"I'm not good at doing anything else," he says. When I first track him down, it is the night before the festival in Mexico, and just gone midnight when he appears at the hotel bar, in spectacles and a chunky jumper, complaining that his ex-girlfriend, Mexican, a model, has got him terribly stoned. Vanity Fair even featured his book: 128 Beats Per Minute: Diplo's Guide to Music, Culture and Everything In Between. If anyone is a conduit to underground club culture around the world – in a way that wouldn't have been possible even five years ago – it's Wesley Pentz. Instead, the reason that brands – whether BlackBerry, with a role for him in an advert, or Beyoncé, who enlisted him for work on her last album – hunt him out is that this 34-year-old " random ass white dude" (his description) from Florida knows better than anyone where to find the next thing. But the latter, he insists, is "mostly just a way of paying the bills". He can count himself among the new wave of superstar DJs, like his friend Skrillex he even has a residency at the new club epicentre that is Las Vegas. He has made records with superstars such as Justin Bieber, produced the new No Doubt album and is working with Snoop Dogg, but has also involved himself with Sheffield mathcore exponents Rolo Tomassi. Diplo is the Kevin Bacon figure who has joined the dots between characters as disparate as pop hearthrob Bruno Mars ( the pair visited a Paris strip club in search of inspiration for Mars's new album) and contemporary composer Nico Mulhy (who arranged the strings on Usher's Climax, one of the year's biggest songs, and which Diplo co-wrote and produced).
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