blame them. You can’t blame David Guetta for being No.1 in the Billboard charts. Today, it’s a mainstream genre, electronic music is being played on the radio, and people are being paid lots of money to play at festivals. Our role as adults and grown-ups in a young scene is to be there to encourage, help and push the next generation to do new things, and this is why French artists like Para One, like Brodinski, Gesaffelstein, Club Cheval, all those kids are making way more interesting electronic music than the big names. But again, we don’t need to be against them, we just need to be able to propose an alternative.”
Of course you also produce yourself, is the Busy P album any closer to seeing the light of day? “Well, you know we lost DJ Mehdi last year… you see, 70% of the music and remixes I have done, Mehdi was my hand in the studio, he was really my music partner. So for a long time, I was like, ‘Let’s just leave it’, but just very recently, I met this young kid from Paris, Boston Bun, he’s 25-years-old and we spent some time in the studio last week and it was my first day in the studio for a long time. But it’s not easy. You know, with Mehdi, he was my best friend, so I could do stupid things and not be shy; when you’re in the studio, you often have to do lots of stupid things before you do the right thing. But I feel good with this new kid so I will start again, and my dream is to finish something and be able to release it in time for the 10 years of Ed Banger next year.”
What do you think it is about France and Paris that has inspired so much good electronic music? “I feel like France is at a crossroads where you have American influences, German influences, English influences, and I really feel we are free enough to take all of those and do our own thing. I will also say that perhaps it’s because we arrived on the music game a bit later. You know, when Americans created pop music in the ’40s to the ’50s, then the UK led the ’60s and ’70s, we arrived more in the ’90s when anything was possible.”
What’s the club scene like in Paris at the moment? “Well the Social Club is definitely the one. Firstly in terms of capacity, I’m fed up of big clubs, so The Social Club is just right. They understood that the kids, and you and me, might want to see Skream on a Friday and then Theo Parrish on a Saturday. All the other clubs think you need Bob Sinclar one night and Martin Solveig the next and on and on. Like tonight at The Social, Just Blaze is playing at the Marble party and that’s perfect, and then tomorrow night, Hudson Mohawke and Rustie are going to play and this is exactly what I like, it sounds like what we’re doing, it sounds like what I’m playing and so I’m sticking to The Social Club. No one can compete with them in Paris.”
With the future of French music assured, what next for Ed Banger? “So the next album is Breakbot’s, and we have a new single from Justice, we are also working on a new soundtrack to a film by Mr Oizo called ‘Wrong’ which is crazy, and that will be out soon, the music he did himself with another French guy called Tahiti Boy, it’s a brilliant album. Then I’m working on an EP to come out before my album and there’s a Krazy Baldhead single, that’s all the releases we’ve got planned. “But of course, who knows what will happen, I often compare myself to a taxi driver. In the morning I get up and I know what I have to do at first, but I never know what’s coming next, it might be a call saying Madonna wants Justice or who knows what, we just don’t know what life will bring us!”
024
IN MEMORY OF DJ MEHDI
In September 2011, Ed Banger artist and Pedro’s studio partner DJ Mehdi passed away after an accident at a party. Here, Pedro talks about the loss of one of his best friends.
“I’d known Mehdi since 1997, we grew up together and I took him from the hip-hop world to the electronic music scene that became his passion and where he became most successful. Mehdi was, and is, the kind of person that you always respected and admired. For me it was like he was just too awesome, too handsome, too smart, just too good and too intelligent, but he never, ever made you feel like you were smaller than him or less smart than him in any way. “He had this power to bring people up — in France, we sometimes say that certain people can pull you down, but he was the opposite of this, he was generous, always full of joy and really pushing people. He was the one who really pushed me into the studio to make my own music and we spent a lot of time together, but he was like that with everybody. People would always be asking him to listen to their music and he would never say no or just be like ‘oh this is shit’, he was always helping and building people up.
“He left so much positive energy, the day it happened I received so many messages and the funeral in Paris was incredibly beautiful. There were so many people there, and I think this is the key, all sorts of very different people, there because of him. “Mehdi was my best friend and the one that I spent most of the time with. We were looking at our passports once and we had all the same stamps, we travelled together all the time and that’s why today I DJ less and less, because I don’t want to travel without him. We always did it for fun, not the money, and we had such great times; I think it’s a sad life for DJs to go to shows and travel alone. But that’s life, things happen and we have to move on, we play his music and we move on. “I want to continue because Ed Banger was his baby too, he even gave the label its name, and I know that he was proud of what we were doing. I can honestly say one of the proudest things of my life is to have known that man and to have been able to call him my best friend.”
www.djmag.com
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