Chris Talks Music with Paul van Dyk ahead of his long-awaited return to Sheffield's this week for Trancecoda

If you ask anybody in the know when it comes to trance, very few DJs are held in such high esteem as the German DJ and ex-citizen of Sheffield (pretty much through his Gatecrasher residency). Paul van Dyk and Sheffield have a deeply interwoven deep and rich history that goes way back. The fact that it’s been more than a decade since Paul last spun the decks in the Steel City.

Twenty years have passed since the New Year’s Eve event that was hyped as a once-in-a-lifetime occasion – the dawn of another millennium as the calendar changed from 1999 to 2000. While the Queen and then Prime Minister, Tony Blair, held hangs and sang Auld Lang Syne, Sheffield was upping the tempo with a far livelier party at the now-demolished Don Valley Stadium, where superclub Gatecrasher put up Tensile 1, an enormous tent intended to be the largest nightclub in the world – and 25,000 revellers bagged tickets to dance to DJ sets from the likes of Paul Van Dyk, The Chemical Brothers, Paul Oakenfold, Sasha, Judge Jules and Tall Paul.

If we’re being picky, it’s actually more than 14-years since Paul last paid the city a meaningful visit, so we sat down for a chat ahead of the trance legends return to talk all things music, why trance often speaks to much deeper themes than you may initially realise, we also talked about creating music in isolation, touched upon politics, life and plenty more inbetween.