When discussing Disco and Dance there are few bigger names in the DJ world than Dimitri From Paris. He doesn’t even need an introduction, but we’re giving him one anyway. Having started out as a simple bedroom DJ thirty years ago, he’s gone on to to curate, create, compile, present, produce and remix.

Today he’s here to discuss his brand new remix of Vantage‘s track, ‘I Found You‘ which drops today. Check it below or here on YouTube.. Dimitri From Paris bumps up the synths, fills out the production and turns it into even more of an eighties extravaganzaaaaa…..

Loverboy talks to Dimitri From Paris about Disco being appropriated by Dua Lipa, the genre’s constant battle with homophobia and how an unapproved Björk remix (‘She didn’t like it’) ended up giving him his first big break in the States.

Dimitri From Paris, I was just looking at the footage from Defected Croatia, I so wanted to be there but I got cold feet. Was it amazing as it looked?
Yeah, I was happily surprised that it was so busy. To be honest it was like nothing had happened over the past two years. It was exactly like the last time. It was great.

Speaking of Defected, I just wanted to say how important your compilation In The House of Love was for me back in 2006. I was just coming out and slowly allowing myself to listen to music I had always felt was labelled ‘too gay.’ Hearing In The House of Love was like the big warm hug of support that I needed.
That compilation is one of my favourites, I’m glad you mentioned it actually. I tried to make that album talk to people’s souls more, to be more emotional than just a ‘OK, bang, get up and shake your ass’ type thing.
But also it’s tough in England. There still seems to be a lot of musical segregation. I’m not gay myself so I cannot speak from an inner perspective but I’ve been playing the same music forever and I’ve heard ‘This is gay shit’ too many times. I’m like, ‘So what is the problem with that?’

Exactly. That compilation was released way back when and we’re here today to talk about your current ‘I Found You’ remix for Vantage. It’s so good. Did you guys already know each other?
Well, you know, with a remix, it’s usually a case of saying ‘Yes’ or ‘No’. In this case I liked the song and felt I could do something with it – put a bit of an 80s vibe on it, more than it had initially.
The other thing about remixes is that in thirty-five years of remixing people, I’ve hardly met five of the artists I’ve remixed. So unfortunately we have never met, but I’m curious about Vantage because he’s French and living in Japan – and I am a huge fan of Japan.

As well as DJing in the clubs and remixing, I know you’ve also created soundtracks for a couple of runway shows. I was wondering how the club and catwalk compared. 
The runway thing was more on a collaboration level. Michael Gaubert is the don of runway music. He’s been DJing since before my time and has this amazing knowledge of music, but he wasn’t really that comfortable with mixing. So for the runway show, he had chosen the music and just needed me to put it all together in a nice way.
Sometimes it was crazy because he would pull out bits of opera, snippets from movies, a chilled-out new age thing, then an electro track and like, ‘OK just mix that all together!’ Haha….he really pushed me out of my boundaries. I’m grateful because I used that same no-holds-barred, ‘everything can be mixed’ mentality that I learned from him when making my first album, Sacre Bleu, back in the 90s.

That ‘everything can be mixed’ mentality makes me think of your ‘Human Behaviour’ remix for Björk. I love it but would not necessarily have connected you two together.
Yes, that was my first big break in the US because at the time Björk had only just left her band The Sugarcubes and was barely known. The French label that was releasing her first single wanted it to be worked in the clubs so they asked me as I was working with them lots at the time. I was really pleased because I thought it was a great song and already knew of her.
But I remixed it, she didn’t like it, it was turned down and only a few promos were pressed. I gave one to David Morales, got absolutely no feedback whatsoever and really didn’t think much more about it. But six months later a guy who knew David in New York called me and asked for a copy. I asked him how he knew about it and he was like, ‘Ah well David and Frankie [Knuckles] play that track like three or four times a night when they play. It’s a big New York record right now.’ When he told me that I had to sit down for a minute and process it all. For me New York is the place where all the music I really like comes from. David Morales and Frankie Knuckles were huge idols of mine at the time and I was like, ‘Oh they are playing my record and I didn’t even know!’

It must have been the ultimate validation having a track that didn’t get the approval to having it be a huge track in New York…
Yes absolutely. Being validated by Frankie Knuckles for me was like, ‘OK, I did something good in my life!’

Back to Disco. You are one of the genres ultimate aficionados, do you see Disco as an era or a genre?
I mean it’s both but I think it’s an era-thing and an era gone by unfortunately. Back then you needed people to come together – you needed a band, an orchestra. I think what makes Disco stand the test of time today is that you can hear the emotions of all those individuals playing together, in a studio, being recorded together. When a musician plays a song for four or five minutes, even if it’s a loop, every cycle is slightly different from the last. Those micro-variations make the sound of disco very much alive. It touches people. Today we loop something and it just sounds like it’s the same. Then there is the lyrical content. At the time there were a lot of double entendres. Obviously people knew Disco was popular in the gay clubs, you can hear it in ‘Where is my Man?’

I love that track.
Right and back when it was released, unless you were gay, you wouldn’t get those double entendres. There are a lot of things like that that are semi-cryptic for people. So it keeps being interesting. You can listen to a song twenty years later and realise the lyrics were not about what you thought they were about, or hear a difference in the music. It makes you dance, but you may not understand why it keeps you dancing for over forty-five years!
Disco has this essence that is not so easy to find in music these days that has been produced with software and machines. Disco is enduring. It is still there forty-five years or so after it was declared dead!

There is talk of Disco having a rebirth with Dua Lipa, Kylie, Jessie Ware, Roisin Murphy all taking influence from it with their recent work. What do you make of their interpretation?
It kind of makes me cringe because they are just appropriating the name ‘Disco’ but actual Disco doesn’t have much to do with it. Happy dance music isn’t Disco, it’s happy dance music. If it’s a trendy word, they’ll use it but the moment it’s not trendy they’ll say, ‘Oh no, this is not Disco, it’s…whatever!’ You can really see people just trying to be cool by saying ‘Oh Disco this…’ and ‘Oooh Disco that…’ Fair enough, we all try to be cool. Oh and I like happy dance music too. I like Kylie!

Lastly Loverboy is named after the biggest-selling single of 2001 so we always ask, what is your favourite Mariah Carey track?
There’s one that I used to hammer. It was a David Morales remix of a Christmas record. Let me look it up because I am that kind of nerd. I would hate to quote the wrong record. ‘Joy to the world’…on red vinyl.

That remix is so good. I really feel they created the blueprint in terms of remixing pop for the clubs with new vocals etc…
They did! And interestingly he was credited as a writer and a producer on her remixes and that was a big first too. Like Todd Terry really made that Everything But The Girl song into the one that everybody knows, but he was only credited as a remixer. All the royalties went to Everything But The Girl who didn’t write the song the way people liked it.
In the case of David, I mean Mariah took him in, she made less money and gave David his share of the royalties which I thought was quite ground-breaking. I always had a soft-spot for Mariah. I loved when she did that movie Precious too. I think it is great that she did things that people did not expect from her. I’m not an unconditional lover of her music but I have a great respect for her. 

Vantage’s ‘I Found You’ (Dimitri From Paris Remix) is out now.