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This year, Pete Tong celebrated 20 years at Radio 1. We met him at his London studio to look back on a life dedicated to dance music – and find out just what it is that keeps him coming back for more.

Pete Tong has had a recurring nightmare for 35 years. “It’s always the same,” he says, “I’m DJing, and the record I’m playing starts running out… and I can’t find another one to put on. I’m looking everywhere and I’m panicking and then just before it runs out I wake up like this.” At this point he clenches his fists and shudders convulsively, like a man running at top speed who’s just come to the end of his invisible rope.

We’re sitting in Pete Tong’s studio space in leafy Parsons Green in south-west London. Gold and platinum records line the walls, the trophies from the three strands of Pete’s career: radio presenter, record label A&R and club DJ. Above the decks is an original print by Goldie, who Pete describes as, “Like family –I think we were brothers in another life or something.” There’s memorabilia spread out everywhere today, as Pete’s been digging through his archives for Mixmag – ancient flyers from Soul Weekenders, pictures from Ibiza in 1988 or sitting at huge archaic mixing desks at forgotten radio stations, even the framed sleeve of the antique orchestral record that Pete found years ago in New York, and which gave the name to his famous FFRR label, recently relaunched with Warner Records.

Also present is Paul Rogers, Pete’s musical collaborator for the past few years. Together the pair have worked on everything from the soundtracks to The Beach and Harry Brown, to their new album of ad-friendly instrumentals, to remixes of the new signings to the reborn FFRR, the hotly tipped Paper Crows. This isn’t the first studio the pair have shared; the last one was the famous Olympic (“pretty much the last proper old recording studio left outside of Abbey Road until it closed down”) where the pair shared a hallway with Brian Eno (“we used to try and nick his synths,” says Pete; “he would have all this amazing old gear lying around. We found one amazing synth from the 70s and got really excited, and he was like, ‘why do you want to use that old piece of shit?’”) 

 Pete Tong grew up in Kent. His mother worked in her family’s pub until he was born, and his former army dad was a bookie (“a turf accountant, they used to call it then”). It was a comfortable, middle-class childhood in the main; Pete’s first home was near Hartley, where he remembers cycling around the countryside as a young lad, before learning mechanics from his dad at “around 12 or 13” when he started riding a bantam motorbike around the lanes. Music was always there – the young Pete was “always banging on drums, strumming guitars”, and listening to his dad’s extensive record collection, from Dean Martin to The Beatles to Santana. Around the age of five or six Pete’s 16-year-old cousin, a Motown fanatic (‘he had every single”), introduced him to the classic sounds of the Detroit label. This would kindle a lifelong love affair with what DJs of a certain generation still call ‘black music’.

After the birth of his little brother, Pete was sent to boarding school. “Apparently I was really traumatised, I used to send really sad letters home, but I don’t remember that ” he says. “I really think it was the making of me.” The love of music went on, but he had not yet found the right outlet; “I tried learning piano and gave up, tried guitar and gave up; eventually I took up drums and used to play in a band doing deep purple covers.” That was until, at 14, he saw his first DJ at a school party –and life changed forever.

At this point in our interview Pete pulls out a paperback book he says was his ‘Bible’ as a child. It’s The Emperor Rosko’s DJ Book by sound-system pioneer and Radio 1 DJ Mike Pasternak. “I read this book over and over,” he says, flicking through it until he comes to a picture of Rosko sitting in his studio, surrounded by kit. “I always imagined myself sitting in that picture – I used to listen to him on a Saturday morning and write down all the records he played, even the phrases he said, in a little book.”

Soon after, Pete was throwing his own school discos and village hall gigs in Gravesend. “My dad and my godmother lent me the money for the gear, and I handpainted all the posters. My dad used to drive me around, and the big West Indian guy who used to help him at cashing-up time in the bookies would be the doorman.”

