Craig Richards Wonderfruit interview: "It’s so funny, this word, ‘curation’, isn’t it?"
Catching up with the accidental DJ at the jewel in Thailand’s subcultural crown.
“I've managed to stay in this 'sleep all day, up all night' zone, so the jet lag hasn't hit me. I’ve been sleeping during the day and I watched the football at night, which was quite fun.” The powerful afternoon sun has made way for the tantalising potential of a tropical night, and Craig Richards is taking a moment to relax backstage, poised to perform his opening set at Wonderfruit 2022.
The late-night kick-offs and unusual winter scheduling of the World Cup helped provide a dose of nocturnal entertainment for a man who, apart from being a renowned record collector, visual artist and beloved underground figurehead, revels in his “gentleman of the night” tag. An artist in every sense of the word, Richards has maintained a powerful presence at esoteric dance music’s vanguard for more than three decades. For years his name has been synonymous with shaping the cutting-edge sound signature of London’s Fabric nightclub, and, in recent years, his co-production, curation and art direction of celebrated UK arts and music festival, Houghton, has allowed him to channel his creative inventory in expansive new ways.
The enforced hiatus, or “relentless catastrophe” of the pandemic may have brutally stymied our ability to come together and celebrate (among other things) music, art, and dance for longer than most of us care to recall, but 2022 saw the profoundly welcome return of almost unrestricted travel and congregation — along with all the joyous possibilities the relaxed rules afford. “It's been nothing but a relief,” says Craig. “This whole year, as things have started to open up, has been very reassuring. It was difficult back there, in this industry, for us. I felt very dysfunctional. In the beginning, it was fun to have some time off. Then it dug in and went on for a while. It's not just 'masks off, here we go’, but it's been a relief to be around the scene again and to travel again.”
No stranger to the Wonderfruit experience, the 2022 edition marked Craig’s fourth appearance ‘in the fields’. For the third time running, he was invited to bring his curatorial touch to one of the event’s iconic stages, assembling a fitting line-up to provide the soundtrack at the infamous late-night den, The Quarry. “It’s so funny, this word, curation, isn't it? It's such a grand word,” begins Craig with a characteristic lack of pretension. “I'm thinking I'm going to start using 'organised by' rather than 'curated by’,” he laughs. “It's relatively straightforward. Whatever 'curation' is, thus far it's been really [about] inviting my friends and people I respect and cherish. So, it's not really a complicated, intellectual process.”
Suggesting that an overriding variable when programming events far from home is the availability of any potential guest and the logistics involved in bringing them in, Craig feels the very space in which the music will be played is perhaps the most important factor when considering who to select to provide the sounds. “The Quarry is a long, tunnel-like, fairly dark and interesting space down into the pits. That defines what sort of music should be played in there I think. It's definitely a spot to lose yourself in.”
Houghton, too, roared back into life in the summer of 2022, the beloved festival’s return — following three years of cancellations — bringing with it the same celebratory scenes that quickly made it one of the world’s most popular and forward-thinking dance events. While his experience of organising a small-but-vital slice of Wonderfruit has proven to be reasonably simple to approach, figuring out how to populate ten stages of music across four non-stop days and nights at Houghton brings an altogether more complex set of challenges. “It’s almost like a strange game of chess, trying to piece it all together. I suppose it's about offering the broadest amount of opportunities musically to the listener. If you're asking people to come and have it at a place for four days, you need to provide downtime and party time and inspiration in different spaces and ways. It's actually one of the most complicated things I've done in my life.”
Softly spoken, measured and engaging, Richards comes across as refreshingly down-to-earth. This apparent lack of hubris can, it seems, be traced back to the beginnings of his career in music, which began in unassuming fashion while studying at St Martin’s during the halcyon days of early UK rave and “DIY party culture”. “As a younger man, I went to art school and started DJing at parties and accidentally became a DJ, in a way. I did this night, Freaky Disco, [and] got asked to do Fabric from that.”
While for many, the idea of becoming a DJ is in itself a dream to be pursued, for Craig, it was a vocation that manifested itself as a means to pursue visual art. After leaving college, he rented a studio space under the railway line near London’s Paddington, and, after putting on his first few art exhibitions, he quickly realised that the solitary life of a painter wasn’t quite what he was looking for. “I loved art school because of the community it was, being able to move around different areas of the school. I didn't fancy being on my own just painting. DJing meant that I could keep painting and not have to make a living from it. DJing became a way of self-sponsorship in a sense.”
Craig continues to paint and take photographs, and 2017 saw the release of his first art book — a collection of paintings and illustrations depicting every artist who performed at the Houghton Festival that year. “I think, if I had a dream, it would probably be to be a painter. And now, as I get older, I like being on my own, I'm less sociable, so maybe it makes sense. It's very much a part of me. It's like a professional hobby, a very serious hobby, and DJing is how I earn my living and support myself.”
Despite his humble interpretation of the way his musical path unfolded, it’s fanciful to conceive that anyone could have enjoyed a career in the field as successful and long-lasting as Craig’s without a good measure of talent. His passion for collecting sounds from disparate corners of the musical universe combined with a desire and aptitude to finesse these textures into coherent and immersive sets has, arguably, contributed as much as anything else to his enduring appeal. “I think that really is what made me as a DJ. Listening to lots of different things, always buying lots of different records and, I suppose, and working out how you piece them together into something believable.”
