'And then shit got kinda rowdy.’

That’s what we said when DJ Vadim rocked Favela Chic a few weeks ago. He’d just performed his new single ‘Hidden Treasure’ for the first time. The vocalist, Sabira Jade, was sounding on top form, their band was warming up nicely – oh, and the dance crew on the floor was going nuts. It was a pretty epic live show.

Now, a few weeks later, the Russian-born, London-raised Vadim (just back from a healthy midday jog) is talking about that show, and how he prefers to rock on stage. Although he’s a fifteen-year veteran of rocking shows with two turntables, he’s happy to turn to live instrumentation as and when required. “It really depends on the gig and what I’m trying to do,” says the bespectacled, sprightly DJ in a slightly high-pitched, crackly voice. “Sometimes it’s great to go up and just DJ and rock a club, because that’s the kind of energy in that environment. But sometimes it’s great to go up and give a performance, and come with percussionists and keyboard players… one’s not better than the other, they just work better in certain environments.”

He’s also very concerned with making sure that those who pay to see him get their money’s worth. Vadim, who has just come off a three-month tour world tour, says he’s been planning the details of his album launch party at the Rhythm Factory for a month. “It’s quite time consuming actually!” he cracks.

“I want it to be good. I care about the show...I take this really seriously, and I want to put on a good show that people will enjoy and remember and talk about. I don’t want to knock out some lazy crap and have people think, that wasn’t very good, was it? Why’d I pay ten pounds to see that? If you get the connection [between you and the crowd], it’s really magical: you and the crowd can go on a journey, and everyone leaves the place ecstatic.”

Vadim sounds excited, amped-up and extremely comfortable with life. Which is kind of surprising. This story – this conversation – could have turned out so differently. Like Vadim’s upbeat new album, U Can’t Lurn Imaginashun, it is, at first glance, a positive tale of a DJ doing what he loves in front of thousands of people.

But last year, Vadim had eye cancer. Ocular melanoma, to be exact. It required a lightning-fast, incredibly dangerous operation to extract. When asked about it, and how it impacted the music he’s making now, Vadim responds: “What doesn’t break you makes you stronger. It sounds like a cliché, but when you’re down…I had cancer. I had really terrible thoughts about death…”

He pauses. For a good ten seconds.

“When I went through that, I thought about dying a lot. When you go through that experience of having to contemplate your own death, it doesn’t in a sense…”

Another pause.

“Well, it made me stronger. I came through that. You look at life in a slightly different way in the sense that you enjoy the moments that you have more than I did before, when I maybe took things for granted.”

It wasn’t just cancer that Vadim had to deal with last year. His father also went partially blind and his mother suffered anxiety attacks. His wife, the vocalist Yarah Bravo, fell ill. In the period following his operation, October-December 2008, Vadim made his new album. It could have been the darkest, most introspective album of his long career.
But it wasn’t.

Vadim says he realised that, having come through an experience where he came very, very close to death, he had to appreciate every second he had. “That same ethos or philosophy is the way I look at music. I could’ve come out of that experience and made a very dark album. Depressing. But that’s not what I felt. I felt like I had a second chance at life.

That’s what Imaginashun feels like: a second chance. It is not, as he would have you believe, the best music of Vadim’s career; that accolade still lies with ‘Your Revolution’ and the music he made around 2000. But it is some of the funkiest, most danceable music you’re likely to hear this year. ‘Hidden Treasure’, though a serious banger, is not the only song on the album likely to get serious rotation.

“If I made this music [when I started] in 1994, I’d’ve sold bucketloads and maybe gotten on the charts,” Vadim laughs.
That, of course, is debatable, but there’s no question that the album was psychologically important for him. He needed to prove he could still make music: “If anything went wrong, I would’ve died in hospital. So I came out living. And that was enough of an impetus to create something.”

His approach to making music as a producer and as a DJ has changed, as well, particularly in his use of samples. “When I came up, fifteen years ago, I was mental for record shopping and buying as many records as I could find,” he explains when asked about the kind of sounds he used on Imaginashun. “At one point I had a really big record collection – I’ve still got about 20,000 records. I don’t go digging that often. It’s actually quite rare now, because I’ve got so much stuff I haven’t even listened to yet.

“Plus, the way I make music now is very different to when I started. In the early 90s, it was a basic sampler and a little Atari computer. It was difficult to make music; it was very primitive. The amount of software and the power of computers now is mindblowing… I use a lot of synthesisers, keyboards, a lot of live instrumentation. The problem is, when I first came out, sample-based music was a new form of music. Now, a lot of people are getting sued and it’s hard to find samples that other people haven’t used…”
And fans are happy with your approach?

“Well, people still say to DJ Shadow, you’ve got to do Entroducing. But you’ve gotta progress.”

It remains to be seen whether the psychology of the record will have the same effect on his fans that it did on Vadim. But whether or not his new life-affirming approach succeeds, he’s adamant that he came out of one of the darkest, deepest holes, and created something special. “I feel really, really happy. This is one of the most creative points in my life.”