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Claudio Coccoluto is one of a coterie of DJs whose careers span decades; who were there when club culture was born in a wash of acid house and a flash of ecstasy. His contemporaries are few: Sven Vath, Laurent Garnier and Carl Cox among them. Like them, Coccoluto is an icon, commonly referred to as "the godfather of Italian house."

What good is an icon, though, except to revere? How does an artist stay relevant in a world that feeds on youth and energy? Every DJ who survives long enough to address these questions seems to find a different answer. Carl Cox has a private jet to whisk him to his highly paid gigs. Laurent Garnier makes jazz albums. Sven Vath recreated himself as the Freakiest party demi-god in Ibiza.

And Coccoluto? He is, perhaps, the most ambitious of all. But to understand his ambition you have to go back in time more than 30 years, to the point where a young teenager started messing around with music, fascinated by sound. "I remember the first time I saw turntables, with the belt-drive, I was 15," he chuckles. Before that, he'd played a tape recorder. "To be able to mix two records - this was magic." The youngster played his first gig in 1980 at a club called Seven Up, when he was 18.

At the time there wasn't any concept of DJing as a career. "You were halfway between a jukebox and a radio. Everybody on the dancefloor would be calling out requests, or the owner would tell you what to play. 'Dance music' meant Michael Jackson or a Madonna song," Claudio recalls. By the mid-80s though there was a new sound seeping into Italy: house music. "Everything started with house music. People DJ has to be within the party. DJs shouldn't want to be like a rock star...in Europe - especially in Italy - didn't understand what was happening. But I understood. I was buying everything that arrived from the US," he says proudly.

In today's context there is nothing remarkable about that kind of dedication (or is it obsession?) But at the time, one imagines, it required a peculiar concoction of passion, arrogance, idealism and naivety. Passion for the music, the arrogance to believe in something no one else did, the idealism to think he could be a prophet, the naivety to imagine that others would see the world through his eyes.

Certainly, Coccoluto's career bears out his passion and idealism. He drove the Italian scene, playing at parties like Pussy Galores, Ecu and Zen, then founding Angels Of Love in Naples. Simultaneously, he set himself up as one of the world's leading house DJs, playing across Europe and even securing a residency at New York's famous Sound Factory. What is fascinating is the extent to which, after all these years, he still seems to retain his youthful arrogance and naivety. The cockiness bleeds through when he starts talking about the contemporary scene, referring to "younger DJs who don't know what a record or a CD is… 18 or 19 year olds who think the whole world of the DJ is in the laptop."

Nor is it only DJs who he feels lack culture: "The audience is getting younger, which is a shame because the older crowd had more culture. I have a lot of experience, a lot of colours in my palette, I use more kinds of music to express myself. For young people in Italy this is not a plus." Yet in the next breath Claudio says, "A DJ is an entertainer. Everything is shared with the crowd. The DJ has to be within the party. DJs shouldn't want to be like a rock star."

He may have a point about the "younger generation," and even if he doesn't nearly 30 years in the DJ booth means he's entitled to his opinions. It is the naivety of his assertion that "the DJ is an entertainer" that skews the whole colour of his commentary. This contradiction crops up again and again. Talking about Angels Of Love, he says, "I stopped because every magic thing is destroyed by the power of money." Yet he is partner in high-powered Roman club Goa - a role which surely requires plenty of dealing with the "power of money."

Given the chance, Coccoluto waxes even more lyrical about his ideal DJ life. "For me, DJing is like eating. It's the same thing. I need music and passion. I don't want any interference from money or politics. I want to be free and happy to be a DJ - that would be my utopia."I want to change the attitude in Italy. I want my club to be a place where people appreciate all types of music.

They are the words of a dreamer. A fantasist, you might even say. Claudio has also been quoted as saying, "Underground is a way of thinking… underground music doesn't belong to the musical industry." A strange stance for someone who threw the Amore Festival, on New Year's Eve 2007, which brought a 50,000-strong crowd out to hear the M_nus crew and a host of other "underground" talent. 

He isn't just a competent operator in the business of dance music, he's a shrewd analyst: "Every club is a company and every company needs to be competitive. Globalisation means Goa's competitor is not another club in Rome, it's Cocoon in Frankfurt or Amnesia in Ibiza." This has the benefit of promoting a passion for music, he says.

"Italians go to Ibiza for a week and they come back and talk about it for a month. Which DJs they saw, who played a wicked set, it's like the football!"

The problem, he says, is that "Ibiza represents everything that is good, people think it's perfect. When they come back to Italy there is no communication about electronic music. No magazines, very little radio devoted to electronic music [his Friday night radio show is one of the few]."

And Coccoluto - with a combination of arrogance and idealism - wants to change this. "I want to change the attitude in Italy. I want my club to be a place where people appreciate all types of music. This is difficult because the people are young, they have less information, less media, but it's not impossible."

Coccoluto's ambitions may be beyond his reach. It is almost impossible to be both an artist and a shopkeeper. To "be free from convention" and thrive as a businessman. To entertain and educate. But his career, however riddled with compromises and contradictions, speaks for itself. He is not just a survivor, he is a creator. Wherever his passion takes him, the story of Claudio Coccoluto is far from over.

CLAUDIO COCCOLUTO VIDEOS:
World Festival on the Beach »
ITALIAN FACTORY in DUBLIN DECEMBER 07 »

www.myspace.com/coccodj  - www.claudiococcoluto.dj