True House Stories® Youtube & Spotify Video Podcast
TRUE HOUSE STORIES W/ SIMON DUNMORE - DEFECTED RECORDS / GLITTERBOX
Simon Dunmore Founder Defected Records & Glitterbox interview podcast hosted by Lenny Fontana # 117 - True House Stories®
A very candid interview with the main man responsible for some of the biggest house music hits in the game, Simon Dunmore of Defected Records and Glitterbox Recordings. Listen carefully on how he explains his rise in the music business.
There are key notes to work and live by that he shares with all of us. Simon’s journey through the music industry to head of Defected was a journey through various subcultures. While working in a London dry cleaners, being sent to a textile course in fashion college in Derby exposed him to the more electronic, danceable side of the post-punk and New Romantic sound.
Venturing deeper into the club scene back in London, he found a new community in the soul scene that would be the canary in the mine for the house music starting to cross the Atlantic. Nights like Nicky Holloway’s Doo at the Zoo and Special Branch (including a trip to Ibiza in 1986) and a pivotal Soul weekender in, of all places, Berwick-On-Sea, lit the flame of a lifelong devotion to the soulful end of house that burns to this day.
A DJ since 1983 (“I’d been making a lot of mixtapes, admittedly mostly for girls, when one day I was asked to play someone’s birthday party”), Simon Dunmore threw himself into DJing and the soul scene: writing for magazines, building a database for his hand-lettered and photocopied ‘London Soul Circular’, organising buses from the suburbs to parties and events around the country.
A job at Record & Disco Centre in London’s Rayners Lane saw him receiving promos from labels hoping he would hype their records to influential customers like Record & Mirror writer James Hamilton. Another customer, Cooltempo A&R Steve Wolfe, gave Simon a job doing club promotions, plugging club DJs whose feedback would inform the dance charts that were the bedrock of a track’s journey from record bag to radio play.
Soon Simon Dunmore was suggesting better records to sign or remixes to pursue, and when Wolfe left the label, Simon applied and got his job, later repeating the process when Wolfe left new home AM:PM. In the famously cut-throat and hedonistic 90s record industry, Simon took his time to find the right records to launch his new position with AM:PM, but a string of extraordinary releases including Ultra Nate’s ‘Free’, Alcatraz ‘Give Me Luv’, Mousse T’s ‘Horny’ and MJ Cole’s ‘Sincere’ quickly made his name.
When Ministry Of Sound – whose compilation CDs were not just dominating the electronic music sales but also effectively defining the culture – offered him the chance to set up his own label (just as a takeover of AM:PM by Universal was decimating the team he loved working with), the die was cast. Defected Records was born on January 1st 1999 and has now coming on its 25th Anniversary better than ever.
Biography Simon Dunmore (founder Defected Records & Glitterbox)
When he stepped down as supremo of Defected Records in August 2022, Simon Dunmore left the label he had founded 24 years earlier as the foremost house music imprint on the planet, a major club and festival brand, and a pioneer of a community-focused approach that has become the new template for success in the industry. As a DJ, he’d played the soulful house and disco that have been his enduring love to thousands of rapt dancefloors from Ibiza to Australia. Now he’s taking that experience of over four decades immersed in music to new audiences, beginning with a collaboration with acclaimed visual artist Mark Vessey.
Simon’s realisation that a shared love for music can build a community didn’t didn’t come in Ibiza, some glamorous storied nightclub, or during the halcyon days of rave. It was a tube station in the late 70s, it was punks vs rockabillies, and it was, in his words, “all kicking off”.
If equally passionate about the music (a closed capsule of collectable obscure, unpolished 50s 7”s with a uniform to match), 16-year-old Dunmore was an outlier in the Rockabilly scene: far younger and far less battle hardened than the average be-quiffed rocker. Born in 1962 in Northampton, moving at the age of 14 to Uxbridge in West London, young Simon’s first musical obsession was the working class glam rock of Slade. He remembers David Bowie’s ‘Life On Mars’, with its opaque lyrics and androgynous hero “perplexing” him at a young age, opening his eyes to music’s capacity for deeper meaning.
The impact of the death of Elvis in 1977 saw him “looking under the bonnet” of the King’s sound, which led him to Rockabilly, a scene with a subculture at its core. And that’s when he found himself in a tube station after a gig, under attack from a gang of punks. “When it kicked off, a couple of older people looked after me. They were a tribe, brought together by their love of music; a family. That’s what communities do, they look after each other. I’ve never forgotten that.”
Simon’s Dunmore journey through the music industry to head of Defected was a journey through various subcultures. While working in a London dry cleaners, being sent to a textile course in fashion college in Derby exposed him to the more electronic, danceable side of the post-punk and New Romantic sound. Venturing deeper into the club scene back in London, he found a new community in the soul scene that would be the canary in the mine for the house music starting to cross the Atlantic.
Nights like Nicky Holloway’s Doo at the Zoo and Special Branch (including a trip to Ibiza in 1986) and a pivotal Soul weekender in, of all places, Berwick-On-Sea, lit the flame of a lifelong devotion to the soulful end of house that burns to this day.
A DJ since 1983 (“I’d been making a lot of mixtapes, admittedly mostly for girls, when one day I was asked to play someone’s birthday party”), Simon threw himself into DJing and the soul scene: writing for magazines, building a database for his hand-lettered and photocopied ‘London Soul Circular’, organising buses from the suburbs to parties and events around the country.
