Category Archives: Interviews

The Radiophonic Workshop saw the sines

The Radiophonic Workshop saw the sines

While its 1958 founders Daphne Oram and Desmond Briscoe imagined it as an outpost of avant-garde composing, to the wider BBC the Radiophonic Workshop was a source of handy sound effects and music for children’s stories. But as a refuge for musical mavericks like Delia Derbyshire and John Baker, a sound lab filled with the latest room-sized synths, the RW was at the forefront of electronic experimentation throughout most of its existence. Peter Howell and Roger Limb were there from the early ’70s until its demise in the ’90s, and key players in its subsequent rebirth; Peter, a mischievous musician with a string of semi-imaginary psych-folk bands to his name, and Roger, a TV announcer with a teenage musique concrete habit.

Interviewed by Bill, 6.11.2018

How did you each get involved in the Radiophonic Workshop?
Roger Limb: We both arrived in the first half of the ’70s. I landed on the doorstep in 1972; I was there on an attachment, which was a week’s work, and their way of seeing if they liked you. If they did, they’d give you three months. After the three months you might get lucky and get another three months or you might just go back into somewhere else in the BBC, because this was all internal. We were all on the BBC staff. When some vacancies arose again in 1974, I got one of them and Peter followed soon after. I think the person I replaced was David Cain.

Peter Howell: Yeah, I think I got the vacancy caused by John Baker, when he left. I’m not suggesting for a moment that I stepped into his shoes. His shoes are still there, as it were. He was quite unique.

What involvement had you had in studios prior to that? 

PH: Oh lots.

Peter, you were in [highly collectible psych-folk bands] Ithaca and Agincourt. And you had built your own studio at home, right?
PH: Yeah, we did five albums there. We thought they’d be so unpopular that we only had 50 copies pressed, for each of the five albums, but because we’d only pressed that amount they became collectors’ items. That actually enabled me to really get into audio.

Was that the fascination for you, the manipulation of sound rather than composition?
PH: Yeah. Prior to that I’d been in a rather bad Shadows-lookalike band, but with my friend John Ferdinando we got the chance to write the music to a local amateur dramatic production of Alice Through The Looking Glass.

This is in Ditchling in Sussex?
PH: Yeah. That was the first album we produced. And as you can imagine that subject was a gift for manipulation, and we played around with reversing the tape and using telephones to sing through, and I frequently went down to a music shop in Brighton to see if they had another cheap instrument I could buy to make a silly noise with. I think that started my whole interest in the thing.

What about you, Roger?
RL: I too had always been interested in sound. In 1958, the year that the Radiophonic Workshop arrived, I was a 15-year-old schoolboy, and I noticed the school had bought a tape machine to use in the modern languages department, so I begged the French teacher that I could take it home and they let me. I had a microphone and I’d crawl into the piano and bang the strings and record it and put the sustain pedal down and make all sorts of shrieking noises.

But I didn’t really follow it through. Having been at college, I spent a couple of years on the road with various jazz groups and then I applied to join the BBC as a studio manager, and did all sorts of jobs in the BBC for ten years before I arrived at the Workshop. I was a newsreader, a TV link man and all sorts. Then the Workshop thing came along and I got in and was there for 20 years. I did actually write some music for a school play once, but sound manipulation was not a part of it.

When you guys were starting, synthesisers must have been starting to come in and replacing tape manipulation as the primary means of making sounds at the RW.
PH: I wouldn’t actually say they were on the market. That’s probably jumping the gun a bit. There were synthesisers. The VCS3 was very expensive and there weren’t many of them around.

RL: At the time we arrived, yes, but it was a significant moment at the Workshop. It was a changing of the guard really at the RW. Delia [Derbyshire] left, John Baker left, David Cain left. Paddy [Kingsland] had already arrived. And at the same time there was a gradual phasing out of tape cutting. John Baker had done some wonderful work with it that still stands the test of time, and Delia too, but both of them were rather suspicious of synthesisers; they didn’t take naturally to them. That’s how that big changeover came in the mid ’70s.

Reversed chants lead the way in this 1968 track made for a TV drama about a robot uprising.
A handy DIY guide to making electronic music, ’60s-style.

What was their suspicion founded on?
PH: They were both suspicious, but not necessarily in the same way. John Baker was a fantastic jazz musician, and his compositions when you look at them musically are fascinating, so I think he was suspicious of synthesisers because they had a keyboard stuck to the front of them and to him musicality was not as instantaneous as that. He felt you either had a band of musicians and you added some electronics to it or you worked on the tiny minutiae of it with tiny bits of tape, as he did. Then along comes this thing that’s a bit of an easy option.

He felt it was cheating?
PH: Yeah, it was cheating.

But he certainly wasn’t unique among musicians feeling like that.
PH: No, he wasn’t and it didn’t stop there. When we’d been at the Workshop quite a while, there was a lot of distrust at how we were operating and the fact we were taking work from jobbing musicians. Although theoretically that might be true, if you compare the number of programmes we worked on to the number using BBC broadcasting, it was infinitesimal. Looking back. I don’t think it was as big a deal as they made out, but nevertheless it is true to say there was suspicion.

And what was Delia’s take on it?
PH: She had a very mathematical and almost scientific approach…

RL: Analytical.

PH: Analytical is the word. She liked to approach things where she had decided what she was going to do before she started it, and then along comes something that begs the opposite: which is saying, ‘Find out what I can do!’ And it’s a completely different thing. It was just not her bag, really.

RL: Also, it has to be said that when the VCS3 first arrived it didn’t actually have a keyboard. Although it did have one sewn on to it, it never really worked satisfactorily in a keyboard-y sort of way. It was originally conceived as a sound source rather than as a musical instrument.

PH: It was enormous fun. I came across my first VCS3 in the Cockpit Theatre just north of Paddington [we’re in the Paddington Hilton in Praed Street], where the BBC amateur dramatic group I belonged to the Aerial Theatre Group were doing a performance and one of the things we were doing needed some sort of musical accompaniment and someone said well actually there’s some electronic bits we use for the youth group upstairs and there were two VCS3s sitting there. It was likely to be 1972.

Had you come across electronic music prior to working at the Radiophonic Workshop?
RL: I don’t know if I’d had a serious experience with it, I was certainly interested in contemporary and modern music. I’d been to concerts for Boulez and Messiaen etc.

PH: And there was musique concrete too.

RL: Yes, although I don’t think I’d had a serious musical experience of that.

PH: I’d also listened to a few tracks of Varese.

RL: The one person we haven’t mentioned of course is Stockhausen, who was in the vanguard.

PH: Stands alone really.

So were they influential with members of the Radiophonic Workshop?
PH: It’s funny, people assume they must’ve been important, but it was certainly not the case. I have a background in instrumental guitar music; I’d realised what fun it was to manipulate sounds on tape, so I came in on a purely practical experience-led way. It was selfish in a way because I was in this little bubble and thought, ‘Ooh this is great!’ I said to a friend the other day don’t get the impression I had lots to choose from – I was bloody awful at everything else! I was delighted that I was so enthusiastic about this and I could do it quite well.

RL: Mine was similar. My bubble was playing keyboards and bass, and yours was guitar, and when I found myself at the BBC playing with the equipment, long before I was in the Workshop I discovered all sorts of things about feedback and loops that I discovered myself. I was just discovering the possibilities of a professional studio like that.

PH: I can’t speak for the others, but I know Paddy has a similar background. We didn’t imagine something and investigate it, it really was an experience-led thing.

Similar, I guess, to what Joe Meek was doing.
RL: Well, I actually did work in Joe Meek’s studio in about 1963 or 1964. I was playing with a jazz group at the time. I was going to say I went up to his studio, but in those days everybody did. My experience of him was he was a fairly down to earth bloke. We never got anywhere commercially with him, but he did show us his wonderful machine that he did ‘Telstar’ [by The Tornados] on, and he showed us his bathroom which had a microphone at one end. So it was a little bit of history but I wouldn’t say it left a lasting influence on me. He left an impression on me but not an influence.

PH: There were lot of parallel lines at that time but they weren’t really converging. And then we get into the BBC and if ever there was a hermit-like operation… the BBC was it! It outsources a lot of stuff nowadays, but in those days it was proud of the fact it could do the whole damn thing itself. It had a wardrobe department, it had everything; buildings all over West London. Everything was in-house. There we were, stuck in the middle of this giant bubble, and I’m almost ashamed to say this, but all that time I was in Maida Vale I never once went to Abbey Road Studios!

How far is it?
RL: A 15-minute walk.

PH: We were so heads down because a lot of projects were coming through the door all the time.

How did the work come in, was it generated by the BBC itself?
RL: It was producer-led. The Workshop grew out of BBC radio. They were preparing and inventing all sorts of new psychological dramas. And some of those producers went to TV and they took us with them really.

PH: Also, you’ve got to remember the biggest lucky break we had as a department was getting the credit on the end of a programme. The Radiophonic Workshop name coming up on the end of Dr Who, and it was very cleverly negotiated so it wasn’t just the department name but also the composer who got a credit. And so everyone could see this, including directors inside the BBC: ‘Oh they’ve done this weird stuff, and I need something strange, I’ll go to the Workshop.’

RL: And lots of people came to the Workshop. A lot of people beat a path to our door.

PH: [British experimental Composer] Jonathan Harvey was one…

Marc Bolan was another, wasn’t he?
RL: Well, I was in my studio working away and it was lunchtime so I opened the door to walk out and there was Marc Bolan with his ear to the door. And he said, ‘I’ve always wondered what went on in the Radiophonic Workshop.’ So I gave him my card and said if you want to come back and have a proper visit let me know. Mike Oldfield used to come around. Bolan said thanks very much. Two weeks later he was dead.

When did you realise that the Workshop had had this influence in the wider culture?
PH: Not for absolutely ages. I don’t think the penny actually dropped until [Producer, journalist and Gay Dad frontman] Cliff Jones did a little survey, because he was very interested in managing us as a band, and we’d never given a second thought to that being a possibility. So before he committed himself he asked a researcher to ask around a bit, and she came back and said, ‘Well actually there’s quite a lot of love out there.’

RL: I’m not sure how much influence there has been to be honest. I think it’s more apparent than real, if you know what I mean.

PH: I think people think we had a certain sort of cachet and I think they liked being associated with that.

RL: I don’t think composers would sit down and wonder how the Radiophonic Workshop would approach a score, but they might have unconsciously soaked up a few sounds.

PH: I’ve heard us mentioned in the same sentence as Pink Floyd, and I’ve listened to tons of Pink Floyd and I don’t jump up and down and go, ‘That’s us!’ It sounds like original material and I don’t think for a minute any of it was influenced by us. The rush to find influences is an after-the-event explanation and it’s not really true. I think your remark about parallel lines is much more what it was, and it took many, many years for those ideas to be compared.

RL: Also, it’s worth noting that it was by no means homogenous in the Radiophonic Workshop. Paddy had his style, Peter had his style, I had my style, etc.

How did it work? Did you each have your own studio space?
RL: Peter and I shared a studio for a while though. You came in the morning.

PH: No it was completely the opposite! I’d come in the afternoon and start at 3pm. My wife is still complaining that I still work like that.

How did your 2009 Roundhouse show come about?
In 2002 the Radiophonic Workshop did a concert called ‘Generic Sci-fi Quarry’ in a quarry in Oxfordshire. It was celebrating the fact they used an awful lot of quarries in sci-fi films. It was a playback of original music, over two nights, and they’d hired phenomenal projectors and an incredible sound system. It was a one-off and those people who turned up really enjoyed it, about 800 people.

RL: But in 2009 at the Roundhouse we had a cast of thousands: brass section, session drummer and bass player,

PH: Dave Gaydon from the venue approached us, because he was doing a festival called Short Circuit over four or five nights. We were approached and we thought. ‘Are they mad?’

RL: After that there was a pause, and then we reinvented the group and started doing festivals.

What was it like playing your music in that context?
RL: Well, you’re going to get two completely different answers, but I enjoyed myself immensely. Technically there were things that went wrong but it didn’t bother me particularly.

PH: I didn’t enjoy it. I wasn’t prepared enough. It did give me the motivation to get ready for the next time. I did enjoy bits of it and the audience reaction.

What are some of proudest moments as composers?
RL: It’s like asking which one is your favourite child. There was something I did for ‘Box Of Delights’ that I was quite pleased with. There are some pleasant parts of Dr Who that I’m not ashamed of.

PH: Of the Dr Who stuff I’m most pleased with ‘The Five Doctors’ because I loved the whole idea of that programme.

How much did sci-fi feed into the work you did? Most of my memories of the Radiophonic Workshop were of sci-fi stuff on the BBC.
PH: Not as much as you might think. We worked an enormous amount for radio schools programmes, and they were not science fiction by any means. A lot of them were for quite simple stories, things like Ali Baba’s magic carpet. The first job I did in the RW was a flying steak and kidney pie. That’s not very sci-fi.

RL: One of the things we dealt with at the RW was outer space and inner space. So a lot of the things we dealt with were psychological. Someone once said you should have a sign up saying you specialise in nervous breakdowns because there was a lot of that going on.

Is it true that they tried to limit workers in the department to three-month stints because they thought it was psychologically damaging?
PH: In the early years I believe that was actually true. They were actually suggesting you couldn’t hold down the job for too long.

RL: It might have also come from the fact that John Baker and Delia were wonderfully creative people but not exactly feet-on-the-ground. There’s no doubt that I think they suffered from that.

PH: To call them otherworldly is not to describe them as science fiction; they were just constantly absorbed in other things. That worried a people a little bit.

RL: Delia had a certain mindset to the whole of her life, which was not negative, it was very positive in fact.

PH: Yes she enjoyed her life. She was very bohemian

RL: She was a character with loads and loads of friends. John Baker was a bit more of a loner, I think.

PH: John Baker was the very first person I saw when I went on attachment there. He turned up early for work and hardly anyone else ever did. I went into his room and the first impression was cigarettes. He was a chain smoker and the nicotine hung down like stalactites from the ceiling.

RL: I spent a morning on attachment with him and although he was smiley and friendly it was also really obvious he would much rather be on his own in the studio and I was upsetting his routine.

Tell me about the Delaware [The nickname of the VCS3].
PH: It was a very, very big VCS3.

RL: They were Synthi 100’s really.

