Financial Times 08Apr2020

(Amelia) #1
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

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