Photo by Leon Chew

5-10-15-20 features people talking about the music that made an impact on them throughout their lives, five years at a time. In this edition, we spoke with 43-year-old Richard Russell. As the head of London's hugely influential XL Recordings, Russell has released music by the Prodigy, Vampire Weekend, Adele, Dizzee Rascal, M.I.A., Radiohead, and more across the last 25 years, as chronicled in the new compilation, Pay Close Attention. He's also maintained an identity as an artist and producer for much of his career, making rave records in the 1990s and, more recently, working with Gil Scott-Heron, Bobby Womack, and Damon Albarn. And though he runs one of the most renowned independent labels on Earth, he still finds time for his first love, DJing, including a recent mix for the BBC's Benji B.

My family was Orthodox Jewish, and we lived in a London suburb called Edgware, which was about 50 percent Jewish. These communities with extremely strong religious and cultural identities tend to be a bit insular and cut-off, and Edgware was the kind of a place where people live their whole lives. But I found that world stifling—I didn't want my life to be defined by a particular culture that I inherited from my parents. I had a stable upbringing and I’m appreciative of that, but music offered a potential way to escape from a background that I wasn’t going to be comfortable in.

My parents were second-generation immigrants, growing up in the shadow of the Holocaust. My dad sold insurance and my mom was a primary school teacher. And though I couldn't see this at the time—because I thought of him as this conservative authority figure—my dad was a bit rebellious for the world he was existing in. Part of his rebellion was listening to things like Ian Dury’s New Boots and Panties!!, which he had on cassette. It’s really profane music, quite rude in a lot of places. Listening to that album in later years, I noticed there’s a song on it called "My Old Man", which is Ian Dury's song about his dad. It’s very genuine and heartfelt, and it squared a circle for me.

A few years ago, my dad and I went to see this play about Ian Dury called Hit Me!—and there cannot be a play in history that has more profanity in it than this play. It's only got two characters: Ian Dury and his bodyguard, Spider. There's one point when Dury says to Spider, "If you entered a cunt competition, you'd come second." And Spider says, "Why?" And Dury says, "Because you're such a cunt." Going with your dad to that sort of thing can be awkward, but I felt surprisingly comfortable watching it with him. He really loved the play.

When I was 10, my room was a shrine to Adam Ant. British pop music was very exciting in the early ‘80s, and Adam Ant had this bizarre mishmash of cultural references that he'd stolen and put together—African drums, Native American visuals, along with a very strong pirate fixation—and it was unbelievably exciting to me. If you grew up in a conservative background, seeing Adam Ant on "Top of the Pops" was pretty mind-blowing. It was like, "What the fuck is going on here? This is far from where I am." It was like seeing someone from outer space.

The song of his that I really loved was called "Ant Rap". He actually is rapping on it, and it came out in '81, so, weirdly, it was one of the first rap records to get made in the UK. There's been lots of ups and downs when it comes to British rap music, but before legitimate rap records got made here, you had pop artists making rap records, and not doing it badly.

I remember going off about Adam Ant to two of my older cousins, and one of them mentioned they'd seen him in concert. I was like, "What do you mean? You were in the same room he was in? How did that happen?" They explained to me that anyone can go to a gig and that you just have to pay for a ticket. That was absolutely a moment of realization for me—that these were real human beings. Up to that point, it was total fantasy. Later, I’d come to another realization: That you could actually make music yourself, too.

I was also really into the Jam. I was familiar with them when I was so young because all of their singles were going to the top of the pop charts in the UK, which I now realize was so amazing and inspiring. [Frontman] Paul Weller was getting out a message that had a lot of integrity to a lot of people. The last one of these singles was called "Beat Surrender", and at that point they were totally at the top of their game and probably the biggest band in Britain. But Weller decided he had enough of it. He didn’t want to do the Jam anymore. So they went to #1 and then they stopped. It’s quite contrary to how things tend to be done in music these days.

People are far too committed to the idea of success now, and there’s not enough subversion. The audience can sniff out when people’s motivations become questionable and when it's become more like a business endeavor. I don't consider myself a businessman. I’ve always tried to be artistic in how we do things at XL. Some people who are known as artists do appear to be more like businessmen, though.

