It’s been a stellar year for British DJ John Digweed. He has remixed tracks by Underworld, Way Out West and The Orb. His fledgling label, Bedrock, has been well received. His radio show on KISS FM is proving a hit. And he has played at any number of sweaty parties across the world. And then, to top it all off, Digweed performed well in DJ magazine’s influential DJ poll – he came third, his highest placing to date.
However, Digweed, being a down-to-earth character, insists that he’s not obsessed with his own popularity, remaining philosophical about such things as polls. “I’m more worried about the people having a good time when I go to a club than what polls say, but, as they are actually readers’ polls, and if it’s actually people who come to the clubs and vote, then that’s a really good feeling. It’s like you’ve made an impact with the people so much that they want to go out and vote for you. So, from that point of view, it’s quite rewarding – it makes it seem like all the hard work you’ve put in over the years is starting to pay off, so, yeah, it’s nice. But I don’t really get too worried or frustrated about the whole ‘Where am I this year?, Where was I that year’?”
A decade ago Digweed was an aspiring DJ who couldn’t get a gig at all – so he launched his own night, Bedrock, in his Hastings hometown. It grew in momentum. He now oversees Bedrock nights in both London and Brighton.
Digweed finally landed his big break in the early 90s when he took up a residency at the Renaissance superclub – Sasha, the club’s star DJ, had heard his tape and recommended him to the promoter, Geoff Oakes. The two DJs became close friends and started spinning as a tag-team. Out of this union came their Northern Exposure mix-CD series, which culminated in this year’s Communicate. The Northern Exposure CDs now command, according to John, “a massive hardcore fan-base worldwide.” Sasha and Digweed also share a residency at Twilo in New York where they spin for up to 10 hours.
“We are quite different people in terms of our characters,” muses Digweed, the self-described “dark horse” of the two, “but when it comes down to music we’re very much the same and I think if we were probably the same in many ways it wouldn’t work… We’re both striving for the same goals, we both think alike when it comes to DJing, and I think that’s what makes the partnership so strong, really – the fact that we can go into a club and play together back-to-back and no one can really tell when one of us is coming off and one of us is going on, things like that. I think it’s very rare that you find two DJs who play well together.”
Digweed is lost for words when asked to elaborate on those personality differences. “He’s the bigger party animal,” he laughs. “I mean, I have my moments, but… there’s just certain things that are slightly different about us.” Digweed finally concedes that he is the more conservative, driven and resourceful. Indeed, John is an ‘organiser’ – and that usually means ‘organising’ the free-spirited, unpredictable Sasha.
Above all, the duo have been credited with cultivating a new form of deep progressive house – a trans-atlantic tribal hybrid – with their Twilo nights. It’s a sound that has been championed by Danny Tenaglia, Deep Dish and even Satoshi Tomiie – much to the dismay of their more purist US house contemporaries who steer away from any kind of European trance influence.
Digweed has cut several mix-CDs (with and without Sasha) and remixes and now he is venturing further into production, working under his trademark Bedrock monicker with studio partner Nick Muir. They’ve released the singles Heaven Scent and Voices and, come January, will deliver Beautiful Strange. Yet there are no plans for a Bedrock album at this stage. “We’re kind of relaxed about what we’re doing with the whole thing – if something came up and we had enough time and we felt that we were going in the right direction, then, yeah, but we’re very much like as soon as we’ve done a track then we want to play it and we want to get it out and we want everyone to hear it. I think it would be very hard to do an album of eight or nine tracks and sit on them without taking them out. There’s no real kind of emergency. We’re not really an album act. We just make good tracks, I think, so if we can carry on putting out two or three singles a year, we’re quite happy with that.”
And Digweed is also currently starring as himself, a DJ, in the rave cult flick Groove, an independent Sundance film described as the American version of Human Traffic. John looks on the experience as “a lot of fun,” while adding in his typically self-effacing way, “I don’t think I’ve got any power lunches going on in LA in the next few months.” And maybe that’s just as well – after all, Digweed’s real talent is still on the decks, not the film set.
