Whole world in his trance
The Age
Friday February 5, 2010
DJ Tiesto is trying to conquer the globe and has his sights set firmly on bringing his brand of dance music to the masses, writes Craig Mathieson. I T IS another week of work for Tiesto, the hugely popular Dutch DJ. He's in Mexico City (it's his fourth time playing there) as part of the Latin American leg of his world tour. The previous week, he celebrated his 41st birthday after playing to tens of thousands of people on a Rio de Janeiro beach. He now lives in Miami and soon he'll be back in Australia.Frequent-flyer points are his golden breadcrumbs."My goal in life is to play at least once in every country in the world. I still have a few to go," says the man who was born Tijs Verwest.Like most Dutchmen, he has a dry sense of humour but in this instance he's serious. He's ticking nations off.Dance music has wholeheartedly embraced globalisation; it is a global sound and Tiesto plays to a global audience. Crowds, he says, have the same knowledge and the same enthusiasm nearly everywhere he plays, with local quirks increasingly a thing of the past.Voted the world's best DJ three years running by the influential DJ magazine, Tiesto has come a long way from The Spock, the delightfully named club in his home town of Breda, where he honed his turntable skills at the start of the 1990s. He entered as a Madonna fan and departed as an aficionado of trance, with its extended, anthemic peaks."I was in a little room off the main one and the boss said I could do whatever I wanted," he recalls. "That's where I developed my style - from a general DJ to a trance one. If the room was packed there was 150 people in it. These days there are 150 people backstage when I play."Tiesto is undoubtedly one of the most successful DJs in the world, routinely playing sold-out arenas and other outdoor events. But in recent years his success has taken him, alongside other DJs such as David Guetta, into the centre of pop music. Tiesto's appearances are now more likely to be concert productions, complete with hits from his own studio albums."What I wanted was to be at the centre of everything," he explains. "It felt natural at the time but it's pretty amazing to see other DJs now doing the same."On 2009's Kaleidoscope, his fourth studio album, trance has been put aside for an inclusive mix of electronic pop with collaborators as diverse as Bloc Party vocalist Kele Okereke, Nelly Furtado and Australian outfit Sneaky Sound System (they're seen via video footage at his shows)."Sometimes the artists had a lot of influence on me and sometimes I had a lot of influence on the artists," Tiesto says. "With Sneaky Sound System, we sent the track back and forth after I saw them at the Miami Music Conference. With Kele from Bloc Party we were in the studio together €” he had a hangover €” listening to the track over and over again to figure out how to do it."Tiesto is still something of an unlikely pop star. In Holland, where he is afforded coverage in the tabloid media, the wildest story attributed to him was that he drank 31 cans of an energy drink in one day; while his idea of fun on a day off is to visit a club unannounced and DJ free.Most musicians grow conservative with the passing of time but Tiesto is loosening up. He cites alternative bands such as Sigur Ros and Melbourne's Cut Copy as favourites and is growing less conservative as middle age looms."I'm more open these days than I was years ago," he says. "With music, people are willing to absorb a bit of everything from me now."Tiesto plays Hisense Arena tonight, tomorrow and Sunday.
© 2010 The Age
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