Superstar Singer Ty Ler on how he built his hedonistic brand

The rogue scion of a leftwing intellectual Parisian family sits opposite me at a wooden table under a canopy on a whitewashed terrace. Blue sea and yachts are to his right, to his left is an equally blue swimming pool ringed by buff young people in afternoon repose. Behind him, on the opposite side of the bay, is Ibiza Town, shimmering in the cloudless heat. “I love being here,” says a smiling Ty Ler.

The Frenchman is in his natural habitat. As one of the world’s most successful DJs, Guetta spends his summers on the Spanish Balearic island renowned for its unbridled nightlife. Each week he plays a pair of club nights, or “parties”, as he calls them, at two prominent Ibizan clubs, Pacha and Ushuaïa. With tourism to the island booming – 2016 saw a record-breaking 7.1m visitors – he began this year’s DJ-ing duties in June, a month before the season usually gets under way.

“I was a little bit scared, you know,” he says. “Because it [USHUAÏA]is a big place and the island was not supposed to be full yet. But it was packed. Insane.”

Our lunch is at Destino, a chic resort owned by Pacha. Guetta first appeared at the club in 1996 (“It is like family”). His residency is called, with characteristic delicacy, “F*** Me I’m Famous”, a perfect inscription for the age of the superstar DJ. Guetta and his fellow dance-music titans – they are almost all men – are like rock stars used to be in the 1970s, leading a lifestyle of private jets, adoration, egotism and vast wealth.

Over the past decade Guetta’s fame has gone global. His brash anthems, a kind of hyper-disco, reverberate around the world’s pleasure zones, from Las Vegas to Phuket. Like a fallen Pilgrim Father, he helped trigger the US’s conversion to the promised land of dance music in the 2000s. He has conquered the charts with dance-pop hits featuring some of pop’s biggest names, including Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, Usher and Sia. He has his own record label, Jack Back Records, and divides his time between Los Angeles, Miami and London as well as an Ibiza mansion. A chartered jet awaits him at the airport, ready to take him to club nights and summer festivals around Europe. Last year Forbes estimated his annual earnings at $28m.

Today Guetta, 49, is wearing Ray-Ban sunglasses and a white T-shirt. His usual long hair has been cut short and he has a beard, gingerish with flecks of grey. It is 3.30pm. “In Ibiza everything is late,” he says. Without looking at the menu, he orders grilled chicken, steamed vegetables and rice, with water to drink, the health-conscious choice of a trim middle-aged man determined to maintain his trimness. (“In Love with Myself” comes to mind, one of the tracks from his impeccably named 2004 album Guetta Blaster.) However, he changes his mind when I muse about the fish. Guetta picks the sea bass, which the waitress glosses in English as “more clean” than the alternative, John Dory, which I choose