No. 30: Richard Russell

Hello everyone, how are you? Thanks for the love and feedback for Trevor Fung, it was a great start to 2025, a reminder of how all these great connectors we are meeting in this series continue to impact on the fabric of people’s lives and culture. And hey! Here’s someone else who definitely does just that!

As an A&R – and artist – at XL Recordings from 1991, Richard Russell was responsible for bringing some of the biggest rave tunes ever made to public attention, and most notably helped guide his friends The Prodigy from the rave scene to becoming one of the biggest bands in the world. In 1996, after the two founders Tim Palmer and Nick Halkes had retired and left to found commercial dance imprint Positiva respectively, Russell took over running XL – and gradually turned it into a label that would be as definitive for millennials as its rave era had been for gen x.

The White Stripes, Dizzee Rascal and Wiley, MIA, Vampire Weekend, The Horrors, Friendly Fires, Giggs, FKA Twigs, The xx, Jai Paul, Sampha… Tyler, The Creator! ADELE! I mean, come on, that’s just ludicrous, right? And all this time, Russell was also re-launching himself as a producer, making the backing for what turned out to be the final albums by both Gil Scott Heron and (in partnership with Damon Albarn), Bobby Womack.

Since then, he’s eased off on the label duties, published a memoir, and continued producing – including a fantastic album last year as a duo with the actor / director Samantha Morton, and now two albums with his sprawling supergroup Everything Is Recorded. The first, Everything is Recorded by Richard Russell was in 2018, and, following a series of download-only Equinox live recordings, the new one Temporary will be out in a fortnight.

Brian and I went to his studio in Notting Hill, where he welcomed us in warmly. The living archetype of The Cool Dude with his tinted specs, perfectly slicked-back ponytail and luxuriously comfortable-looking white tee and combats, he is clearly making the very most of his various successes. For the photo with his eyes closed, he sat in the front yard listening to LL Cool J. His studio is, frankly, a paradise, full of wonderful things and a very easy place to be: this is a theme we returned to repeatedly in the conversation, and indeed it very much helped the conversation flow. It’s a long one, so get settled, but it’s also a rewarding one… we really got into it!

OK we're in your studio, and there's more set up downstairs which you said is for a live jam – is that going to be a performance of the new record?

Yeah, kinda. Our way into this is going to be based on this Solstice / Equinox thing we did over the last year which is improvisational, and there was a certain point with that where where we thought it would be good to now open this up a bit and have a bit of an audience there, and try and not let that change the the really like truly spontaneous nature of it... so no we're more going to be starting off doing that – but also working towards playing the record

Yeah. I mean, you know, we're surrounded by music gear and lovely rugs and jazz records and joss sticks and stuff. Have you... have you always been this much of a hippie?

No! Well, I suppose it was probably latent. I'm a Pisces, so I think it was probably in there. I think I was probably in denial of it when I was younger, you know? I think I was probably a bit in denial of that, errr, somewhat sort of softer side, which I suppose, when you say hippie, that's what I associate with that. Just like astrology, or Jungian archetypes or astrological science, another way of looking at that is through, like, musical subcultures: like, what are you? Like, what are you, at heart? Do you know what I mean? Because we are, right? So, what are you, at heart? Are you a punk?

Well, I'm a Gemini, so I can't say I'm anything, right?

But you must be something! If you had to align yourself with one movement, what is it?

Well I'm certainly an old raver. Techno raver, maybe?

You're a raver? You're a raver?

I guess.

Right, and [to Brian] what are you?

He's a goth.

Brian: Hey!

Well what someone else thinks you are is another thing, so Joe you would self identify as a raver and what would you self identify as?

Brian: Erm, left of field. That's about it I would say. You know you used to watch Top of the Pops when you were 10, 12. There'd be a weird band on, there'd be three or four weeks, you'd have somebody like Bauhaus would be on it. And I'd be like, “That's my people.” Oh no, that's a goth one but it could be some weird electronic band. I can remember as clear as any memory I have as a kid, seeing The Human League doing something from the Holiday 80 EP. And you could tell by the crowd in the Top of the Pops studio, who were all sort of disco dollies bussed in for the whole thing, that they had no idea what to do with it. Kind of doing that there was a thing if you had to get a band on people knew how to dance to, great – if you had The Human League on people were sort of “Ooh...”, and doing this weird, shuffly, kind of... of swaying. And the uncomfort of the audience was so palpable, and I absolutely adored that.

Well I'm a punk. But I'm a polite one. And a b-boy. So obviously you start to realise at a certain point, mostly you're kind of all of these things aren't you? Because obviously I've got a big chunk of raver in there as well and the raver is very hippie adjacent – ravers are, ravers are hippie adjacent. And you know maybe being a raver is a way of fusing... I'm thinking about especially what we start started off doing – Prodigy and Essex and everything like that – in a way was a sort of bringing together of some quite b-boy things and some quite hippie things in one seamless place which was rave. So I suppose in terms of... and Keith was really really... Keith was was punk in his core, he was really really a hippie as well. He was really an archetypal hippie you know.

