Music
10 Sep 07

The bleep shall inherit the earth

He’s the DIY pop genius who, in the space of a year, has gone from stacking the fruit shelves at Marks & Sparks to masterminding Kylie’s next record. Meet Calvin Harris the bedsit wunder-kind.

Ground zero for Calvin Harris is a poky sink-estate bedroom, lined with faded fly-posters and yellowing music magazines. In the corner are a computer and sequencer: Harris’ recording studio.

It was here, in this cramped space in the Scottish ‘burbs , that he recorded the UK top 10 hit ‘Acceptable In The 80s’, and here, too, that he wrote the songs that will form the backbone of the next Kylie Minogue album.
“There seems to be a bit of a backlash,” says Harris, sipping a freshly poured mug of tea. “The public thinks I’m too pleased with myself, that I’m living a rock-star lifestyle. They’re missing out on the irony. Take the song ‘Girls’ [wherein Harris brags, at very great length, about his sexual magnetism] – it’s an absolute piss-take. I wrote it in my bedroom, on a computer. It’s not meant to be taken seriously. There’s a strain of humour in my music that people seem to be missing out on.”
A talent for cheeky lyrics and bubblegum electro-beats have combined to make Harris something of a Gen Bebo poster boy. In the past six months, he’s notched up a brace of smash singles and been tapped to pen tunes not alone for Kylie but also for oddball Wicklow songstress Roisin Murphy.
“The whole Kylie thing happened so quickly – it was really surreal,” he reminisces. “My A&R man sent a demo of some songs to Kylie’s A&R. I got a call saying, ‘Would you like to work with Kylie?’ And I thought: ‘Come on mate, that’s never gonna happen.’ That’s how I felt until the day before we met.”
His memories of his stillborn hook-up with Murphy are less warm: “The songs I gave them were really, really good. For some reason, they chose not to use them. Even worse, they handed one of my tracks to a producer from Miami and he completely fucked it up. I wasn’t happy about that. They were idiots. In the end I ended up losing money out of the whole thing, because of the lawyers’ fees.”
On this muggy July morning, Calvin has more pressing distractions, however. Such as updating his MySpace site. He has 35,000 ‘friends’ and, as he’s not a megastar yet, there’s a presumption he will take the time to correspond with each in person.
“I’m beginning to regret putting so much effort into it, to be honest,” he sighs. “People expect me to reply to each and every one of them. I mean, Robbie Williams has a MySpace site and nobody thinks he’s going to write back to everyone. With me, they assume I’m going to say ‘hello’ to each and every person. And when I don’t, they think I’m a dick. Sometimes, I just can’t be arsed. I know I shouldn’t say that. There are times we all can’t be arsed, right? I know Mika used MySpace early on but, as soon as he started taking off, he just walked away from it on a personal level. I should have done the same thing.”
The cover of Harris' debut album, I Created Disco, shows the singer sporting a pair of superfly science-fiction mirror shades. The glasses, which have become something of a call-sign for Harris, look preposterous and impractical – which is exactly what they are.
“I made them myself. I figured I needed a gimmick, so I got some bubble wrap and stuck it to a pair of plastic sunglasses with Pritt-Stick,” he says. “You can’t see anything if you're wearing them, so they’re for photoshoots only. I certainly couldn’t wear them during a show. I’d probably walk off the edge of the stage by accident.”
From downstairs comes the faint hubbub of voices – Harris’ mum, settling down for her daily appointment with Countdown.
“My parents were a bit appalled after I told them I was going to start making records in the house,” he reveals. “My dad wanted me to get a job. He was eager that I'd have a trade to fall back on. I think the idea of their son becoming a pop star struck them as completely ludicrous.”
Nonetheless, the family were generally supportive as Harris went about masterminding a pop career from his bedroom. They didn’t, for instance, bang on his door and tell him to turn the music down when he was in the middle of recording I Created Disco.
“They were very tolerant, in fact. I’d be up here, putting the beats together and they’d be in the living room glued to EastEnders. In hindsight it was very surreal. At the time, these things feel perfectly natural.”
Gazing out the bedroom window, you're afforded a view of leafy Dumfries, a small south-western Scottish town which poet Robert Burns called home (its rock and roll lineage is less impressive: Stiltskin singer Ray Wilson hails from here). Harris has lived in Dumfries all his life and, since leaving school, has mostly occupied himself with odd jobs. As recently as earlier this year, he was still working in the fruit section of the local Marks & Spencer.
“They wanted to promote me to head of the department,” he smiles. “I ended up having to go to a conference with the heads of all the other Scottish stores. We got to try some mangoes. I said to myself ‘this is okay’ That was shortly before my publishing came through and I left. My boss was really a bit browned off. Her parting words to me were: ‘So where will I get a new fruit-and-veg man?’”