Global Underground’s Andy Horsfield chats to 909originals about the past, present and future of the iconic mix series

For many, Global Underground is more than just a series of DJ mixes, it’s a succession of pitstops along the road of life. 

Many of us remember what we were doing when we first heard Sasha’s epic San Francisco or Ibiza mixes, or soundtracked our after-hours sessions with contributions from locations as diverse as New York, Shanghai, Sydney, or Oslo. Some may have fallen in love to the series’ seminal moments, others immersed themselves in its sonic soundscapes during challenging times. 

For more than 25 years, we have worked, played, studied, laughed, cried – and most importantly, danced – to the Global Underground series. 

This week sees the launch of GU’s latest release, Global Underground 045: Danny Tenaglia – Brooklyn, which, given the New York native’s previous epic contributions from Athens (Global Underground 010) and London (Global Underground 017), is likely to be on constant rotation at 909originals HQ for the next few weeks. You can purchase it here.

Also of note is Global Underground: Unique, which kicked off in August with a series of individual releases week-on-week, from artists such as Tinlicker, AFFKT, Gai Barone, Emanuel Satie, Florian Kruse, Magit Cacoon, EdOne, Sasha Carassi, James Harcourt, Kamilo Sanclemente and Giorgia Angiuli. That’s due to come to a close later this month, with the release of a 12-track vinyl album.

Founder Andy Horsfield, who alongside former business partner James Todd launched Global Underground in 1996, is still at the helm, ensuring that the series continues to push musical boundaries, not to mention soundtrack our lives. 909originals caught up with him. 

Hi Andy, it’s great to chat to you. How are you doing? Are you on the West Coast?

I’ve been here a couple of years. I lived in New York for like six years, or something like that. So yes, I didn’t honestly think I would move back to the States after I left New York, but I kind of moved around a lot. I was in Asia for a long time – in Singapore – and then I moved back to London. I got stuck there during the pandemic. And then I got itchy feet, and thought, ‘where can I go and live now?’

I should start by saying, I’m a huge fan of the Global Underground series, since I got into dance music really in the 90s, so it’s an absolute pleasure to get to talk to you. To start, maybe you could tell me about the Unique series and how that came together?

So basically, we’ve done repertoire in the past – singles and artist albums, such as the UNKLE album from a few years ago – and when we’ve done it, we’ve always tended to do it in fits and starts. Also, with the city series albums, like Joris Voorn, we had two singles from that, and with Amelie Lens, we had a single from that. 

We realised that we were really good at working singles around album projects. Plus, there are so many amazing producers around, and new producers that I love, that I was trying to work out how I could combine both. We use their music on our albums, but a lot of these producers aren’t really big enough to justify doing a mix album with us. 

We’re an albums company when it comes down to it – that’s what we’re really good at, as outdated as that may seem to some people. Album projects are something we can really get our teeth into: come up with great artwork, with great concepts and just it properly, rather than just working on, say, just one individual single. 

I was thinking, ‘why don’t we do a series of singles, but bundle it around an album project?’ I had this hit list of artists I wanted to work with – we got in touch with them, and everybody said yes. And not only did everybody say yes, the minute we said that the release was going to be vinyl-based, everyones eyes popped open. 

A lot of artists churn out these digital singles, for streaming, and it’s like a treadmill for a lot of labels. Nothing’s particularly spectacular. But the minute you put a beautifully packaged Global Underground vinyl album into the mix, it captures everyone’s attention. 

I wanted to do it properly – obviously we want to generate sales, but also support artists. Each of the artists are making £1,000, £1,500 from having a track on the album. I’ve seen quarterly statements from some people and they’re getting something like £30 or £50 for appearing on an album. That’s not fair on the artist – they’re putting a lot of time and effort into creating something amazing. 

Once this has been released, we’re going to have a second edition coming out next April, and then another one at the end of next year. We’re aiming to get two of these released every year and help support amazing artists, both new and established.

