In France, garage and house music wouldn’t be the same without Sven Love and Greg Gauthier, co-founders of the famous Cheers party, which helped to introduce soulful house music to a wider audience in Paris since its creation in 1994. Today, while carrying on with Cheers, Greg Gauthier runs his very own party, Dance Culture, a not-so-typical (straight) tea dance where you can listen to disco, funk, early garage, latin music, as well as to the latest soulful house records… on Sunday afternoon! I met him last week in his studio to talk about Dance Culture, Cheers, and the position of quality dance music in France, among many other things.

To begin, how would you introduce yourself, as far as music is concerned, to someone who wouldn’t know anything about you?

That’s funny, because I’ve done that the whole summer, and in fact that’s a question I avoid answering to! I tell the people I make music, and I try to avoid going into details, if the person in front of me doesn’t know the whole dance music thing, because there are too many confusions, and I think that I’m doing a so precise, personal thing, so far away from the prejudices people can have, that ‘ordinary’ people can do nothing but understand my explanation the wrong way! Well, let’s say I make music, I earn my living by making music, and this music is a certain type of dance music, actual and ‘mannered’…

It seems like you deliberately avoid, too, using the words ‘house’, or ‘garage’!

Yes I do. That’s funny, I read interviews of pop bands, rap bands, and they all said the same thing: “we don’t want any label to be put on us!”. But for several years I wanted to be labelled, I said that I was making house music and that I loved that, and now, in fact, I feel I’m doing something else, I’m not an exclusively house dj anymore, by all means this word is so overworked that I try to define myself another way, or simply to stop defining myself… I tell people they have to come, to listen to what I’m playing. Some of them make this effort, but generally speaking people are not so interested! In fact, that’s a very complicated question for me…

Your approach is very intuitive, in fact…

I’m lucky enough to be able to do what I want to do. Honestly I don’t really do all that I want, for instance on Sunday, at Dance Culture, there are some things I would like to try, but finally I don’t do them, because I feel the audience is not ready for this yet! Anyway the house music I play aims at going away from what house music really is, or was at the start. These days I play a lot of songs which are made by live bands, be it Osunlade’s, or Louie Vega’s; actually, off course I play house music, but also a lot of songs which aren’t really house music according to me; and if it’s not house anymore for me, I think it’s all the more too complicated to explain it to people who don’t even know what mainstream house really is! So I think the best for them is to come and see me play… What I like is to see that people who don’t look the part come to my party, people who obviously didn’t listen to house at all before, or who thought it was something else, and who finally are happy here. Generally speaking I’m not going anymore to house music parties, and I don’t buy mainstream house records anymore, too; what remains of this in my sets is something very personal, and I don’t think it matches the general definition that people can have for house music.

How did you come to listen to dance music?

It’s a sad story… Sven and I used to have a neighbour who listened to what was called dance at the time, it ranged from Madonna, to acid house and to Chicago house ; he was older than us, and he began to take us with him to various nightspots. But finally he passed out, and he left us his records and his turntables. It gave us the opportunity to start. I was 15… Like all the Parisian teenagers of the time, we used to go to parties where you could hear funky rap, house music, and so on, but before that we had a transition to dance music thanks to pop dance bands such as the Happy Mondays or the Stone Roses. In fact the first big party we went to was a rave we had heard from thanks to the Inrockuptibles [famous French pop/rock magazine], when it was still a fanzine.

And what about your first contact with the NYC scene?

I get there for the first time in 1993. One of the more striking memories I have is a summer I spent there, going three, four weeks in a row to Underground Network. It was the golden age of this party, and I was really into NYC house music. In fact I came to know this music thanks to mixtapes taken back from New York by people from the Parisian club scene from the time, Thierry Pila for instance, a friend from Patrick Vidal. He came back from New York with recordings of Humphries and Knuckles mixshows, in 1991-1992. He gave us these tapes and we listened to them again and again, and I found it was really my thing. There were not many parties in the same vein in Paris, so the first examples I had in mind for this kind of music were the parties I went to in New York… Needless to say, when we went back to France, there was a big gap… Even if we had good parties in Paris, it wasn’t the same thing, it was not the same universe!

