David Guetta. The World Is Not Enough

I rarely dress up for an interview. Conversations with the lords of vinyl happen in whatever the night caught me in, usually comfortable casual. But for a talk with David Guetta, this year's main newcomer on the glamorous disco scene, I decided to fish a jacket out of the wardrobe. In vain – Guetta turned out to be a cheerful, easygoing Frenchman who treats dress codes with irony.

My high placing greatly surprised me. That hundred is mostly trance and psy-trance DJs. And house is a rarity there. So I'm pleased. But there are loads of excellent DJs who are universally recognized, yet have never once made it into that hundred. Louie Vega, for example.

Not quite. On the whole it's rather good for business to get into a ranking like that.
It's another matter that there are currents and tendencies this Top 100 doesn't reflect at all. In one country there are loads of popular DJs who fill stadiums, but in another they wouldn't be let in to play at a middling club. And popularity itself is an ambiguous thing too. Many DJs are known only to a handful of people, but their skill is worthy of the highest praise.

You know, it's something amazing. Our gigs constantly overlap. For example, two weeks ago I was doing my Fuck Me I'm Famous party in London, at Ministry of Sound, while Laurent was performing the very same day at The End. I found out from the poster. In general, when something like that happens, we always call each other.

Heh. It was a very funny story. L'Oréal racked their brains for a long time over which DJ to pick for a global ad campaign. This one is known here but not there, that one's too fat, and this one's completely bald. Anyway, in the end several DJs were selected and photo tests were done with them. And they chose me. Honestly, I was rather surprised, since I don't consider myself any special beauty. But that ad reflected well on the promotion of my music.

I'm not very fond of all this terminology and I try to stay free of it. I like house, and electro, and pop, and hip-hop. And all of it finds reflection in my sets. I try not to fall into a narrow stylistic rut. There are loads of underground DJs who play some kind of shit, yet in the underground their music is considered cool. I'm guided solely by my own instinct. I love what I play. As a producer, I can take some wild bass line and end up putting out a pop song.

Earlier something like that would hardly have been possible. In France there are rather few clubs that play this kind of music. But here globalization may do its thing and all of this might become popular in Germany and Britain. As far as I know, Black Strobe are already quite popular in London right now. So a wave might come together. If we're lucky.

Yes. But it's actually just an optimistic song. It's not my fault that we live in such a spoiled world.