A lot of things have changed for Robbie Bergin.
This week, the 19-year-old producer and DJ behind the Throttle moniker will play a much-anticipated set at The Argyle, but it wasn’t all that long ago that he was having slight altercations with the venue’s staff.
“I came up [to Sydney] for Stereosonic,” Bergin says. “I wasn’t playing, but I came up. A few friends of mine took me to [The Argyle]. I was still wearing shorts from the festival, so it was a nightmare getting me in. It wasn’t too bad, but security were like, ‘Nah, fuck off,’ and my friends were like, ‘Nah, he’s [going to] be playing here!’”
The anecdote neatly encapsulates the stage Bergin’s career is at – though he might not yet be a household name, he is moving from strength to strength at a rapid pace. A lot of that comes down to his incredible work ethic – his touring schedule would make a less committed performer go a little green.
“[I’m] pretty much touring non-stop all year,” he says. “I’ll be heading to the States all of May. Then back to Australia for a couple of weeks. Then back to the States. Then Europe … It’s pretty tiring. Especially when my agent books an 8am hotel call the next day,” he laughs.
Even more impressively, performing live is still a relatively new experience for Bergin. “Honestly, I haven’t done much of it,” he says. “I performed a little bit with a guitar as a kid, just in school things. But the touring has only really kicked off now. The US tour was my first real run of shows … I’m loving it, but it’s all really new to me.”
Luckily, Bergin got a chance to learn from one of the best. He toured the US alongside Oliver Heldens, the Dutch DJ and producer whose house track ‘Gecko’ cracked the charts and has chalked up almost 15 million hits on YouTube. “The [Heldens shows were] pretty full-on,” says Begin. “It’s two-and-a-half thousand people looking at you. But I love that. That was awesome.”
Though Bergin and Heldens first got in contact with one another years ago, it was a while before the pair finally began work on their collaborative track, ‘Waiting’. “We’d been chatting online for maybe two, three years prior to talking about doing a track together,” Bergin says. “We got in touch about the time he released ‘Gecko’ and that was when I did the remix of Avicii … We were both big fans of each other.”
Perhaps aptly, given its title, the writing of ‘Waiting’ was a lengthy, drawn-out process, one that Bergin wasn’t quite used to. “I think [Heldens] had a couple of weeks off in the studio,” he says. “But it took about six months all up to write the song. Maybe it was even a year from when I first started with the idea to when it wrapped up. We worked almost entirely online. And then we met up in LA last October. That was when we fully finished it. But until then it was 100 per cent online.”
Though the long-distance working relationship was one Bergin found sometimes difficult (“We don’t work on the same program,” he says, “so it was pretty tricky”), the end result is something Bergin is immensely proud of. “It was weird, but you make a few changes [to a song] and then you hear it played out at one of the biggest dance festivals in the world. [That’s] cool.”
The story is very different when Bergin works by himself. He takes pleasure in getting songs out quickly, writing and recording almost in an impressionistic manner. “Some tracks come together in one or two days. [They] are always the best tracks, I find. ‘Waiting’ came out great, but that was way slower. Recently, the best ones I’ve been making are the ones I’ve been finishing in two or three days max.”
It seems as though nothing quite beats the experience of making music for Bergin – he sounds almost giddy when asked about his creative process. “Especially with the remixes, I’ll do four or five versions before I settle on something,” he says excitedly. “Usually I’ll do something, and then make another change, and then make another change, and then delete the first thing and end up with something totally different than what I started with. It ends up sounding nothing like how I thought it would.”
Though Bergin has always had a strong cult following, recently he found himself on the receiving end of a very special fan’s affections. US presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton used Throttle’s ‘Together’ in one of her campaign videos, a massive boon to an emerging artist looking to break out in North America.
Bergin laughs when the story is brought up – the whole situation evidently still feels more fantastical than anything else. “That was nuts,” he says. “That was out of nowhere as well. That track we thought had done its dash months before. Then someone from her team emailed my manager and then the whole story blew up.”
There’s only one question left, really – has Bergin managed to meet up with the one and only Hillary just yet? “I haven’t,” he says, sounding almost disappointed. “I think we invited her to the show when we were in D.C. but to no avail.” He laughs. “Probably a long shot.”
Throttle plays at The Argyle’s 9th Birthday Weekend on Friday April 15.
