Calvin Harris Nearly Quit Music

Music production is not an easy thing, by any means. In the early stages, it can often involve sleeping on friends’ couches, eating ramen daily, struggling to find a foothold in an oversatured market, and trying to find your own identity in a sea of posers and covers. That’s why when a producer actually makes it, it’s such a stellar achievement – you can hate on sell-outs all you want, but there are still thousands of DJs living at home in their 30s.

According to Forbes, Calvin Harris made $66 Million last year. He has modeled for Emporio Armani. If there’s any kind of role model to be found in dance music, Calvin Harris isn’t a bad place to start.

In a recent interview with Prestige Hong Kong, Calvin talks about what it was like being a model and his beginnings as a grocery market attendant. But it gets a little deep when Harris mentions that he was once really close to quitting music altogether.

I realised I’d wasted enough time and all my money doing music. I just wanted to live for a bit.

After a year of just being a young kid and working at Marks & Spencer in his hometown of Dumfries, “show[ing] people where the corned beef was and date-rotat[ing] the yogurt,” he started up again just for fun and found a foothold on MySpace.

This was in 2006, when people were still looking for music on MySpace, and enjoying it. I would search for names that I would recognise from record liner notes – songwriters, DJs – and I would send them a message to check out my music. I was basically spamming them. One of them was a promoter named Mark Gillespie who used to book DJs and run festivals, and another was Felix Howard who had just started a job at EMI and was looking for music. They both got back to me. Mark knew two managers who looked after DJs and suggested we all have a meeting, and Felix signed me to EMI. Mark is still my manager and EMI is still my publisher. Everything happened in that one week. It was crazy. I was literally on the shop floor at Marks & Spencer and got a call that EMI was offering me £30,000 for three years. I put the phone down and remember thinking, “What am I going to do?” I was earning £20,000 a year and I was thinking if I should really leave. Thank God I did.

Calvin Harris is currently serving residencies in Vegas at both Omnia and Hakkasan. You can see him at the Grand Opening of OMNIA on the 24th.

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