STEVE HILL

Unlimited Energy

Touted by DJ Ed Real as the “king of hard dance” a few years back, DJ Steve Hill has had to cancel a holiday to Hawaii three times recently due to his heavy work schedule. “You have to take a deep breath because there’s no room to manoeuvre, like you can’t get sick or anything else like that so you really have to look after yourself,” he tells ANNABEL MACLEAN.

Steve Hill is sitting in a Sydney restaurant with his daughter who has just finished day care forever. The family man who runs Masif Saturdays, a hard dance night which attracts 800 to 1,000 punters in Sydney every Saturday and a bunch more in Brisbane, the Gold Coast, the Central Coast and Melbourne, says Sunday mornings aren’t the best and on Saturdays he has the occasional “disco nap”.
It’s not bad for a man who is constantly touring, mixing and running his hard dance party nights. Booked for every Friday and Saturday night until the end of June, Hill jet sets off to Italy and the UK this month before heading to South Africa, Singapore, Korea, New Zealand and America – and that’s all before the end of June. “I’m [going to be] in the studio with three mad Italians who love their food so I basically go there, come out with 10 tunes under my belt and five kilos on my waist every time I go over so I try not to go too often,” he says. “Then in the UK, it’s just freezing cold so you basically get off the plane, get into the studio and then – without swearing – get the eff out of there (laughs).”
Hill is excited, however, to be visiting the land of biltong. “South Africa is off tap!,” he says. “It’s crazy! I played at a party there a few years ago called H2O in Joburg and it was like at a water park and there was 14,000 people there. There are planes flying over the top of ya, you’re DJing, there’s loads of people dancing in pools and on the side, it was crazy. The atmosphere was just so intense; you’re DJing and you’ve got to stop yourself from hyperventilating because you just get the crowd so revved up, you’ve got to calm yourself down.”
Being revved up is all part of the atmosphere which comes with any hard dance event (“It’s really up for it - obviously the speed of the music is such that it’s energetic and people are bouncing off the walls so you’re definitely not going to go there tired, you’re going to come out tired”) and it’s what Hill, Suae and Pulsar have done as the Hard Dance Alliance on Wild Energy 2012. Mixing two discs for the compilation which currently sits at #5 on the ARIA Top 20 Compilations Chart and #8 on the iTunes Album Chart, Hill says the process of putting the compilation together wasn’t difficult. “Suae, Pulsar and I run Masif Saturdays so we work with each other during the week and on the weekends. We know each other’s record boxes.”
Hill says there were discussions with the record label as to the amount of freedom the lads were given with regards to song choice when putting together the compilation but overall, he says “on disc three, it’s how we sound in a club environment and disc two is how we sound at an under 18s or something where it’s a bit more chart based.” As for liaising with America’s party boy Oh Snap!! on his mix for the compilation, well there weren’t many disagreements on track choices. “We were trying to nab tracks he wanted and he didn’t want to relinquish them but that was cool. We wanted Calvin Harris but he said it sounded better at the speed it was at as opposed to 15 bmp faster so yeah, that’s cool. We let him have that one (laughs).”
As for being named “the king of hard dance”, Hill says he’s grown into the title now. “At the time, he [Ed Real] was working for a – I wouldn’t say competitor – but he was working for another record label that was in the same fare but obviously we were all chasing the same records to sign,” he says. “I was actually quite flattered that one of my competitors actually thought that highly of me so I thought ‘ok, I’ll stick with that’ and people just carried on with it and it’s still there today.”
It’s a fitting name for the DJ who has over 300 productions to his name. “I can’t keep up with it either,” Hill says of his huge back catalogue. “I try and do my discography and on my website and I have people emailing going ‘ah you missed this one and this one’ and they’re tracks I’ve forgotten I did. And sometimes, I actually go to discogs.com in case I’ve forgotten one because someone has registered it for me (laughs).”