PH: Yes, that was its trade name. We called it the Delaware and it was the first one of its type. This is my controversial bit because I guess a lot of fans would say how could you say nasty things about the Delaware, but it had a very thin sound. It could make some lovely sounds and I used it almost like a condiment to add to other stuff. On the very few occasions I used it entirely for something I was never very happy and always felt it sounded a bit thin. And by the time you’d have thought there’d be a son of Delaware things had moved on. The ARP Odyssey was with us, with the fattest bass sound you ever heard.

RL: The Delaware did have the first sequencer I seem to remember.

PH: Yes, and a very large matrix selection programme on it. So in many ways it was very inspirational for lots of synths that came afterwards.

RL: You know how ‘Incubus’ starts? I did that with the Delaware.

PH: Oh really!

What were your favourite compositional tools?
PH: Paddy and I absolutely adored the ARP.

RL: I love it too. It was very much in demand and we only had one. And the Yamaha DX7.

PH: The DX7 was great and it came with a big fanfare, but not as versatile as they made out. This is almost harder than asking about your favourite piece. Although you’re in partnership with these bits of equipment, they did tend to come and go so you’d be using whatever you were excited about using at the time. It was very wrong to say it was the Fairlight, but at the time I did enjoy using it because it did things other machines couldn’t.

Was the Fairlight a quantum leap in terms of composition?
RL: It was the first time we got seriously into the digital recording of sound.

PH: It was the first sampler really.

And it would have coincided with the arrival of MIDI too?
PH Yes, it would, although I’m saying they’re part of the same stream. Again, parallel lines. It had a sampling time of 1.6 seconds, but boy you could do a lot with it when that’s all that was available. One thing it would do is literally morph between waveforms. I had a favourite sample which I’ve still got which is a mandolin and a choir, two almost completely different sounds and the sound of the mandolin pluck literally turns into the choir. I’ve yet to find anything that really does that. Also, the composer page was quite innovative, because there were no bar lines.

RL: One of the most significant moments was when we first started using sequencers – using a Mac with a sequencing program.

What were you using originally, Cubase? Notator?
PH: Performer to start with. Then something called Studio Vision, which was very good but sadly got bought out and discontinued, but now I’m on Logic.

How does it feel to know that the Radiophonic Workshop has had such a profound influence on British youth culture?
RL: I’m pleased to have been part of it really. At the time I could’ve done better but I was enjoying myself.

PH: Sounds like one of my school reports!

RL: I was lucky to be there. When I arrived there in the 1970s, the feeling was this was wonderful and it can’t possibly last.

PH: Yes, you felt like you were going in every day and thinking how can this exist in the BBC?!

RL: Yes but actually, it could only have existed in the BBC, paradoxically!

PH: That’s the paradox.

Was it John Birt that ended it for the RW?
PH: Well John Birt dug the hole. That’s not strictly fair, though everyone absolutely hated the producer choice system he brought in. But I think it would be unfair to blame him for its demise. I think it was natural evolution of the marketplace. When it started we were using things that nobody else had access to, and that’s what made it so mysterious. The only pity was that they didn’t have party and say thank you you’ve done a grand job.

RL: It went out with a whimper. It faded away.

PH: Our fans continued on, as did fans of Dr Who, we disappeared off the scene for nine years and then we came back for the concert and there they all were waiting for us to return.

© Bill Brewster & Frank Broughton

Matthew Collin was wise to our Altered State

Matthew Collin was wise to our Altered State

With its cover of a dilated pupil, and a title that promised to give acid house the social and political context it deserved, Matthew Collin’s book 1997 Altered State was a landmark. Here was dance culture taken seriously, and by someone who had lived it. Matthew’s writing career started in Nottingham on the city’s Duck Call fanzine, but went into overdrive when he moved to London in 1988, keen to document the exploding dance scene using what he liked to call ‘participant observation’. As editor of i-D between 1991 and ’94, he used his magazine to document the rapidly evolving culture and the exciting musical splinters flying off it. (He also took a punt on a rookie writer named Broughton.) And he continued a lifelong devotion to the intersection of music and humanity with a series of incisive books – like Serbia Calling, which explored music as political resistance, or Rave On which detailed house culture’s global evolution. His latest, Dream Machines, is a rip-roaring story of electronic music told from a distinctly British perspective. This interview took place on the 30th anniversary of 1988’s Summer of Love.

Interviewed by Bill in London, 7.3.2018

What was happening for you in 1988?
I moved to London in April 1988. I have to say that serendipity is real. I left for London the night after seeing Depeche Mode’s Music For The Masses tour in Sheffield and wanted to make it as a music journalist, and living in Nottingham that wasn’t possible then. Got the offer of cheap flat, in fact Sheryl Garratt’s former flat. Arrived at the right place at the right time. Not by plan. It was one of a train of events that sets you on a course for life over the next 30 years.

Had you been going to places like The Garage?
Yeah, we were lucky in Notts because we had Graeme [Park] at the Garage and Jonathan [Woodliffe] at Rock City, who were pioneers in acid house/electronic dance music. They were playing these new imports from Chicago, Detroit and New York. But of course, there weren’t enough house and techno records to fill a whole night, so they’d be playing soul, hip hop, as well. You’d get a hip hop section for a couple of hours, and you’d get a house and techno section, and in the middle there’d be electronic soul records: that Easy Street or Prelude sound and that was the bridge between the two things. At that time we didn’t really see it as a new form of music, but part of the whole same thing. You don’t know any different. Certainly, it was very lucky that my local club was the club where a DJ was playing this new music and trying to push it.

From then, Graeme Park went on to the Haçienda, so we were lucky to have that connection, that different interpretation of things. In the Midlands, you’re not northern, you’re not southern, you’re not really anything, so you don’t have this attachment to north or south, you’re just happy to be going anywhere out of your city where there’s going to be something good going on. And hitchhiking to gigs before that. You’d hitchhike anywhere within a reasonable – or unreasonable distance – to hear what you wanted to hear. This all comes down to scarcity doesn’t it? It wasn’t easily accessible and it was scarce, so you had to make a reasonable effort to find it.

Moving to London in 1988, what was your trajectory of writing jobs and going out?
I was lucky I had friends who were… well one friend, Sheryl Garratt, [writer and editor of The Face 1990-95], who I have to credit for everything. She was obviously well connected in club culture in London, and she knew John Godfrey [i-D editor 1988-90], who gave me my first job as an editor. So it was reasonably easy to get in anywhere you wanted to. Obviously you wanted to go to the most exciting places possible, which at that point were Shoom, Spectrum and Future in London and then I was lucky to have the Graeme Park connection, which opened up the whole Manchester thing as well.

Did it feel like something massive was going to happen? Was the change dramatic from 1987 to 1988?
In 1987 all the music was already there: house, techno and garage, and pioneering DJs around the country were already playing it. But this was a set of sub-cultural styles, it was not a mass nationwide movement. I think the early months of 1988, as acid house exploded, it felt like the onset of a psychedelic trip. Sounds and feelings and colours intensified and there was this headlong rush that swept you up, up and away into the unknown. It did feel like a dramatic change and a break from what had gone on before. Those first few years from 1988 onwards really did feel like the highest of high times; the kind of times where anything was possible, although obviously ecstasy played a massive role in all that, of course.

I suppose that’s the part of the recipe that was missing in 1987 that became evident in 1988.
Ecstasy was the accelerator. Ecstasy was the drug that bound people together. It didn’t create the music, but it did help to create this community around it. And it gave it that passionate intensity. Of course, there would have been an electronic dance music culture without it, but it definitely wouldn’t have happened in the same way.

What were the most exciting events of that year?
The Nude and Hot nights at the Haçienda, Spectrum, Future at Heaven, The Trip at the Astoria. Everyone’s got their own story to tell and what it meant to them. And then seeing it begin to explode in my hometown as well, that made it clear that it wasn’t just going to be some metropolitan hipster scene; it was going to be a major phenomenon everywhere.

There was this amazing sense of liberation and freedom which was compounded by the sheer innovative power of this incredible new music, which was so full of energy and passion and excitement. It did feel like something special was happening, and you did feel like you were part of some sort of secret society, all joined together on this incredible journey. It wasn’t at all clear where it was going. It certainly wasn’t clear we’d be talking about it as an important movement in contemporary cultural history thirty years later. By the end of 1988, there were even some people suggesting it was already finished and they were looking for the next trend. It was still relatively small in terms of numbers in 1988, and then the orbital raves of 1989 just took it to another level entirely.

When you went back to Notts, is that when you really noticed the sea change?
There was just this greater intensity in the air. People were wearing more colourful clothes. People weren’t going out to be looked at or to assert status, but to be involved. They were going to dance. They were going out to sweat. They were going out for the music, rather than any showing-off aspect of the culture, which really existed before. So the first time I saw it, I was like, ‘Bloody hell, the hometown’s got ecstatic!’ If it’s happening in Notts it’s going to happen everywhere else, and that’s exactly what happened.

In the Garage?
Yeah, but I can’t remember if it was called the Garage or the Kool Kat at that stage. That was the central point because Graeme Park could mix, he’d been doing it for years already. He had the records and he knew what to do with them. At that point I think there was also still some scratching! There was this weird crossover point where you still had hip hop records being played, like Mantronix ‘King of the Beats’, Chubb Rock ‘Ya Bad Chubbs’, they were still being played in ’88 and ’89. You can hear tapes in the Haçienda where they’re playing Public Enemy. It wasn’t house music all night long. You had these weird atmospheric records which would be quite difficult to get away with nowadays, like ESP ‘It’s You’, which is a Haçienda classic but you listen to it now and it’s so sparse and emotional. You can’t hear it now as a club record. It wasn’t just the fact we were so out of it we’d dance to anything; it was a kind of searching for a sound. At one point, Jon Dasilva, who played the Hot nights was using BBC sound effects records to give his sets a different texture than no one else had. People were experimenting with how to put this music together because there was no template.

And the UK was quite late to start mixing records, too.
In some ways that was a good thing. The way the culture developed, people needed a constantly evolving narrative. And a constant groove. The way the music was played before acid house wasn’t going to work at that point. There was so much energy. You’ve probably seen those clips from Quadrant Park in Liverpool on YouTube. That is the kind of acid house experience, the non-Balearic experience, instilled to its absolute essence. And anyone who’s been through the scene, seeing that will get emotional flashbacks. That is really how it felt every night you went out for a long period of time. That kind of intensity.

I remember weekends lasting from Thursday night to Monday lunchtime.
Yes, but I don’t necessarily think the experience of this for someone who got into it in 1998 is any different from someone who got into it in ’92 or ’95 in qualitative terms, because you do have this absolute passionate love affair with the whole culture when you first feel it. So that could’ve been true in 1988 or ’92 or ’95, and probably it could happen in 2018 as well.

Did it change your life in any way?
It completely altered the course of my life. Obviously other things go on in life that shape the way you develop and shape your interests, but the fact of moving to London in April 1988 set me on a course that shaped my entire social and professional environment for years to come, and I’m so thankful for it. It was an incredible experience and incredibly inspiring. And I don’t think I’m alone in this, but it wasn’t just going to parties, it was the whole culture that grew up around it which I was very lucky to be able to document and participate at the same time.

What’s the lasting legacy of acid house if there is one?
It brought what were previously the pleasures of the bohemian elite to the whole of society. In practical terms it brought about changes in licensing laws, it changed city centres through fuelling a night time economy, and of course it normalised drug-taking. Its do-it-yourself ethos also enabled the democratisation of creativity, which has produced this huge and wonderful body of amazing music.

Did it change society?
That’s really impossible to say because society is affected by so many other things.

What was its long-term impact on dance music.
Acid house clubs, more or less, are still the template for the global dance music scene that we have today. From Shanghai to Cape Town, Sao Paolo to Moscow this is now a worldwide culture, and in some way it’s still rooted to what happened in the UK in 1988, as well as the music of Chicago, Detroit and New York. This set the pattern for global hedonism. That’s the lasting impact.

Are there things we’ve lost from those early years.
We’ve lost our braincells and we’ve lost our hair [laughs]. Obviously, this thing about it happening for the first time means it can’t happen again for the first time.

In the thirty years leading up to 1988, we had rock’n’roll, mods, psychedelia, punk, jazz-funk  and acid house. But thirty years after it there’s been no comparable youth explosions Why do you think that is?
It’s really, really hard to say why not. It would be a subject for sociological study rather than me.

Does the internet have something to do with it?
Nowadays all history exists simultaneously. Post-punk was a challenge to people to always create something new. And the same happened with acid house, the whole Chicago thing was a competition between a set of people, same with Detroit, same with jungle. We come from this time when the future was a kind of aspiration. We were socialised into looking for the new and expecting the new any time. We also came from a time of scarcity, so I had to hitch hike down to London to buy second-hand records from Record & Tape Exchange. It would be seen as ludicrous to do that now. This is the argument against these festivals with amazing line-ups, where you’re like a kid in a sweet shop. Scarcity and having to struggle to find something gives it more value.

Was there an anti-Thatcher element to acid house?
I don’t know. We’re talking about this first year, it wasn’t even a full year, because really it was only when Spectrum and the Trip started, these bigger venues, that it actually became a phenomenon rather than a sub-cult.

Will it ever happen again?
[laughs] Obviously nothing ever happens again the same way twice. Society has changed and it shapes cultural movements. In terms of a mass dance movement? Well, it’s now a global movement. I don’t think there can be anything like 1988 ever again, but that’s the same with all moments in history. I do think there’s something essentially primal in this need for humans to get together and celebrate and abandon their inhibitions and find some kind of transcendent bliss, if only for one night. It’s dreadful being nostalgic about 1988 because there were shitty things happening in 1988.

It was important, but enjoyment and pleasure doesn’t end for young people
I think it’s massively detrimental to fetishise an object of the past and worship it like a god. It’s historical arrogance saying we had the best time ever. A guy at my FE college was always saying, ‘Oh, you should’ve been around in the ’60s; that would have been your time.’ I was always miffed about that. I’ve got 23 Skidoo and Cabaret Voltaire and Throbbing Gristle and Clock DVA; why do I need your ’60s!

I also worry about this iconography of the past, whether it puts a weight on people’s enjoyment of the present, when there’s old farts standing around saying it was such better back in the day. In the end all that matters is the present. 1988 was a remarkable year that changed a lot of things, certainly British youth culture, but it wasn’t the only important year in history, and it should be seen as some kind of date that’s written in stone and handed down by the gods.

