Music
Listen to a Fireside Chat with British DJ and producer Paul Woolford
The inimitable British producer and DJ, whose many aliases include the rave-revisiting Special Request, looks back at a career spent indulging in all his musical passions.
"You put a record out because it's intrinsically who you are. You put it out because it's your passion." Over almost two decades and more aliases than you can wave a pen at, Paul Woolford has been at the vanguard of many strains of electronic music in the UK.
As well known for slamming piano house anthems as he is for mind-bending trips into the underbelly of rave as Special Request, Woolford has had major success across many overlapping musical realms.
He's done so much over so many years that it's best just to let him do the talking. In his Fireside Chat, Woolford looks back at a lifetime in music and the records that have shaped him along the way.
Listen to Paul Woolford's Fireside Chat below:
It's a northern thing
It began for Woolford in his hometown of Leeds, in the north of England, where he spent his childhood seeking out dance music through radio, pirate mixes and whatever channel he could lay his ears on. He describes these years as a series of "lightbulb moments", from hearing house music for the first time and falling down hip-hop wormholes via b-boy soundtracks, to immersing himself in the leftfield weirdness of rave compilations and the potent, "intimidating" energy of his first acid house parties.
That elation of being opened up to new sounds – and later, finding the connections between them all – is still imprinted in his memory. But one tune stood out: Big Fun, the 1988 hit by Detroit group Inner City. "It's always in my mind," Woolford says. "Simultaneously a house record, a techno record and a pop record, while just being itself completely is something that fascinates me and enchants me."
Abandoning the rules
After rising through the ranks as a resident at Leeds's legendary techno night Back To Basics, Woolford spent the '00s experimenting across many shades and shapes of club music, releasing on a number of the country's independent labels, as well as on his own imprint, Intimacy Music.
In 2011, Woolford had reached a peak where he'd "taken techno to its absolute logical conclusion, which was to sign for Carl Craig’s Planet E." Achilles/Razor Burn, his first release on the label, is a masterclass in stripped-back techno, just a few simple elements dancing around each other with an energy that pushes on, but never spills over. "It's that discipline of it, not overdoing it," he reflects. "Gradually, what I've learned is to throw discipline away completely."
Around the time of Achilles/Razor Burn, Woolford had grown disillusioned with the mainstream house scene and the stifling structures of the music business. He knew he wasn't engaging with all sides of himself in his output, so he stripped away "the circus" of management and PRs, and dived headfirst into a new direction, a "ravier, Belgian-influenced, darker sound, with the energy of jungle and hardcore insanity". Special Request was born.
Paul Woolford
© Steve Gullick
The arrival of Special Request
The project quickly grew into a body of its own, allowing Woolford to indulge in the power, pace and the bass-heavy sounds of pirate radio that he spent his youth glued to. Never one to be pigeonholed, the scope of Special Request has expanded and splintered off through numerous releases on vital British labels, like Houndstooth and XL Recordings. In 2019, this culminated in four brilliant, radically different LPs released within the space of a year – from the thrilling, mind-splitting Vortex, to the intimate glow of Bedroom Tapes, each album tapped into Woolford's evolving memories of scenes-gone-by.
He sees Special Request and the productions released under his own name as two sides of the same coin: it's all from the heart. Where the former is a love for harder-edged dance music run wild, the latter is Woolford's way of connecting house with as wide an audience as possible. His forthcoming release with Diplo (Looking For Me, released June 5) promises just that. "You have to do what's instinctively you, because you can't help but enjoy it. The love, enjoyment and the passion you exude, that's imbued in the record and it will come out the other end."
