Defected is the great success story of UK dance music

“I’m a collector of labels. My ambition was for people to have a Defected rack in their collections in the same way they'd have a Salsoul rack, a Prelude rack, a Strictly rack, a Philly International rack,” says Simon Dunmore. After a decade working in club promotions and A&R for the majors, he founded Defected Records on 1st January, 1999. The plan was to establish the UK’s answer to Mark Finkelstein and Gladys Pizarro’s legendary New York imprint Strictly Rhythm. You could say that he has achieved that. 

Thanks to Dunmore’s keen A&R savvy, which has over the years secured releases and forged enduring friendships with Masters At Work, Bob Sinclar, Dennis Ferrer, Roger Sanchez, Kevin Saunderson and Todd Terry, Defected has made an indelible imprint on British dance music. ‘To Be In Love’; ‘At Night’; ‘Finally’; ‘Another Chance’: all tracks knowable by name alone. To call it the most influential UK house label of all-time would be entirely acceptable. 

There have been bumps in the road. Fortunes made, lost, and made again. But after 20 years and well over 500 releases (that’s on Defected alone, never mind its numerous spin-off imprints), it’s in better health perhaps than it’s ever been. CamelPhat & Elderbrook’s dominating anthem ‘Cola’, for example, was studiously picked up by Defected MD Wez Saunders after dozens of other labels had either ignored it, or turned it down. It was nominated for a Grammy and an Ivor Novello award, as well as topping the Billboard chart and grabbing near-ubiquitous radio and club play around the world. It’s sold two million copies worldwide. Defected, in short, has very much still got it. 

EXPERIENCE 
Had things worked out differently, Dunmore was all set to be a dry cleaner. Buying records was a hobby. But as he amassed a vinyl collection, so he’d start to get booked for gigs at parties and wine bars around where he grew up in West London. House music arrived gradually. “It was records like Russ Brown’s ‘Gotta Find A Way’ or Steve ‘Silk’ Hurley’s ‘Jack Your Body’, or Farley ‘Jackmaster’ Funk’s ‘Love Can't Turn Around’,” he says. “Before I was even really aware there was a house scene going on in Chicago, these records were coming in on import. They’d be getting played by the people behind the counter in the record shops. Then after a while, you realised you had 15, then 20, then 30, then 100 records that started to sound alike, and that would work together in a set.” 

Soon, he found he could make a living out of DJing, and so his dreams of spending his days up to the elbows in dry cleaning chemicals were duly abandoned. He eventually got a different day job too, at the Record And Disco Centre in Rayners Lane. It was there that he began rubbing shoulders with London’s A&R community, and in 1989, he was offered a job doing club promotions at Cooltempo, where he worked with Arrested Development, Adeva, Gang Starr and Kenny Thomas. Soon moving into the A&R department, he signed huge club hits from Juliet Roberts and River Ocean, his first professional encounter with Luis Ferdinand Vega Jr, aka 'Little Louie' Vega of Masters At Work. Dunmore remembers exactly where he first heard those wild congas of the pivotal ‘Love & Happiness’. 

“Louie was playing at a warehouse in Tottenham,” he says. “It was a filthy night, the middle of winter, pouring with rain, horrendous, and I wasn’t going to go, but my mate persuaded me. And Louie came on to the beats of that record. The place was absolutely jumping. Even if it was just the congas, I thought it was an incredible record. After four minutes, India’s vocals come in. We all knew it was her singing, but had no clue what the record was. You couldn’t get to the DJ booth, so on the Monday, I phoned him up. He told me it was this new record, and he’d just signed it to Strictly. I’d already signed Aly-Us’s ‘Follow Me’ to Cooltempo from Strictly, so by that time I had a good relationship with them. I phoned up Gladys, and told her I had to sign it. You can still play it now and get a great reaction. People go on about records being spiritual — that is absolutely a spiritual record.” 

