14 ★ FINANCIAL TIMES Wednesday8 April 2020

ARTS

Clockwise: XL boss Richard Russell;

The Prodigy, whose ‘Experience’ was

XL’s first album; Adele, who signed

to the label in 2006 —Koury Angelo, Getty Images

Russell is back making music. His first

album as Everything Is Recorded came

out in 2018 and was shortlisted for the

UK’s Mercury Music Prize. Its follow-up

Friday Forever s themed around the ideai

of a night out — a return to the nocturnal

world of “The Bouncer”.

“I feel this is my rave album,” he says.

With guest appearances by rappers

ranging from Manchester tyro Aitch to

Wu Tang Clan veteran Ghostface Killah,

it also draws on his formative love of hip-

hop. The quality of the production is

impressive, including a deft use of sam-

ples from vintage records like the ones

lining the wall of his studio. All have

been licensed for use, unlike the free-

for-all that characterised sampling in the

Wild West early days of the rave scene.

“I’ve got a few sample skeletons in my

closet,” Russell cheerfully admits. He

looks trim and has an easy, informal air.

Above the sofa where he sits is an art-

work imagining a meeting between elec-

tronic pop pioneers Kraftwerk and

fabled bluesman Robert Johnson. “I had

these fantastic dreams, in the sense of

fantasy, that I wanted to pursue, and I

did,” he says of his life in music.

He grew up in the north London

suburb of Edgware, a solid middle-class

upbringing. “My dad once said that he

would have been up for participating in

the Summer of Love in the 1960s but no

one invited him,” Russell says. “He was

working at Marks and Spencer at the

time, he didn’t know what was going on.”

His family is Jewish, but he experi-

enced their faith as oppressive. “I had

some sort of visceral response to it, I

didn’t like it,” he says. “It didn’t feel like

freedom to me. So I really reacted

against it.”

In time-honoured suburban style, the

rebellion was filtered through music.

Russell involved himself in London’s

hip-hop culture in the 1980s, learning to

DJ well and breakdance badly. Encoded

in the background ofFriday Forever’s

night-out theme is the memory of

sneaking out from home to go clubbing.

“Friday is obviously the night when

people let off steam and go out,” he says.

“But in Jewish terms it’s also the start of

Sabbath. It’s this very sacred time when

you’re meant to be having dinner at

home with your family, which I was hav-

ing to escape from through various

methods and get to Edgware station and

get on the Tube to go into town.”

Y

our name’s not down,

you’re not coming in,” an

implacable London voice

announces. Connoisseurs of

classic rave hits will recog-

nise the utterance. It is the spoken-word

refrain from“The Bouncer”, a UK top 10

single released in 1992 by dance music

duo Kicks Like a Mule — a grudging trib-

ute to the well-built men in bomber

jackets and black leather gloves who

guard access to nightspots.

“In our minds, we were entitled to be

on guest lists. Sometimes we were,

sometimes we weren’t,” Richard Russell

says, recalling the confrontations out-

side clubs that inspired him to make the

“The Bouncer” with his Kicks Like a

Mule partner Nick Halkes. In those

days, Russell lived in a flat in Camden in

north London (the local venue, Camden

Palace, had a particularly intransigent

set of doormen). He and Halkes ran a

record label as well as DJ-ing and mak-

ing music. It was unclear which was the

side hustle.

Halkes subsequently left the label but

Russell, 49, has remained at its helm. XL

Recordings is now among the world’s

most successful independent record

companies. Its prize asset is Adele, who

was signed on the basis of a four-song

demo in 2006. The label has also

released records by The White Stripes,

The Prodigy, Radiohead, Dizzee Rascal,

FKA Twigs, The xx and Tyler the Crea-

tor — a diverse and formidable line-up.

We meet at Russell’s personal record-

ing studio in Notting Hill, a short walk

from XL’s headquarters. It is the early

stages of the coronavirus outbreak,

when shaking hands seems like a rebel-

lious act of sociability, not the reckless

act of folly that it will shortly be revealed

to be. The room is comfortably shabby

and bohemian. There is a book about

magic on a bookshelf next to a record

player. Thousands of vinyl records line

one of the walls.

Two are propped up so as to display

their covers. One is an album of quite

spectacular obscurity, a 1971 work by

avant-garde Turkish composer Ilhan

Mimaroglu featuring the US jazz trum-

peter Freddie Hubbard. The other is the

fresh vinyl pressing of an album by Rus-

sell himself, made under the name Eve-

rything Is Recorded.

Having concentrated on running XL

Recordings in the 1990s and 2000s,

Record mogul who’d rather make music

XL Recordings boss Richard

Russell has a glittering CV

and Adele on his roster but is

going back into the studio to

make a ‘rave album’. He talks

to Ludovic Hunter-Tilney

The rave scene in the late 1980s was

dubbed the “Second Summer of Love”.

Unlike his father in the 1960s, Russell

threw himself into the sequel. It was

not the lifestyle that Russell’s parents

had envisaged for their son. “They

wanted me to be a lawyer or doctor,” he

says. “I think they might even have

taken Financial Times journalist. That

sounds respectable.”

His choice has been handsomely

vindicated. Invited to join XL Record-

ings as an A&R man in 1989, he took

over as owner in 1996 after the depar-

ture of his Kicks Like a Mule partner

Halkes and another founder, Tim

Palmer. His ownership is split with indie

label Beggars Banquet, which deals with

the business side of the operations, leav-

ing Russell to concentrate on creative

decisions. His personal wealth was esti-

mated at £135m in the 2019 Sunday

Times Rich List.

