Richard X

Making mash ups in his bedroom, Sheffield based Richard X’s talent caught the ear of DJs and the press alike. In a sea of simple mash ups, Richard had a fresh sound that combined the complexity of the popular in an artistic manner, but with dancefloor, and more importantly, commercial viability. His first mash up, working under the name Girls On Top, was a limited seven-inch featuring, on side A the Whitney Houston-meets-Kraftwerk contemporary classic ‘I Wanna Dance With Numbers’. On the B-side, Richard placed his all-time favourite track, The Human League’sBeing Boiled’ beneath TLC’sNo Scrubs’, creating ‘Being Scrubbed’. These two fresh-sounding, icy electronic R&B anthems took London by storm, and were considered novel, not a novelty. His next single had on the A-side ‘We Don’t Give A Damn About Our Friends’, a version of which the Sugababes would later take to the top of the charts, and on the flipside ‘Warm Bitch’ married The Normal’sWarm Leatherette’ to Missy Elliott’sShe’s A Bitch’.

The name Richard X has nothing to do with fighting oppression ala Malcolm X, but rather happened as a bit of an accident. “It was quite a while a go when I was doing the Girls on Top bootleg,” says Richard. “Because I wrote a letter to someone and wrote ‘Richard’ and then put a kiss, which is the ‘X’, it became Rich X, then Richard X as it became. Richard Y was another popular name; it’s what my mum used to always say – ‘Richard, Why?’” he laughs.

“At the time it was more I was bored of electronic music, and still loved with music from my past, and I was also into the RnB stuff quite heavily, you know ‘the American Pop’, since 1997,” Richard relates of his first track. “At the time it was at odds with British electronic music – a lot of people couldn’t see the similarities (between pop and electronica) but I could. For me they were cut of the same cloth, they’re both minimal, both pop songs, and I saw it as a logical step to do it as a booty. I don’t think anyone had done a booty outside the world or house music, or the world of ‘art’. It was very fresh at the time.”

This gave rise to a whole host of bootlegs, sometimes called mash ups, or ploppers (plopping the vocals of one track over the instrumental of another with little production) or, my favourite term, Bastard Pop (the illegitimate child of two unlikely pop songs). Richard wishes to distance himself from this scene, although he states, “I’m not a person to say that it’s rubbish or it’s unfashionable. I always said it wasn’t just about making bootlegs, and that’s what I’ve tried to show with the album (Richard X Presents the X factor). I’ve been doing other stuff as well, I’ve been writing and producing for other people,” he adds.

“But I try to avoid playing at the nights, just making bootleg after bootleg, because it’s bit of a trap; a trap for artists just to do one thing, it always is. That’s the only downfall in that. I like some of the stuff, and I see the Get Your Booty On web board as something really healthy, and there’s some great talent out there. I’ve got nothing bad to say about it at all. I’m just more interested in the people who take it a bit further, into the realms of making ‘unofficial remixes’, adding more of their own sound, less about bootlegging and more about traditional production.”

Richard is philosophical about the future of pop music as a whole; the way it’s made, as well as distributed. “I think what will happen is filesharing will get regulated. It is inevitable; but the only thing is I don’t think you can blame piracy for the crash of the music industry business. I think there are other factors in that; most of it lies in the hands of the record companies themselves. Companies run by shareholders are never particularly stable, and when things take a downturn it’s ironic that bedroom musicians and the people who don’t have to spend thousands of pounds putting records out, they’re the people who benefit,” he says. “Independent music will probably get a big boost in the next few years because we have that mindset of doing things on the cheap, or not getting a lot of money for it. I say we,” he says as an aside, giggling. “I’m now on a major! But I think it’s a re-adjustment. If I was a young artist doing it all again, I wouldn’t be worried at all, I’d still get my music out in one way or another.”

Being signed to a major label that helped the much-undervalued Sugarbabes to chart success with the tune ‘Freak Like Me’, there’s a delicious sense of irony that’s not lost on Richard that his album has copyright protection. “The copy protection never works, people can easily get around it,” he says. “You used to get around it just by drawing with a black marker on the CD… but don’t quote me, I don’t want people wrecking their CDs!” he laughs. “It was more of the downloading thing, which is ironic because of where I’ve come from. Sure, back then I had most of the records, but there were a couple of things I got from Napster and Audio Galaxy. It was novel way of making music. It was almost at the point where you could physically manipulate anything in the world without having to buy it. It was exciting, I was on the ‘cutting edge’”, he says with a hint of sarcasm.

“But you can’t not have copy protection on records,” he continues “But rather than hide it away and pretend that I don’t have to conform on an EMI recording, I thought lets make it really huge… just have me standing in front of this big sign! Originally it was going to be carved on a gravestone, but they weren’t having that. But it’s a red hearing, its not a matter of selling out,” he states. “I think that’s what most people might want to criticise me being on a major for, but all the records I’ve ever made have been pop music, so it’s where I should be naturally,” he says, with just a little hint of egoism.

