They seek him here, they seek him there. Dan Prince reveals the full exclusive story behind the man in the mask who has given clubland the biggest kick up the arse in years.
Welcome back to DMCWORLD Jags. The last time we spoke I asked you what you thought your best ever release was. You said it was your son who was born on January 8th. So how have the first 12 months been?
“Dan it has been awesome. He has just broken through the baby barrier into my studio funnily enough to come and say hello. He is at the age when he is becoming a presence in the world and noticing things around him. He is great.”
Cool. I was reading an interview you did a little while ago today and you said that the music format you prefer to use in your DJing sets is hip hop and drum & bass, but that you would never ever play any of today’s hip hop?
“To be honest I fucking hate hip hop at the moment, it upsets me. Where have all the balls gone? They have all been removed and I’ll never include it in any of my sets. I’m comfortable playing 90s stuff and obviously the golden age of hip hop, but my sets these days are more electro, dub step, drum & bass and house. People like Public Enemy and Eric B & Rakim had something to say and the beats were wicked, now the beats are shit with weird audio tuned lyrics, it’s not for me.”
What music was coming out of your speakers growing up?
“My pop was a DJ and radio producer in the 70’s and 80’s. He produced the first reggae radio shows in the UK, he helped start the career of David Rodigan and also produced a load of disco and country & western records. He was a huge record collector and we had around 80,000 records in the house – like every wall in every room had thousands of vinyls stacked up. He had whole areas for different styles and genres of music. There was a whole TV theme tune part, rare KPM records, mad disco stuff, all the early Hip-Hop records, jazz shit, pop. Everything. I used to help him sort them out and when record dealers came to the house I would pull out the vinyls they asked for. I was only 7 or 8 years old then. But I somehow memorised the covers and names. I guess I was drawn to the disco stuff mostly. I loved the cinematic, cheesy feel of it. I must have checked out pretty much the whole collection. It was a wonderful and lovely time.”
You have never really spoken about how this whole Jaguar phenomenen began. Sure we know you from Radio 1, your fantastic DJ sets and your Toolroom 2011 compilation must have been on everyone’s christmas list. But how did it all begin?
“Around about 2000 my mate tipped me off that our pal Theo who was DJ Touche and now Fake Blood needed a driver for his gigs. I jumped at it because as per usual I was broke. My early clubbing life was spent at real dark reggae clubs and night’s at The Africa Centre in London with Jazzie B and his Soul II Soul collective. Usually I was only the white guy in the club and I always felt slightly out of place no matter who I was with or how often I’d been there. Now all of a sudden with Theo I was walking into modern dance music clubs surrounded by girls and lazers – and Theo was mashing it up! We’d be at Gatecrasher up in Sheffield or Fabric and he’d be playing some hip hop, breakbeat, house and then electro – and people were loving it. I was used to being surrounded by people looking mean and smoking ganja nodding their heads to the beats, not this craziness. At the time I told people I was a DJ, but it wasn’t really DJing like you and me know it. I’d be playing at mate’s houses and little bars being paid £50 for eight hours work. These clubs however were totally different and I thought to myself, fuck me, I can do this. And that’s when the first ideas started trickling into my head.”
What did you think when you began to hear all of this different music all around you? You’d been used to smokey clubs filled with bass, attitude and rhythms. Now you were driving around the UK listening to mad new electronic music?
“Well I’d never checked it out before then. As you say, I was into the more downtempo stuff. Back then when I heard new music sampling my beloved hip hop I would give it the whole “fuck this shit” B-boy attitude. I would get personally upset if I heard a hip hop or drum n’ bass sample on a new track. Seriously! I was a real hip hop and bass fascist. But listening to Theo and then people like The Scratch Perverts really inspired me. I’d go and see the Perverts at Fabric and they’d play some rock music and mix it into jungle and then house, it was unreal. I could see they had the hip hop skills but they were playing other sounds and I could see that it was actually okay to scratch on house records, it was okay to fuck around with it all. It gave my mind a real switch in the way I thought about my music. At the time I was a hip hop journalist for Blues & Soul magazine which I dropped straight away and before I knew it I was at home on my own listening to all of my newly discovered ‘guilty pleasure records’ that nobody knew I was getting into.”
But that was years ago, the Jaguar Skills explosion is a recent thing.
