Danny Howells interview “I do quite miss my old job in a way because it was very rewarding in a totally different way to the job I’m doing now. It could be the most heartbreaking job in the world, and the most rewarding as well.” Nowadays best known as an A list DJ as recently as six years ago, Danny Howells was working as a psychiatric nurse in a British hospital treating patients suffering from serious psychiatric disorders. “It was in the acute ward of a small hospital, a semi secure 12 bed ward, and you’d get a lot of aggression there, a lot of violence, in fact it could be quite a nasty place sometimes, though on the whole you’d find it very, very rewarding,” he recalls. “You’d spend months and months working with one particular person calling you **** and wanker and all that kind of shit, then suddenly they’d become your mate after a couple of months. In that sense it could be the best job in the world at times, but then it could be the worst at other times.” Simultaneously developing his DJing career (first making his name as warm up DJ for John Digweed’s Bedrock club), he’d also find his two roles merging on the dance floor as well as the clinic. “There’s been quite a few occasions – isolated incidents where alarm bells have been ringing when you come across somebody in a club or you’ve seen somebody at an after party definitely suffering from some kind of psychosis and they are on a lot of drugs as well, so I’m not sure whether it’s immediately drug induced, or whether it’s the beginnings of some sort of illness,” he admits. “Especially people aged around their early 20’s because people often develop psychiatric illnesses at that age.” And just as Danny was spotting potential patients on the dancefloor, some of the same individuals would be noticing him, with surprising results when he’d return to his day job after the weekend. “On many occasions I’d be out DJiing at the weekend, playing Hastings Pier and Monday morning I’d go to work and be told we’ve got a new patient coming in. Then the patient would walk in and go ‘Alright Danny, good set Saturday night’. That was quite bizarre. It was also quite good in a sense, because I ended up knowing a lot of the younger people through the clubs and pubs so they’d feel quite confident in talking or opening up to me.” 6 years on, Danny’s concentrating solely on his music career, and is just about to release a double mix CD for compilation company Global Underground, themed around his latest gigs at Space Miami (last October) “The Global Underground series is based around a city and one particular night, so I wanted to stick to that them as much as I could,” he explains. “Every year in Miami I do a Halloween party, but because my surname is Howells, it’s called Howellween, and this year we had Josh Wink play so it became Howellwink. I played two sets there, one set indoors and one on the terrace, and as much as I could I based this CD around those two sets. For CD1; 95% of the tracks were played on the terrace there, and for disc 2 the same applies.” Skrufff: (Jonty Skrufff): As a DJ, are you generally approaching every weekend trying to find as many new tracks in as possible? Danny Howells: “Yeah, I do that is because when I’m actually playing in a club, if you are too familiar with a track it takes away part of the excitement for me. I like hearing tracks almost as on the same level as the audience. So you’re hearing in the same way as them. I like my tracks to be as new as possible so I’m always trying to put new tracks into my sets every single week. When I go away for a long period of time, say to somewhere America for six weeks, you find yourself stuck with he same records and there are always a few records you just get sick of by the end of the trip. If most of the crowd haven’t heard them before, it’s not too bad, but I do prefer having new tracks each week.” Skrufff: The tracks from this album are they pretty much gone from your box or…… Danny Howells: “I keep some of them there for now, because they are promoting the CD but I do generally have a very high turnover of records in the box.” Skrufff: Are you still spending a lot of time in America? Danny Howells: “Not so much recently because I was doing a monthly residency in New York, it was originally called Vinyl, then it became Arc, and unfortunately that got pulled down a year ago to be made into apartments, which is tragic because it was such a great club. Since then I’ve not been so regular, so I’m spreading it out a bit more. Over in Asia a bit more and doing more in Europe, bit more in the UK.” Skrufff: How do you see the club climate in America right now? Danny Howells: “I don’t think dance culture is going to get the chance to break through there like it did over here, because of the government and because of all the restrictions imposed on all their club. The over 21 (drinking) law in particular is holding back a lot of people of clubbing age from going out, and the whole New York thing with Guilliani and the way he was trying to shut down all the clubs, means it’s never had a chance to really crack open like it did over here in the UK. Perhaps there’s still a slight hangover from the whole disco sucks thing, I’ve no idea really, but a lot of DJs still spend a lot of time out there touring extensively, and it’s still great , it just hasn’t really gone ballistic like it did over here in the late 80’s early 90’s.” Skrufff: Do you ever go back to your home