From DISCOID August 96

[Versione italiana]

"Please Claudio, try to be brief and to the point with your replies, I' ve got less space than usual this month and I' d like to use two, or at the most three pages...". In spite of my warning, at the end of the recording of our telephone conversatio, I found that I'd used no less than 90 minutes of tape! Who knows, maybe I'll be able to turn this interesting interview into a series of supplements! In the meantime here are the most important parts taken here and there on the cassette: if at any point what Claudio says seems rather fragmentary to you, remember it's your truly's fault, as I had totry my hand at an anything but easy job of "cut and paste" which lasted an entire afternoon!

Well, Claudio, where' ll we start ? That's up to you. The important thing is not to get me to talk too much of the past. I don't know if its a merit or a defect, but memories don't exist for me: from the moment in which a thing happens, stop, it's water under the bridge; I put it in a drawer and forget it. Although I've often felt embarrassed, I've always hated saying "I did this, I did that"; I prefer to concentrate on talking about my future, which is the most important thing and which gives me the right stimuli to continue trying to improve.

Ok, but at least let me ask you if there has been a point in your career in which you understood that something was changing, that a decisive turning point had been reached... I'd say yes! More or less in 1986: I was working in a club in Arezzo and, there's no point in denying it, earning a lot of cash. It was a phase in my career in which I got results, yes, but which was also rather damaging. The problem was that as far as the situation was concerned, I just couldn't stand that club! I promised myself I'd never get into that situation again and decided that the moment had come to change "strategy", putting at the center of my professional interests, before any purely financial aspects or things like "a nice club at all costs", the thing that I found most important and which represented the main motivation behind my choise of a Dj's job: a good healthy love for music! At that point a second more productive phase of my profession began. From that moment on, I tried to make certain that every situation in which I was behind a console were of a certain type or that they pleased me rather than anybody else. Then i started selecting the records to play in my set with a precise criterion. I had to like tem and... that was al! The idea was to play only what i really liked, not try for any "easy applause" or "momentary" shouts from the crowd. I rolled up my sleeves and started working in what I believed was the most obvious way and in the end this turned out to be the most profitable. Along with my friend, I rented a small venue Rome, risking my own cash: the idea was to run an evening in which the music started from slow stuff (which at that time was wrongly called "down-beat") and reached House music without any continuity though. I immediately ran into crude reality, but didn't let that get me down, in fact I insisted with even greater determination until after a while we got the first results and I started to take my first important steps out of my customary path. I' m talking about the period of the Zen in Spelonga (a club in which I did everything even laying tiles at one point!) and later the wonderful period in Naples with the Angels Of Love (a group which , I presume everybody know recently broke up). The thing I' d like to emphatize particularly is that in all these situation (above all the early parties), I always risked personally, reaching into my own wallet, as I've already said, and staying up to all hours at night thinking up graphics for the tickets. This is how I managed to create myself a setting which suited my needs and was talking about was close to what I wanted a club to be. The period I'm talking about was that of early house-music and the first raves, which played an almost decisive role in that delicate phase of my career. In fact, thanks to them I had the opportunity of moving in a radius of a few hundred kilometres and play my sounds all over Italy. Another thing that has to be said is that this type of event opened the doors for new Djs, and gave those who weren't well-known to step forward: nowadays the various Syncopate or Exogroove (just to mention a couple of the most famous) are just the domains of these big names, which you find all over the place, wherever you go... there always the same! In fact a decision I took very recently was to eliminate all the after-hours from my future plans, and you can take this as important advance news, as it's the first time I've spoken about it publicly!

Thanks for this "scoop"! To get back to what we were talking about: how important a role was played by certain kind of PR work in your professional success? People say you're an expert in this sort of thing? Take this at a tangent: when I decided to give up the idea of a residency, I starded behaving with the mentality of an entrepreneur, producing the events myself. I'll explain this better: not having a club to play in Souther Italy, I had to build it myself and entirely with my own resources. So it was indispensable for me to wear my PR hat, without which I would not have been able to do what I did. But apart from all this stuff, which could seem very obvious, there's another concept which a lot of folk, particularly at that time, didn't take into consideration and which has always been at the hub of House music's life-style; the so-called "house nation" (of which nowadays, specially in Italy, only very little remains), according to which the way they dress, dance and communicate inside this House setting is exactly the same , whether you're in london, Paris, Milan or Bangkok; this is what I like to consider the fairy tale of the "Global village", with the consequent destruction of barrieres between countries. The meaning of being Italian, American or French is practically non-existent; maybe I had the merit of realizing this before others did and exploiting it in the best possible way.