In the late ‘80s and throughout the ‘90s, London boasted an abundance of record stores selling all manner of esoteric wax. Craig recalls how many would be rigidly aligned to a given sound or style, specialising and, in most cases, not diverging from strict stylistic boundaries. “It was very territorial and people were quite snobby about that territory. For me, that never appealed. I always loved to flirt with all the different sounds. When I was growing up, we used to dress up in rockabilly clothes but we'd listen to David Bowie, you know. People were very strict about 'mods listen to this' [or what have you]. I always found it difficult to restrict [one's] love of music in that way.”
It was the blurring of one particular set of parameters that would provide a bountiful supply of novel sounds during Craig’s residencies at The End nightclub and later during the formative years at Fabric. Its definition has become muddied and the music with which younger generations associate the tag bares little, if any, resemblance to its earliest incarnation, but back then, for a while, tech house burned brightly at the core of the UK dance underground. “I don't know what the current interpretation of tech house is,” muses Craig. “All these genres have been stamped on and are now quite hard to fathom. I mean, we used to call it 'housey techno'. There was a sound happening which wasn't techno — techno, at that moment, really was techno and [had] a different crowd and a different feeling. Techno was quite a commitment at that time. If you were into techno, you were into techno. And, in the same way, if you were into house, people were quite purest about that. Tech house was somewhere in the middle. Maybe strip away the vocals, and put some acid lines in there. Taking from techno and taking from house, but keeping an atmosphere within the music that was less threatening than techno was at that time.”
If being free from tribalist musical allegiances is something that has helped shape Craig’s career, he feels that the ability to research and explore diverse musical forms has been made easier than ever before with the arrival of the internet. For many, the concept of digging for music without the aid of the virtual world is nothing short of unfathomable, but for collectors old enough to remember life pre-internet, the practicalities of searching for sounds has changed exponentially. “The internet has made it very possible to explore. That exploration was always stunted in a way [before the internet] because you were only buying as many records as you could afford. And the method of finding it was only record shops, so it was [a case of] showing up in a record shop with thirty quid and working out what you wanted to come away with. But the information that's now available is phenomenal, so I think the music lover now is so much more informed than when I was growing up.”
This relatively newfound access to an abundance of music in all its forms brings with it a certain set of problems, with collectors faced with being overwhelmed by a seemingly endless torrent of sounds to sift through. “It's gone from famine to flood,” says Craig. “As music lovers, we can flood ourselves if we're not careful — especially if you're into music across genres. You can have a lot of music to listen to that you barely have the ear time to absorb and digest it.” For Craig, the restrictions of the past had some surprising positives, with the scarcity of the desired sounds adding to their allure. “I think the famine, in a way, made us more hungry. It made me much more determined to find stuff and to look for stuff, to listen, write things down, and even go up to DJs and ask what things were. There was no Shazam in those days! But the needle has gone the other way now.”
Craig proudly admits to being “addicted to the process of buying records,” but feels gatekeeping and filtration are now more important than ever. “You have to have time to listen to music. It's one thing foraging and hunting for it. You bring it back, but the listening process is important. Whether it's an album that you listen to at home and form a relationship with, or it's a track that you need to know because you're going to play it [out] and mix it. Sometimes I feel like I've got too much [music] around me and I don't know it well enough. It's a nice problem to have, admittedly.”
With more than thirty years of diligent digging under his belt, Craig’s collection has, by now, taken on a life of its own. Trying to “keep a relationship with the collection as a whole, past and present” is a challenge in itself, one that’s been made a touch more complicated by some less-than-precise organisation. “Sadly, I never catalogued [the records] or kept them in order and it's now in complete disarray. [But] it somehow works in this disarray, where I can just grab and find stuff.” Indeed, this lack of vinyl housekeeping has unlikely benefits, a randomness that offers up plenty in the way of sonic surprises as he flicks through the shelves. “I’m now at a point where I can almost go record shopping in my own collection, because there are things, especially as the memory starts to wilt, that you do need to see [to remember]. I might find almost anything in each queue because it's that badly organised, it’s a system and a process in itself that I quite like. You can delve in there and find a record you played a lot in the '90s, but you've forgotten it until you see it.”
Turning back to the distinct charm of Wonderfruit as he readies himself for a dose of pre-set festival immersion, Craig has no doubt as to the primary source of the event’s magic. “I think the passion of the man behind it is the driving force. Pete [Phornprapha, Wonderful founder] is a really phenomenal character. A very inspired character who travels the world and has an amazing sense of inspiration and that shows in this festival.”
Praising the love and care that goes into its conception, Craig suggests it’s the attention to detail that sets Wonderfruit apart from its rivals. “There's a lot of thought gone into the whole process and it’s a long-term project. It’s very special. It's a beautiful aesthetic, [especially] some of the sculptural pieces that aren't stages. It's a warm and friendly place and it's been a joy for me to play here and it's a pleasure to be involved in something at an early stage that's growing and will definitely develop as the years progress.”
Written by Rocco Universal
Wonderfruit photo credits Brent Burns
Interview conducted in conjunction with Bangkok Community Radio
