KALEIDOSCOPE

COSMIC DISCO

DJ HARVEY

INTERVIEW BY THOMAS GORTON

Dj Harvey has been a fixture on the dancefloor since he started DJing in 1985, going all the way from the phoneless freedom of those anarchic acid house parties to gaining deity status as an early pioneer of the Balearic sound. Captured at Ibiza's legendary hotel and nightclub, Pikes–an island within the island, where he goes by "cultural attaché"–he flaunts his playboy style and carefree worldview, as we pick his brain on the future of dance music.

"Oh God, it's one of those interviews," says DJ Harvey, laughing down the phone as we ponder whether a DJ really can save someone's life two minutes into our conversation. It's lunchtime in an overcast LA, there's a week of downtime before he hits the road again for Miami and New York, and aside from shutting the window to block out the noise of a large truck near his house, he doesn't have a lot going on—"few calls, that's about it, really, which is nice." That's not to say he hasn't been busy, having spent most of the year on the road, including three summer months hosting his party Mercury Rising at the island's legendary hedonistic hotel Pikes Ibiza.

"It's a special place for me for so many reasons," says Harvey. "I've been visiting there for about 30 years now. And obviously there's the legends of Pikes—we're including Tony Pike, the original owner and builder, and the place's associations with Grace Jones, Freddie Mercury, and George Michael. I've even seen a picture of Frank Zappa at Pikes wearing a Pikes t-shirt, having a good time. It's like some kind of pharaoh's pleasure palace, a cross between Saturday Night Fever (1977) and Caligula (1979). And we go there and we live exactly that. It's close to my heart. I'm known as the 'cultural attaché' of Pikes: I'm out in the world letting the people know how wonderful Pikes is. And I'd highly recommend it to anyone that enjoys a grownup good time".

"I think that some superstar DJs do take themselves too seriously, and I find it highly amusing, because they're wasting their own time." In a world of deadly serious DJs—see the @DJsCompaining Twitter account—Harvey's carefree worldview, playboy style, and effusive easiness stand out; he's a man with a giant smile, laissez faire attitude, and an impeccable wardrobe. "I feel that style is everything," he says. "Fashion is usually copying or trying to emulate someone else's style. If you're truly stylish, you live beyond fashion. If The Persuaders got in an accident my style would come out the end—half Tony Curtis and half Roger Moore. You portray your character through your style, whether that is a hoodie and some flip flops or whether it's a snake-skin Gucci suit-no matter how you want to take it."

While Harvey raises an eyebrow at some of his prima donna peers, he is totally serious about his role as an entertainer and his passion for his craft, paying attention to every minute detail so that the experience for paying partygoers is as premium as possible. “I know that I have a small reputation for wanting to try and get the sound or the conditions within the environment as good as I possibly can,” he says. “God, if I find another lighting guy asleep, I will pour a bucket of cold water over him. That stuff gets on my nerves. It's like, ‘Man, you're being employed to do a job here.’ And he's got just some programmed rotation going on the lights and I pay attention, so after that thing's gone ’round four or five times, I'm like, ‘I know that guy's asleep.’ So I'll go down and wake the guy up and be like, ‘Go home, I'll do your job.’ And then he'll go and tell his friends that, “Oh DJ Harvey's an asshole, blah, blah, blah.’ But Harvey wasn't an asshole. He was actually trying to make the best experience possible for the people in the environment. When I throw my own parties or I’m playing for anyone, we ask a million questions—attention to detail is all, and if the details aren’t right and I can’t affect or enhance them, I won’t take the gig.”

DJs used to be heard but not seen, tucked away in a shadowy corner of a club, anonymous mediums for vibrations and sound. Over time, the DJ has morphed into a deity, a totem that everyone faces, a magnet for the smartphones that now illuminate the nightclubs of the modern era. Clips surface from time to time of DJs playing to a crowd standing motionless, recording the entire experience on their phones. Is everyone really enjoying this? What does a good time look like now? Harvey is a permanent fixture in dance music—not just physically but emotionally, not an anachronism but a constant. Having started DJing in the mid-80s, he’s seen cultural shifts take place on the dancefloor but holds no desperation to roll back the years. “In many respects things haven't changed,” he says. “You've still got a room with a DJ and music being played, and people having a good time; there are still clubs that do exist where a focus is actually on dancing. But I have found myself in environments where the promoters have put too many people, and there's actually no room to dance, and all you've got left to do is take photographs of you and your friends. But the nightclub experience is almost impossible to record via a phone or a movie. There's very few movies that actually do that experience any sort of justice, because most of it actually takes place inside you rather than outside of you. It would be very easy to say ‘Oh, everyone's just doing selfies the whole time and it's shit.’ But it's not. The people holding their phones up, they're actually enjoying themselves. It's just a different kind of enjoying themselves. Do you know what I mean? I know that things aren't like they used to be, but I'm not someone that revels in being like, ‘Oh, it's shit today. And it was much better yesterday.’ I don’t feel that way.”

