Carl Cox: The Legend

Tobacco Dock in London’s East End has seen a lot, from the British Empire at its industrial height to a dismal shopping centre a century later. What it hasn’t seen before, however, is the SIDEXSIDE day-rave, wherein its giant, ornately arched open spaces bustle for 10 hours, from midday onwards, with a writhing mass of smart, party-ready freaks.

Evening is descending. Sporadic rain dampens the smokers on the balconied walkways, the Car Park and Little Gallery have crowds jigging, respectively, to Seth Troxler vs Loco Dice and Joris Voorn vs Kölsch, the latter pair revelling in a tasty, retro acid streak. Crowds, however, are moving towards the Great Gallery. In there, having finished his own back-to-back set with Nic Fancuilli, one of dance music’s all-time greats, living legend Carl Cox, is battering a line of Pioneer CDJs as if his life depended on it. Perspiration flicks off his distinctive dome as he slowly squeezes out frequencies from the David Tort remix of his Nile Rodgers collab ‘Ooh Baby’ until the tension is unbearable. Then he drops its thick layers of drums. A crowd who’ve come from all over the UK and beyond barrel about and dance all the harder.

For nearly 30 years, Coxy has maintained a consistent presence as his contemporaries have fallen by the wayside. He moved easily through styles, from 80s Balearic beats to 90s hardcore junglism, until he eventually became one of the giants of 00s techno. He flicks the fader, leans back from the decks and throws his hands in the air, showing off his famous grin. It is tribal machine-drum armageddon. Thousands of bodies fill their lungs and roar.

But there are rumours. That Carl Cox is not just leaving hs weekly residency at Space but that he is finished with Ibiza. That Carl Cox is leaving the UK for good. Even that Carl Cox is quitting DJing. Can this ballistic evening in Tobacco Dock really be the start of a wind-down to retirement?

In the Grand Hotel on Brighton seafront, Carl Cox sits back on a mock-Edwardian chaise longue. He sips tea and takes a small bite of a crustless sandwich. He wears a stylish grey dinner-suit jacket over a similarly toned, mosaic-patterned open-necked shirt. His face, led by his brown eyes, is jovial, though capable of suddenly hardening if he’s wary. He is reminiscing about Brighton.

“When I moved here in ’85 nobody knew who I was,” he says. “I’d play little jazz bars. If the place filled up they’d pay me. Lots of shebeens and run-down warehouses where I’d put in a generator and sound system. A pound to get in and a can of Red Stripe. We’d kick the shit out of it until the early hours of the morning. I remember playing the Zap Club, finishing at 3AM, going to bed. A friend came banging on my door at four. "We’re bored, let’s get your sound system and play Black Rock [on Brighton’s undercliff].” He sighs. “I grouched for a moment – I’d just woken up – then I was like, ‘OK, fire it up, let’s go.’ I played to the sunrise. Amazing!”

His face lights up at the memory. It’s a long time since he played free parties on Brighton seafront but his belief in the power of dance music to send people crazy with euphoria has not waned. This is a man who was there at the very birth of acid house, playing the opening of Danny Rampling’s epochal Shoom.
He played the M25 orbital raves. He played at era-defining events such as Fantazia, Dreamscape and Rage at Heaven. He had a run of hits through the 90s, starting with ‘I Want You (Forever)’ in 1991. His 1999 mix CD, ‘F.A.C.T.’, sold hundreds of thousands, pushing him to another level. The 21st Century
saw him consolidate his techno rep. His Intec label became globally regarded (as it remains since resurrecting as Intec Digital in 2006). He’s renowned for his personally curated stages at multiple major festivals, notably Tomorrowland, Ultra, and Electric Daisy Carnival, and for his Global radio show, listened to by tens of millions. And then, of course, there’s Space where, for 15 years, Carl Cox has been an essential element of the Ibiza season. He takes up the story from its earliest days.

“I was playing Sundays at We Love… Space on the Terrace,” he recalls, “It started out as six hours but then they began booking Steve Lawler, Pete Tong. They started to whittle down my hours – three, then two, then an hour-and-a-half. Pepe [Roselló], Space’s owner, asked me to do the club on a Thursday. I’d always enjoyed the inside, but nobody did anything with it. It was an overspill for the Terrace, pitch black, people freezing their nuts off because the air-con was crankin’.”