Outside of the club scene, you’ve got to remember – and acid house was really quite a small thing compared to even a year later or five years later – life went on as normal. It was the late Thatcher era and it was pretty dreadful, but that all contributed to how the culture developed. And it developed in that way partly because of what we imported from the US and Ibiza, and it developed because of the socio cultural and political climate of the time.

But it did reinforce this post-punk idea of DIY. Anything is possible. You may fuck it up the first time you try it, but it’s great to try and it may lead to something amazing. All those first DJ records. Do you remember that article in i-D: British Underground Music, where they got together Tim Simenon, Coldcut, Mike Pickering, Graeme Park, which is where they first met. Pretty much all the people who went on to be some sort of luminary in UK dance music, and these guys were just trying it, basically. I don’t think they would say they knew what they were doing at the time, but that was the spirit of the time. That was the spirit of 1988.

© Bill Brewster & Frank Broughton

Read some of Matthew’s Dream Machine interviews here

Martyn Ware built Electric Foundations

Martyn Ware built Electric Foundations

Whether it was the Yorkshire Dadaism of Cabaret Voltaire, or the city’s backbeat of steel foundries, when punk told everyone to have a go, something about Sheffield encouraged bands to pick up synths rather than guitars. After a succession of ‘imaginary bands’ Martyn Ware formed the Human League along with Ian Craig-Marsh and Phil Oakey, with Adrian Wright as ‘Director of Visuals’. When the band split in 1980, Ware and Marsh formed British Electric Foundation, followed by Heaven 17, and everyone involved started having chart hits. This 2013 interview gives a great flavour of the electronic experimentation of the time.

Interviewed by Bill in London, 28.5.13

OK so tell me about growing up and getting into music.
Grew up in Sheffield in a very poor family.  Lived in a two-up, two-down council house in Walkley. With my brother and two sisters, who were older than me, my sister was 20 years older so a lot older than me. I was listening to their record collection, early ’60s pop, Motown. That’s where I learnt my love of pop music.

In the fourth form in secondary school, I started going to this place called Meatwhistle, a sort of arts youth club, set up by Chris Wilkinson, who’s an actor, and his wife Veronica. It’s where I met Glenn [Gregory] and Ian [Craig Marsh] and loads of people I still keep in touch with. It changed my life. It was a council-sponsored project where you could live out your artistic fantasies. We used to have imaginary bands that would only exist for that day and we’d perform for our mates. We even had early video recorders that we could mess around with. We’d make plays

There was nothing to do in Sheffield. It was derelict. The economic situation was grim. So you had to make your own fun. Musically speaking I’d always had a fascination with futuristic sound stuff.

Where did that come from?
Good question. I suppose, futurism in the broadest sense. Looking towards the future. It was the age of space travel. And electronic music was what drove it all. It seemed so mysterious. It would just pop up on occasional records. Then when I got a bit older and started buying my own records I found myself gravitating towards that sort of thing.

About five minutes’ walk from our house was a secondhand store called Rare & Racy. It had every kind of music in there. I just couldn’t get enough stuff into me. I listened to everything from pop, prog rock and psychedelic rock, American stuff and on the other side of the coin, classical music and things like Computer Music by Xenakis. Fantastic! You’d put it on and it sounded terrible, but it didn’t matter because it sounded like the entrance to another world. I wanted things that painted a picture in my mind and that’s been a guiding principle of everything that I’ve done.

Did punk rock have an effect?
Yeah, we were all punks for about three weeks. Ripped T-shirts etc. And then we realised it was all just rock’n’roll. To be honest we’d had our punk phase in the early ’70s with T. Rex and glam and the New York Dolls. Punk all seemed a bit quaint to me. We were in a slightly different part of our lives. It wasn’t a big discovery of music to us, it was an opportunity for self-expression. We started a fanzine called Gun Rubber. It was the sudden realisation that you could create stuff, you didn’t have to live in awe of those that did. It wasn’t just music, it was art, publishing, and an explosion of creativity. It helped to visualise the possibilities. So that was much more exciting than the music which we soon came to realise was basically pub rock.

There was one epiphany, when one of our imaginary bands did a gig at the Salter Lane Art College, this was six months before the first Human League gig. We supported a Manchester band the Drones, who were terrible, by the way. God knows how we got the gig. There was a bunch hanging out together, us, Cabaret Voltaire, Adi Newton, 2.3, we formed a supergroup, before any of us had been famous or even in a group (apart from Cabs). Apart from Richard Kirk and Chris Watson we were all playing the wrong instruments. We had one rehearsal and most of that was spent deciding which songs we were going to do. We did a version of ‘Dr Who’ and ‘Cock In My Pocket’ by Iggy Pop. As we got halfway through this, the Drones manager came on and said. ‘Listen, the Drones want to come on now’, so this song evolved into a chant going ‘The Drones wanna come on now.’ The audience was looking on bemused. Unbelievably, we were terrible, but the Drones were worse. And they had a record contract. It really made us realise that everything was possible. So we did start taking it more seriously.

Was this a precursor to your band the Future?
I think it was just after the Future and before Human League. We got our first recording studio, it was a hovel that used to be a small engineering firm, a room in a derelict building essentially. I’d bought a Korg 700S monophonic synth on HP [hire purchase]. Ian had bought a System 100 on HP which was the basic tools for us to create.

It was basically synths, tapes and voices wasn’t it?
Yeah. We’d bought a Sony two-track which had sound-on-sound capabilities. Let’s have a real go at getting the tracks to sound good. This was me, Adi [Newton, later of Clock DVA] and Ian. We enquired around for someone who had a four-track recorder. And we found this guy who used to work for Radio Sheffield. He’d retired but he’d got this TEAC four track, which to us was like… my god, can you imagine what you can do with that. Ian and I were computer operators at this time so we had a bit of disposable income.

Anyway, we booked a weekend with this guy who lived in a typical suburban house with his wife on the outskirts of town. It was in his front room, with his wife making us cups of tea while we sang about Virgin Of The Time Dunes. It was just… bizarre. We weren’t musicians in the traditional sense. Our compilation The Golden Hour of the Future documents this. We did seven or eight songs. We liked them. There was something in them.

I was working on nightshifts at Lucas Industries doing payroll and bored to tears. I thought why don’t we try and get appointments with some A&R men in London. I made a punch card computer printout with the words ‘This Is The Future. This is your chance to meet the Future. Here are the two dates they will be in London. Don’t miss this opportunity’. And amazingly we got about 12 appointments in two days. We took these bizarre demos to everyone from EMI and Warner Bros. We’d never even been to London! We got there, and most of them took about a minute. But there were two companies, Island and Virgin, who, while they weren’t interested in signing us, showed an interest

Ian and I realised we couldn’t write songs with Adi because he was on a different path. So that’s when we decided to find another singer. I would’ve suggested Glenn but he’d just moved to London a month before to seek his fame and fortune. Initially as a photographer but he also he wanted to be in a band. He was in 57 Men which went on to become Wang Chung.

The original Human League: (L-R) Adrian Wright (Director of Visuals), Ian Craig Marsh, Martyn Ware, with Phil Oakey lying low

I said, I’ve got this mate of mine from school called Phil [Oakey]. We were still best mates. I said he looks amazing. Good-looking guy, funny haircut. I’m not sure he’s got much of a voice but we’ll find out. But what we wanted was someone who could help with the songwriting. So we gave him the backing track to ‘Being Boiled’. Asked him ‘Do you like it?’ He said he did and went away to try and write some lyrics to it. He brought it in and started singing, ‘Listen to the voice of Buddha, saying stop your seri-culture’. Woah woah, what you talking about here?! He said it was about how parents treat their children. The reason we got on so well was because we were so opinionated. I thought this is brilliant. You’ve definitely got the job.

What gear were you using?
The Korg and System 100.

And a drum machine?
No, all the rhythms were done on the hardware sequencer of the System 100. Every sound on that early stuff was created from scratch. Our new rule was it all had to be electronically generated. That became our manifesto.

It was a different world. I remember going into a shop called Musical Sounds in Sheffield. That’s where I saw the Korg 700S. I was considering learning to drive, but it was the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire and the buses were 2p at that time. So I bought the synth. I still can’t drive.

When I went into buy that synth, everyone in the shop looked like they were in the Eagles and it was full of people doing Stairway To Heaven. It was pretty much the same when we started recording. Everywhere you’d go people found it hard to relate to it. We loved Amon Duul, Vangelis, Krautrock. Most rock fans didn’t have a clue. My girlfriend at the time that I did the Reproduction album, I played it to her and she was trying to wrap her head around, she said. ‘Yeah, it’s a bit like Led Zeppelin’. She was only trying to please me, but there was that inability to figure out with what was going on.

We recorded ‘Being Boiled’ in the studio we were in. That version was the first time he’d sung it. There were no second chances to drop it in later. Everyone to this day loved the first version much more than the second. For the first version you couldn’t bounce it more than four or five times it would have turned to mush. There something to do said for limitations.

How did you get the deal?
Paul Bower, whose punk band 2.3 was signed to Fast Product, said we should send it to [label founder] Bob Last. We honestly didn’t believe anyone would see it as anything other than a curio. But Bob loved it. We created the cover. My original version was very condensed and Bob thinned it out a bit but kept the central stuff. Next thing you know, it was getting played three or four times a week on John Peel. Over a period of three months we sold 5,000 which was astonishing. There was nothing else remotely like it. No one had taken on the rigour of only using electronic instruments and nobody was trying to make pop songs with inadequate tools. It was like electronic punk.

Did you do ‘Dignity of Labour’ before ‘Being Boiled’?
We were determined to show as much diversity in our music as possible… it’s almost like a self-destruct button in my career. So just when it looks like we might actually make a bit of money, we want to put out a 12-inch, purely electronic, with no vocals! To his eternal credit Bob said, yeah let’s do it.

Shortly after that you signed to Virgin.
Bob became our manager for that two-and-a-half-year period, with the first two albums. We did two tours with Siouxsie and the Banshees, we did one in Europe with Iggy Pop. In the UK we were playing to punk audiences. We were generally scared we’d get bottled off. I think the secret for us was bravery and the fact we had visual accompaniment, and we were at least trying to do something different.

We did one gig at Victoria Hall in Stoke and everyone was like, ‘Are you alright Martyn?’ ‘Yeah I’m fine. Why?’  ‘You’re covered in blood’. This skinhead had been banging his head on the stage, sucking up the blood and spitting it out.

We did some headline gigs in small clubs in towns in Germany. I can’t remember the name of the town, but we went on stage and I knew it wasn’t going well after two songs when they set fire to a Union Jack. Then they started throwing things at us. We’d always made a point of having the backing track on a reel-to-reel on the stage rather than hiding it. At that point in Europe they used to often use the Hell’s Angels as security. Well, they disappeared. And the stage got invaded.

So how did the deal come about?
After ‘Being Boiled’ came out there were several labels interested, people like Chris Parry at Fiction, EMI and a few others. We very quickly came to the conclusion that Virgin were right for us. There was no vibe at EMI. But Virgin we immediately got on with, it was like one giant brainstorm. You’d walk into Vernon Yard and there were people shouting from the top of the stairs. We lived in Notting Hill at the time and we were in there most days of the week. Bob lived in Edinburgh. We were in there even more later with Heaven 17 because we didn’t have a manager of any description.

How did the Human League split happen?
We had two albums out, both of which we were pleased with, but neither yielded a hit. There was a very slow inexorable pressure being put on us to have a hit. We released ‘Holiday 80’, which we were convinced was the one. We were convinced that ‘Marianne’ was a good song and would be a hit. But it wasn’t. So Virgin bribed someone to get us on Top of the Pops, even though we were about number 70 and you needed to be in the Top 40 to get on there normally. It helped a bit but the jury was out.

There were some electronic records in the charts by then
I can’t remember the exact chronology, but Gary Numan brought out ‘Are Friends Electric’, OMD came along, so everyone seemed to be having hits except us. It felt like we’d missed the boat. We were still living on £30 a week. We were preparing for a new tour in Europe. It was turning into a multimedia show. Bigger and better projections. I suppose because there was more tension going on, even though they had faith in us, the next album was make or break.

How were relations in the band?
Me and Phil would have the occasional contretemps, but no more than you’d expect when you live in each other’s pockets. There were no disagreements about creative direction.

Unbeknown to me – which Bob Last has since admitted to – he was conniving with Virgin to destabilise the group by a whispering campaign in Philip’s ear that he was the main man. So one day they called a band meeting. Bob’s there, Ian’s there, Phil’s there. They’re all looking a bit strange at me. Martyn we’re throwing you out of the group.

A complete shock?
Hard to comprehend because there was no reason for it to happen. More to the point, Phil had been my best friend since we were 16. So I was stunned. First thing I said, I think this is my group, you’re not throwing me out of my group. But it was all a fait accompli. They’d already figured out how they’d approach the new group, and who would write with Phil, which was Jo Callis, they’d already got someone to produce the album.

And they were going to get me to go up to Edinburgh to talk to me about setting up a production company, which they thought was right for me. But what they hadn’t bargained for was Ian joining me. I don’t blame Jo for this, by the way, he’s a mate and a really good songwriter. He was Bob’s best mate.

In short order I soon got over it, thought up a name for the new production company, British Electronic Foundation [BEF]. Bob reckoned he could get me a deal with Virgin. I said Ian has to be part of it. But the thing that really upset me was that Phil had said to various people at the record company that he didn’t want to be associated with the ‘un-aesthetic’ part of the band anymore. Which was me. But it did provide a great deal of impetus after.

So there was a competitive element after the split? Did it feel a bit like the Space Race?
Totally. Oh yeah. It was well known that we used the same studio in shifts, so they were doing Dare [as Human League] and we were doing Penthouse & Pavement [as Heaven 17]. And some of the backing tracks that me and Ian had been writing became the songs for Penthouse & Pavement.

The first thing that came out was the Music For Stowaways album wasn’t it?
Yeah they were sonic maquettes. They weren’t really songs.

Heaven 17: Ware, Marsh and Gregory

‘Fascist Groove Thing’ was an instrumental on there wasn’t it?
Yeah. What was important was that we got something out quickly that showed the intent of the company, almost like a manifesto. Music For Stowaways was the arty side and the pop manifesto side was Music Of Quality & Distinction Volume 1.

