“I think it is fairly easy to rock the house, but so hard to look out of the window. Maybe some people think my music is funny because I’m often standing outside that house.” — DJ Koze

Vince Aletti & Michael Gomes
Mixmaster, Summer 1978

VA: Don’t you think the life of a DJ can be very lonely?

MG: Oh yeah, that’s why they play all these sad songs and I think the dance floor should only be a happy place. I think there should be a law against sad songs. The dance floor is somewhere where you should ask, “Could heaven ever be like this?” It should be a place of bliss, just happiness and joy. When people go out, they have problems, broken hearts. It should be a sanctuary, a retreat that is somewhere wonderful. Some places I have been, god, the things I hear on that dance floor, the music that comes out. Oh, those women are so bitchy. And some DJs will follow it record after record this way and I flee from clubs this
way. You can’t take it after a while.

VA: What songs do you mean?

MG: Of course, the example this year, which I think is the rudest, is “Runaway Love.” No wonder she can’t keep that man, honey, with an attitude like that, I would run away too. “You could leave if you want to.”

VA: That was a lot of people’s favorite record.

MG: If there is nothing else I have learned about the dance floor, it is built on bondage and discipline. We have no records per se from men where they take this attitude which women are taking, what man is ever saying “Oh baby, you can leave if you want to?”

VA: Only Teddy Pendergrass.

MG: Women keep coming out with these things, and then they literally push the guy out of the door and they then wonder what it is that makes “a man leave a girl so all alone.” I asked Linda Clifford, “How can you, after making a record a year ago saying from now on things are going to be so different, so wonderful, you come up a year later telling him he can leave if he wants to?” She said, “Sometimes it be that way.”

VA: What becomes a legend most?

MG: A hard dick, what else?