So you created Cheers parties to emulate the New York atmosphere, that’s it?

No, it would have been impossible at the time, there was too big a gap between Paris and New York. We came to create Cheers because, in the one hand, we had the turntables, all the stuff, and in the other hand, we were too young to come into the clubs: we were 16, 17, we were frequently turned back at the door of the Palace, so… We went to some raves, which were very different from what is called a rave today, you could hear all kinds of music, but soon we were fed up with them; we wanted to go into the clubs, and the clubs we loved, with the dj’s we liked (Eric Candy, David Serrano, André), were hard to get in, because the public was gay, older than us… We managed to get in from times to times, but when we came with friends we were turned back, because we were too young. So we felt the need to do something to spend the Saturday night!

Everything started at the Erotica, a strip club you rented for the first Cheers…

First we did some private parties, in fact, and we did so for a pretty long time, for instance a guy we knew wanted to set up a party at his home, he called us to come with our stuff and to play. After that we played in clubs we rented, indeed, and then some party promoters began to keep an eye on us and to suggest that we come to their clubs to play. And among them, the What’s Up Bar, which was a very important place for us. When I think of it, I tell myself it’s crazy we stayed two or three years there, but the parties were really crazy… Today I wouldn’t do that anymore because I wouldn’t enjoy it, for instance I’ve got more sound in my studio than there was there, but at that time it’s true that we played a music which wasn’t very well represented in Paris, and that’s at the What’s Up Bar that we began to get a faithful public. After that we moved to the Queen, and then to the Coupole.

Can we sum up Cheers evolution by saying it was a progressive refinement of your initial plan?

It wasn’t a straight line, there were several steps. But from the start at the What’s Up Bar, the musical colour has been very clear, well defined, a lot more than today, in fact… At that time we were playing only NYC vocal house. Our experience at the Queen club makes us learn what it was to manage a big club, and it was important for what came next. But it was only at La Coupole that I began to be really satisfied with the music we played. And from this it was like a funnel to what I really wanted to do.

 How would you define Dance Culture ? As far as music and atmosphere are concerned…

We can say it’s a party which tries to avoid all the Parisian clubbing clichés, one by one, because I’m fed up with them. I don’t go out anymore, or only If I have a good reason to. Dance Culture, for me, is a basic which should have exist since the beginning of the Parisian dance music scene! I’m even surprised that nobody’s got the idea to do it before me… Smoking, non-smoking, it doesn’t matter, but I think Paris needed a party of this kind, raw, where it’s all about music and nothing else. Then I see it as a laboratory, it allows me to try new things, especially as people, I think, come here to find something different.

So it’s no kind of try to transpose the NYC Shelter to Paris?

Not at all… I wouldn’t say I never think about Shelter, or that it’s not something very important for me, but I’ve never said to myself “well let’s duplicate the Shelter in Paris”, because that’s simply impossible. In the on hand, we don’t have the audience, culturally speaking, and in the other hand, Timmy Regisford IS the Shelter (and I don’t speak so because Timmy is my pal and someone I admire)… In fact, I said to myself there were elements that really pleased me at the Shelter, and that I really missed when I was in Paris, and indeed I wanted to bring them here; but actually these elements aren’t proper to the Shelter, you could find them at Undergound Network, or even at Body & Soul! Which are they? Simply, the will to focus the party on the music and the dance; then, smoking, non-smoking, once more, it doesn’t really matter, I wanted cigarettes to be banned because I like it like that, and I think many other people  do, too; and it makes medias talk about us! But the point is not to emulate the Shelter. What I learnt there was the pleasure you can find in a party where the only thing to see is… the music! That’s it: when you’re at the Shelter, once you’ve marvelled at the public, “my god there are such great dancers!”, once you’ve marvelled at the quality of the sound-system, finally you realize that you’re alone in front of the music. And either you enter the music, and that’s great, or you don’t, and you go back to other clubs, more akin to those in Paris. And so I wanted that, I wanted to say: let’s make a club where we put you in front of the music, in front of yourself, and if it works it will be fantastic, because I’ve experienced that myself and I know what it means to enter the music, to enter the dance, and in Paris it never occurs! Why? Perhaps you need the party to be raw, to be a place where we you can do nothing but dance, ultimately. That’s true this kind of parties are less social, at the Shelter for instance, people talk less than in any club in Paris, where everybody goes out to drink a glass or too and to chat. And that’s true that what I like is the experience of the night club where you’ve got REAL sound, even without light! That’s what I want to do with Dance Culture, but to achieve that, you need a better sound, you need the will to do it, you need to know how to do it…

…and a more adult public, perhaps! What do you think of the Dance Culture clubbers? Are you satisfied with them, do they allow you to do what you want?

