Slim Hyatt was America’s first discothèque DJ, schooled in the French art of ‘spinning’ by Oliver Coquelin proprietor of New York society hotspot Le Club.
In the backdraft of the disco era, in a city known more for oil and politics than wild club culture, one of history’s most unlikely nightclubs was born. Built by a kitchen extractor magnate and envisioned by future design legend Phillippe Starck – he of three-legged lemon-squeezer fame – Dallas’s Starck Club rivalled Studio 54 for its mix of the monied and the magnificent. And it owed much of its success to an unlimited supply of a new drug called ecstasy, which it sold legally over the bar.
For five years between 1984 and 1989, the Starck Club sat at the epicentre of Dallas nightlife, channelling the hedonism of Studio, the novelty of New York’s Mudd Club, the style of Le Palace in Paris, and the innovation of Manchester’s Hacienda. It pre-empted a new wave of US dancefloor culture powered by a brand-new drug, and embodied a wild and revolutionary spirit that made it like no other place in the world.
By the early eighties, mainstream disco was losing favour and while there were vibrant underground dance scenes around the US, most of America thrilled to Bruce Springsteen, Madonna and Michael Jackson. Dallas at that time was best known for the TV show of the same name, the Cowboys football team and the JFK assassination (probably in that order). But thanks to the vision of local businessman Blake Woodall, a nightspot opened that signalled a new chapter in American club culture.
The Starck brought together cutting-edge Eurocentric electronic music, new wave and acid house in a purpose-built setting designed by French architect and industrial designer Phillipe Starck. “It was uniquely perched at the nexus of money, sin, sexual politics, style, recreational chemicals, and strange new musical hybrids,” Dallas musician and video director Greg Synodis told Jeff Liles in the Dallas Observer. “The Starck Club influenced people’s tastes and acceptance of what was right or wrong.” A draw for anyone who landed in the city, nothing was off limits, including then-legal ecstasy aka X, key to the club’s success, but also at the heart of its downfall.
At the turn of the decade, Blake Woodall was looking for something a little more exciting than taking over the local, albeit highly profitable, Vent-A-Hood family kitchen extractor business. He decided to open a nightclub slap bang in the centre of his hometown. But knew it was no small undertaking. “There was a design aspect, a music aspect, a fashion aspect, management aspect,” Woodall told RBMA. He managed to pull in some big-name backers including Stevie Nicks, as well as younger investors like Christina de Limur (aka Sita) who connected him to a then-unknown industrial designer destined for greatness. “I brought Philippe Starck to the deal, built the Club – my official title: conceptual engineer – and was a night manager from ’84,” she explained. “The point of the whole thing was to bring a little Paris to Texas. Bring something exotic, something different. It was a gamble, but it was a gamble worth taking,” she told the Dallas Observer. “We were at the right place at the right time. Dallas was like a boomtown then.”
Having found the perfect location – under the Woodall-Rodgers freeway – Woodall left Starck to work his magic. All went smoothly until, part-way through construction, the Frenchman was called back to Paris to work on the French President’s residence. While seemingly frustrating, the breathing space proved serendipitous – financial daggers had been drawn as costs ballooned, and while he was awaiting Starck’s return, Woodall paid a trip to Ibiza. “I was awed by the culture, the fashion and the music, and how it seemed so international,” he recalled. “We were listening to music from Barcelona, Munich, Tokyo, New York, Los Angeles. It was a remarkable music scene, and I made the decision at that point that would be the music aspect of our project.”
Before the grand opening night, a couple of jigsaw pieces were still missing. The first was Door Bitch. Woodall recruited the ‘Parisian Queen of Punk’, the late Edwige Belmore, doorwoman at Le Palace and frontwoman of Mathématiques Modernes who would turn away punters even when the dancefloor was half-empty. “I loved the original door girl,” Starck DJ Mark Ridlen remembered. “She would be doing the Watusi to my random mix one minute, and the next be manhandling an unruly cokehead to the nearest exit.”
The other was, of course, the music. With an opening night set to feature Stevie Nicks, Grace Jones and the Dallas Symphony Orchestra performing live, Starck recruited compatriot Philippe Krootchey on the decks. A model for Pierre and Gilles’ and a permanent fixture in the Paris clubs, Krootchey was also a musician, releasing ‘Dance on the Groove (And Do The Funk)’ as part of Love International. However, after many delays he failed to made it to the Starck’s opening night. Instead, on the advice of Grace Jones’ manager, at the last minute they pulled in New York-based Kerry Jaggers, who would be resident for the next six months.
The Dallas Morning News described the opening night as the kind of party Jay Gatsby might have thrown. To the fore was Starck’s radical design. A marble staircase led to a colossal bisected circular door which by all accounts took some welly to get open. “Once you entered beyond the red velvet curtain, it was an amazing labyrinth of walkways and hallways of a shrouded interior made up of translucent white curtains which made up cubicles,” remembered a patron on DiscoMusic.com. Kubrickian in essence.
But it was the dancefloor that really wowed the crowd. Sunk 12 feet below the DJ booth, the dancefloor housed the subwoofers, creating the sensation of actually being inside the sound system. And the floor was bisected by a giant arch which was placed there provocatively to create division. “It was the Capulets and the Montagues,” David Muir, another Starck DJ and regular told RBMA. “We didn’t go over and dance on that side and they didn’t come over and dance on our side. It was two separate worlds.” The other great talking point was the unisex bathroom. With stalls divided by glass blocks and motion sensitive TVs, people were very much left to do what they wanted. “There were honestly people that came into that club, went to the bathroom, stayed for two and a half hours, and when they left the bathroom went home,” General Manager Greg McCone added. “Never even went in the club.”
Despite the extravagant opening night, it took a while for word to spread. A strict door policy was in place, as much to protect the patrons as to create hype. “If you were of the gay culture you would want to know you were welcome,” Woodall explained. “If you were a business guy you would want to know you’re welcome. I had this idea that inside there would be green hair and then there would be some of the most remarkable, political people in the world.” In Dallas at that time, to have a dancefloor where drag queens rubbed shoulders with celebrities and aspiring politicos marked a truly watershed moment – all inhibitions and pre-conceptions to be left at the door. “There’d never been a mix of straight and gay crowds in a dance club, and it was just open season,” patron and doorman Nick Hamblen told the Dallas Observer. “I’m gay, and it was nice to go to a bar that was so incredibly mixed. The Starck Club opened the door and we never turned back.”
The dynamic of the place encouraged a broader, wilder and more creative crowd. “Part of the design and desire was to have a complete mix of all spectrums of people,” David Hynds, who ran the club’s art dept. told D Magazine. “The club was so ahead of its time, a Saturday night looked like Halloween,” remembered McCone. “People were in drag as Marie Antoinette or dressed up in tight suits painted green like Mars men. They’d come in naked with a terrycloth bathrobe on.” The club hosted fashion shows, plays, performance art. Local artists were invited in and there was an anything goes attitude. “We had these funky theme parties,” Ridlen told D Magazine. “We would make it look like a grocery store or we would make it look like a rodeo. We’d have these fun themes with appropriate music. We’d always have video exhibits, people showing their art videos. We had events just for that.”
Word quickly spread that the Starck was the hottest place in town, and by the time Grace Jones returned a couple of months later, it was the final push that was needed. Jones arrived late, very late, and insisted that the air conditioning was turned off. But she dazzled the crowd. And soon the Starck was a must for any celebrity who happened to be in Dallas – Rob Lowe, Robert Plant, Annie Lennox, Tom Cruise and Prince were all spotted. A Young Republicans fundraiser was held there with future prez George W Bush in tow. Thanks to its futuristic design, the club even featured in classic ’80s dystopian sci-fi Robocop!
The club’s other secret weapon was, famously, ecstasy. In 1984, when DJ Kerry Jaggers arrived from New York a friend gave him some with the instruction: “Spread that around. It will make it more fun.” Still legal in the US, ecstasy was made freely available at the Starck, sold by the bartenders who proudly advertised their side hustle with the t-shirt slogan “I got X.” “The money was crazy,” bartender Craig Depoi told the Dallas Observer. “Every night I’d make 600 to 800 bucks. People would slide ten or twenty hits of legal X across the bar in matchbooks.” The drug’s abundance was thanks to the crusader-like efforts of Michael Clegg, one of a group of Boston chemists who had investigated the therapeutic benefits of the drug and gone on to become one of its key producers (as well as rebranding it from Empathy to Ecstasy). Though now legendary for it, the Starck was not alone. “It was easy and clean, and all of the clubs in town were making it available to their clientele,” Mike Graff told Liles. “The whole city was overtaken by this phenomenon,” Wade Hampton told RBMA. “Southern Methodist University was completely knee-deep in ecstasy. You’ve got the children of politicians and you’ve got the parents trying to see what the kids are up to – it wasn’t unusual to see your parent’s friends out at Starck.”
As well as Grace Jones and Stevie Nicks, live gigs included Kid Creole and the Coconuts and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, but the Starck wasn’t really set up for live music. The stage was encumbered with large pillars, the acoustics were all wrong and the audience was thirty feet below. Unsurprisingly then, when it came to music it was all about the men behind the decks.
Despite failing to make the opening night, Frenchman Phillipe Krootchey was an early resident, but his punky approach meant he didn’t last long. “He would play something three times in a row and kind of sloppily scratch, throw people off in their rhythm while they were dancing. People would boo, and I thought, ‘That’s great!’” Mark Ridlen told the Dallas Observer.
Ridlen himself also played there, adopting a similarly raucous, anything-goes style. “He had more of this punchy flavour that was probably more suited for the bombastic desires of a Dallas crowd,” says Wade Hampton, producer of the unreleased documentary The Starck Project.
Kerry Jaggers brought a style of DJing that wasn’t bound to four to the floor. “We weren’t afraid of playing below 110 beats per minute,” he recalled to RBMA. “Most DJs would say, ‘Oh, no, that’s too slow. You can’t play that in a club!’” He didn’t shy away from playing more commercial tracks either – The Smiths’ ‘How Soon Is Now’, Billy Idol’s ‘Eyes Without A Face’ and even Nik Kershaw were aired there.
It was his successor, San Antonian DJ Rick Squillante, who put The Starck on the map musically. “Rick was a very Hawaiian shirt and flip-flops type of guy,” said Jaggers, who brought him to the Starck. “I had to kind of trick them together, but that was one of the best things that I probably ever did to that club.” Squillante would go on to head Virgin Records New York dance division in the ’90s, signing key tracks by Josh Wink and Armand Van Helden and helming Janet Jackson’s rise to superstar status. In Dallas, playing what became known as “Starck music”, Squillante brought a mix of deep disco, new wave and European synthpop to the club. He played Trevor Horn, Pet Shop Boys, Echo & the Bunnymen, Bauhaus and Malcolm McLaren – music that the Starck crowd had never heard before. They called it “Eurotech”. “He was playing music you couldn’t hear at any other local club… that you couldn’t hear at any other club in America – until he made it relevant,” Don Nedler, who (briefly) reopened the club in 1996, told the Dallas Observer. But while he may have had the crowd eating out of his hand, Squillante wasn’t what you would call a technician. He didn’t really mix, preferring to spend his time hosting breakaway parties in his booth. But he was always in control, deftly switching between tracks and often playing for ten or eleven hours straight. “Rick would be talking to all these people and would turn away with 30 seconds left of music, walk over, pull a record out, throw it on, and it would be right on cue and mix right into a new track,” Starck regular David Muir told RBMA.
Christina de Limur and DJ Rick Squillante
As the eighties advanced so did the music, and while Squillante was highly lauded, his successor, “GoGo” Mike DuPriest was perhaps even more influential. Embracing acid house and the burgeoning rave culture, he shifted from the melody aesthetic of Squillante to the pulsating rhythm of house music. Often using three turntables, DuPriest acted as the inspiration for many local DJs who took the new music and spread it across the US – Red Eye, Rob Vaughan, Cle Acklin, JT Donaldson, DJ Merritt, Ronnie Bruno and DJ Daisy – moved by his unmatched knowledge for this new music and flawless choice of records. “Chicago house tracks by Frankie Knuckles and Fast Eddie, Detroit Techno tracks from Derrick May and Juan Atkins alongside UK Acid House artists like 808 State, S’ Express, Baby Ford and The Beatmasters,” Jeff K told Liles in 2009. “Having come to Dallas from NYC, Mike DuPriest had the knowledge of these records and understood the movement that was upon us.” And it wasn’t just his choice in tunes; it was a whole new approach to playing music. “He was also blessed with the skill and technique to phrase, mix and generate emotion unlike any DJ I’d ever seen before,” continues Jeff K. “Prior to Starck, electronic dance music had never made me cry. That final night of Starck Club with Mike DuPriest at the helm, I wept like a child.”
All good things must come to an end and by 1986 the writing was on the wall. This was partly down to the fact the Starck was so fun, innovative and audacious that it had spawned a wealth of new clubs in Dallas and its novelty was diminished. It was also partly down to MDMA. The Club’s open drug sales meant the DEA got very antsy about it. MDMA became a Schedule 1 narcotic on July 1st, 1985, and a year later the Starck was raided. The club was served with a no-dance ban in April 1987 which they embraced by running a “No Dance” party. It carried on for a while but following one last hurrah with who else but Grace Jones, it closed its doors on July 11 1989.
“It was fun being one of the owners of one of the most remarkable nightclubs in the world,” Blake Woodall told RMBA. “Then I started seeing how big it was getting, how almost out of control it was.” Christina de Limur agrees. “All these things do have a lifespan. We had a good run.”
He has the honour of being first to bring dance music to Radio One in with his 1987 Friday-night Big Beat show. He followed this with another groundbreaking dance show, Club Culture, on Capital, along with stints at Kiss and a long-lasting show on Jazz FM. He’s also enjoyed a long and influential career behind the scenes in labels and production companies. But Jeff cut his teeth as a soul DJ, warming up for Robbie Vincent and Greg Edwards, then throwing his lot in with the new generation as electronic soul, hip hop and house started frightening off the old guard. Few DJs have such a broad understanding of how dance music moved from a world of obsessives and obscurities to the driving force of the UK music scene.
How did you get into music? I grew up in North Kent, born 1955. All I can remember is around eight years old, I just started to listen to music. And in 1963, things were pretty exciting. I listened to the pirate stations avidly, Caroline, Radio London. I was gutted when they all closed down, because the BBC’s coverage of the music I liked was pretty poor. When I was at school it was Zeppelin, Hendrix, Stones. It was the blues-based stuff. I never liked the Deep Purples and the Genesis of this world. There was always a black music thing in me somewhere. And then when I was 17, I started DJing with a friend of mine, and it was all up to Contempo to buy imports. I still kept up an interest in pop and various other bits and pieces, but black music pretty much took over my life after I was 17.
What was Contempo like? In those days, it was two rooms on the first floor of a building in Hanway Street, just by Tottenham Court Road. We used to get the train up there on a Saturday and climb the stairs, and the guys behind the counter would just be playing tunes one after the other. You’d stick your hand up and you’d buy it. They always had a little thing where they’d pin sevens on the wall, the stuff that had come in that week. They had a lot of back-catalogue as well. I can’t remember if the Blues & Soul [magazine] office was there as well or not. That was the first place we went to. Then after Contempo, we found places like City Sounds and The Groove, and Bluebird and all those other shops that had emerged.
When you started DJing, was it a mobile DJ set-up? Yeah. We I DJed in a Catholic youth club, of all places. Sunday nights, and gradually got some money together, got some gear, and then started to do weddings and that kind of stuff. A good grounding really, because you learn how to get a dancefloor and then keep it, which is something I’ve seen some people still not be able to master.
When I was around 21 me and my friends, if we didn’t go to the Goldmine, we’d go to this Golden Lion pub in Sydenham where Robbie Vincent was DJing. And one week, Robbie needed a backup DJ, and so he took a flyer. I started to do bigger gigs with him. I built up a sound system, and when he got booked, he would get me to put the sound in and then back him up. And he took to me because I never stitched the main turn-up.
You laid the ground. Yeah. I could quite happily warm a room up for an hour without playing anything. He told Chris Hill about me, and then Greg Edwards. So I ended up doing loads of warm-up gigs for these guys. Robbie then got me a gig at The Royalty in Southgate, warming up for all the big turns of the week.
What was the Goldmine like? It was a great place to go. When we first went he was doing the swing thing with the Glenn Miller business. There’d be all these kids dressed up in army gear, waiting for the 45 minutes when he’d turn the place into a swing palace, and then he would go back to the black music. We liked it as a novelty, but we weren’t unhappy when it ended. It was a good camaraderie there which carried on for years and years. It was so rare there was a fight in the Goldmine. Everyone was friendly. The weekly lot, which was probably two-thirds of the club, you knew each other after a while. It was great.
Robbie Vincent and Jeff Young (R) show off their military side
And was it very multicultural or…? It was multicultural, but I do think there was a little bit of door racism. A few people have said to me over the years, “I went down to Goldmine and they wouldn’t let me in,” which obviously hurt quite a lot. Embarrassing. You had the tribes in those days of course, the Brixton Frontline and so on, and everyone had black members in their tribes. So it wasn’t like we were a completely middle-class white audience. It was multicultural, but maybe not as multicultural as it could have been.
I guess the crowd in those days was largely working-class kids? Yeah, and they nearly all traveled. There were a few kids in there from Canvey Island, but not many. Most people drove down from all kinds of places, as they did most of the other suburban soul clubs like Frenchies and Flicks, and all these other places that sprung up.
What was Frenchies like? Frenchies was similar to the ‘Mine. Different clientele. A Sunday night, so it had a slightly different vibe. It was the first place I ever played where, a bit like the northern scene, if they really like something you played, you got a round of applause at the end of it. And that shocked me the first time it happened. I was like, “Fucking hell, what are they doing? They’re clapping.” The guy that ran it was a bit of a notorious boy, and he was quite funny. So yeah, it was great, Frenchies.
Did the music vary from club to club? It was mainly along the same lines. The jazz funk and soul-y bits, and Philadelphia International and Salsoul. There was one period at the Goldmine where it was very jazzy. The other clubs were not as jazzy as the ‘Mine, which would have been quite tough for a lot of punters [to dance to].
And what about Flicks in Dartford? What was that like? Well, Flicks was a different kind of club, in that although it had a black music policy, it was a dress smart thing, there’s a restaurant in the club, like a lot of those kind of clubs in those days.
Were there any DJs in particular that inspired you when you were starting out? Chris Hill and Robbie [Vincent] and Greg [Edwards] were the obvious ones, because they would be getting stuff even earlier than some of the import shops because of their record company connections. Chris’s music was a bit tougher than what Robbie used to play, and I liked that. Later on, I began to like people like Gilles [Peterson] and Paul Oakenfold. I looked at what some of the younger guys were playing, and I used to think they put sets together really, really well. In those days you would still play anything you wanted. So you could play jazz and you could play hip hop and you could play soul, but they would be doing it in a slightly different way. It wasn’t until the acid house thing came up that nights began to emerge where you weren’t doing too much cross-pollination.
What about your broadcasting career? You played on Radio London from very early on. Yeah. I always thought I was too Cockney for radio. These were the days when you had to have a modicum of Queen’s English to get away with broadcasting. Robbie was going away for a weekend and he put me and Graham Canter on his show on Radio London. We did that a few times, and then eventually he said to me, “Just do it on your own.”So I would do sit-ins for Robbie when he went on holiday or he’s at home cutting his grass or something. And it just developed from there.
I did go on the pirates as well. I was on JFM for a little while, but not regularly. I was working in club promotion for a major record company, and the hours were long and I was away a lot. So the last thing I wanted to do most Sunday mornings was jump out of bed and drive to Streatham to broadcast. Eventually Robbie went to Radio One, and they gave me the Radio London show. It went on at 11:30 and think it was the breakfast show for most people who we were broadcasting to.They later changed it to 8.30 which wasn’t as much fun. But soon after that I moved to Radio One.
On Radio London, were you given carte blanche to just play what you wanted? Yeah, exactly. Whoever did that show chose the music. I’ve been really, really lucky, because every radio show I’ve done that’s my own, I’ve either programmed all of it or most of it. I did have a show on Jazz FM on a Saturday and a Sunday for a little while where they wanted me to play fifty percent playlist, but I got to choose the other half, so that was okay. And even on Capital, Richard Park let me let me choose all the music, which was pretty unheard of.
I was at Capital around 2000. Saturday nights from seven to eleven. I’d left Radio One and stayed out of radio for a while. Then I formed a production company with Pete Tong and Eddie Gordon and we got Danny Rampling onto Radio One, and [Judge] Jules. The Essential Mix was our program. I did some stuff for Kiss. And then Parky came in and I went to Capital. My Capital show had more people listening to it than the relevant Radio One shows and Kiss shows added together, it was a really good platform, it was their first foray into a proper dance show really.
I did a year on Xfm, which was disastrous. So I came off radio, and I was basically listening to Ibiza chill-out music for about ten years. And all of a sudden, I got a call from Jazz FM. Robbie wasn’t well. They said, “Would you do three and a half months?” And I stayed for ten years. So, I’ve done most of the major stations in London at various times.
