Crispin J Glover hates being called a ‘house producer’, a tag he earned for his past contributions to the genre. But, try as he might, the rest of us can’t ignore Glover’s past. With as many monikers as Emelda Marcos had shoes, and countless releases under his belt, it makes sense, in telling his story, to look back to the end of the 80s when he first starting making music for himself. That was when, inspired by the sounds of Derrick May’s Transmat label and fuelled by a London scene rich with parties run by, amongst others, his mates the Tonka soundsystem, Glover found himself in the thick of things. But Crispin himself insists he was never a DJ and, he says, he only ever came to things from a production angle. His love affair with music started at an early age and has as many racy twists and turns to it as the sauciest Jackie Collins novel.
Growing up in the Sussex backwater of Hayward’s Heath in the seventies it was cheesy popsters The Osmonds that first got Crispin interested in music. He was the oldest of five children and the first to have access to his parent’s record collection. Uninterested in his dad’s 7 inch jazz collection it was his mother’s Beatle’s LPs that eventually displaced his obsession with Donny and family and it was because of the Beatles that Crispin took up the drums at school. But his stint at the strict, catholic comprehensive was short-lived. All the other boys in his class had names like Dave, Paul, Steve and Mark so Crispin stuck out a mile. His headmaster was a socialist and an ardent supporter of the early eighties miners’ strike. Crispin was always in trouble at school; forever accused of being disruptive, hyperactive and problematic. What the teachers didn’t know was that he was vaguely politically aware. In an attempt to stick it to his headmaster Crispin graffitied the boy’s toilets in big red letters with the slogan ‘Arthur Scargill Is A Wanker’. Everyone knew Crispin had done it. The news filtered back to the headmaster and Crispin was expelled. He was only 15 years old. He had no qualifications and no desire to get any. He’d fallen out with his parents too and, just weeks before his 16th birthday, he left home for good, moved in with a family friend in a neighbouring village and started work on a building site.
It was the post punk era that next grabbed Crispin’s attention musically. He found punk too intimidating and preferred the musicality and emotion of bands like New Order and Depeche Mode to the raw intensity of punk. Crispin landed a job painting the outside of Hastings Park Gate Residential Recording Studio in Brighton in the early eighties. He got on well with the owner, landed a job as a tea boy and from there progressed to tape op, a job that came with its own lodgings at the studio. It’s a period Crispin remembers as one of his happiest. He was little more than a gopher most of the time but dashing through the corridors of the studio running errands he got to catch snippets of recordings that went on to become the pop hits of the time. Crispin sat in on sessions for Paul Young’s ‘The Secret Of Association’ album and was present during most of the recording of ‘I’m Going To Tear Your Playhouse Down’. He remembers Paul as a friendly, inclusive character, always pulling Crispin in to sessions and explaining what was going on. Crispin was unaware at the time the value of these impromptu tutorials; he was just soaking up the excitement. He was a teenager, living away from home, hanging out with pop stars and being paid for it. One day he would sit in on a jam session with Level 42 the next he’d find himself having a cup of tea with prog rock legend Peter Frampton, listening wide-eyed to stories about touring with Bowie. China Crisis recorded at the studio and would send Crispin out to buy their drugs while strictly tea-total, vegetarian popsters King would have Crispin boiling up their herbal teas. Crispin was still too young to contemplate his career but what he soaked up at the studio set the framework for what he would later devote his life to.
Crispin moved to London aged 18 and got a job as assistant tape op at Trident Studios on Wardour Street in Soho. Crispin couldn’t believe his luck; The Beatles had recorded ‘Hey Jude’ here. Then, three months later the studio went bankrupt and Crispin was out of a job.
By 1988, Crispin had got himself another studio job, in a computer-based, 16-track studio in the depths of South London. A far cry from the big budget, 64-track desk he was used to this new path helped Crispin learn more about computers. Crispin’s younger brother Dominic had also moved to London by this stage but unlike Crispin, was getting heavily into house music. Dominic would play Crispin the house 12”s he would buy on import from the US but Crispin found the stripped down tracks non-musical and way too basic for his seasoned palate. Dominic would play Crispin his latest acid tracks and Crispin would sling them aside and tell Dominic to go check out the latest Sade album. Then Crispin heard Ten City’s ‘Devotion’ and everything changed. The next day he piled his record collection into six cardboard boxes, took a cab into town to Reckless Records and sold the lot. With the money he bought a computer, an 808 drum machine and a synth. Through Dominic he hooked with DJ Rev from the Tonka Sound System and together they started experimenting, eventually coming up with ‘Happy’, a house tune that got signed to Blackmarket Records by the then unknown r&b guru Steve Jervier.
