There is a lot of fuss being made in dance music circles by a certain Craig Richards. Particularly in London where his genre busting Tyrant nights and residency at Fabric are finally making people realise that there is no need for the rigid musical formulae that has governed the scene for so long. The funny thing is that despite all the fuss, Craig Richards himself admits, ‘I don’t really see myself as a DJ. I see myself as a music collector and I’m not a crowd pleaser. I don’t aim for that’
So, if Craig Richards doesn’t consider himself to be a DJ, what is he? Looking at the way the shy Londoner approaches life, it’s quite easy to see that the tag ‘artist’ is far more appropriate. It was art that originally drew Richards to London from a relatively sheltered upbringing in New Forest. After completing a degree at the renowned St Martin’s School of Art, Richards went on to do an MA at The Royal School of Art where he landed all the qualifications he could possibly want to move in the right circles. Sure enough, the companies that count recognised Richards’ talent but as he explains, all that glitters is not gold. ‘My work once I left College is one of the reasons I continue to DJ and put on parties. I was involved in some commercial work for Sapporo and Absolut Vodka and I did a lot of work for Paul Smith. I was getting involved with a lot of advertising and I didn’t really like it to be honest. I didn’t like the way it made me feel and if you’re working for someone, it doesn’t matter how funky the client is like Sapporo who are very liberal minded, at the end of the day it’s commercial art and I didn’t take to it at all.’
In many ways, Richards has carried the same aversion to commerciality into his DJing and promoting. He explains that his unwillingness to compromise his sound for sales is ‘the very reason he turned down a Global Underground CD’ and that he takes the same ethos to all he does as the driving force behind the phenomenally successful ‘Tyrant’. It’s a well coined phrase in dance journalism but with Richards you really do get the feeling that it ‘is not about the money’. If anything, he has used DJing and promoting as a means of furthering his visual art. ‘I wanted to find something that I could make a living from on the weekend that would give me time during the week to develop my views.’ It has now got to the stage that Richards sees everything he does ‘in the sense of art as being interwoven or intermarried. Whether it’s graphic art or photography or music it’s just another medium and I take a similar approach,’ he explains.
Perhaps it is this intricate relationship between visual and aural art that lies behind Richard’s remarkable success as a DJ. His trademark is not so much a particular sound but an awesome cross section of sounds the defies definition – dubby house, tech house, breaks, 4/4 – it’s all there. ‘St Martin’s was really about turning things upside down and looking at them from a different angle and so certainly that has influenced my record selection process. I’m not looking for big tunes that make the crowd go mental.’
Having sadly missed the first ‘Tyrant’ tour of Australia, Craig Richards will be playing a much anticipated one off gig at The Prince of Wales (Melb) on Friday Feb 8th. As you would expect for a DJ who plays such a broad range of music, there is an equally broad range of people ready to subject themselves to the sound that Richards claims ‘is entirely about creating a groove.’ Furthermore, the night is aiming to express something of Richard’s visual art through installations at the venue and so the event will be generating interest within the art community as well. Above all, it will be refreshing to have such a lateral thinking musician play to a community that prides itself on being open minded.
