‘I’m of an era, really, where nobody ever got old,” says Pete Tong with a smile. Certainly not in the rave scene. “When you start, you never think you’re going to be doing it for that long. But then, equally, you don’t think it’s going to only be for, like, two years or 10 years. You just don’t think about it.” The dawn of dance music in the 80s was far too exciting to worry about when the party might end – and there is no sign it is about to. Tong is still presenting his BBC Radio 1 dance music show 35 years later, as well as running a record label. Last year, he says, he had more gigs than he has for ages.
Tong, who is 65, was talking to fellow DJ and longtime friend Carl Cox (63) about it the other day. “We’re just so blessed and lucky to still be doing it – being able to play music to people and doing what we loved as kids.”
He has escaped the burnout (and worse fates) of many other DJs who started around the same time, but he is not unscathed. Hearing loss is an occupational hazard for DJs and ageing ravers, and Tong’s latest mission is to raise awareness of it (untreated, it can affect mental health and cause social withdrawal). In the 2004 mockumentary It’s All Gone Pete Tong, the superstar DJ Frankie Wilde, played by Paul Kaye, goes deaf – Tong, who has given his name to rhyming slang, makes a cameo. About 10 years ago, Tong was diagnosed with hearing loss in his right ear. “I’d been in and around music since I was 15, so I guess I wasn’t surprised. I just started to become conscious of it.”
He started wearing earplugs while working to filter out some of the noise. They made him feel “quite cut off, because it totally changes the experience. You hear the music really beautifully, and you feel the bass, but you don’t really hear the crowd in the same way.” But it meant he could work at a safer noise level. “I psyched myself into: that’s my new environment, and it’s healthier for my hearing.” He has had to take his altered hearing into account in other aspects of his work: “It’s good to know about it, if you’ve lost some high frequencies and you’re making decisions on mixing music, so you don’t overly turn up the top end of the track.”
Tong says his hearing loss doesn’t affect his day-to-day life very much, and while he has tried hearing aids, they are not something he needs all the time. In a noisy room, or a meeting, for instance, with many voices, he can find it harder to pick out speech. “That’s probably the situation where I find it most useful.”
Still, he has been tasked by Boots Hearingcare to make people realise the importance of protecting their hearing and getting it tested, and to tackle the stigma around hearing aids. He was, he adds, quite conscious about being seen to need one, which must be a particular concern in an industry that prizes youth. “I think there probably is a stigma – thinking that you must be old if you need a hearing aid. But then I’m not 20 any more.” Anyway, he says of the newer devices that are more like wireless earbuds and can stream music, “They’ve changed a lot.”
Raising awareness of hearing loss is not quite as sexy as bringing hip-hop or rave culture to the masses, but such are the ravages of time. Tong wants the relapsed ravers, as he calls them – the people who grew up with him – to view audiological tests as being as routine as going to the optician, “so they can rave for as long as possible”.
Tong is speaking over Zoom from his office, every so often shuffling papers on his desk. Somewhere he has a manuscript of the book he’s supposed to be writing, he says, but it’s been “stop-start, frustratingly. I’ve been making notes for years.” He’s getting bored of his own excuses. “It’s definitely an aspiration.”
I would read it. I was the rural teenager, too young, square and provincial for rave’s glory years, who religiously tuned in to Pete Tong’s Friday night dance music show each week (the cassettes, recorded off the radio, would keep me going all week). By sheer luck of being born in the right decade, and with a skill for putting himself in the right place at the right time, Tong has made it feel as if there hasn’t been a major music moment in which he hasn’t had a part. His career in DJing, signing artists and record-producing has spanned New York’s early hip-hop, Manchester’s Haçienda years, illegal raves, Cool Britannia and Ibiza’s clubbing boom. He has survived what must have been really heady times, probably by being the kind of person who appears on my laptop screen today: thoughtful, cautious, more of a music nerd than a superstar DJ.
As a child, he was always banging on drums and toy guitars. His mother was a former publican, and his father a bookie who had a big record collection, so there was always music in the house. “I guess that my personality lit up when I was around music,” he says. Tong got a drum kit when he was about 12, then joined a school band. It was seeing a DJ at a school disco that made him realise that was what he wanted to do. “I just thought that would make a much better noise.”
At first, experimenting with two turntables and an amplifier, he started playing his own school discos and small gigs. Then, when he left school, he became a mobile DJ with proper equipment and a Transit van. “I didn’t really know what I was doing,” he says – but he loved it. “Just being around music, making a living playing music. My thing was always finding music I liked and wanting to share it with other people. But I realised as a late teenager that it wasn’t considered to be a proper job.” He got other jobs, but these, too, were in music – as a journalist on Blues & Soul magazine, then in 1983 for London Records. “It was a very explosive time,” he says. He signed artists such as Run-DMC, taking hip-hop mainstream, and would later look after New Order and others who had joined from Manchester’s legendary (though by then collapsing) Factory Records.
Tong was DJing on the side, which his record company bosses thought of as his hobby, he says. But this was the beginning of the rave era, and Tong found himself in the middle of it. In the mid- to late 80s, he got in with the Boy’s Own crew – a scrappy group including Andrew Weatherall and Terry Farley, who would later become influential DJs and producers – who had started a fanzine, and then began to put on parties. “That was almost like me being a kind of suburban boy from Kent teaming up with the London crew.” The clubs in London in the mid-80s had become quite exclusive, he says. “Whereas the rave mentality was: everybody’s welcome and everybody dances side by side, and all pretensions go out the window.”