Crispin set up his own studio, ditched the day job and started making house music full time. That very same studio, with several additions and updates, still crowds the front room of Glover’s South London flat where he’s lived for the past fifteen years. It was in that small studio that Glover went on to make a string of productions. After watching someone make a mint out of sticking a house beat under Suzanne Vega's 'Tom's Diner', he realised he could do better and chose Mariah Carey's 'Someday' to bootleg. He sold 500 copies in one day and even heard Trevor Nelson play it on his lunchtime Kiss show. Carey had just got hitched to Sony Records big boss Tommy Mottola. The hype around the bootleg made it over to New York and a copy was slapped on Mottola’s desk. He wasn’t happy. It wasn't long before Glover; as Master C, had the might of Sony breathing down his neck and on his return to the pressing plant to press more, he was nicked!
Crispin got himself back on his feet by taking a restaurant job. With the money he earned bussing tables he set up Matrix Records and, after spending all his spare cash on a Roland 909, penned a house tune called ‘Northern Lights’ that he released under the name Caucasian Boy. The track was snapped up by Belgium’s R&S Records and, after a lengthy bidding war, licensed by Strictly Rhythm Records crowning Glover as the first UK house producer to release a track on a US label. This opened the floodgates for other UK house producers to spread their wings stateside.
In 1997 Glover started losing interest in house music and decided to shut shop on his Matrix label. The swan song release was his Expressions album that pulled together the best Matrix releases and was put out simultaneously by Dust II Dust records. The album spawned a same-name (now defunct) club night at South London venue The Junction (also home to the vibrant Basement Jaxx nights) that nurtured Glover as a DJ.
Unable to find the right album deal – flirtations with MCA, JBO and Nuphonic didn’t work out - Glover continued to make tunes and made a mark collaborating with two other London producers as Stryker. Their disco-tinged house was released by Manchester’s late, great Paper Records and so came the offer of an album for Glover.
‘Rhythm Graffiti’ was an album that exorcised a lot of Crispin’s production ghosts. It was a fusion of deep, discofied, dubby house music and, for him, marked a creative exercise in tying up loose ends. Comprising mainly new tracks alongside re-works of old releases and previously released classics; the album was refreshingly non-noodly with soulful vocal tracks cut nicely against deeper, tougher tunes and jacking disco stompers. But that was then.
A trip to California in the winter of 2000 saw Crispin again take a new musical path. Holed up in the desert, on the ranch of his horse trainer sister, Crispin had little to do but sit around and flick through local radio dials. The only three stations he could tune into played back to back r&b tunes and he spent days listening to the catchy, short and brilliantly produced r&b pop songs. Outkast’s ‘Sorry Miss Jackson’ had just come out and it was while watching the video for it, and smoking some heavy, sweet, Californian weed, that Crispin clicked. When he returned to London he joined forces with his pal Richard Waterhouse and together they started a club night called the Waterhouse And Glover Sessions. Every week, at a small venue in Brixton, they would play r&b cuts from the US and UK. At the same time Crispin had bought a new computer and started downloading tracks from the internet. Amazed by the CD quality of these downloads Crispin began to replace his lost record collection. By sourcing a lot of the old Bowie, PIL and Led Zepellin tunes he’d got rid of he began a paper chase that saw him download the entire catalog of bands he’d never come across before. Suddenly he found himself listening to Nirvana, Thin Lizzy and Guns N Roses – major rock acts that he’d never touched on before. It was this sense of musical freedom that gave him the idea for another album.