A job at Record & Disco Centre in London’s Rayners Lane saw him receiving promos from labels hoping he would hype their records to influential customers like Record & Mirror writer James Hamilton. Another customer, Cooltempo A&R Steve Wolfe, gave Simon a job doing club promotions, plugging club DJs whose feedback would inform the dance charts that were the bedrock of a track’s journey from record bag to radio play. Soon Simon was suggesting better records to sign or remixes to pursue, and when Wolfe left the label, Simon Dunmore applied and got his job, later repeating the process when Wolfe left new home AM:PM.
In the famously cut-throat and hedonistic 90s record industry, Simon Dunmore took his time to find the right records to launch his new position with AM:PM, but a string of extraordinary releases including Ultra Nate’s ‘Free’, Alcatraz ‘Give Me Luv’, Mousse T’s ‘Horny’ and MJ Cole’s ‘Sincere’ quickly made his name. When Ministry Of Sound – whose compilation CDs were not just dominating the electronic music sales but also effectively defining the culture – offered him the chance to set up his own label (just as a takeover of AM:PM by Universal was decimating the team he loved working with), the die was cast.
Defected Records was born on January 1st 1999, with the release of Soulsearcher’s ‘I Can’t Get Enough’, a number 8 hit in the UK charts, setting the tone. The label today is the house music juggernaut, but Simon’s fondness for those early, shoestring days is obvious. Set up in the centre of Soho’s music mile across the street from Blackmarket Records, their office became a hub for the international DJ community “They’d come over on a Thursday night to the UK, get their records in Blackmarket and then nip across to see us and grab some promos.
Soho was alive with record shops.” Business could be precarious of course, with cash flow issues often being resolved quite literally in the nick of time: famously, “releasing Roger Sanchez’s ‘Another Chance’ in 2001 gave us exactly that.”
Having to stay agile just to survive also drove innovation. When radio stations like Kiss FM became corporate entities with a focus on commercial music, Simon Dunmore and the team realised that to reach their community they’d have to step onto dancefloors themselves. Club brand Defected In the House was born in 2003 at a time when club promoters were sceptical of promoting someone else’s brand. “It wasn’t until we started to tie the nights to specific releases; Dimitri From Paris or Masters At Work ‘In The House’ comps, say, that people got it,” recalls Simon.
Now ‘it’ is industry standard. Defected would go on to throw events across the world at a dizzying scale: festivals from London to Croatia, tours spanning Australia to South America. For Simon though, the standout remains their eight year weekly residency at Pacha in Ibiza. “It was one of those moments that I’ve been really lucky to have throughout my career, when I looked around and thought: ‘even if this wasn’t my job, this is exactly where I’d want to be’.”
When Simon announced at a marketing meeting in 2009 that he wanted to shun traditional advertising in favour of doubling down on the then nascent social media, talking directly to the community that bought the records on their own terms, “some of my staff thought I was mad” he says. “And it was a risk. But times were rapidly changing, and we had to change too or we wouldn’t survive.”
Indeed while the shift to digital files and streaming might have caused existential panic among much of the record industry, for Defected the new order was liberating, connecting them directly to their global community and allowing the label to be more agile and responsive to the dancefloor. It also put their incredible back catalog in play as a continuous revenue stream.
In 2014 Simon Dunmore launched Glitterbox in Ibiza as a counter to a scene dominated by EDM and Techno. Originally pitched as a throwback to ‘classic DJs playing classic records’, the new club night targeted a crowd that frequented Ibiza in the 90’s and early 2000’s and were returning to the island in search of that spirit. But by also foregrounding its drag performers and celebrating the often overlooked black, gay, outsider roots of house culture and disco, it would become a genuine cultural force on the Island.
It took the global pandemic, and the realisation that the record industry had moved irrevocably towards a more isolated way of working, with digital interaction replacing face-to-face connection and collaboration – from the way the tracks are made to how artists are found and developed – for Dunmore to start considering his future. With his sixtieth birthday on the horizon, and close friend and protege Wez Saunders eminently ready to step up to take over Defected, Simon announced in January 2023 that he would be leaving the label and playing his final public DJ gigs.
This mini goodbye tour was almost Simon Dunmore in microcosm; an all-vinyl disco and house set in the epic spectacle of Glitterbox’s night in Printworks’ main room, a sunset party at Mambo in Ibiza to launch their summer season, a benefit gig for soulful house legend Bobby Laviniere in Brixton, and a final, intimate party for close friends at a pub in Kent.
Stepping away from Defected and DJing, Simon Dunmore says, is an opportunity to pay back the ”time debt” owed to wife Yasmin and his family after decades of intense work and touring. Their sons Louis and Lucas are now taking their own steps into the music biz, producing and Djing as the Dunmore Brothers, “they’ll have to pay their dues just like anyone,” says Simon, “but I’m always there for guidance and support when they want it.”
And of course there are new projects: first up the collaboration with Vessey, who asked Simon Dunmore to choose a fraction of his 20,000 strong record collection to be immortalised in a stunning giant canvas (“choosing just 88 records took a lot of deliberating ,” says Simon of the selection process, “and about two weeks of digging: my records weren’t as alphabetised as I hoped!”)
Always hands-on with Defected’s artwork and branding over the years, and a keen collector with a particular ‘obsession’ with the febrile 80s New York creative community (where artists like Haring and Warhol rubbed shoulders with DJs like Larry Levan), this step into the visual arts is a natural progression.
As ever, though, Simon Dunmore is looking beyond, to the potential of this project to build something more. “Maybe it’ll be a podcast, maybe it’s talks or even listening parties, but I want to use the collaboration with Mark as a springboard to share records that are personal to me. To share what I’ve learned in the industry, to connect with people. To remind them not to lose faith in the music, in their work and in what they believe.”
Looking after his community, in other words. He’s never forgotten that.