All successful artists feel burdened by the necessity of playing the hits, or in some cases THE hit, the one that launched their career and catapulted them into the public consciousness. Some, with various levels of enthusiasm, embrace it. Others, like Eric Prydz, run away from it.
The Swedish DJ hadn’t played Call On Me, his 2004 Number One for over 20 years, describing it as “super lazy”. Often this stance hasn’t done him many favours – at one gig in Quebec City, Canada in 2008 punters bottled his decks when he refused to play it – but through two-decades of DJ gigs, high-concept A/V shows and a multitude of aliases, Prydz has succeeded in becoming known for things beyond his breakthrough hit.
But he now appears to have softened his stance. In a new interview with Billboard, Prydz revealed why he played Call On Me at a show in Austin this March, mixing it into Steve Winwood’s Valerie, the original '80s song from that provides that track's central sample.
“I was just flicking through my SD card looking for music and I saw a special edit of the track I have,” Prydz told the magazine. “I turned around to my tour manager like, ‘Stefan, should I play ‘Call on Me’?’
"It was almost like a joke. He looked at me, like, ‘Yeah, go for it.’ I was like ‘Are you sure?’ I was like, ‘Well, it’s in the same key as the track I’m playing now,’ so I just played it. There was no planning. I was as shocked as everyone else.”
As you can see from the video below, the punters, predictably, went bananas.
Prydz said that playing the track felt “weird” and suggested he might wait another 20 years before he played it again. Not so, it seems – he played it again at a gig in Brighton just two weeks ago.
Call On Me, you may recall, reached Number One in the UK in September 2004. Apart from the sample – which Winwood re-recorded especially for the track – the track was memorable for its notorious ‘sexy’ aerobics video, which even then-Prime Minister Tony Blair saw fit to comment about (“The first time it came on, I almost fell off my rowing machine.”)
Different times, eh? Different times.
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