"Beat Surrender" has this lyric that stuck with me: "As it was in the beginning/ So shall it be in the end/ Bullshit is bullshit/ It just goes by different names." I’ve thought of that recently, because you get people saying that things in music are bad right now because of Facebook, or Twitter, or EDM, or whatever. But it’s the same as it was 30 years ago. Weller was saying that there’s always a lot of bullshit around, but there’s still a certain way of achieving things with no compromise or dilution. That’s quite a useful and instructive thing.

By then, everything's happening: girls are happening, hip-hop is happening. There's a wealth of tunes that are incredibly evocative of the period for me, but "Eric B. Is President" is the one I'd pull out. Rakim's voice still has a massive impact on me. It still sounds completely fresh. "I came in the door, I said it before"—those words were such an incredible statement of intent, but the way he delivered them was so low-key that it didn't sound like he was trying.

In terms of what music was getting made in the '80s, when I was a teenager, I don't see how you couldn’t have had your mind blown by hip-hop. It was rock'n'roll starting all over again. I was feeling the same thing a lot of people were feeling, and that connection quickly became obsessional. I'm always meeting fellow '80s b-boy types, it's like being a part of the Masons or something.

Even though I was growing up in a Jewish suburb of London, I know I felt that music and what was being said. I didn't need to hear those records that many times to memorize every word. That connection happens to different people in different places all over the world mainly because of the authenticity of it—when something's authentic, you don't have to have had the same experience as the person saying it to relate to it. You just do. I've looked for that honesty and rawness in music ever since, because with that comes originality.

Around this time, I was starting to go to Groove Records in Soho and buying one import 12" single or album at a time: Public Enemy, Paid in Full, LL Cool J’s Radio. The roots of what my life would become were being laid down then, because that shop was owned by Tim Palmer, who started the City Beat label, out of which XL was born. Def Jam, as a label, was incredibly important—just seeing that logo. Record labels were quite noticeable on all those early hip-hop records: Cold Chillin', Wild Pitch, Tuff City, Next Plateau, Tommy Boy. The quality control of those labels was very good at that time, because there weren’t that many people making hip-hop records. They were run by people who were trying to make money, but there was a real power to those small independent labels in this era, before they started to be bought up by the majors.

The UK had its own breakdancing scene that was very vibrant, and I was a terrible—but committed—breakdancer. My friend and I actually won a competition when I was 12, but it wasn't a very big competition. We won one copy of Street Sounds Electro 2, a UK-made hip-hop compilation, and I ended up with it. That must've been so mean, but I had to have that record. My friend was actually a better dancer than me, too. But he never complained about it. He's still a good friend. These days, it doesn't take much persuasion to get me to show off a move—but it wasn't that impressive then, and it's a lot less impressive now.

"The Message" by Grandmaster Flash was an important record for me too, and I listened to it on my dad's hi-fi over and over and over. At one point, my dad came in and said, "What's a sacroiliac?" And I was like, "What? I don't know." And he said, "The guy on the record just said, 'I can't turn around, I broke my sacroiliac.'" I felt slightly embarrassed that I couldn't explain what that was to him, but I really got something from that—every word counts, and you’ve got to listen. Hip-hop wasn’t something my parents massively understood, but it wasn’t that much of a leap from Ian Dury either, in terms of something intensely lyrical and somewhat profane. It didn’t bother them that I listened to rap music or that I had a mixed bunch of friends—what bothered them was how I was obsessed with it to the exclusion of all other things.

I didn't go to college or anything. I had my first actual DJ gig when I was 16, and I started earning money from it a year later. But at 15 I was still learning and practicing. We basically lived between a freeway on one side and a neighbor who was completely deaf on the other, so my parents would let me play music as loud as I wanted. I learned proper hip-hop DJing, with two copies of a record, in my bedroom. I spent many thousands of hours doing that at enormous volume.

Going into music and earning a living from that was really unfathomable to my parents—it was as if I told them I was going to fly around on the ceiling. My mum now says that when I started bringing home money from DJing, she thought I was selling drugs, because she thought that was more plausible. I mean, I couldn't believe when I started to get paid to DJ either. I thought it was just extraordinary. I loved doing it so much. Every musician must have that moment when someone starts paying you—it's just out of this world.

The tune I picked for this time was on Shut Up and Dance, which was this rave label from East London, and it's called "The Green Man". The song is named after a really rough pub in the East End, which is now a really trendy pub, of course. Shut Up and Dance had this pirate rawness to it, this breakbeat sound that got all of us b-boys into rave music. They also had a punk ethic. Their compilation was called Fuck Off and Die, and they embodied the spirit of what was possible at that time.