What about the label side of things? I was at Phonogram, which later became Mercury. I’d signed Shannon’s “Let the Music Play” to the label and I went to America with our video bloke to shoot a video for it. First time in New York, I couldn’t believe it. I’m listening to these radio stations, and I’m looking at the city, all this stuff. I realised that quite a lot of pop stations, like WBLS, would have a normal week. Then at, say 6pm on a Friday, they would become a dance station, and they’d stay like that until Sunday night, then they’d revert to their normal format.
So in 1987 I wrote a three-page letter to [Radio One Controller] Johnny Beerling telling him why he needed a dance program on Radio One, either a Friday or a Saturday. Indie music was in a bit of a doldrums at that point. I thought nothing would come of it. But all of a sudden there was a rumble around Radio One that they were thinking about doing this. And I’d actually agreed to go to Capital when Radio One suddenly rang and said, “Would you do Friday nights for us?” I nearly didn’t take it because they were on medium wave at that time. A medium wave at night was just an unmitigated nightmare. But they said, “Oh, six weeks after you join, we’re going FM.”
And did they let you get on with it? I think outside of people like [John] Peel, they’d never had anyone like me in there before. They gave me a guy to work with who was a regular Radio One producer. He’s looking at me to play the dance music that’s in the chart. And I was saying, “You know what? It doesn’t really work that way.” But I was lucky, because he went off with Mike Read to do a mammoth Paul McCartney documentary which took him out of the building for months. So I just worked on my own. I got people to make jingles for me. I started in October ’87, but it took me about six months to kind of get in the groove of the whole thing. And then they started to say to me, “Man, your figures are flying.” They never showed them to me, but they were obviously very, very happy with it. And I just kept going.
At that point, even on radio shows, you were still dodging around between genres. I kind of isolated the hip hop stuff and devoted the last hour of the show to that, because it would really break up the flow otherwise. I had three or four hours so I had plenty of time to fit in the other stuff.
What other music were you playing in ’87? Early house records would have been out by then. Yeah, early house. In those days you got letters from people saying, “Oh, you don’t play enough acid.” So I would play a bit of acid and a bit of this and that, but I didn’t go the whole hog. It was a bit of a leap of faith for me to play Lil’ Louis “French Kiss,” for example. I was always aware I was on the radio. It wasn’t in a club. There was still Salsoul and stuff buzzing about. And a lot of the British stuff that really went pop, like S’Express.
Stock Aitken and Waterman? No, I stayed off that. Even though I was working for Phonogram. We had Kool & The Gang too, but I never played a Kool & The Gang record. I wasn’t going to do that. I might have played Cameo. I can’t remember. I probably did, but yeah, the real pop end of it, I didn’t. I might’ve played “Roadblock”, but that was a scam anyway, as we all know. It was quite funny going into a shop and someone trying to claim it was an old record from back in the day, when it was being driven by a drum machine.
Yeah. Listening to it now, you’re like, How did people fall for this? It was shrink-wrapped as well. I ripped the record out of the sleeve and looked at the run-out groove, because there was the British mastering boys’ signature in the run-out groove. So you knew it was cut in London, and they had a drum machine on it, and no, it wasn’t Maceo. You know? So, yeah. Funny. Good scam.
Tell me about [Record Mirror dance columnist] James Hamilton He was a larger-than-life character on a number of levels, both his height, and he was really funny. He told it like it was. If he didn’t like something you’d done, he’d tell you, no problem at all. He would come to our gigs, he’d review them, and we’d go out to eat. And of course, the size of the bloke, he was unbelievable in restaurants: two starters, two main courses. And his obsessive BPM business was a legend of its own. But yeah, he was a really, really great guy. Proper music lover. And he didn’t mind a laugh as well. We put a couple of things in Record Mirror that were proper stunts. Fictitious clubs on a Tuesday night, people wandering around Essex looking for Candles Club at Camberwick Green.
And the Japanese jazz stunt. He printed a chart with a fictitious title, and the artist was “Can you suck a large one?” It was K-A-N-U, Sukka Larjwon, spelt like a Japanese name. And of course people fell for it again, and it started to appear in people’s charts. It was tragic when he died, it really was.He died a young man, really, in the big scheme of things.
I met him once and he really reminded me of [’50s actor] James Robertson Justice. Yeah, oh, absolutely. The whole accent thing and all that. Yeah, he was a proper lord.
In the ’80s, if you were into dance music, it was hard to actually hear it, unless you went out to clubs. Outside London, on the radio you’d get maybe two hours tops of dance music programming a week. Radio London had a couple of shows on during the week, the big one was obviously Robbie’s Saturday show, then Greg Edwards on Capital Saturday night. You’d wait for the weekend and try and zoom in on the pirates, God bless them. They all had money problems and they kept having their transmitters nicked by the DTI and they couldn’t afford to replace them. So you never knew if your favorite guy was going to be on Sunday or not. So it wasn’t until really Radio One opened up. And then of course we had Kiss, which opened up things in London.
Kiss really did change things, didn’t it? Yeah, absolutely. Kiss did open it up. They had a couple of false starts, but they finally got on. They had to do what all radio stations do: they started off with great intentions of having all these specialist shows, then they had to start whittling those down because they needed to get numbers to get ads. So it did get a bit diluted after about 12 months, but yeah, Kiss did a fantastic job. It’s unrecognisable to what it is now, of course, but yeah, it was great. It was exciting being involved. It really was. The place was buzzing because it was all young kids that were running it.
How has the fact that we have a national broadcaster in the BBC, influenced how music is programmed? What are the differences if you compare it with the US, which obviously has always been very commercial. Radio One will roll with what’s happening at any one time. When Pete took the Radio One show on and club culture did absolutely explode, it had a really big influence on what they were playing during the day as well. At the end of the ’90s, that decreased a bit as the guitar genres woke up again. I think Capital might have jumped into a bit more dance stuff than it did initially. So yeah, I think it did. I think it had a huge influence.What used to happen back in the mid-’80s, something would be the leading genre of the time, whether it’s indie guitars or dance or whatever, stick around for three years, and then it’s something else. But dance turned up and it never left the building. The ’90s were just awesome when I think about it. It’s a testament to the producers and the artists that kept it moving.
It was the first kind of dance music we were able to make here that had credibility outside of the country. Suddenly, we were making music that was comparable with America. All of a sudden you could put a studio in a bedroom, that was it. We’re off to the races. All of a sudden, we don’t have to go and record it somewhere that’s a few hundred quid a day. You can do it at home and do it very economically. The world was everybody’s lobster when technology made that leap.
When I interviewed Marshall Jefferson, he described house music as the black punk rock, and that really struck a chord with me because as a teenager, I moved down to London as punk rock was happening. And house music felt like that to me. I loved the slightly amateurish feel of it. I think it’s a really good description. People like him took the bull by the horns and just cracked it. Absolutely.
How did you go from your Radio One show to Pete taking over? I left Radio One at the very end of December 1990. And at the time, I had a very responsible job at A&M, and it was pretty pressured. I look back and probably all I needed was a month off, because I was just shattered. I listened to all the records. I did everything. Whereas I think where Pete was quite clever, he had a couple of people around him that helped him out. When I left they asked me what they should do, I said, “Get Pete Tong off Capital.” And they did.
How did [production company] Wise Buddha come about? [Radio One Controller] Matthew Bannister kept badgering Pete to do more programs, and Pete just couldn’t do it, but he decided we could form a company and deliver dance-orientated programs to Radio One. It was one of the early independent production companies: Me, Eddie Gordon and Pete. The first thing we did was get Danny Rampling off Kiss. We introduced Westwood to the Radio One people. We just sort of let them shake hands, then we stepped away. We already had the Essential Mix on air, that was another one of our programs. We kept saying, “Take Gilles,” and they did eventually, about three years later. They took a drum and bass show about eight months after drum and bass first reared its head. And that was quick for them. They asked us to do it, but we weren’t sure. So they took Fabio and Grooverider in-house and just did a show with them.
And who were you dealing with at Radio One in that period? Andy Parfitt, mostly. We said to them, “Look, we think you should get involved in Ibiza.” And they were like, “Hmm, okay, that’s interesting.” So we did a recce, decided we could do it, although we had to drive broadcast satellites to Ibiza. We didn’t trust Spanish ISDN. The first year, it was just Pete, Danny and a couple of guests did programs. The second year, we bolted on Dave Pearce. And then the third year, Radio One went mental and sent everybody. That was when Moyles went. Zoe went. Everybody went.
Is that the year that Lisa I’Anson… Yeah, that was the, “Has anyone seen Lisa?” year.
They were asking for trouble, weren’t they? It cost them a lot of money. They wanted to take everyone, which meant all the staff went as well. I would have just had two teams working on various times during the day, and that would have cut the costs down. But no, they wanted everyone, and it was like that for quite a few years.
Was it inevitable that house music would take over the world? I remember being at one of the New Music Seminars in New York. And all the top boys were on the top table jabbering away with stories and insight, the likes of Marshall Jefferson and all these early adopters. And I remember saying to Pete, “If these boys put songs on these tracks they make, they’d be really dangerous.” And eventually, that did happen, and it allowed that music to open up to a wider audience who don’t all want instrumentals or dubs or whatever. Let’s face it. There are people that need a melody with their music. And in the early days of remixes, some pop act would make a generic record. And then somebody like me would send it to someone like Marshall Jefferson and say, “Turn that into a house record for me, so I can get it played in clubs.” That’s how it rolled.
Did you have to fight to get UK remixers involved? In the early days of Janet Jackson on A&M, she was having all of her stuff done by Shep Pettibone. And we were ringing the Americans going, “Listen, this is fine, but it’s a bit like telling the same joke twice. Can you please let us get one of our guys to do it?” And we got either CJ Mackintosh on his own or him and Dave Dorrell to remix a track. She loved it. Then after that, they let us do it because what we did had more of a European flavour than just another Shep Pettibone remix. It’s always been the same. You do anything to push that record a bit further, and the remix was the tool that you use.
When you look back to the remix mania of the 1990s and triple packs of Dannii Minogue, it did get a bit mental, didn’t it? It got completely out of hand, really. But in those days there were still budgets to be had and you would do anything to get your act into the chart. And if you got it there by selling 3000 12-inches in week one, then that’s the way you did it.
I want to ask you about the splits in the soul scene in the ‘80s, because you had a foot in both camps. Tell me about the adverse reactions to the electronic soul music that was starting to come out in the early ’80s, and to hip hop. Well, it split the DJs as well as the punters, really. A lot of the DJs really didn’t like the step away from what was soul music of that time. At first, there was a bit of a kickback. What we never got into was the electro thing. We did records with drum machines, but we didn’t do electro, but we did do hip hop. And I think most people came round to that. In those days, hip hop was made using samples that we all knew, so there was kind of a perverse familiarity to it. Before you’ve even stuck a needle on, you knew there’s going to be a reference point for people, and it’s just down to them whether they want to take it in and dance to it or not, really.
The first huge one was Doug E. Fresh “The Show”. It was absolutely enormous. At these traditional soul weekenders you’d put Doug E. Fresh on and people would go absolutely ballistic. And that didn’t go down too well with some of the older members of the community. Same with radio, Pete [Tong] and I were deliberately pushing barriers all the time. We’d play hip hop records we thought were relevant or good, and then we did dance stuff. And of course, there was jazz as well. Even Prince was not acceptable for some people, but Pete and I were into that whole Paisley Park thing. We were pushing the barriers a bit on the radio, which helped with the clubs. But yeah, the split. Some people did go off and just do soul clubs instead of clubs that played across the board. But it split the DJs more than anything else, I think.
Was it mostly a generational thing? Yeah, definitely. The older ones were not having it basically, whereas the younger ones, that’s what they were up for. That was their lifeblood, keeping everything moving forward. New music, new genres. So yeah, definitely. Definitely a generation splitter.
I remember reading in Blues & Soul, Frank Elson claiming that it wasn’t soul, it wasn’t soulful To me, it was just music moving forward, music progressing. Did it have to be some sort of fist-clenching indie soul anymore? I don’t think so. We were moving on and looking for new things. I’m not surprised Frank Elson would write that. I’d be more surprised if he said, “Oh, I love all this new stuff that’s coming along.” I remember one kid writing to Blues & Soul because he looked through the back window of my car and I had a couple of Gang of Four cassettes on the back seat, and he thought that was disgusting.
How did it affect the soul scene? Was it like northern soul where some people were only playing classics? There was new soul music for those guys to play. So, there were rooms where people would go and hear that stuff, but there was a group of us that just moved away from it, because we wanted to play other things that to us were a bit more exciting. The soul thing never really went away.
What other records divided people? Gave people a real line in the sand? Particularly the early Def Jam stuff, really. “Rock the Bells”, “My Adidas”, all that classic stuff from Run-DMC, and the Beastie Boys. When I started the Radio London show at 8:30 in the morning, I opened up with “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party!)”, just to send a little message to the people at Radio London. People had to make up their minds pretty quickly.
When I interviewed Pete Tong many years ago, he said, “When rap came along, me and Jeff Young became the embarrassment on the bill at those weekenders.” We were the enfant terribles. For example, on a Sunday afternoon we deliberately played Doug E. Fresh, knowing the next bloke on the decks was Robbie Vincent. And Robbie would come on shaking his head, “Oh, fucking hell, they’re playing this shit.” So yeah, we did it deliberately.
Did you feel you were the vanguard of the next generation and these guys were out of touch? It did feel like that. I was in a slightly difficult position because I straddled the generations. I wasn’t a young gun, yet I wasn’t one of the old gits. You know what I mean? I would be siding with the young guns, because that’s what I liked.
How important was the jazz-funk, soul scene in setting the stage for the rave scene that came later? I think we did really set that whole rave thing up. Although people take the piss out of the weekenders, they were early raves, if you see what I mean. Three thousand people in a holiday camp! Because of licensing laws, it was one, two, three, four or five sessions of music over the weekend. And a lot of those early rave DJs came out of that soul scene. When you think of Nicky [Holloway] and Pete and Oakey, Johnny Walker, those boys cut their teeth playing soul records and then developed into their own thing. I think we were the precursor to it. I wouldn’t say I would want credit for anything, but I don’t think what we did got enough recognition in terms of what rolled forward out of it.
“Noone else could do what I was doing at that time, that type of music what I was playing. It attracted the good soul people to come down and have a good boogie, show what they can do,” George Power told BBC documentary The Last Pirates of his time at Crackers nightclub. “People come here to dance, express themselves let themselves go – whether you were gay, straight or bisexual it was just something unique.”
Crackers has made its way into London clubbing folklore for the fact it inspired a generation of soul boys to sally forth and transform the future of British music. With its first-rate musical credentials, it enticed white and black music lovers to come together on the dancefloor like never before, in a scene that helped black kids develop their own sense of Britishness. There were a few clubs around London that were channelling the same aesthetic of danceable and hot-off-the-press jazz, soul and funk – Upstairs at Ronnie Scott’s, the 100 Club, the Electric Ballroom – but it was Crackers, located in the heart of Soho and presided over first by Mark Roman and then the much-revered George Power, that became the scene’s heart and soul.
Back in the early ’70s, as northern soul was thriving in the top half of the UK, a different breed of swing-heavy, funk-inflected soul took hold down South. Moving out from suburban clubs like Chris Hill’s Goldmine in Canvey Island, this blossoming soul movement and its largely white following started gathering for weekenders at venues across the country including Caister and Prestatyn, led by the ‘Soul Mafia’ of Hill and his coterie of likeminded DJs, Robbie Vincent, Greg Edwards, DJ Froggy and a young Pete Tong.
But while these parties concentrated on almost exclusively black music, as the scene grew, black dancers felt edged out. “The Soul Mafia things tended to be white beer boys in T-shirts, dancing to the obvious big records,” says soulboy and Crackers regular Terry Farley. The West End was a similar story, thanks to blatantly racist door policies.
George Power would go on to a long career in radio, launching Kiss FM with Gordon Mac, as well as Mi-Soul, London Greek radio and Crackers Radio
“They wanted the blackness, without the black,” agrees Good Times’ soundsystem DJ and early soul boy Norman Jay. “It was great for white kids to like black music, but they didn’t want black kids in there for some reason.” Norman recalls how things changed as football terrace culture infiltrated the scene. “I can remember the earliest things at the Goldmine in Canvey Island, and it was almost exclusively black. If you look at photos of Canvey Island circa ’74 it’s black. Within a few years the clientele had changed.”
For the black kids who went to Crackers, soul represented a move away from the reggae that was the staple of their neighbourhoods. “I was kind of divided,” says Fabio, one half of the legendary drum and bass duo, Fabio and Grooverider. “I felt reggae and soul music, but in them days, you couldn’t really be both, you had to be one or the other.” So much so that he used to lie about going to soul clubs. “A cousin of mine used to go to soul clubs, and she used to sneak me in and I never used to tell anybody.” Dancer and DJ Cleveland Anderson felt a similar divided loyalty. “It wasn’t we weren’t into reggae, but as soon as I got old enough to go out on my own, I was drawn to the soul.”
Crackers was where many British clubbers experienced a truly mixed crowd for the first time. “Blues parties [all-night ska and reggae house parties] you didn’t meet any white people in there,” says Fabio. “It was 99 percent black. But this was 50/50. That was the first time I’d ever seen that. And the first time I saw colour didn’t really matter. You could go out with a white girl and it weren’t no big thing.”
“Crackers was much more urban, a heavier London,” recalled Gilles Peterson on The Last Pirates. “A blacker London. It was less what I was used to but equally it was really exciting, and it was a whole other world.”
There’s almost no visual record of Crackers. This classic piece of archive was actually shot in Brixton’s Cloud’s club, but it features many of the great dancers of the scene.
The club was slap-bang in the middle of Soho, at the Oxford Street end of Wardour Street. Not much to look at, it was essentially a basement dive that housed a cramped dancefloor for 200 revellers – a stark contrast to some of the more swish West End clubs of the era. “Upon arrival we’d go down a short flight of stairs and the first thing that greeted you was the smell of sausages and chips,” says Farley (the food was a licensing loophole). “The carpets were dirty and sticky. The sound system whilst loud lacked any real clarity and the high end would always leave you with ringing ears the next day.”
“Crackers was more about dancing, it wasn’t to do with girls really,” remembers Soul II Soul’s Jazzie B. “For us it was just purely about the music: getting that early music before anybody else. It was mainly for dancers, because it wasn’t where you came to meet people, it was where the dancers came to burn.”
It was also markedly different from northern soul, a scene based on unearthing rare soul from the ’60s. “The difference between us and those northern kids is that we were into new things,” says Norman Jay. “New music, new sounds, new clothes. We didn’t want to look back. Looking back was rock’n’roll and dinosaurs. We wanted the latest, the hippest.”
And that’s certainly what was delivered at Crackers. George Power would be its best-known DJ, but it was Essex-born Mark Roman who set the wheels in motion in 1973. He was drafted from a residency in Leytonstone to spin records six nights a week, and given carte blanche to play pretty much whatever he wanted – which was anything from deep soul to jazz-funk to fusion to proto-disco.
It was on Tuesday nights when it started to get serious – with Roman impressing collectors and dancers alike. On Tuesdays he would play US imports only and had no hesitation in sitting the jazz-fusion of Grover Washington Jr next to the out and out funk of Bobby Byrd and Johnny ‘Guitar’ Watson.
Other tunes he made his own include Juggy Jones’ ‘Inside America’, The Blackbyrds’ ‘Rock Creek Park’, Donald Byrd’s ‘Change Makes You Wanna Hustle’, David Ruffin’s ‘Walk Away from Love’, Dooley Silverspoon’s ‘As Long As You Know,’ Fatback Band’s ‘Going Home To See My Baby’, Black Blood’s ‘A.I.E.’ and Crystal Glass’ ‘Crystal World’.
“He never mixed but kind of segued the tracks, so it was this seamless mixture of funk and soul,” says Fabio. “It was amazing.”
It took a while to get going. “Tuesday nights had a big fat zero people when I started,” Roman told Terry Farley. But then it all changed. “One night in the middle of winter we had over a thousand people there… the walls were wet with water dripping down them. That night was like no other night I have ever known, it was so rammed I used to have to piss in a glass under the decks I had no chance of getting through the crowd and back in time.”
And while Tuesday attracted the diehards, it was the Friday lunchtime dance sessions that made Crackers famous. “I used to play all my new stuff,” remembers Mark Roman on SixMillionSteps.com. “Somehow it just went down. The hot summer of ’76 was when it really peaked.” It was customary to see kids bunking off school, uniforms screwed up in duffle bags, while the grown-ups awarded themselves a half-day. DJ and producer Ashley Beedle remembers changing into his Bowie trousers in the school toilets at lunchtime. And social media is awash with similar stories. “Went every Sunday and Friday lunchtimes while still at school 1979/80,” recalls Crackers regular Lynn Gant. “Went in lunch break when started work in Holborn, then stayed until 3pm. Told friend to tell boss I was ill!”
