“There’s no point making good music if no-one’s going to hear it.”

How much of all the social networking would you say you really enjoy?

Well….I joined myspace in 2005, when it was a little baby. There were only twenty million members, it was really small and people in this country weren’t on it so much. I was able to communicate with loads of great artists I wanted to work with so that was a great tool that hadn’t been available before. And it was a great tool for promoters and fans to contact with me. It was one of those things that I never thought I’d need before it came along. My head was just into music and I fought against it initially, thinking ‘oh I don’t have time for this shit, I just want to make music’. But one of the very big problems in this country is that there are too many people making good music and not doing anything with it. Because they’re all at home saying ‘fuck Myspace, fuck Facebook, fuck everything’. They’ll make a hundred good beats a year and then they’ll….make another hundred. There’s no point making good music if no-one’s going to hear it.

In America the mentality there is different- it’s all about promotion and hustling and grinding, and doing the Myspace, getting your shit out, jumping onstage and forcing people to listen to your stuff. It is, on my level, necessary. For Kylie Minogue, possibly not. I don’t think she does her own Facebook. It takes a lot of time but the benefits it gives me outweigh the negatives- how much time it takes and all the spam. Like Myspace now, I’d say it’s eighty percent, ninety percent spam. It’s retarded, all these people hitting me up with automated messages. But I still get to talk to fans. It’s a necessary thing that artists need to do.

How do you go about making people feel comfortable on your home turf?

A cup of green tea, Maltesers….Just being down to earth really. The studio is pretty cosy, has a good vibe. A successful collaboration involves people being on the same plane. You create a friendship to a certain extent, it’s not just a business transaction. Fortunately most of the people I’ve ever worked with I’ve had a good rapport with. That’s one of the most important things to me- I don’t want to make music solely based on a transaction. You will do more for a friend than you’ll do if you’re employed by someone. So if you can be a friend of someone they might be willing to do more for someone. If I rang up Jay-Z’s management and said ‘look, I wanna do a track’, that wouldn’t be a problem, aside from the fact that I’d have to pay him probably $100,000. If I paid him that money he’d do the track- money can buy anything. But what would he do? He could turn up and go ‘yeah yeah whatever yeah yeah’…who do I go to and get my money back? Is he going to put in 100% for me? No. He doesn’t know me, I don’t know him, I’m not his ‘bro’, wasn’t born and raised in Brookyln. But then I can go to someone else who might not be famous who would put in 150%. So that’s why I don’t always look to collaborate with super-famous MTV-style people.

To keep all of these plates spinning, you must have a good work ethic?

Yes. It’s called (adopts mock-European accent and bangs table with his fist) ‘working your balls off everyday’! It’s because I’m Eastern European. We all work hard. Do you know any Eastern Europeans who don’t work hard, who are ‘milking the system’ as the right wing press here say? All the Eastern Europeans I see round here are working their frigging arses off- cleaning cars, washing dishes, just hustling. They are doing the work that a lot of English people don’t want to do. People don’t want to be a road sweeper, people don’t want to empty the trash or clean toilets. These jobs were done by English people thirty, forty years ago and now they don’t want to do it. But at the end of the day, a job’s a job.

I used to clean toilets, I used to clean offices when I was seventeen to pay for equipment. You’ve gotta do what you’ve gotta do. I’ve never been a lazy person. If I need something then I’ll work my arse off to get it. So I always look up to people who achieved things through sheer hard work. Musically one person I’ve always really looked up to is Slug and Atmosphere. I’ve seen them come from nothing, from selling 500 mixtapes back in Minneapolis in 1998, to selling 250,000 records now, independently. It’s incredible how their shows are bigger than a lot of major label rap artists. And they’re still independent, still doing it for themselves. So I’m like, ‘wow, you guys did it, you really did it’.

The industry is changing so fast. If I wanted to, when you guys leave, I could just sit here, have some drinks, chill, get up tomorrow, chill, do fuck all. I’ve got no-one telling me I’ve got to make another album. And even if I didn’t make another album for 2 years people would still buy it when it came out. But the industry really is changing very, very fast. There is the constant pressure that if I don’t release stuff people will move on. It’s not certain that we will be able to even sell music in the future, or whether it’s gonna be solely live-music based. So that’s why I’ve got to be there putting myself out and about, to be at the cutting edge, to be there when the change happens. Because whatever happens, the way people consume entertainment in 2012, when the Olympics are in London, will be very different to how it is now. Whether music will be totally free, I don’t know. I hope it won’t go corporate and be in the hands of the big corporate sponsors.