The New Bee Gee: Calvin Harris
The electro king waves goodbye to his factory gig, recreates disco, and makes it with Kylie. Sound fishy?
Matthew Strmiska
November 29, 2007
By Nick Haramis
Click here to listen to Calvin Harris’s “Acceptable in the ‘80s!”
Harris, above, East London.
In order to pay the bills while making house music-literally, his bedroom moonlit as studio space—Scottish pop sensation Calvin Harris slaved away at a fish factory in Dumfries, where, by his own hands, salmon chips turned into oblong bits. “They were hot as fuck, and it wasn’t even your standard fishy smell,” he says, the odor in his mind now coming back to him in acrid waves. “Raw fish is so much worse.”
But Harris plugged his nose and soldiered on, parlaying minimum wage into a record deal. This past year, the lanky freak and terrible dancer—his description, not ours—grabbed London club kids by their tapered skin-tights with the release of I Created Disco, an addictive blend of hipster petulance and breakneck dance beats.
Still a toddler when “Dynasty” started peddling shoulder pads, the 23-year-old quips, “Everyone wants me to be this ‘80s guy, but my sound is quite modern. Actually, my career is based on a lie. I can’t sing-they think I’m a performer, which is a ridiculous proposition.”
His videos seem to agree, at least as barometers for his alleged performance anxiety. For the first 20 seconds of his infectious single, “The Girls,” Harris stands caught in the headlights of success—and the camera lens—a little doe-eyed, a lot shifty. “There I am,” he laughs, as he recalls being surrounded by a coterie of dancing girls, “having to lip-sync like a fucking twat.” But that hasn’t stopped Harris from winning the respect of U.K. critics and celebrity chart-toppers like Mark Ronson and Kylie Minogue—who enlisted his help on a much-publicized collaboration that had tabloids referencing The Graduate.
With his wildly successful U.S. album release, Harris now leads a dance pack that includes tastemakers like Simian Mobile Disco, Does it Offend You, Yeah?, and Mstrkrft. Still, Harris wants more. “I don’t feel like I’ve succeeded just yet,” he says. “There’s still a lot to be done. If it all ended now, I’d be like, ‘For fuck’s sake, that was a whole lot of rubbish.’”
Click here for more from Calvin Harris!
Photo by Robi Rodriguez.
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