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So is the idea to tease some of these tracks on the traditional Global Underground mixes?

Well, we’re going to do that retrospectively. I want to try and keep it as pure as possible. So, we’ll put the singles out and then put the album out and then we’re going to select whichever tracks we think work and include them on some of our albums in the future. And then there’s also the possibility of doing some remixes.

So it’s a work in progress, you know? We’re finding our feet, in a way, but the response has been phenomenal. I’ve actually been taken aback how well it’s been received by everybody. Because traditionally with our stuff, when I read comments online and speak to fans, it’s all about what the next city is going to be. 

No matter what we do with our own projects, like After Hours and Global Underground Select and stuff, our core fans are like, ‘yeah, but when’s the next city series album coming?’ But the response to this has been amazing. So maybe this time we’ve got it right. It’s new music – it’s unreleased, it’s exclusive – from amazing producers from all over the world. Hopefully the fans will take to it.

It’s interesting that when you said it was vinyl only that everyone’s ears is pricked up, because obviously, Global Underground was born out of the hard copy era as opposed to digital era. And as it has gone on – even now – the mixes still come out on on CDs. It’s the die-hard format for the Global Underground obsessive.

I don’t know, honestly, why we sell so many CDs now. I mean I don’t have a CD player at home any more, I don’t have one in my car. But I know collectors love them because of what we do, with the beautiful booklet included. In fact, we have to get them pressed in Poland, as there only a few places in Europe that still make this format. 

I suspect that our fans buy that format, but then consume the album on streaming.  They want it in their collection. It’s understandable – some people have bought every single city series album we’ve ever done. They want to listen to us on streaming, but they still want to look at the booklet and read the sleeve notes and everything. 

You know, that whole immersive experience that we created nearly 30 years ago to take people to a particular city, with a particular DJ, at a particular time. 

I remember a few years ago, Fabric stopped doing the mix CDs and people were like, ‘what are you doing?’ I don’t know how many Global Underground superfans are out there that have every one, but it’s probably more than you think. Has it really been 30 years since the first one? 

It’s getting there. It was 1996. I think in just over two years, it will be 30 years. That’s f**king incredible. 

Back in the mid 90s, CD mixes weren’t ten a penny – they weren’t that common. Renaissance kind of broke the mould on that, in 1994. In terms of how the Global Underground story began, then – the idea to do a CD series, go from city to city? Maybe you could shed a bit of light on how that conversation started?

Basically, like you said, there were clubs doing mixes, basically. So, Ministry were doing them – The Annual mixes, with people like Pete Tong and Boy George. Renaissance and Cream were doing them. The Ministry logo on the cover was the biggest thing at the time. 

At the time, myself and my ex business partner [James Todd] were involved with lots of various things, and we got to know Paul Oakenfold and Sasha and people like that. We had all these friendships with the biggest DJs in the world. But we didn’t have a club. And at the time, in order to sell a mix, you needed to have a club. It was the case that you had to have that recognition factor.

So I was like, I need to think about this. And I thought about it over and over again. And it all came back to the same thing –  there was all these famous rock albums, that were like ‘Live in Paris’ or wherever. I thought that it was a great concept, and maybe we could do something with that. 

There was a TV show at the time called Rough Guides – I think it was on Channel 4 – and you would have a couple of reporters go somewhere like Amsterdam with a film crew, and go to the best bars, restaurants, nightclubs. They would whip round the city and basically edit it all together very quickly, so it was a ‘rough guide’ to a city. I had always thought that it was a good concept, and at the time, DJs like Sasha were starting to play in places like Miami. I think he had just done his first tour in Australia at that time, actually. 

So, DJs were starting to travel a bit, so we thought, it we take a DJ and we go to a city, why don’t we try and capture that whole concept together and put it in an album. Base the album on that city, take some photographs and so on. Eventually that would turn into what we knew as Global Underground. 

