At the end of 2006, Erol Alkan was at a crossroads. He’d been voted DJ of the year by Mixmag. He’dmade landmark, expectation-defying remixes for bands he loved: a crunching “glam racket” reworking of ‘Do You Want To’ for Franz Ferdinand, a wonderfully wistful reinterpretation of Hop Chip’s ‘Boy From School’, a psychedelic take on Scissor Sisters’ ‘I Don’t Feel Like Dancing’ and a genre-defining reworking of Justice’s ‘Waters Of Nazereth’. He was about to close Trash, the Monday night indie disco that had somehow morphed into the most adventurous, influential and glamorous club night in the world without changing its attitude, musical philosophy – or ever charging over six pounds on the door. Other triumphs lay a little further in the past. In 2006, he supported Daft Punk for their live return at Global Gathering at their own personal request. The year before, he did the same for Madonna at Koko in Camden with a DJ set which she used as an intro tape on her subsequent world tour. In 2002, he’d lent some muscle to another icon, creating the bootleg of ‘Blue Monday’ and ‘Can’t Get You Out Of My Head’ that Kylie performed at the Brits in 2002: the culmination of a craze for “bastard pop” hybrids he’d been instrumental in creating alongside long-term kindred spirits Soulwax. Then there were his DJ sets at clubs and festivals around the world, in which Erol’s unerring instinct for playing the right record at the right time brought hardened clubbers and alternative music obsessives together in abandoned celebration of brilliant music. Though he started DJing in dance clubs in earnest in 2001 after being invited to play at Bugged Out, Erol still considers himself an outsider in that scene. “Unfortunately, I never had that seismic moment of hearing someone like Carl Craig DJ in ’96” he says. “I feel as passionately about the Manic Street Preachers as people in dance music do about Kraftwerk.