A very tired man is on the other end of the phone. David Guetta is somewhere in Peru. Later today he'll be in Guayaquil, in Ecuador, for a gig. Tomorrow it's Bogotá, in Colombia. Yesterday it was Chile. Or was it Argentina? Life on the road is amazing, he says, more than once, but in the tone of a man unsure what country he was in yesterday.
Guetta remembers the summer of 2014 as the summer of jet lag. Each Monday and Thursday he was in Ibiza, to DJ at the Ushuaia and Pacha clubs. The rest of the week he hurtled around European festivals or, in August and September, went back and forth from Las Vegas.
“I won’t do that again,” the Frenchman says of his summer schedule. “I had jet lag every week for months. The logistics were a problem.” An infamous YouTube clip that shows Guetta staring into space at the Tomorrowland festival over the summer begins to make a lot of sense when you take that schedule into account.
Few will have much sympathy for the superstar DJ crisscrossing the Atlantic, of course: he is one of a select band of men who make a heck of a lot of money playing records for a living.
Cock of the walk
The Guetta of today is in marked contrast to the DJ and producer of a few years ago. Back in 2011 he had just released a new album,
Nothing But the Beat
, and was cock of the walk. Every track he touched appeared to turn into a Saturday-night anthem. When it came to dance-floor pop Guetta was the man with the plan, with tracks like
I Gotta Feeling
,
When
Love Takes Over
and
Titanium
to call on. If you were spending the weekend whooping it up at a mainstream club or bar you were whooping it up to a Guetta soundtrack.
He was also a big winner when it came to the US electronic dance music (EDM) revolution. The birthplace of house music may have taken a long time to catch up with the rest of the world when it came to clubs and dance music, but it caught up with a vengeance – and Guetta was perfectly placed to take advantage.
He turned up at the sharp end of the bill for events such as Ultra and Electric Daisy Carnival, found himself in demand at the megaclubs that opened for business, and cashed in to the tune of $30 million in earnings in 2013 alone.
But, like some of his peers, Guetta believes that the EDM boom is coming to a close. “I feel like we’re at the end of the cycle,” he says. “The sounds have become so hard, and sometimes it’s not very melodic. The hard stuff was exciting at the time, but it isn’t sustainable. I think it’s reaching a limit, and I think it’s why deep house came back so strong. Music is always about reaction to a previous movement. I think EDM is still going to be strong, but in a different way.”
And there are new territories to conquer. Every trip Guetta makes to South America sees him play to bigger crowds. “The best gig I did this year was two days ago, at Creamfields in Argentina. It was insane, my friend.” And what about the worst gig he’s done this year? “I forget those ones very quickly.”
When Guetta listens to the deep house records currently in vogue he’s reminded of the tracks he used to pick up somwhere like Black Market Records, in London, and play in clubs in Paris. Things have gone full circle, he says. “Some of the records remind me of what I was playing in 1991 or 1992. This music is perfect for clubs, but when you play for hundreds of thousands of people, at an event or festival like Ultra, it’s hard to play that kind of music and get that sexy club environment. It will be interesting to see what happens if the music continues to go in that way.”
His new album, Listen, is a clear sign that he thinks "electronic music which will be more song-based" will keep him in gold and platinum discs for some time to come. When he talks about the album, which features collaborations with Emeli Sandé, John Legend, The Script, Nicki Minaj and Sia, among others, he talks about the songwriting process.
“It was very different for me from grabbing an instrumental and working with an artist directly, like I did before. I made the songs first with guitar or keyboards, then I’d use electronic instruments to give it a dance edge and later on, when the song was sounding perfect to me, work out who would be the best singer for the song. This is why I think it’s the most personal album I’ve made.”
‘I didn’t believe in myself’
It’s also the first album where Guetta found himself having a crisis of confidence about what he was doing. “When I was making
Listen
I was worried. I didn’t believe in myself, and I was doubting myself every minute. I felt terrible. When I did
Nothing B
ut the Beat
I’d done
One Love
before that, and that had been hugely successful. I knew my sound, and I knew how to make it.
"Making Listen was the exact opposite. I made a choice to go into something I didn't fully understand. I didn't have the recipe, so there was a lot of experimentation involved. I spent months not being able to come up with any interesting idea, and that was very scary."
How the new material will go down with pop radio, which has made Guetta a successful artist and producer, remains to be seen. Tracks such as Dangerous fit neatly into the Guetta template, but others may need a couple of remixes to get that big-room boom.
Does he think Listen is going to move the crowds who already know him for something slightly different? "I wish I had the answer to that. What I want to do now is create music which is a lot more emotional and which is less about a physical reaction. There are different ways to do this, and you can do it with a tune like Dangerous. I want to combine the soulful stuff but with hard musical parts. I love playing to big crowds, but I love the emotion in songs, too."
And with that he’s gone. Ecuador – or is it Uruguay? – is calling.
Cash cow: How Sin City became Rave City
Las Vegas has become the US base for superstar DJs such as David Guetta, which is one of the many side effects of the American electronic dance music boom.
Although EDM draws hundreds of thousands to open-air events and festivals, it’s the new-school Las Vegas clubs that are the money-spinners for the A-list DJs.
Clubs like XS Nightclub, Hakkasan, 1 Oak, Light and Tao compete in terms of cold, hard cash for the services of Guetta, Avicii, Skrillex, Tiesto, Calvin Harris and Deadmau5, all of whom can earn up to $400,000 per night.
With falling casino revenues and stagnating convention income, Las Vegas hotels have invested heavily in upgrading their clubs and booking the biggest names in the business to pull a crowd.
It seems to have paid off, with hundreds of thousands now flocking to Sin City for dancing rather than gambling. Last summer’s Electric Daisy Carnival in the city drew more than 400,000 people and reported a $322 million economic windfall for the city.
More clubs are in the pipeline, with the likes of Sam Nazarian, the Los Angeles club owner, moving into town with the Life space in his SLS hotel. It would appear that Vegas is aiming to do for clubs what it did for casinos.
Listen is on Atlantic/Parlophone
