We'll Always Have Harris

He’s the Twitter-addicted, foul-mouthed, NME-bashing hit factory who gets all the girls (well, all the girls he can squeeze into a single catchy electro-pop chorus at least) but somehow I suspect there’s more to Calvin Harris than meets the Fly Spectacle-wearing eye. Today, backstage at Marlay Park and sans sparkly glasses, I can only describe the man sitting across from me as a very tall, very good looking mouse... in nice trainers.

“My life is extremely anti-social,” the softly-spoken Scot admits. “I’ve been anti-social since the age of 14. You’re stuck in a room on your own for extended periods of time not speaking to anybody and you get used to it. Then after a while it’s quite difficult venturing out into the outside world, you know? Answering a phone call, having a conversation, it’s a hard thing to do sometimes.”
The floorfilling wallflower has taken quite the lyrical plunge with his sophomore effort, even admitting on its title-track ‘Pushing knobs, pushing faders/But I don’t know what they do’.
Equally, smash hit and song of the year candidate ‘I’m Not Alone’ hides an anti-showbiz message that you may have missed when you were dancing to it in your car all summer long – ‘God I can’t do this anymore/though I’ll be laid down on the floor...’
As well as baring his soul, Harris is just as keen to show off some new musical abilities on Ready For The Weekend;
“It’s the greatest achievement in my life,” he offers, albeit rather shyly. “It’s the most amount of time I’ve ever spent on any one thing. It’s the most amount of effort I’ve ever put into anything.
“There’s certainly more musical things than there have been before in my old stuff,” he adds. “I upgraded my equipment and I was sort of giving myself the capability to do that. Before, I was limited. I could only do a certain amount of things with what I was using.
“I’m not a good musician, d’ya know what I mean? I couldn’t sit at a piano and play you an amazing piece of music, I could never do that... I can just pick out parts of most instruments and use them how I want to but I’m not a sort of virtuoso guitar soloist or anything.”
You mean four undisputed superhits later, he doesn’t rate himself as much of a singer?
“Nah, nah,” he dismisses. “I can see production becoming more of my focus. I prefer to do that than singing.”
At only 25 years of age and just a few years rid of a job stocking the fruit shelves at his local M&S, Harris has already racked up production credits with Kylie Minogue, Sophie Ellis-Bextor and Dizzee Rascal and has been signed up to work on the next Kylie and Katy Perry records. Does the electropop mogul know where his next megastar collaboration is coming from?
“They’re usually sort of in my head that it’d be a good idea,” he explains, “and then when it actually happens it’s not so good or it just doesn’t happen because I bottle it.”
So the man who turned down Lady GaGa (he didn’t think the song she sent him in early 2008 was “that good”) loses face around fellow musicians? “Yeah, I dunno, I’m not really a people person. I’ve never approached anyone in my life to do a song. Not in a big headed way, it’s more a fear of rejection, you know, a classic psychological problem.”
Whether you’ve noticed it yet, there are a great many reasons to like this Calvin Harris, besides the fact that he’s quite partial to an Irish audience (“It’s kind of like Scotland’s 10 and Ireland’s 11 on the scale of craziness.”) The tunes are great, the live show’s energetic as hell and he’s downright hilarious when he wants to be (check out his side project Jam TV on YouTube).
Now that I’ve made up my mind, I have to know: is Ready For The Weekend going to be the last Calvin Harris record?
“I wouldn’t have thought so,” the timid Scot says before pausing for a moment. “Nah, I don’t think so. I’m not entirely sure at the moment. I’m thinking about doing other songs, but I don’t think I could face starting another album now so it’s not really in my head.”
So luckily for us, an uncharacteristically gracious Calvin’s not sick of the world of pop music just yet.
“It’s like anything, there’s parts of it you don’t like and there’s parts of it you love. I mean, the one sort of overriding thing is that I’m doing something that I love doing and if there’s little negative sides to that then so be it. It’s a very, very small price to pay.”