As well as the music, Crackers was known for its forward-thinking fashions, with many an outfit patently ahead of its time. Much of the fashions that would become known as punk started here. Bondage trousers, army surplus, fluorescent colours, clear plastic jelly sandals. There was an overall atmosphere of tolerance and freedom. “It wasn’t a gay club per se, but it was hip and fashionable,” Norman Jay told RBMA’s Stephen Titmus. “Yes, the music was brilliant, but it was the coming together of different social groups and races. That was what was groundbreaking.”
By the mid-’70s, Crackers was pulling in punters on Saturdays and Sundays as well as Friday lunchtimes, as dancers flitted from one West End soul venue to another. But while they may have been dedicated to the cause, they weren’t helping Crackers turn a profit, and many remember when they turned the cold-water taps off to encourage spending at the bar. This coincided with a clash between Roman and new management who were not only unhappy at the low bar takings but were also less than delighted with his music choices, and so it was that in late 1976 Roman and Crackers went their separate ways and he moved back to Leytonstone’s Jaws, taking half the crowd with him.
As well as George Power, a fair few DJs passed through Crackers’ doors, including Andy Hunter, Pepe, and latterly, Paul ‘Trouble’ Anderson. “Andy Hunter, he was just amazing,” recalls Cleveland Anderson. “He was a white guy, skinny, kinda tall. Boy he could throw music down. He seemed to have this ability to pull out the new tunes that the heads would like and also the girls would like.” But he soon became disillusioned with the way that the music world was going and when he left George Power stepped in to the limelight.
Power had been thrust into the multi-ethnic community of North London when he arrived from Greece aged just 15, and before long had immersed himself into DJ culture, ending up with quite a following at a club called Bumbles in Wood Green. When he left here for Crackers in 1976, Power brought with him a gay and black crowd. The music had moved from the slower funk vibe into disco, and he was quite a bit older than the kids on his dancefloor. Despite seemingly corny shoutouts – ‘Wang dang dooey, shoobedy on down’ – his music and his over-the-top flamboyance endeared himself to the Crackers’ crowd. They knew that under his wing they would hear the best music, dance in peace and come together.
“A very strange guy,” says Jazzie B. “Quite hard and a little bit militant. But very cutting edge, and he was very into that whole black thing, the whole black scene.” And this gave Crackers a big pull. “He was totally on the button, understood what black kids were about,” says Jay. “He became a legend. In our eyes, inner city urban kids, George Power was more important than any Chris Hill or Robbie Vincent. They didn’t mean anything to us. They weren’t as cutting-edge, or as up to the minute as George.”
Even his predecessor agrees. “Over many years he showed he was a true soul man,” Mark Roman told Soul Survivors magazine (??). “George was more of a person’s DJ than a lone wolf like myself. George had the knack of getting others involved, and that was his strength I guess.” And he played everything from Philly soul to jazz-funk to the staples of what were to become rare groove, including Reuben Wilson’s ‘Got to Get Your Own’. “When George took over, it went slightly more specialised,” says Cleveland Anderson. “George could go half the night playing jazz. You had to be serious to stick with it. Some people – not me – but some people would be like ‘What’s George doing, man?’. Good jazz, it would be good stuff.”
And when the music got more ‘hardcore’ so did the vibe. “The amount of girls at the club diminished and the vibe became edgier,” says Farley. “Full of young kids from some of London’s toughest estates, peace and love was not the mantra.” The trouble came from all quarters. “Towards the end of the ’70s a lot of the reggae clubs were having trouble, the girls were leaving those clubs and coming to the soul clubs,” says Cleveland Anderson. “Crackers started having problems with reggae people coming down and George used to play a whole night of jazz just to get rid of them!” But Power was no fool when it came to looking after himself, and the club. “He had the hardest geezers around him,” remembers Jazzie B. “And always women you’d never fuck with on the door. At the end of the day no matter what you did you wouldn’t mess about with the scene.”
And while dancing was always essential to Crackers, it was when Power came in that the serious dancers really took their place at the forefront. To dance here was not a casual thing. “There was a lot of rivalry in the dancing,” remembers Cleveland Anderson. “The dancefloor was tiny. Unless you could dance, really dance, you would not step over that line, you’d dance on the carpet at the side.” The style of dancing was a real contrast to the high-octane amphetamine driven Northern soul. “The southern style was tight and precise: feet made rapid tap movements, knees were bent, hips sashayed, shoulders rolled, heads bobbed,” wrote Robert Elms in The Way We Wore. “The whole effect was somewhere between boxing and bopping. And if you couldn’t cut it, you didn’t go anywhere near the floor.”
For some the dancing wasn’t just recreation, it was their day job too. “A lot of them used to go to dance classes, Pineapple studios, ballet Rambert” says Norman Jay. “All those guys were the first black dancers to feature in pop videos.”
Horace, Franklin, Trevor Shakes, Tommy McDonald, and future DJ star Paul ‘Trouble’ Anderson: the best dancers enjoyed a fame that often eclipsed the DJ. And competition between them was fierce. Cleveland Anderson recalls a time when Horace came down to reclaim his crown. “There was talk that Horace was losing it and he’d stop coming to Crackers for a while. Then he came to one Sunday. He walked in halfway through the night with this hot bird, put his leather bag down, grabs a chair, puts it right in the middle of the dancefloor and starts dancing with the chair. He was on it, around it, flicking it up. He just started freaking out and everyone backed off. The record finished, he put the chair back, grabbed his leather bag and walked out of the club. It was as though he was proving a point. Next day everyone was like, ‘Did you hear about Horace last night?’ He was the talk of the scene. That was how much a dancer meant in London then.”
George was good to his dancers. “He would use them to break certain records and focus upon them during the session, made them feel special and they stayed loyal,” says Farley. He was also generous to Anderson, encouraging him to make the move from dancer to DJ. “That’s how I started, basically, as a warmup DJ, and I did that for years and years and years for no money. It wasn’t about the money, I just wanted to play my records.”
The great Paul ‘Trouble’ Anderson rose from the dancefloor of Crackers to become one of London’s best-known DJs through the ’90s
By the late ’70s, 230 Wardour Street was leaning heavily towards punk as its Vortex nights started to become more well-attended. Crackers finally closed its doors in 1981 as the key players were let loose taking the soul, jazz-funk scene to the next level. Norman Jay went on to build the Good Times soundsystem with his brother Joey; Jazzie B formed the Soul II Soul collective and set up residency at Covent Garden’s Africa Centre; Fabio went from soul boy to jungle forefather; and Paul Trouble Anderson became a key DJ on the rave scene. It’s fascinating to consider what direction these pioneers might have gone in without their time at Crackers. As for George Power, he continued his mission to bring the dancefloor to the forefront of popular culture as he helped set up Kiss FM and of course continued to DJ, eventually setting up Crackers radio. Sadly, neither Power nor Roman are with us today, but their legacy most definitely lives on. “At the time you didn’t know that in 20-odd years you’d still be referring to this place. It was just a place you went to on a Saturday afternoon and had a wicked time in there,” says Fabio. Norman Jay sums it up best. “We felt this was home, this was our place,” he says. “We belonged, we were wanted.”
The Crackers community is very much alive and well, with Crackers Radio broadcasting wondrous soul 24-hours daily, and throwing parties and events in the heart of Soho.
Francis Grasso was the original. If DJing is about playing a meaningful set, rather than a jumble of tunes – then he was the first. He wasn’t the first to mix and overlap records, but as he stitched rock, soul, Latin and African tracks together to keep an adoring crowd on the floor, he showed how DJing could be a performance. Before Francis, disc jockeys were waiters, bringing a menu of familiar tracks. After him, the DJ was the lord of the dance – creating a rhythm-heavy narrative from personal taste and force of personality. In New York, as the sixties ended, he stole a job from society discaire Terry Noel, added a love of thundering drums, and pioneered beat-mixing by slipping the needle into the grooves at just the right moment. As the founding father of the scene that would become disco, in clubs including Salvation, The Haven and most importantly Sanctuary – a church that was deconsecrated on a weekly basis – Francis Grasso created modern DJing by showing everyone how much was possible.
In a pre-internet age, no-one he’d inspired could tell us if he was still alive. In the end we found him in the phone book and I took the subway an hour into Brooklyn, cassette recorder in hand, to meet outside a Carvel ice cream store. Skeletally trim, with a raspy beat-up voice and a mane of fuzzy grey hair, he took me straight into Joe’s bar where I found myself interviewing the godfather of DJing over glasses of draft Bud at 10am.
Tragically, Grasso was found dead in his apartment on March 18, 2001, just as his foundational role in the craft of DJing was becoming more widely known.
Interviewed in Brooklyn by Frank, 4.2.99
So you’re from NY originally? Brooklyn. Born and bred, lived in many different places.
And you started off dancing, didn’t you? Yep. One of the original Trude Heller go-go boys. Dancing on a little platform with a live band. It was in the Village, Sixth Avenue, on the corner of 9th Street. You had 20 minutes on and 20 minutes off, and you could only move your ass side to side because if you went back and forth you’d bang off the wall and fall right onto the table you were dancing over.
What were you wearing? Slacks, you know and you’d have a partner, and they’d play ‘Cloud Nine’ by the Temptations for about 38 minutes [laughs]. It was the most exhausting job I’d ever had in my life. I was beat that night.
What was Trude Heller’s like? Was it ritzy? Kind of. Kind of like date oriented. Couples, very few recorded records, and she was just somebody who became famous. It was the hardest 20 dollars I ever made in my life. I’m going home, my muscles were killing me. I remember on the train it was…
How did you get into that? What? Dancing? I got three major motorcycle accidents, so I couldn’t co-ordinate my feet and the doctor suggested for therapy that I try dancing.
So it was a therapeutic thing? Yeah, sort of. Very very wacky sort of way. I never thought I’d go down that sort of trail, cos I’d gone to college for literature, and I never thought I’d go down the trail…
Featured dancers on the ledge at Trude Hellers, 1966.
How did dancing turn into DJing? Well, I was managing a clothing store on Lexington Avenue between 57th Street and 58th Street. It was upstairs. And the bartenders used to come in from a club called Salvation II, and I’d become familiar with Salvation One and Bradley Pierce [manager of Salvation and previously Ondine, where he’d been the first in New York to put on The Doors]. So they said come by. Back then it was couples only. And there was a disk jockey named Terry Noel in Salvation II, and I went there on a Friday night, and he didn’t show up for work. Which later I found out when he showed up at 1.30 and he’d taken acid. It’s not a good start, to a Friday night! And they so liked me they asked me if I wanted to try.
You were dancing there for money or just… No just dancing there.
And the club had the records at that time; they didn’t belong to the DJ? The club had the records. For a long time that was the way it always was.
Rek-O-Kut turntables, like this top-of-the-line B12, were the platters of choice for ’60s radio stations, loved for their massive motors and fast start times.
What was the set-up? What were the turntables? It was a Rek-O-Kut fader with two Rek-O-Kut turntables and the fader was just somewhere in the middle of both turntables. Probably not even in existence now, like radio quality at the time, motor driven. Not belt driven.
And all you had was a switch to cut between the two? No. It was a knob, a fader. It was a fader, so you could do mixes. Sort of. If you knew what you were doing. But this was my first night
Do you remember the first record you played? I don’t know, but I had a hell of a good time. And they paid me a lot of money, and I said “Wow, they paid me this much money,” and I would have paid them. I had that much fun. I know when Terry showed up he was fired.
Because he was unreliable and you were the new kid? ? Well. I played better too. He used to do really weird things. Like he’d have the whole dancefloor going and then put on Elvis Presley. I kept em juiced. He would play bizarre records… He’s still bizarre, but anyway. But he showed up at 1.30, which is now Saturday morning, the club closes at 4. It’s not the right time to show up for work. And the owners had probably had enough of his attitude.
Can you remember the kind of records you were playing the first few times? ’Proud Mary’ [by Ike and Tina Turner] was very popular. I played things like ‘96 Tears’, [by ? & The Mysterians] Temptations, Four Tops, Supremes. There was no Jackson 5 then. Uh…
Can you remember the date when you first played? Ooh no.
You remember the year. 1967 or ’68. Then Salvation II closed. So I was sort of out of work. I was doing air conditioning work. And I was at this club in Union Square called Tarots, which was on 14th Street. And I asked them if they needed a disk jockey one night and they said go. And he just had a switch, he didn’t have a fader. He just had a switch; you went from one to the other. And back then it was basically the same tunes. ‘Knights In White Satin’ was very popular.
How long did you play there? Until the bouncer from the Sanctuary came to the club on a Sunday night. He turned around and said to me, “You know the guy we’ve got at The Sanctuary really sucks, so would you like to, you know, audition?” I said sure. And at the time I had Brian Auger & the Trinity and Julie Driscoll. I went there and they were practising for a fashion show, with models. And in eight records I had the job. I thought if I can’t do it in eight I’m not going to do it all night long. Next thing I knew I was at the Sanctuary.
And they were the wild years. No. Those were the quieter years. It was when the Sanctuary was straight and it was mostly couples like Salvation II. But really it was what was really funny was that the manager of Sanctuary used to be the manager of Trude Heller’s. And we all thought the day manager and the night manager hated each other. But in reality they were shacking up, and they took off with like $175,000. [There was another scandal at the club in 1972 when manager Shelly Bloom was the victim of a mafia hit, two weeks before the club was closed for 33 drug busts in three nights.]
The Sanctuary, at 407 W43rd Street, now the Westside Theatre, was a Lutheran church turned nightclub by impresario Arnie Lord, with a decadently irreligious theme conceived by Liberian economics student Francois Massaquoi.
The DJ booth was on the marble altar. You can see Francis top right DJing in front of the organ pipes.
This is from Sanctuary? The original Sanctuary, the original owners. The one on the church. It’s the one that was called the Church first; open two weeks and the Catholic Church got an injunction to close us down [In fact the veto was from the NY Buildings Dept who refused a permit under it’s original name The Church ]. Cos we had this mural that I would face that was unbelievably pornographic. And what was interesting about it was the devil; this guy painted a distinct feature of it was that no matter where you stood in the club he was looking at you. Angels were fucking and… So what they did was they changed the name to the Sanctuary and reprinted everything, and they stuck plastic fruit in various places, bunch of grapes here, you had red grapes, you had green grapes.
To cover everything up. Yeah, cos it used to be some kind of German protestant church. But cos this guy took the $175,000 they had to change hands. So they wanted to make the first gay bar.
This is what year? 1969? And they fired everybody, cos they didn’t want women. Cos this was after Stonewall, suddenly… Well, it was the first time they’d taken the concept of a gay bar without a jukebox.
And not being secret… Well, I remember the Stonewall. I was at the Haven the night of the Stonewall riot. I remember seeing the police come in a city bus. It was like wacky. They locked the doors, the cops were clubbing people, they were throwing bricks and bottles. It was a wacked out night that night. Anyway, they were gonna keep me, to try me out or whatever. So it became evident that I had the job. We used to close Mondays and Tuesdays, now we’re open seven days a week. And we’re packed.
I used to go to the men’s room, and customers always tried to pick me up, so I remember one time I was in a urinal pissing and this guy was in a business suit, and he said something to me, I said, employer policy is that employees cannot date customers. Then I started going to the ladies’ room cos there were no ladies. I remember one time there was a fellow named Alan who used to stand by the door and greet people. And somebody was doing an article with somebody and they said do you get straight people here, and he went “Yeah, there he goes.”
I had such power at that time that two female friends of mine came to visit. They were just friends, at two o’clock in the morning, a weekday night, and I had James Brown Live At The Apollo on, 25 minutes and 32 seconds, and I said if you don’t let them in, you better get somebody up there to change that record. So after about five minutes of this stalemate, they let them in. Jane Fonda filmed the movie Klute there. She had a big argument with Seymour and Shelly because they wouldn’t permit lesbians in the club. I’m the disc jockey in the movie, and I had like three weeks work, doing the whole thing. It was fascinating to watch. Only thing is I was doing double duty, I was showing up at the movie set at 7.30, driving home, to Brooklyn, walking my dog, shave and showering, going back to work, till 4 o’clock in the morning. It took its toll.
I bet. It was like summertime and they would have a big table with coffee and bagels and doughnuts and everything that you wanted. And then the cops came in, cos to get the feel of real hookers they had real hookers. Then they sent the cops in cos there was a lot of drug-dealing going on – in between takes! It was a lively crowd!
So you didn’t play at the Sanctuary that long? Oh, about a year. Then I remember when I was working at the Haven, the [Sanctuary] manager, Michael Crennan called me up and said somebody been fooling around with the cartridge in the back. And could I take a look. I said I could stop up there before I go down to the Haven to work. And when I walked in and the customers saw me behind in the booth, they all applauded, there was this big cheer. I’m like [shrugs] I’m not staying.
From what I’ve read, the Sanctuary was a wild place. Did it change? It got wilder. In the summertime they were having sex in people’s hallways.
Not in the club? Did that go on? Only me! ’Cos we were open all night. We’re a juice bar now. We lost the liquor license. So they had to be doing something. We were staying open till 12 o’clock in the afternoon – Saturday afternoon. And Sunday afternoon, and they’d be so smashed, in the summertime they’d be in peoples vestibules, in their hallways… It was a very. I have articles on it. I still have them. Daily News used to call it a drugs supermarket.
What drugs were people doing back then? Back then? The biggest drug people were doing back then was Quaaludes, the small ones, 300 milligrams, the pills. And you had the capsule which was 400 milligrams, and back then they went for 5 dollars apiece. I had a pharmacist friend of mine and he used to get them in a sealed bottle and I’d sell them for a buck a piece, to my friends, who came in. made a lot of swaps for tapes, back in those days. It got pretty… I’d be out walking my dog; people like scream out your name on the street, in the supermarket. I would do average things; they’d yell “Francisss”
But that must have been great! It must have just been people you knew from the clubs. You’d be surprised. If you put an average of 1500 people in a room, for however many years I was playing: 17 years, a lot of people are gonna get to see you… I made a lot of fans in New Jersey. I made a lot of fans everywhere.
Cos you were pretty much the first DJ that had that kind of following, there were guys before you, what were you doing differently? There wasn’t really guys before me. Nobody had really just kept the beat going. They’d get them to dance then change records, you had to catch the beat again. It never flowed. And they didn’t know how to bring the crowd to a height, and then level them back down, and to bring them back up again. It was like an experience, I think that was how someone put it. And the more fun the crowd had, the more fun I had. See I really loved the atmosphere. I just wouldn’t have wanted to have been a customer. I loved being in the room, but I couldn’t see myself like being amongst one of the customers, being on the dancefloor, because I couldn’t handle that. I really hate crowds. But it’s fun to absorb it.
So how did you develop all of that? I was a dancer! I was a dancer, so it was rhythmically… not hard. And I play a few instruments.
Really, what do you play? Well, I started on the accordion. I was young then. Then I went to guitar and then drums and saxophone.
You say musically it wasn’t a problem, and I can understand that. If you’re a dancer you know what you want to dance to, but technically, technically it must have been a real problem… with the equipment you had back then… Today you’ve got a disc jockey that puts on a 20 minute 12 inch. I’m changing records every 2 minutes and 12 seconds, on average. These guys don’t really work today. Unh-uh. I mean if you’re playing mostly 45s… I had like certain bathroom records, certain records you played only when you had to go to the bathroom.
What were they? James Brown Live At the Apollo, then I used to play the Befour album, Brian Auger & the Trinity. I played a lot of English music. I had gotten a lot of imports over my time. I would hear things and I would have a deal with the record store where I used to live. He would let me take in all the new 45s, go in the back with this little portable Victrola, listen to them.
So technically, you pretty much invented slipcueing right. How did that come about? Well, to tell you the truth, when Bob Lewis was a disc jockey on the radio, at CBS, before they went to oldies, way back when they played rock and roll, the engineer had taught me. But I found with the two slide faders, that I had gotten so good, cos you see the reflection off the record, you can see the different shades… of the black. And I got so good I would just catch it on the run.
You would just drop the needle on it? No I could catch it in the beat.
But that’s by holding the record. No, without. The records spinning, you put the needle in it, right into it. And you just practised. I guess I practised live. I guess. You start out with records like, say, The Staple Singers’ ‘I’ll Take You There,’ now that’s a slow beat, and you build slowly and slowly, till you get them dancing fast. Like I used to play ‘Immigrant Song’ by Led Zeppelin, I loved playing that. I discovered a lot of records too: Abaco Dream, which was really Sly And The Family Stone, [a tune] called ‘Life And Death In G&A’ was a biggie, discovered James Brown’s ‘Sex Machine’.
So when did slip cueing come in with felt pads? Not till around the disco convention started. And the Bozak started coming in, the Bozak mixers. But by this time I had already been tired of disco, because they had basically put everything except Mary Had A Little Lamb with a disco beat. It was just the same sound; there was no variance. Went to a club, it was like moronic.
So what year were you able to beat mix, and completely segue? I was able to beat mix right away.
That must have been so difficult with the records back then. It was very difficult.
What were your peak records? ’You’re The One’ by Little sister, which was also Sly And The Family Stone. ‘Hot Pants’ was very big, by James Brown, when it came out.
