The Sunday Times - UK (2022-05-29)

20 The Sunday Times May 29, 2022

NEWS REVIEW

Once it was excess all areas and bricks of

cash. But is the party over for superstar DJs?

is a bit unfortunate given that

he is being sued for

repayment of a £650,

loan. Carl Cox has sunk some

of his DJ wealth into

supporting several

motorcycle racers in events at

the Isle of Man TT, which

starts today after a three-year

hiatus. Paul Oakenfold, or

Oakey to his fans — the

Oakenfolk — has a memoir

published later this year.

For a certain generation, it

will stir a nostalgia for a time

when the supermodel Linda

Evangelista famously said that

she wouldn’t get out of bed

for less than $10,000 and the

superstar DJs didn’t pack

their vinyl for under $50,000.

While some may argue that

DJing requires little more than

the ability to gyrate behind a

turntable and stay up late, an

ability to take several

thousand people on a

continuous many-hours-long

seamless “journey by DJ” is a

rare quality. That’s one of the

reasons these guys (and they

were, at this point, mostly

guys and an awful lot of them

with a very British chewing

gum-grey pallor) were paid so

much and worshipped by so

many. “Son of God?” Mixmag

asked in 1994, of Alexander

Coe, DJ Sasha, who was the

most venerated of them all.

“There’s models and

supermodels, and then

there’s DJs and superstar DJs,”

Dave Levy, one of the talent

managers who got fat off the

back of this new generation of

unwitting celebrities, once

said. Thus, the concept of the

superstar DJ was born.

I

n the swish restaurant of

the Mandarin Oriental

hotel in Knightsbridge,

London, Tony Marnoch,

the 55-year-old DJ known

as Fat Tony, last Wednesday

celebrated the publication of

his autobiography I Don’t

Take Requests. The launch

was “star-studded”, reported

the tabloids, and marked a

long way from his beginnings

playing records in fields to

goggle-eyed ravers.

Looking back now, it is

hard to comprehend the

cultural moment that gripped

the nation in the late 1980s

when a combination of

ecstasy and repetitive beats

swept the youth of Britain off

their feet and on to illegal

dancefloors everywhere from

disused gyms to abandoned

airports. So contagious was

this fever for acid house

dance music that within a

few years the DJs were

idols. The strange oxymoron

of the superstar DJ reigned

supreme.

Recently those 1990s

names have been back in

the news, providing us

with a window into what

they’ve been up to since

their heady heyday.

Robert Gorham,

founder of Bestival,

is better known by

his DJ name Rob

da Bank, which

They were the geeks who honed their

skills at illegal raves and made fortunes.

Now they’re more into organic farms

and bike racing, says Kate Spicer

Turner, a former editor and

now a consultant to the

electronic dance music

industry. “It ended for me

with the millennium.

Everybody got greedy, the

promoters, agents, managers,

and the artists all running

multiple events at overblown

prices. You’d have DJs trying

to do four gigs in one night.”

Coe, aka DJ Sasha,

disagrees. “It didn’t go

wrong,’ he says, “it went

global. We had huge

underground success in the

1990s but the next generation

[of DJs] wrote actual pop

songs and smashed it. But the

truth is, most of us were

happiest in a dark club with

minimal lights and with the

DJ booth not lit up like a

Christmas tree. There’s a

reason why there’s no

pictures from some of our

greatest gigs. No cameras

were allowed. Imagine telling

that to 5,000 kids now.”

He says a new generation

of famous DJs like Tiesto,

David Guetta and the Swedish

House Mafia are pop stars

with huge teams driving their

careers. They’re still on the

geeky side, but with fortunes

estimated in the hundreds of

millions they display a far

more wholesome front. The

highest paid DJ in the world, a

38-year-old Scot called Calvin

Harris, has a fortune of £

million, is an ex of the saintly

Taylor Swift, and teetotal.

How times change. Back in

the day, they said God is a DJ.

Nowadays, Calvin Harris is an

organic farmer on his 138-acre

estate in Ibiza.

song made it on to Top of the

Pops, but when DJs Pete Tong

and Boy George (who quit a

pop career to have a go on the

turntables) sold a million

units of their Ministry of

Sound compilation, the

forces of capitalism started

salivating and weighed in to

milk the subculture.

Ramshackle nightlife

businesses and illegal raves

were swapped for

“superclubs” like Cream and

Ministry of Sound.

As the 1990s came to a

close Cox famously played

out the millennium twice, in

two time zones, first Sydney,

then Hawaii. “It felt like we

were at the middle of fashion

and society, surrounded by

actors and supermodels in a

way we never were before,”

says Tong, 61.

In the end it wasn’t

personal excess but “greed”

that ended the reign of the

superstar DJs, says Ben

In 1997 his client “Oakey”

chose to ostentatiously sign

an exclusivity deal with the

Liverpool nightclub Cream on

the pitch at Chelsea’s

Stamford Bridge, showing us

that big money DJs made big

money club transfers just like

the football players.

What followed was private

jets, DJ babes (disc jockey

groupies) and gigs for

thousands paid in bricks of

cash, and a premier league

spearheaded by the British

and marked by excess. It was

a delirious time for the

musical dweeb who honed

his craft in dingy record shops

and basement nightclubs.

Keith Richards they were not.

Yet, says Marnoch, they made

more money than bands,

“which is ridiculous as most

DJs are goddam ugly. Classic

faces for radio.”

Despite its size, the dance

music scene was largely

underground. The occasional

We we re

surrounded

by actors and

supermodels

Pete Tong plays to a packed festival dance tent in 2008

ANDREW AITCHISON/IN PICTURES LTD/CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES

War in Ukraine had the summit’s suits fretting about the

future of their business-class world, but the party isn’t

over yet, writes Peter Frankopan. We’re in too deep.

