The week before I met Craig Richards for this interview, he rang with a confounding suggestion: that this feature about him not be about him. "I'm not a very self-promotional person," he said, "but there are things I can illustrate by talking about other people." By "other people," he meant the DJs he plays with frequently and whom he considers world class: Ricardo Villalobos, Nicolas Lutz and Ben UFO, to name a few.This allergy to the spotlight speaks to a broader principle Richards holds about DJing, where the job is not to steal the scene but to facilitate the experience. fabric made him adaptable in a way that only residencies can. He'd warm up for guests, DJ back-to-back with friends or close the club by himself. He did this almost every Saturday for 18 years. Richards is known for being able to master any scenario, though I think he relishes DJing deep into the small hours most of all.His consideration for other DJs and the flow of the night couldn't, however, obscure a singular style. "Intergalactic space metal" is how a colleague who knows Richards well once described his sound, which is more erudite than "house, techno and electro" can reasonably suggest. To that I'd add a flintiness that allows for groove but repels easy melodies, vocal hooks, or anything you'd usually find in "big tunes," the sort of phrase that makes Richards shift in his seat. The closest you'd get to hearing a hit in one of his sets are the tracks I've seen him play again and again, like "Bluntski," a spider-legged Bushwacka! cut found on Richards' much-lovedmix, or Orgue Electronique's "Suck Seed," an early '00s electro track I've lately thought of as an Evil Coop to Felix Da Housecat's "Silver Screen (Shower Scene)."It's also useful to consider what Richards does outside of the DJ booth. That Houghton is already considered one of Europe's top dance music festivals has a lot to do with his careful curation of the experience—even for the DJs. The booths, I learned, were standardised to ensure no DJ was left to play with shitty equipment ( it's more common than you'd think ). That's to say that underneath Richards' artistic sensibility is a degree of pragmatism. Know your records. Pack them properly. And for God's sake, don't cane the warm-up.When I visited Richards at his flat in London last month, we spoke about the unseen effects of DJing every week—the self-doubts and what-ifs that follow disappointing gigs, the mental toll of demanding high standards of yourself. Then there are the gigs that go brilliantly. In May, I was in fabric to see Richards DJ back-to-back with Villalobos. On that occasion, as on many others, their different temperaments—Villalobos's dazzling, mercurial style, Richards' bloody-minded discipline—came together in an especially fruitful way. Sometimes, the magic came in the tension of a loop that rolled on and on, after which Richards or Villalobos would suddenly snap in a bassline—on a proper soundsystem, it can sound like a dam bursting. Over six or so hours, the set took on a double-jointed mobility; everything clicked. The tempos went up and down. There were weird records. There were classics . There was Butch , which, after so many deep, headsy tunes, tore the lid off the party. One killer record followed another. Only one friend of mine seemed unhappy: "I just want them to play a dud so I can pee."My dad collects books, and also records. Not as intensely as I have, but he was always a record collector. He was interested in old music, from the '20s and '30s and '40s. That had an influence on me. He was always buying and collecting books. He collects books on Hollywood from its infancy, all the way back to silent movies. And books on inns and pubs and coaching houses. Lots of niche subjects which meant very little to me at the time, but I now realise is part of my collecting. Which obviously is a big part of my being a DJ. Arguably it's the most important part, in terms of finding music wherever you are. In every city that I've had gigs, I've always gone record shopping for anything, across genres.Collecting on a lot of levels is important to me. I grew up with second-hand clothing, because it was an obvious way of being different. And some of the bands that were around, a lot of them were wearing second-hand clothes. It was easy, it was cheap, we could afford it. You could put together an outfit from a jumble sale really easy. You'd buy things that didn't even fit. I had an old pair of brogues for years that I wore because they were just a wicked pair of shoes, but they were two sizes too big. Years after, I sold second-hand clothes for a long time when I first moved to London, at Portobello and Camden. So second-hand things have remained a part of my life.The filtration process is imperative. You have to refine what you're doing, otherwise it's just a muddle. I was notorious for taking too many records to gigs and I still do that a little bit. As you get more experienced, the packing of the record box is done a bit more professionally. I was always impressed with Andrew Weatherall. He never used to bring so many records. In his case, it appeared like it was, "Bring what you're going to play." My take on that was always, "Oh, I might bring that in case it goes that direction"; "Oh, I