There was a band at the time called Transglobal Underground – I think they’re still going – and I came up with the name Global Underground, because it was it was just a reflection of what was going on. I was like ‘can we, can’t we?’, because Transglobal Underground were quite big.

So then we decided that ‘yes we could’, and when we approached Tony De Vit with the concept, he loved it. He was probably the biggest DJ in Britain at the time – he was certainly the biggest hard house DJ in the world.

He told us ‘oh, I’m doing a gig in Tel Aviv soon’. And I was like, ‘that’s f**king perfect’. Tel Aviv sounded so exotic.

So we went there, and Tony did the mix. We had no idea about licensing or anything that. I remember I called Hooj Choons up; DJ Lottie was working there at the time. She was lovely. I was like, ‘we’re doing this Tony De Vit mix, and we want to get this track’, and she said ‘well, you need to send me a deal memo’. I was like, ‘what’s that?’. So she sent me a fax, and then talked me through it, and that was how I learned how to licence tracks. 

But we still didn’t have a distribution deal. I had got the manufacturing sorted, assuming that I could set up a distribution deal within a month. But of course, you need to pre-set albums two months ahead. So that’s how we ended up with SRD – Southern Record Distributors, who we were with for quite a few years. John Knight, who runs it, is a sort of anarchist anyway. He loved the fact that we were last minute and we had this great record. He gave me the worst deal ever, but he did get the record out and, you know, he did a really good job with it. 

I remember the album was hand-packed. SRD were like ‘we need 10,000’, and we were like ‘what the f**k, I thought we needed 2,000!’. So we had to get loads of people into our office to hand-pack all these albums. There literally was about 20 people, friends of friends, and you know, everybody’s drinking, getting stoned and all that, and we’re all packing this stuff. 

A friend of ours was driving back and forward to London, with basically a van full of albums, and then, by the time he got back, we packed another load, and then he would go back again. It was like this shuttle, back and forth, over a long weekend. That’s basically how we fell into it, and the album did really well.

Then I went to Cream, and bumped into Nick Warren, who I had always really liked as DJ, and he loved the idea as well. And then the next record was Paul Oakenfold, and what can you say? It’s was a defining moment.

Moving on from that, I think the other the other big moment for me, personally, would be the Danny Tenaglia record, because Danny didn’t do mixes, and he was a New York DJ. We didn’t know him personally, but we knew people that knew him.

Eventually, because he loved what John Digweed did, and what Sasha did, and what Tony De Vit did, he agreed to do it, which was a massive coup for us at the time. And obviously Athens was one of our biggest records. 

We interviewed Danny recently, and he was saying that Global Underground enabled him to explore a different side of his musical personality, because he was renowned for a certain kind of house music. On the London mix, of example, he was mixing up tribal, progressive and techno, which he hadn’t done before. Was that something that you encountered with other DJs? 

Yeah â€“ on Oakenfold’s Oslo record, for example, it starts off with drum ’n’ bass. There are about four or five drum ’n’ bass tracks on there. That wouldn’t have been what he was playing in the club at that time, but he loved those records, and he wanted to put them on the album to reflect that. It made that album particularly unique. Also, on New York, there was that hip hop vibe to it. 

It was a case of, ‘it should reflect your version of that city – how that city makes you feel’. We had a hard and fast rule when we started, that you can’t do your home city. But recently we’ve done a couple like that – Amelie Lens in Antwerp, Joris Voorn lived in Rotterdam for many years. So we’ve ditched that rule, because if it’s where they’ve cone from and they feel it’s a city that reflects them, then that’s where their Global Underground is going to come from. And obviously Danny Tenaglia grew up in Brooklyn as well. 

Obviously the first Global Underground – Tony De Vit in Tel Aviv – was a live mix and then you moved away from that pretty quickly. Was the initial plan to have them as live mixes? You used to sell mixtapes, right? So this would be like a sort of ‘formal mixtape’, going from city to city?