Yes… even If we’re only at the beginning of the road, at the beginning of what I want to do… The success of the parties I’ve just told you about lies in the fact that you see that all these things (dance, and so on) are part and parcel of the culture of the people who are there, and the things which could look a little bit strange at Dance Culture, from a French point of view, are totally common there! But I think things can only get better here. And my current public is fantastic! Apart from the fact that they don’t spend enough money at the bar, I’ve nothing to reproach them with. They are musically open-minded, they dance well, there’s never been any fight, and last but not least the crowd is a very mixed one… As far as style, race, social background are concerned. They are 20, 30 years old, and if Dance Culture carries on growing, and if they’re still here in ten years, it will be fantastic!

Like in New York, where the dance music culture is old enough for people to have grown up inside…

It’s true that’s something you can only be longing for, when you’ve been there… You can see people who seem to be 40 or 50 years old, they’ve got style, they dance! But in fact that’s no surprise, because this music we listen to was born there, the classics I play were created at the beginning of the 70’s, and so someone who’s 40 or 45 discovered them when he was a teenager! And that’s great, because in France, if you see a 45 years old guy in a club, that’s a bad sign! Although it shouldn’t be…

Yet there must be French people who discover these classics when there were released, like the Americans do!

The ones who listen to something else than Boney M, they keep away from us, and more generally they keep away from all the things which are going on nowadays… In France people always think so: ‘I was here in the 70’s, I was here in the 80’s, it was better before!’; for instance Thierry Ardisson, I like his TV concepts, but that’s quite incredible that he keeps on rehearsing this Palace myth, although he doesn’t keep himself informed of what’s going on today! These guys can say anything they want, but fantastic things are going on! And they’ve missed them, no matter what they think… I’ve seen a woman has just released another book about the Palace, but all these people, I’ve never seen them in any club, and I’ve been going out for fifteen years! I don’t doubt the Palace was a great club, moreover I knew its last years, people say it wasn’t its best period, but I remember of great parties… But in France people think that there is a time for clubbing, you shouldn’t go to the clubs when you’re too old, but only during the time between the end of your studies, and your wedding! The four years between the two, when you’ve got the right to have fun, and accordingly clubbing comes down to fooling around. That’s why I don’t enjoy going out anymore! And yet I know I still like to go out, because when I’m in another city I always manage to get something out of the local club scene. I think everybody has always thought here in France that going out means playing the fool, chatting up girls or boys, that’s all! And as long as nobody proposes another idea of clubbing, there’s no reason for other people (outside clubland) to take an active interest in it… Yet I can’t understand that someone who’s interested in art, generally speaking, doesn’t find anything interesting in this dance music culture! It seems to me you can find extraordinary things in this music…

How do you see Dance Culture future?

It will resemble the current form of Dance Culture: what I want to do is to bring more freedom into it, and more knowledge, too. I’ll always see to it that someone who doesn’t know dance music very well can have fun, but I do know that it’s great to have this culture, to understand things in it; the more you know this culture, the more you understand it, the more you interpret things, and the more you have fun, actually! At the beginning of my career, sometimes I would play a house record, before discovering later that it was a cover, and it was like wow, the original is so much better that the one I play! That’s the way I would like to follow, I’d like the public to be more and more informed, I wish there was more exchange between the public and me, there was more freedom, I’d like to try new things, even unexpected ones…

Is Dance Culture strongly linked to the Djoon? Or could you move to another place, one day?

I don’t know, for the time being it’s fine, if one day I had my own club, it would be great, but… At present I don’t see any other place which would be appropriate!