“It is Dan. By now it was about 2001. I said to myself if I am going to do this I am going to have to really train up, really give it 100%. Which I did. But I just couldn’t get any gigs. At the time my then girlfriend worked for this barefoot doctor type of guy. A real guru who wrote self help books on hands on healing, kung fu and ti-chi. He had a house in the hills in northern Spain and he said to us why not move over there and help him with his work. Well I wasn’t doing anything back in the UK so I thought fuck all this DJing for a few quid. I’ll fuck off to Spain and illustrate his books and see what happens. So I sold all my clothes, records and decks, made a final mix tape for my mates as a goodbye present and got on a plane. And I thought that would be it. And it was for three years. Then one day I got a phone call from a friend back in England who wanted to know whether I wanted to go to Ibiza and DJ for Jade Jagger. No word of a fucking lie. Apparently he’d given one of my goodbye mix tapes to her and she’d been playing it all of the time. I said to him “you could have bloody asked me when I had some records”. Well anyway, I had a feeling this could turn into something so I got myself a bank loan, bought some decks and a laptop and invested in Serato.”
You must have loved that being a computer geek…
“Absolutely. It was a mind blowing experience discovering I could edit a tune and play it as a record! Anyway I did the gig at Jade’s beautiful place in Ibiza and it was unbelievable. Duran Duran had reformed to do the night, Jay Z and Kate Moss were there partying and there was me in the corner on my own thinking, ‘well this is slightly nutty’. I was fucking starving and had no money on me so I was trying to figure out how I could get into the kitchen and steal some food out of the fridge without anyone clocking me. Then this guy from Pacha wandered over and told me that they were looking for a new resident in The Global Room and was I interested. Was I interested? Fuck yeah.”
The Global Room is one of the best little rooms on the island, perfect for a proper little block party. Right up your street!
“I really upped my game in there. I learnt so much, it was like I was at university or something. A season in Ibiza is 16 weeks long and every week your skills get better and better. If they don’t, you may as well fuck off home. I also picked up Ableton at that time which was essential as I was DJing before people like Mark Ronson and Jazzy Jeff and I wanted to play the big new records that they were going to play as well that night. So I had to play the records differently with some re-edits. I didn’t know the rules of DJing back then and there were a few occasions when I got the filthy looks from the headline DJ going on afterwards for getting the crowd hyped too early on. You could say I was that arseole warm up guy now and again! Anyway, this one night I was playing this mash up I’d done and Ronson came running up screaming ‘what’s this, who’s done this?’. I told him I had and he asked for it there and then. A little while later I’d heard that he played it on his radio show in New York and that MistaJam had played it on Radio 1, which I suppose was where my first connection with the station took place.”
Where did the whole Jaguar Skills image come from?
“I was sat around one day doodling some super heroes characters, I love that shit. And I thought to myself, there really can be nothing cooler than being a superhero who is a ninja and a DJ all rolled into one. Three of the coolest things on planet earth all together! So I continued my scribbling and then I thought, what about if I give it a bit of a twist and made this character a bit of a bum who wore a mask and jeans, this was before Kick-Ass came out remember. So I created this anti-super hero guy who is a DJ but other than that is shit. He’s stoned all the time and just fed up of people keep asking him for help. I’d just been watching Jaguar Wong in the film Ninja Terminator and he was about to get beaten up. He turns around and says something like ‘oh okay, you want to see my Jaguar Skills?’. And bam! There we had it, Jaguar Skills was born. I drew the logo and it was finished. I’d created the character before the DJ had actually been booked for a gig! So if any film makers or publishers need a comic strip out there, it’s all here waiting for you!”
Back to Radio 1 where millions of people know you of course – how did the shows kick off on Saturday nights?
“I came back to the UK and my mate told me via Zane Lowe that Trevor Nelson was looking for mixes for his new show. I was totally broke again by this point so I thought fuck it and did a mix which was then aired. Then someone fell ill at the last minute and so I did another one. I realised that the whole Jaguar concept was all ready and it was solid – I had the start, middle and end…it was a radio show within a show with my voice sounding like a broadcaster from the 1920s! I knew that this was going to be life or death for me and so all the mixes I did for Radio 1 were the best I could possibly do. And people bloody loved them.”
I knew you were going on for greatness, but what did you think when all of a sudden you were flavour of the month in the Chris Moyles studio with him raving about you day after day?
“It was a massive boost when Chris started mentioning the mixes but I never asked him to plug me. It was great that he was talking about the mixes but in the same way I did wonder whether I was going to be tarred with the whole Radio 1 brush. I never hang out with any of the other DJs and go to any of the parties. At the end of the day I simply love music, I eat music and I think Radio 1 loved the fact that I wasn’t scared to play anything how commercial it was. If I like an 80s pop record, fuck it I’ll play it. Last week I found an instrumental version on ‘The Kids From Fame’ theme and I thought I’ll have that! When the Back To Mine people coming knocking on my door it’ll be perfect!”
