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 “If you speak to a lot of DJs you’ll often find they had to deal with some sort of rejection in the past. It certainly helps, because this inner survival instinct emerges in response to being rejected, to prove you’re not worthless.”
Laughing infectiously as she outlines her prerequisite for DJ success, Anne Savage admits her own unsettled childhood ‘tossed from pillar to post’ as her parents divorced, played a key role in transforming her into one of the world’s most popular DJs.
“I’ve met so many people my age who tell me they wish they’d got involved in music, but they didn’t because they had some sort of stability and their parents were pushing them towards some sort of education,” she points out, “whereas I realistically had absolutely nothing to lose, so I got into DJing.”
Sitting in a Japanese bistro in Soho on a late winter’s afternoon, however, she’s quick to disown the ‘superstar’ DJ tag, stressing its appearance on her website has nothing to do with egos, fragile or otherwise.
“I’m not comfortable with that term at all,” she sighs, “but at the end of the day, you’ve got to market yourself because effectively you are a product. I know that’s an awful thing to say. I’m an artistic person and deep down I know I do it for the right reasons. It’s also not me that calls me that, it’s my PR people,” she points out.
“Am I a superstar DJ? I don’t know, I don’t think so,” she continues, “I’ve been DJing for over thirteen years, I’ve been in DJ Magazine’s Top 100 for more than a few years but to me a superstar DJ is someone like Carl Cox or Sasha; I don’t even consider myself A list or B; maybe C list,” she laughs.
Status talk aside, she’s meeting with Skrufff to promote her new compilation The Very Best of Frantic Euphoria, a triple CD package of which she’s mixed 2 of the 3 CDs.
Skrufff (Jonty Skrufff): Starting with the ‘Classics CD . . .
Anne Savage: “This time around, I was offered the Euphoria album, presuming that it would be the same process as before, of mainly new tracks, but this time there are three CDs, I mix two of the three CDs and Andy Whitby mixes the third. I originally thought that I would get to choose the classics, but they were mainly chosen for me, with a lot of to-ing and froing and arguing, like there is with most of these compilation albums generally. To be honest, for the Frantic (classics) one, I was a little dubious about some of the tracks initially, but when it came to mixing them together it actually sounded really good and it was a lot of fun. I know a lot of people already have these tracks on other compilations, but it’s been put together in a way that’s meant to remind people of the progression that’s happened in hard house and hopefully they enjoy it. For the Slinky mix, I chose 90% of the tracks and it’s a reasonably fair representation of what I’m playing at the moment.”
Skrufff: How do you see the standard of today’s new hard house tracks compared to the classics, could any of the new ones end up being regarded like Dominator, for example?
Anne Savage: “I suppose if you are a new punter then some of these tracks could become classics, sure, but it’s difficult to compare when you are my age and you remember things first time around. It’s hard to compare because those classics are classics because they relate to what you were experiencing at the time you first heard them. For me personally, things have moved on, so it’s very hard to find a classic that compares.”
Skrufff: You’re highly enthusiastic about your new parallel breaks DJ sets, do you see yourself playing hard dance indefinitely?
Anne Savage: In some sort of form I will be playing hard dance, yes. It’s funny, I played at a breaks club the other Saturday and I’d been practicing my breaks all week and it was brilliant, but in the car on the way home I instantly wanted to hear hard dance, and do genuinely really like it, deep down. There’s nothing wrong with liking breaks AND hard dance, I hate those purists who think that just because I play hard dance, I shouldn’t be able to do a good job of playing breaks, so I think I can’t see an end to it just yet.”
Skrufff: You recently appeared on a celebrity poker TV show, how long have you played poker for?
Anne Savage: “I first played poker in 1998, doing a game for Loaded Magazine. I beat (snooker player) Steve Davis and it ended up being between just me and Jimmy White (another snooker player) at the end. Jimmy White won, obviously. Then I was asked if I wanted to do the Celebrity Poker show. I was there with my PR Roo, who wasn’t expecting me to get through to the semi finals and she had tickets to Mylo that night. So we got through the first two days and I was doing quite well, and she said ‘Anne, we’ve got to get the six o clock train’. So, I just went all in against Craig Charles and lost the lot, came out of the room and she said ‘I want to stay now’. Which was tough because I’d been doing really well and there was twenty five grand (thousand) at stake. I do like poker. When I’m very drunk I often come home from a gig and call up all my friends to play.”
Skrufff: Are you a very competitive person generally?
Anne Savage: “I don’t know. You would have to ask somebody else that, I suppose. I must be.”
Skrufff: Are you a good loser?