What about the sound system?

I’m really satisfied with it! We had problems with some neighbours, who complained about the noise, and accordingly we  can’t have all that we want, that’s to say two other big loudspeakers, so the sound is not perfect, but, at least, very good. Well, that’s Paris… I thought there wouldn’t be any problem, because it takes place on Sunday afternoon, because there are not many people who live close to the Djoon! But even at 7 P.M., on Sunday, it seems you don’t have the right to make some noise. That’s the way it is. That’s disappointing for a city like Paris, but we try not to care! Actually it’s still the best sound you can find in this city… It’s a Turbosound system, other clubs have it in Paris, but ours was conceived according to the place, and what is more we adjusted it perfectly, we know how to use it. We spent two days adjusting it, and I think few people do that. Because people don’t care about that, in fact!

One could have thought the new socialist mayor of Paris [Bertrand Delanoë, elected in 2001] would try to help the nightlife, for instance by being more flexible as far as sound level is concerned!

Nothing has changed actually, and that’s quite incredible. I don’t think it’s normal it’s impossible to make noise in a city like Paris at 7 P.M.! Parisian people think they’ve got an absolute right to live in a silent place – I don’t agree with that. If you don’t want to hear any noise, then move to the country! There were even noise problems with the neighbours on the Champs-Elysées, or on the Boulevard Montparnasse, were Cheers took place in the past; but historically these are neighbourhoods which have always been on the move, so why live there if you don’t want to hear any noise?

Let’s go back over Cheers. Last week you announce its new formula…

The Djoon owner have suggested that Cheers takes place every other Friday, and now I think we must avoid repetition, and so if Cheers becomes more frequent, it has to be something interesting, and to say something new. And indeed we’ve got a lot of people behind us, who have a real talent, and if we don’t do anything to help them, who will? So I’ve thought that it would be good to use Cheers to give them a boost. It’s something we really missed when we started. So we would like to do that, without creating a “school”, we just want to let these gifted people play! Every other Cheers will be opened to them.

Is it so say that the time when you invited guest DJ's such as Louie Vega or Dimitri from Paris is over?

In fact, a lot of people are doing that now, booking big names and so on, but first, we don’t have the money to compete with them, and then, we’re not interested by that! I’ve booked a whole bunch of American deejays over the years, I know the ones I want to work with, I know the ones I’m fed up with, and I’ll carry on working with the ones I like. But we absolutely want to avoid guest deejays to be the main reason to come to Cheers, we don’t want people to be interested  by Cheers because Mr. Thing comes to mix. We don’t want this kind of people anymore in our public. Cheers survives when they’re not there, so… Actually, these big names of deejaying, we saw them all, several times, but anyway we don’t close the door, either. Timmy Regisford will go back, that’s sure, and many other too. But we want to break the image of the superstar dj. Because finally what do we have? More often than not, a guy comes, he mixes well, he plays some records we don’t play, but also a lot we do, he’s going to play Sandcastles for the hundredth time… At the beginning there was a certain curiosity, you know it was like “yeah I buy all the records by the Basement Boys, I want to see them, let’s go!”. So we go… and finally there is nothing special with them! Well there are a lot of deejays, but what is important is to see deejays who have a real one-of-a-kind talent. According to me there are there types of dj, there are the ones who train themselves, who learn the job –the bedroom dj’s-, then there are the professional dj’s who play regularly –I put ourselves in this category, as well as a lot of Americans, who are neither better nor worse than us-, and at the end you’ve got a handful of incredible dj’s, who have the kind of magic we don’t have and we’ll never have, for instance Krivit or Regisford… So if we carry on inviting this kind of deejays, we’re not really interested anymore by all these simply good dj’s who just have their name on many records… most of the time, one half of the audience is disappointed, the other half is happy, but for wrong reasons, and so we prefer to show people what makes the real interest of our parties. That’s to say our background, the depth of our parties.

Money problems aside, who would like to invite?

Humphries, Krivit… Humphries, we’ve tried to convince him to come for ten years! Then there are some other dj’s I’d like to have, like Danny Tenaglia or Frankie Knuckles, but only to have them play classics and good music, not to play what they’re currently playing in other clubs…

Let’s speak about your producer and remixer work. Is it as important as deejaying to you?

