Y
ou could easily forgive Pedro Winter, former manager of Daft Punk, current manager of Justice, label boss of Ed Banger and DJ and producer in his own right, for being perhaps just a touch arrogant. After all, to have struck gold once, overseeing the rise and rise and, well you get the
idea, of one act that changed the face of dance music, sure, that could have just been a case of right place, right time. But to have then repeated the trick with both a new label and group who, for all their detractors, pro- vided dance music with a much-needed kick up the ass following its post-millennial slump, well that’s worthy of some respect. Still, the smiling, slightly disheveled-looking man who greets us at the door to his label’s Paris office in cut-off jeans and an old AC/DC t-shirt is nothing but gracious, waving us inside the office that could double up as a museum of the past 20 years of popular culture. Promo CDs, some the best part of a decade old, cover every desk, flyers for parties long gone litter the floor, giant canvases by Ed Banger’s artistic director So-Me adorn the walls, and the very personal mementoes of a life lived well — giant Daft Punk models, limited edition Ed Banger trainers, customized teddy bears and battered MPCs — fill every shelf.
From leaving school early to oversee the nascent career of two unsigned French kids to fielding calls from the likes of Madonna and Kanye West, Pedro Winter has come a long way, and there’s one question we have to get out of the way...
Pedro, how did it all go so right? “Honestly, I didn’t plan it at all, and you know, if you talk about Ed Banger I still don’t think it’s that big. Look around, you are in the office and you can see that the space is not for 20 people! There’s just the three of us and it’s been like that for nine years and I don’t want to expand. But I do understand that we arrived at the perfect time in 2003, and I think the big time for Ed Banger really was 2006, 2007, with Justice’s first album, when, let’s say, the electro kids, hip-hop heads and indie people were all coming together and we were able to unite them. So I’m proud and happy of that, but we were not alone at the time, I think I was lucky to be there at the right time.”
Looking back to 2003, it was also around the same time that [French hip-hop band] TTC were recording their second album [‘Batards Sensibles’] and had gone in a much more electronic direction, was there something in the air in Paris that year? “I think it was just the perfect time for all these different genres to combine and you see that exactly with TTC’s ‘Batards Sensibles’, an album that I love. Of course, at the time, people like Timbaland, The Neptunes, all those guys were already making this kind of modern and futuristic sound, but then Para One and the TTC boys went even further into distortion and crazy sounds, and again I think it was just a natural thing and none of us can really say, ‘Oh, I knew it would be like this or it was the time for that’. We were just mixing all of our influ- ences together.”
And things moved pretty quickly for you… “Oh yes, right from the second release, Justice’s ‘Never Be Alone’. The first time I listened to it, I knew it was a big record, not in a market way, but just big, wow! Although I don’t want to compare them, when I listen to New Order’s ‘Blue Monday’ I think ‘Never Be Alone’ has
that same power to unite people, it’s exactly the kind of record that everybody is into. So yes, with the second release on Ed Banger, the buzz was already there, and that is why it was hard, but really important, for us to keep our feet on the ground. We needed time to prove that we were going to last, stay the course and surprise people by trying different things and I believe that is what we have done with Ed Banger.”
Certainly the last couple of albums, Mickey Moon- light’s and Krazy Baldhead’s spring to mind, and the upcoming Breakbot album sound nothing like Justice… “Of course, but it’s not in opposition to what we have done, that is important. I just believe the younger crowd are ready to listen to something different. They might be fed up of the noisy headbanging sound, I myself am fed up of it, and American dubstep is doing that for us now anyway. The energy, the stage-diving era that we had in 2007, that is what’s happening now in America. So me, personally, I want to go more into something like disco, something for the boys to take the girls in their arms to, and this is why the Breakbot album is perfect!”
When people think about Ed Banger, do you think they focus too much on Justice or SebastiAn? When you look at even the first five or six records, you had everything from Krazy Baldhead in there to Mr Flash… “Honestly, I will never complain that people focus on Justice or SebastiAn because it put a light on us and that is just the price you have to pay to have that attention and the power. I’m not doing Ed Banger to make easy money, I’m not doing my label for it to be just heavy and loud. The Mickey Moonlight album could have been signed to DFA, it could have been on Ghostly, it could have been signed to tons of other labels, but we met and the vibe was good. I had some spare money that had come in from Justice and I thought, ‘OK, let’s invest this in a completely different project’. But you see, I’m not doing it in opposition to what we have done, people who think that do not really know Ed Banger, our first release was by Mr Flash, ‘Radar Rider’, it was like a DJ Shadow song, it could have been on Mo’ Wax.”
It’s interesting you’ve grown tired of the noisier stuff at just the point that half the world is going crazy to
what often sounds like second-rate knock-offs of Ed Banger tracks… “Exactly, I know, I know and I’m sorry for that, I’d like to apologise! [laughs]. But you know, I’m more into a posi- tive view of life. I’m having a lot of fun joking about the state of American electronic music and the crazy success of the Swedish House Mafia or of Avicii, but you can’t
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