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The Guvnor's Story - James Zabiela

Author: Mark Burton
Monday, June 7, 2004
Dubbed 'The Guvnor' by his mentor, Sasha, James Zabiela is one of the new breed of DJs that's been reinvigorating the British dance music scene.

Describing himself musically as being "kind of all over the place!...I wouldn't like to say I was a techno DJ or a house DJ". James first came to prominence after winning Muzik's Bedroom Bedlam competition, so what advice does he offer today's bedroom DJs-

"Just give out loads of CDs. That's all I did! I just gave out CDs to everyone. I gave one obviously to Muzik but I also gave one to Lee Burridge, which was what ultimately got me signed to Excession. He passed it onto Sasha, and he liked it and they signed me up. But I would give them to everyone...even the taxi driver! I broke 3 tape decks giving out mix tapes, as it was at the time. Also now what you can do, which I didn't really have access to when I was giving out tapes, is the internet. With all these dance music message boards its great. You can go online, make some friends, put your mix up so that everyone can listen to it and give you opinions...whether they're critical opinions... whether someone's saying I didn't like it because of this, or it's great. You might even get a gig out of it from some strange promoter from Russia or somewhere, who's gone on there, seen it.

That happened to some friends of mine; they put mixes online and got gigs off the back of it, which is amazing! Also if you put it on there and someone is critical, you actually learn from that... they might actually have a point!"

As you might expect he's a real believer in the internet. "I think that there are more pros than cons, especially for me. I think it's great to go online after a gig and find out what people thought about you. You can learn as well. If you played a bum set and you didn't realise it, you can find out things and learn from them.

"Also it's nice to go on and say thanks for a great night and talk to the people that paid the money to go into the club and see you; that put you there in the first place. For me it's great!"


Last summer saw James spend the majority of his time in Ibiza, with a bi-weekly residency at super-club Space, which proved to be a great learning experience. "Say I wanted to play this breaks record, which is great, but it just really wasn't the sort of record you could get away with in there, you just have to introduce it in such a way as to so that people will get into it. I felt really accepted and it's nice because people kept coming up to me and saying 'What's this crazy music you're playing-' and to me it's not exactly that crazy but I guess it's just different from the usual 4/4 funky Ibiza sound which is great, there's nothing wrong with that at all, it's just not really what I play!"

So what's in store for this summer- "I'm gonna be in Ibiza again. I'm gonna be doing Space 5 times and Pacha once, so I'm gonna be there quite a lot. Also I've got the CD coming out for Renaissance, so I'm gonna be doing a world tour for that. In fact if I wasn't doing the promotion for the CD I'd probably be in Ibiza more, but you know I've got to go round and promote myself, whore myself (laughs) and try and sell some copies!

"It's good; I'm really looking forward to it actually. I'm going to get to go to all these crazy places, a lot of them that I've never been to before like Japan, I'm coming to Japan before I come to Australia. That's the one place that I've always wanted to go, I've never been there. Have you seen the film Lost in Translation- If you see that film, that'll make you want to go to Japan!"

The self-confessed film buff loves incorporating little samples into his sets. "In the Essential Mix I filled it with loads of film samples from Lost in Translation like I just mentioned, Tokyo Soundscapes, and Vanilla Sky, Doctor Who, and all sorts of things that I put all the way through the Essential Mix." Thanks to the new DVJ player he "can go out and do that Essential Mix in a clu
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