I had run away to New York and worked in Vinyl Mania, which was an incredible record shop in Greenwich Village. I was really on my own, a fish out of water, but it was working because I was a bit closer to the music. After coming back to London, I was making rave and hip-hop stuff, and I took some demos to XL to try and get signed, and [XL co-founder] Nick [Halkes] said, "You should come and play these to me when they're finished." And I remember thinking, "They are finished!" But I never left XL because I liked the vibe. It was in a basement in Wandsworth; I always liked basements for some reason. There were only two people there, and I just used to hang out and make tea. It felt like that was something you could do. They'd give me records and test pressings, and I'd take them around to other DJs.

XL was very much a home for frustrated b-boys. It was hard to get that far with British hip-hop—no one could sell anything. So people started speeding up breakbeats, adding samples and synth sounds, and not necessarily bothering to rap. And suddenly, people were more interested in what we were doing. We kind of ended up making rave records and being a rave label rather than being on a mission to do that, but maybe there's an accidental coolness in that. I felt a little bit reluctant about it all at first, but then you saw the impact of it: We were transitioning into something much more original.

While I started working at XL, I carried on being an artist and put out records on a label called Tribal Bass. I've always thought of producing, DJing, and doing label things as equally important, and it was only when XL became a bit bigger and more grown up that I started doing label things more. For a time, making music faded for me, which was good for the label, but not that great for me, personally.

I've always been a huge Beatles fan. George Harrison is a bit obscured between the towering talents of Lennon and McCartney, but All Things Must Pass is probably the best solo Beatles record. It's very meditative and healing and unbelievably spiritual. Particularly on "Beware of Darkness", he's talking about using spirituality as way out of pain. It made a massive impact on me. I felt like I knew what I was doing as a teenager and then, in my 20s, I gradually lost direction. So that was a time of trying to work out who I was and where I'd come from. More reflective music became interesting to me, and I found real solace in that record. My mid-to-late 20s were a transitional time, as they are for a lot of men; women become more self-aware a lot earlier than men. It’s when you stop being young and start being something else. Some people come to that very early on. Some people come to it very late. Some people never come to it.

XL was a small label, and then we had this worldwide success with the Prodigy, who are incredible artists who have always done things their own way and totally provided the blueprint for everything we've done on the label. It was an incredible experience, but there was a considerable hangover from it for everyone involved—it was like I needed a George Harrison record to listen to after coming back from an MTV Awards after party in fucking Milan at Donatella Versace's house, where Bono was hanging out. That's never been a world that's interesting to me. Being exposed to it briefly was a reminder that you have to be deeply into the music, and that's what counts.

If you look at what else was going on at XL in the mid-to-late '90s, we didn't quite find our way again until the end of that decade, which was around the time I turned 30. The '90s were weird anyway—in British music, you had Oasis and the Spice Girls. It was the height of the CD era. The major labels were very powerful. It wasn't really our time.

Hearing "Tears Dry on Their Own" made me realize there was something very powerful and emotive in Amy Winehouse’s voice. She also came from this Jewish North West London background, and there was so much pain in her voice. I didn't know her, but I was extremely upset by what happened to her, such a disastrous thing to happen to someone her age. Obviously, it's a waste of life rather than a waste of talent, but she had a lot more things to say. She had the potential to be one of the absolute greats. Back to Black is up there with Lauryn Hill, Joni Mitchell, or Carole King—one of the greatest-ever female statement records.

There's this thread of amazing British female soul singers who are influenced by America. Adele is the modern embodiment of that, and it probably started with Dusty Springfield and Sade, who has been an unbelievably important artist—no one else has a career like Sade. With all these records, it's about the voice. The sound mainly needs to get out of the way. You're there to hear that person and feel that connection. With the records I have produced in the last few years—Gil Scott-Heron’s I’m New Here, Bobby Womack’s The Bravest Man in the Universe, Damon Albarn’s Everyday Robots—the voice is loud because that's the point. You definitely don't want the production to get in the way, because then you're not doing the job properly. A lot of music now is overproduced, maybe because the vocalists aren't special enough. I'm a bit of a minimalist.

