Richard X has opened up about his refusal to allow Geri Halliwell to record his track Some Girls.
The pop genius penned the track with Hannah Robinson in the mid-’00s and it was released by Rachel Stevens as a charity single for Sport Relief.
“Some Girls was written on the first day I met Hannah Robinson,” he tells Retro Pop’s August 2022 issue. “We had Girls Aloud in mind and it has some of our cheeky references, a little bit knowing.
“It’s a record about records; a song about songs. So they heard it and eventually it went to Rachel.”
However, before Rachel recorded the track it was offered up to Geri – without Richard’s knowledge.
He explains: “Me and Hannah made the track, it went to the publishers and they played it to people. They played it to Geri and I think Geri and her people thought it was great and started to plan a lot of stuff.
“There was a video director on board already, but bear in mind I didn’t know any of this until someone rang me up,” he says. “Someone thought, ‘Oh, has anyone actually checked with Richard?’ And then when they rang me up, I was just so horrified by this idea of that song going to Geri – no disrespect to Geri – but I wasn’t a great fan of ‘Geri pop’.
“I was like, ‘This is just gonna be awful.’ Also, it goes hand-in-hand with your album, and if what you’re trying to do is thought, left-field influenced pop, it was just like, ‘This is just gonna mess it up. This is not what I want.’ I just said, ‘No, no, she’s not have that,’ and they were horrified!
While Richard insists he’d “consider it a bit more” today if a similar situation arose, he recalls: “She apparently just lost it and there’s talk of her complaining, storming out, going in the car and locking the door. I heard all this second-hand and I was like, ‘Really? I can’t believe this…’
“I had nothing to do with it apart from just saying, ‘No,’ and then all this chaos erupted over West London.
“I wasn’t thinking about the financial aspect at all, because otherwise I probably would have said, ‘Yeah’,” he maintains. “I just thought, here’s the time to be making good records. Making good records that say something about me, as well as the artist, is what I want to do at this point, and that’s probably more valuable.
“And Rachel had done Sweet Dreams, which was such an amazing sounding song – very modern – and I just wanted Rachel to do it.”
Read the full interview in the August 2022 edition of Retro Pop, out now. Order yours or subscribe via our Online Store or use our Store Finder to locate your nearest stockist.
