David Guetta is a DJ and music producer. He’s the one that comes up with the killer beats that create the hit songs. He’s the one that music artists clamour to collaborate with, in the quest for that major hit. Call him the guru of electronic dance music, as he’s the one credited with getting dance tunes well wedged into the domain of pop and mainstream music. Guetta’s trendsetting 2009 album ‘One Love’ was one of the first electronic dance music albums to make it huge on pop radio; this was the break that got electronic dance music to the ears of a wider global audience and was what saw Guetta becoming one of the most in-demand DJs in the world.
David Guetta has been officially named as ‘Number One Deejay in the World’ (DJ Magazine, 2011), has over 25 million Facebook fans, more than two million Twitter followers, and over half a billion views on YouTube. He sells millions of records as well as deejaying in stadiums packed with tens of thousands of people.
Guetta speaks of how he has spent his life searching for that perfect dance beat. His dedication to the acoustic and his talent for arousing emotions in music listeners has made him one of the most in-demand producers on this planet. His collaborations with hip-hop’s biggest stars have resulted in some killer dance tracks and some superb chart-topping songs. For 47-year-old Guetta, successful songs all rely on the melody. “The main idea of my music is to make people dance and to make them emotional at same time,” he says. “Of course, because it’s club music, the way it is mixed down, the kick, and the beats, this is all important, but it is the melody that makes records stand out.”
How did it all begin for Guetta?
David Guetta’s fame grew from humble roots as a Parisian deejay at the age of 17. Like most parents, his weren’t happy about their son becoming a deejay. But for very different reasons.
“My parents were extreme left so everything was against the system. I was walking barefoot in the streets of Paris when I was eight. When I started to DJ they hated it, because for them, nightclubs, and all of this life, was terrible and fake,” says Guetta. But he loved it and knew that was where he wanted to be.
So Guetta’s career in music began in the nightclubs of Paris. At the ‘Broad Club’ to be precise. He says that it was there he first played popular songs, but soon discovered house music when he heard a Farley ‘Jackmaster’ Funk track on French radio in 1987. The next year, he began hosting his own club nights and in 1990, he released his first single, ‘Nation Rap’, a hip-hop collaboration with French rapper Sidney Duteil.In the mid 1990s Guetta played in other clubs including ‘Le Centrale’, the ‘Rex’, ‘Le Boy’, and ‘Folies Pigalle’. Guetta’s second single released in 1994, a collaboration with American house vocalist Robert Owens called ‘Up & Away’, was a minor club hit. In 1994, Guetta became the manager of ‘Le Palace’ nightclub and he continued throwing deejay parties there and in other clubs, such as the legendary ‘Scream’ parties in ‘Les Bains Douches’.
During his Paris deejaying days, Guetta tied the knot with nightclub manager and business partner Cathy Lobé. They have two children: son Tim Elvis Eric, who’s now 11, and daughter Angie, who turned eight last September. Last year, after 22 years of marriage, the Guettas called it a day, filing for divorce in March. Rumour has it that they are still bumping heads over the division of an estimated 30 million euro fortune.
There were more singles and three albums to follow for Guetta, including the formation of Gum Productions in 2001 and the release of his first album, ‘Just a Little More Love’. Later, he released ‘Guetta Blaster’ (2004) and ‘Pop Life’ (2007). But it was Guetta’s fourth studio album, ‘One Love’, that did it for him. The album was a ‘coup de maître’ in the kingdom of music, selling over 3 million copies globally. It gave rise to a total of six worldwide hit singles throughout 2009 and 2010, most notably ‘When Love Takes Over’, featuring American recording artist Kelly Rowland, ‘Sexy Bitch’ with Senegalese-American singer Akon, ‘Who’s That Chick?’ featuring Rihanna and ‘One Love’ featuring British R&B artist, Estelle. Not only that, but the album received a nomination for the 52nd Grammy Awards in the category ‘Best Electronic/Dance Album’. The album’s lead single, ‘When Love Takes Over’ was nominated in the categories ‘Best Dance Recording’ and ‘Best Remixed Recording, Non-Classical’, winning the latter. His sixth studio album, ‘Listen’, was released worldwide in November last year, with Guetta co-writing the title track ‘Listen’ with American musician and songwriter, Austin Bis.
However, regardless of his rise to fame as a music producer and songwriter, Guetta is quick to confirm that he is still a DJ at heart. “Everything I make as a producer, I visualize it as a DJ first. And all those beats, I test them as a DJ,” he explains.
“It’s actually quite incredible that I’m not really doing anything that different to what I was doing when I was 17,” he says. “I started my career playing records at a small club in Paris, before the emergence of house music. Back then, I played a mixture of new wave and funk, and in a way that is what I’m playing now.”
Aside from long stints in the studio recording albums, 47-year-old Guetta still gets into the concert groove with a hectic touring schedule, flitting to and from some of the finest venues in the world: he’s played at the lowest point on earth: Masada in the Judean Desert in Israel, and in summer hotspots such as the idyllic island of Ibiza and the whitewashed Greek island of Mykonos. He’s hosted glitzy gigs in Las Vegas and he’s headlined New York City’s Electric Zoo festival. And those are just a few.
Set foot into a David Guetta concert and you’ll really experience what he’s all about. You’ll be seduced by his sound. You’ll feel the emotion emanating from a captivated audience. You’ll literally feel the beat, the rhythm and the bass. You’ll be hypnotized by the sets, the lights, the smoke, the spectacle. You’ll get just how he entertains and enthralls the tens of thousands of fans who sway and gyrate to his beats, to his personal music mixes.
David Guetta, the go-getter is really going places. But for Guetta, it will always be about the music. As he explains, “I don’t do this for the money, I don’t do it for record sales, I don’t really care about that, I just want to make beats.”