How long were you at the Haven? Oh, I think about ’69 to er… things were starting to happen. People were approaching me with business deals and stuff, always wanting to make a dollar quick. And I always loved that phrase; “well we don’t have enough money!” And I would make a deal with them, could you invest it in equipment, cos I had always believed I was only as good as my equipment. The only limitations I would put on myself was the equipment I was working with.
Who were you working with equipment-wise, Alex Rosner? At first it was Alex Rosner, then it was Dick Long. Not Casey that much, he came in later on. Richard Long used to be Alex Rosner’s fix-it man. If something happened during the night, he’d send Dick Long out. Then they had some kind of disagreement or whatever and Richard, he outbid him, he outperformed him, and he out-equipment-wised him. Dick and I used to have some really serious conversations about… Dick was into perfecting it and making it more and more reliable.
What was the first system he built for you? ? Who Richard Long? Um, I would say the one I had in my apartment, when the equipment was stolen along with my records. It was called Disco Associates; it was a Beyer with a triple volume control, single headset. Richard was really on the cutting edge. And gave me separate microphone, and he was always toying with improving it.
Was it a big celebrity scene at Sanctuary? Did famous people come in? Oh yeah, all the time. I dated Liza Minnelli for a while. When it’s people like that you’d just nod hello. Recognition is like… people expect it to be really cool, but a lot of times it isn’t cos you’re expected to be always on. My second fiancée took a picture of me once, waking up. My hair was like this, you know, She’s caught me in the middle of a yawn. And she went ”This is the real Francis.” Because I was so vain and my hair always had to be impeccable. Even my dungarees had a crease. I’m serious.
The Haven was where sound engineer Alex Rosner installed Rosie, the first stereo mixer designed for nightclub use, developed with Grasso in mind.
That’s what you wore in the booth. At Sanctuary? No, I wore dress clothes. But at the Haven I made dungarees popular. The 501 Levis. Button fly.
Were you able to see what your influence was on other DJs? Yeah. I taught, two of the most prominent: Michael Cappello and Steve D’Acquisto.
How did you meet up with them? Hanging out. From them coming in as customers. And I basically needed somebody reliable and who knew what they were basically doing, at least had an idea. I had to teach somebody. I was teaching in secret because it was really hard to do what I do. I may teach you the basic moves, but it’s your interpretation that makes or breaks you. Then I had that business of opening Club Francis. I had this idea of starting like the apex technical school – see that commercial? – said I wanted to open a disc jockey school they said I was crazy. Then we had Club Francis which was the old Cafe Wha.
What was the story behind that? I forget what year.
But that was after everything else? It had to be around ’73, ’74. I knew a lot of famous people. Knew Jimi Hendrix very well, fact when he died, his main old lady, after she flew his body back to Seattle, when she came back to New York, she moved in with me. She wasn’t a fiancée, a little off the wall! For my… Not too stable. But nobody was stable back then.
What kind of kick did you get out of it? When you first played. It was just feeling the excitement the electricity that was in the air. It was just it was phenomenal. I said I would pay them (they didn’t know it). It was that much fun. It wasn’t until the middle ’70s when everybody got into disco and Saturday Night Fever, and then it became so routine and mundane, and everybody wanted to be a disc jockey. Like hey, everybody’s a disc jockey. Everybody and their mother’s a disc jockey actually.
Tell me about Club Francis. Did you actually open it in the end? Yeah, we did. I dissolved the partnership.
Wasn’t the story that you got really badly beaten up? What was that? That was opening up Club Francis. My nose has been broken about 12 times. Least that’s when I stopped counting.
That was from another club? Yeah, the Machine.
Cos you were so successful. Yeah they didn’t want me to leave. And they had the Mafia sit-down. The guy in the corner had instructions not to hit me, but to scare me. Only the guy they sent got carried away.
Shit! How bad was it? Kept me home for three months. Bad. I remember sitting in St. Vincent’s hospital. I told the cops that I was went out to get a breath of fresh air, from the club, and these guys were coming up McDougal Street, and they hit me with beer bottles. And I remember these two doctors, I was in the emergency room of St Vincent’s hospital in Manhattan, said, “shame, must have been a good looking guy.” I had to reinvent myself so to speak, sitting at home for three months. And really when I walked my dog people thought I was Frankenstein. I was a teenage Frankenstein looking with the bandages the whole bit.
Was that the end of Club Francis? No that was the beginning. That was the first night of Club Francis.
You were home for three months. What happened with the club? It went on…
Where was it? On MacDougal Street, over the old Cafe Wha,
And were they the real wild years. I mean if there were women in there…? Oh, I was caught so many times getting oral sex in the booth it was disgusting.
While you were playing? I would tell the girls bet you can’t make me miss a beat. Gave them a little challenge and away they go! In fact one time the manager waked in. Michael Krenne. He walks into the disc jockey booth, in the Sanctuary, and he sees this girl on her knees, and I says, don’t bother me now. If you’re gonna yell, yell later.
What were the other rewards? You got pretty well paid? Oh I was making a lot of money. I think my drug bill was… at that time drugs were a lot cheaper, was about two-fifty a week. And that was for what I’d give away. I’d go to work I’d have 20 joints. I’d buy pot by the pound, bring 20 joints to work with me. Buy an ounce of speed.
Did you get any interest from the record companies recognising the promotional value of what you did? Yeah, some, but back then everyone was caught up in their own thing. It was like I’m doing my thing, leave me alone.
I know you were noted for your mixing. What sort of records were you mixing together? I had been known to make mixes like Chicago Transit Authority’s ‘I’m A Man’, the Latin part, into ‘Whole Lotta Love’ by Led Zeppelin. I played a lot of African music. I started African music in nightclubs. Michael Olatunji’s ‘Drums Of Passion’, which bothered me when Santana came out because they didn’t give Michael Olatunji credit for Jingo, and it’s not even pronounced that way.
What were some of the other big mixes that you would do? I was responsible for bringing Osibisa’s ‘Music For Gong Gong’, Earth Wind And Fire, ‘Sweet Sweetback’s Badaasssss Song’. Mitch Ryder went with the Memphis sound. Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels went to Memphis and it was called the Mitch Ryder Experiment, which was very good.
Did you ever have two copies of the same things and extend things? ‘You’re The One’ [by Little Sister] was similar, with part one and part two on the other side.
So how would you work that? Well, you always get two copies, cos you only had like two minutes.
You had two copies of everything? Mostly. If they were really big, like James Brown’s ‘Hot Pants’, that was big. Cos people wanted to dance , it’s summertime, the tube tops were in, no bras, the whole bit.
If you had two copies, how long would you work it? I’d never push it more than three times. On Little Sister’s ‘You’re The One’, part one ended musically, part two would begin with a scream, so you could blend right into the scream, and then go back to ‘You’re The One’. Or the scream twice. Play it twice, part two, flip it over and play it, twice. They didn’t know I was playing two 45s.
But you didn’t cut it up any more. You didn’t say right I’m gonna play the intro, then another ontro, that kind of thing. Did you do that? Occasionally. It would depend. I just basically tried everything there was to try.
When did you call it a day? 1980, 81.
And that was because…? I got disgusted… this bullshit. And the people had changed. As it turns out I was lucky to get out, cos it was just the advent of AIDS and I had always thought that AIDS would develop into a heterosexual disease too. And Richard Long died of AIDS. I lost 38 friends. Then I found out Richard Long died, it was 39, all of AIDS.
So what’s your greatest memory behind the booth? I think its that one night, when I went in to fix the cartridge when they just saw me up there and applause just started. People stood up; the house lights were all on.
Did you ever make tapes and sell them? ? I traded. For clothing. I’d make like cassettes for clothing and things like that. But as far as going into making a tape, like I’d do it for friends. If somebody… Albert Goldman had a fourth of July party one time; I made a tape, reel to reel that he played at his party.
You were friends with him? Yeah.
Did he get it right in his book, Disco? Is that all correct? Basically he got it right. The Penthouse article that it was taken from, my mother went out and bought so many copies. She had framed the picture of me in Penthouse. Its like a centrefold, they took the staples out. So you see this naked broad Ginger and then the next page is me.
How come you never wrote a book about it all? It’s not over yet. My life is an adventure.
What do you think makes a great DJ? A lot of persistence. And a lot of being aware of your surroundings, and you gotta have a natural feel for rhythm. I mean guys that work at weddings they work four or five hours they get paid 500 dollars. I went to two weddings. I sounded better than that practising.
What makes a bad DJ then? [laughs] The wrong records.
We licensed this amazing photo (by Slim Aarons) for the new edition of Last Night a DJ Saved My Life, but we knew very little about Slim Hyatt, shown here DJing at the Egyptian-themed Shepheard’s in New York’s Drake Hotel in 1964, other than the important fact he was America’s first discothèque DJ, having introduced the French-derived craft at Le Club on New Year’s Eve 1960. The only source we had was Albert Goldman’s book Disco. Now, thanks to the mighty powers of the internet, and the tireless detective work of our friends Mark and Barney at Rocksbackpages, we know a lot more. Check out the 1965 piece from Hit Parader below. As well as a night out with Slim, it contained another nugget of gold: the mention of Annette Clark and Orell Gaynor, discaires at swanky members club L’Interdit.
Slim Hyatt was a former military man from Panama who was butler to pianist and bandleader Peter Duchin and who fell into the role of pioneering club DJ by accident. When wealthy French hotelier Oliver Coquelin opened Le Club, the first Parisian style nightclub in New York, he asked Duchin to find him a DJ and Duchin recommended Hyatt. At 416 East 55th Street, Le Club opened its doors on New Year’s Eve, 1960 with Hyatt at the turntables. Musically, however, things didn’t go so well that first night. We’ll let Goldman pick up the story:
Opening night at Le Club (1960), from Disco, by Albert Goldman, 1977
The society girls were delighted by the host’s good taste and found the ladies’ room especially kicky: on the vanity was a one-gallon jug of Arpège secured to the table by a gold-link chain. The men were impressed by the clubby atmosphere and the wine list. The plan of entertainment was to start the evening off on a low key by playing the then-fashionable continental music (which had taken hold in America thanks to the currently popular French and Italian films), then escalate gradually to more and more lively strains till the belles and the beaux were doing the Twist.
Everything went to plan and the opening was adjudged a success, but Coquelin was deeply aggrieved by the music, which instead of describing a smooth arc of mounting excitement, started and stopped, faltered and fumferred, as if the discaire hadn’t the faintest idea of what he was doing. In fact, he hadn’t.
America’s first disco DJ was a very pleasant and deferential black gentleman named Slim Hyatt. He had been recruited for the club by society bandleader Peter Duchin. Coquelin had asked his friend Peter for an unemployed musician to spin the discs. Duchin had replied: ‘I have just the man you want.’ When everything went wrong on opening night, Coquelin called Hyatt on the carpet. ‘What sort of instrumaint do you play?’ he demanded. ‘As a matter of fact, I don’t play any,’ confessed the embarrassed Hyatt. ‘Then, you are a dansair?’ queried Coquelin. Again the reply was in the negative. ‘A singair?’ persisted the perplexed proprietor. ‘No, sir,’ replied Hyatt. ‘As a matter of fact, I am Mr Duchin’s butler. You see he didn’t have the money to pay me jes now, so he said I should take this job.’ Coquelin hit the ceiling, but after he had tried a couple of real musicians with uniformly dismal results, he went back to Hyatt and gradually trained him in the old French art of spinning.
French New Yorker, founder of Le Club and Cheetah, Oliver Coquelin
Slim Hyatt, New York’s first discothèque DJ (and former butler) at Le Club.
Coquelin, known as ‘Disco Daddy’, would go on to open a series of society nightclubs, most famously the kaleidoscopic Cheetah in 1966. Hyatt continued as a DJ and after his shaky start, by 1965 was an impressive forebear to DJs like Terry Noel and Francis Grasso, ‘creating moods, manipulating crowds, playing God in the universe that is Shepheard’s,’ as we read here in this vivid snapshot.
Dancing in New York, From Hit Parader magazine, by Jane Heil January 1965,
SOMETHING’S happened to dancing that never happened before, all at once several million people of all ages, on several continents, have discovered that their hips can do all kinds of wonderful new things they hadn’t even thought possible. Why? Some say it’s the sound: Ray Charles, the Beatles, Trini Lopez. Some say it’s the high cost of floor space; you can’t move your feet so all that’s left are your hips and arms. And there are others who will tell you it’s because boys don’t want to dance with girls… because dancing this way expresses our turbulence and releases our tensions… because teens are setting the standards these days.
Everybody has a theory — but what it all boils down to is this: the whole world’s doing the Frug, the Watusi and the Monkey and having a ball!
I recently spent three weeks around New York looking, listening — and dancing. Here’s what’s happening at the swingingest places in town.
SHEPHEARD’S Shepheard’s is the most popular place in New York, and don’t accidentally stroll down those two little steps between the bar and the tables, or it’ll cost you four dollars. It’s only been open since New Year’s Eve, and it hasn’t had a less-than-capacity evening since. It’s the only true discotheque, with no live music at all, only records. There used to be live music: six musicians who’d switch off, three playing along with every record. But then the union had to find out about it, and now there aren’t any more musicians at Shepheard’s.
But there is Slim Hyatt, a popeyed Panamanian who presides over Shepheard’s three turntables and 2,000 records. I slithered around in back to talk to him, and believe me, he’s an artist. He doesn’t just play records; he creates moods, he manipulates crowds, he plays God in the universe that is Shepheard’s. ‘I got to keep them on the floor,’ Slim says, in his slightly manic but very personable way. ‘I got to keep them dancing.’
‘Do you introduce each song like a disc jockey?’ ‘No. No time for talkin’. Talkin’ kills the whole scene.’ Slim looks through a peephole at the dancers, studies their reactions to his music like a scientist studying the reactions of animals undergoing an experiment. ‘I start to compile the whole thing together… minute I see them fading away, I change it. My job is to keep all people on the floor,’ he reiterates, sliding records on turntables, looking at ‘his’ dancers, turning knobs, gauging, judging. ‘You got to pick the right moment, the right time. I might even play a bunny hop — if it was the right time! The whole thing is psychic.’
What’s big at Shepheard’s? ‘French songs… The Beatles…mambo… cha cha. This one’s good: “Where Did Our Love Go,” by the Supremes. I know music,’ Slim says, watching his turntables and, like a puppeteer, using his music to control the people dancing out in front.
Shepheard’s at the Drake Hotel, NYC, 1964
THE PEPPERMINT LOUNGE It all started with the Twist, and the Twist started at the Peppermint lounge. After nearly four years, they’re both still going strong. The place was packed. The twisters were twisting, Sharon Gregg was singing, the Epics were playing, the tape machine was blasting, and I was sitting there wondering where you do an interview in a place that’s never quiet.
In the kitchen, turned out to be where. Among the glasses and the waiters and the sinks, Ralph Saggase told me how it was in those days. Saggase, a former policeman who come out of retirement to try his hand at running a nightclub, showed me a Cholly Knickerbocker column dated Friday, October 6, 1961. Dukes, duchesses, millionaires and just plain movie stars were coming every night, it said, to do the Peppermint’s own dance called the ‘Twist.’
Well, you know how it is with us followers; everybody rushed over to West 45th Street and started twisting. Mr. Saggase thinks it had a lot to do with megatons: ‘People got tired of all that testing, all those megatons.’
Anyway, Hank Ballard wrote a song called ‘The Twist’, Joey Dee played it every night. Chubby Checker recorded it. I needn’t tell you what happened then. The Peppermint Lounge and the Twist set off an explosion all its own. There was a lag for a while, then — Pow! Along came The Beatles who, Mr. Saggase believes, have rejuvenated the whole entertainment industry. Twisting, he thinks, is an egotistical dance. ‘You can have a lot of fun all by yourself.’
I thanked him, squeezed past the waiters, and went back to the Lounge. The dancers were still dancing (today it’s all Frug and Monkey at the Peppermint as everywhere else). Tommy Hunt was singing, the Young Philadelphians were playing, Herkimer Strubbles was monkeying, the audience was clapping, and the noise was deafening. But it looked like fun, so I dropped my pencil and pad and started dancing. As Ralph Saggase says, ‘It takes two to tango, but it only takes one to Twist.’
Featured dancers on the ledge at Trude Heller’s, 1966
TRUDE HELLER’S Once upon a time there was a woman named Trude Heller, and she had a place in the Village called The Versailles, and it was a bomb. So she turned it into ‘Trude Heller’s,’ put in continuous live twist music, hoisted her house twisters halfway up the walls [one of these paid dancers was pioneering DJ Francis Grasso], and stood back in awe as it took off like a rocket. There’s always something happening at Trude’s. The lights flashing on and off, the bunches of colorful balloons, the smallness of the room, all makes it seem more like a very swinging party than a nightclub. When the Larks aren’t playing, the Jimmy Castor Quartet is. Trude’s is where I learned the truth about feet-on-the-floor dancing. I chanced a cha cha, and a girl wearing the sharpest heels in the world stepped on, if not through, my right foot. So even if you get the chance to move your feet, take my advice, don’t.
THE EIGHTH WONDER If The Eighth Wonder, around the corner from Trude Heller’s, looks something like it there’s a good reason; Trude’s son Joel owns it. I stopped in early to talk to him before the noise started (having learned my lesson at the Peppermint Lounge), but there was a group onstage auditioning so we had to vell anyway. After the group had plugged themselves in (‘Meet the arranger: Con Edison. They get ten per cent’), Joel shouted to me across the tiny table, ‘I come from the Nina Simone, Count Basie school, and I always looked down on this kind of music! But it gets to you after a while!’
‘Do you dance yourself?’ I screamed. ‘Yes! I’m basically shy, but this kind of dancing makes you lose your inhibitions. It turns you on. They’re things anybody can do. You just look at somebody and get up and pretty soon you’ve got it. And if you don’t, so what? Nobody cares.’
Who’s dancing at Trude’s and the Eighth Wonder? Everybody, says Joel Heller. Models, socialites, college kids, young people, old people. ‘The older ones come to watch and end up dancing. One night we had a woman here about seventy. Maybe eighty. She didn’t even look like she could walk! But she got up and started dancing.’
The auditioning band left and the regular band, the Starlights, came on. The house dancers jumped up on their little boxes and started doing the Frug. ‘See that girl?’ Joel said, pointing. ‘She’s putting herself through medical school by dancing here.’ The dancers are to inspire customers and for entertainment. If they start getting too intricate, Heller makes them simplify their dancing so as not to discourage the customers.
At that point somebody asked me to dance. He didn’t dance like me, and I didn’t dance like him, but as I say, it doesn’t make the slightest difference. There’s another clue to dancing’s new popularity; the number of possible partners has multiplied by the thousands.
THE GOLD BUG A few blocks further downtown, on West 3rd Street, one discovers the Gold Bug, the only club in New York City with dancing plus a big rock ‘n’ roll show every weekend. Bob Santo Pietro, a former dealer in Las Vegas, took the club over from his father not long ago.
‘First we had jazz,’ the 25-year-old Santo Pietro says, ‘And it died. Oh, did it die. Besides, I hate jazz with such a passion I had to leave every time they started to play. I used to feel like I was in the Twilight Zone. You know what? They never played the same song the same way twice!’ (The jazz, needless to say, had been his father’s idea.) ‘I figured it was my place, I’d do what I want. I put in rock n roll, and it was packed from the first night. They do the Monkey, the Frug, the Hully Gully, the Dog…. They’re still Twisting… the Swim…’ Mike Scott and the Nightriders play for dancing; on weekends Santo Pietro presents such stars as The Bobettes, the Ronettes, little Anthony, Ruby and the Romantics. ‘Strictly top selling acts, million sellers.’ Everybody from celebrities to tourists come to the Gold Bug, but Santo Pietro has a special place in his heart for teenagers, and the crowd there is the youngest of any place I visited.
L’INTERDIT L’Interdit is another of the three or four true discotheques in New York City. Like the others, it was inspired by the discotheques the Jet Set saw in Paris three or four years ago. A private club, L’Interdit is not the sort of place one could just stop in at on a short visit to New York, since you have to make application for membership first. The atmosphere is truly European: small, dimly lit, intimate. Orell Gaynor and Annette Clark, the disco-technicians, play a great many French and Italian records, plus the Beatles and Trini Lopez. Sometimes records are discovered by far-roving socialites who bring them back for Orell and Annette to play, perhaps for the first time anywhere in this country.
Annette Clark, one of America‘s earliest club DJs, or ‘discaires’, who played at the exclusive L‘Interdit in 1965
Vogue called L’Interdit a ‘New York discothèque with Paris boite manners.’
At L’Interdit all the men are handsome and all the girls are pretty. Incidentally, I saw more real discotheque dresses here than anywhere (discotheque dress: a dress that, the first thing a girl does when she puts it on, is wiggle). Everybody you ever wanted to be belongs to L’Interdit, and Robert, the charming, handsome European manager, is groovy too.
