Dimitri from Paris

Too few tales from the Playboy Mansion make mention of the dimmer switches. When Dimitri from Paris played in the infamous LA estate, he paid more attention to the wall fittings than he did to the girls.

'The whole décor of the place, the furniture, the light switches,' he recalls, 'it was great.'

Dimitri, who is renowned for his chic disco and house sets, first visited the place in 2000, to launch his seminal mix CD, A Night at the Playboy Mansion.

He had hooked up with the magazine empire some months before, playing a Playboy sponsored party at dance music industry event, The Winter Music Conference, in Miami.

Playboy were so impressed by the event that they asked Dimitri whether he could capture the vibe of the night on a CD, pairing his DJing skills up with the magazine empire’s classy heritage. Packaging was to be quite unlike the slick, digitally manipulated imagery of contemporary men’s publishing, and would, instead, hark back to the title’s heyday. Dimitri’s tunes weren’t the most obvious records either; he selected a bunch of vintage dance cuts and some newer house and hip-hop records.

Hugh Hefner offered up the Mansion, at 10236 Charing Cross Road, LA, to mark the album’s release. Dimitri’s guests included Daft Punk and Kylie Minogue. Later, some of Hefner’s own crowd arrived, including Farrah Fawcett and Scott Baio. Playmates were in attendance and everyone went for a swim in the infamous cave-like pool, The Grotto, though for him, the real attraction lay in the furnishings:

'It was something out of James Bond,' he says, 'What I remember liking in Playboy magazine, after the girls, was all the swanky stuff: crazy beds that had loads of gadgets in them, or super hi-fis. Being in the Mansion was like being in those magazines.'

You see, Dimitri’s penchant for design classics began almost as early as his love of music. Born in Istanbul in 1963, yet raised in the French capital, he developed his sense of style during those first years in his adoptive city.

'My mother took me to the movies from when I was eight until when I was twelve,' he says, 'sometimes she would make me skip school.'

The kid soon acquired a liking for Alfred Hitchcock and Rat Pack movies.

'Men were extremely elegant,' he remembers, 'they were wearing everyday suits, but these suits were great.'

A precocious collector, Dimitri began buying classic tailoring as well as soul and disco records in his early teens. During the early eighties he began to send tapes to radio stations, placed an ad in a trade paper, and soon established himself as one of Paris’ foremost jocks, both in the clubs and on the airwaves.

In 1996 he released his debut artist album, Sacrebleu; a collection of runway soundtracks to accompany fashion shows by the likes of Chanel, Jean-Paul Gaultier, Hermès and Yves Saint-Laurent. The disc became an international hit, launching his career abroad.

Dimitri’s style, a beguiling mix of retro flourishes and carefully selected modern classics, has remained with him through out his adult life, and reflects his deeply-held respect for the disco era.

'People took the time to record,' he says, 'it cost much more to cut a disco record. These days kids can bang a track in a couple of hours using hacked software and make a worldwide hit.'

While fellow DJs have altered their styles to stay abreast of newer trends, Dimitri prefers to stay true to his roots.

'I’ve been DJing for over twenty-five years, and my sound is basically the same as it was twenty years ago,' he believes, 'yet I’m getting booked more than ever before.'

His CDs remain popular too. Though Playboy only expected to sell a few thousand, the initial mix has shifted just under 400 000 copies, and morphed into a series, the latest inclusion being Dimitri From Paris Return To The Playboy Mansion.

The first disc in this new mix pairs break-in-case-of-emergency floor fillers like Jamiroquai 'Cosmic Girl’ alongside obscure eighties tunes like Musique’s 'Love Massage’ and recent jazz-pop oddities like Mario Biondi’s 'This Is What You Are’. Meanwhile, the second CD is for lovers.

'Many people came up to after my sets and said that they made out to my CDs,' he explains, 'I wanted to give them something to make more of that.'

Featuring sophisticated love songs like Marvin Gaye’s 'I Want You’ and Teddy Pendergrass’ 'Close the Door’, disc two is the first commercially available boudoir mix by Dimitri.

Brand new and retro, modern and classic, good in the ballroom and the bedroom, with over a quarter century of experience, DJ Dimitri is unrivalled when it comes to evoking the sophisticated, nice light switches, Playboy life.

'It is good to remember that I have been in the business over 25 years, we have this saying in France,' he explains, 'in the old pots you make the better soup’. I do an old fashioned, heart-warming soup. It goes down well; I like it and I want other people to taste it.' Indeed, Dimitri; people are lapping it up.

Dimitri From Paris Return To The Playboy Mansion is out on Defected Records April 7th.