Victor Simonelli interview – “Go back in the studio and do it again”
The New York house legend retraces his early steps

They say to know where you’re going you need to understand exactly where you’ve been. That’s harder than it sounds when you’ve been cutting seminal New York house tracks for the best part of 40 years, and have worked with global luminaries from Talking Heads to Quincy Jones.
Impressively, Victor Simonelli doesn’t struggle to recall the details of his era-spanning career half as much as you might expect, or he fears. Speaking to us from Florida, formal introductions quickly give way to a deep dive into a life spent putting serious graft in, the personal significance of music, and importance of finding your own rhythm and voice in studio and booth. On the line to discuss a new two-part Behind the Groove compilation, Victor Simonelli: The Early Years, a double release stacked with flawless productions under myriad guises largely recoded between 1990 and 1993, our conversation dials the clock back even further, where we find a teenager in Midwood, Brooklyn, and a Big Apple disco scene in full flow.
“If someone asked me about my early works, I wouldn’t be thinking about the early-90s. I’d be thinking about the 1980s, that’s when I started to get into production. Well, technically I began with editing,” Simonelli explains, accent rich with Brooklynite intonation. “By the 90s, I’d reached a point where I was able to express myself more freely from the DJ booth. Prior to that, if we go from the late-80s, I was at the learning stages of production and arranging, songwriting, mixing, editing. Still getting a grasp on how my emotions and feelings can relate to tracks and how to include those in what I’m making as best I can. Further back, 70s, early-80s, I was doing a lot of listening, recording, and some spinning.

“I mean, my Dad is a collector, since the day I’m born my earliest memories are going through his collection. All kinds of music, colourful covers and artwork, detailed credits and sleeve notes. He’d play tunes for me and ask what I liked about what I heard. What did I dislike? What instruments did I hear? What did they make me feel? Which lyrics stood out? So from an early age I wasn’t just listening but experiencing tracks and albums in this really complete way — dissecting what was there,” he continues. “Moving a little forward — I won’t make it too long — then I started listening to DJs on the radio. At the time, clubs were dictating what dance music was on air. Programme directors were out in the venues hearing what was played… Stations were literally loudspeakers for what has happening in clubs.”
Names like Ted Currier, Shep Pettibone, Tony Humphries and Aldo Marin quickly follow when we ask about seminal broadcasts and hosts from Simonelli’s formative days. The latter, we’re told, was known for compiling mix shows like medleys, “hundreds of tunes or snips of tunes played within a short time frame… this was all pre-85”. Then we get to the clubs that made an impact, like Plaza Suite, where DJ Danny Cole held things down at a time when it was possible to catch the likes of Diana Ross and Sylvester at venues situated in the middle of residential neighbourhoods. Sowing the kind of roots that were always likely to lead to something, somewhere, in music, in this case it was Arthur Baker’s studio for an internship, circa 1987.
“I was already out and about in the city then, going to clubs. I was a regular at Dave Mancuso’s Loft parties, I’d go to The Underground, The Roxy — later 1018. I’d go to Jersey for Tony [Humphries] at Zanzibar. It was right after I got out of the Center for Media Arts [school] and I knew very clearly where I wanted to work — Shakedown. Being owned by Arthur Baker, I was such a fan, and John Robie as well, they were working together,” says Simonelli, voice betraying how exciting memories of that time still are. “When I went to get the job at the office I wanted to get in there and become a tape editor. I remember the first day I turned up for work at Shakedown and thought — what am I, late-teens? — I thought, I can’t wait to get in there and get my hands on the machines. Get started.