The champion dancer of New York is Killer Joe Piro, so one bright day I hustled over to his dance studio on West 55th Street to see what the master had to say.
Killer Joe sits behind what looks like a bar but is actually a desk. Several lithe young men hovered around, and behind closed doors a Frug played over and over. I hopped on a bar stool and asked Killer Joe how come everybody’s doing the frug.
‘The twist caused the explosion. It’s not new, you know. Cab Calloway was doing it thirty-five years ago. But all of a sudden everybody discovered they have a bottom.’
‘Sound is most important. The sound makes you move. The boys are happy because they’re not touching the girls — boys are scared of girls, did you know that?’ (I didn’t) ‘The girls don’t care as long as they’re dancing. And what the kids do, the parents do. The trend is to youth. The youngsters are running the country!’
The phone rang, and while Killer Joe was talking, one of his assistants came over and gave me a quick dancing lesson ‘We call this contra-body motion,’ he said, doing the frug as taught at Killer Joe’s. ‘It’s just like you walk — the arms swinging just the opposite of the feet.’
Killer Joe, off the phone now, said, ‘The dances start in the Negro sections and on the Coast. I learn them in Harlem, or St. Louis. And whenever a new sound comes out, I see what my kids are doing. They’re the ones that know what’s happening.’
The Killer cited space — or rather the lack of it — as a major reason for stationary dancing. He also said, ‘When wars break out we dance together… between wars we dance a part.’
‘Anything else?’ I asked.
‘Yes. Everybody should learn the fox trot. It’s our national dance.’
I thanked him, slid off my stool, and took my leave. I never did see Killer Joe dance.
Here are some other comments I’ve heard about the new sound and the new dancing. An older friend — who doesn’t like it — says, ‘They’re not doing anything, they weren’t doing anything before, but at least they were doing it together.’ Another: ‘You used to touch a girl once in a while — now you just send signals.’ But the teenagers at the Gold Bug say, ‘It makes you swing. It makes you happy.’
Everybody’s got something to say about the Frug-Watusi-Twist-Monkey Craze, that’s for sure.
Me? I just think we should all turn on some music — and dance. It’s like Slim Hyatt says:
In the 1980s, black Britain’s soundtrack evolved from the ‘heavy manners’ of reggae and dub, washed in biblical prophecies and tales of oppression, to favour a lighter, more optimistic sound. Rather than looking to the music of the islands, the British-born children of the Windrush generation wanted some of the American soul glamour they occasionally saw on Top of the Pops. In London, this meant partying in the soul clubs of the West End and suburban hotspots like Ilford‘s Lacy Lady or Flicks in Dartford. These were places where you could hear obscure danceable jazz and the hottest American imports, and, especially in the city clubs, where intense competitive dancing was the main event. Cleveland Anderson made his name dancing and DJing across this scene, which became known as ‘jazz-funk’, as well as venturing north to play many of the all-dayers in cities like Manchester and Nottingham.
interviewed by Bill in Acton, 9.9.04
In the city clubs it was all about the dancers, wasn’t it? Back in those days the dancers were every bit as important as the DJs and the music he was playing. People like Horace, Franklin, Danny, all those guys. They were stars. The DJs… yeah… but people actually came to see the dancers, too. People like Clive Clark, who won the Disco Dancing championships. Names like Peter Francis, he was one of the exceptional dancers of that time. These guys were characters in the club. If you didn’t have your dancers, it wasn’t really regarded as the edge. The girls would just stand there watching these guys dancing with naked chests. The music that you got there, the music would be more underground.
In which places? Crackers, especially. Countdown, north of Oxford Street. There’s a club called Hombres there now. Paul Anderson played there. You walked in and it was like a spaceship. When I first went, I was there practically three quarters of the night trying to work out where the DJ was. He was all the way up there, in the spaceship! That was on a Friday and it was excellent. That’s where I first heard records like Celi Bee and the Buzzy Bunch ‘One Love’, Munich Machine ‘Get On The Funk Train’.
The week started with Hemel Hempstead Scamps on a Monday, Tuesday it was Sutton Scamps. On a Wednesday we would go to Bumbles in Wood Green, which was George Power and Paul again. On a Thursday, we’d go to Beagles, then Friday lunchtimes was Cracker, Friday night would be either Countdown or 100 Club all-nighters with Ronnie L. God, Ronnie was hot! Late 50s, white guy, but did he know his music!? He had people hoppin’ in there. Saturday lunchtime was Crackers.
Dancers at Clouds, Brixton, 1978
Tell me about Crackers It was amazing, ’cos you had kids maybe as young as five or six dancing and the age group went up to 18 or 19. It was one of those places that was actually really hard to explain unless you was there. Even I could move in those days, but you should’ve seen some of those kids moving! These little kids were hot! You had that on a Saturday lunchtime. That started at half 11 or 12. That used to be Ronnie L and Greg Edwards as guest, maybe every other Saturday. What would happen then was we’d rush home and shower, then Saturday night would either be Global Village with Pepe and Norman [Scott].
What was Global Village like? Global was excellent. It was the first club where it made me realise how much of a strong gay scene there was on the soul scene. Music was great, great atmosphere. At the time it was the most flamboyant place to go, with the most flamboyant people. In those days, soul boys were quite freaky anyway. Beagle started as a Saturday rival, but you’d only go to Beagles as a break from Global. Then on a Sunday night it was Crackers. It cost 30p. to get in. With your ticket you’d get a basket of sausage and chips.
That was a licensing loophole wasn’t it? Yeah. Well 12 o’clock was considered late in those days. I always remember the first time I went to Crackers. I wasn’t old enough to get in so I had a birth certificate that was two or three years older than I actually was. My heart would be pumping. I was small, so I was worried. The bouncers there, two long-haired hippie looking guys, who looked so far removed from the soul scene, and you got in there and the music was damn funky man! The music was a mixture of jazz – George Power played some great jazz – The DJs were Andy Hunter, Pepe, Paul and then later on they brought Mickey Price in. Andy Hunter, he was just amazing. He was a white guy, skinny, kinda tall, boy he could throw music down. He started getting disillusioned with how music was changing. I started DJing in 1977, and he DJed for maybe another two years and he was one of the guys I looked up to. He sold off his record collection. At the time, he was the one that people came to hear, then obviously George became the main DJ.
George Power
What was the difference between them? I would say Andy moved you more. Andy probably had the edge with regard to the overall crowd. He seemed to have this ability to pull out the tunes something new that the heads would like and also the girls would like. Whereas George was more of a heads DJ. When George took over, it went slightly more specialised. George could go half the night playing jazz. You had to be serious to stick with it. Some people – not me – but some people would be like ‘what’s George doing, man?’. Good jazz, it would be good stuff. Then Paul came on board. He was George’s protégé. We used to get down there early because Paul was warming up.
This is Paul ‘Trouble’ Anderson. Wasn’t he one of the dancers? Yeah, Paul was a dancer. I’ve known him for donkey’s years. I used to take my crew up to the Royalty and challenge him to a dance. Paul took over George’s spots as warm-up and George did the main spot once Andy left and it lasted maybe another three four or five years.
Paul ‘Trouble’ Anderson
When did Crackers run from? ’75 or ’76 and closed 1980? There were other clubs: Titanic in Mayfair, which was very good. Studio 21 was on a Thursday night. That was where Spats was on Tottenham Court Road. Small place, 200 or 300 people. Then there was Frisky, that was really good. These were all West End clubs. West End was ripe then. Everyone made a beeline for it. Beagles was in West Kensington, in a pub. Maze, Gullivers. Tottenham Royal was maybe 1973 or ’74. That used to draw people from all over London, on a Thursday night. Then there was the Hop Bine in Wembley. That was on a Saturday. Andy Mann was the DJ there, ran a shop in Rayners Lane. That was where I heard Mass Production’s ‘Welcome To Our World’ for the first time. It was the stomping ground of Tommy Mack, white guy, good dancer; The Wembley Footsteppers and Foot Patrol. Wicked dancers. Clinky, Tony Newman, Peter Francis.
There was a place called Bandwagon in Kingsbury on a Monday. It closed at 12. As most clubs did in those days. The bouncers scared the living daylights out of you. You had one guy that looked like Henry Cooper with a nose that had been broken a million times, and another guy we called Twitch. They didn’t speak to nobody. Twitch would twitch and Henry’d give it the nod. And then you’d walk in. Even though it was in Kingsbury and on a Monday night, it drew some serious clubbers. This was around 1979, Hudson People ‘Take A Trip To Your Mind’ was coming out. Things like the Kay-Gees ‘Tango Hustle’, Teena Marie ‘I’m Just A Sucker For Your Love’, Francine McGee ‘Delirium’, all massive records at Bandwagon. South London had some places but it was definitely more reggae. East there was definitely stuff there, but that was Froggy’s territory.
What was the racial mix in the clubs? In the soul clubs, it was predominantly white. The reggae scene tended to cater for the majority black. It wasn’t we weren’t into reggae, but as soon as I got old enough to go out on my own I was drawn to the soul. Global Village there was maybe 50-100 black people out of 2,000 capacity. Sutton Scamps, there’d be seven or eight black people. It only started changing at the back end of the ’70s start of the ’80s, when jazz-funk started coming in. And towards the end of the 70s a lot of the reggae clubs were having trouble, the girls we’re leaving those clubs and coming to the soul clubs. Crackers started having problems with reggae people coming down and George used to play a whole night of jazz just to get rid of them!
I’ve heard Crackers was a little dodgy for handbag nicking and such? Towards the end maybe. We became disillusioned with the amount of reggae people coming into the scene. And the music began to change as well. There was a new audience who couldn’t get down to jazz and uptempo soul records. The tempo went down. The two-step soul was really the reggae boys’ soul. Anything beyond that bpm they had a problem with. At the start of the ’80s you had Larry Graham ‘Coming Out’, Howard Johnson ‘So Fine’, Collage ‘Get In Touch’, great tunes, but they were the ones the reggae boys could get down to. A lot of us went with it cos it was still soul, but there was a change.
What was Gulliver’s like? It was okay. It was more for your dress-up crowd. The music wasn’t bad. Slightly posey crowd. You didn’t go there to sweat.
And the 100 Club? The 100 Club was a teen disco, but it was so good everyone used to go! You’d need to get down there by 1 or you wouldn’t get in. It would be packed solid by 1pm. It finished at 4pm. It was a sweatbox in there. It was underground and in the summer you’d be dripping. The music was Hi Tension, Cameo ‘It’s Serious’, Fever ‘Don’t You Want Me’. Greg (Edwards) played his best when he played at 100 Club. It was one of the most memorable, because it had something that a lot of clubs didn’t have, it had kids that could really dance. Kids of five dancing to Brass Construction! Not just getting down, but serious moves. It was amazing. There was a lot of black dancers coming down there, a 60/40 split.
Most of the good dancers at Crackers were black weren’t they? Yeah. Trevor Shakes. What’s his daughter’s name, she’s a well known R&B singer now. Kelly Le Roc! Trevor Shakes was a serious dancer, you had people like Horace who was my favourite. Horace used to come down to the Clarendon in Hammersmith occasionally. One day he came and Sylvester’s ‘Mighty Real’ came on. I’ve never seen a person dance like that in my life. He danced to every word Sylvester sung. He had a move for every word. He was a trained dancer, too. Gradually everyone stopped dancing and just watched. Either he was on something that night or he was on a different planet. He was like a dancer acting out a part, you know.
There was a lot of rivalry in the dancing. The dancefloor was tiny. Unless you could dance, really dance, you would not step over that line, you’d dance on the carpet at the side. There was talk that Horace was losing it and he’d stop coming to Crackers for a while. Then he came to one Sunday. He walked in halfway through the night with this hot bird, put his leather bag down, grabs a chair, puts it right in the middle of the dancefloor and starts dancing with the chair. He was on it, around it, flicking it up. He just started freaking out and everyone backed off. The record finished, he put the chair back, grabbed his leather bag and walked out of the club. It was as though he was proving a point. Next day everyone was like, ‘Did you hear about Horace last night?’ He was the talk of the scene. That was how much a dancer meant in London then.
Horace was dark skinned, coffee looking, very slim, bald head, he looked like the model dancer. Then you had Mohammad, he used to dance at Pineapple [dance studios]. Like a lot of them. He was more light-skinned, and with a more of a rough edge about him. They didn’t like each other. Then you had another guy called Danny. He was also very good. You also had Peter Francis, very stocky, he’d do some amazing things with his feet, he didn’t move his top half, it was all about his feet. He also won the Disco Dancing championships. They were an integral part of the London scene and most of them used to follow George Power.
That must’ve been a hell of an attraction knowing George Power had this kind of following. Oh yeah, it was. They danced at a time when dancing was taken seriously. They lived for dancing in the way that I lived for DJing. They wanted to be professional dancers. It was all they ever wanted to do and they mastered dancing like the DJs mastered their decks. Even though the minority were black, there was serious black music being played down there.
If you walked down the road, there was no mistaking the fact that you were a soul boy. The reggae boys, they wouldn’t hesitate in telling you ‘batty boy’ because the girls might have loved the soul boys, but the reggae boys hated them! Compared to then, you could argue that the dancer is non-existent now. Horace and those guys were proper exhibitionists and showmen. In fact, when George use to run the best dancer competitions, the best dancers wouldn’t even go up!
Did the DJs of the period talk on the mic? Most of them did. The only one that didn’t was Andy Hunter. George used to speak, not all the time, but he used to speak. Most DJs did because that’s what part of the job was: to entertain. More the DJ/entertainer, Andy was getting disillusioned with this, he wanted to shut up and play the music.
What did you think of it? Did you think they should’ve shut up? I’m a bit of hypocrite. When I was DJing I used to talk, but when I was in a club it used to wind me up. But then there was a new breed of DJ who came along like Steve Walsh, and Chris Hill…
I get the sense that they were like pop radio DJs except they played better music… Yeah! You’re right. The DJs did strive to sound as professional as they could, but playing great music. Probably till the mid ’80s. You listen to [pirate stations] JFM and Horizon, the presentation was way up there with Capital. So you were getting great presentation and great music.
Do you think club DJs spoke because they saw one of the avenues to progress was to get on to radio? Most definitely. Presentation was the order of the day. Even in a club. To get a residency you had to be able to present. Outside the underground clubs, you had to be able to present, to give it the showmanship. And there weren’t many underground clubs about. There weren’t many promoters. There was Brian Mason, John Shohan, who ran Americas and the Margate soul weekenders. There was Pete Hardings, he used to run the Lyceum all-dayers. And the Isle of Wight weekenders. Brian Mason used to run the Slough all-nighters. The Slough all-nighters were very good. Players Association, Breakfast Band, Level 42 played there. Steve Walsh, Alan Sullivan, Tony Hodges all DJed there. They used to cater for the more black side, because you could see there were more black people getting involved. And around this time, the sound systems started breaking in.
Did the sound systems started playing soul because it was getting harder to get into the clubs? There had always been problems for black people to get into clubs, but at that point, we generally got in because black people were such a minority at that time.
Because you were a novelty rather than a threat? Precisely. The problem really started towards the late ’70s and early ’80s and it got worse and worse. You couldn’t put on a soul night. They thought of soul and they thought of black people, and they though ‘nah, they don’t drink!’ It wasn’t good for business. They couldn’t afford to give over a club on a Saturday to a load of black people who were just gonna come and get down to the music. And around this time, the sound system’s started breaking in.
It drove the soul scene in a slightly different direction. The likes of me and Norman [Jay] and Rap Attack. We were the first to start soul blues [sound system house parties]. It took a while and there were a lot of knock backs before it started. I went up to Glasgow, on and off between ’81 and ’83 and when I came back I noticed there was a new generation of black kids that had nowhere to go. They was just loafin’! There were loads of empty properties. And of course there was always that blues [party] heritage there from our parents anyway.
How did things get started? Soul blues started round west London. When Norman [Jay] used to have his birthday, they’d empty his whole house, a three floor terrace. Or we’d go spotting empty houses. We’d go round the back, nudge the window, change the locks, make sure there’s electric in there. In those days, you were so brazen, you’d turn up at 10 o’clock in the morning offloading massive speakers and the neighbours aren’t even asking any questions! We’d walk around the streets in the area, and invite pretty girls with flyers. Then we’d string up [the cables] and come ten o’clock BAM! And the whole street would rock.
Fantastic! Now I think back, and I think how did we get away with it? The police would turn up and ask ‘Who’s party is this?’ ‘Oh, it’s my mate’s 21st’. ‘It’s my birthday sarge.’ ‘Okay, turn the music down.’ ‘Okay’. Then as soon as they’d gone round the corner BAM! On again. Eventually they wised up to what was going on, there were a few too many birthday parties happening! We had streets blocked off. We had a house that maybe held 300 people if you were lucky, and there’d be 1,500 descending on some small back street trying to get in.
Then they started special blues units with plain clothes officers walking round Acton High Street, looking for flyers. So we had to think ahead. We’d have two houses, one on stand-by. We’d set up a scaled down sound system in this one, but the main sound system would be in this other one. Once they’d all arrived here, we’d throw the switches on the other one, so by the time they got there it would be full and they wouldn’t be able to throw anyone out. This went on for a good while.
But it did change the music a lot. At that point, soul had definitely gone down in tempo. The fastest soul records would be Royalle Delite ‘I’ll Be A Freak For You’, Sharon Redd, those kind of things became uptempo soul. Jazz definitely went out the window. If you wanted to listen to jazz you had to go to Dingwalls on a Sunday. Also electro had come on board by now. You had certain really funky gritty records like Serious Intention’s ‘You Don’t Know, but they were the minority. You had Surface ‘Falling In Love’, Collage ‘Get In Touch’. I didn’t mind them, but you know… You still had vocal tunes coming out, Brenda Taylor ‘Can’t Have Your Cake…’
But also at that time there were the tracks that would later become rare groove. I tunes like Archie Bell & The Drells ‘Don’t Let Love Get You Down’. I remember playing that in the ’70s, but it didn’t come big until the ’80s and it came big through the reggae boys’ soul scene. And things like Jacksons tune ‘Blues Away’. And Jeffree’s ‘Love’s Gonna Last,’ which originally came out in ’78 or ’79, suddenly started to be big in 1980. It slowed the music right down. All of a sudden Archie Bell stuff became big, things like ‘Strategy’, ‘Harder and Harder’. That’s what became rare groove.
Rare groove was soul music that the reggae people liked. The soul scene hasn’t recovered since. The nearest thing to the old soul scene now is the soulful house scene. Byron Stingily sounds like Lenny Williams to me. Rare groove was the equivalent of northern soul but northern soul was proper soul music. I thought London had lost the plot. I hated it.
How did you cope with the change? Once the scene started changing here in the early ’80s, we started going out of London more. We started going up north more. I started running coaches. The music had still changed up there. At that time Colin Curtis, Mike Shaft, Richard Searling that was the line-up there and the music was good, fresher up there. I remember going up to Manchester and it reminded me of what London had been… They had some dancers there and people from Birmingham used to travel, like Bulldog and his crew. Manchester Ritz was really good. People used to travel from Birmingham, from London, to go to the Ritz. Everyone used to descend on Manchester. All-dayers started popping up. Every week we were on the coach. Nottingham, Leicester, Shrewsbury. Every week we were going to some all-dayer.
And you played at some of them. Yeah. I did Ritz in Manchester, Tiffanys in Sheffield, Snobs, Maximilians, Powerhouse in Brum, Rock City in Nottingham, Notts Palais.
What was different between the south and the north in that period? Well, I used to go up north even before I was playing. We used to go up in the late ’70s to, I think it was called Angels in Burnley. That was a serious soul place. Phewww! I think it was on a Wednesday. I used to go up with Norman. He’d left school, but he was four years older than me. He used to have a blue escort van, no mattresses and it was a bumpy ride. We used to get up there and dance all night and then come straight back! And be in school for nine o’clock next morning. We used to do that every Wednesday. So, apart from reading Echoes and Blues & Soul, we were aware of the north. The Manchester scene had not yet been taken over by the reggae scene, like it had in London.
How important was the Royalty in Southgate in uniting the tribes from the suburbs and urban London? It was probably one of the clubs that was keeping the soul scene alive once Crackers had fallen by the wayside. I used to travel from here [Acton] to there, rather than go to Cheeky Pete’s which was just down the road for me [Richmond]. We went on the Saturday nights. Froggy [Steven Howlett] done the Saturday, then you’d have guest DJs, Chris Brown, Sean French, Tom Holland, all that crew. Chris Brown and Froggy were our DJs. Then maybe Tom Holland.
Why? We felt Froggy and Chris threw it down in a black way. It wasn’t just what they played, it was the way they played it. Froggy in the mix and Browny, even though he wasn’t a mixer, it was the records he selected. Chris Hill was the God for that [white suburban] crowd. But it was the complete opposite for us: it was Froggy and Browny. Froggy started a thing called Bentley’s on a Sunday in about 1983 and it was very very good. Me and Norman had started a thing called the Bridge on a Monday. Froggy had started this thing with Derek Bolland out in east London. You went down there and the crowd was predominantly black guys and white girls.
