Jogging down Edgware Road past the Beirut Express café and the map-reading skills are proving unfruitful. Instead of finding a route closer towards Maida Vale, one lone Clash writer is standing at a bus stop listening to an agitated Lebanese restaurant owner yell at his News 24 television screen from his ring-side bar seat. “I don’t like to watch too much of the news,” Richard File, one half of visionary dance-act Unkle admits, as he takes time out from the studio. “Just enough to know what’s going on. It just gets too depressing otherwise…” The political climate is somewhat diluted as we sit at a table outside a fairly deserted Café Rouge. Affluent chalk white apartments surround the neighbourhood: the contrast is striking.
It’s been two years since Unkle released the ambitiously groundbreaking follow up to their debut ‘Psyence Fiction’. The second coming ‘Never, Never Land’ was brought cinematically alive by a new production partnership when James Lavelle brought long-term friend Richard File into the fold. “It came to the point after ‘Psyence Fiction’, that James was looking for someone else to work with in Unkle,” Rich explains, basking in the North London sunshine. “It was all pretty natural: he just asked me to do it. We just had a go. And then it just… happened.” It certainly happened. The pair took off to new experimental heights. Rich’s imprint was felt through the fragility of his searching vocals, placed peacefully over agitated electro-beats, in addition to finding a home within soulfully lost ballads. The mixture of sound was taken from all walks of life and was brought together in a powerfully fresh way. “The crossover aspect of it makes it not your average electronic act. It is a dance act, but it takes from so many other areas: rock ‘n’ roll and hip-hop… Dance somehow brings it all together and makes it tangible.”
“At this point, I’m just putting stuff out there and letting it decide what it wants to be. Until you put them out, you can’t move on.”
Many would have cashed their cheques in with such a tangible success. But for Rich, the need to write and release songs is something that spurs him further. Ten years after first walking into a recording studio, he’s now ready to release his first solo EP ‘Neon One’. “It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while. I write shit loads of songs and I don’t want them to be just sitting there. I just want to put out as much music as possible.”
All three tracks brim with abstract urgency: ‘Big Mistake’ demonstrates this perfectly against soft-spoken vocals. Further tracks ‘The Time is Mine’ and ‘In My Head’ explore electronically fuelled landscapes against gentle melodies. With a backlog of songs and with nothing to prove, the aim is simple: there is no aim. No objective. Just a desire to get melodic songs out into the world. “At this point, I’m just putting stuff out there and letting it decide what it wants to be. Until you put them out, you can’t move on. It feels great: I can see them now in a different light. They’re in the public arena now.” Which begs the question: is finally letting them go a difficult thing? “No,” Rich shoots, “it’s quite liberating.”
With an additional album out at the beginning of next year, and a film score recently penned for a post-production Cuban art house film that “almost sent me mad”, the future looks set to become illuminated for Richard File.