“I don’t feel like I ever joined the

navy,” he says of his graduation from the

piratical days of rave. “British independ-

ent labels have always had a culture of

being run by people who were anything

but suits, who embodied a kind of free-

dom and anti-establishment spirit. It

came from punk. I would argue that the

only person who came out from that but

ended up representing something

totally different is Richard Branson.”

He takes a back seat at XL Recordings

these days, preferring to concentrate on

making his own music. The reorienta-

tion followed a bout of serious illness in

2013, including a period of paralysis.

Working with Gil Scott Heron was

another inspiration. Russell produced

the final album by the New York “godfa-

ther of rap” in 2010, having persuaded

him to end a long absence from the

recording studio.

“He said to me, ‘Are you making

records now? You realise that’s a demo-

tion, right?’,” he remembers. “It was

slightly tongue-in-cheek, but I think,

coming from his generation, it was also

like, the boss of a label is the boss. I have

never seen it like that. And I don’t see

reconnecting with music as being

kind of demotion, quite the opposite.

I see it as a reconnection with what’s

really important.”

‘Friday Forever’’ is out now. Richard

Russell’s memoir ‘Liberation Through

Hearing’ is published by White Rabbit

In the amateur-

made ‘Ruckus’,

you play a cute

Godzilla-like

monster out to

destroy a city

When I watch my housemate paint, sit-

ting in the sun-dappled cupboard we

call a “studio”, I sometimes get the urge

to join her. Though not artistically

gifted, I get the basics: apply paint to

brush, then brush to canvas. My result

might not be any good, but at least it’ll

be a painting.

We can all learn rudimentary paint-

ing, photography or guitar just by

watching. Not so with games. Video

game development is a complex multi-

disciplinary endeavour requiring visual

and audio artists, scriptwriters and an

army of coders and engineers. Even

indie developers need considerable

technical knowledge. I wouldn’t know

where to start.

This is a shame, because over the

years I’ve had ideas for games. One was

an old-school arcade fighter based on

psychoanalysis: you play a dapper

Carl Jung fighting through levels

of the unconscious, battling phantasms

and solving trauma puzzles, building

up to a big fight with Sigmund Freud.

Then as a surprise final boss, the real

enemy: yourself.

Even though I can’t code, there are

game creation tools for hobbyists that

could make my game idea a reality.

These are meant to dismantle the high

barrier of entry for game design, turning

the player into a creator. Such platforms

have been around since the 1980s but

have become more popular and sophis-

ticated recently as the internet allows

users to share creations and play other

people’s amateur games.

InSuper Mario Maker, Nintendo

invites you to tinker with its peerless

platforming formula, building your own

levels, placing every mushroom and

making each jump as punishingly pixel-

perfect as you please. Another game-

making platform is Roblox, with more

than 100m monthly users who skew

young, mostly between nine and 15. The

user-created games are basic, some-

times even broken, but considering

they’re made by kids and played online

with friends, it’s all part of the fun. The

most popular creations are decidedly

un-fantastical, boiling down to every-

day grown-up activities such as going to

a dance or working in apizza parlour.

Developers of these tools have the

challenge of making game design not

just accessible but fun. One company

stands out: Media Molecule, whose

LittleBigPlanet series is packaged

with a robustlevel creation tool that

players have used to share more than

10m different levels online. Its new

project is even more ambitious. Nine

years in the making ,Dreams s ai

YouTube-like hub that offers a whole

suite of design tools. It takes a while to

learn the ropes, though — after hours of

tutorials I still find myself stuck making

coloured boxes.

Instead I turn toDreamsfor browsing

the works of more talented and dedi-

cated creators. There are impressive

games such asRuckus, in which you play

a cutesy Godzilla-like monster destroy-

ing a city, andRed, a side-scrolling

fighter which is satisfyingly local to

London, including a grime soundtrack,

fights on the tube and health bonuses

from boxes of fried chicken. There are

plenty of oddities on the platform, too,

including beautifuldigital art which

isn’t meant to be played, countless

recreations of existing games and

movies, and a hyper-realistichot dog.

Most of these feel like sketches and

experiments, with only a handful stand-

ing out as games that you might actually

pay for.

The thorny question of ownership

hovers over theDreamscommunity. As

it stands, no matter how much sweat

and love you pour into your creation,

you can’t take it off the platform or

profit from it. Media Molecule is tenta-

tively allowing creators to apply to

use their creations for business pur-

poses, but at the moment you still need

special permission to acquire the rights

to your work. As with social networks,

Dreamsis fuelled by the creativity and

energy of its users, who, in generating

content for free, become both consumer

and producer.

As a game design tool, though,Dreams

establishes a new benchmark. It also

boasts a remarkably kind-hearted

online community with members who

often end their posts with sincere

thanks to Media Molecule for creating

the platform. It will be a while before I

share my creations with them, however.

I’ve spent the past hour adjusting the

bristles and tint of Jung’s moustache.

Maybe by the end of the lockdown I’ll

have got it just right.

When the aim of the game is to create a game

GAMING

Tom

Faber

‘Gil Scott Heron said to

me, “Are you making

records now? You realise

that’s a demotion, right?”’

ARTS ONLINE

‘Live’ jazz for

lockdown

An online festival of

gigs livestreamed

from the homes of

New York’s jazz

heavyweights

ft.com/arts

APRIL 8 2020 Section:Features Time: 4/20207/ - 18:33 User:peter.bailey Page Name:ARTS LON, Part,Page,Edition:EUR , 14, 1