Pete Tong: Orchestral manouevres on the dancefloor

When we did the first Ibiza Classics as part of the BBC Proms last year, I never expected this level of success. We didn’t contemplate anything after July 29 2015, so it’s been such a pleasant surprise that it’s gone so far beyond what we expected. When we did that first one, we knew we’d been involved in something special, but the real magic happened overnight and into the next day with people checking it out on the iPlayer and posting it on social media. By then, we realised we’d gone viral – and it snowballed and rattled around the world for weeks after.

We were originally approached by The Proms to do something, and then, with Radio 1, we came up with the idea of doing something to mark the fact that Radio 1 had been broadcasting from Ibiza for 20 years. We really wanted to celebrate how Ibiza had changed the culture and brought so much to the world artistically.

I don’t know if it’s just that we have a chip on our shoulder, but it feels like dance music never gets the respect of things like rock ’n’ roll or hip hop, and somewhere like Ibiza just gets written off as ‘the party place’. So it was about magnifying the impact Ibiza, and in a wider sense, dance music as a whole has actually had on the world. Songs like ‘Belfast’ by Orbital or Fatboy Slim’s ‘Right Here, Right Now’ have soundtracked people’s lives, and when you see the reaction of five thousand people in the Albert Hall, and then the reaction of people online afterwards, it really brings that home to you.