As far as the mechanics of how the music was made, there's no denying: Endtroducing was extremely simple. That's not to denigrate it - that doesn't mean I'm knocking it or I'm saying my new stuff is better, or anything like that: it just means, I literally had, what, 12.5 seconds of stereo sampling at my disposal, and some turntable overdubs... The nature of the beast back then was probably about 50% looping and 50% chopping, and that was what you could do with samples.

Things go wrong when the people who control that world stop listening to their own instincts and start catering to their fan base.

Incidentally, the very, very first review that James Lavelle and I saw of Endtroducing was very negative! It was in The Wire, and the context of the review was that, you know, Mo'Wax was so far behind Ninja Tune. Heheheh. And people wonder why there was this sense of a feud between labels! We just kind of looked at each other and we were like, 'Oh, well, let the floodgates open!' But, not to be facile, that was literally the last bad review I ever saw for that album.

I would rather have 10 people working on a record that are really committed and believe in it and love it, than 50 people who have no idea who I am or what I'm for.

There are a lot of music startups that don't have anything to do with anyone's love for music. It has to do with them having a glorious IPO and then retiring to the Bahamas somewhere. It's important to keep that in mind.

So, in addition to being a full-time father of two and everything else in life, it isn't so much that I'm sitting around plotting an album. I just kinda follow my muse and wherever my interests lie, and at some point I decide, "Right. It's been a while, time to figure out how to get serious and make some music."

When I'm representing my music live I think of it very much in a rock band sense. When I first started doing festivals in the 90s there really weren't other DJs playing the stages I was playing. So I felt I was being afforded an opportunity to kind of make a statement about what DJ music can be live. In the 90s, if you were a DJ you were in the dance tent, and you were playing house music and techno music. There was no such thing as a DJ - a solo DJ - on a stage, after a rock band and before another rock band: that just didn't happen.