Duke It Out

“I’m looking on YouTube right now,” says Dyment. The 32-year-old English producer is the king of a newfound commercial heyday for house music. And, now, he’s clicking away, rock interview turned into the standard semi-distracted phone call of the digital age. But he’s looking for the figures to “mathematically quantify” the point he’s making about being a career producer, a music obsessive who’s just happened to have a run of hit singles. “One my most favourite things I’ve done this year, a track that I just love, it has 3000 views. And I’m as proud of that as I am of I Got U, which has 60 million views.”

I Got U marked Duke Dumont’s second straight UK chart-topper, following 2013’s Need U (100%), which became the first house single to hit #1 in the UK in 15 years, and was nominated for a Grammy. His roll continued with his latest single Won’t Look Back, which sounds exactly like Black Box’s Ride On Time, and landed at #2 on the UK charts. It’s heady territory, but Dyment feels unchanged; there’s no UK media trying to turn this semi-anonymous figure into tabloid fodder. He sees himself as part of a new crew of house producers who’ve found huge commercial success without playing the old game. “I don’t have a publicist. Route 94 doesn’t have a publicist. Secondcity doesn’t have a publicist. And we sell as many records as pop stars who have entire publicity teams and strategies. What is nice is that the game is changing. When you’ve got people like us who make music in a room in our house, and we can go toe-to-toe with the biggest pop-stars in the world, then that’s a great thing. You don’t have to conform to a pop-star formula to be successful.”

With Duke Dumont’s debut album close to finished and a full-band live show set to debut, Dyment’s rise doesn’t seem set to slow. Whilst he’s adamant he’s going to stay true to his roots – “I still want to make club tracks, and I still release vinyl records” – he’s not afraid of being ambitious. “If you say you’re ambitious, a lot of people will immediately conflate that with monetary value. But when I say that I’m ambitious, it’s not about that. I’m not trying to sell as many records as possible. My number one ambition has always been to try and be one of the best record producers in the world, not one of the richest.”

Yet, Dyment points out, he feels no unease with his success, and with navigating the commercial realm. It is, he considers, the fecund, formative terrain from which his own inspiration grew. “The music that inspired me when I was younger was huge commercial music. When I was growing up, the UK charts were in a really healthy state. We had The Chemical Brothers, The Prodigy, Fatboy Slim, Basement Jaxx, Daft Punk, etc. From there, I could get deeper and deeper into music. Hopefully, now, if some young kid hears one of my songs, and from that starts exploring house music, and finds his way into music that way, that’d make me really happy.”