Beautiful new album from the Deep House pioneer
Interview by Dan Prince
Pete a huge welcome to DMCWORLD…where in the world are you right now?
Thanks for having me! I’m sat on the sofa at home. My wife and I are buying a house that needs a lot of work, so we’ve been in an Excel sheet for most of the evening working out budgets. Rock and roll, I know!
What was the first piece of music you heard this morning after crawling out of bed?
It was a new track I’ve been working on. I hadn’t been near my gear since finishing the album last year, but last weekend I got the itch again so had a little play. It’s early days but it sounded OK to me this morning!
Such an exciting time for you at the moment thanks to the release of your debut album ‘The Root, The Soul’. A long held ambition of yours I know to write a long player, so congratulations young man. Please give us a few words on your 8 new musical babies…
They’re eight tracks of deep house music inspired as much by the past as the present. I wanted to keep the record house only, but knew it would be challenge to keep it interesting. I tried to make eight unique cuts that worked together, but didn’t sound too alike…and that worked as well in a club as on the stereo at home. Hopefully I succeeded!
This album journey started in 2013 when you recorded the bulk of it. T’was a very special year for you for other reasons we understand?
Indeed, it was the year I got married to my wife Ciara. I proposed in March that year, and we got married in October over in Mayo on the west coast of Ireland. Making the record at the same time was purely coincidental, but it worked out nicely. It was a great summer and the record holds a lot of those memories.
It has been 10 years since your label Lost My Dog launched with your friends Ian Straker and Najan Ward. We hear the album will be the label’s final release? Why…?
Ten years is a long time, and we’re knackered to be honest. Running the label has been an amazing experience with too many high points to count, but it’s also been a huge challenge, as any business is – we’ve invested thousands of hours of our time, and the novelty has lone gone. It’s right that we go out on a bang.
You met the guys at Loughborough University, what were you all studying there and how did the whole label thing come about?
I was there to study Economics, something I didn’t spend much time doing in truth! Ian was doing a PhD in airport transport management, and Nags ran the town’s best record shop, In The Groove, where Ian worked part time as a buyer. Ian was also DJing around the town and ran a weekly night at the Student Union, which is where I first met him. He was playing loads of US house, and it was my first real taste of the music coming out of Chicago and the West Coast. Before then I’d been playing whatever they had in HMV. I started producing over one summer, and shared the tracks to Nags and Ian when I got back to Uni. They liked them, and Nags had the idea to get a label up and running. We never dreamt it would last a decade.
Clubs and DJs you were checking out back then?
Passion was the big club for us, nearby in Coalville. It was mainly known for trance, but the back room was hosted by MYNC Project and they booked DJs like Derrick Carter, Roger Sanchez, DJ Sneak, and folk like that. It was the best, and really only, place to find those big US DJs in the area. Ian and I both played there towards the end of our time at uni, it was a real honour for both of us.
Tell us about the first ever release…you went to extraordinary lengths to save money…
Ha ha, yes we did. The record was by some mates of ours from Derby called Subterfuge DJs. They’d done a track with Tony Thomas who was pretty big in the scene at the time. We had scrabbled the money together to cover pressing for our first few releases, but every last penny counted, so we decided to save money by picking the first batch of records up ourselves from London. I drove them up to Loughborough where we stickered them all by hand, and then on again up to the distributor in Bolton. It was a good laugh but I think we only saved a fiver or something like that!
The Sonar party…?
I think we did four Sonar parties in the end, and they were all brilliant, each and every one. The first was on the rooftop of the ME Hotel, full of beautiful looking people who made us look like a troop of goblins. We did a killer one on a yacht too, and the final one (at Family Music Club on Las Ramblas) was a peach, rammed all night and we actually made some real money which I think was a first!
The 3 finest releases…
YSE’s Bounce Back is our most iconic record, and probably still our favourite. My track In Flux was one of our biggest selling releases, AtJazz’s remixes of that became cult classics in South Africa and sold thousands. Demarkus Lewis’ Snazz-A-Tron EP is my other big favourite. It had three killer originals, and two incredible remixes from YSE and Milton Jackson. Five outstanding tracks on one record, I think it was probably the high watermark for us in terms of quality.
Running a label in 2015 is certainly a lot different from running one in 2005. What are some of the biggest changes, good or bad, that you have seen and taken on board from a label owner’s point of view over the years?
It’s become painful watching the biggest digital stores make millions while label owners like us do the hard slog and get very little reward. When we started we were vinyl only, and it felt like we were all in it together – no-one was making money back then! I think it’s great that the industry has found a way to prosper, but it’s unfair that money isn’t trickling down the supply chain. Label owners and musicians tend to do this for the love of it, and that makes them an easy group to exploit. There are still plenty of good guys out there though!
What are the 5 big tunes in your box this weekend…?
1. Pete Dafeet – My Love Is Raw (Manuel Tur Remix)
2. Karizma – I Got My Music
3. Juliet Sikora – Larrys Garage
4. Detroit Swindle – Figure Of Speach
5. Shur-i-kan – Bird Man
An album in your collection you’d hide if we came round?
There aren’t many to be honest, even the cheesiest ones I’m proud of! I got the full Dire Straits back catalogue on vinyl from my local Oxfam a few months ago for £2.50, but you won’t find me hiding them – they’re too good, I love those albums!
What are the future plans recording wise for Pete Dafeet?
No real plans at the minute. Making the album ticked a lot of boxes for me, and since then I’ve been enjoying the other things in life. I’m happily married and we have our first child on the way, so I’ve been wrapped up in all of that. That creative itch has just started to return, but I’m fairly relaxed about it. Lets see what happens!
5 lazy Back To Mine tunes you’d spin us after the club…
Marvin Gaye – After The Dance
Nina Simone – Baltimore
Massive Attack – Safe From Harm
Glass Candy – Computer Love
Bjork – The Anchor Song
And finally, gotta ask. Lost My Dog – the truth behind the name…?
A misunderstood MSN Messenger conversation! Ian, Nags, and I were chatting online, throwing potential names for the label back and forth. We wanted something that would stand out, and didn’t take itself too seriously. We’d been chatting for hours without anything sticking, then Nags said “I’ve Lost My Dog”. Ian and I offered to go round and help him find it, but quickly realised it was an idea for the label…and we loved it! It’s worked well for us I think!
Pete Dafeet ‘The Root, The Soul’ is out now on Lost My Dog Records
Pete Dafeet
‘The Root, The Soul’ Album
Lost My Dog / LMDLP024
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