Alex wuz here

As far as unlikely albums go, Alex Gopher and Demon’s new offering, Wuz, is fairly unlikely.

Gopher’s better known as the man behind the sublime ‘The Child’ – the deep house groover that sampled Billie Holiday – and various other downtempo nuggets than anything more, well, French. But Wuz is exactly that – ten tracks of filtered French house. Er, don’t we have enough of this already Alex?

“Well, I wanted to make a ‘pure’ electronic album, you see,” says the amiable Gopher. “It came about at the start when Yves Saint Laurent asked me to make tracks for a fashion show and we made four tracks. And then we decided to make an album with it – I wanted to make an album made up of electronic music.

“I think I had to make this, to get it out of my system,” he reckons. “The next Alex Gopher album will be live, there will be no samples. I think I was not looking forward to making the new Alex album so much before Wuz. There was pressure on me to follow up the last one. But because this isn’t an ‘Alex Gopher’ album and we made it somewhat unexpectedly, now I am looking forward to making the next one, you know?”

How did the collaboration with the young Demon come about? “He is a young producer, and initially he wasn’t involved. But after the first few demos, I asked him to co-produce it with me. He doesn’t DJ, he is just a producer… and we work well together, you know?”

Talking to Gopher, you get the impression that, ‘all this straight house stuff’ isn’t really him, but he’s pleased and in some way surprised with what he’s achieved in such a short period of time.

Given that the last album, You, My Baby And Me had a decidedly defined theme – dedicated to his new family, dummy – will his next project, the proper ‘Alex Gopher’ one follow the same path, with one theme central to the overall plan?

“I don’t know yet,” he jokes. “I have to start working on this soon and we will see.”

Gopher DJs quite a bit around Europe as part of the travelling Cream roadshow, but definitely doesn’t see himself as the jobbing DJ you’d expect.

“DJing is not really a big thing for me, actually. It’s not a very big part of my life. I prefer to stay at home with my family and work on my music.”