By Danny Corvini

Softly spoken and thoughtful, Craig Richards is not your average DJ. He doesn’t try and sell himself, he actually ties to cuts back on DJ gigs and he loves to paint. So what’s this man doing being resident at London’s hottest nightclub Fabric? Listen to his new mix CD on DMC "Fabric 01" and you’ll see. A tasty and trippy mix of lucid house - it’s guaranteed to take your head right away. Craig is also the man behind legendary mid 90s club night Malibu Stacey, which he ran with Prototype’s Seb Fontaine, and the more recently successful Tyrant, which he started with DJ Sasha. And did I mention he loves to paint? Read on to find out just what else colours this man’s life.

You’ve had a much more creative past that most other DJs out there..

Yeah I spent quite a long time at art school, and I always put on parties throughout that time. I guess I’m still trying to get to a happy medium between painting, taking photographs, being involved in creative work, and DJing and making music. My label and my website will probably be the first thing that can house those things.

Yeah I definitely like to do lots of different things. I don’t see myself just as a DJ really, even though that’s what I’m doing at the moment. It’s going well and that’s great but I’d like to keep it a bit more open than that really.

Yeah. The Georgie thing I did on my own and it was when I left art school, so I had a really good bunch of people around me, a really colourful crowd. I started doing these big raves because I struck up a deal with a film studio. It was in this industrial estate, and we had mad parties. That was 92 I suppose. Then we started doing Malibu Stacey at the Hanover Grand (in London’s Soho), which I sort of have mixed feelings about now really. It was a real success – the scene was really commercial and I guess it was quite commercial really. It was also a lot of fun and it was of a time, y’know.

Yeah we did actually, and the music was varied.. Jon Digweed, Rocky and Diesel, Smokin’ Jo and those sorts of people used to play. I think in retrospect we probably let it go on too long.

To be honest Lee (Burridge – co-promoter) and I have a couple of Tyrant residencies and we play loads, but I don’t really promote parties and I haven’t done for years. Mainly because I’m 35 now and that group of people I had around me when I first left college have moved on a bit, and it’s not so easy for me to put those bodies in a room if you like. I’ve actually cut back on my DJing gigs, and I certainly didn’t have time to be creative when I was promoting. It just means that you’re exhausted and there’s no time for anything else. It’s terribly important to me that I get the balance – I’m not one of those DJs "on tour" sort of thing, it just doesn’t appeal to me.

To be honest I never really felt like the promoter. I mean we all used to play records, Lee, Sasha and I. Let’s just say there wasn’t a promoter – I booked all the venues and did all the flyers, I suppose I sorted it all out, but it was more about us all DJing, it was good fun. We don’t work together so much now because we all have really different agendas.

It didn’t really. And we all started playing separately. When we all did The End it was a lot more cohesive. But we don’t play with Sasha so much any more because he’s busy all the time – he’s in a different area, remixing Madonna, which puts you in a different area completely!

A big one really. I think it fills a big one in terms of this whole country as well. It’s open really late, people stay really late, it’s open until seven in the morning. It’s got a 24 hour license – we play until eleven on a Thursday. I think it’s just a really really good club. The sound system is amazing, there’s two room. The main room only holds 700 people so although it’s a really big club your common rooms are actually parted in two. It’s a very labyrinth-like brickwork affair. It’s a really good place to be, and they’ve booked a really good range of people to play there. I think that in the beginning there were lots of DJs that people hadn’t heard of, and if you go along and listen to someone you haven’t heard of that’s really exciting. It’s a lot more exciting that going along to hear Paul Oakenfold.

No, not really at all. The mad thing was the press pitched those two clubs against each other, and really when they opened was the only thing that was similar at all. The clubs themselves represented something completely different. The areas they were in were so completely different that it’s not true. Completely different. It was the press that created the whole thing off Home vs Fabric.

It’s a section of the sound.. Yeah it’s typical of the sound that I play quite late in the morning. The trouble with any CD is it’s only 73 minutes, so.. But the real luxury of my residency is it is a residency – I’m not a resident. So I’m not fitting in around other people, it’s actually a residency and I’m given a very free reign there and I’m given a very long time to play. I’m there every week so I can experiment a little bit. Sometimes I play soulful and bongo-y, and other times I play pretty hard, and other times quite trippy like the CD is. That to me is the luxury of a residency.

I don’t really know actually. Since I’ve been at Fabric I’ve made a lot more impact, and I guess there are more people into what I am doing. I don’t really know – it’s hard to tell at Fabric because the crowd are quite transient, and it’s dark so it’s hard to see people’s faces! I don’t really know – I hope there’s a group of people into what I’m doing. I’d like to think so. But I’m sure I’m not going to put queues around the block with my name, but it’s more important to me that I’m good at what I do really.

Fabric 01 is out now on DMC. Watch out for word of an Australian tour in February.