How old is too old for clubbing? Ben Watt, who is now 42 and a father of three, isn't sure. "I ask myself that from time to time, but when I go out and there's a good night going on I love it as much as the next person, " he says. Well, you might argue, he would say that, wouldn't he? After all, the onetime quieter member of now mothballed pop duo Everything but the Girl is these days a London DJ and boss of a boutique record label, Buzzin' Fly, supplying his own brand of deep house to the masses.

But then music is his way of life. "It's always what I've wanted to do, " he says. "My father was a jazz musician. I was the youngest of five kids and all my brothers and sisters were mad on different kinds of music. As soon as I could, I wanted to form a band."

Back in the early 1980s that band was Everything but the Girl, which Watt formed with Tracey Thorn at Hull University. A guy, a girl, an acoustic guitar and a Rod Stewart cover song.

"That's the cardboard-cutout memory, isn't it?"

he says dismissively. "It's just slack. We made records that were influenced by Latin music in the early days. We made a record with an orchestra in the mid-eighties."

That openness to experiment was presumably what attracted trip-hop pioneers Massive Attack to Thorn's voice and prompted DJ Todd Terry to remix Missing, thus helping reinvent the duo for the more club-friendly nineties. But before that resurrection came darker days when the band couldn't get arrested - and when Watt found out the hard way that there were more important things than the band's rider.

In 1992 he was struck down with a rare autoimmune disease called Churg-Strauss syndrome. He lost his voice, nearly lost his life, and lost most of his intestine. "I live with it day to day, " he says. "I still have to take medication to keep it at bay. It's left me with a very compromised diet. I've only got 20 per cent of my digestive system so I have to eat food that's very easy to digest. I just can't cope with bulk and fat, so I eat loads of chicken and fish and fruit. It's a really healthy diet."

Still, music remains a consolation - and he's not alone in seeing it as such. DJ-ing in New York, he says, he's noticed a new lust for life over the past couple of years: "There's been a kind of a slow process of healing going on in a lot of the crowds that were coming after 9/11, people reminding themselves why they love living in the city."

As Sterling Void once put it: "The music plays for ever." It does round Ben Watt's house.

Buzzin Fly Vol 2, compiled and mixed by Ben Watt, is released on March 24.