Anne Savage: “Yeah. Yeah, er, I don’t know.”
Skrufff: Do you feel anger towards those people that beat you?
Anne Savage: “Bitterness maybe, but not anger. There’s a fine line there isn’t there.”
Skrufff: Are you a big risk taker?
Anne Savage: “No, I find when I was younger I was, because the background I had, I wasn’t really brought up, I was just kind of tossed from pillar to post by my parents who were divorced, and I really had absolutely nothing to lose when I was a kid hence I wanted to be a DJ. I’ve met so many people my age who tell me they wish they’d got involved in music, but they didn’t because they had some sort of stability and their parents were pushing them towards some sort of education. I realistically had absolutely nothing to lose, so I got into DJing. Then once you start you become used to a certain standard of living and all of a sudden, the risk taking changes because you think ‘Hold on, I’ve got something to lose here’. Maybe that’s just growing up in general, but there is an element of thinking ‘Okay, I’ve achieved all this, so if I take a big chance I might lose it all. At the same time, if you don’t take a chance you are just going to stay where you are. I’m not afraid of sticking my neck out.”
Skrufff: What happened to the Cellist you taught to DJ in TV show Faking It, she did so well then never broke through, why not?
Anne Savage: “They actually did a follow up program and she said ‘Oh Ministry have asked me to DJ and so and so have asked me to play’, but she was quite happy just to be playing in the bar in Belfast. I think doing the show changed her personality, and I think it made her think about a few things and brought her out of her shell, but I don’t think she genuinely wanted to be a DJ. The experience changed her life to some extent, but she’s 100% a classical musician and I think that’s why she didn’t break through. She proved she could do it, but it doesn’t mean to say she wanted to do it for the rest of her life. To her the program was a challenge, something she achieved and did well at, so she’s probably using that for something else in life.”
Skrufff: Is determination and drive the key for new DJs coming through?
Anne Savage: “Yeah, drive and a broken background; and anyone who’s bitter and got something to prove to their parents; and anyone who has nothing. If you speak to a lot of DJs you’ll often find they had to deal with some sort of rejection in the past, it certainly helps. This inner survival instinct emerges, to prove you’re not worthless.”
Skrufff: Do you ever think about having kids yourself?
Anne Savage: “I’ve got three nephews and two nieces, I can’t even look after a plant, mate, when I go on holiday and come back it’s dead. I’m not bothered to be honest and I really don’t think I’ll have children. If I ever decide I do want children I’ll be too old anyway, I will try and adopt. The good thing is, my boyfriend is ten years younger than me so hopefully he’ll push me around in a wheelchair and wipe up the dribble.”
Skrufff: Lisa Lashes admitted to feeling broody on occasion, are you not maternal at all?
Anne Savage: “Not maternal, no, I’m really not, or perhaps I’m lying in a way, I think it’s because it’s forced on you if you are a woman and you’ve only got so long. I know that my mum had my baby brother when she was forty-one, so. Hopefully there’ll be a few eggs left. I could have them frozen (chuckling).”
Skrufff: Do you go back home much these days?
Anne Savage: “Where’s home? My parents have moved away from the North up to the Lake District, and my sister’s don’t really live where I was born, so there is no real home. Lancashire’s home, I suppose but I can’t imagine living up there.”
Skrufff: Where do you take the breaks next?
Anne Savage: “It’s not just breaks, I’m playing other stuff as well, the Dumb Blonde thing is a whole extra project. At the moment some promoters are like ‘Hmmm, we don’t want to bring a hard dance crowd in’ and Nu Skool Breaks.com have been asking recently ‘Should we book her?’ There’s been online debates on it which is brilliant, It’s all very well playing a backroom breaks gig at a hard dance event, but that doesn’t mean you’re cutting your teeth in the breaks scene.”
Skrufff: How have breaks producers and clubbers been reacting to the Dumb Blonde project so far??
Anne Savage: “There’s quiet respect from the actual producers, and if punters don’t really know who Dumb Blonde is then it’s like starting from scratch and I’ve nothing really to lose. Especially abroad, because people don’t know that Dumb Blonde is Anne Savage. Whereas here, I can understand why promoters would be a bit funny about booking me. It’s just like starting from scratch, building up Dumb Blonde through word of mouth. If I do a good job, someone will talk about it like in the old days, when I started DJing. It feels like starting DJing all over again and I get those tingles in the spine. I can get so nervous when I’m on the way to breaks gigs, which is the best feeling- it feels like I’m going back ten years.”
The Very Best of Frantic Euphoria is out now on Nukleuz Records.
http://www.annesavage.net
Jonty Skrufff (JontySkrufff.com)
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