Brian: For the b-boy thing did you have the Martha Cooper book on graffiti in New York?

No I don't think I had that.¹

Okay because that's the way the b-boy stuff got into our school. Yeah photo books. Somebody came in with the Martha Cooper book of the subway stuff, the graffiti on the subway. And everybody got into it. It almost came from art. And the graffiti came first and then people started getting music, the sort of Street Sounds albums and all that.

My writing skills were very poor but I had a couple of friends who were really good and I sort of ended up being more of like a lookout, so I was like a graffiti lookout which wasn't like, it's almost like a security position, it wasn't like my job of choice so I think that was the least of those kind of pillars of hip-hop for me, that was the one I was least adept at.

I love the stories of how it came into British schools though, I mean the classic one is always what George from Nightmares on Wax said: he saw “Buffalo Girls” on Top of the Pops, next day every kid in that Leeds comprehensive was spinning on their heads, or trying to.

That's right, that's right. It could just take one thing...

But the kind of warm, gentle side is obvious in this album. It keys into something that I've been doing a lot over the last few years, which is “Soft Music for Hard Times,”² you know, just to make in playlist upon playlist of stuff that's a salve. And it's not escapism – quite the opposite. That place of softness allows you to go into quite melancholic, elegiac things about heartbreak or mortality, which is in this record a lot, right? Is that partly to do with getting old? You do come face to face with this stuff and you either fear it or you kind of get into the emotional side of it...

That's right. I mean, it's... you've got to develop some kind of relationship with it, and the sooner the better, really! So yeah ageing sure, but also just because I've had experiences, you know, that have bought me... that have made me look at stuff like that. Those were not so much to do with aging, that was just more to do with events in my life that made me just look at that and think about that. But you're going to be looking at it. You're going to need to, you're going to need to look at it. It was an unavoidable theme in people I was working with too, it just seemed to be around them lots.

Maybe that was also coming out of the pandemic as well. Yeah I'm sure that was in there. For obvious reasons, people had lost a lot, we all did, everyone lost a lot during that time, some which you got back, some which you maybe didn't. So yeah, I think all of that has sort of pointed towards something when everyone was talking about a lot. So that was just an unavoidable theme. But, but I didn't want to make something miserable. And I hope it's not miserable. I hope it's actually... it's joyous, you know, the making of it was joyous. And it's more like a way of... well, that's a good, good phrase you had there, “soft music hard times”. It's like, you know, let's not, let's not complain about the darkness. You know, let's grab some candles, right? Like, I'm trying!

It's funny because I was listening to it this week and also because I had to review it, the new Cymande album³. Now obviously they're 50 years deep in their music, they're getting on a bit and they were always a bit melancholic and now they're old and also recapturing that melancholy and they've got all these rich strings on it and it's a very heartfelt record. They don't hit it right on every track but when they do you can really bathe in it, it completely sweeps you up in these complex emotions. It was a very similar thing on your one. It's like you really kind of soak right into it and you've got all these different voices articulating these feelings in different ways. Did you talk to all the different people working on it about what the emotional approach was going to be?

Well, not only speaking about it, but the speaking about that is where it kind of came from.

At the beginning of the process?

Yeah, and those conversations, which you hear snatches of on the record, that dialogue was the thing that kind of established the themes of the record. And I think partly that's because this [the studio where we’re sitting] is a place where people always feel comfortable and so the conversations here have always been interesting. And people just... there's an openness to what people talk about here. And people always just seem to... that's maybe got a slight element of something a bit therapeutic, because it has been that for me, it's got a bit of a healing quality, this place. And so I think people have always talked openly about stuff. And I've always liked sampling spoken word, but spoken word is like, nightmarishly difficult to clear. You might use a small bit and then you've got a big headache. And then, well you know, I use this name, Everything is Recorded. And at some point I was like, why don't I record some of these conversations? So obvious!

So when I felt like a conversation was going in an interesting way, I said, “Do you mind if I record, start recording?” And gradually I had this like bank of words and it was a natural thing to start mucking around with it and throwing it onto the CDJs and using it as a musical element. And so then that did, then kind of provide the themes for the record. So the themes kind of came out of those conversations. And then I also use those conversations as a sample source. I transcribed them as well, so I could look at them. So I was actually doing some literal cut and paste in places, because I wanted it to sort of tell... or rather, there was a story being told I felt by the different things that people said – that often happens. And then in the middle of all that, I read about William S. Burroughs and him doing that – basically that, that was one of his techniques, the tape cut up and the audio collage. And you know, he had one of the first VCRs and he used to just tape the telly and turn over and like be taping what was coming up. And then he'd have a sort of collage of accidental stuff. And often some sense would come out of it.