9. The best album in the world... ever!

The strange genius of Richard X (and some stuff about the Bravery)

An important part of my “process” so far in writing Upskirt Decade has been writing very long footnotes about songwriter and producer Richard X, and then wondering if I should delete them. In terms of cultural impact, it’s hard to claim that Richard X left anything like the same mark as Max Martin, or Cathy Dennis, or Xenomania, or the Neptunes, or Bloodshy & Avant, or Dr Luke, or… but you get the picture. The generous way to describe his discography is “select”. The ungenerous way would be “scant”.

But this is his choice. In an interview with the BBC’s Mark Savage from 2005, he explained laconically that his choice of who to work with was down to “who tickles my fancy”. Plenty of people were asking for him in the noughties — either on full writing and production duties, or as a remixer — including P Diddy and Girls Aloud. Only a select few interested him enough to get him into the studio, and P Diddy and Girls Aloud were not among them.

As a freelancer who finds turning down work almost traumatically unpleasant, Richard X’s work ethic fills me with equal parts awe and horror. Imagine just… saying no? Unthinkable. It’s also specifically annoying to me as a person who really, really likes Richard X’s music. The list of things he worked on in the noughties has an almost perfect overlap with the list of things I listened to obsessively: the records he worked on with Rachel Stevens, Annie and MIA were among the MVPs of my CD player; so were Gwen Stefani, TLC (though my big TLC period had been CrazySexyCool during my GCSEs) and the Bravery, all of whom he remixed.

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Did I just say in public that I liked the Bravery? How embarrassing. If you remember them at all — which probably you don’t — it will be for their one big single, “Honest Mistake”, and then possibly for an ongoing trial by music blogs about whether they were a “real band” or in fact a “fake one”, manufactured to catch the new-wave revival kicked off by the Strokes. Pitchfork called their first album “rock made on an assembly line”, which, tbf, I cannot argue with.

I also can’t really argue with the extremely mediocre score they give to the album overall — I was working in a music store around the time it came out, and it was one of the CDs I borrowed from the stockroom then returned without much regret.¹ But I do really like “An Honest Mistake”, which is very New-Order-mashed-up-with-Echo-&-the-Bunnymen, and has a lyric which lands compellingly between blame and apology: “Don’t look at me that way/ It was an honest mistake,” mumble-roars singer Sam Endicott. He feels bad about what he did but is madder with you for being hurt than with himself for hurting you.

Watching that video, your first reaction may well be: that’s a lot of haircuts. You might also notice that the cardigans are very the Strokes, the military jacket is very the Killers (or maybe very the Libertines), and also — not to be rude — but don’t these guys look… kind of old? I mean, not old-old given they were only in their early thirties at the time, but definitely rock band old. They had about five years on the bands they came up alongside, and there’s something about them that suggests a group of people who’ve been around the block a bit and are going to throw everything they have at this chance to make it, no matter how opportunistic that might look.

You could call that an air of desperation, and it’s something that’s generally considered repellent in an indie band (who are after all supposed to be too cool to care), but I like it. There’s an inadvertent frankness in the contrivance. I mean, what exactly is the charge sheet against an act that tries hard — that they want to have a hit record? They want to succeed? Duh, you think people spend their lives sleeping in vans between crappy gigs because they hope they’ll be doing that forever? Here’s the secret of the music industry: it is, for many of the people in it for much of the time, untenably horrible.

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I suspect that this is something Richard X liked about the Bravery too when he accepted them as a remix project, because he always seemed to be attracted to the not-quites: the broken biscuits of the pop world. He wrote a number one song about the abnegation of the popstar — “Some Girls”, for Rachel Stevens, although Geri Halliwell was reportedly very adamant that it should have been hers (then he wrote an absolutely savage song about a “wannabe senorita” who can’t admit her time’s past, which went on Norwegian singer Annie’s debut).² He worked with Popstars: The Rivals leftover Javine,³ and before that with Popstars season one runners-up Liberty X.

“Being Nobody”, the song he made with Liberty X, is a blend of the Human League’s “Being Boiled” and Rufus feat. Chaka Khan’s “Ain’t Nobody”.⁴ It’s a brilliantly weird record, and the video is weirder. The song is a sinuous declaration of sexual satisfaction, but the video is nothing like that at all: in it, the band work on an assembly line overseen by a just-glimpsed Richard X, where they make replicants of themselves. (I can't imagine they expected to end up in a Popworld-friendly version of Blade Runner when they first auditioned for Nigel Lythgoe and co.)

It’s pop music as mass product, and it’s an attitude Richard X brought to his first (and only) album, Richard X Presents His X Factor Vol 1 from 2003. The album sounds — to me — like a Now compilation from heaven, with Richard X applying his magpie aesthetic to the whole field of music, pulling in ideas from wherever he found them to make something that sounded like the whole of pop history, something that sounded like nothing before it.

His label believed in it enough to buy a TV campaign. The public did not: it peaked at 31 and spent three weeks on the charts. There has not been a vol 2. I still feel like Richard X got something about noughties pop that no one else did in quite the same way — about the sudden collapse of genres and eras created by streaming, about the hunger for excitement and experience that makes pop music great, about the dirty glamour of the industry. And somehow, his fascination with populism — with what the people want and how to create it — landed him perversely in the role of unappreciated genius. Perhaps that’s what I like about him most of all.

Sarah x

P.S. You can listen to the whole of Richard X Presents His X Factor Vol 1 on YouTube. Stick around for the transition between “Lemon/Lime” (which pitches pop stardom as a grueling job application process) and “Finest Dreams” at around 27:00, which is a contender for my favourite thing to ever happen on a pop record.⁵

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Do you have a detailed theory about the Bravery, or indeed any other objectively not that exciting band? The least I could do after this would be to listen to it in full. Email or leave a comment — I’d love to hear from you.

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Gimme, gimme more

• Kelefa Sanneh was the NYT’s chief music critic through most of the noughties, and a prime mover in the formulation of “poptimism”. Nice interview with him by Dorian Lynskey.

• Billboard has an interesting rundown of how the industry has changed between Adele albums. Shorter campaigns, no streaming windows to protect CD sales, and less likelihood of keeping listener interest after the initial cycle. So faster, faster, faster.

• Interested in the influencers who live for (and on) pure drama? Then read this profile of Trisha Paytas, the troll queen of YouTube.

1. The same music store I mentioned in this column on Rage Against the Machine — RIP Music Zone, the Moor, Sheffield.

2. Can you imagine how Geri would stamped the innuendo out of that song? Chilling. Bear in mind that the song she did instead of “Some Girls” was a horrible eurodisco tango called “Ride It”. Yes Geri, we know what you mean, thank you.

3. Javine was considered a dead cert for the final girl band, but lost out to Sarah Harding. At the time, this was a great scandal and there were rumours of a fix: Harding said it was one of the things that left her unsure of her place in the band, driving the insecurity that she stifled with the “Hardcore Harding” act.

4. It’s also a do-over of one of the first records Richard X made — in 2001, he released a series of mashups under the name Girls on Top, one of which blended “Being Boiled” with TLC’s “No Scrubs”.

5. Strong competition here from the first twenty seconds of “FM” by Steely Dan, and Holly Johnson’s absolutely degenerate ejaculation at 3:09 in “Relax” (“HWAUGH”).