I’m first and foremost a deejay, and I try my hand at producing records. But it’s something difficult for me, because it’s not totally fulfilling yet, except for a few things I made and I like. I don’t manage to express exactly what I want. I work with Tony L, and If from times to times I’m fully satisfied with my dj activity, it’s never the case as far as production is concerned… But things are slowly changing, recently I made two records I like, the one with Arnold Jarvis, and my remix of Stevie Wonder. There is also our remix of Sven Love feat. Blaze. They are the first things that seem accomplished to me. But that’s not easy for me, even If I work with an excellent musician! To sum up, I never felt like playing my records. We had technical problems for years, but now, they are fixed, and I think we begin to work seriously. I hope things are going to evolve. But I’m not so frustrated by the turn of events, because, once more, I’m not a great producer, I only try my hand at production, I’m a dj, and I’m happy to have succeeded in setting up my dj career without the help of produced records. Because today there are, to my mind, too many guys who get behind the decks because they have released some records, and by the way, and that’s no coincidence, my favourites dj’s aren’t great producers, generally speaking! Most of them don’t have an incredible career in this field. At least they’re not known thanks to their records.

How do you judge the current French producers? Franck Roger, for instance…

I’m rather close to him, musically, and that’s true he produces quality records! We let him play several times at Cheers. Now I understand his music doesn’t appeal to everybody. But you feel his work is accomplished. I play his records more than those of any other French producer. There is also Manoo, in Lyon, who’s just released an awesome record, under the Rodamaal moniker; Amnaye, and I’m not saying that because he’s my buddy, but he does a good job as a producer! But frankly I’m mainly interested by vocal cuts, that’s my idea of music. According to me, you assess the talent according to the song, even if that’s important to create good tracks. And actually Franck Roger has found a good partner with Chris Wonder, who writes well and who is a good, an excellent singer, better than certain Americans. There are the guys from Qualomota, also, I feel good things for them.

And I hope that people coming from r’n’b will feel the need to find something more sincere that mainstream r’n’b, and that they will leave the r’n’b/hip hop to come to soulful dance music, like the people who come to Dance Culture without having ever listened to dance music before. I told you about French producers who come from house music, but what is going to be interesting is when there will be people who come from other musical universes. Anyway there are a lot of other French producers I like, I forget many of them, by the way I’ve told to myself recently that these days I play a lot of French records. A few days ago Osunlade sent to me a record made by a French band, and that’s a terrible record, and I never heard of them before! I’m more interested by what’s currently going on than by what was called the French Touch. I was very close to the Daft Punk, and happy for them, but Daft Punk aside, nothing really appealed to me…

What can we wish you for this new season?

First, papers which are suited to us! I feel there are a lot of interesting things going on in our music, and nobody’s talking about them, though a lot of bullshits are talked about! That’s a pity, and you can’t avoid being bitter, at the end… You can also wish me Dance Culture to be packed, and that we manage to do what we want to do, this different thing Paris needs! I hope I’ll manage to produce good records, I hope there will be interactions with other musical scenes I like, for instance when Jephté Guillaume played at Dance Culture he came with musicians who play zouk, Caribbean music, and I think it’s logical that such people come by us, because I like these kinds of music, and in a way they are linked to what I do ! That’s the same idea, music you can dance to… Recently I worked with Mario Canon on a remix, I also remixed Allen Hoist, and even if I’m not totally happy with this remix, I’m interested by this kind of collaborations. Because these artists have something to say. And finally that’s the reason why music is better in the USA; guys there have things to say. And whatever you do, if a record means nothing, it’s not going to be interesting. And that’s the same as far as parties are concerned…

Some releases on the way?

Perhaps a new song with Arnold Jarvis… Apart from that, I’ll release this autumn a record I’m really satisfied with, but that’s a surprise! But we’re going to try to speed up production, now!

Dance Culture, every Sunday from 6 :00 P.M. to midnight / Cheers : every other Friday at the Djoon, 22 boulevard Vincent Auriol, Paris 13.  Station: Quai de la gare.

More infos : Cheersparis.com