He was the first of the 90s superstar DJs. Now, as ‘the son of god’ enjoys a second life as an EDM deity, he talks about making it, staying on top and anxiety attacks
Interview by Kate Hutchinson at The Guardian
Between the bands and the booze enclosures, the crochet dresses and the flower garlands, dance music peacockery has established itself as a vital part of Coachella’s aesthetic. Last year nearly 50% of its artists came under the electronic music category, while this year, Calvin Harris, Jack U, Major Lazer, Zedd and those spanners that made that #SELFIE song will foist their lighting rigs and confetti cannon on the main stages before jetting home to their LA compounds. But over yonder, in the smaller Yuma dance tent, further down the bill, is someone who knows more about the superstar DJ lifestyle than most. In fact, he practically invented it.
Sasha is the Welsh DJ who defined the superstar DJ era. In the 90s, he was probably the first DJ to see the inside of a private plane, the first DJ to be offered £50,000 to play for two hours and almost certainly the first to be treated like a pop star, his party boy lifestyle thrust into the limelight. He was no longer tucked away in the booth in the corner of clubs but centre stage, and on the covers of magazines. The hype that followed was of biblical proportions: in 1991, Mixmag put him on its cover with the headline SashaMania:the first DJ pin up. Two years later, the magazine did the same and posed the question: “Sasha: son of god?”. His DJ sets and mix CDs were talked about with the sort of reverence usually reserved for a deity.
For all the cliches about his emotional style of progressive house taking clubbers “on a journey”, though, Sasha was part of a technical revolution. In those formative days of DJing, he was one of a few who were defining how to mix records, adding a flair that was over and above just playing other people’s music. His sets created new music on the spot, as if DJing were its own art form. At the time, it was radical, and it attracted an obsessive crowd globally. But in the age of $300,000-a-night LAs Vegas residencies, it’s funny to think that Sasha’s fanbase was forged at regional English clubs with names like Shelleys Laserdome in Stoke-on-Trent (cue white gloves and Fila jumpers out in force) and Renaissance in Mansfield, the Vegas of the midlands.
But while many of his 90s and 2000s contemporaries are merely footnotes in dance music folklore, Sasha’s career has recharged, especially in the US. His name may never be too far from the top of a “chillout” compilation album, and 1996’s Northern Exposure, his own statement trance album with his former partner in all things euphoric, John Digweed, was named one of Rolling Stone’s top 30 EDM albums of all time. Yet Sasha is also now nestled on bills next to vest-ripping house DJs like Dixon, Tale Of Us and Maceo Plex. His DJ sets span the more discerning – and compared to EDM’s thunderous judders, more underground – end of house and techno. This second (or third, or fourth) wind is presumably why when I ask about his past he replies, simply: “I don’t really like talking about those days too much. It makes me feel nostalgic, and a bit old.”
Sasha has always been embraced by the US. He started off there playing massive parties in Orlando and was a favourite at San Franciscan clubs such as Spundae. In the late 90s, he and Digweed held a residency at the Twilo in New York (formerly the Sound Factory, where Frankie Knuckles and Junior Vasquez had been fixtures), until the venue shut in 2001. The pair long predated today’s stadium-sized EDM setup with their 2002 live project, Delta Heavy, a large-scale performance that was “produced like a rock concert, complete with touring sound, lighting, staging, laser and video production”, which they toured around the US. But by 2003, Sasha was feeling creatively spent and the two went their separate ways. Not long after, the superstar DJ era – and the superclubs that sustained it – was declared dead.
And now here we are in 2016 and the electronic music industry is in ridiculously rude health. The global EDM market is valued at $6.9bn and Calvin Harris earns more than Beyonce. Sasha says EDM is “not my cup of tea”, though he does see a link between the groundwork he has laid and what dance music sounds like now. “A lot of what the EDM guys are playing seems, to me, to be like trance music,” he says. “Maybe some of the sounds have changed but the buildups and the drops and the breakdowns are very much like what old trance music used to be about. I think they call it house now, don’t they? There are so many confusing labels in dance music now. I don’t think anyone really knows what they’re playing.”
There are so many confusing labels in dance music now, I don’t think anyone really knows what they’re playing.
He is guarded, perhaps wary of being asked to take dance music’s temperature. He did once, after all, declare that he didn’t think America would ever embrace dance music in the mainstream. But as someone who has been in the unique position of seeing it rise, fall, and rise again, does he see any similarities between the EDM takeover and the 90s superstar era?
