“I’m a pirate and I keep my loot,” says Dave Clarke with a wry smile. He’s quoting BowWowWow, specifically the song ‘C30, C60, C90, Go’, a thirty year old tribal punk-pop ode to home-taping. He sits back in the swivel chair at the sound desk of his Dutch Radio Studio, a sharply designed black and chrome space fleshed out with quirky visual flourishes. BowWowWow came up because he’s talking about his vinyl fetishism, the smell of 12”s in record shops, yet he hasn’t used the format professionally in eight years.

“I’m really buzzing about the new version of [virtual DJ mixing tool] Serato,” he enthuses, “I’ve always been at the vanguard of digital DJing and the internet enables me to get new music immediately. Sometimes I’ll be in a hotel, someone can send through a track fifteen minutes before I go to a venue and I think, ‘This is incredible, I’m playing this tonight.’ That’s such liberation compared with to waiting months for an acetate.” He pauses and reaches the crux of the matter, “It’s all artist to artist now, there’s no middle management.”

He may be known as The Baron Of Techno, a moniker given to him by John Peel, but Dave Clarke has an anarchist streak a mile wide and punk... More Biography