‘The music still batters the senses, pushing boundaries, constantly reinventing and setting the tone for what’s coming round the next corner,’ says Mike Grieve, head honcho at Glasgow’s Sub Club, possibly the world’s longest-running club of its kind. ‘This is the space where underground clubs really exist, breaking new music, creating new energies, inspiring new ideas, and forging new friendships all along the way.’With this level of excitement after almost thirty years, it’s not difficult to see why the Sub Club has firmly established itself as a Glasgow, dare we say Scottish, dance music institution.
Located on 22 Jamaica Street, the Sub Club, or ‘Subbie’, became central to the club culture explosion in ’90s Glasgow. The scene had been set thirty years before when it opened as afterhours speakeasy Le Cave – supposedly graced by the likes of Nina Simone and Louis Armstrong. By the early ’80s the same dancefloor was playing host to the likes of Primal Scream as the indie-centric Lucifer’s. In 1986 DJ Harri – who is still resident all these years later – moved in armed with his record box of dub, hip-hop and soul, and a year later in 1987 the Sub Club opened its doors.
But it was the advent of house music that really changed everything as Glasgow (along with the rest of the UK) began to experience a monumental shift in dancefloor culture. Within a couple of years, the Sub Club had become a beacon for every top house DJ in the world. Larry Heard, Derrick Carter, Sneak, Juan Atkins – and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. But it wasn’t just the guest appearances that made the Sub what it was. It was what it created. It was here that Slam found a home and it provided the birthplace for Optimo’s beloved Espacio. It’s hard to understate the importance of the Sub.
Back when it opened in 1987, house music domination was a little way away. With its rise seemingly less engineered than elsewhere in the UK, house began to seep into the consciousness of Scottish clubbers via a less direct route – gay clubs, hi-energy and Italo-disco. ‘My first encounters with house music were in gay clubs, because they were the best places to hear good music,’ explained Keith McIvor aka JD Twitch of Optimo in 2018. ‘There was a club called Bennetts, which lasted until relatively recently… hi-energy and Italo was the dominant sound in gay clubs but also in mainstream straight clubs.’ This led to a more organic rise of party culture. ‘I think initially the DJs who were playing it perhaps weren’t even aware this was this new thing, it was just that these records coming from Chicago fitted in and didn’t sound rabidly different from the Italo-disco they’d been playing.’ Around the same time, people started creating their own raves. ‘Before any house clubs per se, there was a lot of house parties… people would throw big parties, put up a few UV lights, get a load of ecstasy. Those were the first proper house music parties in Glasgow that I went to.’
The attitude to playing music was also changing. ‘I was always interested in mixing myself but the musical styles at the time were more eclectic and it wasn’t always possible until house took hold,’ remembered Stuart McMillan, one half of techno pioneers Slam. Key inspiration at this time was local mixmaster prodigy Paul Welsh: ‘I took part in the DMC mixing championships in the early ’80s. I started DJing when I was 12 at the local youth club, so that would’ve been late ’70s and I don’t even know if mixing was a big thing then – I was just learning the ropes.’ One of the judges was the legendary James Hamilton of Record Mirror – who had inadvertently introduced the young Welsh to the concept. ‘I had a good long chat with him because he was my hero. He used to do that page in Record Mirror and give you the BPM, so he saved you all the work!’ says Welsh. ‘It was trial and error when I started mixing records myself, but I didn’t fully understand that to get good at it you had to have a good understanding of tempos.’ All the same, he soon became the man to learn from when he played 22 Jamaica Street in one of its earlier incarnations – the Jamaica Inn. ‘He blew me away with how he could put records together in such a smooth fashion,’ says Harri, Sub Club legend and long-time resident. ‘He said you’re really good at holding down the beat, but you’re missing the bars. Pointing that out to me was a total revelation.’
It wasn’t long before this spread to the dancefloor. ‘Sunday night in a place called Fury Murry’s,’ remembers Harri. ‘It was fifty pence to get in and it was called Ten Bob Bop. They were playing a fair bit of house. It was probably the first exclusively acid and house night.’ Fury Murry’s also put on another night called Black Market – an early home for pre-Slam McMillan and Meikle. ‘When they started that night, I was still playing a cross section of things and then there was a deluge of house and also learning how to mix it properly,’ says Harri. ‘It started to take over, in tandem with ecstasy arriving. The two things together just made sense and went hand in hand.’
The Sub Club started off as a night at Lucifer’s but just a year later on April Fool’s Day 1987, 22 Jamaica Street re-opened as the Sub Club. All the vital ingredients were in place. Harri had joined in 1986 with his mate Gerri MacLaughlin when it was Lucifer’s. ‘We called the night ”Deep Box.” At the start of the night, we’d play reggae and northern soul and then stuff like “Rhythim Is Rhythim” mixed in with it, but it wasn’t exclusively house.‘ Paul Welsh was there too. ‘We used to do a Friday night. Harri would play mainly house and I’d play hip hop and jazz. I know this was going on in London cos I used to go to London regularly on record buying trips and I met people like Patrick Forge and Gilles Peterson and Paul Murphy.’ Current owners Mike Grieve and Paul Crawford remember the transition on their site. ‘At first it was a mix of soul, funk and hip hop with an occasional house track thrown in, then acid house blew up and that was just crazy – smiley t-shirts, kaftans, flares, whistles, smoke, strobes and a full night of acid house music. It completely changed clubbing and that was certainly a defining moment.’
Slam arrived in 1989 and things really began to change. Both regulars, McMillan remembers that it wasn’t really about the club itself back then so much as the nights that they put on. ‘Harri and Gerry had a night called Deep Box. and Graham Wilson and Nick Peacock were the residents at Lucifer’s. I was always that kid standing at the side watching. Trying to find out what the records were called.’ By this point the pair were playing Fury Murry’s. ‘It was a real mish-mash of music from House to disco rare groove and some cool hip-hop cuts like Spoony G’s the Godfather,’ McMillan said. ‘The only night the club could give us was a Wednesday night, but when you’re keen, you’re keen. We managed to fill that quite a few times.’ Steven Sweetman then started his UFO night at Tin Pan Alley where Jon DaSilva and Harri were residents and coaxed Macmillan and Orde across giving birth to their reinvention as Slam. ‘I never really liked the name,’ says McMillan, ‘but it was ideal for the night as the name was taken from Phuture’s ‘Acid Tracks’ EP. We ran that for about 5-6 months and now has become a legendary night…the scene went from quite underground to utter hysteria in the space of months. You really could feel you were living through some sort of revolution.’
By 1990, the Sub Club was thriving – Slam’s JOY became a Friday night banker from 1989, while Harri took over the Saturday night residency a year later. And it wasn’t long before the two joined forces. ‘They started a new night at the Sub Club called Atlantis, which was all about house, acid house with a slight Balearic feel,’ says McIvor. But it took a while to get going. ‘For the first few months it wasn’t that busy and then we got these UV lights and big white drapes and the club felt like you were in a big tent,’ remembers Harri. ‘The night that really kicked off for us in that club was Stuart and myself warming up for Stone Roses. They played at Glasgow Green and asked Stuart and I to do the warm-up for them and we’d never heard of them. Then we did the after party at Atlantis and we had a queue round the block and from that night on we had a queue every Saturday for the next four years.’
Atlantis, by Nick Peacock (also the header image)
This all coincided with a novel time in the City’s history. ‘Glasgow was the European Capital of Culture, so we had a 5am license for the whole year, which was unheard of in those days,’ Slam told Do Music Yourself. ‘We quickly attracted a second wave of new house music fans to join the acid house early adopters who had lasted the pace. It was at a special point in time for the scene – a point where indie bands were just as likely to get on one and join the party as ravers and clubbers.’ McIvor remembers the change. ‘The nights in the Sub Club were the ones were you felt something revolutionary was happening and everything’s changing. The dress code is changing, the attitude is changing. Before then it had been very much about what you were wearing, fashion, looking a bit moody and suddenly it was all wiped away.’
Sadly, it wasn’t long before Slam started to lose interest in big parties and moved back underground, heading to the nearby Arches and shifting to a more techno-centric focus. Harri stayed put, launching his new night Subculture in 1994 with Domenic and Oscar Fullone and which, remarkably, is still going strong to this day. ‘The owners of the club offered me the Saturday night with whoever I wanted to do it with,’ explained Harri in 2018. ‘After a few years Oscar left to do Mish Mash, so for the last 22 years Dominic and I have been doing it on our own. We’ve had our peaks and troughs, but they’ve always stood by us.’
Troughs indeed including a fire (started in the pub next door) in 1999 that wiped the club out for three years. ‘Paul got a phone call that the building next door was on fire and we headed straight there,’ remembered Mike Grieve in 2007 (Previously a promoter in Aberdeen and long-time associate of Harri’s Grieve took over the club in the early 1990s). ‘We never thought it was going to be that bad. In fact, we all went into MacSorleys bar for a pint while the fire brigade put it out … or so we thought.’ Three years later the club reopened. ‘It allowed us to reopen the venue with brand new fit-out and an unbelievable sound system.’
It wasn’t the first time the Sub had had a revamp. In 1997 they had a second bar installed and ‘the sticky carpet’ removed and then nine years later they had a Bodysonic dancefloor installed – road tested by Derrick Carter no less. But the Sub was far from being showy. In fact, that was a large part of its appeal particular in the era of the superclub. ‘Our punters preferred the intimacy and community of the Sub Club,’ explained Grieve and Crawford. ‘The club has always had a strong policy of inclusion – if you come down for a party, with a friendly attitude, then you’re in. It’s not about following fads or fashion. The DJs are constantly pushing music forward, seeking new tunes and sounds that will keep people dancing.’ Harri agrees on that front. ‘I might only be playing four hours a week but I’m certainly putting in a lot more than that trying to find a new music.’ And for a while it was the place everyone wanted to be. ‘I remember the captain of the Scottish football team, off his face, trying to order drinks at the cloakroom.’
Today the Sub Club’s most celebrated residents are Optimo, aka JD Twitch and JG Wilkes, with their much-loved Espacio night, which ran every Sunday until 2010. Named after the Liquid Liquid song, the duo’s big appeal was their ability to take tracks from any genre and work them together – which wowed crowds and became their calling card. Both Wilkes and Twitch had cut their teeth playing techno, but by 1997 were ready for more musical freedom. As DJmag put it, alongside techno and house you might expect to hear anything from post-punk and new wave, to dub, electroclash, Afrobeat and more. ‘Ambient Eno cuts could slot in seamlessly alongside an industrial Cabaret Voltaire banger, a Fela Kuti jam or a straight-up classic pop hit.’
It took time for the word to spread but by the time Optimo returned to the venue after the fire, queues would form around the block. ‘Their musical policy had a huge influence on my DJing and my taste in music,’ Richard Birchard aka Hudson Mohawke, who worked the Sub Club bar in Optimo’s heyday, told The Guardian. ‘The way they crafted their sets opened me up to so many things. Their influence spreads far, but they don’t often get the credit they deserve – there are plenty of people out there now doing pretend versions of Optimo sets to huge festival crowds.’ As their reputation grew, a who’s who of established names played: from good mate James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem, through to Franz Ferdinand, Peaches, the Pop Group, Gang of Four, ESG and even Rachel Stevens. But rather than let the rot set in, the duo decided to call it a day in 2010 – parodying a David Cameron campaign poster for the announcement: ‘Optimo (Espacio) 1997-2010: Getting out before the Tories get in.’
Other residencies included the The Yard with Stuart McCorisken and Gareth Sommerville in 1995, Sensu from 2007, techno residency Animal Farm, The I AM, Thunder Disco, Don’t Drop – all local faces mixed with a list of A-Class musical guests as long as your arm including Carl Cox, Green Velvet, Juan Atkins, Kerri Chandler and of course, Liquid Liquid.
Still going strong today and showing no signs of tiring, it seems that the Sub has come to represent everything that’s so vibrant and unique about the Scottish club scene. ‘I love the Sub Club. I’ve had some amazing nights there over the years,’ says Irvine Welsh. ‘Whatever genre of music it hosts, it always pulls along a great crowd of party animals who really know their stuff. Sometimes, the perception on the other side of Hadrian’s Wall is that Scotland just do the Highland fling of a weekend.’
Most of you reading this will be far too young to remember the original DjHistory site. Ask your gran. Back in the before-times we published snappy book reviews about 100 words each. Of classics we loved, and new releases we managed to blag from publishers. A team of restorers has been working night and day and has pieced together the following.
Spot-on acid house daftness
Once In A Lifetime: The Crazy Days of Acid House and Afterwards – Jane Bussman, 1998
Acid house told as sit-com. A hilarious scrapbook chronicle filled with snippets, quotes, memories, and stories. If you were there, every page revives priceless forgotten details; if not, this is the best book for soaking up the sheer lunacy of the time. Bussman captures those crazy, hazy days of the summer of love better than anyone.
Foremost acid house history
Altered State: The Story of Ecstasy Culture and Acid House – Matthew Collin, 1997
With Collin as editor, i-D magazine boasted the most insightful coverage of the ’80s emerging club cultures. Altered State was the first serious book about acid house, and for a ride through the social and cultural revolution that ecstasy and house music ignited, it remains the best. The 2006 update catches Tony Blair using an E anthem to get elected.
TV spin-off house history
Pump Up The Volume – Sean Bidder
The TV documentary was strong on the origins of house, then got a little cabbaged when it tried to stand up and go anywhere. This accompanying book is similarly disorganised, but worth having for its acres of extended quotes: a veritable oral history. It would be churlish to point out the debt it owes to our own little history book, but we’ll do it anyway.
On-the-ground house memoir
Adventures In Wonderland: A Decade of Club Culture – Sheryl Garratt 1998
Former Face editor Garratt follows the arc of acid house from American origins to Clink Street, Shoom and the Hacienda, then along the M25 to raves, Ibiza and the Criminal Justice Bill, including interviews with all the major players. Having partied centre stage through it all she treads a bouncing line between history and memoir.
Scrappy happy house history
What Kind of House Party is This: History of a Music Revolution – Jonathan Fleming, 1995
When house was still in short trousers, champion raver Fleming self-published this psychedelic monster, took the pictures, did the interviews, wrote the theme tune, sang the theme tune, visited Detroit and Chicago, broke his leg, collected a load of flyers and a tall stack of his own photos, hosed it all into an stone-age version of Photoshop and hit the button marked ‘SWIRL!’
Precision-engineered rave chronicle
Energy Flash – Simon Reynolds
Step this way for ’ardkore… A rock fan bodysnatched by techno, Reynolds filters the UK dance explosion through grown-up music journalism, going deep with genre definitions and record-by-record analysis, but always coming up for air with rich writing and great musical descriptions. Dance music’s iconoclast. Published as ‘Generation Ecstasy’ in the US.
Chi-town originator stakes his claim
House Music: The Real Story, by Jesse Saunders, 2007
Though the name came from Knuckles’ disco edits and much of the musical spark from Italy, with ‘On & On’, Jesse was the very first to get Chicago’s home-grown minimalism onto vinyl, and here he stakes his claim as the originator of house music. A well-written, detailed and personal tale, evoking Chi-town’s teenage heroes and the music biz villains who stole their thunder (including a good old Tong-lashing).
Tooled up gangster house
Class Of 88: The True Acid House Experience, Wayne Anthony, 1998
‘Alright geez, hold this huge bag of money could you, I’ve just got to fix the smoke machine.’ While you were off your tits dancing in a cowshed, Wayne, founder of the Genesis raves, was coining it hand over fist, outsmarting the filth, facing down shooters, and generally living the life of smiley. Don’t worry, there’s no modesty to spoil the fun. The Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels of acid house.
US ’90s dance boom
Rave America: New School Dancescapes – Mireille Scott,1999
Written before ecstasy hysteria pretty much criminalised the flourishing US rave scene, Scott’s solid account of America’s dayglo dance teens feels like a first act in search of a climax. It chronicles NYC technophilia, west coast rave, including some great anti-Brit backlashery, and a trip to Sasha-loving Orlando, from whence emerged the cultural treasure we call breaks.
Southern deathbed rap
Triksta: Life and Death and New Orleans Rap – Nik Cohn, 2007
Old white music writer (a short story he wrote inspired Saturday Night Fever), dying with hepatitis, settles in New Orleans, city of his personal demons, and as a musical last rites tries to connect with local rappers. It’s all doomed; their styles are too local and they don’t want to be helped. Filled with scenes of poverty, struggle, hope, despair, and that’s even before Katrina hits. Beautiful in its futility.
Straight outta Compton
Westsiders: Stories of the Boys in the Hood – William Shaw, 2001
Compton high school yearbooks have full-page ads for funeral parlours. Brit William Shaw’s South Central travelogue brings you kids whose lives are shaped by gangs, riots, drive-bys and… hip hop. Demo tapes, sad talent shows, scraping a living putting up Alkoholics stickers. The characters and scenery are vivid enough for a novel. Plus chats with Cube, Tupac and others who made it.
Hip hop’s Rosetta stone.
Rap Attack: African Rap to Global Hip Hop – David Toop, 1984
The first great book about hip hop, written back when it was def, fly and fresh as a daisy. After talking roots – African poets, soul preachers and doo-wop groups – Toop grabs Flash, Bambaataa and the rest, adding some classic white-gloved, fat boombox B-boy pics to boot. Rap Attack is essential old school literature; updated editions leave the original text and photos intact.
20 years of Black culture
Buppies, B-boys, Baps and Bohos: Notes on Post-Soul Black Culture – Nelson George, 1993
So a black yuppie, KRS-1, a Black American Princess and a bohemian Fort Greene intellectual walk into a bar… A collection of George’s Village Voice column, collating the varied characters and concerns of ’90s black American culture, along a personal 20-year timeline that winds from the Muhammad-Frazier fight to the debut of Urkel, ‘the first hip black nerd in history’.
Hip hop’s pioneers tell their tales
Yes Yes Y’all: Oral History of Hip-Hop’s First Decade – Jim Fricke & Charlie Ahearn, 2002
From the times when dinosaurs ruled the earth and Kool Herc rocked the Bronx. Back in the day – when it was fun, spelt F-U-N. Fricke and Ahearn (Wildstyle director) take us back, effortlessly, brilliantly, merging a barrage of photos and flyers with extended interviews starring a full cast of B-boys, MCs, graffiti writers and old school pioneer DJs. To the beat y’all, and it don’t stop.
DISCO
Love Saves The Day: A History of American Dance Culture 1970-1979
Tim Lawrence, 2003
A scrupulous historical document: Lawrence follows the New York disco underground with detail to suit a forensic scientist. Forget character sketches, here’s detailed biography; instead of snappy anecdotes you get careful reconstructions. There’s charm, wit and warmth here (and great photos), but the more casual reader might not hang around long enough to find it.
Painstaking NY disco history
Disco – Albert Goldman, 1978
Best-known for digging dirt on Elvis and Lennon, Goldman became fascinated with the disco underground after interviewing Francis Grasso for Penthouse. The result, an extended essay and photo album, is one of the classic texts of dance music (now an expensive collectors’ item), not least for the respect Goldman gave to a scene most people saw as a gimmick. Profound passionate and prophetic.
Revered disco timepiece
Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco – Peter Shapiro, 2005
Peter Shapiro’s forensic examination of disco is at its strongest in his early brilliant chapters detailing its genesis from Parisian speakeasies to New York bacchanals. He excels at socio-cultural theories while still managing to convey the excitement of the music and clubs he undresses. A genre history that lovingly redresses Mama Disco’s oft-maligned reputation.
Mama Disco gets the biography she deserves
The Last Party: Studio 54, disco and the culture of the night
Anthony Haden-Guest
Debonair Vanity Fair hack Haden-Guest details the monied world of upper-crust New York clubbing in a history that climaxes the day Bianca Jagger rode a horse into Studio 54. It’s the full saga of Studio itself, populated largely by people with titles, racehorses and Truman Capote’s phone number; then Palladium, Limelight and other gossipy spots. Best picture caption: “Andy Warhol is in the rear.”
New York club vulture
CLUBBING
The Manual – Ministry of Sound:
After a total of 148 years writing about dance music, Broughton and Brewster emptied their hard disks for the men from the Ministry, found some lovely photos and added some jokes. The result was this beautifully designed coffee table book, which laid the ground for their classic, Last Night a DJ Saved My Life. A perfect present for tricky nephews. Doesn’t actually contain much Ministry.
ISBN 0747276366
Elegant clubland colourbox
Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital
Most sociology is just pub-level chat disguised in impenetrable jargon; this book is wonderfully different. Not only is it written in earth language, but it’s filled with proper research, interesting facts and provocative insight. American Thornton uses her experience as a UK clubber (plus a good deal of history) to examine why the hell we love to go out dancing.
Club sociology that isn’t wank
Night Fever: Club Writing in The Face 1980-1997 – Richard Benson (ed)
The Face and i-D were the first magazines to take clubbing seriously on a regular basis. This little time capsule fills your head with bygone dancefloors, including several classic articles that were first to shine light on a scene: Stuart Cosgrove’s ‘Seventh City Techno’, Sheryl Garrat’s Chicago House report and Steven Harvey’s 1983 NYC disco snapshot.