Yeah, I mean the live thing is great, but in terms of licensing it’s a f**king nightmare. Basically, because even if you even if you clear a load of tracks and give the DJ those tracks, and tell him or her to ‘only play those records, because we’re going record it’, they’ll still put other things on there. So yeah, it’s a f**king headache. So as quickly as possible, we dropped the live thing – a lot of people still thing they are recorded live, but they are generally studio recordings. 

Amelie Lens, actually, recorded in a live format, as she did it on decks, which is quite unusual, as a lot of people just use Ableton. So it’s down to the individual DJ, really. Then, if you look at Joris Voorn’s mix, there are something like 120 tracks on there, it’s edited within an inch of its life. But it’s done in such a beautiful way that you don’t even hear the transition. 

So you can go from something like Amelie’s record, which is very raw – and a lot of people love that, because it reminds them of our early records – to something like Joris did, which is just this beautiful, polished work of art. 

As the series evolved – probably after maybe Sasha San Francisco – you kind of became synonymous with a particular sound. That mix sort of established the Global Underground as the standard bearer for the progressive house movement. Was that sound something that you you fostered, or was it something that happened naturally, because of the times?

It was basically just a reflection of the best DJs at the time. I mean, people always say that, that we’re progressive and stuff, but if you think about that period, Danny Tenaglia, that’s not a progressive house album. Darren Emerson, definitely not. During that period, we were working with people that were outside of that. 

Sure, Dave Seaman’s, and Sasha’s, and Nick Warren’s are definitely in that vein. And Digweed’s. We just happened to work with a lot of progressive house DJs. But if you look at the DJ Mag Top 100 at the time, that’s what people were listening to in clubs at the time. It’s like the whole melodic techno thing that’s been going on for the last four or five years – Tale of Us, and these kind of guys. 

When we started Global Underground, the idea was that I wanted to work with as broad a selection as possible. That’s why we worked with Tony [De Vit], because I wanted to work with the best in the world. They might not be the biggest in the world, but I wanted to work with the best. 

So that’s why we ended up working with people like James Lavelle. With James, it’s just f**king brilliant to put albums together, because he’s an artist with UNKLE, â€“ he’s not, even by his own admission, one of the biggest DJs in the world. So we wanted Tony De Vit, we definitely wanted James Lavelle, We wanted Fabio & Grooverider, for drum ‘n’ bass, or LTJ Bukem. That was the idea, you know? We wanted Carl Cox for techno. 

A lot of these albums we ended up doing, and the idea was that it would definitely be the best from each genre. And then we ended up down this route where a lot of our artists – but by no means all our artists – were progressive. And then when we introduced Nubreed, the likes of Danny Howells and Lee Burridge and Anthony Pappa were probably considered progressive as well, or were at the time. 

So, so yeah, it was more of a sort of happy accident, and a reflection of the best artists at the time, and they were playing that particular sound. But, you know, by signing James Lavelle and Darren Emerson and people like that, we were still mindful that we had to keep the thing quite broad. 

But it’s amazing how many people who are like hardcore prog people love the Lavelle records or love the Emerson records. They’re just great, great albums, even if that particular sound might not necessarily be people’s first choice. James Lavelle’s mix was sort of breakbeat, the first CD of Barcelona, but the way he put it together, with the Ian Brown bits and things like that, it’s beautiful, you know?

In terms of the structure, or the ‘journey’ behind the mixes, CD2 tends to be the peak time part of the mix. In a way, CD1 is almost like the ‘starter’ and the CD2, the ‘main course’. Is that something that was part of the plan? 

Yeah, it was never anything we specified. It just tends to reflect the set, you know? So it’s a two and a half hour set – the first part’s probably going to be a little bit gentler than the second part. 

That’s just how DJs play, you know? So it’s never been prescriptive on our behalf. It’s just the type of journeys that DJs tend to build. 

