The Richard X story begins at the start of 2001, when he accidentally instigated the short-lived craze for making bootleg records. Secretly working under the name Girls On Top, Richard released a limited seven-inch featuring, on one side, the Whitney Houston-meets-Kraftwerk contemporary classic ‘I Wanna Dance With Numbers’. On the other, Richard placed his all-time favourite track, The Human League’s ‘Being Boiled’, beneath TLC’s ‘No Scrubs’, creating ‘Being Scrubbed’. These two fresh-sounding, icy electronic R&B anthems took swinging London by storm. Tastemakers raved about them – this was novel, not a novelty. For a month or so, with-it DJs played the tracks to death.

That August, Girls On Top surfaced again for the second and final time with another seven-inch. For the record, an all-girl rock group who’d been performing as Girls On Top for a while took umbrage at Richard’s use of 'their' name; by then, Richard felt his Girls On Top project had run its natural course, had said all it had to say. The A-side was ‘We Don’t Give A Damn About Our Friends’, a version of which the Sugababes would later take to the top of the charts. The flip, ‘Warm Bitch’, married The Normal’s ‘Warm Leatherette’ to Missy Elliott’s ‘She’s A Bitch’. Amid an avalanche of wacky bootlegs conceived with little thought or attention to detail, Richard had again produced a couple of magical modern pop moments. The Face noted at the time: 'If talent borrows and genius steals, Girls On Top commits the perfect crime, every time.' These tracks worked not just because the original records complemented each other musically and conceptually, but because you sensed that Richard genuinely loved the raw materials he used.

So far he’s recorded material with Kelis, Jarvis Cocker, Liberty X and Sugababes.

'These are all people who aren’t afraid of pop music,' says Richard. 'Everyone of these people has made a pop record that I thought has stood out and pushed the boundaries. They may not have played or liked the records I’d done before but they understood. I’m trying to avoid the rent-a-singer route.'

Richard has also been working with P Diddy, but that’s another story. A different concept altogether.

Releases

• Presents His X-Factor Volume 1 - album, out 25/08/2003 on Virgin. (post review)

News

• 24/07/2008: World record broken for number of samples used in one track?

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