Harvey’s musical journey didn’t start manning the decks but behind a drum kit, playing in punk bands in Cambridge from the age of 11, at a time when it was “hip to have a baby drummer.” From 1976, he was that baby drummer, playing shows up and down in the UK, often in working men’s clubs, youth clubs, and pubs, releasing singles, getting John Peel’s stamp of approval, and “being fed vodka and orange by 19-year-old girlfriends of the bands.” Over time, he became frustrated with the restrictions of the band dynamic and craved independence. “When you're in a band, it's like having four or five girlfriends,” he says. “And then those five girlfriends get girlfriends, and you have all this influence going on and politics going on within the unit, which can sometimes become very frustrating. Now, I saw that as a DJ, you could basically be a one-man band, and you could play music that you actually wanted to play. So maybe, as a band, we couldn't play a particular John McLaughlin record or whatever, because it's too technical or somebody didn’t like it. But, as a DJ, you can. I saw this thing, it was like, ‘OK, you're manipulating beats, you’re affecting the mood of the crowd, you're a one-man band, and you can play all the music there is.’ And it just seemed very appealing. I slowly slipped into it. I took a visit to New York, actually, to the source, went to every single club in Manhattan in 1985, and came back a DJ."

His return to England coincided with the birth of acid house and his immersion into Tonka Soundsystem, a legendary DJ party crew where Harvey made his name. Starting in 1988, the collective put on weekend-long raves across the South of England for five years, starting in Cambridge and then moving on to Brighton and London. Looking back on grainy archive footage of the Tonka raves, it’s hard not to be seduced by the phoneless freedom of those anarchic parties. When the pandemic swept across the world in 2020, people (including myself), wondered if a new form of acid house would emerge from the ashes, as clubs closed and people’s worldviews shifted. It hasn’t quite happened, but Harvey is adamant that it didn’t really ever go away. “It hasn't stopped for 30 years,” he says. “It wasn't like two really good years, 1988 and 1992 or whatever. It's a natural progression. There are genres and factions, stuff like that. But for me personally, it's all acid house. The words ‘acid house’ actually encompass the movement itself. And I feel that it hasn't stopped; in fact, in many ways, it's gotten better. I can understand people in their thirties, under it, wondering what it was like before they were born. Similar things happened to me. If you speak to a few old silverbacks, they're like, ‘Yeah, it was done by 1990.’ And basically, that just means they thought they had to age out or get a decent job.”

AG Kaleidoscope 0001545 R1 14 16 A AK F03

At the turn of the millennium, Harvey left the UK for the sunnier climes of Los Angeles, staying in the States for over a decade, unable to return to his home country because of visa issues. In this nascent period of the early internet, his myth blossomed, and friends and fans missing him in the UK & Europe scrambled around on forums to keep up with his movements abroad. While he may now be closely associated with Ibiza and is regarded as an early pioneer of the Balearic sound—fittingly for Harvey, a genre defined by vibe and feeling rather than its functional components—he cut his teeth in London. In the early 90s, he was running his own night with Heidi Lawden, Moist, at the Gardening Club in Covent Garden, New Hard Left at The Blue Note, and occasional one-off parties where they called the shots on all the elements: the music policy, lighting, and sound—a sound he’s previously referred to as ”Balearic garage“ or “cosmic disco.” These parties were places that allowed him, as the resident DJ, freedom outside of the creeping corporatization of club culture, where legends such as Larry Levan, Robert Owens, Da Posse, and Kenny Carpenter graced the decks. Simultaneously, he was resident DJ at Britain’s first superclub, Ministry of Sound, and editing his own edits to play when he played, in the ethos of Ron Hardy and Larry Levan themselves; he wanted extended versions or certain sections repeated, so he made his own. It was Harvey who largely reintroduced the art of re-editing to British clubs, cutting up disco and soul records for his dancefloors; some edits released then now, decades later, go for hundreds of pounds on Discogs. These are all just stories from early on in his career. People have memories of DJ Harvey that he doesn‘t even have himself anymore. London has changed—the Gardening Club is now the Apple store; The Blue Note has gone—but he laid the foundation, left the country, and became an institution.

