Is Global Gathering your first visit to Ireland?

I played a month or so ago, but the venue wasnﾒt even open yet, and there was a panic to try to get it ready in time. It didnﾒt turn out that well in the end; maybe itﾒs safer to say I havenﾒt played here before!

Youﾒre playing alongside house legends like Kerri Chandler and David Morales, who is twice your age. Is it a sort of learning experience playing alongside older generation DJs?

Itﾒs difficult to class it as a learning experience; weﾒre from different schools completely. Morales is from the whole New York, Frankie Knuckles kind of school; and while it is obviously fun to be sharing a stage with him, I donﾒt think I can learn much from him. Weﾒre very different DJs.

Most people would have first heard of you from your Subliminal mix [Subliminal Sessions Eight, also featuring Jose Nunez and Sebastian Ingrosso]. How did it come about?

Erick [Morillo] has bee supporting our stuff on Size Records from the very beginning; and when the chance came to put out an EP on Subliminal earlier this year [ﾓAcid/Euroﾔ] I got the chance to play some gigs alongside him. He obviously liked what Sebastian [Ingrosso] and me were doing and soon afterwards I was asked if Iﾒd like to get involved on the next mix project. You never know how anything is going to pan out; everything changes from one second to the next.

In the past few years at least, Sweden hasnﾒt really been renowned for house music...

I think its almost on top now. Sweden has never had the media to support dance music or dance culture; the club scene sucks. The media are highly unsupportive; they think that everything is drugs based and nothing else. Young people donﾒt get the chance to understand dance music, because parents put a stop to it. It took a long time for us to break into the UK and the rest of Europe so we could showcase what we were doing. Itﾒs been a rough one, but Iﾒm kind of happy it turned out the way it did because its made us work harder and put a little extra energy in to making it.

Adam Beyer, Joel Mull and others have always been flying the flag for Swedish techno thoughﾅ

Exactly, and because they started out so early and have been producing top quality music for such a long time, they have always been on top of things and have a large fanbase. For us house guys, itﾒs been harder, because individual European countries tend to champion their own acts, rather than seek out new talent from abroad. It took us a while to get there, hopefully we can hold the fort for a while!

Itﾒs not like the way you can travel around the world and in every major club you are going to have a good experience. In Sweden, when we were starting out, a house party was a major clubbing event. All your friends came over and you got to know everybody; within a couple of years you knew everybody in the industry. Itﾒs not a big scene. Sebastian and I have grown up together, musically and as friends.

You have listed Daft Punk ﾑHomeworkﾒ as one of your major influences- why do you rate it so highly?

I was only 13 or 14 when the album came out; I was only getting into music at the time. It taught me a lot; straight away you could tell from the sound that these guys were really having fun in the studio, doing what they love. Music shouldnﾒt be about having to take everything so seriously. These guys made huge success out of playing around with different sounds. You listen to it now and it hasnﾒt aged; people might even ask me these days what track Iﾒm playing and it turns out to be ﾑRollin and Scratchinﾒ or one of the others tucked away on the album.

ﾑAcidﾒ, released on Subliminal earlier this year, has a real Detroit sound behind it; would you rate that as another of your influences?

Of course I would; I grew up with that kind of sound as well because Sebastianﾒs father ran a techno label as well as a house label. Thatﾒs probably why our DJ sets are getting such a good response- weﾒre not afraid to mix it up and try new things. I think its all about having fun; when youﾒre standing there playing, people watch you. If they see you all stiff, concentrating on the technical part, people are going to be standing instead of dancing. When you dance the people dance. Itﾒs not a fashion contest; you should enjoy the party as much as everyone else there.

On the subject of mixing up things, you recently got to remix ﾑGehtﾒs Noch!ﾒ, one of the big crossover tunes of the last year. What was that like to remix?

The original was innovative, but it lacked a certain something that I thought would sit well in my bag. Thankfully it worked, people have been raving about it. Iﾒve been doing a lot of remixes of leftfield acts; Goldfrapp and Ladytron and people like that. I would rather do my own thing on a B-side rather than make a house remix that would sound almost the same. Thatﾒs why I donﾒt usually say yes to remixing a lot of artists; I want to have the freedom to put my own stamp on the record.

Is it all happening really fast for you? Your debut [Outfunk- ﾑFreshly Squeezedﾒ] was only out in 2002...

Yes and no. It seems like a long time ago. It was a bit slow in the beginning, when you start out, people donﾒt want to touch your stuff because they donﾒt know how long you might last. Size records put us on the map, and this year has really seen things start to kick off, its looking promising for the future.

Steve Angello plays the House arena at Godskitchen Global Gathering Ireland alongside David Morales, Kerri Chandler and Tim Deluxe to name but three. More information is available at http://www.novadance.com/godskitchen_global_gathering_2005_cork_ireland/