So he leapt at the opportunity?

“No, I said, ‘I’ll think about it – but there are conditions: first, I want to change the DJ booth because it’s in the wrong place. Second, the toilets smell so you need to sort that out. Third, the soundsystem sucks, so you need to change it.’ The next season when I walked in – boom! – they’d done it all. I thought, ‘I’d better do this then!’.”

And so he did, moving from Thursday to Tuesday to avoid going head-to-head with Cream. For fifteen years, Cox built his Music Is Revolution sessions
into an Ibiza institution, but this summer, on September 20, it will close its doors for the last time. “Pepe has been running Space since it started,” Cox explains. “Twenty-seven years ago [Ibizan real estate giant] Abel Matutes leased him a bit of land in a car park. The agreement was that once he was 80, Pepe would give it back – and he’s 80 this year. I cannot envision Pepe not being there. It’s not going to work. Ushuaïa, just over the road from Space, is also run by the Matutes family. The guy who manages it is very good at what he does, so they’ll say, ‘Here’s the keys to Space, do what you like.’ I’ve had fifteen years of amazing nights, booked the DJs, had the club how I wanted it. Pepe gave me the opportunity to be the person I am in that club, so if he’s decided to retire, so will I.”

Which, of course, leads to speculation that Cox may be thinking of hanging up his headphones entirely. “People think if I’m not doing Space, I’m not doing anything,” he says, a hint of exasperation in his voice. “Steady on! Take a breath! I’m going to slow down, no doubt about it. The travelling aspect is hard on my body, hard on my brain. I want to wake up in the morning and feel normal. I can’t sleep on demand in all these different time zones. I don’t want sleeping tablets, but I haven’t had a natural eight-hour sleep for years. I’m the consummate night owl but I can’t get back into a daytime rhythm. If I carry on I’m going to burn out. But I’m not over yet – far from it. I’ll just be doing less.”

Cox has plenty going on outside music. He’s built a life in Melbourne, Australia, where for the last 11 years he’s lived between October and March. He owns 40 acres of land where he grows lucerne (food for racehorses), and has houses by the sea. He also has a collection of over 70 motorbikes, including his favourite regular ride, a Ducati Diavel (“Goes like hell, looks fantastic and makes me feel like a rock star”). He collects American muscle cars and owns classics such as a Plymouth Roadrunner 572 with a Hemi engine, and three Mustangs, including a 1968 convertible 428 Cobra Jet, and he even shipped over from the UK the car he bought when he first started achieving success, a 1989 Mercedes 560 SEC.

It’s more than just a collection, though, and extends to Carl Cox Motorsport, for which he runs his own motorcycle teams specialising in sidecar racing. His team are New Zealand national champions and have started to make real headway at the annual Isle of Man TT Races, an event that’s clearly a highlight of Cox’s calendar. He’s DJed at the afterparty for the last couple of years, hanging out with fellow petrol-head Keith Flint of The Prodigy. “All the time I’m DJing I can’t get to the boys while they’re racing,” he says. “I need to be there. Once the DJing eventually stops I’ll be going head-first into it.”

Australia is not just all about vehicles, though, it’s also the operational base for Cox’s recording studio, where he works regularly with producers Josh Abrahams and David Carbone. His last album, his fourth, 2011’s ‘All Roads Lead to the Dancefloor’ featured a host of Aussie guest artists. He premiered it as a live show at Stereosonic down under, but while he’s proud of it, he feels it was misunderstood, and there was little point in pursuing it further. He says it will be his last album.

“My music is as well-produced and thought-out as anyone else out there,” he says, with a hint of wounded pride, “But as soon as you put the Carl Cox label on it people go, ‘No, he can’t be a DJ and a producer’.”

He reminisces about producing. Remember, he’s had five UK Top 40 hits, which is more than most DJs can say. He recalls making his 2002 ‘Club Traxx’ EP on free software on his laptop, drinking vodka in a hotel room in Thailand, and how, from such unpromising origins, it went on to become a well-loved DJ staple. He enthuses about his 2011 song, ‘Give Me Your Love’, featuring the singer Hannah Robinson.

