “Before synths made it into the mainstream, it was pop music. The Top 40, same as everybody else. But once synths were involved, the whole atmosphere changed.
The music became a lot more interesting, much more introspective.
“There was an early synth band called Visage [masterminded by the late Steve Strange and featuring various names and faces of the late70s/early-80s]. People know the hit single, Fade
to Grey, but the whole of their debut album was very influential for me. John Foxx, too. The
Metamatic album. I remember seeing it in WH Smiths and thinking, ‘that’s a cool cover. I wonder what it sounds like’. I hardly had any albums at the time, so the ones I bought would be played over and over. The sound of the synth pulled me into myself, in a good way. I found that I was happy existing in that internal space.
“That sense of introspection also collided with punk. Bands like the Ruts and Damned. Together, synths and punk gave me the energy to get through each day. It helped me understand the world for what it was. Not the world that was portrayed in post-Industrial Revolution education. I started taking an interest in the social situation of various parts of the country… the huge divide between the north and the south.
“Then there was John Peel. Crackling out of the AM radio at night. Hearing Joy Division for the first time. Wanting to be so close to the radio, just so I could hear every little sound. Music saved me. And, as I got older, it gave me direction; it put food on the table and a roof over my head. It allowed me to be part of a
system, but not have to be part of the greater system.”
: At what point did you think, ‘I fancy having a go at making my own music’?
DC: “Right from the earliest days. Even in my Lego years, I used to build Lego guitars so I could play along to Top of the Pops. My father saw that I had an interest in music and he actually sorted out piano lessons for me. As I look back now, I realise my father had a bigger impact on things than I thought at the time.
“I wasn’t great at piano – my hands were too small – but the main problem was that I found it all too emotional. I would hear a wonderful piece of music and I would start crying. There was a piano at home, but my father eventually swapped that for an electronic organ. This was another of those strange, life-changing moments. For a start, I could listen to it on headphones… again, this idea of being in my own world. I had no idea what a ‘reed’ sound or a ‘string’ sound was, but I was fascinated by what I heard. The organ also had a rhythm box with an output that allowed you to record it to a tape machine.
“The techie inside me started wondering what I could do with these rhythms. What could I record on top of them? Soon I was pulling together every bit of audio equipment we had in the house and recording my own radio shows. I even used to include adverts that I recorded from the new commercial radio station in Brighton.
“The cherry on the cake was a little red ‘recording’ light outside my bedroom door. When that was on, no one was allowed in!”
: Any of those shows knocking around? How about a covermount CD?
DC: “‘Rare Archives Of Young David’? Sadly, there aren’t! Ha ha. I’ve got a few early fourtrack demos, but I think I’ll keep them locked away for the time being.”
: We were wondering about those early demos around the time you got picked up by XL. What were they made on?
DC: “Some of my father’s hi-fi stuff. He had a nice JVC tape deck and a top-of-the-range record deck. I’d managed to get myself a little Yamaha four-track, a drum machine and my first big investment, which was the Ensoniq EPS sampling keyboard.
“Bang the demos off to the record company, wait three months to hear anything back. Get yourself an answering machine so you don’t miss that important call. It was all quite demoralising at the time because everything happened in slow motion.
“That whole side of the business happens so much quicker today, but it sometimes means that people aren’t prepared to invest time, effort and money into getting their tracks heard.
“Songs are like relationships. At some point, you have to commit.”
People don’t bother spending €120 for a year’s WeTransfer, which means that their file expires after seven days and I don’t get to listen to it.
“When I was putting those demos together, I hardly had any money, but what I did have was invested in my music. If buying some more cassettes meant that I couldn’t eat next week, then so be it. The music always came first.
“In fact, my father was so impressed by how little I was eating that he used to offer me the chance to earn a little bit of extra money by trying to beat him at pool. At the time, I thought I was just fantastic at pool, but, as I got older, I realised that he was probably letting me win so I could afford to eat.” : We haven’t mentioned one synth yet. DC: “I’ve never been interested in synths. I’m not a musician in that sense. I was more interested in rhythms, samples and production. After XL, I was invited over to Ghent to record some stuff in the R&S studio. Yes, they had synths, but I was drooling over the compressors and the Eventide Harmonizer. On some of those early Trax Records tunes like 7WaystoJack, they had this huge, deep, God-like vocal. That was the Harmonizer.”
: Does that mean that, when the software thing started happening, it was a relatively easy and painless move for you? You weren’t having to worry about syncing up all your analogue keyboards?
DC: “Unfortunately, even though I didn’t use keyboards, my studio was still hardwareheavy, and a lot of that was running via MIDI. I’d invested a lot of my money into outboard, sampling technology, speakers, mic preamps, DAT machines… I was running an old Mac G3 with 265 channels of MIDI! That was the setup I used right up to the Devil’s Advocate album in 2003.
“Eventually, I started moving into the box, but the problem was that everything was so fucking slow! It was always crashing. Even though my MIDI setup was fiddly, it was rock solid.
“After that album, I ended up taking a break for various reasons. My marriage broke up; I
had to sell the studio. Obviously, something like that can take time to get over. I was still interested in what was happening, and I remember having a play with Logic, Ableton and Cubase, but things still felt unstable. And everything took so long!
“The arrival of Logic Pro X was the moment for me. That was the one I’d been looking for.” : So, all the hardware has gone! DC:
“God, no! Still loads of hardware on the production side. It’s an in-and-out setup. The outboard gives me the character I’m looking for, and the computer gives me an incredible amount of flexibility and control.” : Are you still anti-synth? DC:
“I was never anti-synth; they just didn’t appeal to me. Softsynths are more… enjoyable. For me, a synth is still a fairly basic tool, but I use the Arturia collection a lot. Anything from GForce. Native Instruments, of course. Waves, too. They’re known for processing and production, but their synths have definitely piqued my interest.
“I do use software FX – there are some lovely EQs out there, anything by Soundtoys, the Eventide Omnipressor, maybe the odd Chandler plugin – but it’s mainly hardware.” : Any hardware favourites? DC:
“This is going to sound a bit boring, but it’d probably be my ATC monitors, my Crane Song Avocet monitor controller and my chair. I do have a mixing desk, but actually adjusting faders and controllers isn’t necessary these days. I leave everything set for optimum compression, and adjust the dynamics inside the computer.”
: was your first ‘proper’ full-length album in 14 years… DC: TheDesecrationofDesire
“As I mentioned before, there was the divorce and losing the studio, but I think I was also waiting for technology to catch up with what I had in my head. I remember getting an 8-core Mac Pro and still being seriously disappointed. Again, it was all about stability. I’ve got a 24-core now… no problems at all.” : Do you still call your music ‘techno’? DC:
“Hmm… techno is now a tough genre to explain to the outside world because it’s been hijacked. If I talk to people inside the genuine techno world, there’s a lot of pride in what we do because this music feels ‘real’. But following the collapse of EDM, you’ve now got a lot of people trying to cash in on the credibility of techno. Suddenly, everybody’s going ‘techno’.
“What I’m hearing isn’t techno; it’s techhouse. I’m embarrassed. Tech-house has a different mission statement to techno. Techhouse doesn’t challenge people… it sells units. It all sounds very similar. Sidechain everything until it brings tears to your eyes.
“Commercialisation. That’s not techno. For me, techno is about pushing the envelope. It’s the music of the underdog. The music of revolution and rebellion.” Dave Clarke’s latest album, The Desecration of
Desire, is out now. A new single, IVT? (feat. Louisahhh), is released on March 23, with remixes from The Mad Professor and Chloe.