Going back to that Danny Tenaglia London mix, I remember him saying previously that it was based on a set he did in Home, a club that’s no longer around, obviously. And that basically, the remit from Global Underground was, and you can correct me if I’m wrong here, to not the exact match of the set, but to go through some of the tracks he played and try to recapture that vibe.

Yeah, across the two-CD mix. So it’s not like a carbon copy of ‘this is what I played at Home on whatever day in 2000’. It’s like almost a recreation of the atmosphere, the vibe, the kind of the energy he was trying to convey on the night, in a way. A lot of DJs choose to do that. 

I mean, we’ve always said, if you want to record it and you want to refer back to it, take parts of it, use bits of it, or take some of the tracks, it’s up to them. But it really is up to them to deliver a mix in that they’re happy with, that they feel reflects themselves in that city. 

I like to give people the freedom to deliver what they want. You can’t be too draconian about this stuff, you’re dealing with creative people – you’ve got to let them flow and do the job. The reason you’re working with them is because they’re the best in the world. So you don’t go putting them in a ‘progressive house cage’, for example.

One of the things that made Global Underground was that it was a whole package – and it continues to be a whole package – with the photography, and indeed, the sleeve notes from the late Dom Phillips, who you got involved with quite early on. How did you start working with Dom?

So, the first album didn’t have any sleeve notes. For the second, we went to Prague. I took a very, very young Ben Turner with me, who was the editor of MUZIK at the time. I think I terrorised him, ha ha. He did the sleeve notes for the second album.

When we got to John Digweed, the Sydney album, Lynn Cosgrave, who was managing John at the time, suggested Dom. I had spoken to him when we did the Tony DeVit Tokyo album, because I took one of his journalists to Tokyo to do a feature on Tony DeVit, and it was all very last minute.

But for Sydney, Lynn was like, ‘look, get Dom to do it’. I loved his writing, he was at such a high level, I’ve never really considered that he would do it, but sure enough, he agreed. And so he did the Digweed album. I’m trying to think when he started traveling with us – maybe San Francisco? He definitely came to Athens.

Again, I wanted to the very best people in the world to work for me and help create this thing, which was still very – even by volume six or whatever – was still quite embryonic. Even the cover for the Sydney album, we shot in London. It’s John with his hands in front of his face.

I think it was when we did the Paul Oakenfold New York album and Dean Belcher shot the cover for that, and we also shot New York as a city, that it was a case of ‘okay, this is all coming together now’. 

The words were so important. I mean, if you read some of Dom’s notes, they’re just phenomenal. They’re like time capsules, of when and where he traveled. We used to go to the club, Dean would go off with his camera and Dom would go off with his notepad, literally a pencil, and I remember when we got the photographs back – the contact sheets, it was like ‘Where was she? Who was he? Where did you find him?’

Dean would find these amazing people and Dom would be the same, he would be at the back of the room interviewing people, asking ‘why are you here?’ They were creating these amazing documents of a moment when a Global Underground DJ came to Los Angeles, or wherever, and just the whole thing just flowed. 

I think Dom’s notes definitely went to another level – he had those beautiful, colourful stories. We went to after parties and we met these freaky people, you know, and he’s interviewing them and weaves them into his notes, and it’s just pure artistry. 

It was so tragic, just over a year ago when we lost him. I honestly thought they were going to find them, and then the news came out that he had been murdered. It’s just horrible, horrible. 

The rise of Spotify and other streaming platforms means that fewer people are listening to albums now, and things are more geared around singles. How has Global Underground shifted to accommodate or to appeal to that new listener, while also continuing to appeal to the older generation?

Well, in terms of digital, were the first big label to sign with Beatport in 2004, when it launched. I saw an advert for it, and I had a quick look at the site, and there were no labels there. We were Beatport’s biggest label when it first started.