Next came a residency in Gravesend pub The Nelson; popular with the town’s surprisingly big multicultural community, it was where Pete was first exposed to reggae. He started hanging out with older lads who would go up to the clubs in London. “That’s when I started to hear about things like American imports and 12” mixes,” he recalls. 

Pete and a friend decided that the best way to get in with all the big-name DJs of the time was to start a club and start booking them. A weekly night at a restaurant in Brands Hatch attracted people from all over the country, and a residency would follow at The Royalty in Southgate (“we actually booked Marvin Gaye one night – I think he had some money troubles at the time”). An encounter with Nicky Holloway (“the loudest, biggest-nosed kid that came every week – he used to beg me to tell the guys to fuck off and go to work with him”) led to gigs in Bermondsey in London and parties at London Zoo. It was 1987, and the hard core who would become the founding fathers of the UK dance scene were starting to come together. “Danny Rampling was Nicky’s best friend. I met Paul Oakenfold, who ran a club in Streatham, and Carl Cox, who did his soundsystem, and started doing parties with the [legendary footie/music fanzine] Boy’s Own crowd: Andy Weatherall, Andy Farley.” As a DJ, Pete had swapped his suburban jazz-funk sound for a more rare groove and soul, maybe mixed up with some early hip hop and electro, but soon a new sound would come along that changed everything.

“At first, house music was a progression from the black music I loved; it didn’t seem so revolutionary,” he says. “If you went to the Paradise Garage they were really keeping disco alive: 117/118 RPM, four-to-the-floor. But when those first house records – Joe Smooth, Marshall Jefferson – arrived, it was like year zero, like everything before had ceased to exist.” The scallywags at Boy’s Own made sure the former soul boy from Kent turned house DJ didn’t forget where he had come from, though. “They used to take the piss out of me all the time for being from a previous era! And they invented the phrase ‘It’s all gone Pete Tong’.”

It was a DJ gig that got Pete his first proper job, and was his ticket into the record industry. At a DJ competition in London (he came third) he was offered a position at Blues & Soul Magazine (“It was the Mixmag of its day”). Expecting to start work as a writer, on the first day he was told that he would actually be working as a junior ad exec for the magazine’s offshoot, Black Music. What this actually entailed was compiling the extensive classified ads for reggae record shops and driving around some of London’s roughest areas to collect the money. “I had a gun pulled on me once in a reggae shop in Craven Park Road,” chuckles Pete. “If you got one detail wrong for one record these guys didn’t want to pay.” 

Next stop was London Records in 1983. Once again, his first day was eventful. “I thought I was signing up as a junior A&R and club promoter, but when I got there they had already sold me off to (parent label) Polydor. New Edition’s ‘Candy Girl’ was number one the day I joined, and on my first day they gave me a bunch of master tapes and said, ‘You’re a DJ – go and edit the follow-up to ‘Candy Girl’.” Later Pete would sign some of the biggest records around and launch his own subsidiary, FFRR, which would release huge hits by everyone from Lil Louis, LTJ Bukem and Armand Van Helden to Carl Cox and Salt ’n’ Pepa.

Pete Tong’s first involvement with Radio 1 was actually in around 1981. At the time he was mates with UK DJ Froggy (Steve Howlett), one of the first DJs to popularise beat-matching and crossfading in the UK. Each week Froggy, who built the sound systems for Radio 1, would be invited by the station’s Peter Powell to speak about dance music on his show. “He was a genius,” remembers Tong (Froggy died in 2008), “but he wasn’t that great at speaking about it. He asked me to help write a blurb for him; what to say about the records.” In the end Pete ended up doing the slot for him. “I was 21 or 22 and I thought I was going to get a Radio 1 show… It took me ten years to get back there!”

Pete the radio DJ spent the next few years flitting around pirate and commercial radio stations before being hired by the new Invicta station in Kent in 1983. It didn’t end well. “I had the biggest show there on a Saturday night, but I was a victim of racial profiling! Budweiser came in to sponsor the dance show, but they insisted on a black guy presenting it.” In 1986 he moved to Radio London (“Funnily enough I was actually hired by Dave Pearce”), where he did the hip hop and soul late night show. Within a year he was hosting Saturday nights at London’s Capital Radio, just as house music was filtering into the consciousness. 