You never managed hits together, yet once you split up you both start having them.
The weird thing is that as Bob Last tells the story now, he regards that as justification for what happened. There might be some truth in that. I don’t know, but the split was incredibly upsetting.

Do you have a relationship with Phil now?
There was a BBC documentary about ten years ago – maybe more – and the researcher asked if I’d be willing to do an interview in the same room as Phil and the girls. It was the first time we’d met in the flesh since 1982. He lived in Sheffield and I moved down here so we never bumped into each other. It was quite poignant in a way. Phil’s a lovely guy. He’s a bit angular if you don’t understand him, but he’s got a heart of gold. He comes across as a bit awkward but he’s also disarmingly honest and he genuinely thrilled to see me.

So when you produced the Tina turner album was that under the BEF banner?
Yeah.

And was Ian working on it too?
No, by that time Ian had had enough. He was involved in Hot Gossip, which was a bunch of covers of Human League, Heaven 17 and even a Sting song on there. He just turned round to me one day and said, I don’t think it’s for me this. Everything we did with the Human League was split three ways and the same for Heaven 17. But as soon as it turned into more traditional production, so it was a relationship between the producer and artist, it stopped being equal and Ian thought it was time to step out. I volunteered to train up Glenn, but he said no I can’t be bothered.

How do you feel now about electronic music being so prevalent, did it feel inevitable?
Well, like all innovation, as it proliferates it becomes less flavoursome. We’re now in the endless iterations of the diffusion of electronic music.

It’s 2013 and you’re releasing a new BEF album – Music of Quality and Distinction 3: Dark. What’s the reason for exhuming the series?
I always wanted to do a volume 3. I planned to do them every ten years but it came to the millennium and I couldn’t think of any exciting vocalists, so I just didn’t get round to doing it. Then in 2010 I was putting together the ten-CD boxed set for Illustrious of all the stuff that had never been released, which came out on Mute, and I thought I’d really like to do a BEF album incorporating the ideas I’ve learnt from doing all this ambient and sound design stuff.

How have your studio techniques changed?
A lot of the stuff on the new album started out as either real instruments or samples of real instruments, but then got so processed and chopped up and reordered, atomised and reconstructed. Something like ‘The Look of Love’ [Dusty Springfield] backing track. Started working on that in Ableton. I became obsessed with current processing techniques. Took some of the original backing track and chopped it up and chopped it up, slicing it and dicing it, seeing if there’s something in the essential DNA that could be incorporated into the new backing track. There are little tiny hooks which are fantastic part of Bacharach’s writing. There’s a tiniest hint of those in this ambient soundscape and it worked.

One day I listened to ‘The Night’ by Frankie Valli, and I really love that song. I was listening to the lyric, it’s almost like a stalker, a bit like ‘Every Breath You Take’ by Police. Then I thought maybe I could do an album of stalker songs! Then I thought of taking the northern soul backing track from Frankie Valli and put a more David Lynch style backing track. The second one was ‘Didn’t I Blow your Mind’, which is a very dark, vengeful lyric. The final bit of the jigsaw was finding people daft enough to have a go at singing this. There’s not much money in it, but whatever we do we’ll split the proceeds 50/50.

The Kim Wilde track was arranged by Brian Duffy from Modified Toy Orchestra. He picks up toys from skips and car boot sales, with chips in, Speak and Spells, Barbies etc, he picks them apart and turns them into instruments. Honestly, it’s brilliant. Next thing he sends me a Logi song session with 78 tracks of individually recorded tracks. Each chord has to be recorded separately. It’s been recorded on a non-MIDI monophonic synth with Kim Wilde sounding more contemporary than she’s ever sounded.

How do you work these days? Do you use soft synths?
Yeah.

What happened to your old analogue gear?
I sold it all when I was skint. Also where do you store all this stuff? You don’t need it now. I mixed the whole of this album on my computer. Apart from the vocals which were either recorded at Strongroom or the singers did them themselves and sent them over.

It’s all part of the virtuous circle of trust, that if you put faith in people, they will deliver. I’m an enormous believer in that. If you give people creative responsibility they will respond to it. I’m the opposite of a control freak.

© Bill Brewster & Frank Broughton

Boy George broke all taboos

Boy George broke all taboos

There is no such thing as a bad Boy George interview. Forever the iconoclast, there are few interviewees as happy to cause a commotion as this pop star-turned-DJ. We met George in 2002, when the stage production of Taboo was about to launch in London – it was for a feature in the Big Issue – but since it also coincided with an updated edition of How To DJ (Properly), we took the liberty of quizzing him about his DJ career too, while also dwelling on his occasionally fractious relationship with the gay community.

Interviewed by Bill, 07.01.2002

Whose idea was it to do Taboo as a play?
Chris Renshaw, who was the director of the King & I with Elaine Paige. He came to see me about a year ago on a freezing cold night on a barge on the Thames with Culture Club on Watchdog. And my manager said this guy’s got an idea about something that he wants to talk to you about so while we were having a break we sat down and chatted. I think the thing that excited me was that he didn’t want to do something like the Buddy Holly Story or Mama Mia. He said he wanted to include all of those people from that time, so it amalgamated with my book and Sue’s book and turn it into something. That excited me. To just do a show about Culture Club, when I’d just finished three years of touring with them… And also, he wanted me to write a new score. We are using some old songs…

How many new songs have you written?
We’ve probably got too many songs, about 18? They won’t all be in the show, some I’ll use for something else. 

Did you write those yourself or did you collaborate?
I always collaborate. I work with mainly on the musical with Kevan Frost, who I’ve worked with for twelve years and John Themis, another collaborator, a guitar player, Richie Stevens. I’ve also written a song with Judge Jules and Paul Masterson. I actually wrote that outside of the musical, but then I thought, ‘this really fits into the show’ so I rang them and asked how would they feel about including it and they were very excited.

How involved have you been in the stage production itself?
Everything. Every little detail. 

Were you involved in the decision about who was going to play you?
Yeah. 

How many people did you see?
We did a workshop last year and the guy who is playing me now was playing someone else. And a very good friend of mine, Philip Sallon, who’s also in the show, grabbed me at the end and said, “That’s you there.” 
I said, “Really?” 
“Yes, no question, he should be playing you.” 
So I watched carefully, and I thought yeah, he does look a bit like me when I was 17. He’s not an obvious actor in the sense of being too theatrical. He’s a real person. Now I’ve got to know him over the past year and he’s very much like me; it’s almost frightening. The day that I actually saw him in drag was probably the freakiest moment ever, because he was even behaving like I was.

Is it going to be nerve wracking this weekend?
No. It was supposed to go on in November, but I think the timing of it is really good. It feels right.

Are the songs coming out on a soundtrack album?
There’s an exhibition being done in Selfridges, so there’s a four-track sampler which will be given away. At the moment I don’t have a record deal so I can do what I want with the songs. I think they might have to buy something. 

Taboo cast on Today show, USA.

Looking back on it now, was the 1980s a special time, in terms of music and clubs?
Well it was interesting from a political perspective because you had a really Tory government and you had all this creativity. I think in some respects you do need something to rally against. If you look at the current government, it’s sort of a nothing government so it’s really hard for people to have anything to rally against. I think at that time, you’ve got to remember that new romanticism was a follow on from punk and before that was the Bowie kids. So you’d come from all of that depression in the seventies to this very opulent decade of greed and right-wing politics, but really we were children of the seventies. There were lots of interesting musical styles in the seventies, it was a real pot pourri of styles, like reggae and disco. Punk was a reaction against all of those supergroups and new romanticism was a very small scene. We kind of made a mountain out of a molehill, because it was a small club with a handful of people. But they were very attention seeking and managed to get a lot of mileage out of what they were doing. But the roots of that go back a long way. It wasn’t something that just sprung out of nowhere. Why it happened I think was because punk had became this quite serious student concern. It got political. It was no longer this about showing off. It changed into something that I personally didn’t feel part of. 

Does it feel weird that such a small clique of people went on to do all of these things?
I think all of those people that were involved were from similar backgrounds. Steve was from Wales, Marilyn was from Borehamwood, I was from Eltham. There’s a whole list of people who were from these disfunctional suburban families and came to the big city to seek their fame and fortune. So we had a lot in common in that respect. I mean, you had two camps. You had the art school camp, with people like Stephen Jones, Kim Bowen, Lee Sheldrick, Stephen Linard. Then you had the other lot who were kicked out of school, like myself, Jeremy Healy, and various others. At first we looked down on them, and they looked down on us. The fusion happened eventually when Jeremy Healy and Kim Bowen ended up having a love affair and that brought the two households together. It became like the Waltons. It was very romantic. The funny thing was Jeremy hated Kim and them. They were fashion students and their clothes were really well made and ours were sort of DIY Oxfam, all thrown together. Then something happened and they became lovers and the houses came together and created this new family of freaks. 

Do you think that the music at the Blitz and those places gets overlooked bit in favour of the fashion?
I think the people who were there were interested in the music, were obsessed with music, whether it be Cabaret or Sound Of Music or Lou Reed, Bowie, T Rex or the electro sounds of the time, like Fad Gadget. That electro scene, like Cabaret Voltaire ‘Nag Nag Nag’ were very important records. I remember the first time I saw Human League, either supporting the Gang of Four or Gary Glitter, I can’t remember which was first. Just seeing this band on stage with no instruments.

Was it at the Marquee?
Yeah. It was the first time. It was like: this isn’t a band, this is performance art. That was a fascinating idea. The music industry was in its infancy in terms of ideas. If you look at it now, it’s polished and preened. It’s a money-making organism. Back then, they missed things. I think one of the downside of the information age is that news travels too quickly. The one great thing about England is that ideas, even back then, worked quite quickly. But at least there was a period when ideas had time to develop and have an identity. Nowadays, if punk happened, it’d be in a B&Q advert soon after. Like what happened with drum and bass and dance music. There was a slight difference between what you liked and your parents liked. My mother would never have dropped me off and picked me up at a Bowie concert. But then you had parents going to Take That concerts with their daughters. I talked to David Bowie about this and he said when he was into rock’n’roll, his parents told him to get a proper job. Rock’n’roll wasn’t seen as a job. Whereas now, it wouldn’t be a surprise to see ‘Pop Star Wanted: £30 an hour’. That’s the change, the romance as gone. 

I agree with you, but a friend’s son wants to be a drum and bass DJ and he’s getting pressure to get a ‘proper job’…
Absolutely. I went to this thing recently in Romford, which was Young DJ Of The Year. I was one of the judges. I felt like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz when she encounters the Munchkins. There were 4,000 kids face to face with a real life pouf and it was really scary. It was mostly white and they were all getting down to garage. And it was really interesting to see that up close: wow, this is what’s going on. At the moment the most rebellious thing you can be is black or into black music. If I go back to the seventies, I remember dating girls who would go to blues dances and wear all the uniform, pleated skirts and loafers, but it was quite rare.

There was a club in Peckham called the Bouncing Ball that I used to pass on the bus quite a lot and I always used to sink down in my seat in my punk gear shitting myself. People were very active with their aggression in those days. They’d get on a bus just to punch you. I think things have changed dramatically. We were listening to Bubba Sparxx yesterday and what’s happening in America is that black artist are taking white artists and manipulating them musically. If you listen to a lot of dance music at the moment, it’s very eighties influenced. It’s coming back.

Boy George playlist

Do you think the eighties will get reassessed positively?
I think you need distance from any decade to appreciate it. It’s a bit like your parents. You grow older and you think, actually some of the things my mother said to me when I was 15 were spot on. I remember my mother telling me not to go out with someone because ‘He’s a pervert!”. I was thinking later, actually she was right! Someone asked me today what I would say to the 20 year old Boy George and I wouldn’t have listened to what I had to say. I did what I wanted because I wanted to change the world. I think one of the problems with young people at the moment, which sounds really patronising, I’m sorry to sound that way, but they are really complacent. A couple of weeks ago, I went to Top Of The Pops with Philip Sallon. (They’re doing this thing where they’re inviting freaks along to make it look more colourful.) And there was Philip dressed up like a dog’s dinner and pretty much every kid in there came up to me and said, “Why’s he dressed like that?” For me, being a pop star (or ex-pop star) I have a reason to dress up. When I was 15 and I saw Philip and I was drawn to him like a magnet to a fridge. I had a girlfriend then and I said, “That man’s our new best friend and we have to find a way of manipulating ourselves into his life!” That’s how it was. It doesn’t happen like that any more because everybody wants to be the same. 

Everything is packaged so quickly now, including rebellion…
Well, if you look at the gay community and their struggle for assimilation has meant that their sense of identity has been eroded so they’re actually more uptight than straight people in some respects. When I went on Frank Skinner’s show and talked about buggery and stuff, the letters of abuse I got on my internet site were all from gay people. All of them. 

What were they saying?
Well, one said you’re running the risk of becoming like Kenneth Williams, this bitter old queen. My reply to that was that because I find a subject fascinating, which I do, I find the whole subject of sexuality so fascinating and it’s something that comes up almost everywhere I go. My reputation – like Jordan’s breasts – goes before me. 

Do you think that certain elements of gays, since Aids, don’t want a fuss to be made about it?
I think there’s a certain element of gay culture that doesn’t like anybody to be too flamboyant or outspoken because it’s ruining their bid for respectability and that doesn’t concern me in the slightest. I know that people look back at me in the eighties and think I was a kind of clown, charming the pants off the establishment. Which I was, in a way. I did want people to like me. But part of that was growing up in an environment in which I was told there was something wrong with me. As I was growing up, I bought into that. 

Who would you like to play you in a movie?
Euan Morton. Without make up he doesn’t look much like me. But there’s something about his personality, behaviour and attitude which reminds me so much of myself. The only weird thing about Euan is he goes off into corners and reads books alone. Which I never did. I was always in the thick of things. When my mother was in the kitchen talking I would be in there, trying to join in the grown ups conversations. I never wanted to be left out of anyone’s conversation. I was always the last to leave a room, whereas Euan has a reclusive quality. I think all actors are mad. Certainly working with them and watching them walking round the room talking to themselves. 

