Having a DeWaele of a time

Today it often seems like the life of a DJ is no life at all. With dance music increasingly supplanted by hip-hop and downloading pulling the rug from under record sales, deck spinners find themselves spending more and more time on the road. Now David DeWaele, one half of 2manydjs alongside brother Stephen and one quarter of Soulwax, wants to take things one step further. With the new Radio Soulwax app, the brothers’ music and mixes can live in your pocket.

We find David in the back of a taxi, in the midst of a mammoth touring schedule, not entirely sure where he’s going next. Destination? Ireland.

“Well, good. Ireland’s fun, fun, fun.” He does know he’s due to spend the week in the studio, which seems to lift his mood.

“And then off to somewhere else,” he offers. “But I don’t know where…”

He’s more than a little road weary.

“Me personally, I prefer creating. But that’s how life has become as a musician – I don’t think we’d sell any records, you have to go on tour. I shouldn’t be complaining but if I’m being honest…” He pauses. “I’d rather have it the way it was in the ‘70s. You make an album and it sells for you. Maybe you’ll do a few gigs to promote it. But the music speaks for itself. It was a lot easier, a lot nicer.”
Forecasting the commercial death of the traditional album, but keen not to get stuck in some touring circuit limbo, David and Steph have devised something new. It’s called Radio Soulwax. Existing online and on your phone, for free, it amounts to a heady, eclectic 24-hour mix of audio and visuals, all (somewhat ironically) based around record sleeves.

“The thought behind it was really simple. Instead of doing another 2manydjs compilation CD, which couldn’t have the same impact, we thought, ‘Why don’t we do something a lot more extreme and a lot more diverse?’ Over the last eight years we’ve grown and played bigger and bigger clubs. In front of a large crowd like that, there’s only a limited amount of things that you can play. What we wanted to do with the Radio Soulwax project was to show many different sides musically. Things we couldn’t necessarily do in front of 20,000 people.”

The seed of an idea was planted when the boys from Ghent, Belgium, started incorporating visuals into their live show, and grew following their involvement in the Part Of the Weekend Never Dies Soulwax documentary.

“At the time it seemed like a good idea!”, says David of the app. “It’s crazy. We thought it was going to take us six months and it ended up taking two-and-a-half years to get it done well. Sometimes it was an animator we needed, a director. Sometimes it was stop motion. It’s always a different visual take. We gradually became a small production company.”

He may christen it “a weird business model”, but David speaks a lot of sense.
“We see releasing a product, whether it be a CD or this app, as a promotional tool to sell our gigs. Why not invest in it? We’re essentially losing shitloads of money, but we think we’ll make it back by doing gigs. Releasing a CD is a lot of effort for something that will have a shelf life of one or two months. This is a campaign that will build over the next few months.”

Of the music on the app right now, expect a lot of vintage rock and exquisite soul. As for David, he’s currently into big band jazz, another side-product of touring.

“The swing era, and not the cool stuff!” he laughs. “Glen Miller… I love the harmonies. I’m subconsciously drawn to it. Maybe because of the life I’m living. I tend to listen to music when I arrive at the hotel room and that’s naturally what I want to put on.”

With that, David pauses to pay his driver, our conversation ending as he arrives at a destination he can identify.