10 MusicWeek 27.04.12 THEBIGINTERVIEWRICHARDRUSSELL ‘I’M PAST THE POINT OF
This week, XL founder Richard Russell will receive the Music Week Strat Award – celebrating a unique and relentlessly tasteful career that has provided some of the most important music in modern history…
LABELS BY TIM INGHAM
I
try and work on instinct; a sort of collective instinct that XL has developed by being a close- knit team. We have a feel for the sort of things
we should get involved in and the things we shouldn’t. The things other people think you should be doing are irrelevant. The rules, as much as people think there are rules, are nonsense.” Back before the internet; before Google, social
media strategies and TV talent judges with big red buttons, there was the rave scene. It was disruptive, energised and brimful of disdain for the worst of popular culture. And it taught Richard Russell a heck of a lot. Rave’s rise in the late Eighties had roots in the
pills‘n’thrills‘n’bellyaches of the acid-house era, enhanced by a brazen blend of American breaks and Jamaican dub, plus a big dumb whack of European electronica. These multifarious influences were an enticing draw for Russell, then a teenage north London hip-hop obsessive and prolific club DJ. He loved the music, identified with its biggest
fans and – by unleashing the freshest cuts each and every week on pirate radio and in front of saucer- eyed, hedonistic dancefloors – cultivated a refined nose for its smashes-in-waiting. Alongside friends Nick Halkes and Tim Palmer,
the owner of regular haunt Groove Records in Soho, Russell set up a niche label to capitalise on the trio’s closeness to the scene, and to concrete their position within it. “We couldn’t really get it wrong,” recalls Russell
in XL Recordings’ Ladbroke Grove London offices, 23 astonishingly successful years later. “The records we were putting out were sort of road-tested. There was very little planning. No one considered themselves as an ‘artist’ – we never used that word. Our tunes were simple, made quickly and were fucking great.” Listen to XL’s efforts from that era now –
including Russell’s own chart hit The Bouncer by Kicks Like A Mule – and you’re confronted by a reckless, repetitive aural assault; strikingly of its time yet liberatingly uncommercial. This is the sound of Russell’s unconventional A&R education; the bedrock of an uncompromising, tastemaking XL
www.musicweek.com
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68