Woah hold on there Jags, ‘Kids From Fame’? Fuck. Myself and my mate Paul Harris used to run a weekly night at Nicky Holloway’s Velvet Underground and I made him play that record as the last tune every week!
“Ha ha! Well there you go, it’s a great record Dan. Fuck what everyone thinks, play what you love.”
When though did the being seen in public as Jaguar Skills kick off?
“I had the character and I had the music all down to a tee, but I never for one minute expected to be wearing a mask in nightclubs playing records – that’s nuts right? One day Trevor Nelson asked me to go and DJ at a BBC showcase party and said to me ‘you have to wear your mask, you do know that don’t you? I haven’t helped create this figure of mystery for nothing!’. I was like, no way Trevor. I will look like a right dick standing there with a wooly mask on – no fucking way. But here’s the funny thing. Usually I’m a pretty shy guy, but as soon as I put that balaclava on it transformed me. I came out of my shell! I thought this is actually good fun. Sure, we’ve had the headgear designed a bit better now and it’s all gone bespoke and it’s comfy but during a night when I’m DJing, I get this half and half feeling that I’m either Mickey Mouse or the coolest man in the world. I am very aware of what’s going on, I analyse things all of the time, too much to be honest. But I have trained so hard to become a good DJ and I know I am good enough Dan. I really do. The mask isn’t a gimmick in my eyes, if I was a shit DJ then the whole Jaguar Skills character would be a joke. Sure I look mental, but I fucking rock it. I can’t tell you the amount of times when I have been DJing at a festival before some superstar DJ and I can see them shaking. I can actually see them fucking shaking wondering how the hell they are going to follow me on the decks. I swear I have blown every top 10 DJ away with my sets before they placed their first record on after me.”
Don’t you find it amusing when you read certain magazines where they write scathing comments on DJs who don’t play their own records in their sets, I find that unbelievable?
“I do. It’s gone completely full circle. I watch DJs and all they play is like an hour and a half of their own music, which is great and good for them. But I don’t do that, well not yet anyway – watch this space! But that’s exactly how the art of DJing started in the first place, DJs playing other people’s music – and they got slated for that back in the day with stupid comments like ‘they’re getting paid how much? For playing other people’s music?!’. Now we’re getting slated for not playing our own music. Craziness. I’m not the first to DJ like this, DJs like Jazzy Jeff used to play like me, it’s nothing new…I’m just the next guy in line.”
You have a massive UK Tour kicking off next month entitled Jaguar Skills and His Amazing Friends. Aside from your lightning-quick mixing skills, what else can we expect, who is on board?
“There’s loads coming on the road like Flux Pavilion, Brookes Brothers, Sway, DJ Cable, Zinc and my buddy DJ @War who is an amazing producer. With the tour I’m just trying to make it an interesting night with interesting music. I’ve told all the DJs to play whatever they like and if you want to play something like the theme music to Kids From Fame, then go for it! From my days clubbing in the company of DJs like Jazzie B, they played anything they liked and it sounded so dope and made everyone dance. If you can deliver a tune into a different light and make people really listen to it and get them smiling, well that’s the key.”
How did it go on the American tour last year, did they get you?
“It was fun and mental. Playing in warehouses in San Fransisco looking down at the crowd and knowing they were thinking, ‘who is this dickhead with a mask on?’ Anyway I murdered it, it went off everywhere and was hilarious seeing all these kids down the front giving me gang signs.”
And finally, what’s next from Jaguar Skills…
“I am finally working on my own tunes with some different style producers and it’s going well. I’m lucky enough to have met some top producers in different genres, some really big names and I’d love to make an album just like my mixes – but instead of using other people’s tunes, use my own tunes. They’ve just all got to fit together! This will hopefully take me to the next stage. I have too much creativity just to be a DJ, I have a good ear and it’s great that I’m hooking up with my buddies and making records that I will one day be able to use in my own sets. I’m a happy guy.”
The Tour in fulll…
24th February – Manchester, Sankeys
2nd March – Bristol, Thekla
3rd March – Cardiff, Glam
6th March – Newcastle, Tup Tup Palace
9th March – Nottingham, Rescue Rooms
10th March – Portsmouth, Guildhall
16th March – Liverpool, Chibuku
17th March – London, Scala
23rd March – Norwich, Waterfront
24th March – Birmingham, HMV Institute
30th March – Oxford, Oxford Academy
07th April – Northampton, Road Mender
Tickets are on sale now from www.gigsandtours.com.
Make sure you get yours ninja-quick!
More information at:
www.jaguarskills.com
www.twitter.com/jaguarskills