After you read through the article about Rusko Drug Use, What camp are you in Team Rusko or Team Deadmau5?
(Inthemix) U.K. bass-bender Rusko has never made a secret of his tendency to hit it hard, and his recent exit from a show in Texas on a stretcher was a testament to that. The DJ wound up that extensive trek around North America with a send-off show in L.A. at the Palladium, and in September he’s set to play the Electric Zoo Festival in New York. Then it’s time to head down our way for Parklife 2012. If his upcoming tour itinerary is looking quiet in coming weeks, it’s probably on doctor’s orders.
For the first U.S. issue of DJ Mag, which you can download for free, the magazine caught Rusko in the thick of his U.S. circuit. “I’m very raspy today, after 22 nights of getting pissed up in a row,” he says. “You know they have the one litre bottles of Grey Goose, the big fat giant ones? I do a whole big one a night. It’s a combination of tolerance and being more fucked up. Every day I wake up more and more hung-over and more and more bruised and tired, so I have to drink more to get myself in the right frame of mind to get back on stage. I’ve been drinking vodka for the last 22 nights in a row, so you build up a tolerance to it. Now I’m just necking it out of the bottle. It does make mornings a little harder, but every night I get more pissed. It’s fun. If I worried about it, I’d be a mess.”
On the topic of excess, Rusko elaborates on how the making of his most recent album, Songs, was something of an epic drug binge. “I made Opium entirely on Promethazine codeine syrup, which basically looks like opium in a bottle,” he cheerily details to the DJ Mag interviewer. “I managed to score a bottle of the real lean 100-percent codeine syrup. The album was very inspired by the drugs I was taking while I was making it. One day I took Rohypnol, the date-rape drug. I date-raped myself, and made a track, Dirty Sexy Money. I’m at this stage now, I’m drinking a bottle of vodka a night, enjoying drugs for what they are, and not being shy about it. This album wouldn’t sound as good as it does if I wasn’t taking a fuck-load of drugs.”
That laissez-faire attitude crosses over to his shows, too. “I always make sure that everyone’s been getting fucked before I get on the stage,” he says. “I get a little show of hands for who’s been taking pills, who’s been doing MDMA, who’s been smoking weed. I let them know what I’ve been doing too. Always on the level.”
It’s an attitude that stands in pretty stark contradiction to Rusko’s old sparring partner, Deadmau5, who just this week said in an interview, “I’m wearing this mouse head and I’m watching kids get carried out my paramedics over the front rail while I’m playing. Sometimes I just want to stop the show. It’s not cool to me. It upsets me.”
DJ Mag also pressed the UK producer on his rant against Deadmau5 back in 2010, which, as it turns out, was over drug use. As the story went, the mau5 objected to Rusko smoking a spliff backstage at a festival. “People have tried to reconcile us,” Rusko tells the magazine. “I’m like, ‘Don’t bring that c**t near me.’ It’s still very much on. We haven’t really been in the same room since it happened, until we are put in the same room by accident or whatever, who knows? He might be chilled out; it’s still on for me. Once I hate someone, I hate ‘em forever.”
“He did definitely try to shop me to security – what a dick!” Rusko continues in the interview, clearly on a roll. “The funny thing was we were in Colorado, which is a legal state. I was outside, with a medical marijuana license in my fucking wallet…Have you ever been to the backstage area of a gig before? They all smell like weed!” Read the full interview here.
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