Stand Up: Gavin Herlihy, DONT WALK afterparty DJ

Gavin Herlihy, who will tonight headline the DONT WALK Afterparty, meets with DONT WALK DJ Alex Kirkbride to discuss everything from gigging in Berlin & South America to dance kingpin Ricardo Villalobos and how music helped calm The Troubles in Northern Ireland.

If you still haven’t bagged yourself a ticket to the afterparty, remaining tickets will be sold at the bus collection tonight, please see here for details. From the sounds of it you do not want to be missing out.

Hi Gavin, you’re Irish, but would it be fair to say that you made your name as a DJ in Berlin? How important was Berlin in your progression as an artist?

Really important in that it’s super cheap to live meaning you can endure the grind of being skint and still go to the panorama bar or Club Der Visionaire to see the best DJs in the world on your doorstep and get inspired!

You’ve headlined an envious collection of clubs: Berghain/PanoramaBar and Watergate in Berlin, London’s Fabric, and Space Ibiza amongst others. Any performances over the past couple of years especially stick out in the memory?

My recent first tour of South America in January. My two favourite gigs were D’Edge in Sao Paolo and Sneak Peak in Bogota. At D’Edge, a really famous club for it’s excellent music policy, I got to play a long set which I love doing and the club’s amazing sound and futuristic lights make it feel like a set from Tron.

Sneak Peak was the final gig of the tour and is a small basement party run by a really cool crew of like minded people so it got out of hand in all the right ways. I’m fascinated by South America so to be one minute in the Amazonian jungle and then next on the edge of the Peruvian desert and then a few days later to be the bustling streets of Medellin in Colombia was a massive buzz.

A lot of DJs don’t really see the world through DJing, just the airport, hotel and the club but I try and buck the trend where possible.

The quality and diversity of the labels you’ve put tracks out on is striking: Get Physical, Crosstown Rebels, Cocoon, Cadenza…the list goes on. Could you pick just one release as a particular landmark in your career to date?

My EP with Delano Smith from a couple of years ago springs to mind. I’m a big fan of Delano’s productions, and the label that signed my track ‘Krypton Factor’ asked Delano to remix the track and then contribute his own track to the release also. To be on the same record sleeve as one of your favourite producers is a good feeling in my game. To have it championed by one of your favourite DJs is another. Very shortly after receiving the masters, I passed a CD to Ricardo Villalobos at a gig. I normally don’t really do that sort of thing but Ricardo isn’t the best with email and asked me to pass him a CD whenever our paths crossed awhile back. So i gave him the CD like a proper keeno. Ten minutes later at this particular party I could hear a familiar beat coming in and sure enough it was my track. He went on to play it week in, week out so I’m told. At least until the CD it was on was so trashed it stopped and started spluttering at Timewarp!

This year, DONT WALK is working closely with the Non-Violence Project to encourage programs that build self-esteem and prevent violence in local communities. On your travels, have you found electronic music to be valuable in forging relationships and uniting young people in local communities, which after all are the real roots of the scene?

Massively. Northern Ireland springs to mind. When I was growing up, the idea of peace in Northern Ireland was a pretty ambitious thought. Now, despite the odd hiccup, it’s pretty much a reality. Music has had a big and much underrated part to play in that. Underground raves and clubs were probably the only place were protestant and catholic kids would mix in some places. Everyone was so lost in going on a mad one for a few hours every weekend they’d forget the tribal bullshit their parents had brought them up with.

Also, I come from a small town in Ireland where when you’re young there is little else to do other than get fucked up or get in a fight. It’s hard to see past those two options unless something drags you out of that mindset. Electronic music definitely opened my eyes from a very early age to a much more productively fun way of approaching the world!

You alluded to your recent tour across South America earlier; after performing at DONT WALK, you’ll head to Fabric in London, before jetting off to continue touring the United States later in March. Is there a corner of the world you haven’t played to yet; what cities remain on your bucket list?

I’d love to play in India and somewhere in central or Southern Africa. The scene for touring Djs isn’t that big there so I’ve never found an opportunity to go as yet but they are on the list. More so for my own selfish touristic reasons though I have to say!

You’ve worked as an Editor for Mixmag previously. In interviews with DONT WALK, both Midland and Deniz Kurtel have criticised journalists’ desire to pigeon-hole music. Having once worked on the ‘other side’, are you able to sympathise with a journalist’s need to plug something as ‘fresh’ and new?

Let’s cut to the chase. Music is such a subjective experience there really is no globally accepted right or wrong, or good and bad; there is only your own particular definition of those things. As a journalist I really didn’t like being on the opinion soapbox for that reason and I learned to approach reviewing and writing about people a little differently.

When writing long features about people for example I’d prefer to figure out the story of people’s lives in order to discover why they’d made the music they made rather than bleating on with my opinion of their music. My most important question was always: what’s the hardest thing you’ve ever had to overcome? that would soon bring out the tales of prison, or poverty or whatever struggle it was that had lead to that person writing the music they’d made. But for good or bad, journalism is a journey for the people pursuing it, much like any other profession. It takes a long time to figure these things out and unfortunately there aren’t a lot of people trained as journalists writing about dance music.

A lot of electronic music journalism blends into unnecessary noise, so I can understand why people like Deniz get frustrated. I prefer to react to bad journalism and unnecessary pigeon holing by ignoring them and getting on with making music!

The Stand is very excited to see Gavin tonight, here is a little something to get you all in the mood for DONT WALK 2013.

image courtesy of airlondonmusic.com