Russell Small

When You Touch Me (Graham Norton Performance)
I was born on the 10th January 1968 & grew up in a town called Peacehaven which is where my career started at the age of 13 when I started my own DJing business; I was escorted around by my father to weddings and parties but unfortunately it didn't last that long as I had a dislike to slow ballads and my inability to stop swearing over the mic.

I focused my attention on house music......& started DJing at the Zap Club in Brighton this led me on the path to success as I had the opportunity to DJ with the likes of Carl Cox and other big named DJ's who all had career starting sets at the club over the years.

I formed a DJing partnership with Jason Hayward (Phats) and in 1999 Phats & Small was formed; we appeared on the scene with "Turn Around" a track sampling the vocals taken from Toney Lee's "Reach Up". We re-recorded the vocals with singer Ben Ofoedu & once released it debuted at No.3 in the UK Top 40, before climbing to No.2.

In this year we also released our first album titled "Now Phats What I Small Music" which is a play on words from the compilation series "Now That's What I Call Music". The album contained the follow up material "Feel Good" & "Tonite" which we also released as singles.

Apart from releasing our own material we managed to remix tracks as well for other artists such as; Earth Wind & Fire for the track September and Simply Red's "Ain't That A Lot Of Love"

In 2000 we won various awards for our work including a Muzik Dance Award, TMF Award, RSH Award, 2 German Dance Awards, 2 Southern FM/Capital Awards, 2 MOBO award nominations and a Brit Award nomination for Best Newcomer.

The first single off our Second album also called "This Time Around" was released on Multiply Records in 2001 with lead vocals from Tony Thompson, we followed this with the album "Soundtrack To Our Lives" in 2004 on Sony BMG Records this contained such tracks as "Beautiful Day", "The Groove", "Keep On Loving You" and our remix of the Annie Lennox and Dave Stuart's hit "Sweet Dreams".

Phats & Small sold over 2.5 million singles worldwide

The Freemasons were formed in July 2004 and Infamously named after a Brighton pub close to the studio. James Wiltshire and I are behind it all.

Over the last 2 years we have been writing, and producing material and in 2005 we transformed Jackie Moore's 1979 track "This Time Baby" and Tina Turner's 2000 hit "When The Heartache Is Over" into our first single "Love On My Mind". This track peaked at No 11 and stayed six weeks in the UK charts as well as going on to have international success in the US and Australia.

In an interview about the track I said the following;

"We were delighted with how the track did, It was great to see, because I think house music disappeared up it's arse for a while but then people started to have fun with their music again. "Love On My Mind" was a big tune that harked back to that early nineties vibe of hands in the air party music and it was nice to see that clubbers appreciated that."