Classic style mag clublife articles
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Seduced And Abandoned: Essays on Gay Men and Popular Music – Richard Smith, 1995
‘Pop music’s a bit like boys. I mean, I just really, really love it.’ Smith’s enthusiasm makes for sharp insight that never forgets the cheeky fun of it all. From homo svengalis and closeted pop puppets, to fag hags, queercore and heavy metal’s gender confusion, a beautifully written account of a night in a gay club and a hilarious history of the penis in pop.
Cheeky smarts about music and gayness
The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Hackers, Punk Capitalists and Graffiti Millionaires are Remixing Culture – Matt Mason, 2008
Wonderful for spirited stories of rebellious creativity; infuriating for sloppy logic and wild overclaims (who knew graffiti ‘inspired amazing new technologies’?). Arguing for an open-source world, Mason flits from a WWII jetty with its own stamps, to tagging the president’s plane, to the DJ nun who inspired David Mancuso. Great fun, brimming with colour, but in need of a remix to bring home a serious argument about copyright.
IP plunder and copyrighting wrongs
Slumberland – Paul Beatty (2008)
DJ philosophising of a higher fidelity. Beatty cracks post-racial satire like no other, and his third novel does for music what ‘Perfume’ did for stink. Trying to erase notions of ‘negritude’, Los Angeles DJ Darky gets his blackness caressed as ‘jukebox sommelier’ in wall-time Berlin while tracking missing jazz ghost ‘the Schwa’, whose chops are destined to wail over his perfect beat.
beats-per-minute poetics
UK BASS
All Crews: Journeys Through Jungle/Drum & Bass Culture – Brian Belle-Fortune, 2004
Intensive care nurse Belle-Fortune whipped up this spirited junglist scrapbook after partying his way from acid house, through hardcore, to jungle and drum’n’bass. All Crews is the closest to a classic text on the scene, fat with snippets, interviews, quotes and an extensive overview of the players, pirates and producers, including some evocative recollections and captured moments.
Spirited junglist patchwork
State of Bass : Jungle, the Story So Far – Martin James, 1997
James follows the early years of jungle, from its origins as a dark force emerging from rave, through its evolution into drum’n’bass, enlisting A Guy Called Gerald for a rousing forward. Strong on historical details, but written a little early for much in the way of perspective. The book ends on a plea for unity as he watches the genre splinter into shards of argumentative sub-scenes.
Early jungle d’n’b history
Cut ‘N’ Mix: Culture Identity and Caribbean Music – Dick Hebdige, 1987
This classic cultural history follows Caribbean music from slavery days, through the birth of ska and reggae, up to pirate radio and Smiley Culture, and ending around the emergence of ragga. Excels on reggae’s UK collisions and evolutions, from punks and dreads in Ladbroke Grove to the Hackney birth of lovers’ rock and the Coventry melting pot of Two Tone.
UK reggae culture classic
The Two Tone Story – George Marshall, 1990
A fan’s gushing love affair with ‘a stylish little number decked out on black and white checks.’ It charts Jerry Dammers’ biography and the rise of the Coventry scene, then lovingly chronicles each Two Tone release, complete with discography, scrapbook pics and details only a spotter could love.
Loving spotters guide to Coventry
SIXTIES
Wonderland Avenue: Tales of Glamour and Excess – Danny Sugerman, 1991
It’s not widely known but the seventies were nearly cancelled due to a lack of drugs. This was because Danny Sugerman had taken them all. Classic rock craziness by the one-time manager of the Doors – groupies, overdoses and cars in swimming pools. Whenever you get used to the excess, a stripling Iggy Pop arrives with three girls and a family pack of angel dust to warm things up a bit.
Original rockstar behaviour
Give the Anarchist A Cigarette – Mick Farren, 2001
An angry punk let loose at the heart of London’s sixties psychedelic love-in. Farren’s memoir paints the decade (and after) with hard photographic detail where his peers have only managed glowing romantic impressionism. Rings hilariously true.
bit more
The muck-flinging sixties
NYC
Disco Bloodbath: The Story of Michael Alig, King of the Club Kids – James St James
He came, he partied, he killed. The true story of New York superfreak club promoter Michael Alig, who killed his drug dealer for being tacky, then hailed a yellow cab to take the corpse to the river. Elegantly written by co-freak St James, it pins down the candy-coloured drug-skewed ‘Club Kids’ scene of New York misfits in a surprisingly moral tale.
NYC killer club kid shocker
Downtown – Michael Musto, 1986
Village Voice clubs scribe Michael Musto sweeps you on a mid ’80s clubland safari, armed with an Andy Warhol cover quote no less, showing off New York’s post-Studio 54 places, faces and social graces. The arty be-seen scenes of Pyramid, Mudd Club, Danceteria and Palladium are the main stops on his tour; Paradise Garage doesn’t even merit a drive-past.
Eighties NYC nightlife safari
SOUL, FUNK
Nowhere To Run – Gerri Hirshey
Along with Guralnick’s Sweet Soul Music, one of the greatest books ever written about soul music. Scores of original interviews, beautifully written and with rare passion, it will make you, like any good music book, want to own the songs it documents.
bit more
The In Crowd: The Story of Northern Soul and the Rare Soul Scene – Mike Ritson/Stuart Russell
The Northern soul scene is littered with well-meaning but rubbish books. The In Crowd is passionate, put together with style and a soul nut’s eye for detail. There’s only one book you need on Northern soul and this is it.
bit more
The Death of Rhythm and Blues – Nelson George, 1988
The classic account of how black music carved a place for itself in apartheid America, how ‘race records’ evolved into rhythm and blues, then soul and funk, helped by some wily entrepreneurs and the rapid social climb of the first black radio DJs. The ‘death in George’s story is when black music found white acceptance with the era of Motown pop.
Black music takes America
fashion style culture
Street Style – Ted Polhemus
The 1994 original was issued to Japanese fashion students at the UK border. Now this classic spotters’ guide to ye olde street tribes of England is repacked and beefed by the lovely folk at PYMCA. Insightful essays about the evolution and importance of street fashion, and stacks of brilliant pics. Thanks to Ted Polhemus Japanese cities have a shopping mall crew assigned to each chapter of the book.
tribal gathering
Leigh Bowery The Life and Times of an icon. Sue Tilley
I saw him ‘give birth’ at Heaven. Some Italian boys were so horrified they were flicking lit cigarettes at him. Now that’s what I call an impact. From Club Kids to nu-ravers, so many have fingered Bowery’s ideas, we lose sight of what a revolutionary he was. A fearless explorer, he did for dressing up what Picasso did for painting or the drum machine did for dance music. An affectionate revealing biog written by his best friend.
Life.
Garments as legend
Club Kids: From Speakeasies to Boombox and Beyond – Raven Smith (ed), 2008
A sparky volume on the club faces who’ve led pop’n’fashion, from ’20s flappers to nu-rave. A few lapses: Leigh Bowery ranks next to Duchamp as a revolutionary artist, so it’s a crime to give him less space than some of the cheeky Hoxton peacocks currently recycling his ideas. Still, this is their book and if they want to portray the history of clubbing as merely a lead-up to Boombox, fairy nuff.
Shoreditch crowns a century of clubbing
Skins & Punks: Lost Archives 1978-1985 – Gavin Watson, 2008
Subculture-liggers will grab this as an eye-spy style manual. In fact the skinhead thing is close to irrelevant; better to see these photos as tender and revealing portraits of a gang of mates tumbling through life together. A first tattoo, at the fairground, outside dad’s, after school at my house… The last pic shows the day the world changed thanks to acid house (Gavin’s next book!).
xxxxxxx
The Look: New Romantics – Dave Rimmer, 2003
With their post-glam, post-punk love of Bowie, Roxy and Berlin, the New Romantics definitely did their bit for the European eyeliner mountain. The Blitz kids also launched eerie synth futurism, scads of proper pop and the self-transformational genius of Leigh Bowery. Rimmer’s clued-up account details the movement’s influences and influence to show the substance behind the foundation. Forgive the clumsy ’80s pastiche design and buckle that swash.
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MUSICOLOGY
The Recording Angel: Explorations in Phonography – Evan Eisenberg, 2005
Before recording, to hear your favourite tune took a special occasion and a roomful of musicians, and owning or collecting music was unimaginable. In this quirky and thought-provoking treasure Eisenberg muses on the culture-quake of records and the love affairs with music they made possible. Originally published in 1987, the new edition adds digital musings.
Our love affair with recorded music
Will Pop Eat Itself: Pop Music in the Soundbite Era – Jeremy J Beadle, 1993
The guy who invented the sampler laughed when someone suggested it might be the future of music. Written in the aftermath of the ’90s remix revolution, with a resolutely chart-based pop perspective, this chronicles the rise of post-modern musical recycling, from scratching, through Stars on 45 pop-medleys and Coldcut’s cut-and-paste collages to the rise of house and techno.
Soundbites and sampling in pop
Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain – Oliver Sacks, 2007
What’s your problem? Fear of music? tunes cause you pain? it’s all just noise? Call Oliver – ‘My wife’s not a hat’ – Sacks, famous neurologist, to help and explain with odd tales of melodic malfunction. Sadly it’s all genteel case histories with a classical bent – he blithely ignores the millions of brains who’ve done their own weekend pharma-musico-neurological experiments.
Star neurologist on music
Big Bangs: The Story of Five Musical Discoveries That Changed Musical History – Howard Goodall, 2001
Not content with writing the Blackadder theme tune, Goodall is on a mission to educate the masses in the mysteries of classical music, focusing on five ‘big bangs’: the inventions of written music, the piano, opera, recording and some cleverness called equal temperament, the secret that keeps the world in tune. A fascinating intro to the principles behind all music.
The foundations of (classical) music
This Is Your Brain on Music: Understanding a Human Obsession – Daniel J. Levitin
Explain the unspeakable magic when rhythms enter a human. How can vibrating air build emotions to bring you to your knees? Did music come before language? Exciting questions with astonishing answers. And Levitin, a neuroscientist rock producer, is the man to give you them. But his writing travels like treacle, his explanations meander endlessly. Dejected, you lose interest and put some music on.
Music, language, rhythms and emotion
SOCIAL HISTORY
Satan In The Dance Hall: Rev. John Roach Straton, Social Dancing, and Morality in 1920s New York City – Ralph Giordano, 2008
Once they’d hoodwinked the country into banning alcohol, America’s fundamentalists targeted dancing. Lincoln Nebraska outlawed eye contact between dance partners, while many cities banned ‘animal’ (ie black) dances, like the scandalous Charleston. Forgive the lifeless academic prose, this is a book of amazing revelations, leaving no doubt that jazz culture was more threatening than punk.
the original dance revolution
Social Dancing in America vol 1 & 2 – Ralph G Giordano, 2006
The author’s passion is clear, so it’s a shame he’s written this truly epic two-volume history in a style so neutral it might be aimed at Vulcans (at one point he even stops to define ‘house party’). From 1607 up to the twist, it’s an unbeatable academic reference, packed with social context and cultural insight. There’s not much thread to pull you along however, and it creaks badly once it reaches disco.
academic history of dance
Swing Under The Nazis: Jazz as a Metaphor for Freedom – Mike Zwerin
Quiffs, platforms, cut-off zoot suits, sunglasses and pop-socks, set off with a Neville Chamberlain umbrella and a smirk: les Zazous of wartime Paris kick-started club culture with swing records in secret cellars. Along with jazz musicans across Europe they showed up the Nazis as the squarest, grouchiest daddios in history. A laid-back look from American Parisian Zwerin.
Jazz sticks it to Hitler
The Twist: The Story of the Song and Dance That Changed the World – Jim Dawson, 1995
Despite the cancer of Strictly Come Dancing, most of us shake it without worrying about the rules; we can thank the twist. A bum-wiggling transatlantic dance craze, it ushered in the shocking idea of dancing without a partner, showed the new power of youth culture and niftily de-coupled dancefloors forever. Along the way there’s racism, payola, mafia dons and a ton of great stories.
Screwy dance revolution
Teenage: The Creation of Youth – Jon Savage, 2007
The teenager is a post-war creation, but what were the ingredients? American industry spat out ‘juvenile delinquents’ as early as 1810, while in Victorian London gangs of hooligan scamps ran wild. WWI thinned a generation of dreamers and turned the survivors wild and weird, leaving the Hitler Youth to take advantage. When American swing and rock’n’roll turned up, the job was already done.
Glorious prehistory of the teenager
Low Life: Drinking, Drugging, Whoring, Murder, Corruption, Vice and Miscellaneous Mayhem in Old New York – Luc Sante, 1998
In 1860s New York, the poorest drank poisonous alcohol from rubber tubes and whole families lived in the cupboard under your stairs. ‘Suicide Saloons’ had hatches in the floor for the cleaners to drop bodies in the river, and warring fire brigades would leave buildings burning while they fought their rivals. The bare-knuckled reality of ‘Gangs of New York’-era Manhattan.
Wonderfully grim 1860s NYC
Out Of It; A Cultural History of Intoxication – Stuart Walton, 2001
Not enough drug books are written by wine writers. Walton’s thesis is that getting fucked up is a human right and a biological imperative, and he shows us piss-head hamsters and silver Edwardian ladies’ syringes to prove it. He treats legal and illegal drugs alike, arguing with a flawless objectivity that mainlining skag is not so far removed from necking too much Kenko.
A refreshing look at refreshments
Cocaine: A Definitive History – Dominic Streatfeild, 2002
Your gram of toot left an acre of virgin rainforest drowned in petrochemicals and made sure a peasant family can’t grow their own food. Sobering tales, smugglers adventures and a deal of hidden history to bore your mates with in this ripsnorting read about the devil’s dandruff. Not least, the truth about Coca-Cola’s central role in the worldwide trade in blow. Not to be sniffed at.
Full speed down the white line
TECH HISTORY
How to Wreck a nice beach: The Machine Speaks – Dave Tomkins
The Vocoder started life as a phone scrambler for Churchill – five tons of valves and some self-destruct double decks, went on via late funk, early electro, Kubrick, Stalin and the Muppets – and ended up as the autotune chip that powers X-Factor and wibbles out of every sodcaster’s mobile. A bonkers story, but an exhausting read – as if in tribute to his material Tomkins writes so obliquely you have to decode every sentence.
The amazing life of the Vocoder
Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music Paperback – Greg Milner, 2010
Is recorded music ever the real thing? Or always better? A mesmerising tale of man’s relationship with music, detailing the leaps of recording technology and the genius of producers who made the studio their artform. You learn how the industry’s obsession with volume prevented CDs reaching their potential, and is marching us into a world of over-compressed flatness. Curious, fascinating, poetic.
Curious history of recorded formats
The Long Player Goodbye – Travis Elborough, 2008
Wagnerian epics to triple concept albums: the LP brought it all home. A smart history of listening, from 33 triumphing over 78 in the speed wars, up to the iPod uprising. Great details – his charity shops theory of tastelessness, the scandalous first edit (an operatic high C), even the well-worn pop stories feel fresh. But Elborough don’t dance: DJ-mix albums, a key innovation, get no mention.
Charting the album
Old rare new: The Independent Record Shop,
In Lincoln’s ‘Rockabilly Shop’ Colin and Mary Chapman sold me battered James Brown albums. Here’s a book of people who measure their time on earth in dusty vinyl: collectors sleeping in warehouses, shopkeepers too attached to their stock, handmade signs, groaning shelves. Inspired by a US road trip (film to follow), and centred on a touching memoir from Bob Stanley. Lovely and loving.
The record shop has its day
TECHNO
Modulations: A history of electronic music – Peter Shapiro (ed), 2000
The least inviting book I own – actually a ‘multi-media exploration.’ If martians read this they’d think dance music was an industrial process done in vacuum chambers to rigorous health and safety standards by academics in white coats and Polyveldt shoes. There might be some interesting things in here: interviews with Robert Moog and Giorgio Moroder perhaps, but the layout is designed to appeal to barcode machines, so I have no idea.
electronic chronicle killed by design
Techno Rebels: The Renegades of Electronic Funk – Dan Sicko, 1999
The allure of Detroit to eggheads means most books on techno are written for cyborgs. Sicko’s sharpened pen cuts through the crap, with great humour and precision, finding the human stories behind all that Third Wave futurology. Later chapters spread thin into a global checklist of techno’s many tendrils, but his journeys through Detroit’s pre-techno scene are outstanding.
Fine Detroit techno primer
GENRES, sounds AND LABELS
Ninja Tune: 20 Years of Beats & Pieces – Stevie Chick and Peter Quicke, 2010
‘We are ninja, not geisha’. Ninjatune was always about stealthy insurrection more than anything else, as it snatched the hip hop aesthetic for the UK and took it into the future and beyond. From Coldcut to Scruff to Roots Manuva, the label’s big guns paved the way for legions of research mixologists. The best labels have an unmistakeable identity, and this jam-packed retrospective nails it beautifully.
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BLACK DOG COSMIC BOOK?
As definitive a book of long-haired German Kosmiche freaks as anyone could desire, packed with knowledgable essays and an abundance of information: band by band, label by label, plus enough tripped-out psychedelic artwork to set off most smoke alarms. Its only fault is a lack of discographies, but an ausgezeichnet Buch nonetheless. Worth buying alone for a shaggy shot of pre-haircut Kraftwerk.
Tangerine Dream posing by a wall of computers.
WAX POETICS ANTHOLOGY VOL 1, 2008
If DJhistory smoked bigger doobies, knew Pete Rock, lived in Fort Greene and did capoeira at the weekend it would be Wax Poetics. We’d be kicking back with Idris Muhammad, Bernard Purdie, the RZA, Prince Paul, cat’s like that. We’d have James Brown’s drummers, graffiti nostalgia, and acres record porn. The best of the studious magazine’s first six years. Fine, detailed, earnest and pure.
WAX POETICS ANTHOLOGY VOL 2, 2009
meets more powerhouse musicians who keep the samplers in business, plus the intense-looking beatmasters who’ve done the sampling. Scrupulous collector-stiffening pieces on Sun Ra, Deodato, Randy Muller and 90s A&R wunderkind Dante Ross, and much more. Danny Krivit picks out 12s, and DJ Premier confesses he’s a Smiths fan. Mind you, I still think ‘Wax Poetic’ would have been a cleverer name.
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The Sound of Philadelphia – Tony Cummings, 1975
With the march of an obsessive, and some friendly words from the musicians, Cummings traces Philly soul power from its gospel and doo-wop roots, up to Gamble and Huff, Sigma Sound Studios, the O’Jays and MFSB – ‘a rag-bag assortment of leather-capped soul brothers and near-sighted Jews, renegade jazzmen and moonlighting symphonians.’ With some less-than-household names for the spotters.
Dedicated Philly groove
Warp: Labels Unlimited – Rob Young, 2005
It was originally going to be called Warped records, trivia fans. A scrap-packed coffee-table compendium on the Sheffield label, from the bleep era, through the ‘intelligent’ techno rave-backlash, up to cutting edge filmmakers. Despite a section on Sheffield’s electronic prehistory, it’s fairly light on context. Lashings of Designers’ Republic artwork and a solid 1989-2005 discography though.
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1000 Songs to Change Your Life – Will Fulford-Jones (ed), 2008
The inevitable lists are well wrapped in engaging essays, as Time Out guidemaster Fulford-Jones collects music for goosebumps, adding smart top tens (Thatcher’s Britain, dance crazes, awkward time signatures…) and clips from the T.O. cupboard. Many of its 1,577 tracks will be old news to obsessives like you, but there are plenty of off-piste trails among them.
Bucket-list xxxxxxx
The Olivetti Chronicles: Three Decades of Life and Music – John Peel, 2008
When he died, a generation (or three) were as bereaved as if he were family, such was his place in our musical lives. So here’s another chance, via 30 years of his articles, to let the great man’s wearily mellow tones and life-affirming sarkiness infuse your evenings. All you need to complete the picture is a can of Tizer, some maths homework and your finger on a cassette-recorder pause button.
Keep it Peel
The Human League: Perfect Pop – Peter Nash, 1982
Written like an Ultravox video, every sentence swirls around in dry ice and contrast lighting, wearing a batwing blouse. Though clearly a chart-friendly cash-in there’s also a solid biog in here, including interviews with Oakey and the girls, quotes and clippings from the Heaven 17 half of the band, plus a decent discography and clever Martin Rushent telling production stories.
No longer working as a waitress
DJing
Danny Rampling
Why settle for just learning to DJ when you could learn the secrets of success and positive thinking at the same time? On the one hand this is a comprehensive DJ manual written by a spiritual figurehead of house music, filled with clear tutorials and solid insider advice. Turn to the second half and it’s a self-help programme written by The Danny Lama himself. Follow it to the letter and Mr Rampling will, ‘personally GUARANTEE your life will take on a whole new level of depth, happiness and success.’
DJ yourself into a brighter future
DJ Culture Ulf Poschardt
I was a wanker when I was a student; this book has much the same faults: it believes everything that it’s read on the subject, adds nothing new, regurgitates it with the best pseudo-intellectual vocabulary it can lay its hands on, and expects you to admire it for being original. Anyone who references Hegel and Descartes to explain DJing is not really at the same party as everyone else.
