Words by Laura Martin
Photo by Dan&Steve

Chances are if you’ve been to a festival this year, either 2 Many DJs or Soulwax will have been been there, doing what they do best - ripping up the dancefloor, remixing it and delivering it back in banging dancey meteorites. And for that, you should be thankful. Not just for the epic dance moments, but for the fact that David Dewaele is there, as he hates festivals. No, really.

We caught up with him as the festival season sounded like it was grinding him down.
But then he told us another reason for his fatigue – the awesome new project he and brother Stephen have been working on: a free, 24 hour long, visually streamed Radio Soulwax, a lightening speed trip through their 60,000 strong record collection. WOWOW. Read on and get ready to set the dial to Radio Soulwax: The New Generation.

Hey Dave, how are things?
Good, I’m eating a biscuit actually.

What sort of biscuit?
I’m eating the original digestive. It’s a good biscuit.

Where are you at the moment?
I’m living out of my suitcase but I live between London and Ghent. I kind of feel London is a bit more home than Ghent. I’ve lived in London for about eight months, but I never leave the house. I might as well live in Siberia.

You’re right in the middle of an epic festival season at the moment. Are you festival-ed out yet?
If I never have to do another festival in my life it’ll be too soon. I haven’t been fond of festivals for about eight years. I mean, I understand why they exist and why they’re popular, but for me, I would never even go to them if I had to. I just find it a lot of hard work, just for listening to bands.

Surely it’s about the experience of it all, having a “lost weekend”, rolling around in fields and stuff?
Even as a kid I didn’t see the attraction, travelling for three hours to some field where it’s muddy and rainy to watch a band for 45 minutes, where they didn’t have a sound check, so it sounded like shit and most likely my favourite bands were on at the same time, the food was horrible, it’s not very hygienic…basically when it comes to festivals, I’m like a old rich Jewish person, “Oh, never mind, I’ll just go and watch it on TV.”

Other than “don’t go”, what would be your tip for surviving the festivals?
Bring a helicopter. Or bring a van or one of those luxury tents.

How do you manage to keep your suits so clean at the festivals?
I wish I had an exciting answer. But sadly, it’s simple. We pay someone to look after them. Also we wear bow ties and neither my brother or me can tie them so she has to do it for us.

So you basically have a professional bow-tier on the payroll then?
Yes. That sounds more exciting than what I said.

We love your documentary, Part Of The Weekend Never Dies, directed by Saam Farahmand, which seemed to perfectly capture the craziness of your non-stop touring. What did you think when you watched it back for the first time?
Well, it wasn’t really like that as we made it with him. There was a lot of stuff that we edited, so it wasn’t like we went off on tour and he went off and made something and then showed it to us. So my view on it is quite skewed as I was so involved in every part of it. I spent months tinkering at the sound and edited it so I wouldn’t really have a view on it. There is a bit of it though, where there’s all these little cut up bits of 2 Many DJs and I had to show it to this guy yesterday that we are working with and we had to watch it on a big screen and afterwards I had to sit down as it just took so much energy out of me to watch. We have a crazy life.

That’s what I got out of the film too. I only had to watch and hour and a half of film and I was exhausted just watching it – you had to live it! How did you keep going? And how much longer can you keep up at that pace of life?
My body’s quite used to it. I think it helps that I don’t take drugs and I don’t really drink. So all that craziness in the film is quite funny, I know it’s ridiculous and it doesn’t mean anything and it’s all funny in the long run. We need some perspective, you know, we’re not changing the world, we’re not doctors or politicians, we’re just people bringing a lot of fun to kids. It’s a bit of a mind fuck as right around that time when Saam was filming, things were quite different. Basically I was surrounded by people on drugs, pretty much 75% of the people I was in contact with were people on ecstasy for about two years. What a complete mind fuck! It’s like living in one long science fiction film, and it’s quite funny, that’s all I can say.

Isn’t annoying having people off their nuts around you the whole time when you’re sober?
It’s very simple. When we started out we we had 2 Many DJs and Soulwax on the side, two different things. With Soulwax we would play more serious rock clubs and God knows we’ve done all of them so many times and even when people go nuts, it really is nothing compared to 10,000 people who are on ecstasy. It’s much funnier because a lot of funny things happen. I’m not gonna knock it, it’s a nice place to be in.