Do you feel lucky to be one of the survivors of the eighties?
I was up early this morning and Kim Wilde was on a gardening programme and I’ve read stuff dissing her for doing that. Actually, I say hat’s off to her: she’s working. I’ll always respect anyone for working, whatever it is. The guy from Dollar, for instance. OK, so he’s running a hamburger stall. So fucking what! At least he’s doing something with his life. Good luck to him. When I get slagged off for doing this and that… I’m not motivated by money. I’ve made a lot of money, but I came from a background where money wasn’t respected. My father was a terrible gambler. He had six children. He would take the whole month’s wages, including everybody who worked for him, and put it all on a horse. So I grew up with this absolute disregard for money. And it’s only really been in the last ten years that I realised that you actually need it to survive. You need to pay bills. You have responsibilities. 

Are you still friends with many of the people from the Blitz era?
Yeah. Princess Julia, Jeffrey Hinton. I was always friendly with Steve Strange’s mother. His mum was a great character and I always used to joke, “How did you end up with a son like that?!”. In the last few years, Steve – and he would probably say the same about me – has become a less bitchy human being. That comes with age. At the time we were all scrambling to get to the top of the heap and Steve Strange – damn him! – got there first. Part of what we talk about in the show is that he got there, and it really bugged the fuck out of us. We all hated him for it. And you know, Steve loved to lord it. He loved to stand on ceremony and tell people they weren’t good enough to come into his club. Turn away Mick Jagger, which I thought was one of the most outrageous things he ever did. But I understand what he was trying to do: he was trying to create this exclusivity which, to be honest, never really appealed to me. I wasn’t into alienating anybody. I come from a big family of extreme characters. I’m drawn to people with something to say, regardless of what they dress like or how cool they’re meant to be.

How do you think the general public perceives you now compared to 20 years ago?
There are gay people who refer to me as a pantomine dame, which I find quite offensive, because in my own way, I’m quite outspoken about what I feel and who I am. So I’m as far away from Danny LaRue as we are from Mars. So I find that insulting and it’s one of the things that aggravates me the most. But it’s the price you pay for having a style.

Do you think part of that is because you’ve refused to become a ‘mouthpiece’ for gay people generally?
I talk about it in a way that I feel fit. I don’t talk about it in the way that, say, Peter Tatchell would though I have a lot of respect for him. And Peter Tatchell is as hated in the gay community as I can be. I find it weird that gay people would be like that towards him, because in his heart what he wants to do is really positive. At the same time, the downside of that is that we end up with a community – if there is such a thing – where it has no identity. 

What do you think that straight Britain thinks of you?
Well, judging by what happened after Frank Skinner which is the most sexually explicit I’ve ever been on TV. What tends to happen with me is that I operate in whatever mood I’m in. If I’m in a spiky mood, and I think it depends on what questions you’re asked as well. I mostly DJ in straight clubs, I rarely have abuse. Whereas in gay clubs, I have a fair amount. I’ve been in gay clubs in the past where people have come up and given me bits of paper with some really horrible things written on them. But then I guess in a straight club I feel special, but in a gay club I don’t really fit in the criteria of the perfect homosexual. That’s what was great about Leigh [Bowery]. You know, you’d see Leigh at the Fridge which was a Muscle Mary club and there’s this guy with a huge body with his arse out spoiling it for the rest of them. The fact that he would even go to that club, which was so body conscious, wearing a vagina wig, and a push up bra and his arse in everyone’s face. I can remember thinking that he was quite sexy because he was so brave. I admired him.

Do you think he’s more culturally important than he’s been given credit for?
He is to me, which is why it was important for me to try and tell his story. The most important thing about Leigh was that he was fabulous. When he got it together, he was a vision to behold.

Does it annoy you’ve not been fully recognised for your songwriting?
Yes, in a word. It infuriates me.

Do you think the way you dress has a bearing on it?
I suppose I have to take some responsibility for that. It does bug me. I’ve always said that I’ve never been driven by the desire to be taken seriously. I don’t take myself seriously, so I don’t see why other people should. I think there are people out there who get what I do. I get letters from them, they stop me in the street. But I am who I am. I actually think we live in an era now where people respect success more than they do creativity. So there’s not much I can do about that.

Which gives you the most satisfaction: singing, songwriting or DJing?
Songwriting. Because I’m a selfish writer and I write about my own shit, the stuff that happens to me and there are times when I’ve had four hours sleep and I’ll call Kevan and say ‘I’m really sorry, what are you doing? I’ve got an idea for a song. Something’s happened; I need to put it down’. I’m very much into capturing that feeling of what I’m going through at the time. For me songs are a diary. They’re my life. That’s what I write about. For me that’s why it was great to do a musical because I got the chance to actually listen to script, listen to the message of the dialogue and go and be very strict with myself about writing a song that went with the dialogue. 

Was it a challenge doing it that way?
Not, really, Because to a point it’s stuff that I’d been dealing with. When I did Cheapness & Beauty right after the book came out, it was completely autobiographical which is why I used all the pictures and telephone messages and stuff like that. And it was really a history of all the things I’d grown up loving from folk music to glam rock. I think I’ve carried on in that fashion. I’m currently working on a record which incorporates some of the songs on Cheapness & Beauty like ‘If I Could Fly’, ‘Unfinished Business’ ‘Il Adore’ which is in the show, and stuff I’ve written about recently, about current situations and current lovers, one night stands, people I’ve encountered. What I love doing is using actual conversations with people, things that people have actually said and putting them into a song so the person actually gets to hear it and knows what it is. Like, for example, the song that Bob Dylan apparently wrote about Joan Baez ‘You’ve Got A Lot Of Nerve To Say You’re A Friend’. I tend to get quite bitter when I write. 

Do you not think that’s a more articulate feeling than being in love?
I think what happens is that songs go full circle and they become about you. If you think about John Lennon, everything you read about him socially that he was actually quite vile and quite cutting. And when you listen to what he sang ‘Imagine’, ‘Woman’, there’s so many beautiful things there and I think maybe he was trying to find that within himself. As a writer I think what you’re trying to find your own goodness or make sense of what you do, how you love and how you operate in relationships. I think you always know when you’re fucking up or you’re doing the wrong thing. When you meet people you know immediately when they’re right or wrong for you. But… there’s a part of you that thinks, I can change this, I can make it different. It’s always the same, but with music it’s always been my best lover…

You’re turning into a John Miles song…
Yeah, absolutely! You can say what you want to say. One of my finest moments of lyric writing was when Kirk Brandon was in the dock reading out the lyrics to ‘Unfinished Business’. I thought to myself, ‘Mmm, actually they’re really good.’ And it’s hard for to appreciate what I do. I’m hard on myself. 

If you could have written any song which would it be?
‘Always On My Mind’, ‘Walk On The Wild Side’ by Lou Reed… One other one: ‘God Give Me Strength’ Burt Bacharach and Elvis Costello… oh and ‘Man From Mars’by  Joni Mitchell

Who’s been the biggest influence on your life or career?
Bowie and then my mum.

What’s the most thrilling thing to happen to you?
I think when someone says ‘I love you’. You never believe them, but it’s nice to hear it.

How do you feel DJing to rooms full of kids on E when you’re now clean?
I have no moral objection to it. We’re a Chemical Nation. We’ve embraced chemicals for many many years. There’s a kind of hypocrisy with drugs. I think if you’re a kid that’s got a job that’s shit and you hate, you’re treated with disrespect all week long. You go out on a Friday and Saturday and you get wasted, whether it’s with alcohol or drugs or cigarettes. I don’t think I’m in any position to point my finger or lecture. That said, I think the road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom is true. But nothing I say will make any difference. In the same respect, when I was growing up I knew about Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix and it didn’t stop me. 

How do you think clubs compare now to when you first started going out?
I think people are less individual. Things are more genre based. Tribal, but not in a style way. More in a sound way: we like this type of music not that. I enjoy that, though. When I got to clubs, I deliberately play what I want to play. I don’t play for the crowd. I don’t believe there’s any merit in giving people what they want. 

Why?
Because I don’t. It’s not why I became an artist. Rock’n’roll is one of the few artforms where you are constantly expected to repeat yourself. 

What was it like going to the Paradise Garage?
I wasn’t really compos mentis when I went there! The one thing I remember about it was the gun detector on the door. Going through this, thinking is this a good idea. What was fascinating was that people weren’t interested [in me]. They didn’t give a crap. I remember being in there one night and seeing Diana Ross saunter in wearing a fur coat. Drop it to the floor, dance around and then leave. And it was just like, it was all about the music. What was interesting about it for me was it was so stripped down and raw, because the eighties was so excessive and so layered. You’d do backing vocals and layer them; you’d do strings and there was Trevor Horn and Steve Levine and then suddenly you’re in this club listening to ‘Set It Off’ by Strafe, which had nothing on it. If you look at some of the biggest dance records at the moment and of all time, there’s nothing on them. Some little noise or an EQ or the way the bass moves that makes it great. There’s no science to it, which I love. 

Is there a record you always keep in your record box?
Yeah. China White Volume 2. It’s got this lyric that goes “I go out, I go out every night, to dance upon the ceiling”. It’s a stupid record, but I love it. 

How does fame as a musician compare to fame as a DJ?
It’s weird for me because I get more hassle as a DJ because of my history. So people get very… they’re off their heads, they’re drunk. The most common comment I get is, ‘my mum loves you’ or ‘can you sign this for my grandma’. Or when people are being extremely witty, they’ll say, ‘have you got ‘Karma Chameleon’?’. To which I reply, I’ve only got the jungle remix. I’ve been in Moroccan bazaars and at the Pyramids and people have come up and sung ‘Karma Chameleon’. 

What makes a hit record?
Radio play [chuckles]. 

Alright… how do you write a hit record?
Was it Bob Marley that said, ‘say what you mean and give it a melody’? You should always express yourself in the most honest way. The early part of my career, I was much more ambiguous. What I’ve learnt from listening to Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell, especially Joni, is that there’s an honesty in her writing. She’s not scared of saying things that are very brittle and open and I think that’s something that I aspire to as a writer. I split up with someone recently and I decided to write a song using their name. One of my good friends was appalled. She was like, “You can’t do that”. Why not? If that’s what I feel. The name worked melodically, mind.

Do you remember a song you wrote, ‘Kipsy’?
It came out on an album Tense, Nervous Headache and it was about a real life person who went from trying to sue me to asking me for several copies to give away for Christmas! That was the beginning of me deciding to write about really real things in a direct way. Kipsy was one of the first people to be done for dealing ecstasy and I’d just met MC Kinky. I’d written this song that went, ‘If you know Kipsy you’re gonna get busted’ and then Karen came in the studio and did this seventies chat: ‘ecstasy, because I’m in ecstasy’.  Then it started getting played in clubs.

Didn’t it come out on 12-inch in Japan?
It might have done. It’s one of those tracks that I’d love to remix. I’d love to get someone to do a real wicked dub to it because it’s a great track. People like Weatherall and a whole bunch of people at the time, like when I did ‘Bow Down Mister’ and ‘Generations Of Love’ ‘After The Love’. It was the beginning of me taking control of my musical career. Having been in a band. And I don’t play anything. I write everything in my head. 

Was it quite liberating doing stuff like ‘Generations of Love’?
Well, when you’ve come up in a band, there’s that sense of we knew you when you were nobody. Who the fuck do you think you are? In Culture Club it was always: you don’t even know what key the songs are in. I realised after a while that a lot of production is just bullshit and a lot of music was just blagging. It was just about being confident. It’s one thing about being able to play instruments, it’s another to have ideas. I think working with Malcolm McLaren was a huge revelation for me, even though it was a brief experience. Malcolm’s an ideas man and completely erratic. I remember sitting with him in a flat in Bayswater listening to him write a song called ‘The Mile High Club’ and prior to getting there I’d been picked up from my squat in Goodge Street and Vivienne had bricked the window, dressed as a pirate, because she thought he was screwing Annabella. We arrived at this flat and there were all these people in the street, from the local restaurant [does foreign accent] ‘She crazy woman, she dress as pirate and how can she go!’. Malcolm cooked me dinner and tried to get me to sign this contract. One of the greatest things my father ever did, even though he knew nothing about music was to say, “Don’t sign anything with that man. I don’t trust him. I won’t ever to tell you to do anything but please don’t sign that contract.”

What’s the biggest crowd you’ve ever DJed for?
30,000 people in Johannesburg. 

Is it weird DJing in front of that many people?
What was weird about it for me was there was only one black queen in the whole place. I noticed that more than anything. It was a huge auditorium. You go there thinking it’s changed. What I realised was that it’s changed in theory but not in practice. I was looking round thinking, where are all the black people? One black queen in this sea of white faces. My cousin’s boyfriend got battered by security. A heavy night. I didn’t enjoy South Africa. It was racist and homophobic. 

What was the first time you ever DJed?
It was at Venus in Nottingham. I brought my records in a cardboard box. I DJed alongside MC Kinky, who was far better than I was, and Danny Rampling and Jeremy Healy played downstairs. I brought these vintage house records and some other stuff I thought would work. 

What was it like DJing, compared to being on a dancefloor?
I’m actually a complete technophobe, so the idea of working equipment was like aargghg! But it was an education for me. A lot of the gigs I did in the beginning were in the North: Birmingham and Middlesbrough was a real learning ground for me. 

The Empire?
That was where I really fucked up. I did things like if the record stopped I would just get on the floor, push the button and the residents would look at me with hatred: ‘Yaugh, you’re only getting this work because you’re Boy George’ and there was an element of truth in that. But you know, I worked at it. I practised. I got my confidence. I was playing with people who were veterans like Tony De Vit, Sasha and Carl Cox and it was like [sharp intake of breath]. I can remember the first time I played with Sasha at the Pier in Hastings [Bedrock] and thinking, ‘Oh my God, what am I going to do?!’ It was so frightening. I remember reading his palm that night. It’s one of my stock chat up lines. He looks like the skinny one from Laurel & Hardy. 

There are people I admire for their technical ability, like Carl Cox and Tony De Vit when he was around. He was a master. I remember giving him a track I’d just made and he put it on. And just watching him mix this record he’d never heard before, so beautifully and keeping it in for half an hour.

Have you ever spent time practising at home?
In the early days. I was very obsessive about practising and when I got two records to go together I’d call everyone and shout, ‘Listen, I did it!’ When I was doing Cheapness & Beauty I took my decks to Oxford because we were in a residential studio. And I just literally, any time there was a break, I’d go up and make tapes. But it’s a bit like singing in the bath. It doesn’t compare with singing in front of a crowd. Everything changes. So you can practise as much as you like at home and you can be spot on. And then you get in front of a crowd and you brought the wrong records, you’re playing with the wrong DJ… all those rules about respecting the night… they’re gone. You get stuck on between Fergie and Anne Savage on New Year’s Eve, so what do you do? What I don’t ever do is adapt to the night. I refuse to do that. I get shit from people and people come up, but I think the thing is you’re always playing to an educated minority. That’s why. 