Then we worked with iTunes to get the DJ mixes on there â€“ that was around about 2004 or 2005 – because they didn’t do DJ mixes. So we’ve always been a very digital-forward label. 

But at the same time, like you said, our stuff is so immersive – it’s so tied to physical. Putting it in a digital format seems to be sort of underserving it. With iTunes, I remember we used to just basically give people a digital-format PDF of the accompanying booklets. 

We definitely took a bit of a hit at the end of 2001, into 2002, when LimeWire and Napster and all these things started, and record stores started going to the wall. Everybody was struggling a bit. But the music industry adapts, you know? It has taken us all a while to adapt to streaming, and we’re all now starting to see the benefits from that in the same way that we did during the whole iTunes era and the early Beatport era, when the digital income was phenomenal. 

People were still buying CDs, but going digital meant that your album was now available everywhere. Previously, we were exporting CDs to the States, to Australia, to Asia, but once they were out of stock, there would be a period when it might take two months to get back in stock, and then you would miss out on sales. Whereas with digital, you’re always in stock, 24 hours a day. You might not sell massive amounts in South America, or Asia, but you are still available.

I have always tried to adapt, and while it’s good people experiencing our albums on streaming, I feel that it could still be an immersive experience, with video and things like that. None of the streaming services offer that – YouTube does to a certain extent – but the way that the royalties back from YouTube work, it’s definitely at the lower end of all the other sites. 

I feel that at some point there might be a way to make it a little bit more immersive, you know, and create something beautiful visually that goes with the audio as well. But what format that takes and who it would be with, I don’t know. It’s something we’ve been looking at for a while. 

People are so used to making their own playlists now, and they may look at the Global Underground albums and pick their favourite tracks – you know, Xpander, Hale Bopp, etc – and make a completely different mix. Do you feel you need to almost educate the listener, that ‘you have to devote 80 minutes of your time – or whatever it is – and immerse yourself in the journey’?

I like to think with Global Underground, people can go on their own self discovery. All our albums are on YouTube. F**king everybody’s put them up there. Some are good quality. Some aren’t. But there’s a discovery mechanism there. 

So, you might be listening to a random Solomun mix, then you might come across his Global Underground, and you discover that you like it, and then you maybe go and discover another one. You know, if you spoon feed people too much, it just feels a little bit too corporate for me.

I mean, there’s a lot of debate over here, you know, about what they call EDM, and its effect on electronic music, and stuff, but it’s no different to, you know, young Andy, in a f**king muddy field somewhere when in 1988,1989, dancing around, listening to ridiculous records from The Prodigy or whatever. It’s no different from that. 

People grow up. So, kids here might be going to see Steve Aoki, and hoping that he throws cake all over them. But two years later, they’ll be in a dirty warehouse downtown LA here listening to Dubfire, you know? Their taste will change.

Ok, not everybody will discover that â€“ not everybody will get that immersive within electronic music culture. But what I guess is good about the popularity in the States of a lot of techno DJs is the relatively uncompromising music they play – it’s phenomenally popular. They’re getting exposed to it.

And they’re learning that there is this other side, you know? It doesn’t have to all be massive drops and cakes getting flung and performance over talent, and stuff like that. It can actually just be heads down, hard techno or whatever. 

The other thing is, do we want the whole world to be into this culture? I’m not so sure. Let’s say there’s 100 million people like electronic music, and a million of them discover the underground side and they go and listen to some of our older records and stuff. I’m fine with that kind of percentage – one or two percent that go down that rabbit hole in terms of self discovery. 

As you say, EDM is absolutely massive, and to do a Global Underground: Tomorrowland or something like that would potentially be very lucrative. But you’ve deliberately stayed away from that – you have ploughed your own furrow and been consistent with it, so that people can discover the series, without it going fully ‘mainstream’?

I mean, maybe it was the mainstream back in the 2000s or late 90s because that’s what the sound was. But the thing is, we don’t need to. That’s the point. 