From Cooltempo, Dunmore moved to A&M Records’ dance imprint AM:PM in 1994, as its head of A&R, from where he released massive club tracks such as Alcatraz’s ‘Giv Me Luv’, Love Tribe’s ‘Stand Up’ and Farley & Heller's ‘Ultra Flava’, alongside chart hits including Mousse T’s ‘Horny’ and Ultra Nate’s ‘Free’ (both tracks hit No.2 in the charts), as well as commissioning club remixes for umbrella label Polygram’s big hitters like Janet Jackson and The Police. “We had that balance of commercial success, that would then allow me to indulge myself and sign records that were more true to my heart,” he says. “And that's not to say that I didn’t like ‘Free’, or ‘Horny’. They brought success and balance to the label.” 

PUSHING ON 
The time came to move on. He was offered funding to start a label by Ministry Of Sound, and so Defected was born, launched with Janet Bell, his former promotions partner at A&M. “It was about giving myself a chance to be in control of my own future,” he says. But although he had a Rolodex full of DJs and producers who could make records for him, things started tentatively. 

“I had really good relationships with a lot of people,” Dunmore says, “but then initially, when I left A&M where we had big budgets, and could afford to pay reasonable advances and fees for remixes, as an independent, suddenly you don’t have access to that kind of finance. I quickly found out who my friends were. With some people, the phone just didn’t get picked up.” Defected’s first single was ‘Can’t Get Enough’ by Soulsearcher, built around a sample from ‘Let’s Lovedance Tonight’ by Gary’s Gang, with the hook sung by Snap! singer Thea Austin. It got radio play straight away, and went into the Top 10. Without him having time for me, I don’t believe Defected would be here now. He impressed on me how important it was to own our music.” 

Massive tracks like Masters At Work’s ‘To Be In Love’ and Paul Johnson’s ‘Get Get Down’ dropped in Defected’s first year, then Bob Sinclar’s ‘I Feel For You’ and Kings Of Tomorrow’s stunning ‘Finally’, with Julie McKnight. The label scooped its first No.1 single in 2001, Roger Sanchez’s Toto-sampling record ‘Another Chance’. “Roger is someone I’ve known since Cooltempo,” Dunmore says. “He’d originally signed his album to Sony, but they didn’t know how to promote it. So his manager approached me, and asked me for help. He said, ‘Sony don’t understand it’. I said, ‘I’ll help, but we need to release it’. I heard the album, and there were several good tracks, but it was missing that killer cut. He went back into the studio, and the very last track he sent over was ‘Another Chance’. Of course, it was the record that drove everything.” 

At No.1, it kept Robbie Williams’ ‘Eternity’ off the top spot. “That was a pretty big deal at the time,” he laughs. “Having a No.1 with a major, you’re just doing your job. It’s something that most people are proud of, but to do it as an independent, without the clout, the infrastructure, the staffing that a major label has, to be holding our own against the majors was something that I was massively proud of.” Things were going amazingly well for the plucky independent — until they weren’t. 

“We were never a cash-rich business,” says Dunmore. “So we always had to manage our finances very stringently. Around 2004, we noticed a decline in income over a couple of months. When it happens for one month, you think, ‘OK, maybe it’s just a blip’. Two months, you feel like it’s something you need to be aware of, then three months, alarm bells start ringing. We knew about file-sharing. We knew DJs were now able to play our records without buying them, and people were definitely raising their concerns. Then distribution companies started to go out of business. And they would go out of business owing people money. We traded with other labels, licensed tracks to other labels, then they’d go out of business, owing us money. We were getting hit in the head from every angle. Then, ultimately, high street retailers started to go out of business. 

“We had to adjust. We cut costs quickly. We cut overheads, staff, we had to make people redundant, which is tough when you work with people so closely. Some understood, some found it difficult to come to terms with. I spoke to a lot of people around that time, and they all said, ‘We just didn’t act quickly enough’. We were probably pretty close to going out of business. But sometimes you just need that little bit of luck. And then we signed Bob Sinclar’s ‘Love Generation’, quickly followed by ‘World Hold On’, which were both Top 10 records in the UK. At a time when everyone was struggling, that gave us just enough breathing space financially to ride it out. If it wasn’t for Bob Sinclar, Defected may not be in business anymore, and that’s the truth.”