The first single from Glover’s forthcoming ‘Which Way Is Up’ album came out earlier this year, the cover of P.I.L’s ‘This Is Not A Love Song’ with Princess Julia on vocals. The rest of the album is a testament to the rock, house, pop and r&b influences that join the dots to Crispin’s past and was penned in his home studio. Many of the musicians he’s worked on the LP with live nearby; a few actually on that street. Others he came across in The Continental Café, a small local eaterie where you can get a thai vegetable curry made from veggies grown in the owner’s allotment for £3.50 a pop. It’s from these humble surroundings that Crispin’s been beavering away; finishing the next chapter in his story. Now he’s ready for the rest of us to catch up on it…
Growing up in the Sussex backwater of Hayward’s Heath in the seventies it was cheesy popsters The Osmonds that first got Crispin interested in music. He was the oldest of five children and the first to have access to his parent’s record collection. Uninterested in his dad’s 7 inch jazz collection it was his mother’s Beatle’s LPs that eventually displaced his obsession with Donny and family and it was because of the Beatles that Crispin took up the drums at school. But his stint at the strict, catholic comprehensive was short-lived. All the other boys in his class had names like Dave, Paul, Steve and Mark so Crispin stuck out a mile. His headmaster was a socialist and an ardent supporter of the early eighties miners’ strike. Crispin was always in trouble at school; forever accused of being disruptive, hyperactive and problematic. What the teachers didn’t know was that he was vaguely politically aware. In an attempt to stick it to his headmaster Crispin graffitied the boy’s toilets in big red letters with the slogan ‘Arthur Scargill Is A Wanker’. Everyone knew Crispin had done it. The news filtered back to the headmaster and Crispin was expelled. He was only 15 years old. He had no qualifications and no desire to get any. He’d fallen out with his parents too and, just weeks before his 16th birthday, he left home for good, moved in with a family friend in a neighbouring village and started work on a building site.
It was the post punk era that next grabbed Crispin’s attention musically. He found punk too intimidating and preferred the musicality and emotion of bands like New Order and Depeche Mode to the raw intensity of punk. Crispin landed a job painting the outside of Hastings Park Gate Residential Recording Studio in Brighton in the early eighties. He got on well with the owner, landed a job as a tea boy and from there progressed to tape op, a job that came with its own lodgings at the studio. It’s a period Crispin remembers as one of his happiest. He was little more than a gopher most of the time but dashing through the corridors of the studio running errands he got to catch snippets of recordings that went on to become the pop hits of the time. Crispin sat in on sessions for Paul Young’s ‘The Secret Of Association’ album and was present during most of the recording of ‘I’m Going To Tear Your Playhouse Down’. He remembers Paul as a friendly, inclusive character, always pulling Crispin in to sessions and explaining what was going on. Crispin was unaware at the time the value of these impromptu tutorials; he was just soaking up the excitement. He was a teenager, living away from home, hanging out with pop stars and being paid for it. One day he would sit in on a jam session with Level 42 the next he’d find himself having a cup of tea with prog rock legend Peter Frampton, listening wide-eyed to stories about touring with Bowie. China Crisis recorded at the studio and would send Crispin out to buy their drugs while strictly tea-total, vegetarian popsters King would have Crispin boiling up their herbal teas. Crispin was still too young to contemplate his career but what he soaked up at the studio set the framework for what he would later devote his life to.
Crispin moved to London aged 18 and got a job as assistant tape op at Trident Studios on Wardour Street in Soho. Crispin couldn’t believe his luck; The Beatles had recorded ‘Hey Jude’ here. Then, three months later the studio went bankrupt and Crispin was out of a job.
By 1988, Crispin had got himself another studio job, in a computer-based, 16-track studio in the depths of South London. A far cry from the big budget, 64-track desk he was used to this new path helped Crispin learn more about computers. Crispin’s younger brother Dominic had also moved to London by this stage but unlike Crispin, was getting heavily into house music. Dominic would play Crispin the house 12”s he would buy on import from the US but Crispin found the stripped down tracks non-musical and way too basic for his seasoned palate. Dominic would play Crispin his latest acid tracks and Crispin would sling them aside and tell Dominic to go check out the latest Sade album. Then Crispin heard Ten City’s ‘Devotion’ and everything changed. The next day he piled his record collection into six cardboard boxes, took a cab into town to Reckless Records and sold the lot. With the money he bought a computer, an 808 drum machine and a synth. Through Dominic he hooked with DJ Rev from the Tonka Sound System and together they started experimenting, eventually coming up with ‘Happy’, a house tune that got signed to Blackmarket Records by the then unknown r&b guru Steve Jervier.