Scholarly guff with Nietzsche in the mix
superstar DJs Here we go
‘Yeah, I used to be a superstar DJ. Do you want fries with that?’ As Mixmag Editor through the ’90s, Dom had the beans to spill. A personal record-bags-to-riches-to-ditches journey, from the rise of Sasha, Cream and Ministry of Tescos, to Millennium Eve when things finally went all Paul Oakenfold. The icing on the cake is that since few jocks racked up any catalogue assets, most are destined to haunt Chinese superclubs until they die. Great, on their dosh, dirt, snort and skirt – Sasha mislaying a car, his mate Sparrow burying squillions in his gran’s garden, and the truth about how drugs actually keep Dave Beer alive.
Confessions of the superstar DJs
Last Night A DJ Saved My Life: The History of The Disc Jockey – Bill Brewster & Frank Broughton, 2006
Bill and Frank’s classic chronicle digs deep to find DJing started in 1906, the Nazis invented clubbing and Jimmy Savile be a hero to all should. Arguing that DJs not musicians are pop music’s true revolutionaries, it details with love all the scenes that matter. The new edition is beefed up with entirely new chapters covering techno, acid house, Ibiza, jungle, UK garage and cosmic disco
Extended remix of the classic dance history
How to DJ (Properly)
Best-selling DJing bible, fat like a car manual with pictures and diagrams, taking you from first day at school to beat-juggling and stadiums. Practical, no-bullshit advice with plenty of laughs. Bill and Frank instill a healthy attitude in the young and/or jaded, putting a love of music and personal taste above all. And who could miss ‘How to get into a helicopter without looking foolish’?
The Haynes manual of DJing
The Manual (How To Have A Number One The Easy Way) – Bill Drummond & Jimmy Cauty 1988
Back when number one was tops, this tiny book told you exactly how to get there – smash-by-hit. From those nice KLF boys, it’s a mash-up of devious cynicism, industry wisdom and gleeful Top-of-the-Pops-loving innocence. It’s also an uncannily accurate prediction of the sample-based no-experience-necessary future of music-making. I left a million quid on that table, anyone seen it?
KLF pranksters’ pop insurrection
Design After Dark: The Story of Dancefloor Style – Cynthia Rose, 1991
The story of the eighties club scene told through its visuals, from the early days of i-D and the Face’s influential Neville Brody right through to acid house and the post-house graphics of Trevor Jackson and Derek Yates. Filled with flyers, posters, record sleeves and magazine layouts, plus biographies of the era’s leading designers, it’s essential reading for fans of graphic art.
Nightlife on paper
PARTYING
Last Nights Party
“Yeah luv, it’s for a magazine/website/casting couch/really important wank – could you just get your knickers off, snog your friend and smear tequila on your boobies.” For Merlin Bronques it not only gets him laid, but thanks to lastnightsparty.com it’s made him famous, too. Erectile images of wasted kids and lurking slebs at slutty Williamsburg parties; with better tattoos, stronger drugs and skinnier, more expensive genes than you’ll ever fit into. All those times I took my camera to clubs, I knew I should have put some film in it.
EDIT
“Yeah, it’s for a magazine/website/really important wank – just get your knickers off, snog your friend and smear tequila on your boobies.” For Merlin Bronques it not only gets him laid, but thanks to lastnightsparty.com it’s made him famous. Slutty images of kids wasted at Williamsburg parties; with better tattoos, stronger drugs and skinnier, more expensive genes than you’ll ever fit into.
Happy Daze: A Personal Insight Into The Acid House Era – Samantha Williams
It’s great looking at pictures from your rave-past, great to make a personal album with flyers and stories. But to give it a 30 quid price tag? Sam runs RaveReunited.co.uk and this is her time capsule, mostly of the early ’90s free parties. It’s zigzaggy jpegs, and acres of average snaps. But though the images are flat the moments are timeless, and hey, isn’t that what it was all about?
Discombobulated: Dispatches From The Wrong Side – Simon Morrison (2010)
We were somewhere around Brighton on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. Morrison’s low-level international mayhem is not quite as out-there as he thinks. Still, he writes with real panache and the scenery flits by too fast for you to care. As he lurches between far-flung clubs and surreal celebs (Judith Chalmers) he turns a phrase like an intoxicated David Attenborough.
MANCHESTER
24-hour Party People – Tony Wilson,
Manchester’s slippery culture uncle traces the proud, daft idealism of Factory and the Haçienda – all the way to Sean Ryder selling Eddy Grant’s sofa for crack. No-one enjoys pricking Tony Wilson’s pompous Baudelaire-quoting ego more than Wilson himself, and for hilarity and detail his mythologised memoir outstrips even the glorious lunacy of the movie.
075222025X
The Haçienda Must Be Built – Jon Savage (ed), 1992
Despite the fact most of them were mooching around Rafters in dirty overcoats Rob Gretton was convinced Manchester kids needed a glossy New York disco. The rest is all hit and myth. A completist’s account, with joyous pics of the hallowed dancefloor, interviews with everyone involved, acres of Peter Saville flyers and complete event listings to May ’92.
The Haçienda
“We had a fookin’ blast, if only we’d known it was our own money.” Hooky manages to rewrite this sentence enough times to fill a whole book. There are solid anecdotes and much detail (a complete events list, including some DJ set lists). But as he sets the record straight, and you wade through talk of licensing boards, bar managers and operating costs, you realise you much preferred the legend.
You’re not a true collector until you’ve battled a river for records. DJ Shadow tells a story about rescuing private press discs from a flooded basement while the Colorado river is coursing in. Amanda Petrusich goes a few steps deeper – her search for the world’s rarest records sees her scuba diving in the Milwaukee River, scrambling in its ‘brown and nearly opaque’ water for country blues records from the 1920s. History notes that Paramount Records, an offshoot of a furniture manufacturer (and no relation to the film company) once had a busy pressing plant on the riverbank. Paramount specialised in the street-level blues releases that are now most highly prized by collectors, and in 2013 someone paid $37,100 for Tommy Johnson’s ‘Alcohol and Jake Blues’, one of only two copies known to exist. Petrusich is risking life and limb in a wetsuit because there’s a chance she might strike gold. Apparently, when they closed the pressing plant in the 1940s, disgruntled Paramount employees spent their last day frisbeeing the remaining discs into the waves. She imagines these treasures, ‘deteriorating at the bottom of the Milwaukee, providing shelter for crawfish alongside crushed Schlitz cans and rusted car parts.’
On her mission to sequence the collecting gene, we visit record fairs, reissue labels and private listening rooms, meeting entertaining oddballs with immaculately organised shelving. Petrusich’s collectors are from the rarified world of 78s – those brittle shellac 10-inches that spun round at double speed (78rpm) and were phased out by the 1950s. Thanks to their age and fragility, they’re so rare that some copies are the only ones in existence.
While researching a story on the resurgence of vinyl, someone told her ‘I can introduce you to plenty of guys who are obsessed with LPs, but if you really want to talk to someone who’s totally bonkers, you need a 78 collector.’ This breed is so rooted in their well-bounded world, few are interested in any music after the ’40s. But they have stories, emotions and dilemmas any vinyl junkie will recognise. Why this and not this? Why the record and not just the recording? Are you a treasure hunter or a preservationist? What’s the difference between an archive and a hoard? When should you say no to an expensive purchase? Or as collector John Heneghan put it, ‘I knew it would be a financial burden beyond what any rational mind would consider a wise decision.’ Some are strange loners; others more communally minded: ‘I could not live with myself as a “collector” without at least one person I could share sounds with,’ says one. Do Not Sell At Any Price is a meditation on the soul of record collecting.
Aside from the nutters, collecting has serious implications – collectors’ subjective tastes are what have defined our view of past music styles: ‘The music that gets collected is also, by default, the music that is preserved and endures.’ She quotes blues historian Elijah Wald: ‘As white urbanites discovered the ‘race records’ of the 1920s and 1930s they reshaped the music to fit their own tastes and desires, creating a rich mythology that often bears little resemblance to the reality of the musicians they admired. The more records an artist had sold in 1928, the less he or she was valued in 1958.’
Immersed in pre-vinyl music, Petrusich brilliantly conjures the early days of the recording industry, a time when America was on the move, with south migrating north and country folk pouring into the cities, bringing the blues and countless other rural styles with them, with recent immigrants throwing global flavours into the mix. The first record companies made the most of this haphazard melting pot, sitting anyone with a guitar and fiddle – or a jug or a banjo, a balalaika or a laughing mule – down in the studio. This produced a wealth of oddities, and one of the great joys of the book is the stream of lovable obscurities it gives you.
The records she picks out are time capsules of human quirks. Wind up your Spotify and wallow in the utter lament of Geeshie Wiley’s ‘Last Kind Word Blues’. Or hear the sheer god-given urgency of Rev FW McGee in ‘Fifty Miles of Elbow Room’, as he and his choir belt out the good word fit to bust. Marvel at the strangeness of Arthur Miles’ ‘Lonely Cowboy’, which sounds conventional enough until Arthur spits bars of eery polyphonic throat-singing, as if he’s straight out of Mongolia. Like a flash of eye contact with a long-dead face in an old photo, these tracks give you human connections that dissolve a century. 1922’s ‘Okeh Laughing Song’ is one of the daftest things ever recorded – a couple of people cracking each other up for three life-affirming minutes. And you have to hear ‘Flat Wheel Train Blues’ from 1930, where Red Gay and Jack Wellman use their guitar and fiddle to create the steady beat and mournful whistle of a steam train. With their Appalachian drawls rambling over this locomotive rhythm track, it’s as as sparse and motorik as any Kraftwerk. Towards the end they spot a lonely mule who races the train, mewling at being left behind. ‘You’d holler too like that if you was to get left,’ says Jack.
As well as these gems she directs you to archivists and compilers who offer further treasures: like the Secret Museum of Mankind, or the Excavated Shellac and Dust to Digital websites. One delight was Opika Pende; Africa at 78rpm, a hundred recordings from 1909 to the ’60s. Do Not Sell At Any Price is a door into a wide world of long-gone music you’ve probably never bothered with, but that you’ll be grateful to have heard. They may be scratchy and trebly, but these selections have a humanity that deepens your feel for the early twentieth century. 78 collectors look down on the rest, suggesting it’s ‘comparable to collecting pebbles versus collecting diamonds’ By bringing you tunes filled with exuberance and life, Amanda Petrusich shows you there’s some truth in this.
And her adventures with the more bonkers end of the collecting spectrum are hilarious in any case, as these 78-hunters epitomise the mad optimism of the crate digger. To help her find those records in the depths of the Milwaukee River, she brings in someone with expert experience. ‘Steve worked part-time rescuing golf balls from the bottoms of nearby lakes; he knew a little about blindly digging around in mud.’ Frank Broughton
DJ and journalist James Hamilton was a force to be reckoned with, a 6’8″ giant of the British music press. His review columns for Record Mirror stitched together the community that became the UK dance industry. On his death in 1996, Eddie Gordon, head of A&R at Manifesto, underlined Hamilton’s importance: ‘He started a kind of national awareness among DJs. Via James’s columns people were able to find a link and find out what other DJs were playing.’ Paying similar tribute, Pete Tong praised the authority of his reviews. ‘He was drawing on such a wealth of knowledge that even if you didn’t agree with what he said, you had to respect his opinion.’ DMC founder Tony Prince simply reckoned, ‘The music business owes him a standing ovation.’
James Hamilton’s Disco Pages 1975-82, published by Greg Wilson’s SWS imprint, gathers seven years of Hamilton’s columns in a single volume. This labour of love was put together by Mike Atkinson, building on the amazing online resource jameshamiltonsdiscopage.com. Mike notes how the columns – along with Hamilton’s forceful personality – helped form the tastes of a generation of DJs, and actually drove the development of the craft in the UK. ‘He had a vision of how he wanted dance culture to be, and he willed that into being.’
Hamilton was a posh and imposing figure, a pedant and perfectionist. His DJ career began with a residency at the Kray Twins’ Knightsbridge club, Esmerelda’s Barn, and throughout his career his upper-class connections meant gigs playing debutante balls in country houses. In the mid-’60s he was in the States working for Seltaeb, promoting Beatles’ merchandise, but also indulging his love of soul and meeting stars including Sam Cook, Diana Ross and James Brown, whose first UK visit he helped arrange. On his return, as ‘Doctor Soul’ he was resident at famed mod spot The Scene, released a soul compilation on Guy Steven’s label Sue, started contributing expert black music reviews to Record Mirror, and set up as an early mobile DJ. But it was for his later 1979-84 residency at Gullivers, London’s premier funk and soul club, that his DJing is best remembered.
His greatest contribution was to popularise mixing among British DJs, a technique which was de rigeur in most American clubs by the mid ’70s, but which didn’t catch on in the UK until the rise of house. The well-financed Embassy club had brought American mixing DJ Greg James over in 1978, and he taught several Brits to mix, including northern soul star Ian Levine, who was evolving his sets towards disco. But with few exceptions, well into the ’80s, most British club DJs aspired to the slick patter of a radio jock, and talking between records was seen as an essential part of the job.
So, as a forceful evangelist of the wonders of mixing, it was James Hamilton who drove its development in the UK more than anyone. Already aware of the possibilities of beatmatching, his passion for ‘New York style mixing,’ was ignited after seeing Larry Levan at the Paradise Garage. Soon afterwards, in 1979, determined to bring UK DJs more in line with their US cousins, he organised a field trip to New York for UK jocks to experience the Garage and meet Levan. One pilgrim, DJ Froggy of the ‘Soul Mafia’ collective, declared himself a convert, and armed with the first Technics 1200s in the country, became a poster boy for the new style.
At the start of the same year Hamilton also began noting the tempo of all the tracks he reviewed, explaining the value of this in a piece titled ‘To BPM or not to BPM’. And while mixing remained contentious, with Neil Rushton documenting both sides of the argument in ‘Does the Talking Have to Stop?’ in Disco magazine, it was Hamilton’s dogged BPMing of records that inspired thousands of British DJs to give it a try. He offered mixing tips and even suggested mixable record combinations in his ‘Mixmaster’ playlists. And while Pete Waterman beat him by two weeks to be the first to publish BPMs, his were far more accurate. He was so scrupulous with his stopwatch he’d even note fluctuations in a record that might upset a mix, (certain jazz-funk tracks clocked up a dozen different BPMs).
It was because he wrote explicitly for DJs, reviewing records with a DJ’s understanding, and used his distinctive ‘squiggly, diddly, boppy writing style,’ (as Mixmag’s David Davies described it) to bring the music to life, that James Hamilton had so much influence. As dance music evolved, he was fiercely progressive, taking the right side of history as black music became more electronic, and introducing numerous new charts as the music he loved split into distinct genres, such as ‘Futurist’ reflecting the rise of synthpop, or ‘Boystown,’ charting the tastes of the UK’s gay clubs.
All this makes James Hamilton’s Disco Pages 1975-82 an essential chronicle of the British disco scene, filled with charts and reviews and nuggets of history with a similar richness of detail as Vince Aletti’s Disco Files. It’s taken five years to put together, with the reviews organised monthly, multiple indexes and a playlist for every month. Not to mention forewords by Norman Cook, and Greg Wilson, whose research has done so much to highlight Hamilton’s importance. There’ll be a second volume in a year’s time covering 1983-89.
Les Adams was a club DJ and DMC in-house remixer – and one half of dance hitmakers LA Mix – who helped James Hamilton splice together his renowned end-of-year megamixes on London’s Capital Radio every New Year through the ’80s. Les shared memories of his great friend on the DjHistory forum.
James was my best and dearest friend for many years and was best man at my first wedding. We produced the Capital Radio New Years Eve mix tapes together and were constant companions as judges on the DMC World Mixing Championships.
James’s role in promoting the use of BPM was invaluable and without him many DJs would have remained fumbling in the dark. A lot of people back then considered it cheating – but that’s like saying a motor mechanic doesn’t need to organise his tools in some sort of order and can have them all mixed up in a box. The best mechanic knows exactly where the 10mm spanner is so he doesn’t have to fumble around looking for it.
I used to teach mixing skills at The Academy of Contemporary Music. BPM was always the first lesson and those who bothered with it were the ones who got the best results. BPM is about being organized. Some rhythms can be deceptive and give the illusion of being faster or slower than they actually are, so the BPM is the only way to get an accurate measure of pace. BPM also suggests tunes that may mix together that you wouldn’t have thought of otherwise. For example, ‘Sweet Child of mine’ by Guns ‘n Roses is about 126bpm, the same as Dennis Ferrer’s ‘Hey Hey’. If I hadn’t calculated the BPM I would never have guessed the tempo is the same. Experimenting in this way could often lead to some very interesting possibilities, and it’s how James and I constructed the Capital Radio mixes, where we would mix everything from Kylie and Pet Shop Boys to Elvis Presley and the Clash, all seamlessly. We used the BPM to suggest tunes that just might mix together, all we had to do was try it and see.
Les Adams
The best mixes are those that follow the musical structure or use it correctly to make things happen at the right time. A good mix is when a bassline, vocal or break is timed to perfection. None of this happens by accident, it requires an understanding of the beat and bar structure of every tune, or it will go wrong. Excessive use of the varispeed is one of my pet hates. Or not following the 4/4 bar structure, mixing vocals over vocals and key clashes. Sometimes DJs forget that music has rules, just as a language has punctuation, sentences and paragraphs.
James’s home was a record library, every room was absolutely covered floor to ceiling with records in racks, shelving and crates. To make extra space for the records, he ripped out his kitchen appliances and cooked on a small stove in between racks of vinyl. His bedroom and half his bed were also covered in records. There was a record deck and a typewriter at the side of his bed where he used to write his reviews. He had a huge 13×2-inch letterbox cut in the front door so records would fit through it.
He was a keen photographer and had thousands of photos he took at music events. I don’t know what happened to them, but they alone could be made into a historical account of soul music and venues.
When James and I made the Capital FM house party mixes, he used to load his car up with countless boxes of records, both 7- and 12-inch, and arrive at the studio with every bit of space in his Nissan ZX crammed with vinyl.
Every sleeve was covered with his wonderful reviews and comments all over them. I’d tease him that writing all over the sleeves was going to devalue the records, but I wasn’t taking into account the value of his writing. He never intended to sell them in any case – what mattered to him was the music in the grooves. He said he needed a reminder of each record: ‘I’m buggered if I can remember what everything sounds like!’ So his reviews were as useful to him as they were to other DJs.
The New Year mixes were produced for Capital FM in London, although the last one we did together was for BBC Radio One. I did all the mixing with James making the track selections. He had great ears and a good understanding of which tracks would work together, especially when mixing cross genre.
We used his records as they were all mint and mine were well played in clubs. He passed me the tracks and I mixed them on two Technics SL1200s with Ortofon OM Pro styli, The mixer was a GLI 3990 and we recorded and edited on a Revox PR99 2 track open reel. We then dubbed to DAT for broadcast because the master tapes had hundreds of splices and we were worried one of them might come apart during playback! We used countless reels of Ampex 456 tape and ate a lot of food!
James was always late for everything. Even at his funeral, at his request, he arrived late. If you wanted him to be somewhere at 9pm, you’d tell him to be there at 5! I recall one occasion when he was due to be at my studio to work on a Capital mix at 3pm on a Friday… he eventually arrived at 9pm Sunday and proclaimed, ‘Sorry I’m Late! It’s too late to start working now and I’m hungry, let’s go and have dinner!’ The only thing he was ever on time for was his Record Mirror deadlines!
My most surreal memory of James was sitting with him and Flava Flav of Public Enemy after a DMC convention listening to them discuss doo-wop music! Two more different looking people you could not imagine, yet totally on the same musical wavelength with mutual and total respect for each other. At the end of the conversation, James peered at the huge clock the rapper used to wear on a chain round his neck and said, ‘So that’s how you know what time it is!’
James was a very honest, loyal and dedicated man who loved life, music, food, the countryside, and his wife Sally, who he married when they both knew he was dying of cancer. Sadly, she passed away shortly after him, I suspect of a broken heart.
He was forthright and often brutally honest in his views and could be infuriating at times, but nobody could wish for a better friend. Never one to give false praise, he was always the first person I went to for an opinion on my music, or anything else for that matter, knowing I would get an honest answer.
James was hugely admired by his colleagues and by most people in the music industry – except maybe those who got a less than favourable review in his column – but then they didn’t know the man behind the words. As much as he could be scathing in his remarks, he would also rave about a record he liked and most DJs and music fans would buy a record without hearing it, based only on his trusted word.
He was a big man in every way, stature and personality. I still miss being able to pick up the phone and chat to him about music, food or any other topic. He lived life to the full.
I loved him dearly and miss him to this day. If there is a funk heaven, my wish is to end up on the same cloud so we can once again sit and chat about music… and eat good food!
RIP my dear friend. Professionally and personally, nobody could ever replace you.
– Les Adams.
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