town of Hastings? Danny Howells: “I live really close to it still, only six miles outside town. So I’m always down there.” Skrufff: Hastings has a rough reputation. . . Danny Howells: “It’s got a lot better I think. There’s good and bad in every place you go to. Eastbourne is supposed to be full of old ladies, but you get more murders there than you do in Hastings. Hastings has obviously been quite a poor place, one of these neglected seaside towns that has seen better days, but I think they are finally starting to pour some money into it.” Skrufff: You worked as a psychiatric nurse, do you stay in touch with anyone from those days? Danny Howells: “A few people I used to work with I’m still in touch with. The other day I was in Hastings and I was walking down the street and I heard “Alright Danny” and it was one of my ex patients, so we were standing in the street having a chat for a quarter of an hour.” Skrufff: Were you working as a nurse when you started your DJing career? Danny Howells: “I started in 1990 about a year before I started DJing in 1991, then did the two jobs together. I finished nursing in 1998.” Skrufff: The whole cliché of dance culture is people borderline psychotic when they are off their heads. Do you come across people when you’re out and think : oh my God, you’re disturbed? Danny Howells: “I have actually, yeah. I think one thing you learn from working in a job like that is you don’t judge people at all. You do see a lot of people out, and you’ll find people will be very judgmental. Somebody might be acting in a very distressed way or very aggressive and people might think: He’s off his head on drugs, but sometimes there’s a lot more going on than that. Like an alcoholic on the street trying to get money out of you. Often these people have got a story and until you know that story you shouldn’t really be judging these people or trying to make an excuse for why they are behaving like that. I even came across some kind of judgmental attitudes amongst the hospital staff when I was working there. You’d have someone come in who was very psychotic who had smoked a joint two weeks previously, and you’d sometimes hear them being referred to as junkie, or drug addict. It made me quite angry in a sense but it was ignorance. Usually the ignorance is amongst psychiatrists more than the staff. Skrufff: How easy was it making the step to work solely as a DJ? Danny Howells: “It was really, really horrible actually. I got really busy with DJing and I was doing a lot of remixes and had to make a decision. I felt that I could go back to the psychiatric job, but I couldn’t go back to DJing so I had to take this chance then. But I then had to got through almost two years of being so poor and getting the occasional monthly gig where I might earn a bit of cash. That’s the reason I held onto that nursing job for so long, because I thought I was quite good at it, and I could tolerate it, but also because it gave me an extra 700 pounds a month to spend on records. Coping with the financial aspect was very difficult for a couple of years after leaving that job.” Skrufff: How did you cope in practise? Danny Howells: “I remember my mum would lend me 5 quid (US$9) here and there, and I could always ring her if I couldn’t afford any food. You’d get the odd good month, but then you’d find that after a good month you are using that to pay off bills that have accumulated before. So it was quite difficult. I always say to people, if you are going to start out as a DJ, make sure you aren’t expecting to survive on it from the start, because invariably you won’t. It’s quite unrealistic to think you can do that. Try and support yourself with a more stable job.” Skrufff: Once you’ve got yourself to a different level, has it been easy to stay there? Danny Howells: “I have been quite fortunate, but I am very realistic about the whole situation, I never really assume it’s going to last for ever. For me personally, after two years I started to get more work and I was able to support myself properly and pay off my mum and the bank and all the bills that had accumulated so in the last few years it has been a lot easier, but I want to stay realistic, DJing isn’t the most secure job. I can’t put my hand on my heart and say I’ll have clubs requesting me to play for them in ten years time, or even in five years time. You never ever know what’s around the corner. I’ve always thought if I had to go back to my old job or do something like that then I will; that’s reality, that’s just life.” Skrufff: I would have imagined you driving in limousines, flying business class all the time…. Danny Howells: “I have had my fair share of business class, but you’ve got to realise that these clubs are paying it, so you might as well take advantage of it, usually it’s the sponsors anyway so it’s not really the club paying for the flight. DJs get business class a lot because you are expected to fly all day, land, then go straight to a club and play. I do a lot of long sets as well, so my year consists of a lot of getting off a plane, going straight to the club, doing all night in the club then going straight back to the airport again. You generally find, especially in the summer, that the only time you are going to get any sleep is actually on that flight. I think just being realistic about the actual stability of it, I don’t know if the most stable job in the world, you’ve got to just enjoy it while it’s there.”