You know, a lot of these kind of mainstream EDM DJs are just not into what they do or how they craft stuff together. There’s no craft. But they’re very popular, and you can’t be too sniffy about that. 

So for us, it’s never going to be a case of ‘oh, I work with this person’. In a lot of cases, I just don’t think they’re good enough. And if they’re not good enough, they’re not getting signed to my label. So it’s a no brainer. 

Someone might tell me about a DJ that I ‘have to work with’, and I’m like, ‘They’re not f**king good enough’. ‘Oh, yeah, but they’re massive’. I don’t care. Yeah, they’re selling lots of club tickets, but can they put a mix together that you will still want to listen to in 20 or 30 years? The answer is no. 

It must be amazing when you look at what people are saying online about different Global Underground mixes over the years. Because they have – and this goes for myself too – soundtracked so much of our lives, and particularly our after-party lives, ha ha.

I’ve been told so many stories about people. The one thing that always comes back is about a particular album, let’s say Sasha San Francisco, that they ‘had it on Minidisc when I was travelling‘ and that they ‘listened to it so much that it changed my life’. 

You get these kind of stories and it’s just wonderful. That’s when you know that what you’ve done with your life or what you’re doing with your work is making a difference to people’s lives, and it’s it’s an amazing feeling. 

You know, I’m lucky â€“ I’ve worked with the best in the world and I’ve done it for 25-plus years. When you work with the level of talent we work with inevitably, you know, amazing things are going to come out.

Does Global Underground have a ’full stop’, do you think? You have paused it a couple of times, in 2010 and 2015, but do you ever think about wrapping the series up some day?

The last pause was because of Ministry [of Sound] – our partners. We basically couldn’t agree on stuff. So we agreed to pause some of the bigger records until we could figure it out. They were struggling a bit in making the label profitable. 

When I got it back – I bought it back off then in 2015 and started again – we launched the ‘super deluxe’ format. I realised – and in a way I’ve always realised – that we’ve got these collectors and these fans and they want like a very special format. Also, sales have dipped. So, why not just sell less but make them beautiful things?

In terms of if there’s a full stop, honestly, I don’t know. I think about this a lot. I mean, obviously we’ve got a landmark in terms of GU:50 coming up at some point in the next two or three years.

But if you’d asked me 10 years ago, would I still be doing this in the way that we’re doing it now? I would have said no. We’re doing better now. This year is the best year we’ve had in about 15 years. The number of records we’re doing, Danny Tenaglia’s record – the pre-sales for that are insane. 

So we’re growing, and again, 10 or 15 years ago, I never would have thought we would. I don’t know about a ‘full stop’. I’m 56 now. Am I still going to be doing this when I’m 65? I don’t know. I hope so. 

I have to ask as well, being Irish. Was Dublin ever on the agenda for a mix? 

It was, and Darren Emerson was going to do it, but it didn’t happen. But don’t discount it in the future. I’d love to do Dublin, I really would. I just need to find the right person that loves it too. 

I’m not going to ask you what your favourite mix is, because you probably love them all equally, ha ha. But was there a moment where it all ‘made sense’, when Global Underground really properly ‘stared’ in your eyes?

Yeah, I don’t have one that’s like, ‘oh my god, my favourite ever’. It’s not one particular album. I mean, I love Athens. I love CD one of Ibiza. I guess I love the whole of San Francisco, James Lavelle Barcelona CD one. Oakenfold New York – the whole album is amazing. I could go on. I could probably pick 10 individual CDs from the whole series.

You know, I might listen to Emerson’s Singapore record when I’m in one particular mood, or Naples, or Solomun’s Hamburg when I’m in a different mood. It all depends on your mood. 

Thanks Andy for talking to us. Words by Steve Wynne-Jones. Global Underground 045: Danny Tenaglia – Brooklyn is released on 10 November and can be purchased here.

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