Sunshine On His Mind

It’s an overcast St. Patrick’s Day afternoon in Amsterdam, but Tommie Sunshine is smiling. Relaxing in a dressing room backstage at the iconic Paradiso venue – a converted church that has played host to the likes of Prince, The Rolling Stones, U2 and Nirvana – the veteran house DJ is highly amused at the fact that he’s been chosen as one of the faces of the new Hilfiger Denim Spring/Summer 2011 campaign, Kids Of America.

“It’s hilarious,” he says. “I turn 40 next week, and the fact that anybody is considering me a kid is comical. But I think I’m a very lively spirit. I think I’ve a great perspective and the life that I lead is definitely not conventional.”
The campaign depicts a collection of the hottest new multimedia talents around – musicians, bloggers, promoters, producers and DJs – and some of those ‘Kids of America’ will headline the bill at tonight’s launch in Paradiso (NY indie act Holy Ghost and teenage pop sensation Sky Ferreira are in the adjoining dressing rooms). Although thanks to his jet-setting, late-night lifestyle, the long-haired DJ certainly looks his age, he reckons that it was his unconventionality that landed him the Hilfiger gig in the first place.
“I’ve been told – and I’ve no idea if it’s true or not, but it sure sounds good – that the guy who put this campaign together apparently saw this thing for the ADE [Amsterdam Dance Event]. There were kiosks and they had these huge graphics and I was one of the faces of the ADE this year. And apparently he saw one of these things and went back to the office and said, ‘Okay, we’re putting this new campaign together, I want Tommie Sunshine. I don’t care who else you get, but that’s who I want’. And I got the call to do it. So it was definitely my look.”
Despite his relaxed demeanour, tie-dyed T-shirt, long flowing mane and cheery moniker, Sunshine says he’s coming from a slightly darker place. “The obvious thing is to say that I’m a hippy,” he admits. “But I think I’m even more of a Beat than I am a hippy. My point of entry with subculture was Kerouac and Burroughs and Ginsberg and Ken Kesey. The hippies were more like San Francisco, it was more dreamy. The Beats were hanging out in New York City, taking speed and hanging out in Times Square, like, seedy places. They were kind of a little fucked-up. I kind of identify with that a little more for some reason.”
Also a record producer, remixer and songwriter, Sunshine has been travelling the world DJing for more than two decades now. His CV’s pretty impressive at this stage. He has played on every continent, remixed everyone from Panic! At The Disco and Kelis, to Good Charlotte and Fall Out Boy, and collaborated with the likes of Felix Da Housecat, Miss Kittin, Tomcraft, DJ Hell and The Aston Shuffle.
He puts his whole career down to simply being in the right place at the right time. Although now based in Brooklyn for many years, he was born in Illinois in 1971. “I was very lucky. I grew up in Chicago and started going out in 1986, which was prime time musically speaking. People like Robert Hardy and Marshall Jefferson were playing the clubs, and WBMX was on the radio. Witnessing the transition from what was disco into house music, and the collision with industrial music, and all the other stuff that was going on there, made me into quite an eclectic DJ.
“At the same time I was going to see rock shows. We’d go to see bands like Jane’s Addiction and then straight from the gigs to a club to dance. So it was all music. I couldn’t have asked to have grown up in a better place at a better time.”
Having been there at its birth, he maintains that if house music hadn’t been picked up on in the UK, it would never have gone mainstream. “It’s really funny. Even at the time, if we wanted to read about house music, we would have to buy NME or The Face or ID, because they were the only ones talking about it. No one in Illinois was talking about house music. I remember one news report and it was like, ‘what is house music?’, and all these stuffy white people were talking about this new music from the inner city. It was ridiculous.
“If it wasn’t for England, house music would never have been legitimised,” he continues. “It probably would have been a fad that would have stayed underground, but once it hit the UK it went bananas. Those guys had No. 1 hits in England, started touring the world and all of that. 1988 was ground zero for all of that. But that’s true of a lot of American music. A lot of it was never legitimised until it went to England. It’s only when England puts its stamp on it that it’s all of a sudden okay for America to like it. That goes back to the blues and jazz. Even Hendrix. I mean, nobody in America cared about Jimi Hendrix until everyone went crazy for him in London.”
Needless to say, although Sunshine isn’t short of work, house music is nowhere near as popular today as it was back in its hedonistic heyday in the mid-‘90s. Most especially in Chicago.
“Sadly, it’s almost non-existent now in Chicago,” he says, shaking his head disbelievingly. “I mean, guys like Derrick Carter who play throughout the world and pack the biggest nightclubs, play in Chicago and they’re lucky if 30 people show up. Which is terrifying.”
What’s been the high point of Sunshine’s own career?
“You know I feel like it hasn’t happened yet,” he avers. “I think that’s a really smart way to look at it as an artist. But I just did something that I feel is the most important thing I ever took part in, actually. There’s a band in Brooklyn called Midnight Magic, and they’re a live disco band, basically. Unbelievable live, three horn players, no backing track, no midi, drummer doesn’t play to a click. I mean, this is as raw as it gets.
“We just did a song together. I quite fell in love with a track of theirs at the end of last year and I asked for a meeting with them. So we met and I said, ‘I would really like to write and produce a track with you and make it my next single’. We did a track together that turned out exponentially better than any of us expected going in to it. There are no plug-ins used, everything is tracked live, and it is a house record – but it’s all acoustic. It turned out extraordinary and we sent it out to people and the reaction has been fantastic.
“It’s such a bold statement. In the midst of all of this digital music, it’s like, ‘Hey, we didn’t use any of that stuff. This is a band playing this music’. I’m just so proud of it. It’s everything I’ve ever loved about house music – being real simple and really good. The song’s called ‘I Found Love’ so it’s all very positive. Everybody else is singing about partying like it’s the end of the world and all of this nonsense. This is the opposite of that.”
While they mightn’t have used any plug-in technologies to make the song, Sunshine is grateful for its advantages when it comes to DJing. Rather than having to lug heavy flight cases around, he can now fit his entire record collection onto his laptop.
“I haven’t played records in about five years. When I would tour Europe five or ten years ago, I was going around with two 200 pound metal flight cases full of records. I’d have a backpack on with my clothes and I’d be carrying these two anvils all around Europe. It was brutal. It was miserable. It felt like some sort of prison work or something.”
Of course, the downside is that more or less anybody with a laptop and internet access can call themselves a DJ nowadays. With a digital world at our fingertips, there’s certainly no need for anyone to spend time scouring record stores for those rare vinyls any more.
“It’s all so different now in the digital age,” he agrees. “People show up with a laptop and they’ve got 30,000 songs on their hard drive. That’s maddening to me because I would never want that many options. I like the fact that I show up with a finite amount of music and loosely knowing what I’m gonna do.”
He says that what separates the men from the noise is the ability to immediately read a crowd and play accordingly. “I think that now that is the only art of DJing. Because it’s equal access with the music. I mean, things go up for sale and twelve hours later they’re on 50 file-sharing sites. So if everybody has equal access to the music, then the only art, the only nuance, to DJing, is how you put it together. Because everyone can get the same tunes, it’s all about the context that you put them in. What you start a set with and what you end a set with speaks volumes.”
At high volumes.

Dublin’s Tommy Hilfiger store is located at 13-14 Grafton St, and the Hilfiger Denim Store can be found at 13 Trinity St.