As close compatriots got trapped in locked grooves of dependency and abuse, Woolford told people what they didn’t want to hear, and was not received kindly for it. For years he was thick as thieves with the sprawling circle of residents, promoters, drug barons and hangers-on who ruled the town’s house scene. He was at the epicentre of a notoriously messy scene, and loving it: when in his early 20s, Woolford would celebrate the completion of a track with a bender the length of its writing process. Woolford made his name here in Leeds, coming up in the 2000s as a resident DJ for the city’s flagship night Back To Basics. You’d struggle to paint a more obvious caricature of what a man-about-town looks like. We grab some food and this gadabout nature doesn’t let up: Woolford leaps two-footed into winding stories about tour mishaps, beams at the restaurant staff, says hello and how’s the wife to all, and tips handsomely on his way out. He is unfailingly courteous, always dropping back to allow people through a door or alley first, acting as my tour guide as much as an interviewee. I’m handed a pack of sealed Special Request records he’s just picked up from the post office, though I’m sure he knows I have them already. Wooly (as he has been affectionately tagged since who knows when) is at Leeds Station ahead of time. With that in mind I arrange to meet Woolford, hoping to chew over the aftermath and the next episode. 2019 was his most unrestrained, prolific and - surely no coincidence - successful year to date. As I’m about to find out, it boils down to one thing: “I just make what I love,” Woolford states. It can get a bit confusing to see the same person release on Positiva and throw out a black metal-styled album with mere days apart, to unleash alluring vocal house screamers at one gig and break sound systems with tear-out drum & bass the next. So active has he been, a music quiz I ran had a round dedicated to the only three certainties in life: Death, Taxes & Woolford Remixes. As well as his own solo catalogue, he has clocked up edit credits on well over 200 official releases. He gigs relentlessly, switching with seemingly no friction between ritzy festivals under his birth name and grotty basement all-nighters as alter ego Special Request, hitting the studio in between. He has a litany of anthems to his name that countless ravers will recognise: “ Stolen,” the ten-minute brain-vaporizing voyage that wowed Carl Craig “ You Already Know,” a sweetly hit to accompany sunkissed road trips and sundowns on Iberian beaches “ Untitled,” a dynamic piano house slammer with a name-calling hook and “ Hang Up Your Hang Ups,” perhaps the most typically Woolford anthem of all - a full-fat banger with crunchy low end and soaring vocal courtesy of the gone-too-soon Detroit legend Kim English.įate has been on his side in the 2010s, as the increasing aptitude of clubgoers for heavier fare has matched Woolford’s itch to blast them with it. ” Since that breakout moment in 2006, Woolford has been on a consistent upward curve, becoming a durable fixture of big-league house and techno. But it wasn’t always this way.Ģ020 marks Woolford’s 20th year as a producer, a nice synchronicity with 20:20 Vision, the label on which he released his first smash, “ Erotic Discourse. Paul Woolford is the King of Leeds, Angel of the North, an alias-switching dynamo with a superhuman work rate, one of dance music’s most popular and seemingly indestructible characters.
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