Interview // Richard Fearless of Death in Vegas

Originally published in the Irish Sun on Friday, June 1.

Urban legend has it that Richard Fearless was forced to drop his electronic project’s original name – Dead Elvis – following an objection from Presley’s estate. Here, the Death in Vegas mainman reveals it was a copyright claim from an identically-titled Dublin record label that led him to adopt the much more evocative title.

“Death in Vegas was a friend’s film about the last minutes of Elvis’ life. I had two days to change the name because there was a record label in Dublin called Dead Elvis,” he recounts. “It wasn’t so much Presley’s music as the kind of ‘obsession’ that interested me. I’ve always been quite obsessed by obsession. The whole obsessive thing about Elvis fans was what I was really into.”