We at Bangin Beats are super excited to present to you, our readers, an exclusive interview with the pied piper of dance music and a known and extremely respected name in the world of EDM, the one and only Pete Tong who we caught up with just before his set at Kitty Su, The Lalit, New Delhi!

Pete’s radio shows are revered around the world. The proud host of the 9pm-11pm Friday night slot on BBC Radio 1 – ‘The Pete Tong Show’ (or Essential Selection as it is still tagged internationally) regularly attracts over 2 million listeners via a combination of live feed and ‘listen again’ courtesy of the BBC i-Player and international syndication. Last year Pete celebrated two decades at the station, with a 12 hour special including live sets and guest spots from the biggest figures and hottest new stars in electronic music. Tong also hosts and co-produces the legendary Essential Mix show, and as part of the 12 hour takeover, he delivered his first ever studio Essential Mix.

2011 represented another gearshift in Tong’s longstanding relationship with the White Isle, and the island rumours were soon confirmed when Pete announced his return to Pacha with a new brand – All Gone! 17 sold out events followed with everyone from Fatboy Slim to Sasha, Booker Shade to Matthias Tanzman, Guy Gerber to Laurent Garnier all gracing the desks. Pete likes to keep the audience guessing, as a special performance by Usher testifies.

This year, All Gone at Pacha has continued to push the boundaries with everyone from Jamie Jones to Alesso, Seth Troxler to Sebastian Ingrosso all making special appearances along side Pete and most recently Madeon, Otto Knows and Porter Robinson.

We are Bangin Beats, an EDM portal, India being fairly a new country in terms of electronic music and we just sat here with some bloke called, Pete Tong !

Q) To begin with, let’s talk a bit about your past, we heard you started off as a drummer right and then a wedding DJ ?

PETE TONG: Yeah a long, long time ago now. Before DJing became fashionable, before people really thought about doing it as a job.

Q) What inspired you to start DJing ?

PETE TONG: Well I saw a DJ one day and after being in a band I thought that, that was something I was instantly attracted to, seemed like a lot of fun to do and the idea was programming music i suppose like it was back then and give people a good time. So that was it, I seemed to adapt to it fairly quickly . I mean back then it wasn’t that glamorous, it was about doing whatever it took to be able to DJ, so I had a sound system I was running my own parties doing Bar Mitzvahs, Weddings, Indian Weddings.

Q) Indian Weddings? How did that work out?

PETE TONG: I grew up in Gravesend which has actually one of the biggest concentration of Indians, its got one of the biggest Sikh temples. So yeah, I grew up in Kent and I was born in Dartford which is next to Gravesend and my parents were from Gravesend so I was always in this big West Indian and Sikh community.

Q) Amazing, so you started mixing soul music before the terms “electronica” or “EDM” were coined, and this kind of music was even popular?

PETE TONG: Yeah it was just dance music really when I was growing up, it was a bit slower then, in the early days of electro, hip hop and rap and then I mean, there are a lot of english DJ’s in the mid-80′s who were preoccupied with rare music, old music, music that no one else could get, it was kind of cool the way it grew, jazz, funk, whatever and then one day in 1986 I heard house records kind of surfaced before it was even called house and then records started arriving from Chicago from labels like DJ international and tracks and then the rest is history, it kind of changed everything, it was kind of the year zero again when everyone stopped playing old records, everyone just started concentrating on the new thing and there was kind of no looking back. I was running a label at that time FFRR, so we tried to put some records out there, kind of shaping the scene really, even in I think Chicago it was underground, it was kind of ostracised by their own public, and we kind of took the story and made it a bigger story in the UK, then it kind of reverberated across the world.

Q) You resurrected your label FFRR, tell us something about that? As a massive fan of your show I reckon you have a bit of an affection for deep house, you reckon its got something to do with your past, when you were mixing soul music back in the day? If not whats you’re favourite sub-genre of Dance music if you have one?

PETE TONG: Well I just always stand by with what I think is quality music . I mean I always see my role on the show, being to bring whats popular, just bubbling under the surface from the underground to the next level, so the point of me going on the radio is just not only playing Swedish House Mafia or something, that’s kind of moved more into the mainstream so it’s established, its on daytime radio in the UK and US and all over Europe and I’m sure that it’s that way here as well, so in terms of championing the next thing then, is where my passion lies at the moment and yeah it’s true to my roots, have a soulful connection. It’s funny that people in America call it Deep House, we would never say that,To me Deep House kind of means what came out of San Francisco 15 years ago or something, but it’s funny that people find it so different to the EDM sound it’s really the Americans that started calling it Deep House.

Q) Talking a bit on the studio and production from you like to collaborate with Paul Rogers a lot any reason in particular?

PETE TONG: Yeah I’ve locked him in my studio, chained him there, so he can’t leave, I mean a lot of people use people to help them make music and they don’t always get the credit, so I’ve always been the other way around with my studio guys, my engineer, my musicians who work with me, so I do, do a few things without him , but he kind of lives in my space, in my studio in London, So obviously we do a lot of stuff together and yeah, it’s just that if you start DJing now you have to make music, when I was DJing no one made music, you couldn’t, it was too difficult, it was cost prohibitive, but now with the new technology and the laptop’s, studio is only a term, anyone and everyone can have a go at it, I was kind of a late starter but it’s something I really really enjoy, its kind of like therapy than anything else, so yeah I mean it’s fine now.

Q) What was scoring for the movie, “Harry Brown” like? We saw the promo and Chase & Status’s track was on it.

PETE TONG: That was amazing. Its something what I love to do, would have been a bit hard in the British film industry, to find that kind of an opportunity, so I’m glad i got a chance to do that. I knew a bit of the team behind the film so kind of just got in there really early, in fact they didn’t trust us to do the score in the beginning, they didn’t trust me because I’d never done a whole score start to finish, we were always going to share it with someone, I was the music supervisor but I was also trying to do some of the score and then the guy who was doing the score kind of left half way through the score and went off to do a theatre production, that left some space open for me to do more, someone else still came in and helped us but we got to do a much bigger chunk of it and yeah, I obviously got involved with getting Plan B and Chase & Status together.

Q) Every year DJ Mag’s rankings come out and there are loads of fans who are disappointed, artists who are disappointed and the industry has kind of adopted those rankings as a system to judge artists by, do you reckon its alright and agree with the rankings every year or do you think we need a better system in place?

PETE TONG: I don’t know if I do judge really, That chart has been going for a long time, I always think that if you do well in it, use it to the best of your advantage but life doesn’t end if you’re not in it and I’m the best proof of that, I’m not in it anymore (laughs), I think it was quite interesting last year there were an incredible amount of DJ’s like Luciano and Jamie Jones who were not in it . So I think now it’s dominated by a certain type of music, it’s more commercial and people who go about working their Facebook fan pages, I’ve always found that a little bit crass.

Q) You mentioned that you see dance music headed in a particular direction in the next few years. Would you like to elaborate on that?

PETE TONG: Well, just listen to my show as far as that’s concerned (laughs), I mean we’re always looking towards the underground to find what’s new,The U.K. is a very vibrant place well it hasn’t been that way in the last 4-5 years maybe longer when the whole thing started to blow up, the french took over, the swedes took over, the dutch took over, and I think again this year the underground has mostly been ruled by the UK again, basically DJ’s from the UK or DJ’s who are at least UK based, and I think between London and Berlin there is so much creativity going on, So it’s exciting times!

Thank you for the interview!

Interview by Kanov Bagai; Edited by Aditya Seth.

Special Thanks to WMS Entertainment & Percept!

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