Is the documentary something you’d like to do again?
Never. Just because like everything we do, every project whether it’s an album or whatever we can never just do it simple, like other people do it. For some reason it never works out that way for us.

Is that because you’re very protective over your image, and what you release?
No, it’s not really about our image it just seems like in our career we never really do things the easy way. It’s like our remixes. I can imagine a lot of 22-year-old kids who do remixes and they’ll do them in three hours. Whereas for us it takes us two weeks to turn on our desk, we’re really meticulous about things, which is quite annoying but in other ways it’s good.

Would you call yourselves perfectionists?
No. Nothing we do is perfect.

But do you aspire for it to be perfect?
Not necessarily perfect, but we aspire for it to be something that we like. I think the problem is we don’t like many things and in order to reach something that we like, it makes it quite hard.

I hear you’re planning big things for your next Radio Soulwax release – how are you planning to incorporate all the visuals you’ve been working in your live show?
Well for our live show at the moment, the visual side is based on record sleeves, so we made bespoke animations for each track. There’s an animation that will start moving, like say it’s a Prince sleeve, he’ll start dancing, or his moustache will grow. We’ve made it in such a way that it’s always perfectly in sync with the music so whether we speed the music up or down. We’ve been doing it for about a year now. So to transport that, we’ve been working on something for  – God knows it needs to end soon as it’s ruining my life! – about a year and a half now and it’s probably the biggest project I’ve ever been involved in. It’s really cool, I honestly think it’s the coolest thing we’ve ever done.

Sound intriguing – what is it?
The concept of it is we’ve done 24 hours of themed music, but there’s always a certain theme per hour and there’s 24 hours.

A whole day’s worth of music?
Exactly, and they all have different visuals each from the sleeves. There’s something happening to all the sleeves and the theme of the music for each hour. Obviously it’s not just going to be 24 hours of banging house. It’s really quite different and it’s basically all the old gems that we think people have never heard on our record collection, which is about 60,000 records. We spent about a year trying to go through every bit of the record collection, even if it’s just 45 seconds we will have edited it in such a way that it’s a new track.

It sounds incredible.
It really is. I hate to be bigging up my own project, but…

And how will it work? How will people get to listen to it?
We already have about 500 tracks on it so what we’ve done is we’ve taken on a radio license so you spend a blanket amount and you can pretty much do anything. The only disadvantage is it’s only streaming. With things like Spotify and stuff, people don’t want to own things any more, The only people who want to own a record or a vinyl or a CD are my brother and I.

When will this be launched?
We started working on it about a year and four months ago, each time we started on it we were like “Oh, it’s gonna take three months”, then “Oh, six months”, then “Oh nine months”. Right now I’m still being careful but we are nearing the end of it. The reason I’m really excited about it is last night we signed off on two hours of it. It’s taken about four months to do that. I hope right after the summer it will be finished. It seems to be the modern way for us to release our stuff. The other thing as well is we’ve become quite good at becoming that act that finishes the main stage and plays big tunes to 20,000 people and people go nuts and however cool that is, you can’t keep on like that, you have to deliver big tunes and we’ve been very fortunate, but it’s quite limiting. So with this Radio Soulwax we can go a lot further.

What sort of music will the 24 hours cover?
There’s a lot of stuff in there that’s like 200 copies that a guy made in his garage in 1981 in Germany and it’s incredible, but no-one’s ever heard of it. It’s all the little gems stuff that we want to show to other people. Another reason for doing it is there’s been a revolution in music but it’s made the way people experience music very different. To be really honest, there’s been nothing new that’s blown me away…there’s been a lot more of fine, OK music and not that much incredible mind-blowing music so we’ve gone back because we’re so sick of listening to 200 promos a week, but it sounds exactly what a guy in Paris was making two months ago. We have to listen to so much crap these days that it’s nice to be able to go back to our record collection and find these little gems that we can play out.

Will you be charging for it?
No. That’s the other thing. Our accountants are furious as it really is costing a fortune. We’ve got five people working with us so it’s really completely nuts that we’re doing it, but we felt it was the only way to do it.

Soulwax – Part Of The Weekend Never Dies from chinkone on Vimeo.