The following is a part of interviews series introduced here.
Luke van Scheppingen, better known as Laidback Luke, was born in the Philippines, grew up in the Netherlands, and since then has had a decade long career making music. In 2011, he was voted to the 20th place in ‘DJ Magazines Top 100’ poll. He also made an appearance at this year’s Ultra Music Festival in Miami.
In the interview with Dan Schawbel to the Forbes Magazine, Laidback Luke expressed his joy about America had taken over from Europe in being the leading continent for house music as like a fresh new start to a lot of DJs who have been doing this for over a decade (like himself) and wonders, why took it so long.
About the recent projects he mentioned a video for his new single “Speak up” featuring Wynter Gordon in London and upcoming bus tour through the states, hitting more the college market after a fair share of the clubs in the big cities and basicly aiming for longevity instead of being just a sudden hype. Which includes crossing his music over more onto radio and TV. Alongside the strong feeling of having the gift to create music that stayes with people, taking them back to an era and emotion and will help them through the toughest of times – he tries to do the best to share that with the world and in five years he would like to be operating on this same kind of level, but bigger.
Until then Laidback Luke is catching up with social media revolution by trying to reply to every tweet in Twitter – as he is getting about 1500 mentions a day, it’s sometimes hard to keep it up. Also describing his typical day being as ongoing time crunch, he always takes notes about what is needed to do and then checking them off. And no wonder - as performing worldwide and having about 200 tour/travel days a year it means 4 to 5 hour sleep and, depending on the destination, taking two or three flights. Sometimes making music on the airplane and listening to demos at the airport, but sleeping most of the time possible. Arriving at the next location’s hotel room, catching up on emails and tweets, ordering room service and producing and working on deadlines at the same time. Taking a nap before the show and arriving to the club an hour before the show. Also trying to squeeze in his Kung Fu trainings, listening to promos, giving feedback on demos and doing interviews in between.
Although making music already about 20 years now, Laidback Luke claims still to learn every day and getting influenced by everyone in this industry. For the main influences he names the guys from Chocolat Puma, also known as the Good Men back in the day, who discovered and signed him when he was 18 years old, but also Daft Punk, Timbaland and Swedish House Mafia, who adopted him and changed the way he produced. Coming from a musical family, but was´nt never very good in playing instruments, he was very happy to found out music could be made with the help of a computer and was finally able to unleash all the music been trapped inside his head. He chose his stage name Laidback Luke because he wanted something with an ‘L’ before Luke and suitably heard Snoop Dogg rapping in Gin And Juice “Laaaidbaaack…’. Luckily it was just perfect to fit to his persona in real life too.