Armand van Helden finally returns to the UK on Easter Sunday 8th April for PUSH's 1st Birthday at the legendary KOKO in London, with a new album 'Ghettoblaster' to showcase. Those lovely guys at One Week To Live Magazine grabbed some words with this legend of house music and gave us a little tease of what he had to say!

Extract c/o One Week To Live magazine the UK’s leading free weekly dance urban and electronic music and listings publication. To read the full interview with Armand and for your chance to win tickets to see him play this weekend in a rare UK appearance pick up this week’s free copy of One Week To Live magazine. To find your nearest outlet check the stockist page online at www.oneweektolive.com.

Words by Simon Guirao

Featured in current Issue 69 of One Week To Live magazine

With his remix of Tori Amos’s ‘Professional Widow’, Armand Van Helden established himself in dance music’s night sky as one of its brightest stars. From here, he maintained his status as a true superstar DJ with output of the quality of 1999’s album ‘2 Future 4 U’, which spawned the now classic singles ‘U Don’t Know Me’ and ‘Flowerz’. His chameleon like musical style then took a more aggressive approach with his next album, ‘Killing Puritans’, still keeping its funk and house groove while upping the distortion factor. A sell-out night battling with Fatboy Slim at the Brixton Academy in 1999, and his performance at Homelands 2000, cemented his rep as one of the biggest and baddest DJs around, and his set at Get Loaded in 2005, for those fortunate enough to hear it, was a sonic orgasm of the funkiest proportions. He’s got a new album out in May, and on Easter Sunday he’ll be performing a rare UK DJ gig at Koko. We got hold of him in his castle in New York, knelt at his knee and listened to the tale of Armand Van Helden.

Hello Mr Van Helden. So you like music, huh? How did that come about then?

My experience with music goes back pretty far. From when I was three or four there was always music on in the house. My mum was a soul sister and my father a rocker. I got to touch on both. Stevie Wonder, Led Zeppelin, Cream and lots of blues. Whether it was black or white, all of it was based in blues.

There’s one track that always spring to mind when your name is mentioned, that remix of Tori Amos’s ‘Professional Widow’. What’s the story behind that? It was pretty groundbreaking at the time.

My friend told me “You’re past octagon, the amount of corners you’ve turned in terms of style”. Tori Amos was one of those corners. What happened with me was I was stuck in a vein doing this New York hard house, dramatic breakdown shit. I was a big fan of drum and bass as it was coming up from hardcore and jungle, but I didn’t produce any because the UK owned that and I knew better than to be some dickhead from the States to try and fuck with it. The politics of drum and bass reminded me of dub reggae – that shit’s gotta be from Jamaica or go fuck yourself. So what I did with Tori Amos was to incorporate a little of what drum and bass does. The main thing with that mix was when it drops. House music back in those days didn’t drop to nothing. The architecture of the songs back then, they would break down, but always with a percussive element, or the bass, something that would keep the floor in a tempo. Friends of mine who were A&Rs at major labels heard the record and said “I can’t play that record, it drops out completely in the middle, if I’m playing for people, they’re gonna stop dancing and look at me”. I guess that’s exactly what people were waiting for. Like in drum and bass, everybody knew there was the drop, they knew the bass was gonna come in at some point. It was that idea. It was a turn for me getting off the New York thing, and I was experimenting. It didn’t make sense at the time, but it happened to strike a nerve and I think the main reason was that drop. It screwed everybody up for a minute.

Tell us about your new album...?

This is another totally different turn. My last album was a rock-based record, I was feeding off the indie rock scene at the time. For this album, forget the indie rock thing – leave it to the pros. I basically made this album with an ‘85-‘90 feel. It’s kind of a forgotten time. I wanted to make it sound like it was from then. It’s soul, with girls singing lots of vocals. I didn’t want to do the hybrid mash-up thing, because it’d be like bastardizing that time. I want people to listen to it and say “That’s exactly how it sounded in 1988.” Obviously I couldn’t do that perfectly, it still has a little bit of today in it.

What’s the New York scene like now?

This town is party-fucking-central. There are so many things to do in New York, so many circles of people in those things, it’s endless. But you have to have the mentality to be open to that. For example, today is a Friday. I can go downstairs to an after-work salsa club. I can go there and see the hottest Latino mummies the world has ever seen. I can leave there at 8pm and go to some lounge and listen to Gilles Peterson or some shit. Then from there, I can go to the regular banged-out New York scene, which is the celebrity mash-up crowd, where they’re playing Led Zeppelin in to Jay-Z, and I can do that all night and then I can go and hear Erick Morillo at Pacha. If you’re open to it, this town works fine.

What you gonna play for us when you come over to PUSH’s 1st Birthday @ Koko on April 8th?

House! I’m a house guy! Maybe a bit of electro, and maybe some chopped up French things.

What would you do if you had one week to live?

I've already lived. So for that week I'd probably do nothing. I've been privileged. I'm not saying I'm Mick Jagger, I've not seen what he has seen through his eyes, but I've had some fun.

Check out PUSH (featuring Armand, CagedBaby and Touche) right here: http://www.dontstayin.com/popup/bannerclick/place-1/music-1/bannerk-6288