Crispin set up his own studio, ditched the day job and started making house music full time. That very same studio, with several additions and updates, still crowds the front room of Glover’s South London flat where he’s lived for the past fifteen years. It was in that small studio that Glover went on to make a string of productions. After watching someone make a mint out of sticking a house beat under Suzanne Vega's 'Tom's Diner', he realised he could do better and chose Mariah Carey's 'Someday' to bootleg. He sold 500 copies in one day and even heard Trevor Nelson play it on his lunchtime Kiss show. Carey had just got hitched to Sony Records big boss Tommy Mottola. The hype around the bootleg made it over to New York and a copy was slapped on Mottola’s desk. He wasn’t happy. It wasn't long before Glover; as Master C, had the might of Sony breathing down his neck and on his return to the pressing plant to press more, he was nicked!
Crispin got himself back on his feet by taking a restaurant job. With the money he earned bussing tables he set up Matrix Records and, after spending all his spare cash on a Roland 909, penned a house tune called ‘Northern Lights’ that he released under the name Caucasian Boy. The track was snapped up by Belgium’s R&S Records and, after a lengthy bidding war, licensed by Strictly Rhythm Records crowning Glover as the first UK house producer to release a track on a US label. This opened the floodgates for other UK house producers to spread their wings stateside.
In 1997 Glover started losing interest in house music and decided to shut shop on his Matrix label. The swan song release was his Expressions album that pulled together the best Matrix releases and was put out simultaneously by Dust II Dust records. The album spawned a same-name (now defunct) club night at South London venue The Junction (also home to the vibrant Basement Jaxx nights) that nurtured Glover as a DJ.
Unable to find the right album deal – flirtations with MCA, JBO and Nuphonic didn’t work out - Glover continued to make tunes and made a mark collaborating with two other London producers as Stryker. Their disco-tinged house was released by Manchester’s late, great Paper Records and so came the offer of an album for Glover.
‘Rhythm Graffiti’ was an album that exorcised a lot of Crispin’s production ghosts. It was a fusion of deep, discofied, dubby house music and, for him, marked a creative exercise in tying up loose ends. Comprising mainly new tracks alongside re-works of old releases and previously released classics; the album was refreshingly non-noodly with soulful vocal tracks cut nicely against deeper, tougher tunes and jacking disco stompers. But that was then.
A trip to California in the winter of 2000 saw Crispin again take a new musical path. Holed up in the desert, on the ranch of his horse trainer sister, Crispin had little to do but sit around and flick through local radio dials. The only three stations he could tune into played back to back r&b tunes and he spent days listening to the catchy, short and brilliantly produced r&b pop songs. Outkast’s ‘Sorry Miss Jackson’ had just come out and it was while watching the video for it, and smoking some heavy, sweet, Californian weed, that Crispin clicked. When he returned to London he joined forces with his pal Richard Waterhouse and together they started a club night called the Waterhouse And Glover Sessions. Every week, at a small venue in Brixton, they would play r&b cuts from the US and UK. At the same time Crispin had bought a new computer and started downloading tracks from the internet. Amazed by the CD quality of these downloads Crispin began to replace his lost record collection. By sourcing a lot of the old Bowie, PIL and Led Zepellin tunes he’d got rid of he began a paper chase that saw him download the entire catalog of bands he’d never come across before. Suddenly he found himself listening to Nirvana, Thin Lizzy and Guns N Roses – major rock acts that he’d never touched on before. It was this sense of musical freedom that gave him the idea for another album.
The first single from Glover’s forthcoming ‘Which Way Is Up’ album came out earlier this year, the cover of P.I.L’s ‘This Is Not A Love Song’ with Princess Julia on vocals. The rest of the album is a testament to the rock, house, pop and r&b influences that join the dots to Crispin’s past and was penned in his home studio. Many of the musicians he’s worked on the LP with live nearby; a few actually on that street. Others he came across in The Continental Café, a small local eaterie where you can get a thai vegetable curry made from veggies grown in the owner’s allotment for £3.50 a pop. It’s from these humble surroundings that Crispin’s been beavering away; finishing the next chapter in his story. Now he’s ready for the rest of us to catch up on it…
House Electronic