Rachel Rixham: Pleasure to catch up with you today Gareth, how has your day been so far? and where in the world are you located right now?
Gareth Emery: Not bad. I’m on a train from London to Manchester heading home after a great weekend touring in Russia with Blake Jarrell.
Rachel: It is a well known fact that most artists are their biggest critic, and can sometimes find it hard to appreciate or notice how far they have come. At what point in your career did you finally accept that you had made a name for yourself?
Gareth: Er, that’s a hard one. Probably when I played 7 hours at Sankeys in Manchester this March and we sold out five weeks in advance. I mean, we’d sold out clubs before, but I could always think “It wans’t me, it was because we had a great supporting line up”, or whatever. The fact that we’d sold out a club so far in advance without a single other act on the bill, no opening or closing DJ, no back room (we just played my music throughout the whole club), was something of a realisation people were actually coming to see me. That was pretty mad.
Rachel: Have you ever produced a track based around an emotional upheaval in your life? If so what is the track called and what does it mean to you?
Gareth: Not really. I know a lot of musicians write well during the bad times in their lives, but I’m kinda the opposite. If things are going well, I tend to be more productive in the studio. If life is shit, I don’t want to make music.
Rachel: What positive and negative changes have you seen happen in the music industry, since your career first started, and how have they effected you as an artist along the way?
Gareth: The internet, to both, and I think it’s pretty clear how it’s been both positive and negative. It’s helped to spread dance music across the world by making it more accessible, it’s brought us a lot of new producers who couldn’t have afforded to buy studios but can easily download software, and it’s meant that as DJs we get to visit places we never would have before. But on a negative, illegal downloads have sucked a lot of the money out of producing music, which means that being a full time dance music producer is no longer a full time job. It doesn’t affect me, or other DJs, as we make a good living from gigs, but what about people who ONLY want to produce music but don’t want to DJ or play live? Well the answer is, most of those guys have fucked off and left dance music, and gone and done something that pays. And people will go “Oh, well they were only interested in the money then” but that’s wrong. Most of these guys would be happy making minimum wage if they could make a living making records, but when they make less than what you’d make at McDonald’s, they obviously move on and do something else to support themselves and their families. Some might be web designers, some might be in other forms of media, some in film, but whatever the case, we’ve lost a lot of very talented people and it’s extremely sad.
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