Calvin Harris: Never too busy to talk

Aug 14 2009 Liverpool Daily Post

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BY HIS own admission, he’s just a tall, socially inept lad from a small town in Scotland, but Calvin Harris is having an extraordinary year.

"I’ve just come back from co-presenting Dave Pearce’s Dance Anthems for BBC 6Music," he says. "It doesn’t get any better than that."

While the Dumfries native might be one of pop’s most unlikely stars, he’s also one of its most in- demand. He’s been on tour all year and this summer has seen him flit from continent to continent, from one festival to another. Last year wasn’t much quieter.

Somehow, he’s managed to release two No 1 singles – Dizzee Rascal collaboration Dance Wiv Me and I’m Not Alone, which hit the top spot in April of this year.

"It’s a nice kind of busy, plus I’m doing what I’ve wanted to do ever since I was a little boy," says the 25- year-old, real name Adam Wiles.

"I’m only too happy to be busy, to spend days speaking to journalists or promoting my music if the result is someone enjoying my album or even buying it, God forbid. I’m having a great time."

His new album, Ready For The Weekend, the follow-up to his gold-selling 2007 debut, I Created Disco, is out now, and at the end of this month he will take to the stage to perform live for Creamfields at Daresbury.

If not for a bit of quick thinking from Calvin, we’d have seen new music from him about a year ago. Record label, Columbia, wanted a second album last summer, but, as he explains, that just wasn’t an option.

"I was still touring and they said I had two months to deliver my next record. How could I do that? I was flying out to Miami to play the day Heathrow’s new Terminal 5 opened, so the opportunity to get out of it presented itself – I made out I’d lost my lap-top with all my music on it," he says.

What a shrewd move. Delivering an album in such a short space of time, almost completely unprepared, could have resulted in disaster for Calvin. The same record label who were pleading for the music would also have been the ones to drop him when it sold poorly. Welcome to the crazy world of record labels.