![]() I thought: ‘Maybe we’ll get four or five years out of this.’ It would be like punk, which came in and went out. “Nobody knew the extent of where it would end up. “At the time it felt like a small subculture,” he says. At Rampling’s invitation, Cox played the opening night. They came back determined to recreate the experience in London and the result was Shoom, the Southwark club night credited for kicking off the UK acid house craze. Rampling was one of the Ibiza Four, a quartet of DJs who also included Paul Oakenfold, Nicky Holloway and Johnny Walker, who had a collective epiphany while listening to the Balearic DJ legend Alfredo play on the Spanish island. I’d never heard anything like it.” Later, he got to know the DJ Danny Rampling, who had hired his soundsystem. “Everyone gone! to me, this sound was the future. Photograph: Sergi Alexander/WireImageĬox remembers playing Chip E’s Time to Jack, shipped over from Chicago, at the end of a funk, soul and disco set in 1986. By the time he left school at 16, he was working simultaneously as a supermarket shelf-stacker, a scaffolder and a fledgling DJ.Ĭox performing at the Ultra Music Festival in Miami, 2016. Ever the entrepreneur, he began assembling his own sound system out of discarded speakers and amps, and hiring it out to people on the agreement that he could do a warmup set. By 14, he was going out clubbing, funding his nights out with milk rounds and cutting his neighbours’ hedges. He would take a small turntable to school and play records from his dad’s collection at breaktimes (one Cabin Fever set was dedicated to his father, who died from Alzheimer’s during the first lockdown). Bake a cake and the numbers go through the roof,” he hoots.Ĭox started DJing at the age of 10, inspired by the music he heard at home. “Put out a new record and – pfffffff – tumbleweed. ![]() Never one to sit still, he launched Carl Cox’s Cabin Fever, a series of DJ sets livestreamed from his garage – “just me in my shorts and slippers” – and started cooking, posting online videos of his attempts at banana bread, cottage pie and leek and potato soup. He usually spends the winters there but, when Covid arrived, he bedded in for the duration. I end up going on Google and saying: ‘Look! See? What did I tell you?!’”Ĭox, 59, has only been back in the UK for a week, having spent the past 18 months on Mornington peninsula, near Melbourne, where he has a farmhouse and studio. “When I tell people my story, lots of them don’t believe me. At the turn of the millennium, Cox DJd at Bondi beach, in Australia, before hopping on a plane to Honolulu, Hawaii, the time difference allowing him to play both sets at midnight. The book relives some of his most famous performances: Berlin’s Love Parade, Stonehenge, the Houses of Parliament, a nine-hour set at Space in Ibiza. We are sitting in Cox’s garden in Hove on a rare sunny day, the sea twinkling in the distance, talking about his forthcoming memoir, Oh Yes, Oh Yes! Along with the Venezuela tragedy and Cox’s subsequent return to the stage, it chronicles his early life in Carshalton, London (he moved to Brighton in his late teens), his burgeoning love of music and his 40-year DJing career, which helped kick off the UK’s house and techno scene. “One minute we were having the time of our lives and the next we were cowering for our lives.” “Seeing people shot on the dancefloor and dying in front of me, blood everywhere …” Cox says, rubbing his eyes. Four people had died and nine were injured. After an hour, they were escorted out to a car, past scores of police vans and ambulances. Cox got down on the floor and crawled to a backstage locker room where he and his tour manager barricaded themselves in. Two rival gang members had met on the dancefloor and begun shooting. I realised: ‘Fuck, that’s not fireworks, that’s gunfire.’” “Then there were more bangs and I thought: ‘Yay, more fireworks!’ But then I looked at the crowd and something was wrong. “I heard all these fireworks go: ‘Bang, bang, bang.’ Everyone was going: ‘Woooo! Yeeaaaah!’” Cox mimics dancing behind the decks. ![]() The vibe was good and the crowd was bouncing. A few days earlier he had played a set at a festival in Caracas, Venezuela, as part of a tour of South America. In late November 2007, Carl Cox’s DJing career was over – or so he thought.
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