might play that, but I'd like to play that." But the reality is you never played these records. So a concisely, sensibly packed record box has always been something that's been impressive to me because I've always struggled with it.I'm very interested in someone who's seeing me for the first time, because it gives me a sense of duty and purpose. The older I've got, the more I think of someone in their early 20s that might have heard about me, and perhaps they're intrigued enough to want to come and hear me. I think it's really important that I impress them. The idea of being an older, sloppy DJ that's not into it anymore, or not on the money, is not good enough for me. So I think by focusing on those people, it gives me a nice sense of purpose. It depends. Sometimes I'm in a room full of people that are a little bit older, sort of nerdy chinstrokers, where it's a very different atmosphere. It can be quite overwhelming... Every gig is different, really. Sometimes, with those sort of crowds, you can spend the whole set trying to win them over, it feels like.Yeah. Which is terribly boring, because it's like, "Come on, then. Let's see what you can do." And I don't mind that, but not if you have to spend three quarters of your set trying to win them over, and then the last half-hour you're really into what you're doing, and they sort of warm to you. It's a bit of a waste of time.In the beginning, a lot of the people in front of me were friends, or at least people I knew, the extended group of people that you have when you're in your 20s and 30s. That group naturally disbands and people move off, have children, get bored with it, situations change. Some people die. All sorts of things happen as you get older. Now I'm often playing to a crowd I don't know. So I just ... to be honest, I just try and do my own thing. If there's any point in anyone reading this—certainly a younger DJ starting out—one of the big messages would be that you've just got to do your own thing. Don't concentrate on the other DJs, what they're playing. I have a relationship with my records, and I think they're all good. The trick, obviously, is to convince the audience that they're good by putting them together in a nice way.The concept of being the centre of attention is not my ideal situation, which sounds absurd, really, when you consider DJing. You can command the room with the music from the side at ground level. You don't need to be up on the stage with a light on you. A dance floor is the most successful for me where people have their heads down and they're dancing, and not a dance floor where everyone's looking at the DJ with their hands in the air. That's not the kind of dance floor that works for the music I play. I tend not to play music with massive moments. I don't really play confetti-cannon music.The problem for me was always that if you play a big tune, that means you've got to follow it with another big tune. So unless you've got a box full of big tunes, that's not really how I play. I'm much more interested in building things gradually, or just moving around underneath the area of big tunes, and trying to create a groove. DJs that I've enjoyed over the years, they lock you into a groove, and over time they teach you within what they're doing what's about to happen. So if by sticking to one thing, you reduce the expectancy of the crowd. The next thing's going to be big. They just get used to the fact that this is where we are.Yeah. So someone like Zip, who's an incredible DJ, his power is he creates this wonderful groove, and you're comfortable and relaxed where you are. You can allow yourself to be absorbed into it because you know that there's not going to be any really radical surprises. It's just going to be lots and lots of good records one after another, and there's going to be a consistency to it, which is comforting if all you want to do is dance. It's all about what you want from the DJ, or what the DJ is prepared to give you. One thing I was going to say earlier was that most of the DJs that have impressed me along the way are DJs that are pleasing themselves. And for that reason, I sort of became one of those DJs.Some DJs don't. Some of the best DJs, they just come, they turn up, they don't listen to the DJ before, they don't listen to the DJ after. They turn up, do their thing and leave. Again, that could be seen as one-dimensional and a bit arrogant, and even in some cases inappropriate. But it depends whether you're happy to be given what you're given, or whether you're expecting the DJ to give you what you want, and therefore if he doesn't you're disappointed.Sometimes!I suppose so. It sounds awful, but it's true, yeah, I guess. I mean, I could try and sort of demystify that and suggest it's not true, but it is true, really. I think—again, not to be a wanker—but just to sort of create a narrative, to create a minor explosion within one of my sets, you could go deep for three hours, and then create an explosion, or you could bang it for half an hour, and then start to go deep. Again, it's all part of the narrative.I can do. My suggesting I don't read the crowd is perhaps not quite true. I think you instinctively know how to read a crowd. To some extent you must do. The differences in scale