I'm also a believer that the word "demo" has become very misused in music, because a lot of the records that we love the most, historically, could be called demos in modern terms; the idea of a demo comes from an era when singers didn't write their own songs, so the songwriter would demonstrate what the song would sound to the singer. When we started the recording studio at XL, it was quite small and basic, and people used to call it a "demo studio." But I was like, "No, it's not a demo studio. It's a recording studio. I don't care how small it is. We're going to make records in it—not records that are half-done, where we have to go somewhere expensive to finish it. That's not how great records get made anyway." If the performance of the song is good enough, that rawness can be just what you need.

In some ways I'm idealistic because I believe things that are truly original and executed well can reach a big audience. But the traps are easy to fall in. It can be hard for indie labels to be ambitious enough, because they might not have the resources. And major labels can be a bit too ambitious. It’s about trying to strive for a balance where you can have a sensitivity to the music but also feel like: If there's a door to be kicked in, we're going to kick it in.

Burial makes this evocative music that is like the sound of empty clubs. And that sound is really meaningful to me. I like being in a club the day after—when it's all still sort of reverberating and it smells a bit funny. There is something very magical about that, and the way he's captured it in his music is just brilliant. He's been very influenced by older pirate radio sounds, and I love all those sounds: reggae, rave, jungle, drum'n'bass, garage, grime. Burial is capturing that feel, but with this melancholy dustiness. I think Burial's music will be enormously appreciated 30 years from now—not that he's unappreciated now, but I suspect that it will last a lot longer than some of the things that are in the mainstream at the moment.

We're talking about my 30s now, but age doesn't mean anything when it comes to music. There's a spirit, and there's no question that people can lose the spirit, but some people never have the spirit in the first place. And some people can gain the spirit as they get older. Some people come armed with it; I mean, Dizzee Rascal made "I Luv U" when he was 16. When I heard that, I was like, "Wow, a lot of experiences have gone into this bit of music."

If you’re able to talk about emotional things in a way that means something, no matter what age you are, that's going to be really powerful. I'm better at being older than I was at being younger. I now appreciate how much of a gift it is to love music and make a living out of it. And the more appreciative you are of it, the more you tend to enjoy what you're doing. Whereas when I was younger, everything was incredibly fast-paced, and I wouldn't really reflect. But now I can be more helpful to people because I can listen better.

This is also around the time I started working with Gil on I'm New Here. He was quite a fountain of wisdom then, even though he didn't live his life in a way that everyone thought was particularly sensible. Maybe he knew he wouldn't be around forever at that point and he had a lot to impart. Every word was profound. He definitely was touching to be around. And you had to be very, very straight and direct with him. If anyone was not being completely honest, he would know about it in a millisecond. He demanded that people were truthful, and there was unbelievable integrity in that.

I met Jai Paul at XL on my 40th birthday, funnily enough. He had stuff out on MySpace, and everyone thought the same thing when they heard it—you didn't need to be a genius. It's just unbelievable from the first note. So original. He was shocked that we got in touch so early, and he said he'd been a big fan of three acts on XL: the Prodigy, M.I.A., and Basement Jaxx. He is clearly a wizard in doing something that could only be done by him. He makes it sound quite effortless, but, as another producer put it to me recently: How does he do that? There's so much charm to the music, and it's so melodic, as well as sounding like pirate radio. That's not easy to do.

He hasn’t put an album out, but what he has put out has had an enormous impact on people—"Jasmine" has had more impact than most people's whole albums. He's an artist who’s doing something totally different to anyone else and hasn’t seen fit to release material in the traditional way that the music business is used to. It doesn't really bother me that much. People should enjoy what is there.

I don't know what he’ll do next. I just want someone of his unbelievable caliber to keep making stuff, and, hopefully, we’ll hear it. The fact that people want to hear it so much in this incredibly overcrowded world of music is a testament to how special it is. I mean, we released very good one-off records early on in the days of XL, and he's beyond a one-off—he's already properly put out two things.

XL doesn't put out many records at this point, and that is the key—it means people at the label are focused on what they are doing. I feel like it will continue to be like that. Meanwhile, artists can get themselves heard quite easily now, so if you don’t want to waste your time waiting around for XL or anyone else, you can just get on with it.

There's always some factor making things easier or harder when it comes to running a label, but in the end, you just don't know what's going to have an impact. You don't know what you're going to hear from day-to-day. You don't know what you're going to be listening to next year. You don't know what someone's going to make. It's exciting. I try and look at it all as a fan, which keeps things uncomplicated. There's no shortage of great music to listen to all the time, but I'm not necessarily trawling for stuff at this point. The good things find their way.