Carl Cox on his love affair with the Isle of Man
I first came over to the Island thanks to a partnership with a guy called Brian Brown in Melbourne, Australia. He's from Northern Ireland and was telling me all the time that I should be coming to the TT. I’d seen it on the TV and knew it’d be good but was always pretty busy DJing. But then one day, I said, “You know what? I'm coming!”
In 2015 I came over and ended up playing at an event arranged by Honda. They wanted me to really enjoy the experience here. They gave us a couple of brand-new bikes, Fireblade SPs. What a great introduction that was!
The first thing I wanted to do was to go on the Mountain Course. Me and Ian, my tour manager and good friend, get these two bikes and at 7 o'clock in the morning, we were off! We had no clue which way we were going around the island, we were just exploring. But we managed to find out where to go. And as we were pulling up to the mountain, they had all these bikes on the left-hand side. The guys all there had their gloves off, waiting for the course to open. But I must have good timing because as we turned up the police opened the gate. So, we had a rolling start on everybody. On a pair of brand-new Hondas as well!
We click down a couple of gears ready to properly go for it but then remember we've never been up here before. And you could use both lanes, left, right, all of the road. But at that particular time, my brain tells me stay left in case someone else is coming on the right. Me and Ian were going fast enough, there's no speed limit there. I looked down, I was still about 100 miles an hour, and I'm like, wow, this is good enough, yeah! We're going for it on the Mountain. I look in the mirrors and see these white lights racing up towards us. And we're getting halfway down the mountain, and I'm thinking, Man, we're doing 100, and they're coming up on us like we're doing five miles an hour! We just stayed left, let them go past, and planned to hang on the back of them. But they obviously knew where they were going! It was probably one of the scariest moments of my life, because although they knew where they were going but we didn’t! We get to the Creg-Ny-Baa pub, halfway through the mountain. We pulled the bikes over and kissed the tarmac. Come on, God, I survived!
That was our first introduction of riding a motorcycle on the road here. No doubt about it, you can do it in a car but it's not the same thing. You need to ride the course on a bike. It’s such a buzz, with the smells in the air and everything that goes with it.
And then I got invited to go to the Secret Garden, which is just after Ago's Leap. Wow, that goes big! The leap is named after Augustini. So, it’s my first time, hearing the bikes come down Bray Hill. So, I can hear this bike coming towards us getting louder and louder. I get my phone out on it ready. And the bike flashes past… but it was a marshal! I’m like, “That's the marshal!? How fast are the others going to be!” Turns out it’s about 175 on the back wheel. And sometimes they come down, a tank slapper sometimes, and they get the back out squirrely, something, they just pin it, to get it right. But it's something else, because the thing is with a Bray Hill, when you’re on the money coming down there, you obviously want to get a good launch, a good run going through, down and up until you come down the Quarterbridge before turning right.
That's what I kind of know that now, but I didn't know that at the time. When you watch it on the TV, it's not the same. It's not the same at all. In the sense of what the speeds are, what they're actually doing. When you’re there you actually feel the energy, the kinetic energy of what the riders create, them going past that space is just insatiable. I wanted more. I want to feel that more. So, all the time I was going to Quarterbridge, I was going to Hillberry, I was going to all the different places to experience as much as I could. I'll get a good feel of what it's like at all the different places where they race. And I kind of know where I'm going now.
I might still be learning about all the island’s different roads here when I go out for a ride myself, but I think at the end of the day, life is to be explored. You make mistakes by going and taking the wrong road, but then you end up on the right road eventually, and that's a brilliant way to experience life more.
When I had an opportunity to enter a sidecar team for the first time, we did pretty well. Out of 41 sidecars, we were 11th place for our first year. And then when we came back the second year, we came eighth place. And that was with Colin Buckley and Robbie Shorter. And then I had an opportunity to get behind Tim Reeves racing and for a couple of years and he was able to get me on the step, a third step, and then eventually all the way through.
We kept coming back for people to understand that I was in it, because I love it. With me and Michael Dunlop was kind of like a mutual respect for each other. He's on the other side of the coin from who I am, by what I do, and vice versa. But I've always respected the Dunlop Dynasty for racing for sure, it doesn't get much better than that. But Michael, obviously, with William at the time, they were basically battling and, you know, trying to keep up the family name of which he did. Michael's still able to be out here doing what he's doing. He’s so impressive, and he’s doing it with my name on his leathers. I got behind Padgett’s racers, Conor Cummins, and I’m behind Davo Johnson this year too, as well as John Holden and Philip Hyde.
It's quite cool, you know, based on my input and the impact of what I've created, and with what I've made over the years to be involved in this. I’m proud that it's made a difference to a lot of people's lives. In that sense, I'm enjoying being here on the island just because of that. I enjoy the Isle of Man so much, I bought a house here. It commits me even more to come over and enjoy the island, enjoy the TT, the Manx Classic, but also catch up with the friends I’ve made here, whilst also getting to enjoy the roads and scenery on my own motorcycles. It’s just fantastic here.