DJ David Guetta, not your usual pop maestro

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This article was published 28/12/2010 (5727 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

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There are four music videos from DJ David Guetta free for the downloading today as part of our iTunes 12 Days of Christmas promotion: Sexy Chick featuring Akon, One Love featuring Estelle, Memories featuring Kid Cudi and When Love Takes Over featuring Kelly Rowland. And the French dance maestro behind all of them doesn’t find it hard to play favourites.

When Love Takes Over, the 2009 hit that puts the spotlight on Destiny’s Child’s Kelly Rowland, is Guetta’s top pick. Its director is music-video visionary Jonas Akerlund (Madonna’s Ray of Light, Lady Gaga’s Telephone). And it revolves around the sort of beach-party scene you could only hope to stumble across if you’ve got a full-time gig modelling resort collections. But that’s not why Guetta loves it. “It was the first time I didn’t feel stupid in the video,” he says with a chuckle.

“I’m a terrible actor,” he explains over the phone between tour stops. “Every time, for me, it is such an effort,” he sighs. “And every time they would say, ‘Action!’ I would be so shy and it would be terrible.” Director Akerlund, he says, put him at ease (“I don’t know why”) — and that meant results. “When Love Takes Over was the first time where I was kind of not looking so stupid,” he says.

Guetta might just be indulging in some self-deprecating humour there, but his stage fright (set fright?) isn’t a secret to those in his circle — to the extent that, when it came time to make the video for Sexy Chick in summer 2009, the shoot was sprung on him guerrilla-style.

It was in the middle of my tour, and I had no idea of what was going on and they gave me a surprise party and I had no idea. They just told me, ‘We’re going to shoot the video in Ibiza . . . and I just arrived at the party and all my friends were there.” (Yes, the extended cast of pneumatic, bikini-clad pool partiers are all Guetta’s pals; most of them, he says, are dancers he knows through his long-running Ibiza club night.)

“I think you can feel it in the video; we don’t take ourselves seriously,” says Guetta. “It’s just a real party.” And who gets nervous about partying? “That’s the reason they did it,” he says. “Because, you know, they know how I feel. ‘So, OK, we’re not going to tell you anything, so this way, you’re not nervous.’ It worked really good.”

When your last album has gone double-platinum (One Love, 2009), you’ve got a special re-release on the way (One More Love, out Jan. 25), and plans to launch a proper followup album by summer 2011, it’s just not practical to throw a surprise bash every time you need to make a pop video — even if your job description includes party-starting on an international scale. (To give you an idea: Guetta’s making this call from Abu Dhabi, hours before leaving for another DJ gig in Singapore. He’s scheduled to play Bosnia, the U.K. and Slovenia before the close of 2010.)

“I just shot my video with Rihanna,” says Guetta of a recently wrapped L.A. shoot for his springy current single, Who’s That Chick? The video, which Guetta shot on a “retro-future” sci-fi set, re-teamed the DJ with Akerlund.

The fact that Guetta, unlike other producers and hitmakers, appears in his videos at all might seem unheard of to traditional pop fans. He’s not the one singing or dancing, but, thanks to the success of One Love, one could argue he’s as much of a pop star in North America as the artists who feature on that album’s tracks. It’s something of an anomaly —- made possible, Guetta says, by his pre-existing stardom in the DJ culture.

“The thing is, I had my own fans and my own world and my own records selling already, before producing artists,” he says. DJ-ing since his teens, the 43-year-old was a multi-platinum dance artist in Europe before One Love‘s breakthrough last year. “It’s a little bit different, because it’s really them coming into my world,” he says of the Top 40 stars who feature on that record. “If I make a record with Akon, for example, I’m speaking to people he’s not used to speaking to. So it’s also bringing him new fans that were not necessarily into Akon before.”

And he makes the distinction that he’s also not your usual pop maestro. The difference between him and the rest, though, is he’s not just a producer and songwriter. The first song he ever produced for another artist was The Black Eyed Peas’ I Gotta Feeling last year. (Not bad; the mega-hit charted as a No. 1 in 17 countries.) “My beats almost can live without the song,” he says by way of explanation. “I play my records instrumental in my DJ sets, you know. And they work. And I don’t give a track to an artist if it’s not already working without the song. So it’s a little different.”

That said, he doesn’t think he should be the only hitmaker to enjoy the spotlight. “Well, it would be only fair because, you know, they make the music,” he chuckles.

David Guetta’s One More Love is in stores Jan. 25

 

— Postmedia News