Way Out West DJ actually travels way out west
Nick Warren has seen a lot of strange things in his decade of professional
DJing, but nothing prepared him for his first visit to Buenos Aires.
"They do this mad thing at the clubs here, where if they like a record,
they’ll sit on the floor during the breakdown," the British DJ laughs.
"As the tune starts to build back up, they’ll all slowly get back
up and as the kick comes back in, the place just explodes. It’s the most
amazing thing I’ve ever seen in a club. Sasha told me about it first,
and he had started to panic because he thought they hated him."
Fortunately, Warren has little to worry about. During a recent poll of readers
in a British dance music magazine, the seasoned jock was ranked as one of the
top 10 spinners in the world, along with the likes of Sasha, John Digweed, Danny
Tenaglia and Paul Oakenfold. Warren is a member of a premier league, men who
travel the world to play for thousands of people and get paid rather well for
it--but he doesn’t take any of his success for granted.
"It’s commitment, really, and what you find is that the people who
are the most successful--like Sasha, John Digweed and Danny Tenaglia--are people
who got into this purely for the music," he explains. "Not for fame
or stardom or money, just the music. I think that’s the most important
thing, because for a lot of young DJs that get into it because they want to
fly around the world, play all the big clubs and get paid a good wage, it’s
going to be very hard for them to become successful."
Song sung Blue
For all of his success, Warren is acutely familiar with disappointment. As
one-half of Way Out West, Warren has endured a grueling battle to release a
record that’s already six months old and four years overdue. In 1997,
he and partner Jody Wisternoff released their debut recording on the British
label Deconstruction. Blue was a blueprint for the entire progressive breaks
movement, which combined the fierce energy of breakbeats with the epic quality
of trance. The album spawned two U.K. chart hits, "Ajure" and "The
Gift," which gave them some clout when the axe began swinging, cutting
labelmates Deep Dish, Dave Clarke and Justin Robertson (a.k.a. Lionrock) loose
in the process.
In the meantime, Warren and Wisternoff were balancing DJ gigs with studio work,
completing a concept album that ended up getting scrapped and recycled into
what became the sinister Intensify. Deconstruction released two promotional
singles, "UB Devoid" and "The Fall" and serviced British
media with advance copies of the album. The reviews were nothing short of sterling,
whetting the appetite of an audience eager to hear what Way Out West had in
store for them.
Then the call came, a month before Intensify was due to be released. "Our
A&R person left," Warren sighs. "Then the head of Deconstruction’s
A&R left. There was no one left at the label who knew us or understood what
we were doing, so we fell into the laps of the people who market 5ive and Whitney
Houston and they didn’t know what to do with us. They ended up giving
us back the album, but the deal we made was such that if we released it through
another label, they’d get a percentage--and a fucking good percentage
of it, too. What really pissed me off was that it took loads of time to get
to that point. We got all these five-star reviews in the magazines and now we’ve
got to try and get those reviews again."
Luckily, Intensify was picked up by U.K. imprint Distinctive, which has led
to a tentative North American distribution deal with Vancouver-based Nettwerk
Records. In fact, it was Nettwerk that asked Way Out West to visit Canada on
a quick promotional tour and the duo were more than happy to oblige. "We
don’t get a chance to play together very often," Warren laughs. "For
me, I don’t get to play more than a couple of Way Out West tracks in a
set, but this time we’ll get to play most of the tracks on the album.
It’s exciting, but it’s a bit daunting as well--let’s hope
it all goes well."
Get with preprogrammed
Warren feels like he is in his element in a club. He enjoys the entire vibe,
hanging out to meet people and hear different DJs play. When he’s behind
the decks, he rips through a funky mix of breakbeats and progressive house that
he fits together on the fly. Warren says he’s uncomfortable with preprogramming
his set, a chore he’s had to endure while mixing his signature Global
Underground discs, including the recent Amsterdam volume. Unlike other DJs who
have been given the nod to contribute a mix to the series, Warren prefers to
mix everything live rather than dump tracks into a computer. Of course, when
he only has a select number of licensed tracks to use rather than his trusty
record box, the sessions become rather trying.
"It can be tough to make them all sound like a set," he says. "You
can’t just choose two records you like and mix them together, because
all the legalities prevent you from doing so. Even though I’m pleased
with the mix most of the time, there’s always a lack of spontaneity to
them. It’s almost impossible for me to listen to some of them after they’ve
been recorded."
Playing live is a liberating experience, Warren says, because it’s a
setting where anything is possible. He tries to keep his schedule down to no
more than five gigs a month, which allows him to listen to new music and keep
his set fresh. He figures he spends close to $3,000 a month on new records,
which he views as a wise investment in his business.
"That’s what keeps me excited and playing well," he explains.
"Once you get to a certain stage, there’s no option but to play a
good set. If someone flies you all that way and pays you all that money, you
have to come up with the goods. I’m not bemoaning that kind of pressure,
but it’s a different kind of DJing than you’ll find playing in a
club every week for the same crowd."
Nightclubbing
The constant challenge is always balanced by the reward of seeing the dance
community become global. Hearing what new underground producers in North America
are creating is exciting for Warren, but he also hopes that the whole scene
will mature as much as the music has--for its own sake. "In the U.K., the
rave scene is disappearing and moving into the clubs, and this needs to happen
in North America," he says emphatically. "Raves were around in the
U.K. back in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, and it was just a bunch of
kids getting really fucked up. They were driving home and killing themselves
on the roads or whatever. No society could accept that. I’ve noticed these
sorts of things in North America now, where young kids are doing loads of drugs
all at the same time and it’s fucking dangerous—it’s not worth
dying for. I know it’s a pain in the ass to get into clubs, having to
queue up and everything, and it may not be as free-spirited as the rave scene,
but it’s no good when a teenager is dying after taking a cocktail of drugs."
Happily, Warren has noticed how different parts of the world have hung onto
dance music’s underground edge, a quality that has ebbed away in the U.K.
thanks to the rise of commercial dance music radio. "Stations like [BBC]
Radio One are really bad on the dance side of things--they don’t play
good dance music. They play stuff like [Zombie Nation’s] ‘Kernkraft
400’ and when the clubs in the U.K. open up at nine in the evening, it’s
full of young kids who want to hear the music they’ve heard all week on
the radio. Keeping it underground is really important, especially since everything
is evolving every day."