“When I got to the studio Arthur came to the door and said: ‘Who are you?’ I said: ‘I’m the new intern.’ He said: ‘OK, you’re gonna come with me and move house.’ So we went down the block to where his apartment was, on Sixth Avenue, right around 37th Street, and we had to pack up a van and move his stuff to a town upstate called Woodstock. We did it that day. And I’m glad it happened. He talks a lot, and I get to know him more. It was an introduction — you’re thrown in headfirst and you’re gonna have to get used to doing a bit of everything. You know? The following days I got into the studio but just cleaning up, running errands, that went on for months. Maybe up to a year, getting to know clients and what went on, slowly starting to assist engineers. But I kept putting the bug in his ear that I wanted to edit.”
While club legends like Danny Krivit, Junior Vasquez, and Gail Sky King were Shakedown regulars, Baker was also plying a big trade mixing more commercial names for major labels. And it’s from that client list Simonelli finally got his shot, on Will Downing’s ‘Sending Out An SOS’. Satisfying both artist and boss, floodgates opened, project after project followed, and Simonelli quickly began building a reputation as an editing master. Now an all-but-forgotten art, back then the process involved mixing down takes of a track onto various tape reels, listening to each, noting what parts of which sounded the best, and then physically splicing them together for a finished whole. Delivering goods for names such as Blondie, Ray Charles, Chaka Khan, and David Bowie, was, in his words, “really good training.”
“It was absolute pressure. On top of the work, Arthur had a real temper and competition was lined up at the door. I knew if I messed up, he’s moving to the next guy. So I basically went the whole other way — I moved in. I never left. He never asked me: ‘Do you want to leave? Do you want to take a break?’ Christmas would come, Easter would go by. I wasn’t asked about lunch or going home. This was work, work, work. I’d sleep on the floor. They had SoundEx soundproofing, there was some spare to lie on and a storage room. When he’d go home I’d continue working on a project, he’d expect results in the morning, but I’d sometimes take a short break in there, then come back… I didn’t think about anything but getting it done.
“Everything else after that is just, well, I’m not gonna say easy, but easier. And while I was doing that so many other clients were coming through and seeing me there, thinking who is this guy who’s always here? So they would approach me, we’d get talking, and I started to branch out a little bit, with other people and labels which, over time, started to take over my schedule,” Simonelli tells us, making it clear this insane-sounding period laid the foundations for him stepping out on his own after meeting Lenny Dee. Another intern, this time over at Nile Rodgers’ Skyline studio just around the corner, the pair hit it off, started producing together, and a new chapter in East Coast dance music opened.

“Arthur saw us and said: ‘You’re both from Brooklyn, why don’t you go with this name — Brooklyn Funk Essentials. He gave us that name, which he had at the time, but had only made one track with it — ‘We’ve Got To Come Together’, which I edited with him… Then Lenny took me to the corner of 38th Street, where Nu Groove and Fourth Floor [labels] were, with Tony Musto and Frank Mendez,” he continues. “This brings us to the 1990s. Until then, I’d done a lot of experimenting with production, mixing, feeling in the dark, feeling out the way. Then I did a production on Nu Groove, ‘I Want You To Know’ by Groove Committee. It was a night and day moment. The reactions I got were completely different to everything earlier… Todd Terry, again he’s from the neighbourhood, five minutes from me but we hadn’t met by this point. He called and said: ‘That’s awesome, you got something there, my advice is go back in the studio, do it again.”
As Simonelli puts it, with typical understatement, that’s exactly what he did. Next with the Groove Committee gem ‘Dirty Games’, then ‘Feel So Right’, another sublime track released under the pseudonym Solution. Both feature on Victor Simonelli: The Early Years, a release which in many ways is less about the tracks where it all started, and more a celebration of work that bookended a period in which teeth were cut in the shadows of chart toppers and industry moguls. Stepping into a fresh decade that would see a protege rise to the top of the international house music circuit, dates in Japan, the UK and Europe soon fell into place, while studio output matched bookings for pace. So, while the compilation doesn’t quite start at the beginning, it’s a time capsule from a period of sudden creative freedom, fuelled by confidence, the likes of which don’t come around too often.
Martin Hewitt
Click here to pre-order your vinyl copies of Victor Simonelli: The Early Years, out on May 12 (vol1) and May 26 (vol2)
Victor Simonelli plays a free instore show at Love Vinyl, 5 Pearson St, Dalston, E2 between 2pm-6.30pm on Saturday April 29