Did have musical experience help you in any way as a DJ?
Not at all. I watched DJs. I used to watch them doing that [licks finger and goes as if to hold against platter]. I used to think what are they doing there? But it’s a load of old bollocks! It doesn’t do anything! Once I’d decided how I would DJ, I DJed from the middle of the record [he motions as though touching/moving the label], pushing it. I used to watch other DJs and wonder what I was doing wrong. And I had all the beat counters, the machinery, and they never worked. I’d spend hours at home going ‘well, it’s 30 of that and it’s er…’ I bought every gadget you can think of. But really, it’s like learning to drive: you’ve got to get out there and do it. Fuck up. Make mistakes. The best bit of advice I ever got was from Jon Pleased in Manchester at the Haçienda. I did this real car crash job, like a drag queen falling down the stairs in platforms. I said, “Argh, I can’t believe I did that!”
And Jon went, “Well, at least they know you’re here!”

Was Karma Chameleon influenced by the Bewlay Brothers?
No. But we got sued by the guy that did ‘Handyman’ [by Del Shannon]. Do you remember that? I’d never heard it. I’d heard it after the court case. When I first played it to the band, they laughed at me. And, in fact [looks round to see if Roy Hay’s still there], Roy’s not here so I can say this. The guitar lick was a pisstake, a total pisstake. It was a diss. It was the last song recorded for Colour By Numbers and everybody was dismissive. They said, “It’s the worst song you’ve ever written”.
I said, ‘It’s a Number One record’ and I fought like mad to make sure it got recorded. Perhaps Roy was right, perhaps it was the nail in our coffin. It was one of those songs you just got sick of! But it paid for his house in LA…

Buy tickets for Outlaws: Fashion Renegades of 80s London

Mark Moore was a true believer

Mark Moore was a true believer

House arrived in the UK amid a whirlwind of other styles: hip hop, go-go, new beat and electro were all fighting for attention, eclecticism was the order of the day, and few people saw it as anything more than another flavour to throw in the mix. But Mark Moore was a true believer determined to give house the focus it deserved. At Asylum (which became Pyramid) he joined fellow zealots Colin Faver and Eddie Richards and pushed the club to an all-house playlist, after which he DJed at many of the emerging acid house scene’s key clubs, including Spectrum, Shoom and some of the M25 raves. Inspired by the new sound, he made ‘Theme From S’Express’, one of the first British house tracks, an international hit and a UK number one in 1988. Having been switched on by punk and John Carpenter soundtracks, Mark began his clubbing life at The Blitz and Heaven, and established himself as a DJ in those heady pre-house years. In this interview he proves himself an astute observer of the shifting times, recalling incisively how ecstasy crept in to the London scene, arriving with a crash onto the giggling dancefloor at Leigh Bowery’s Taboo in 1985.

interviewed by Bill in London, 2.12.94 and 20.07.04

Was there anything about your early musical influences – in the late ‘70s, early ‘80s – that showed where you might be heading?
Everything was so mixed up. Everything was up for grabs and everything was played. You just went for good music rather than a genre. Looking back, we were listening to a lot of electronic dance music. What got me into it was this film by John Carpenter, Assault On Precinct 13. We went to see the movie and halfway through my friend’s sister said, ‘I can’t handle this,’ because it was too intense. People were leaving the cinema in droves. The music just blew me and my brother away: ‘What the fuck, this music is amazing.’

John Carpenter did his own music for his films, didn’t he.
He did. I remember my brother saying ‘Mark, Mark, they’ve released the music from Precinct 13. It’s called the Human League “Being boiled”.’ It wasn’t, but it was similar and the band was great, so we went to see the Human League everywhere. David Bowie would turn up to see them. There’d be people sat at the table reading Kafka books with a pint of beer. Before that, we heard ‘Warm Leatherette’ and ‘TVOD’ by the Normal. I was buying stuff on Mute. Later, electronic stuff from the States, Bobby O, the Flirts, Divine, we lumped it in with Soulsonic Force because it was from America. I remember hearing ‘Blue Monday’ and thinking, ‘What’s this rip off of Bobby O?’

And shortly after that, hip hop started arriving
The rap was coming in. I think I first heard ‘Planet Rock’ in 1982 and it would’ve been at Camden Palace, Steve Strange’s club. When we first heard it, we just thought ‘Ooh, what’s this remix of Kraftwerk?’ We thought it was something cool, but we didn’t think it was a new genre, because we’d been listening to the Human League and Depeche Mode. There was a time when it all switched over: some of my friends had been real stoners who listened to dub reggae and Lee Perry and suddenly you’d go round their house and they’d be listening to 12-inch Martin Rushent dub mixes, like the dub of ‘Happy Birthday’ by Altered Images, something ridiculously camp.

Where did you grow up?
North London, Hampstead, Golders Green. I was born in University College Hospital in London, in 1965. Perhaps! No one knows for sure and I’ve lied about my age since I was 12. My mother was from South Korea. She was one of the first people to come over here after the Korean War. All her hotel rooms were bugged by MI5 because they thought she was a communist spy. She set up a property business and we were living a lovely middle-class existence. She was the Evening Standard’s Businesswoman of the Year. Then she got divorced from my father and started losing her business and went bankrupt. Suddenly we were very poor. We had a nice house but no money and we were constantly hiding from debt collectors. Then she had a nervous breakdown and me and my brother were put into care. And then into a grammar school, Wolverstone Hall, the poor man’s Eton. A lot of people went there, like the brothers from Colourbox/MARRS, Martin Offiah, Ben Volepierre from Curiosity Killed The Cat. To me it was a safe place. I worked hard and got straight A’s.

My brother got into punk rock in early ‘77 and I remember staying at my Aunty Amy’s, bored, playing my brother’s records. I put on Patti Smith’s ‘Piss Factory’ and it totally blew my mind. Then I put on ‘White Punks On Dope’ by The Tubes, and it blew my mind. Then the final test was ‘God Save The Queen’ and by the end of it, no future! I was a punk rocker.

And that led to Billy’s and The Blitz
I met this girl at a punk party called Bowie Teresa, who looked exactly like David Bowie as he did in The Man Who Fell To Earth. She dragged me into the bathroom, and turned on the bath and took her clothes off and tried to get me to get in the bath with her, so immediately I thought, I love this girl. She was quite terrifying at the same time. I arranged to meet her, and she always seemed to be working late in Soho. In hindsight she was probably on the game. And she said, ‘We’re going to go to this great club, which is full of weirdos, freaks, rent boys and prostitutes. It’s called Billy’s. It’s a Bowie night and they play Bowie, Roxy Music, Kraftwerk’

It was Steve Strange’s first club, with Rusty Egan DJing, at Gossips. It was

Bowie ‘Heroes’, Roxy Music ‘Do The Strand’, ‘Editions Of You’. Rusty was definitely very influential for me. Very underrated. Along with John Peel, for the variety, and also this girl called Mandy who played at Marquee. Then Rusty Egan and Steve Strange opened another club: Hell, which was in Covent Garden, just round the corner from the Rock Garden. They opened it because Blitz was becoming quite well known, so it was a bit like the Blitz but more elitist, if that’s possible. We’d go there, and he’d be playing Grace Jones’ album where she’d switched from being disco to new wave and doing things like ‘She’s Lost Control’. And he’d be playing disco stuff like Change ‘The Glow Of Love’, which was cool, breaking down preconceptions.

My guru then was my friend Simon Green who was slightly older than me. He was totally heterosexual but covered in eyeliner and make-up looking really camp. ‘We have to listen to more Grace Jones and we have to go to more gay clubs! We can’t be punks forever.’ So we went to see Grace Jones perform at Heaven. The first gay club I ever went to. He arranged to meet me there. I went in actually petrified, I didn’t know anything – sexuality or whatever – still quite young. People were really friendly there. Went in the first bar, didn’t know the rest of the club existed, and just stayed in that bar all night. I remember seeing Amanda Lear on video there, ‘Geev a leetle beet of mmmph to me and I’ll geev a leetle mmmph to you,’ dressed in leather with a whip. But I didn’t see Simon so I went home!

My uncle and aunt moved out of their house in Finchley and let me and my cousins stay there. They were a bit older than me, but still young and from a hippie background. It was fantastic. We’d come back from clubs like Blitz, lay mattresses out on the floor and crash out there and listen to Kraftwerk and Psychedelic Furs’ first album. During the summer, rather than stay at my uncle’s I would go and have a holiday at the punk squats in Kings Cross. They were amazing. Every night you’d go to a punk gig. They were at the back of Kings Cross, towards Russell Square. There’d be loads of prostitutes in the area and they’d be giving you lectures about how shouldn’t run away from school.

At the time, did you ever think DJing was a career option?
Later on, when I dropped out of my job and I was DJing my mother was like, why don’t you get a proper job, why don’t you do something with your life?’ In the back of my mind I thought, ‘I will be discovered.’ Someone will come up to me and say we want you to be in our movie or we want you to be in our band. Even though I couldn’t sing particularly, I assumed this would happen, someone would realise you were a star and would sort it out for you. At that time everyone thought that: ‘Yeah, we’re on the dole and we don’t do anything, but we’re stars!’ Boy George was a star, even though he was doing absolutely nothing. Then he realised, hang on a minute, if I’m gonna be a star I’ve actually got to do something.

How did you get into DJing?
Back then anyone with an artistic bent could be on the dole and go clubbing all week and somehow survive. It was easy for artists to thrive, bands to thrive. I got myself a bedsit and they were gonna stop my dole so I thought I’d better get a job. I found the cushiest thing I could find on their noticeboard, dressed up all punky thinking they’d never give me a job like that, and they gave me the job! So I was suddenly working for the Jewish Welfare Board looking after old people and the mentally handicapped. All my money went on paying the bedsit, whereas previously all my money went on records and clothes. No one wore designer clothes then, everyone made their own. You bought second hand stuff and jazzed it up.

The Mud Club had opened, I’d been going there regularly, every week. Jay Strongman was doing the downstairs and Tasty Tim was upstairs, playing schoolboy disco, glam rock. I’d take him mad things to play, some electronic stuff and then stuff like Rupert the Bear. People would run on to the dancefloor to dance to Rupert the Bear and this whole anti-cool thing came up where it was like are you gonna dance to this or are you gonna pose and look pretty? And everyone would just let their hair down and go completely crazy. So there’d be Stingray, Captain Scarlet, Julie Andrews’ ‘Lonely Goat Herd’. And people’d be dancing to it! He asked Philip Sallon if I could DJ with him. Philip said yes but completely panicked and rang me every day saying, ‘You’d better not fuck it up!’ Anyway, I did my set and everyone went completely crazy. So he said I could DJ there every week.

The Mud Club used to do one-off balls at Heaven, which were fantastic, and they saw me DJing and got me to do their club Asylum, which turned into Pyramid. So suddenly I was DJing with Evil Eddie Richards and Colin Faver at Asylum. First it was called The Asylum, and then to reinvent it they called it Pyramid. I started there in 1984, but I can’t remember when it started, maybe ‘82. I think it was on a Wednesday. Again, it was that alternative scene, very mixed, lots of straight people, very dressy. Most of the gay scene was very generic handlebar moustaches, listening to this cheesy Eurobeat. We were definitely the black sheep of the gay scene. I remember seeing Ian Levine in print saying, ‘Oh yeah, we thought that was the freaks night’.

We started playing house music very early on. We didn’t know we were playing it. It was just another electronic import thing we were playing along with Koto and the Italo disco stuff. ‘Hypnosis by Void. Or Void by Hypnosis. Yello, ‘Vicious Games’ was huge. Klein & MBO was massive. We were playing a lot of industrial stuff like Front 242 and Nitzer Ebb, Cabaret Voltaire ‘Yashar’, and then the more poppy stuff like Pet Shop Boys, obviously New Order, Soft Cell… So the house stuff started getting slotted in as well. It was a while before we realised, ‘Wait a minute there’s loads of this stuff!’ We actually had Jamie Principal down to play, early days. Must’ve been ‘87.

What was he like?
He was cool. Very camp, quite Princey, vulnerable looking.

And were you playing anywhere else?
The Mud Club and then loads of warehouse parties.

Mark at Dirtbox

Were you playing the off-the-wall stuff at Mud Club and more orthodox elsewhere?
Yeah, exactly. But even the Mud Club, it started to get more electronic. I’d come on after Jay Strongman who’d do the funk and hip hop, but I started incorporating the electro. The Mud Club went through so many changes. I remember after a while it became known as a hip hop and go-go club.

How long did you play at Pyramid?
I left in ‘88 because of S’Express, but it was still going then.

I remember seeing you guest at the Fridge in Sept ‘87 and it was the first time I’d ever heard anyone play only house music. It was very confrontational, like you were on a mission. Did you feel that way?
I did. Because most people hated house music. The whole of London was into rare groove and hip hop. I was known as a hip hop DJ in those days. I remember thinking the mixed gay crowd are really into house ‘cos it’s a progression of disco, but the straight crowd are never going to get into it, ‘cos they all smoke spliff, the main drug of London, so they want slower beats. Loads of my hip hop friends were like that. Took them to a club. Gave them an E. ‘We get it, this is amazing’. I remember when S’Express took off, in my first interview they asked me why they thought house hadn’t taken off in London and I said it was because the drugs were all wrong.

All my friends at the Mud Club were like, ‘Why do you have to keep playing this house music?’ They didn’t get it and it took ecstasy for them to get it. I was on a mission, I thought, I’m not gonna give in. I’d play ‘Strings Of Life’ at the Mud Club and clear the floor. Three weeks later you could see pockets of people come on to the floor when I played it, and dance and go crazy to it. And this was without ecstasy. And they turned out to be people like DJ Harvey. I remember at the Fridge many times thinking, ‘This is hard work, I hope no one shoots me!’.