 In 1991, when Radio 1’s Geoff Young quit his show, Pete was the obvious candidate to take over. Used to a close, “almost father and son” relationship with his legendary radio producer Richard Park at Capital, the return to Radio 1 was to prove a bit of a shock. “It was like being dropped into a vacuum. Nobody said whether I was doing the right thing or doing it wrong. When I started on Friday night everyone was already off down the pub.” All that would change, though, as Pete had unwittingly arrived at the station at a time of monumental change – a change in which he would become a key player.

Newly appointed controller Matthew Bannister and his deputy Andy Parfitt were taking on the established DJ dinosaurs like Dave Lee Travis and Simon Bates in an attempt to change the Smashie and Nicey/roadshow culture and bring the station up to date. The target market was to be youth, and the pair realised they had the perfect man on board: one who already had an insight into dance music. “I went from no one talking to me to feeling like I was the most important person there, “ says Pete. “We used to sneak off for secret meetings in a nearby hotel. They said to me, ‘Who should we hire?’ and I told them to get Danny Rampling, to get Judge Jules, Tim Westwood. I said they needed a mix show, so we started the Essential Selection.”

Not only was Pete in the right place to have the station practically built around him, it was also the right time. “Dance music was getting bigger all the time, Cream and Ministry of Sound were starting, there was so much great music coming out – and I was the only one playing this music to the nation’s youth,” he says.

In the 20 years since, Pete’s innovations transformed Radio 1 into the arguably the most important station in dance music, swapping roadshows for live broadcasts from clubs and taking the station to the Miami Music conference and Skol Beats in Brazil, and of course Ibiza every year since 1995.

In 2009 Annie Mac took over Pete Tong’s Friday night slot, a change he welcomed. “In a way I wish it had happened earlier,” he says. “It helped me reinvent myself. Being on at 6pm was all about managing the transition from the daytime crowd into the evening, mixing commercial into a more underground sound. I picked every record, but it probably didn’t make a lot of sense for someone listening in a different time zone. With the new show [9pm on Fridays], I can be completely focussed on dance music.” The new show also doesn’t have to be recorded live, though Pete says that new technology means that playing live is now a bigger buzz than ever before. “I love the art of radio, that romantic notion that everyone around the world is waiting for me to play the first tune. Now, within minutes you have messages from all over the world, you’re connected everywhere. Somehow I always picture myself as a kid, listening to the radio under the covers at boarding school.” 

 Looking at the old pictures of Pete it can be hard to reconcile the fresh-faced, skinny kid with the stockier man who sits with a kind of coiled restlessness in his dark studio. But every so often he drops his guard, and a trace of that thousand-watt smile – the one that’s such a feature of the old pictures and flyers – slips out. The past few years have even seen him return to making music, teaching himself Logic and Ableton – witness his track with Paul Rogers on your covermount CD this month.

Before we wind up the interview, I ask him the one thing that everyone must wonder about. After thousands of DJ gigs all over the world, and a career that has seen every high and low of dance music for the last two decades, just what is it that keeps him coming back for more?

“I guess, firstly,” says the man who could justifiably claim to have done more for dance music in the UK than anyone else, “I always feel that as a DJ I’m misunderstood, that I have something more to prove.” While we’re still getting our head around that, he continues: “but also, DJing is the purest form of what I do: sequencing records in a club, making people go crazy to tunes they don’t know. Waiting for that special moment when you feel like it’s effortless, like the records are almost playing themselves, and knowing that every one of those moments – that combination of those people and that club and that night and that tune – will never be repeated, just as a surfer knows that each wave is unique. It’s an addiction.” It’s the stuff that dreams are made of.

The All Gone Pete Tong UK tour and compilation will be announced soon