GOOD THAMES Chicago’s house voice calls London home.
Photo: Courtesy of Compost Records
Robert Owens emerged from a modest upbringing in Chicago and Los Angeles with a gospel-trained voice and a love of all kinds of music. The biggest misconception, he tells us by phone from his home in the Hampstead neighborhood of London, is that Owens just burst on the dance scene in 1985 with “Mysteries of Love,” the instant classic he recorded with Chicago producer Larry Heard and released under the group name Fingers Inc. In fact, Owens deejayed straight through disco’s golden era and he hasn’t let up.
“You know, in the early days I did Studio 54, I did the Warehouse, I did Paradise Garage; I deejayed at all of those places, so I have good memories from the whole early ’80s period even before house,” he says. “I was coming into this thing before house even evolved, and that’s something a lot of people aren’t aware of. I didn’t just jump up and say I wanna play. I’ve been there for eons.”
Robert Owens is a thoughtful guy who wears his emotions on his sleeve—dance-music fanatics the world over who know their house classics are already well acquainted with him. Owens’s voice is one of the most distinctive and sought-after signature sounds in dance music. Vulnerable, personal, heartfelt and infused with an inspired musicality and intimacy, it is the antithesis of the packaged pop performance. Known for his work in the ’80s with Fingers Inc., Heard, Frankie Knuckles, the Def Mix posse, David Morales and Satoshi Tomiie, Owens was among those artists working in the first wave of house music who have seen their tunes climb the dance charts in every decade since. While Owens’s journey into dance music started even before the drum machine came into vogue, he’s never dwelled on the glory days of the house explosion. Quite literally, he’s moved on.
In the late ’80s, Owens relocated to New York to work with Knuckles’s all-star production outfit Def Mix, the subject of a recent three-disc compilation for Defected Records. His 1991 single “I’ll Be Your Friend” went No. 1. During the dance-music-crazy ’90s, Owens relocated to London to do A&R and “got the run of the company.” He installed a Motown-like system for Freetown Records with a studio band and choir as he scouted the country for singers to make dance tracks. When word got out that Owens was living in the U.K., DJ/live bookings across Europe started rolling in. “It just all of a sudden just blew up for me. It was almost a shock. The amount of work and the amount of people that were asking me to come to deejay was just insane. Would you say America could compare to that? Logically, it doesn’t make sense for you to go back and forth,” says Owens.
Owens stayed in the U.K. and hasn’t paid much attention to the U.S. since, not because he’s snobby. He contends that American bookers think he’s hard to get ahold of. But with vocal performances on smashes like Photek’s “Mine to Give” and more recently with Coldcut and Ron Trent, he’s still a hot name. While Owens keeps in touch with and even plays dates with Heard, his Compost Records album from earlier this year found the singer keeping new company. On Night-Time Stories, Owens collaborated with today’s house innovators like Jimpster, Charles Webster, Marc Romboy and Ian Pooley. He often tours with Poker Flat producer Dan Berkson on keys, a guitarist and percussionist playing live versions of his originals with a jazz-house tilt or picks up a live band locally, but the live outfit has no plans to hit Chicago.
This week, to make up for his absence, we’re getting four nights of club gigs from Owens in which he spins and sings live from the DJ booth. He’s a people-pleasing DJ who favors a fusion of new, old and European tracks, finding Chicago’s pure throwback sets a bit off-putting: “People have to move forward here.” He remembers when disco, punk, funk, new wave and early hip-hop were all played together. “And people were with you. For me, it’s been about trying to maintain those kind of values that I have come from. That’s what I usually try to deliver,” he says.
As Owens croons on “Inside My World,” he believes it’s still about the people and an atmosphere of dance floor as sanctuary—and savoring every bit of the good times as long as they last—wherever home might be.
Robert Owens plays Sunday 2 through Wednesday 5.