Shit! We're sitting in a hotel in Athens waiting for Armand Van Helden. He's due to play a gig here tonight, another in Mykonos tomorrow and then it's over to Manumission in Ibiza for Monday night. But he hasn't shown up. Why? Because, according to Thanasis, the promoter, he can't get into his house at the moment. I mean, we knew we hadn't heard anything from Armand for a while, we knew that his last album (1997's 'Enter The Meat Market') was a collection of disappointing hip hop, but this is big news: the god of RIP groove house, the man who single-handedly put the bass back into house and inspired a whole new style of garage in the process, can't get into house music? It's the music scoop of the year!'No,' Thanasis says. 'He really can't get into his house.' Oh ... Right ...
Saturday night and Armand has finally arrived with his schedule rejigged and a box of new records freshly bought. He's been rushing around New York like a nutter; sleeping at friends' houses, sorting out his papers and pressing acetates of his new album in one hour in Brooklyn (he's not impressed with the quality: 'it looks like they crushed them. They look fucked up' he grumbles). If anyone's got a right to be stressed it's Armand. But he's as chilled as you like. The promoter, the club owner and the PR woman on the other hand seem wound as tight as a Van Helden production. God knows why. It's all Greek to me.
We are sitting in Privilege (that's Privilege, Athens not Privilege, Ibiza), a huge restaurant-cum-bar-cum-club on the beach, between Athens and the airport, catching a bite to eat before moving to the owner Vasilis' other venue, King Size, for the gig. Privilege is like a Miami Vice set circa 1985; all white suits, smooth Sade numbers and seafood linguine. Armand, in his ubiquitous baseball hat and Wu Wear vest, sticks out like a Buddhist in a brothel (as he says later: 'd' you think they'd let me in this place if I wasn't the DJ? Of course not'). But he's cool with that; sat back in his chair, sipping on a glass of water, shooting the odd clip of footage on his digital video camera and speaking when spoken to. At one point Armand looks up at the lighting rig that's splashing ugly yellow light across the main body of the venue and he calls to the club owner: 'That light is the wrong colour. When you've had a drink you don't want to be looking at each other's pock marks and shit.' But mostly he just observes. Later, when we're talking on the beach in front of the club, he reflects: 'People always say that about me. That I'm like, an outsider. I observe. I'm always trying to look at the big picture.'
Looking at the big picture? Perhaps it stems from his itinerant background. With his father serving in the US air force, Armand spent his childhood to the age of 18 travelling around the world: Holland, Italy, Turkey and so on and so forth. And it was this, he says, that gave him a sense of perspective.
'Living on the bases, you were in a foreign country surrounded by Americans. And the people were from messed up backgrounds. Drug problems? Join the air force. Family issues? Join the air force. Violence? Join the air force. There were all kinds of people in the military.'
Going to high school on the bases in the early 80s, Armand quickly found that the kids divided neatly into two: you were either into rock music or you were a B-boy. And Armand was always a B-boy ('I was the best breaker at my Italian school,' he remembers proudly). But even from the age of five or six, he knew what he wanted to do. He wanted to be a DJ. At high school he ran his own radio show, he hooked up two tape decks and began to loop beats, and he recorded rhymes with his mates about drinking soda and the like (and he threatens one day to release these - literally - old school raps). But it was only at 15 that he blagged, bought and borrowed enough to set up two decks and a mixer, and he began to DJ at parties on the bases.