Paul Woolford, a bastion of quality house, techno and electronic music for nearly 20 years now, is about to release a bold and beautiful new album as relatively new alias Special Request. Plus, he just happens to have made one of the stand-out, feel-good house records of the year. What better time, then, for Defected’s Ben Lovett to have a chat with the man himself…
Special Request is yet another exciting shimmy for his CV, Woolford’s long and distinguished career synonymous with thrill and versatility. Special Request actually began life last year as both record label and production project. Woolford’s debut EP under the moniker, Ride, generated frenzied buzz and inevitably prompted follow-ups Lolita, Hardcore and Vapour/Mindwash. The latter two have dropped in 2013, Hardcore appearing on Fabric’s ‘artist-led’ splinter label Houndsooth – the same as the new album. Momentum is building, much as Woolford himself expected.
“Special Request has always been building to an album” he opens. “It [the project] comes from my teenage years listening to pirate stations. I had the project in mind for some years before the music came, but once I started to make the music it was like a tidal wave.”
Woolford drafted the initial blueprints for Special Request from a wealth of unreleased tracks. A refining process followed but that was more to do with the overall approach of the project than its specific beats, basslines and fly samples. “I played with this [the approach] over the course of the singles... before the full album.”
Woolford’s debut Special Request album, entitled Soul Music, is quite something. Spanning two-discs (and two digital collections) and absorbing those previous EP forays, it wields an irresistibly raw edge sharpened by memories of classic pirate radio rave and jungle, and then sheathed emphatically with the sensibilities of the contemporary dance floor. A cut like Broken Dreams, for example, meshes pitbull house rhythms to a series of equally ferocious breaks; elsewhere, Woolford regularly works savage yet nostalgic warehouse drumbeats next to atmospheric melodies, deep vocal samples and other experimental sounds.
How does an artist organise and contextualise such creative, adrenaline-pumped freewheeling? “I just do what I feel at all times. That’s all it comes down to” he responds. “There are things you can do to keep your state of mind open to accidents that feed into the overall picture, but with Special Request there is a defined shape to the material; although it would be difficult for me to actually describe it you. The rest of it is a mixture of experimenting and a handful of definite ideas.”
He continues: “The whole process was liberating in terms of locking myself away and doing something entirely – at the time of recording – unknown to most of my audience. There is a power psychologically in doing this for any artist because any concerns over perception or intent are out of the question. You create your own world and it can be as potent as you want it to be.”
Woolford ended up creating his own pirate radio set-up, in order to achieve the authentic sounds he craved. His special Special Request studio generated “false memories” by almost exclusively utilising vintage hardware, an industrial-strength EQ and, remarkably, an FM transmitter.
“Recording with hardware is standard practise for most experienced producers – there is a weight and physicality that can be achieved very quickly” he explains. “As the album formed I realised I wanted to add another sheen to some of the sounds and I found an FM transmitter for sale and used it initially as a gauze to record certain sounds through – and subsequently entire tracks went through it, before being sampled back into themselves in various ways. There is an odd sensation of hearing your own material through the FM airwaves before it has actually been released. How this process relates to time is quite an open-ended question but it started as quite a basic textural procedure and ended up becoming a key part of the project.”
The pirate landscape today is, according to Woolford, vastly different; non-existent as far as dance music is concerned. “There’s hardly any of it [pirate stations] around anymore that relates to dance music, but there are still community-based pirates in the North where I live.” He believes those pirate survivors still have a role to play as well: “In terms of if it...pirate radio...still has a place – if it exists then it has a place. I don’t view the world through the lens of media or the internet. It’s far wider than that.”
A mentality typified by his non-conformist debut release (alongside studio veteran Tony Senghore) back in 1999, at the age of 21. Woolford’s first ever EP, Wack Em’ Out!, determinedly blended the influences of house, hip-hop and electronica, and like his similarly popular follow-ups with Senghore helped define the open-minded mindset that has famously driven his career to date.
