“I don’t know where my love of black music came from,” says Bob Sinclar hanging out in the Paris studio, where he’s been putting the finishing touches to his new album Soundz of Freedom . “We didn’t have black culture. We didn’t have Motown or any of those sounds so we had to educate ourselves.” He actually reckons that French DJs and producers were successful all of a sudden – out of nowhere – because they didn’t have those roots and were happy to borrow from everywhere, whether it was house, hip hop or an old Jane Fonda work-out video.

“At 16 I discovered hip hop and it was a revelation,” he goes on, his hair long and glossy, looking tan and buff, probably in preparation for a summer back and forth to Ibiza. “Stuff like Afrika Bambaata. I went to see a live show and saw Cash Money scratching and I was like, ‘Wow! Amazing!’” Not that Christophe was the most likely candidate for a legendary life behind the decks. At the time he was a wannabe tennis champion, taking lessons and coaching younger players and was, he admits, “shy and introverted and maybe a little too close to my mother.” In short, a bit of a geek. Until a night at a club called Le Bataclan, which he sneaked out to see, literally changed his life around.

“It was a live show of hip hop culture arriving in Paris,” he says now, the happy sunny music of Bob Sinclar as far removed from the hardcore Public Enemy-style hip hop he first got to know as it’s possible to imagine. “And I think being shy led me to becoming a DJ,” he says, his French accent actually very cute. “I started in my bedroom as a kid. My mother bought me my first decks but I wasn’t allowed to play after 10 at night.”

Ask him how his mum feels now he is in the Superleague of world DJs and he grins. “My mum is really proud,” he says. “I get awards in France and Belgium so she is more than proud. It’s a bit of a late night for her to come to concerts to see me but she sees me on TV, but she doesn’t really understand how a DJ can be that famous all round the world because of course I’m a producer. I make records and I also play records.”

So now he has his summer smash album – Soundz of Freedom in the bag, what does the future hold for Christophe aka Bob Sinclar? “Jamaica is my future,” he says, “As is my next album and he talks about his interest in how hip hop and ragga are getting closer to each other with characters like Sean Paul on the scene. “I would like to show people that know me for ‘Love Generation’ that I have done a lot of other stuff,” he goes on. “People give me a lot but I will work more and more and more to bring more to the crowd.” And you can’t say fairer than that.

Michael Turnbull, 12th September