Jon Carter was dance music’s George Best in the 90s. So where did it all go wrong? And how did he make it right again?

Jon Carter looks out to sea from the safety of a beach hut at St Leonards-on-Sea’s vibrant Goat Ledge café. It’s a grey, overcast summer’s day so the Space Hut – fittingly bedecked with hand-painted planets and stars – makes a suitable refuge from the intermittent East Sussex drizzle. His gaze is still fixed on some point out towards France as he takes a bite from his sumptuous fish bap. “There’s so many fucking stories, man.”

As anyone who witnessed one of his raucous DJ sets in the mid-90s through to the early-00s (bookended by his superb mixes ‘Live at the Social Volume 2’ in 1996 and then 2002’s ‘Viva Bugged Out!’) will testify, Jon Carter never really did understatement. His barnstorming productions from the same time, particularly Monkey Mafia’s ‘Blow the Whole Joint Up’, where he did just that, combining hip hop, acid house, techno and ragga to stunning effect, helping to crystallise the ‘Brit Hop and Amyl House’ sound that would later be known as big beat, were similar. 

Listening to him recount his rave war tales, and beyond, one afternoon in his new home on the south-east coast and it’s apparent that ‘so many stories’ is, for once, selling himself – perhaps knowingly – short. In his heyday, his name was a kind of byword for dance music hedonism (“I just wanted to create mayhem, musically. Which of course fitted my character”). It was, he happily admits, a great time to be young and living that life.

“Wonderful. Brilliant. Grew up with it, got involved in it… At the time I remember thinking I was a couple of years too late. But it was just the right time. I loved all that Renegade Soundwave and Depth Charge stuff. I used to go back to Beth Orton’s house on Ladbroke Grove after the Heavenly Social. I met Mark Jones who was then starting Wall of Sound, got introduced to the Heavenly lot, and the rest is history.”

By the mid-00s however, the bookings began to slow down. The world of dance music was changing. Carter admits it was frustrating, but he understood the shifting landscape.

“My day had happened,” he concedes, philosophically. “Unfortunately, agents tend not to have conversations with their artists when things are slowing down. If someone had said: ‘You’re not getting this fee anymore’, I would have said don’t ask for it. Reduce the fee. Looking back, you realise agents should have a winding down department. There’s an idea. ‘Are you failing? I’ve failed. Let me teach you how to fail the right way.’ Fail better? Yes! (Laughs). That would be something wouldn’t it? Niche. But back in my day there wasn’t an agency that helped you fail better.”

A bout of tinnitus, allied to a very public divorce from Radio 1 DJ Sara Cox, certainly didn’t help. He recently listened to some production work from back then and says everything sounds tired. “I’m not blaming anyone. I could have taken on less work, got more sleep… But, yeah, I was burned out.”

Behind the scenes he had already begun to diversify. He got involved in pubs, opening the Lock Tavern in Camden in 2001. “The night before it opened I was in there painting under benches listening to Radio 1 when Gilles Peterson mentioned my name,” he adds surreally. Having spent enough time in watering holes he had an inkling what would work. The Defector’s Weld in Shepherd’s Bush, the Keston Lodge in Islington and others followed. 

The pubs were a success. His music career less so. After a short-lived comeback of sorts towards the end of the 00s, he found himself labouring. His 580 Limited pub group was doing well, but while he was asset rich he was also cash poor. One day he was driving the van when he was told his next job was at Keston Lodge – his own pub. The manager of the pub, however, had gone on a bender and didn’t open up.

“So, I never actually had to have that embarrassment,” he recalls, “but I was totally prepared for it. I actually loved it. It was like Ali: If I was a binman I’d be the best fucking binman. I like going out and meeting people. My mate, the boss, had more DJs on his roster at one point than DJ agencies did. We all have to work.”

In 2014, Carter and his partners sold 580 to the Young’s brewery for £10.4m. It led to headlines such as Drinks On Superstar DJ As He Banks Millions. Only it wasn’t £10.4m that Carter pocketed. “The bank took most of it because they owned most of it,” he says.

Soon after, Carter and his second wife decided to open a retreat in East Sussex, with Carter redesigning and rebuilding the derelict farm in Etchingham four days after having twins. This is when things started to unravel.

“Fuck! I’ve worked in music, entertainment, advertising, promotion, pubs, hospitality… every backstabbing fucking industry you can possibly imagine and not picked up an enemy. The second I move into the countryside, Jesus Christ. They had it in for me before I even turned up.”

Carter’s reputation preceded him. A minority of his neighbours thought he had bought the farm for parties. In reality, the 2010s were, musically, a barren period. “I spent a lot of time away from it utterly immersed in other things and thought it had gone. I remember feeling guilt. Andrew [Weatherall]’s death really affected me. I felt I had betrayed a lot of things by moving away from music. But I hadn’t. I just did what I had to do.”

Following the breakdown of his second marriage, he moved down to St Leonards. He started bringing pieces of kit with him. One night when listening to the reggae soundtrack to ‘Countryman’ he had something close to a spiritual – certainly a sonic – awakening. He began to hear something in a percussion loop.

“It stopped me in my tracks,” he beams. “I hadn’t used Logic in ages. I ran this loop. I got a 303 out the cupboard and got that in time with the loop. I put that to a beat from a Derrick Carter bootleg EP. It was the first time in 10 years I heard a piece of music that I could hear a track around. And that’s what started it again.”

That loop became ‘Brothers & Sisters’, which forms part of his genuinely superb new album, ‘Medication Time’ for Brighton label Jack Said What (formed by Irvine Welsh, Steve Mac and Carl Loben). He’s also working on a new project Due South, which he describes, tongue-slightly-in-cheek, as a ‘cathedral of sound’. 

“It’s a piece of music that will never end,” he explains. “It aids meditation and psychic travelling. It’s 90 minutes long at the moment. There’s lots of healing frequencies in there.” 

One version culled from Due South’s never-ending musical explorations is ‘Sail We Must’. He explains how it’s 116bpm - “the tempo of the waves” apparently – which makes sense as he was making it with the windows open looking out to sea. He’s used it as the opening track on ‘Medication Time’.

Back at Goat Ledge and the now lukewarm fish bap is half-eaten. The talkative Carter has taken his naturally ebullient self to new-found garrulous levels. He’s still gazing out to the calming waves.

“Music has been such a razor-sharp saviour,” he concludes. “I’ve never felt such salvation from making music. I’m in the middle of an awful divorce and putting music out again is wonderful. I have no expectations. It’s purely for enjoyment again.”

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This article first appeared in issue four of Disco Pogo.

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