“It’s one of my favourite records I ever made,” he says. “It almost brings tears to my eyes because it was done with passion, not caring what people thought.” He pauses, then draws a line on this side of his career with an anecdote. “[In 1995] I was asked by The Stone Roses to do a remix for ‘Begging You’,” he recalls. “I did a breakbeat thing, still had guitars on, kept the vocals in, then completely forgot about it. I found it recently on YouTube. I listened to it with fresh ears. It was done in a pioneering spirit and it’s pretty cool. It wasn’t the best thing ever, but it reminded me that I have a discography of all these amazing tracks. I haven’t reached the same plateau of acceptance as a producer as I have as a DJ, but maybe it was never meant to be. I’m OK with that.”

Conversely, his productions remain in demand, with forthcoming material including a remix of the Dutch 1990 proto-trance classic ‘Yaaah!’ by D-Shake, a remix of Pan-Pot’s ‘Riot’, new material he’s recorded with Nile Rodgers, and a number called ‘Your Light Shines On’, an ode to his mum, who passed away earlier this year.

Cox’s mother was supportive of him as a Carshalton teenager, buying him his first decks, a pair of Garrard belt-driven ones that were hard work but taught him manic deck skills that have stood him in better stead than any sync button. He came up on the fringes of the south London soul-boy mafia, a long-term associate of Paul Oakenfold, whose Mini Clubman he regularly fixed up prior to either of their fame. His technical soundsystem skills were in demand as rave blossomed and he made sure that his name was on the flyers as the 90s exploded. It’s to those years he returned to when he played a rare classics set for Mixmag at Fabric on May 12.

“I don’t do that sort of set often,” he says, “and it’s a joy to share all those seminal records with people who may not know their story. It’s never fifty-year-olds remembering amazing times – most of them are in bed! It’s people who want to hear good music from over the years.”

The 1990s were also a time of excess, of course, and Cox remembers having 25 people back to his room at Liverpool’s now demolished Moat House Hotel after Cream, for excessive afterparties. “I lived the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle for a while”, he says – but 14 years ago he ended up in hospital with pancreatitis, an ulcer and an irregular heartbeat. They told him if he didn’t change his ways he’d be dead in two years, so he cut out smoking, drinking and red meat, and stopped the afterparties too. Which leaves him where he started, with the music.

“It’s fantastic,” he says. “I never set out to be anybody, but I love the fact that music puts smiles on people’s faces, I love that I’m still able to do that after three decades. I’m going to cut back but I’m still going to do what I do to the best of my ability – for instance, I’m playing Glastonbury for the first time
in three years – but it’ll get to the point where, if I’m playing a club or festival, don’t miss it, it’s going to be that bit more special.”

But it’s not just dancefloors that Carl has moved over the years. Several generations of DJs have been inspired and even nurtured by the big man, from underground heroes like Nicole Moudaber (“He’s the one that discovered me. He played my music on his radio shows. He was one of the first people to invite me to Space and I’ve been playing the club ever since.”) to EDM superstar Hardwell (“Carl’s departure from Space is a loss for Ibiza and clubbing as a whole. He’s always been fearless and creative with his approach to everything and for that reason he’s a true pioneer of our scene. His energy behind the decks has always been an inspiration to me. Few can match the passion that Carl brings to art of DJing.”) No-one can match his staying power. Carl Cox has seen off the end of the rave era, the rise of the superclub, big beat, prog house, the millennium’s superstar DJ backlash, the minimal wave and the EDM explosion – all while maintaining his status as perhaps the biggest star in the DJ firmament. That’s down to his passion and his humility; the way Carl treats the thousands of people he meets each year is a lesson to any bedroom producer who finds themselves catapulted to headline status. It’s also down to an unerring instinct for music, an ‘ear’ that at once transcends fashion and yet is completely contemporary.

Ultimately, though, it’s when he DJs that you feel the true power of Carl Cox. He continues to excel at infecting thousands of people at a time with his own joy and enthusiasm for the music he plays. He makes the Tobacco Dock at 10.20PM feel like 4AM at a warehouse rave. He sends the place bananas, ramming home a ballistic techno tidal wave at the peak of his set. If Cox is going to ration himself in future, we should treasure him accordingly. Oh yes. Oh yes.

Carl Cox: Music is Revolution, The Final Chapter is at Space Ibiza every Tuesday from June 14–September 20