Over the decades, the shift in perception of “the DJ” has been enormous, and in the upper echelons of dance music, godheads up in the heavens stand in front of pyrotechnics, hitting play on laptops, content creators more than they are curators. Harvey remains a beguiling presence within the culture because of his integrity, affable charm, and straightforward approach to communication, describing “I love you” as his favorite lyric. “It has to be,” he says. “It's so simple and it can be said in every single way. I love to play songs. And if there is an issue in modern dance music, I’d say, actually, there is a lack of songs, so that can lead me to play older music.”

The content vortex of contemporary DJ culture has led to an avalanche of sameness, a conveyor belt of “selfies for the algorithm,” and it feels like the online monoculture is reaching saturation point—every day a new mix, a new flyer, a perfect Instagram clip of the crowd going crazy. All the while, clubs are closing, promoters are struggling to sell tickets, and there’s a creeping paranoia about what the future of dance music is. However, Harvey has remained untouched by any insecurity, playing at packed clubs surrounded by people celebrating being back on the dancefloor, “dressing up and having a whale of a time.” Despite his flamboyance and Roman lifestyle, there’s no artifice whatsoever about DJ Harvey—he’s been doing what he wants and loves for over 30 years and inviting everyone along for the ride. In a time of cultural insincerity and individualism, he remains attractive, because he feels rare and comes at his craft with an ageless approach—everyone needs to just enjoy themselves. It’s an ancient creed that appeals to the hedonist inside us, and pleasure is unlikely to go out of fashion anytime soon—certainly not any party he is at the helm of or at Pikes, Harvey’s debauched second home, an island within an island where all there is to do is dance, and maybe, just maybe, a DJ might save your life.

Harvey Bassett, aka DJ Harvey, is a cult British DJ, an early exponent of the Balearic sound wave, and a key figure in the history of clubbing over the past 25 years. In summer 2022, DJ Harvey's signature party, Mercury Rising, was held once again at its original location, the iconic Pikes Hotel in Ibiza. Set in the hills of San Antonio, Pikes Hotel is an Ibizan institution, a symbol of the island's extravagant atmospheres, relaxed days, and hedonistic nights of the 80s. For decades, its founder Tony Pikes has welcomed celebrities such as Jon Bovi, George Michael, and Freddie Mercury.

Thomas Gorton is a London-based writer, Dazed editor, part of the musical duo God Colony, and co-founder of the UK record label Mad World.

ALL CLOTHING: GUCCI

PHOTOGRAPHY: ANTON GOTTLOB
STYLING: GARY DAVID MOORE
CREATIVE DIRECTION: ALESSIO ASCARI

PHOTO ASSISTANT: ADRIEN CRASNAULT
GROOMING: LOUISE MAXWELL
STYLING ASSISTANT: CHARLOTTE KENNEDY
LOCAL PRODUCTION: LOFT
PRODUCTION: MIREILLE FILIPPINI

TOSH BASCO

Formerly known as boychild, a moniker that embraced myriad explorations at the fringes of being human, Tosh Basco now returns to a vulnerable, fleeting, porous self. Stemming from her intersectional identity, and entangled feelings of non-belonging and erasure, her performances are rooted in improvisational movement as a mode of survival and world-building—a subtle testament to the ungraspable nature of living.

MARK FLOOD

After decades spent making art, Mark Flood has remained true to who he was in the 90s, as he continues to probe the basic precepts and structures of the art world—or, as he puts it, to “fuck the frame.” But where does the Houston-based artist situate his work and influence now, when his ideas of irony, performativity, and ownership have become commonplace among younger artists in an increasingly appearance-based world?

CHARLES ATLAS

In today’s internet culture, everyone is a performer. But in the 70s, when artist Charles Atlas first started out making Super 8 films and collaborating with the likes of Merce Cunningham, Michael Clark, and Leigh Bowery, drag and rhythm were the stuff of the underground scene. Across a career as long as it is diverse—spanning from docu-fantasy to mathematics, from TV to TikTok—his lexicon remains one of raw energy and omnivorous imagination.

VEGYN

London-based VEGYN is something of a prodigy, having produced music for the likes of Frank Ocean, founded his own record label, and doubled as a graphic designer. Though he has distinguished himself within the electronic music arena, which is oversaturated to the point of numbness, he remains level-headed about exactly what it is he wants to accomplish, and the realities of making work in an often inhospitable world.