Calvin Harris

He may have barely turned 23 when he first hit the charts, but Calvin Harris had been making music, legend has it, since the age of 15 on an old Amiga computer in the Scottish town of Dumfries, when he wasn’t stacking shelves at the local Marks & Spencer.
It was when Harris hit upon what would become his trademark sound - irresistibly infectious dance-pop tunes built from juicy staccato synths and squelchy electro basslines - that he caught the public imagination, first with breakthrough anthem “Acceptable In The 80s” (given a release in March 2007 by Sony, who had clocked his growing popularity on Myspace), then the even bigger follow-up “The Girls”, and then his non-stop houseparty of a debut album, I Created Disco. And that’s where the trouble began. 

If only he’d slipped a modest ‘Some’ between the third and fourth words of the album’s title, he may have deflected some of the haters. Instead, Calvin’s attempt to bring a little playfulness and wit to the dance music scene was misunderstood as arrogance, and his tall tales of womanising with females of every shape and race and living the high life in Las Vegas were taken literally, despite the fact that they were written in his Scottish shelf-stacking days. He even considered abdicating vocal duties entirely. “I don’t want to be the front man for much longer. I’d rather be a Groove Armada or a Basement Jaxx, but I don’t know if that’s an unattainable dream now.

I thought about using guest vocalists on all of it, but after sending various tracks to various people I realised people in general are an absolute nightmare, and - usually - if you want something doing properly, you’ve got to do it yourself.” Which, as we’ll shortly hear, is exactly what he did. Another way in which Calvin has been keeping busy, in breaks from the little purple room, has been by DJing. Harris has been spinning tunes in Hong Kong, Australia, Milan, Belgium, “any countries where we couldn’t take a six-piece band“. It’s proven a valuable experience. “It’s nice to be exposed to dance music, to hear what’s going off in clubs these days. It has changed his approach to recording. “Now I’ve decided the new one’s going to be a big commercial dance record. By which I mean it’s going to sound commercial, not that I’m expecting it to sell loads of copies.”