“It’s a different culture now,” he says. “The rave movement in the UK in the 90s was a phenomenon. There was a wild west approach to everything. Parties were illegal. There’s a lot of things that have been corrected for the better; people are able to party in safe environments. Some people might say it’s taken the edge off it, but it’s very important that you can rave now and be safe.”
Sasha may have the beige resignation of a DJ who is “happy that I’m still getting to be booked for the big things”, but some club promoters aren’t happy with rave culture’s sterile new frontier. I mention a widely shared article in the Spectator by George Hull, one of the founding members of Bloc festival, the UK house and techno event, who wrote angrily that raving had become “a monstrous cabal of overpaid circuit DJs titillating a precious and unimaginative bunch of wimpy pseudo-hedonists at a carefully designed ‘safe space'”.
Sasha concedes, diplomatically: “It doesn’t really make much sense in this day and age. I don’t think anyone would want to go back to the way things were.”
Why not?
There is a long pause.
Hello?
An even longer pause.
“There’s no doubt we had a hell of a lot of fun back in the 90s,” he offers, finally. “But everything is run like a business now. I know so many people that didn’t get their shit together and they’re not in the game any more. You have to take things seriously if you want to maintain a kind of career.”
Things could have been different for Sasha. When researching a story about DJing and mental health, I stumbled across a piece about him from Dom Phillips’s 2009 book, Superstar DJs Here We Go!: the Rise and Fall of the Superstar DJ, which had originally been published in the magazine Muzik. In it, he was depicted as “half underneath his bed at the Soho Grand Hotel, waving a two-litre bottle of vodka in one hand and a bin in the other” during a “lost weekend” in New York. At one point this sort of behaviour would have been glorified as rock’n’roll, its buffoonery sniggered at. Reading the piece now, however, it’s a troubling picture of someone in need of help.
“It was right at the peak of my rise to fame. I just couldn’t cope with it,” says Sasha, who was under pressure to record an album at the time. “I couldn’t cope with everyone knowing me, I couldn’t cope with the lifestyle – it was mad.” The pressure manifested itself in anxiety attacks, which would strike during his DJ sets. “Music would trigger them off,” he continues. “I thought I was losing my mind. The more intense the music, the more intense the anxiety got. It was quite a hard period of time: I was in the DJ booth with thousands of people in front of me going crazy but I was thinking I was losing the plot.”
Mental health in the music industry is a more frequent and crucial conversation now. At the time, “there was no reference point about this kind of thing,” he says. “I had no idea what was happening to me, and I didn’t know who to talk to. It wasn’t until a friend of mine explained to me what had happened to him – because he’d been off work for about three months – and I was like: ‘Oh my God, I’m having the same thing.’ I went to a doctor and started talking [about it]. I found that I was able to deal with it and I haven’t had one for a long time.”
These days, he says, “I think a lot of the behaviour that went on in the 90s doesn’t really exist any more. Times have changed.” Sasha’s own reset button is getting back in the studio. After a stint where he was “touring relentlessly – I hadn’t really had a break for about eight years”, he holed up in LA to make an artist album, Sasha: Scene Delete, for the Late Night Tales series. Inspired by ambient music’s renaissance, led by producers like Jon Hopkins and minimal classical composers like Nils Frahm, Sasha felt it “was the right time” to start sewing together the threads of ideas he had with his production “team”. He sees a link between Scene Delete and Northern Exposure, noting how he “always looks for those melancholic heart-tugging melodies”. He also hopes that it will help him get soundtrack work, admitting at one point that he’s “trying to use this as a calling card” and he “hopes it lands on the right director’s desk one day”.
I’m just about to ask whether the LA lifestyle has rubbed off on him, kale smoothies and all, when there is an even longer pause…
“It’s last orders and I’m keeping my friends waiting,” he announces down the line. We have been conducting our interview by phone, while Sasha is in London to promote Scene Delete. There’s time for one last question, to which he responds in a way that I can only describe as Peak Sensible Sasha, or someone who just wants to get off the phone and hang out with their mates. Or just a DJ stalwart who has masterfully managed to become an EDM godfather and who is just nice and content to carry on taking club crowds on those big old journeys.
Do you hate doing interviews?
“In the past I did. I used to find it very hard to talk. But I’m very happy to be talking to you today. I’m very happy that the Guardian is interested in my music.”
Sasha plays the Coachella festival 15-18 April and 22-24 April. Late Night Tales presents Sasha: Scene Delete is out now
