Making a name for himself by fusing beloved Eighties synth pop songs with modern R&B on a series of renegade, underground remixes, British DJ Richard X was on the leading edge of the illicit international mash-up game three years ago. Now, September 3rd, he'll drop his legitimate, major-label debut, Richard X Presents His X-Factor Volume One, an album that features Pulp's Jarvis Cocker, Neptunes protege Kelis and Soul II Soul's Caron Wheeler happily, and legally, lending a hand.

How did X go from beat jacker to label-endorsed superstar mixer? Even he doesn't quite know. "I started doing it for fun because I love music," says X, 24, who was brought up on a steady diet of late-Seventies punk and Eighties bands. Around 1998, he discovered that American hip-hop/soul producers such as Timbaland and Rodney Jerkins were making the kind of "fantastic modern club records" he loved.

"I thought, 'What happens when these worlds collide?'" he says. "What would the cold-hearted music of Kraftwerk sound like with a soul diva on top of it?'"

It would sound like his first single, released in 2001 under the name Girls on Top, "I Wanna Dance With Numbers," which melded steely beats with Whitney Houston's warm vocals. "A lot of people couldn't stand how cheery [Houston] sounded in the mid-Eighties," X says. "But with the cold backing, it becomes this beautiful Germanic ballad."

The B side was the song that would really open doors for X, a Frankenstein stitched together from the Human League's "Being Boiled" under TLC's "No Scrubs," called "Being Scrubbed." He followed with a single that featured another early techno song (Normal's "Warm Leatherette") melded to a modern club hit (Missy Elliott's "She's a Bitch"), "Warm Bitch."

While most of the artists X was sampling praised his work and creativity -- Timbaland sent an autograph and Gary Numan gave the thumbs up -- their labels were a bit less impressed. Though he'd only issued a few hundred copies of each single, his bootlegs became all the rage in London, to the point that people were bootlegging his bootlegs and selling them in shops, resulting in a few "slapped wrists" from some labels.

It all got a bit out of hand, and X worried that his message was being misconstrued. "I was just making the music I wanted to hear," he says. "With resources that didn't belong to me, of course. A lot of people loved it because it was illegal, or they saw it as a political statement, a punk thing, but not me."

The hype helped turn X into an in-demand producer, landing him a gig producing a remake of one of his classic mash-ups for the English pop group the Sugarbabes. When the band's cover of "Freak Like Me" (which mashed a 1995 Adina Howard track with Numan's Tubeway Army) became a mainstream hit single in 2001, X was on his way to aboveground stardom.

He eventually signed a deal with Virgin Records and said he has no qualms about going legit. "I don't feel any compromise," he says. "I'm still doing my thing, making my weird pop records, but now I can just make better ones."

Among the people he legitimately bites on his upcoming -- a carefree collection of electro/new wave dance tunes and soulful electronica -- are Spandau Ballet ("Rock Jacket"), Lil' Louis ("Lonely"), Human League ("Finest Dreams") and Mazzy Star ("Into You"). He also revisits his Sugarbabes hit and his other famous Human League grab, "Being Nobody," which again samples "Being Boiled" underneath Chaka Khan's "Ain't Nobody."

"I'm obsessed with [the Human League]," says X, who recently re-released an album by the pre-Human League group the Future on his Black Melody label. "They're like my Beatles. But hopefully I've gotten it out of my system."

GIL KAUFMAN
(August 5, 2003)