Death In Vegas

With all the shadowy enigma of Neu! or Throbbing Gristle, one of the most exciting and unique artists to emerge from the ’90s UK dance scene, is making a stealthy return. Richard Fearless, aka Death In Vegas, cut some of that era’s most unusual records, fusing electro, dub, rock, psychedelia, soul and solid-gone experimentation to create a sound that was spacious and other-worldly, while also segueing with the pop mainstream. After seven turbulent years, which have seen him up sticks for New York, form a raw-power rock & roll band, and eventually move back to London again, Fearless is back as Death In Vegas, releasing his first record under that alias since 2004’s ‘Satan’s Circus’. Called ‘Trans Love Energies’, it marks a return to his roots in minimal techno, deploying the rudimentary gear behind all the classics of the original Detroit/Chicago era to try and spirit up fresh atmospheres. It’s the kind of eerie, nocturnal and often compulsively toxic record, which only Fearless could make, yet which feels thrillingly of-the-moment. His time is now, once again. Richard’s journey in music has been anything but a shrewdly strategized career. Cutting his teeth as a DJ at the Job Club in the early ’90s, he stumbled into making his first track, after hooking up with a like-minded engineer. Experimenting with loping hip hop beats, he became a reluctant hero of big beat, a resident DJ at the hallowed Heavenly Social, and soon found himself putting a live band together to tour his first Death In Vegas album, 1997’s ‘Dead Elvis’. Still finishing his degree in graphic design at the time, Fearless spoke a different language to the club crowd. He’d talk about making music with lasting depth and meaning, far from the ephemeral froth of bangin’ dancefloor tracks. Creating his own artwork, and eventually the band’s videos, he always seemed like a ‘proper artist’, for whom music was merely one piece in a bigger puzzle. After teaming up with a different engineer partner, Tim Holmes, he scaled unforeseen heights of credibility with 1999’s ‘The Contino Sessions’, whose dark, foreboding, guitar-y soundscapes were adorned by vocals from idols Iggy Pop and Bobby Gillespie. 2002’s ‘Scorpio Rising’ repeated the success, with help from a galaxy of stars, including Liam Gallagher, Paul Weller and Hope Sandoval. Two years on, ‘Satan’s Circus’, by contrast, pointedly didn’t feature any guest vocalists, and pursued a stark, beautiful electronic purism inspired by Krautrock tech-pioneers Kraftwerk. Fearless was feeling hemmed in, where once everything had happened freely and naturally. Richard’s darkroom faves: Alec Soth, Joel Meyerowitz, Stephen Shore, Philip-Lorca deCorcia, William Eggleston, Larry Clark and Diane Arbus. New York, however, became a very dark and turbulent period in his life. “There was a lot of anger,” he says, quietly. “I didn’t really know how to deal with it, but the way I did was, to try and channel all that feeling into some music. I got a band called Black Acid together, rehearsed with them for a year, and then recorded everything we’d done in one take in Oliver from A Place To Bury Strangers’ kitchen.” For Black Acid, Richard wrote lyrics. “It was my first time. The only other lyric I’d written was ‘Scorpio Rising’ [the song], and that was purely because Liam was like, Right, I’ll do it, but I’m not doing the lyrics. It was something I’d never thought about. But with Black Acid, I was really trying to deal with my situation, so the lyrics became very personal. I was initially trying to get somebody else to sing them, then, one day, I was like, I can’t get somebody else singing these words – whatever it sounds like, it doesn’t matter, no-one one can sing them and believe them as much as I can.” Once he’d taken Black Acid out on the road, that chapter in his life soon ended when he moved back to his old flat in East London. It was time to move on. In Autumn 2009, Fearless was buzzing about being reunited with some of his vi