What was the crowd at Pyramid?
It was 70 percent gay. A lot of straight people who wanted somewhere to go where they weren’t hassled. Racially it was mixed, a lot of black gay guys went, they loved the house music and they also loved the soulful electronic stuff like Janet Jackson’s ‘Control’. I also had a big hip hop following from the Mud Club. A lot of the main homeboys and breakdancers went there because they were bored. First time they came they were terrified, and then one of them would go to their mates, ‘It’s alright, it’s safe,’ and then more of them would come along. And they’d be breakdancing to the house music. They even asked LL Cool J to come down one time and he came. He loved it, thought it was freaky.

Drugs weren’t that important. Maybe a bit of speed or LSD, but not huge amounts. It was more a case of have a beer. Not a lot of people would do cocaine: it was still considered a great luxury in those days, although Pyramid was very Euro jet set, very rich people would fly in from Italy. It was a mixture of rich types, rent boys, debutantes and strange axe murderers! The Pet Shop Boys would always go there, Jimmy Somerville, and one time Liza Minnelli came down, so it was a strange mixture of high life and low life.

When did you do your first E?
I first heard about it when friends would come back from New York, saying, ‘We’ve had this new drug and it’s like, you feel like you’re not off your face at all, but you are totally off your face at the same time.’ What’s it like? ‘Oh, it’s like a constant orgasm for six hours.’ I remember, they’d always come back with about ten Es, and they were like gold dust, they’d sell for about £30.

I heard things about Cindy Ecstasy on the Soft Cell record, and seeing the Soft Cell ‘Non Stop Erotic Dancing’ – you know, the compilation video, and that was very drug-orientated. It had all things like ‘Sex Dwarf’ and ‘Memorabilia’, which would start off ‘Trip, trip, trip, trip, tripping.’ At first I thought they’d written it on LSD, but then I realised no, it’s this ecstasy thing.

I heard rumours that Stevo was on it all the time, and he’d go into meetings on ecstasy and come out really on top with a brilliant time. Kevin Millins, I remember him saying he got his first one off Marc Almond. Tony Gordon used to have quite a few Es in Taboo days. I remember buying one off him for £30 and it didn’t work.

My first one was at White Trash. Noel Watson was DJing and the music was a mixture of the Jackson 5 and Skipworth and Turner, spiritual and uplifting soulful stuff. I thought this was the perfect ecstasy music.

So here and there I’d take it. And then I guess I didn’t have it for a little while, just here and there it would crop up. I remember having a conversation at White Trash with George Michael about it. He said, ‘I’m sick of people in London who are on ecstasy, thinking they’re so cool, and don’t they realise it’s been around in America for years.’ He was in a corner being really miserable. I remember thinking maybe you should take one yourself George, but he was going through a lot of stress in those days.

Tell me about Taboo, then?
Taboo was great. I had to finish my set at Pyramid and run over to Taboo. It was really fantastic – again a mixture of high life and low life. I didn’t realise at the time it was so crazy because of the ecstasy, but in hindsight that makes sense. People would come back from New York loaded with ecstasy and give them out.

Who were the high life element, was it pop stars like George?
Yeah, Boy George, [TV producer] Janet Street Porter. I think she was going out with Tony James then [of Generation X]. There were up and coming designers like John Galliano, and ABC would be there, in their freaky cartoon phase, fresh from their success with How To Be A Zillionaire. And Fiona Russell Powell, the writer from the Face. Everyone remembers her TV appearance on the Tube with ABC where she took off her coat and she had this belt with dildos stuck all around it; it was live so it was too late to do anything. She’d be there. And the ecstasy would be dished out and somebody would just fall on the floor, and someone else would go, ‘Yeah, good idea,’ and fall on the floor as well, and then the whole place would fall down in unison, this mass bundle of writhing bodies. And that would happen every week at Taboo. It was a lame night if that didn’t happen.

You had great people like Space Princess, who was this lovely guy: Mark Lawrence, an amazing six-foot black model from the north. He used to go to northern soul clubs, then decided he was gay and came to London. Jeffrey Hinton, who was the DJ, along with Rachel Auburn. I think Princess Julia did the cloakroom. Mark Lawrence, who started DJing later at Daisy Chain.

Jeffrey, Space Princess, Mark Lawrence and Mark Time who used to be in Hot Gossip would practise these dance routines at home, with Malcolm Duffy. And once they got into the club they’d do this formation dancing with anyone willing to join in. Suddenly the floor would be taken over by people doing formation dancing. And they’d do this move with a kick and a turn and everyone would fall over in unison as part of the routine.

At the time, the people were just as important as the club, as the DJs, as the music, they were the stars as much as anyone else. The week after Pyramid there’d be a fashion show and people would be chosen out of the crowd to appear, or people would be asked if they wanted to do a drag act, a mime or weird performance art, which they’d do next week at Pyramid. It was so inclusive. I totally missed that in the ‘90s.

It was that performer-consumer dynamic wasn’t it?
Yeah. I think it’s back now with the small electro clubs.

What music was played at Taboo?
It was totally cheesy, hi-NRG, Italo, some of it great, some of it atrocious, but once you’d been in there and you were drunk or on ecstasy, it was fuckin’ amazing! I heard Taffy ‘Step By Step’ played to death there by Jeffrey Hinton. The Taboo anthem was ‘After The Rainbow’ by Joanne Daniels, and when you listen to it now, you think how could we have liked something so tacky? Weak electronic production, but it was so fucking brilliant at the time. Jeffrey would do his own edit where he would elongate the best bits with these mad sound effects over the top. Very underrated DJ, Jeffrey. Very trippy and some of it was completely out of beat, but it didn’t matter. It totally suited Taboo. Sometimes he would let the records clash for a full two minutes and everybody would be like, ‘Woaargh! This is fucking crazy and amazing!’

Jeffrey also used to do the music for Bodymap. In those days they always used to have fashion shows, have the models come on in freaky clothes, and one of the models would collapse and suddenly all the other models would collapse on them. That was Bodymap, which came from Taboo.

How long did Taboo run for?
It must’ve been a year. About 1985, you’d go to the club and people would be missing, and you’d be like, ‘Where are they?’ People started disappearing. And you realised they were suddenly becoming ill or dying. Aids suddenly became very there. It went from this thing you talked about that was happening in America, to something very real. A lot of the creative people started dying out. You’d be wondering, ‘Where’s Space Princess? Is he just staying in tonight, or is he dead?’ Then you’d hear months later that so-and-so had died. It became a very bleak time. People started dressing down more, they didn’t want to look freaky, they wanted to look healthy, they didn’t want to be associated with this disease. So everything started falling apart and the fabulous parties started to become less fabulous.

Just when acid house was about to make an entrance.
There was a void and into this void I knew there was something waiting to step in. I remember taking Philip Sallon to the Future which was in the back of Heaven and just saying ‘This is the future, literally the future. It’s what’s gonna happen next.’ He said ‘Don’t be silly they’re just kids from the suburbs.’ He just couldn’t understand what I was on about.

Had you noticed ecstasy being used in Asylum or other clubs you’d been playing in?
I only noticed it at Taboo. I knew there was a New York scene where people were doing it. And then nothing for a few years [after Taboo], and then I went to Paul Oakenfold’s Future and Danny Rampling invited me to Shoom. Previous to Shoom, ecstasy never took off big-time apart from Taboo. It didn’t spread across the alternative gay scene or the trendy clubs.

I remember the gay scene being really late to pick up on the whole house revolution, besides the Pyramid. The generic gay scene was a good year or so slow to pick up on it. They stuck with their Eurobeat, but then they got stuck into it with a vengeance and made up for lost time. I definitely think The Pyramid was the first house music club in England. I’m not listening to anyone else about this!

Tell me about S’Express. How did that come about?
I was living with my mother, staying on the sofa in a council flat in Harrow Road, and Rhythm King had opened up across the road, in Mute Records. I’d go and hang out in the offices and see if I could get some free imports and stuff. And I’d be like, ‘You should sign this’ or ‘Sign this, it’s great!’ I got them to sign Renegade Soundwave, I got them to sign Baby Ford. And of course, I got them their first hit with Taffy, and I got them another hit with Beatmasters and the Cookie Crew ‘Rok Da House’.

I didn’t particularly ask for anything but they said, ‘Oh you better have some money. You’ve done so much for us, can we do anything for you?’ So I said, ‘Yeah, I’ve got some ideas, can you put me in the studio with a producer. They hooked me up with Pascal Gabriel who I got on with instantly. He had the same musical loves as me, and we did ‘Theme From S’Express’ and ‘Superfly Guy’.

I made a conscious decision that even though it was a house-influenced record, I didn’t want it to be a copy of a house record, so when you compare it now it doesn’t sound very typical. Not only influenced by house, but all the other things I loved, like Kraftwerk, Giorgio Moroder, Philip Glass, punk rock. And I wanted it to be ironic as well, so it goes ‘I’ve got the hots for you’ which was definitely a comment on the crassness of disco lyrics. At the time disco was still a dirty word. I remember thinking, I’m gonna get crucified for bringing disco back.

So did you go in there with a big bag of samples?
Yeah, but I wrote other bits for it like the bassline and got my friend in to do the ‘esss expresssss’ bit. We cleared everything and people hadn’t heard of clearing samples in those days. You could clear samples for £250 in those days.

How many were there, I know the Crystal Grass one?
Plenty. I’d rather not say. It was early days when things were signed on backs of toilet roll!

What were the early reactions?
I wondered what the DJs would make of it. I thought I’d play it at Pyramid and that would be it. I remember playing it to Kid Bachelor at an i-D Magazine shoot for all the up-and-coming DJ talent. Coldcut and everyone played their new stuff and Kid said yours is the best one there. Rhythm King pressed some up on white label, but it took ages for it to come out because of the clearances, so people had these white labels for months and months and magazines would say, ‘When is “Theme From S’Express coming out?”’ Finally, it did.

And you were thrust into a whirlwind of promotion.

I was making a comfortable living being a DJ by then. But I had to stop and promote it around the world for about a year and a half.

Doing PAs?
A few, and a short tour, but it was more TV and interviews around the world. They’d film for TV while we mimed. S’Express was too early. It was breaking down the doors for dance music and people didn’t get it in a lot of places. It would’ve been easier a few years later where I could’ve just gone and done a DJ tour to promote it.

There was a lot of resistance from the powers that be, Radio 1 didn’t want to support it. Someone wrote a letter to the Musicians Union saying that Mark Moore was being interviewed saying he was a non-musician – I was quoting Brian Eno – and they said he should be thrown out of the MU and not allowed on Top of the Pops. Rumour has it this letter came from a very famous producer. But it was cool. It opened the doors for others.

I remember Derrick May being really excited that S’Express had done this. Derrick May said to me, ‘It’s like a party and you’re the only ones there and you’re waiting for everyone else to come to the party.’

How did you end up DJing at Shoom?
Danny Rampling used to come to Pyramid, ‘cos that was the only place in London to hear house music: Pyramid, Jungle and possibly the Mud Club, which was a mix of hip hop and house – though it was a battle to slip in the house stuff. And when I got a test pressing of S’Xpress, Danny came running up, shouting, ‘What’s this record? I have to have one. My name’s Danny and I do this club called Shoom, and DJ at Kiss, and I have to have one!’

Can you describe your first time at Shoom.
Everyone told me it was such a friendly place, but I walk in and there’s smoke everywhere, and when it cleared everyone was walking around like Night of the Living Dead, and I thought, ‘This isn’t a very friendly, happy place, what are they talking about?’ Then, about an hour later, suddenly people are coming up and hugging you and ‘What’s your name?’ ‘I love you, you’re great!’ I thought, ‘Wait a minute, they’re all on ecstasy!’

The first time there were only about 100 people. Straight away I met some guy who was the Shoom dealer, I think there were only two dealers in those days. He just came up and said, ‘Oh I’ve seen you DJ, I think you’re really cool, this is for you mate, thanks for the music.’ And when Spectrum opened he got arrested, he was probably one of the first guys to get arrested for it.

What did you think of Shoom?
I’d been playing house for a couple of years, and I thought, at last a straight crowd that gets it, that understands the whole music (I’d never been to Paradise Garage). Although they had to go to Ibiza to get it, and take drugs to get it, it was another club that was doing more or less what I was doing – which was mixing up alternative stuff which they called Balearic Beats. I thought wow, I’ve found the perfect place, and then Danny asked me to DJ. It was perfect timing. S’Express was pressed and I remember Colin Faver saying, ‘I don’t know if I can play this at Shoom, ‘cos it’s really discoey, and then he played it and they went completely insane. I remember the Shoom newsletter listed S’Express as one of their top records.

How much did you get into the scene?
Totally. It was totally what I was looking for. I already had the gay scene. They understood the records, but they wanted more of a garagey vibe, and I was playing a lot of acid stuff. Whereas this scene totally understood it when you dropped something like Scarlet Fantastic ‘No Memory’. The Shoom scene was so open-minded, you could drop anything that was danceable. And people’s attitudes. Just coming up and shaking your hand saying, ‘I’ve seen you on the telly mate,’ Not being all weird: ‘Oh he’s a pop star’. They were really down to earth and I could just be myself with them.

Were there a few people there you didn’t expect?
I remember seeing a few people from punk days who I hadn’t seen since then. Going to Shoom and seeing Boy George, Paul Rutherford, Patsy Kensit.

Do you think ecstasy genuinely changed things?
I remember you’d hear people saying, ‘Oh all the football firms are here at the Trip, it’s going to kick off, it’s going to be a blood bath’ – and it never happened. A lot of people had their minds opened up. I’ve always come from a spiritual background, with my mum being a Buddhist, so it was great to see these people discovering spirituality and things like that – and it was great talking to them. It was like a door had been opened to a lot of these people, and they realised about acceptance and tolerance.

Did E bring people out of the closet?
Yeah, I think it’s true. A lot of people who were having problems with their sexuality, took an E and were set free of their inhibitions. I think it’s a great way to come out, dealing with it in that way. I think it’s done a lot of good for those people who were unsure about their sexuality.

How life-changing do you think it was?
Was and is! It was very life-changing. It’s changed music. I’ve always lived by ‘Everyone is my friend until they prove they’re not’, and that was strengthened by the Second Summer of Love. I guess nowadays it’s a naive way to be. The first wave of ecstasy opened up so many people’s minds, but the constant caning of it merely helped to close them again.