It must have been thrilling. “It was pretty exciting,” says Tong. What were the illegal raves like? Was he dashing around trying to evade the authorities? “I mean, I wasn’t running them. It was that era of the 0800 number [the phone number to call on the day, to listen to a recorded message giving the event’s location]. It’s all that excitement of going to a secret party. I spent more time avoiding authorities, probably, in the pirate radio days [Tong was a DJ on the soul station Radio Invicta in the early 80s], running around between buildings and blocks of flats. I guess as a DJ, as opposed to the organiser of the rave, you just hoped that it wasn’t going to be cancelled or shut down when you were playing.” It was “good for a while”, he says, “but then it got out of hand with the illegal nature, and it became more tabloid headlines, drugs, sensationalism”.
Tong started his Radio 1 show in 1991 – the same year London’s Ministry of Sound club opened – and dance music went mainstream. By then, he’d had his first child (he had three with his first wife, and has another as well as two stepchildren with his second). “I always had these things that keep you sane, keep you together.” Although his first marriage broke down, Tong appeared to avoid the hedonistic excesses of DJ life. “I never really burned out – I think just by luck as much as judgment.”
Even in the era of the superstar DJ – when the biggest names would play around the world, being paid millions – Tong remained slightly outside that, though he was a draw, adored by huge crowds. How did he not let that go to his head? If he did, or there was wild behaviour, he’s not saying. “Again, maybe I would have been a bigger DJ if I didn’t have a job, or maybe I would have burned out or gone crazy.” Being on the radio – and the BBC at that – meant he was “a kind of public figure in that sense. So I wasn’t in the business of letting it all fall apart.”
I get the sense that Tong was happier staying in the background. “I guess I was shy,” he agrees. “DJs used to be hidden in the corner in the dark – I come from that era. It wasn’t ‘look at me’. It was ‘listen to me’. When I started playing, the stars were the people on the dancefloor. It was a scene run by the dancers, and we used to play records for them. All my mates were dancers, and I couldn’t dance, so I was the DJ.”
He has spoken in the past about the mental and physical health challenges faced by big DJs – the pressures of touring, the late nights, the unhealthy lifestyle – and especially for the younger stars who get rapid fame, money and success. Tong once said you needed “special forces training” to survive multiple seasons in Ibiza. To establish yourself there, he says, “you almost have to do the things that aren’t necessarily the healthiest – after-parties and pre-parties and hanging out with the crowd. That works for a few years, but then you’ve really got to move on and step back out of it without losing your cred.”
Often, for the all-nighters, Tong’s favourite set to play was the one starting at 7am. He would go to bed and get up early for it. “You arrive fresh, and then everyone else is feeling the effects of staying up for days.” He sounds more like a CEO than a rave DJ, I say. He smiles. “Well, I think it’s a profession.” It was different at the start, when everyone was working it out as they went. “The business has changed in the last 30 years, become a lot more professional.”
Has big money ruined clubbing? The private jets, the VIP areas in clubs and the prices that keep young people out? Tong thinks for a while. “I’m part of the commercialisation of dance music,” he acknowledges. In the early 2000s, “the VIP scene in Ibiza, say, was very exciting. There was a point where the mix [between celebrities, the rich and ordinary clubbers] was unbelievably good. And then things get out of balance. If it’s all VIP and everybody’s catering just to keep those champagne sales high, and nobody’s ever taking any risks and just programming hits, then yeah, you’ve lost the plot.
“But the wonderful thing about this scene is it has a habit of resetting itself. If kids come along and go, ‘I hate it, I want to go to Manchester or Berlin,’ because Ibiza is too expensive and it’s lost the plot, then Ibiza needs to hear that and deal with it. If it wants to.”
The other vibe-killer, I suggest, is smartphones, what with their constant distraction, and cameras ready to catch every embarrassing dance move. Many clubs are now introducing no-phone policies, or at least getting people to place stickers over the camera. Have they ruined clubbing?
“Like anything, it’s not black and white,” says Tong, ever cautious. “Social media has helped break music and acts. That’s changed my world big time in terms of music discovery and chasing down the people that are making the music. And then there’s the other side of social media – everyone capturing the moment to tell someone else they were there [at a party], when they’re not really there because they’re on their phone.” He smiles. “It’s just the world we’re in. It’s not going to change. I can’t imagine we’re going to go back to the 90s mindset.”
Is Tong afflicted with crippling nostalgia (as I clearly am)? No, he says. “My focus was always breaking new music, or in the old days finding rare music that was old, that no one had got. For me, DJing and playing all old records was like: what’s the point? It’s always, for me, been about new music.”
That changed, he says, with his Ibiza Classics – the dance tracks performed by an orchestra, first at the Royal Albert Hall for the BBC Proms in 2015, and now at other huge venues. “That’s an appropriate way of me being nostalgic in an original way.” He’s listening to “all these new kids now – Max Dean, Luke Dean, Josh Baker – all these people that are blowing up, incredible, but they’re referencing so much old music.” Does it make him feel old? “No, not really.”
Does he ever go to clubs and stay out all night? “If there was some special person I wanted to see or I wanted to sign, I would, but generally, no.” He smiles. “That’s why I’m still here.” Clubbing might be mainly for the kids – though Tong says he likes a daytime party – but his work is “not really ageist in terms of enjoying music, sharing music, music discovery”. The things that concern him are still the things that always did. “The fun of DJing now is I still worry about getting the records in the right order to move the crowd.”
• Pete Tong’s Ibiza Classics tour begins 11 June in Cardiff, UK. Details: petetong.com
• For more information on hearing loss and to book a free hearing test, visit bootshearingcare.com/hearing-test/
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