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.

In terms of the music, when the idea first came about I was conscious of it not just being a nostalgia trip or becoming a bit of a parody. I have a great relationship with Goldie and he had already worked with The Heritage Orchestra on recreating ‘Timeless’ live. He told me there was no one better than their conductor Jules Buckley to work with. The Heritage Orchestra is about being progressive, and is very careful to not just be a classical orchestra. They’d worked with people like Bjørk and Henrik Schwarz, and they always go for quite modern collaborations. What initially made me think it could work was the fact that in essence, house is an evolution of disco, in which strings obviously played a massive part – and then loads and loads of trance is very string-heavy too. While a club might feel a long way from a concert hall, the overlap between these types of music is quite clear to see, when you really start to think about it. Classical composers were the pop songwriters of their day, really, and orchestras play other people’s music and fill a similar role to that of a DJ in some ways.

Although we’re celebrating the past and what dance music has achieved in the last few decades with this, it isn’t about being retro! It’s a great opportunity for us to show the world, as a culture, what we’ve done.

Pete Tong’s ‘Classic House’ with The Heritage Orchestra is out now