Freak Like Him

Most famously, Richard X is the producer who pulled Sugababes’ career out of the bargain bin with the 2002 smash ‘Freak Like Me’ – a slinky, sexed-up grind which grafted the vocal line of an old Adina Howard track (also called ‘Freak Like Me’) onto Gary Numan’s ‘Are Friends Electric?’ In the process, X encapsulated the then-current vogue for “mash-ups” (songs made from two otherwise-unrelated pieces of music) in three minutes of witty, yet massively commercial, perfect pop. It was widely considered the single of 2002.

Before that, the Blackburn studio boffin had been one of the leading lights of the illegal mash-up underground, having released several deranged minor classics – ‘I Want To Dance With Numbers’ (Whitney Houston v Kraftwerk), ‘Being Scrubbed’ (TLC v The Human League), ‘War And The Bitch’ (Missy Elliott v The Normal) and not least, ‘We Don’t Give A Damn About Our Friends’, of which more later – under the name Girls On Top. Or, to put it another way, along with Freelance Hellraiser (responsible for the Destiny’s Child-v-Nirvana bootleg ‘Smells Like Teen Booty’ and the Strokes-v-Christina Aguilera mash ‘A Stroke Of Genius’) and thousands of amateur mashers round the globe, Richard X was an unauthorised downloader, user, distributor and seller of other people’s copyrighted material, and as such, was no less than a prosecutable criminal in the eyes of the music industry.
“Actually, not having permission to make this music was a hindrance,” X explains, “because it was pretty… you know, legally, you were going out on a bit of a limb. The thrill for people buying it was probably that it was so naughty, but that was never the main buzz of doing it, for me. To be really boring, it was a music thing, an art thing, more than sort of… me, smashing down the institutions of major labels. So in that sense,” he adds, sniggering, “I haven’t really sold out.”
Has anyone actually accused you of selling out?
“I don’t think anyone’d dare,” he says without rancour, “because it’s quite evident from the music I make that this is my natural habitat. I’m in a position now where I can make pop records, using weird techniques, and sounds that stick out a bit: this is what I love. And anyway, the gap between the underground and the overground is so minute. I mean, one day I was doing my underground records, and six months later, ‘Freak Like Me’ was at number one. And it was the same record. Give or take… three girls singing it.”
An earlier version of ‘Freak Like Me’, called ‘We Don’t Give A Damn About Our Friends’ – released when Richard X was still illegal and incognito as Girls On Top, and identical except for the presence of the original vocal line, by the totally unknown Adina Howard – couldn’t possibly have Polaroided the zeitgeist as comprehensively as Sugababes’ version did, when they came to him looking for him to “do a job”.
This is both the greatest success and greatest flaw of his new record, X-Factor. Rather than what you might have expected – namely, an album full of intelligent, immediately memorable pop-culture juxtapositions – it’s “merely” a warm, eccentric collection of great pieces of music, largely made up of other great pieces of music: soul sub-classics (the Caron Wheeler-sung ‘Lonely’, the Kelis-voiced ‘Finest Dreams’); oddball one-offs (a moving take on Bacharach’s ‘Walk On By’ overlaid with the icy posh-dominatrix enunciations of Deborah Evans-Stickland); and weird indie-lounge (the Jarvis v Mazzy Star ‘Into U’). This probably means it will have a longer life as an album, and it points to X’s love for his music and his medium, rather than a reliance on moment-grabbing gimmickry.
“You forget that pop music can be quite powerful, and deep, and interesting,” he opines. “And I think over the last couple of years, there’s not really been much pop music for people over the age of 15 – there hasn’t been much in the way of, you know, anything too disparate. And there don’t seem to be too many freaks. And I see myself more on the freaky side of things. I have more kinship with, you know, the sort of outsider types – people like Jarvis, or Kelis – than I have with anyone who’s on Fame Academy.”

Richard X is telling us about how he came to work with Kelis, the voice on X Factor’s next single, ‘Finest Dreams’, in the perfectly by-the-bye tones of a man discussing someone he ran into on the way back from the shops.
“I met her at a N.E.R.D. gig last year in Shepherd’s Bush, and she’d heard some early stuff of mine which she’d really liked, and we got talking. And then she was back over in London in September last year, working with Diddy on Let’s Get Ill, so I went up and helped out a bit on some of the stuff they were doing. And then the next week I went to Ibiza with them to do some programming. So, to return the favour, she did this song for me.”
You said that unbelievably casually. You do realise that.
He titters. “You know, last year was… a bit of a weird rollercoaster ride. Every other week, something bizarre was happening. It’s like: the phone keeps ringing, and you find yourself talking to all these people from your past. Like, the Human League.
“Going up to see them,” he muses, utterly deadpan. “Having a few drinks, with Phil [Oakey]. Going around Office World, with Phil, looking for stationery. This is just not something that would normally happen to me. But I’ve held it together well.”

Richard X Presents His X-Factor Vol. 1 is out now on Virgin