There are those who would argue, even in today’s digitized, open-bordered times, that an artist’s unpredictability might actually work against them; in terms of label heads, club promoters and even certain club audiences wanting...expecting a certain performance or sound. Are industry preconceptions still a problem for Woolford? He did comment earlier this year, after all, that his maverick musical focus in the DJ booth has caused him issues in the past.
“The people that know me and work with me know exactly what they will get; it’s just that most artists have one particular thing they are known for, and focus on that relentlessly” he urges. “Rapidly they can burn out as trends alter, or as the media becomes bored of that one sound, or if they simplify what they do to appeal to a wider audience and in the process lose their core followers. This whole thing is a game and you have to play it long and hard. In terms of certain clubs, I am working with nearly all the clubs I ever wanted to – there’s about five more on the hit-list that I will get to as time unfolds.”
That’s not to say Mr Woolford is complacent. For all his cavalier spirit and admirable adventurism, there remains a keen focus on dancefloor basics. “I don’t think it is wise to underestimate any audience. Any decent crowd in any club will consist of a variety of different people who hear music differently and will trust you to take them to the destination the way you want” he wagers. “It is true that there is a thirst in certain clubs for that FX-heavy, squeezed, compressed sound, and I noticed Seth Troxler recently speaking about this – there are ways to present house music where it can fit into a framework close to this, but without being compromised and the soul being squeezed out. Ultimately, nobody can argue with a dancefloor that is going off properly so all the theorising means nothing if you achieve this.”
Paul Woolford has always been one for getting on and doing. After his first teenage visit to Leeds’ Back To Basics he was determined to play and record dance music himself. He threw himself into learning to DJ and production, his early gigs and EP collaborations with Tony Senghore leading, over time, to major international bookings (including a prestigious, ongoing residency for We Love... at Space Ibiza) as well as releases for 20:20 Vision (as Bobby Peru, including legendary 2006 cut-up anthem Erotic Discourse), Saved, Subliminal, Planet E and Cocoon. Across all of it Woolford guaranteed the unexpected, zipping between different shades of house, techno and electronica as the mood took him.
It’s no different now. Aside from Special Request (and the odd Special Request DJ set in Ibiza this summer), Woolford is currently working on new and varied material with a rich sweep of labels including Hotflush, Planet E and Metroplex, as well as, teasingly, “a couple more under the radar.” It was Hotflush that released huge summer single Untitled (recorded under Woolford’s own name) this July; an inspired yin-yang of techno grit and euphoric piano-house backed by sweet vocal samples and delivering credible big room shake.
There are remix commissions, too; not least Woolford’s imminent takes on Disclosure feat. London Grammar’s Help Me Lose My Mind and George Fitzgerald’s I Can Tell (By The Way You Move). And then a slew of global DJing gigs - everywhere from New York this weekend to the Warehouse Project and Panorama Bar next month. “All I am interested in doing is providing a certain quality” he suggests, “and building a legacy out of it.”
If Special Request pays homage to sounds of the past, who does Woolford rate among clubland’s current crop of artists? “Always Ben UFO, Move D, Andrea Baumecker, Blawan, Boddika, Joy Orbison, Pearson Sound, Pangaea, the NightSlugs boys, Surgeon, Huerco S, Anthony Naples, Kassem Mosse, the Sex Tags Mania crew, Call Super, Objekt, Akkord.... Why? Because they all do what they do in their own ways, to a very high standard.” Several of the similarly-minded names he is so keen to assert appear on the second half of Soul Music, providing striking reinterpretations of Special Request’s snappy source material.
“I think the club scene is great right now, and I think it always will be for anyone that avoids the bullshit” Woolford concludes. “It’s very simple. You get out of anything what you put in. Go and see the artists you want and have fun. Enjoy life. It’s pretty basic...”
Words: Ben Lovett
Special Request’s debut album Soul Music is released by Houndstooth (UK) on October 7 in triple-vinyl format, and on October 21 as double-CD and digital download (the latter release features a bonus collection of tracks, including Special Request’s Radio 1-supported VIP remix of Tessela’s Hackney Parrot).
