TRANCE MAN: Ralph once moved in circles with names like Sasha and Paul Van Dyk, connections he still uses to his advantage. |
“I’m painting my garage floor,” Dave Ralph says over the phone from Atkinson, in rural New Hampshire. “If you want it to keep it nice and clean, this is the best way to do it. It’s a beautiful tan color — a light tan.”Such is the life of former superstar DJ Dave Ralph. At the height of trance, Ralph was among the DJ elite, opening for Paul Oakenfold on his US tour, playing to hundreds of thousands at Berlin’s Love Parade, going from superclub to superclub.
These days, things are a bit different. The Liverpudlian has moved to New Hampshire and has been retained as the music director for Lansdowne Street superclub Avalon. This Friday, Ralph himself will take over the decks at Avalon, as he does from time to time. “I’ve kind of stepped away from it a little bit now,” he says of life in the DJ limelight. “My values changed a lot when I got married and we had a baby. It just changes everything, and life on the road with a wife and child is not that easy — especially if you’re doing long distances and a lot of plane flights.”
Ralph has worked at Avalon for more than three years. His wife is from Derry, New Hampshire. He’s even moved his mother from Liverpool to the Granite State. “I’m a very domestic person. I’m married with a kid and I live in New Hampshire, you can’t get anymore domestic than that! I am a fully naturalized citizen now.” Although he now ranks somewhere near 2000 on theDJlist.com, Ralph once moved in circles with names like Sasha and Paul Van Dyk, connections he still uses to his advantage. “Most of the guys who come through [Avalon] I have a personal relationship with. Carl Cox I’ve known for, what is it now, 20 years? All those guys — we all come from that stable. So it’s great when they come to town, because they know they’ll see a friendly face and everything will be fine for them.”
As the MD at Avalon, Ralph is well aware the club has taken some heat. “I know we get knocked left, right, and central. ‘You guys should be doing this, you guys should be doing that.’ But your first responsibility is that you have to make a profit. I’m not giving up on creating a demand for new talent, not in the slightest. I’m just more careful about what I do. It’s kind of a Catch-22 situation. Avalon’s a big place.”
Ralph has tried to bring different genres to the room in order to bridge Boston’s many scenes: breaks, house, trance, and so forth. “The problem with Boston is it got too genre-ized. At one time, dance music was dance music. If it’s good dance music, you come out for it. Now what’s happened, in my opinion, is there’re so many micro scenes going on and they all have their own little following. At one time, all those people would come out. Now, if you’re into that thing, that’s what you’re into. That’s the most frustrating thing. Boston’s a unique market in that respect.”