What do you mean? For example I started contacting various Djs and suggesting things to do together; the thing seemed completely natural to both myself and them. Then when projects started taking shape, some folk interpreted, or would have liked to interpret what I was doing as if I wanted to get into everybody's good books and who knows why, judged it negatively. I'll mention one of the numerous episodes which happened to me at that time: the first time Todd Terry came to play in Naples (a city in which, even if just in small way, I gave the House movement a boost), I paid him with one of my cheques and there were 40 people on the dancefloor! With this, which is apparently a stupid example, I want to let those who think in a certain way even today, that anything I have today didn't at some point fall from the heavens, but I worked hard to earn it, with all the weight and the risks involved on my shoulders, but then reaping the fruitts of this work later. As we all know, luck plays an important role in every field, I shouldn't have to remind anybody this; but saying that Coccoluto had more than his share seems to me offensive to say the least!

From then on everybody knows how things went... your success grew continuously. In the end, as you can see, I managed to get you tosay quite a lot about your past: it's turned into a semi-biography! Now let's talk about your future plans. I gave you some advance news earlier when I mentioned the after hours. Generally speaking, I'd like to say that, as of the next season, I intend working in less clubs and giving those I work in a wider margin of territorial exclusiveness. But above all, I'll expect to express myself with greater calm asking for more time for my gigs; and the fundamental point of the whole thing lies in this. All the events in which the trend of "let's pack the console", have for certain aspects, created a negative precedent. So I'll have to renounce something (on the financial side for example ), but nevertheless convinced that I'm doing a sensible thing and we shouldn't have to wait for long for the results to be seen. Without wasting too much time with a topic that would need a lot more space, I think it's about time that those in this business started being a little more self critical, not just for the good of the House movement, but for the clubs themselves in general. So my own small contribution will be to try to give this signal of change which I hope others will follow through time.

If you had to explain what you spin to somebody who'd never heard you playing, how would you do so? By mentioning a few records and artistes, for example: Dimitri From Paris, who's talent lies in his ability to mould: his latest album combines elements of Latin music, Jazz and Rhythm & Blues; I'm increasingly convinced that the combination of House and more "cultural" or different genres will be particularly fundamental in the future. The music scene, in spite of what many people think, is constantly evolving and looking for different ideas, new sounds and real instruments, the only ones able to give you real emotion when you listen to a record. The important part is to have the desire and the right stimuli to update oneself continually, trying to create a really personalised musical vein. As far as I'm concerned, I've noticed that the newest and most positive things arrive from the UK, partly from France and from Europe in general. And, apart from a few US geniuses (e.g. Masters At Work, who are still greats), for some time now I've been spinning things by Basement Jaxx, Ashley Beedle, and things like St. Germain, Crispin J Glover, Daft Punk, New School Science and projects on labels such as Nuphonic o Balihu... to mention the first that come to mind.

Let's change topic completely. How important is record production in your work? More than a little, even if I consider myself a Dj whose hobby is production: this is my real musical safety valve. When I go into a studio my main aim is to enjoy myself and do something I really believe in, without anybody breathing down my neck or being conditioned externally in any way. Obviously (I'd be a liar if I didn't admit it) my dream and that of my partners (Savino Martinez and Dino Lenny, with whom I've opened a studio in Cassino), is one day to do something really important and delicate all our time to producing. What interests us at the moment is that our projects are made featuring an "unclassifiable" sound and with a "sound module" made up of sounds and samples which we've made, not things which have already been heard or used by others. And I think that this is easy to understand listening to our records, whether you like them or not. But anyway I'm satisfied which what I've done to date from this point of view too: I've done a couple of important projects, which have also been released on prestigious labels. Not bad, for somebody who looks on this as a pastime and a sort of test-bed for the future.

Stop! We'll continue this another time. In the meantime what about rounding off by telling us about any unfulfilled dream? To remain on this topic, opening a huge studio as Peter Gabriel, over a stream with the very latest equipment, glass everywhere and top quality leather divans!