Moving on, Richard has done the latest Back To Mine CD, which is surprising in it’s lack of well-known pop tunes. “They’re just great little records that I really do play at home,” he says of the tunes. “I could do a 20 pop record tune mix easily, but I didn’t want to do that. Electronic music was more than just the pop, it was the weird TV theme tunes, like ‘Tomorrows World’ that you’d hear once a week and get really excited about, and that’s what I was trying to capture.” Also noticeably absent is his favourite band Human League. “Last year I talked about nothing else apart from Human League. I went on about it so much it’s slightly perverse not to have included one of their tracks. But I think everyone knows the Human League, with this I wanted to make it… not deliberately obscure, but full of things that are great that you may not have come across before. I went for an obscure Heaven 17 track to represent them. Because there were a few electro compilations out there last year, given that everybody suddenly liked electronic music again, their music did get aired again, I thought I’d look elsewhere. I wasn’t being snobbish and it certainly wasn’t a dis,” he chuckles.

Nubreed

I had a chance to chat to Nubreed’s Michael Walburgh aka Mykel just after Easter, the first Easter they had off in over 3 years. These hard working Melbourne lads have not only been touring extensively over the last few months, but been busy in the studio recording their first full-length album – The Original. Known for an awesome live show, and deep, nasty basslines, Nubreed are the darlings on the breaks scene, both here in Australia and abroad.

Walburgh says that having time off over Easter was a good chance to catch up on what’s happening around the place. “There was a big 33 1/3 show up here in Melbourne with Freestylers, Uberzone, Grass Roots; and the drum and bass crew – Pendulum, and Shapeshifter. It was a really mad weekend!” he enthuses. “I met Uberzone back in Miami a few years ago, and we were talking about hooking up and doing something, and now he’s got some new releases and is itching to get stuff heard and work with us. Aquasky were down here too, and we hooked up with them too.”

This is pretty much how Nubreed got out there in the first place, just by networking and being in the right place at the right time. “We put together a demo show reel and I had the fortune of being in Miami with Rennie Pilgrim, Danny McMillan, Tayo… everyone who’s anyone in the breaks fraternity was there. I got the chance to pass the tape around and through that we got lots of good recognition. And I suppose Adam Freeland, touring with him when he came down a few years ago,” he adds.

Nubreed are as well known for their bootlegs as they are for their originals. Bootlegs are illegitimate recordings of artists, and Nubreed have done a range of stuff from Alanis Morrissette to old school hiphop greats. They’ve done legitimate remixes, such as the awesome Born too Slow by the Crystal Method. “We’ve done a few live booty’s, stuff that works really well live, that we don’t sell or whatever. They came about from the Phil K / Nubreed shows that we did a few years ago,” Walburgh explains. However, the album is full of brand new material. “The Album is a catalogue of or work since about 1997. ‘The Original’ is all new material, and the second disk is mixed by our mate Phil K, and has lots of the vinyl only, hard to find recordings for your CD buying community. On the album we try to morph ourselves in all the directions we’ve wanted to go. We wanted to elaborate on the vocal tunes for this CD release.”

I had to know if they preferred making original tunes, or doing the covers. “It’s all part and parcel of it all. You have to be able to sustain a living. We don’t have any part time jobs, so we try to keep any avenue open to us. It’s a balance, you’ve got to do as many remixes as you can to keep yourself fresh and out there, on the dancefloor and in DJs boxes, but at the same time keep your ideas that you’ll think will work in circulation for your original material.”

Nubreed are keen to get back on the road again with their new live show, one which now features a drummer. “We’ve been so bogged down by the machine behind getting an album actually out there, the artwork, the legals, and so on. We’ve been working on a new live format too. We’ve got a new drummer!” he says excitedly. “That’s worked really well, and we’ve got a lot more options open to us with the drummer. There’s obviously a lot more album based material in the show, so there’s going to be a lot more depth to it. It’s not going to be a straight dancefloor set, which is what we usually do in clubs and dance arenas. This will be a chance to do OUR show, really get into it and play a lot of the older, unusual stuff as well as the new stuff. Dave (the drummer) has played for Wicked Beat Sound System and On Inc. If anyone has met Dave our drummer he’s quite infamous. He’s a great energy; he’s the equivalent of Animal in the Muppets,” he laughs.

“We’re beat orientated anyway, and the only reason we haven’t crossed over to a 100% live format is because we didn’t want to have to compromise on our production values of what we produce in the studio. With software and the money we’ve made and saved over the years we’re at a point where that’s now possible. Dave’s a lovable larrikin type. The three of us (Nubreed) have been together for the last 15 odd years, we’ve known each other forever, and for someone else to come in, despite the odd teething problems, is really good. It’s added a fresh and new approach for us.”

Luckily this current live arrangement is coming to Adelaide, most likely in a smaller, more intimate venue like Traffic, rather than the raves we’ve seen them play at in the past. “Every time we’ve been to Adelaide it’s been at a rather large gig,” Walburgh says. “Its mainly Blake (DJ John Doe) who has really spearheaded us there in SA, he took a punt on us – he’s got a real diverse edge in what he listens to. We slipped really well into that vibe as we do tag some drum and bass on the end of our usual set. He saw a vision of what could be, and it worked really well. One of the best gigs we ever did was at Stardust with the Ez Rollers and Shimon. That was great – you had a really energetic crowd, they were there for it, it was just a mad vibe to be caught up in all that. You caught us at a good moment,” he laughs, and then adds “that’s the thing with Adelaide you never know what to expect.”