T

he mood in Davos last week

was decidedly glum. Usually

awash with celebrities touting

worthy causes, high-rollers

talking of good times ahead

and global leaders rubbing

shoulders in the snow, this

year’s event was all about who

could give the more sobering

outlook on the months and

years to come.

Europe had been struck by a thunder-

bolt, hurled by Vladimir Putin when he

invaded Ukraine, said the German chan-

cellor, Olaf Scholz, the only G7 leader to

attend the summit in the Alps. “We are

experiencing a watershed,” he said. “His-

tory is at a turning point.”

Veteran financier George Soros put it

more bluntly. “The Russian invasion may

turn out to be the beginning of World War

Three, and our civilisation may not sur-

vive it.” What many of the assessments

had in common was the conviction that

the acceleration of exchange that has

characterised the last three decades is at

risk, if not already over. Globalisation,

said Scholz, which had provided North

America and Europe “with reliable

growth, a high level of added value and

low inflation, is coming to an inevitable

end”. It is a consensus that has been

building since long before Putin started

the war.

During Donald Trump’s presidency,

concerted efforts were made by the US to

recalibrate trade with China, in particu-

lar, with a set of tariffs designed to protect

American businesses and hurt Chinese

exports. The US chose isolationism and

protectionism not only in terms of trade

but of a wider set of issues, notably cli-

mate change, which served as a signal

that the age of global co-operation was at

an end.

Nor was Trump alone in this

regard. The past decade has seen

leaders in Brazil, Turkey and Hun-

gary revel in defiance and nation-

alism, and put a heavy emphasis

on challenging the international

legal order. China, which has

transformed beyond recogni-

tion in the past 30 years, has

also sought to claim the bene-

fits of globalisation while pro-

tecting its own economy. As

Anthony Blinken, the US sec-

retary of state, put it last week

in a much-anticipated strat-

egy speech, there is much for

all to gain from China being

deeply integrated in the global

trade system — the problem is

one of asymmetry: Beijing’s

aim, he said, is “to make China

less dependent on the world,

and the world more dependent

on China”.

So, what the sages of Davos pre-

dicted last week is not new — but

nor is it quite as certain as they sug-

gest. For one thing, while deglobali-

sation sounds plausible, even inevita-

ble, statistics and data suggest it is

unlikely. Last year global trade hit a new

high of $28.5 trillion, according to the UN,

rising above pre-pandemic levels —

despite the fact some parts of the world

continue to struggle with the coronavi-

rus. Of course, the Russian attack on

Ukraine will have an impact on these fig-

ures, above all because of the effect on

food and energy prices, as well as

increases to transportation costs. A new

report by the World Bank on the impact

of the war notes there will be a global

slowdown as a result.

But far

from the decoupling and deglobalising

being touted in many boardrooms and

ministries in the West, the trend else-

where is precisely the opposite: flurries

of trade agreements; the deepening of

trade ties; the lowering of tariffs and bar-

riers. The most obvious of these is the

Regional Comprehensive Economic Part-

nership (RCEP), a massive free-trade

agreement concluded in November 2020

that links much of the Asia-Pacific region

into a bloc containing about 30 per cent

of the world’s population and responsi-

ble for 30 per cent of global GDP. Con-

ceived to include the US — which pulled

out under Trump — the RCEP has been

projected to add $186 billion annually to

the global economy, with future gains in

the coming decades.

It was easy to miss last week’s

announcement by President Biden of the

Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, an

initiative aimed at boosting trade, invest-

ing in clean energy and infrastructure

and improving supply-chain resilience.

Nor does the reaction to Russia’s inva-

sion suggest the world is dividing into

clearly drawn blocs, courted or domi-

nated by Washington, Beijing or others.

On the ground, countries have, for the

most part, chosen not to take sides,

instead weighing up alternatives. For

example, the reluctance of India or the

UAE to take a position over Russia and

abstaining from UN votes reveals much

about this instinct not to be dragged into

a distant conflict.

N

or should we assume we are in a

position to go it alone. Decades of

misunderstanding and underesti-

mating Russia and China have left

an absence of resources to main-

tain economic, and even political, social

and military independence. Deep inte-

gration of supply chains lowered prices

but opened up vulnerabilities; those do

not vanish in a deglobalising world, if that

is indeed what we are facing. Historians

of industrialisation in the 18th and 19th

centuries may point out that bringing

jobs back home can create benefits,

from scientific innovation to social and

political reform, but it takes time and

money to close factories overseas

and build them here, and doing so

in a period of high inflation and con-

tinued pandemic uncertainty

requires a stiff constitution as well

lower profits in the short term.

Building up energy independ-

ence will also take many years and

cost billions. Switching away from

oil and gas, partly to minimise

imports from, and the leverage

available to, Russia easily obscures

the fact that a low-carbon world is a

high-metals one — dependent on

copper, cobalt, rare earths and

more. Most of these resources either

lie in Russia or China, or have been

effectively monopolised, above all by

the latter in Africa and elsewhere. Then

there are sectors such as pharmaceuti-

cals, where global production is heavily

dependent on China for key active ingre-

dients, with India’s giant pharma sector

reliant on China for as much as 90 per

cent of some drugs.

Discussions have been taking place in

America, with evaluations of strategic

vulnerabilities, planning around

resource acquisition and a “whole of gov-

ernment” response to mitigate future

threats. It should be a priority too in

Westminster.

That, surely, is what they should have

been talking about in Davos. There is

much thinking and planning to be done

before anyone jumps out of the frying

pan and into the fire.

Peter Frankopan is professor of global

history at Oxford University

Ignore the doom-mongers

of Davos — Putin hasn’t

torpedoed globalisation

ILLUSTRATION: JAMES COWEN