Dave Clarke tickets and 2024 tour dates

Biography

He may be known as The Baron Of Techno, a moniker given to him by John Peel, but Dave Clarke has an anarchist streak a mile wide and punk in his soul. Having no truck with establishment figures or authoritarianiasm, it’s unsurprising he revels in the libertarianism of the World Wide Web. It gives symmetry to his savvy techno vision.

“I got so much shit for being a futurist,” he states (he was the first Techno artist to release an Internet only single back in 2000), “When I started going digital and moved away from vinyl some of my fellow artists asked me, ‘How much are they paying you?’ How much is who paying me? It was such a strange situation - this is techno – it’s supposed to be forward-looking! I thought, ‘Whatever these people say, I’m still going to move forward, it’s the right course.”

He did and does. Ever the gadget-lover, he enthuses about downloading books onto hand-held devices but his main motive is delivering music to the ears of his global dancing public. He plays out every weekend everywhere. To name a recent few, The Rex in Paris, Klubbers Day in Madrid, Buenos Aires, Fabric in London, headliner of Britain’s Glade Festival, and he programmed and headlined his own stage at Holland’s Extrema Festival in 2008 and 2009. At every event there’s the same attention to detail, his sets swooping whip-smart along the cutting blade of techno and electro backed up by a seasoned bag of DJ tricks that pushes the whole caboodle to the next level.

At the same time, it’s all informed by his sonic history, represented on the one hand by 2008’s ‘Back In The Box’ mix CD wherein his peerless selection represented the dawn of house, featuring tracks by DJ Pierre, Marshall Jefferson, Farley ‘Jackmaster’ Funk and more. On the other hand, there’s his gothic, punk side, the man in black embracing the gritty rock’n’roll energy of The Damned and Bauhaus. It seems an unlikely combination but then he’s always been an outsider…

Clarke was born and raised in Brighton. Often expelled from school, he fully admits to being a disruptive boy with a short attention span caused by an insecure home life. What started him on the road to being a DJ was combining his father’s love of technology with his mother’s disco-soul records, tunes by the likes of Roy Ayers and The Crusaders.

“My dad had disco lights in the front room,” Clarke explains, “record decks, reel-to-reels, reverb units, he even did a thing on BBC Radio about quadrophonics. It’s pretty obvious where I get it all from really."