Q+A: Carl Cox

There's been rumours of Space moving to a hotel in San Antonio. Have you head anything about this?

I head about that from day one, but I’m not sure if it’s going to happen because you’re going into the hands of the local government straightaway and it doesn't want another nightclub in San Antonio. Space hasn’t got a licence to start building anything at the moment. If there is going to be something, we won’t see it for, at least, another two years. It’ll start off as something new, fresh and exciting for the now generation. But you won’t find anything happening there anytime soon. There’s a lot of bureaucracy on the island at the moment, which I don’t know too much about, but it’s holding up proceedings for anything to happen at this point. I wouldn’t hold my breath on that right now.

Would you be involved if it did go ahead?

I probably would be involved in a music-related sense, but it wouldn’t revolve around me doing a residency on the island. I am done with a residency on the island. When I go and play Ibiza [in future], I’ll basically be involved in pop-up parties here and there and I’ll just guest here and there. I’ve done my time on the island. I think I’ve proved myself as a worthy, entertaining DJ. I’m going to be going to the island anyway, whether I’m DJing or not. But for me to actually take on something else is a definite no-no.

What impact do you think the club moving to San Antonio would have?

San Antonio has got better over the years. It’s cleaned up its act quite a lot since the days of Ibiza Uncovered. When you go to Ibiza for the first time, you always go to San Antonio because it's all you know and all you can afford. If it moves to a five-star hotel in San Antonio, you’re going to get the right people going for the right purpose. San Antonio’s not a bad place to be. There’s the bay. If you go round the outside, the other side of San Antonio, you’ve got Mambos. It’s beautiful. You’ve got the restaurants, Sasha plays at sunset. It’s amazing. There’s nobody punching anyone down there or being sick, it’s just people round there having a great time, drinking some nice mojitos. It doesn’t get much better than that, really.

Obviously you had a really close working relationship with Pepe [Rosello] over the years. Have you been in touch since the closing party?

He’s still in shock and in awe of it all. The people really wore their hearts on their sleeves when it came to that closing party and Pepe was there through most of that. You can imagine for him, he’s been there since day one, it’s his baby. It started off as a young child, it grew up and now it’s basically been put into retirement. He’s ready to retire himself. He’s 80-years-old. I doubt, if I’m 80-years-old, I’ll want to be in the middle of a nightclub with a glass of champagne.

All the videos from the closing party basically took over the internet for a few days after. How did that feel?

It was going out to the world. It was intense to be absolutely scrutinised in everything that people could see and hear. That’s unbelievable to have that amount of pressure on oneself. When I look back on it, I’m so glad that there are videos because we can go back and find that moment that defined it. If you missed something at the party, you can go back to it. You weren’t able to do that before. When you were there, you were having your real time moment. We’ve never had anything like this. When Studio 54 closed, nobody knew about it apart from people who knew about Studio 54.

Finally, have you got any confirmations for next year in Ibiza?

Not really. As you can imagine, everyone’s coming to the table. “Carl, what do you wanna do?” Not much really, I want to chill. I could play Cocoon, I could play HYTE or Music On at Amnesia. I could play DC-10. I played Zoo Project this year which was unbelievable. If I could play that again, that’d be awesome. It’ll probably be about three to four parties a year on the island, that’s it.

Read our review of the Space closing party here.

'Pure Intec 3' is out via Intec Digital on November 11

[Photo: UIi Weber]

Dave Turner is Mixmag's Digital News Editor, follow him on Twitter