PETE Tong has hit back at a rival DJ as they are embroiled in a row over a music collaboration gone wrong.
American DJ John Summit took to X in a rant where he claimed that the Radio 1 star had ‘promised’ to release his music together, but then decided to work with Dutch DJ Franky Rizardo instead and “jacked” John’s remix.
Fans of Pete and Franky were excited when the DJs revealed they were releasing a new remix of Everything But The Girl’s Missing earlier this year, but ran into controversy when John made the public claims that he was meant to be involved too.
John wrote online: “hey @petetong thanks for promising to release my missing remix with u (while doing nothing in terms of production)
“Then jacking my remix to release with franky rizardo release class act you are. to think i actually looked up to u too.”
John then went on to claim that there was ‘proof’ and said: “Also i ended up doing the whole orchestral version myself which im premiering this weekend, thanks for the zero help”.
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Pete hit back in a video, as he claimed discussions of working with John were simply that and never came to fruition, and that the project with Franky was an ‘independent’ one.
In a video, Pete said: “I’m disappointed. I don’t like being accused of things that aren’t true. If you’ve got a problem, pick up the phone – that’s certainly what I would preach.”
Going on to say that he had tried to call and text John with no avail, Pete claimed: “I think we acted correctly, we laid out the scenario to his team, for one reason or another, it wasn’t to be.
“They never got back to us, we carried on making the other version with Franky. And that’s it.”
Pete later explained: “We had positive conversations on text about doing a new version of his remix and at the same time I was talking to Franky.
“It’s quite normal when releasing a song to have different versions of the same song.
“I started the conversation with both of them, I got into it with John because he was particularly interested in the orchestra because he wanted to perform the song with an orchestra himself.”
Pete then said his management took over communication and told John they were also working on a version with Franky.
He claimed how his team then failed to hear back from John and chased him “multiple times” but never heard back.
Pete did hear back from Franky, he says, and they continued to work on their planned track.
Following John’s very public claims, Franky announced he was withdrawing from the release – saying it “no longer feels right”.