are interesting because in a small venue your slowest and deepest tunes can sound quite banging, and in a big venue your most banging, biggest tunes maybe don't sound banging enough. I've always thought ceilings were a big thing, actually. It could be a big place, but with a low ceiling you can still get away with quite a lot because it seems to put a lid on the music. If it's a festival, you can really lose your tunes up into that height. The intensity of the tunes is key.I really enjoyed playing that Sonar gig, because it was enormous. It was very frightening being on that stage. You should have had a band on it—Rolling Stones could have played up there. So one guy on stage—playing records as well, which I must admit felt a bit stupid because of the fragility of the needle. When you're mixing on a stage topeople, the fragility of the needle during the mix is a real rush. It's exciting, but it's also really frightening. Because if it skips in any way, for whatever reason—it could be a bit of fluff—but if anything happens to it, it's a big soundsystem to...Yeah. It's an enormous contrast. With the benefit of a couple of shots of tequila, I managed fine.The best thing about that is that it's a valve mixer, so it warms up throughout the night. The knobs are sort of oil-filled, so they've got a lovely feel about them. It was ahead of its time in a way, that mixer, because it seems like there are quite a lot of rotary mixers around. It was very expensive at the time, so I don't think it really was a big success for Allen & Heath. But they put it in at fabric and I jumped on it, because I really enjoyed using a rotary mixer anyway. The combination of that mixer, the soundsystem at fabric and vinyl—and me, maybe!—the combo of all of that is strong, I think. It's not a tricksy mixer. It's more a blending... If you're trying to have a free-flowing story unravelling in front of you, it's the perfect way to play. It's your friend. The warmth of it, the blending you can do with it is incredible. I feel very, very comfortable mixing records in that way. Certainly for house, techno, even electro... notelectro, because it's a bit more jerky, but with long, luxurious mixes with techno records it's an absolute joy, and you can have a lot of fun with it and I really enjoy the challenge of mixing it together, even if they're a bit discordant and clashy—the valve mixer seems to emulsify the situation.Absolutely, yeah. I always played lots of different things at fabric, but at the time I was playing lots of San Francisco stuff, deeper house, lots of deeper, housey techno. It went on to be called tech house—I now no longer know what tech house is—but also kind of Basic Channel, stripped-back techno that was very simple.Well, a little bit after. I was playing a lot of American stuff. A mixture of everything—Chicago techno, a lot of really tweaky music coming out of San Francisco that I found very inspiring, that was like trippy breakbeat, techno, trance. Hardkiss, all of the Hardkiss brothers. The breakbeat thing that was happening in Orlando, little bits and pieces from around the globe. But the American sound is really interesting, DJ Garth and a lot of things that they were playing out in San Francisco. It's a really amazing sound. It was kind of house music, but it was broken and trippy, not so logical as the straight-up house and techno.Then, suddenly, a lot of the music I was playing started to be from Germany, and it felt possible in there to play Rhythm & Sound and Basic Channel records, and it was really.... The bass and sub was easily coped with by the soundsystem. Whereas if you're playing that kind of music on a lesser soundsystem, it has the potential to sound appalling—not dense, just overloading. You can just hear the hi-hat and the sub and sub-harmony, and the kick is just a flabby sound that doesn't have any definition.And it's not easy to mix either. Mixing comfortably with the two basslines in is possible to do at fabric. That's not possible everywhere. You've either got to whip the bass out, or you bring the other one in really quickly because it's going to hum. The system's not going to be man enough—or I should say strong enough—to cope with that. So by having the luxury of that soundsystem, it became possible to play that music, and to overwhelm people, and also possible to invite people to come and play—like Ricardo, for instance. I was playing his records. He made a few, " 808 The Bassqueen ," and then some of the ones on Frisbee . I'd heard from a few people—Andrew Weatherall, Ivan Smagghe, a few people we'd played with in Germany—that he was incredible, a real force. A crazy kind of DJ, using minimal techno, but mixing it up in a really interesting way.In the past, underground DJs played in London, but often you were seeing them in shitty warehouses with no soundproofing and not a great soundsystem. Their impact was lessened by the equipment, in the same way that it was heightened by playing at fabric. Swayzak's a good example. Swayzak were playing a lot at fabric. We were all buying their records. The music on Force Inc., Force Tracks—simple records with a lot of information in the sub and lower end. Music that just doesn't sound good on a bad soundsystem. It's just got no chance.