TRUE HOUSE STORIES® W/ SIMON DUNMORE (FOUNDER DEFECTED RECORDS & GLITTERBOX) # 117 INTERVIEWED
BY LENNY FONTANA
A very candid interview with the main man responsible
for some of the biggest house music hits in the game, Simon Dunmore of Defected Records and Glitterbox Recordings. Listen carefully on how he explains his rise in the music business. There are key notes to work and live by that he shares with all of us.
Simon’s journey through the music industry to head of Defected was a journey through various subcultures. While working in a London dry cleaners, being sent to a textile course in fashion college in Derby exposed him to the more electronic, danceable side of the post-punk and New Romantic sound. Venturing deeper into the club scene back in London, he found a new community in the soul scene that would be the canary in the mine for the house music starting to cross the Atlantic. Nights like Nicky Holloway’s Doo at the Zoo and Special Branch (including a trip to Ibiza in 1986) and a pivotal Soul weekender in, of all places, Berwick-On-Sea, lit the flame of a lifelong devotion to the soulful end of house that burns to this day. A DJ since 1983 (“I’d been making a lot of mixtapes, admittedly mostly for girls, when one day I was asked to play someone’s birthday party”), Simon threw himself into DJing and the soul scene: writing for magazines, building a database for his hand-lettered and photocopied ‘London Soul Circular’, organising buses from the suburbs to parties and events around the country. A job at Record & Disco Centre in London’s Rayners Lane saw him receiving promos from labels hoping he would hype their records to influential customers like Record & Mirror writer James Hamilton. Another customer, Cooltempo A&R Steve Wolfe, gave Simon a job doing club promotions, plugging club DJs whose feedback would inform the dance charts that were the bedrock of a track’s journey from record bag to radio play. Soon Simon was suggesting better records to sign or remixes to pursue, and when Wolfe left the label, Simon applied and got his job, later repeating the process when Wolfe left new home AM:PM. In the famously cut-throat and hedonistic 90s record industry, Simon took his time to find the right records to launch his new position with AM:PM, but a string of extraordinary releases including Ultra Nate’s ‘Free’, Alcatraz ‘Give Me Luv’, Mousse T’s ‘Horny’ and MJ Cole’s ‘Sincere’ quickly made his name. When Ministry Of Sound - whose compilation CDs were not just dominating the electronic music sales but also effectively defining the culture - offered him the chance to set up his own label (just as a takeover of AM:PM by Universal was decimating the team he loved working with), the die was cast. Defected Records was born on January 1st 1999 and has now coming on its 25th Anniversary better than ever.
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