You didn’t talk about that scene in interviews.
S’Xpress wasn’t from that scene – it was just me listening to the house music I was playing, and Shoom was starting round about the same time so it all tied in nicely. The reason I never talked about ecstasy in the early days of S’Xpress is ‘cos I didn’t want the scene ruined. I knew if I was to mention ecstasy in interviews with the national papers, they’d jump on it – and that’s what happened. People would ask me from The Sun and the Daily Mirror, is acid house anything to do with drugs, and I remember just lying.

One day, I think it was in the Mirror, it said, ‘Next week we expose the evil face of acid house’ – and there’s a picture of me there. I got on to my lawyers straight away. When it came out it talked about the evils of acid house, and Mark Moore from the band S’Xpress who doesn’t take drugs and is a good boy. They chickened out, ‘cos they were obviously thinking to put it all on me as the leader or something.

I didn’t want to be the one responsible for putting this wonderful scene overground.

When the Trip opened that’s when it it became totally massive – roadblocks outside – the police car would come up and turn the siren on and everyone would start raving to it, dancing to the siren. I remember talking to Kevin Saunderson at the Trip, and saying, after this everybody will go to the car park, and he thought it was the name of a club. But we ended up in the car park, and he says, ‘Oh I see what you mean now,’ with everyone dancing round this one car with a tape on. He was amazed.

Before that, Paul [Oakenfold] opened up Spectrum, and round about that time the record had come out and it had been a hit. And I remember going to the first Spectrum, and there were about 200 people there – empty but such a brilliant atmosphere. We went off to Europe to promote the record, and when I came back a few weeks later, I went back to Spectrum and the queues were all the way round the block – it had exploded. There were all these trendy faces I knew from the trendy scene, who were there, and I thought yeah, it’s going to be massive.

Paul asked me to do the odd DJ spot at Spectrum, and I remember seeing Leigh Bowery turn up in a completely mad costume, and people were just off their heads going, ‘Wow what is it?’

After that came the big outdoor raves. I used to go to those things, but I can’t remember the first one I DJed at. My first impression was it was like a ‘happening’. You’d go up the motorway, and all you could see was a huge line of cars, everyone off their face in their cars.

What memories do you have of that period?
I think you fell in love with your friends, which is the way it should be. It was a total love affair with your friends, without the sexual side of it. I remember it as one of the happiest days, years, of my life.

Although punk rock was fantastic, and New Romantic. I’m lucky enough to have memories of different scenes. With punks and New Romantics, you couldn’t imagine them doing everyday things like shopping in Tescos – it was like, how did they live, how did they eat? The New Romantics it was de rigeur to be bitchy, one minute you’d be best friends with someone, the next minute you’d be total enemies. I have photos of people I used to know in the New Romantic days – they were there on the Shoom scene looking totally laddy, and I have pictures of them from the New Romantic days with lip gloss and blusher. They take me aside and say please don’t show those photos. It’s like they lived two different lives.

Why were you such a campaigner for house?
I knew that house music would take off. Eventually.

Why, though?
Because I loved it! I thought it was so fucking brilliant and I couldn’t understand why no one else did. I just thought, ‘This music is fucking great!’ But no one else agreed with me at the time. At The Fridge in ‘87 I told them to put a sign up saying ‘We play house music here’. That way, if you had been warned, you couldn’t complain. In theory!

Which dancefloors in particular did you clear with house music?
Mainly at the Mud Club. Luckily it wasn’t a constantly cleared floor. I’d clear the floor with Strings of Life and bring them back with Dead or Alive or James Brown. If you’re playing someone else’s club your job as a DJ is to entertain while still being dangerous, taking risks and retaining your own identity. However, if it’s your own club I think that gives you license to do what the fuck you want. I’m actually proud of the times I’ve cleared dancefloors. My attitude was this: the people who left didn’t matter to me whatsoever. What mattered were the one or two people that stayed on the dancefloor whose lives were changed. And those people would go on to do something else.

Like who?
Pete Heller, Laurent Garnier, Trevor Jackson, Daft Punk. I get people coming up now and saying, ‘You changed my life. You played this at that club and I saw the light!’

© Bill Brewster & Frank Broughton

David Morales feels it

David Morales feels it

In 1999 David Morales won a Grammy for Remixer of the year, only the second time it was awarded (his friend and Def Mix Productions compadre Frankie Knuckles won the first). This was a major milestone in the rise of DJing, industry recognition that a remixer could play a huge role in chart success. At the time a Morales house mix was a surefire way to get R&B and pop artists played in the clubs, and through the ’90s he was in constant demand to create dance smashes like Mariah Carey’s ‘Dreamlover’, Alison Limerick’s ‘Where Love Lives’ and Jamiroquai’s ‘Space Cowboy’. At the same time he was making sumptuous underground music under his own name and in his Red Zone dubs. Morales now has over 500 remixes to his name, the bulk of them big-name stars. A Brooklyn DJ fired up by visits to David Mancuso’s Loft, he joined New York clubland’s inner circle in the early ’80s, when he was Judy Weinstein’s assistant at her record pool, from which he was chosen in fairytale fashion to replace Larry Levan at the Paradise Garage, followed by residences at Zanzibar, Red Zone, The World and Club USA. In this brilliant 1999 interview, conducted in the Times Square studio where he was mixing the Pet Shop Boys, he remembers his rise to fame, gives us an insider’s view of the evolution of remixing, and describes the passion which defines DJing greatness: the musical love, instinct and emotion that lies at the heart of his success.

Interviewed by Frank in Manhattan, 4.2.99

What was the music you heard growing up?
Born in 1962 and raised in Brooklyn, grew up in Flatbush, parents are Puerto Rican. I guess I liked music from when I was really little. I remember taking this record from a friend of my mothers, ‘Spinning Wheel’ on RCA Victor [by Chet Atkins]. I must have been three, four. I always liked black music, I didn’t like the Spanish music. There used to be a social club downstairs, and I was free to roam around. Once the morning came the door was open and it was ch! I found myself in the craziest places. As a child you just wander.

What clubs did you go to?
I mean real like ghetto neighbourhood clubs. Painted black with black glow paint. I mean real primitive shit. And that’s when ‘Mr Big Stuff’ [Jean Knight] was out, I remember. ’68, ’69? I remember ‘Want Ads’ [by Honey Cone].

How did you get into DJing?
I used to be the one appointed to play the music. We all be hanging out and I be the one hanging out by the stereo. Picking the tunes. And this is with just one turntable. It wasn’t about two turntables at the time. I never saw that yet.

When did you take it to the next level?
When I was 13 there was my prom. And this is when ‘Ten Percent’ [by First Choice] came out, that was the first time I saw two turntables, and a guy mixing, and this was outside.

Who was that?
I think the guy’s name was Grandmaster Flowers. He was doing black block parties, people hanging out in the park and then they be playing music, and I was like, Wow!

When I first started mixing with the mixer and headphones, I was about 15, and ‘San Francisco’ was out by the Village People. And I remember we was in my friend’s sister-in-law’s apartment and the decks were in the kitchen. Forget about having monitors, the monitors were the speakers in the living room way over there. I put on the headphones, and I’m sitting there looking at the mixer ’cos I never worked one before. The first mixer I tried was a mic mixer, where there’s no cueing. And you’re sort of doing shit backwards because you’re not supposed to really plug a turntable into a mic mixer. Anyway, it worked and that’s how I used to phase shit in and out. So that’s how I started without headphones.

How did things come to another level?.
After doing house parties I started going to a club called the Loft, on Saturday night, probably like 1980. The Loft was Saturday nights and a lot of people from my neighbourhood used to go. I used to hang out and dance. I used to be there for like 12, 15 hours, dancing. I was one of the ones who got there early and I was one of the last ones to leave as well.

What was that like for you?
It was amazing, ’cos up to this I was what you’d call a commercial DJ, I bought the hits, I bought the records you bought in the mom-and-pop shops; that’s what I knew. When I went to the Loft I heard all this different music. I thought wow, I like this. Then it was all about where I could buy these records. That’s when I went to Vinylmania. And I was going to Downtown records since I was 14. So that’s when I started going to stores to collect music.

There were a lot of people there who would go on to be part of the dance industry
Well, people I saw, I saw François [Kevorkian], but I never met him at the time. David Mancuso, Steve D’Acquisto. Those are really the people that I remember from the business, ’cos I was going there from such an early stage, and I wasn’t in the business.

It was after Frankie and Larry had been hanging out there.
Larry would come after The Garage, because the Loft stayed later than the Garage, and he used to bring certain records. I used to go to the Garage. I went to the Garage as well, a couple of times on a Friday, and the reason it was only a couple of times was I was doing my own parties. I started doing my own parties in 1981.

As a mobile DJ?
No, no, no, as a summer resident DJ. I was mobile from the minute I started, I went everywhere.

Where were you resident?
I started at a place called the Ozone Layer in Flatbush. I use to do it on Friday nights, somewhat based around the way the Loft did stuff: I gave fruits away and tried to make it a party. But it was a smaller venue. My girlfriend at the time, her girlfriend was going out with one of the owners from the club. She had asked to do a party of her own, and asked me to play. I drew the invitation, cos I was a graffiti artist, and at the end of the day the people that really came out were my friends, people who I had invited, people that I used to invite to house parties. But the house parties were free, whereas this was pay.

Then I approached the owner and asked him to let me do some parties on my own. I just wanted to play records so I would hire other people to promote the parties, to be co-host, and I just asked for a fee for playing. And they wanted to give me some sob story they weren’t making money at the bar, at the door, all this kind of nonsense, they give me some bullshit trip. So anyway, after going through that a couple of times, there was a core audience, and that was my audience. And I started to realise that I didn’t need these folks. People were coming for me. They’re coming for my music. So I said, I’ll run this. I got it together with my girl. She handled the front, I played the music.

What kind of music were you playing back then? Were you picking up on records from the Loft?
Yeah. The Loft and the Garage. Plus the new stuff, the underground stuff, at the time. Of course with some other commercial records.

Were there any which were really your records, that weren’t being played anywhere else?
I was the first guy to play ‘Set It Off’ [by Strafe] at the Garage, because Larry wasn’t playing it.

How did you get in with those guys?
That’s the funniest story. I had been to the Garage five times.

Just to hang out.
Yes. I come dressed up, trying to get in out there, ’cos it was a private club. ‘Yo get me in, get me in…’ And I’d be the last one out. I’m always one of the last ones out. Not to mention the kind of stuff I used to do to stay there! But anyway, it was part of growing up, like everybody else.

How old were you?
I had to be 20 so it was ’82, ’cos I didn’t play there until 1983. I was one of those kids that sat there and looked at the booth and was like [whispering reverentially] ‘Oh my god…’ Just fantasising. This room was incredible. Even before I went to Garage, I heard stories: four turntables, the guy’s incredible, and all of this, you know.

I used to go to the Loft but the Loft wasn’t about mixing. David had two decks, but Mancuso, he’d play the record from beginning to end, the way it was made. And that was his philosophy: no artificial flavours, no MSG; and that’s the way his sound system was too. Everything was straight. No processors in between, no crap. Just pure, you know. It’s like eating organic food.

Whereas the Garage was the monster system. It was a showcase for [sound engineer] Richard Long. It was his room. So anything new that he built, it was here. It was Larry’s house. He had a carousel for the record bin that schwoooo, spun around. I mean… You see pictures of Mick Jagger and Grace Jones. The Garage had a booth unmatched by any booth there’s ever been in the world.

Even now?
Even now.

The first time you went, did he really impress you, did he blow you away?
Naaah, he didn’t. I mean, the music was ch, incredible. Couldn’t say anything about the music, but you know, as a DJ I had this vision, I thought I was gonna hear science. And at the time I didn’t get the whole picture, because to me the mixing part, I wasn’t impressed by the mixing. There were some mixes that were awesome, when I first heard him do the acappella of ‘Love is the Message’, which he was the first one to play, that shit was like…

How did he play that?
Well, that was when they started doing acappellas.

So he would just kill everything and play that?
No, no, no, he would play ‘Love Is The Message’ over ‘Don’t Make Me Wait’. That was it man. He would play some of his productions of Peech Boys at early stages, just ideas, and people would go wild.

He could be quite temperamental.
He could be SHIT for seven hours, and then he could take 15 minutes, and kick the shit out of you, and that made your night! That’s what it was about. There was nobody that was able to do that. And he didn’t care either. You be like ‘Aww man, what is this guy up to today?’ I actually think I caught him on a bad night. Which was alright. Second time I went I thought, ‘Oh, caught him on two bad nights’.

Tell me about how you got to play the Garage.
Here comes 1983. I joined the record pool. I got in because of this DJ, Kenny Carpenter. He was playing at a big club called Bonds International, which was a huge club, six, seven thousand people it used to hold, right in Times Square. They used to have people like the Clash there, and Planet Patrol, Soulsonic Force, all that shit. And Kenny lived in my neighbourhood. I had met him through a mutual friend, and Kenny took me to the record pool, which is For The record, Judy [Weinstein]’s pool.

It was a privilege to be in that pool, all the big guys were in it, a serious roster. There was a waiting list to get in at the time. I’m talking to Kenny Carpenter, and another friend of ours, late friend of mine, Larry Patterson, my mentor, who used to play at Zanzibar and Better Days. I gave them some tapes, and the pool director at the time was David DePino, and they were looking for somebody new, so they referred me.

Then we’re in my house listening to some new records and I get a phone call: ‘Hi, my name is Mike Brody, I own a club called the Paradise Garage, I’d like you to play my club.’ I was like, ‘Yeah?’ and he’s talking: ‘You’ve been highly recommended.’ He said, quote, ‘Our DJ’s been playing like shit lately, and we’d like you to come in and do a spot.’

So by now I’ve sunk to my knees and I’m trying to write with a pen and a piece of paper to my friend, who I’m speaking to on the phone. He’s like [excited speechless noises], and I’m like ‘Yeahh’, and he says, ‘I have two dates available.’

How did it come about? Did he hear your tape?
Didn’t hear nothing. Totally recommendation. From Judy and David Depino.

Was she managing you then?
Naww. There was nothing like that at the time. No, she had her record pool, that was it. I was 21 years old. I was not making music, I was working at a restaurant… and doing parties… I had my Friday thing going now, full-on, every single Friday. So it was me taking off from my own night, and at the same time, worried about losing business from my Friday night, you understand?

Taking people with you…
I had people come to me and say ‘How did you pull that off?’ because there were other people that were a lot more worthier of playing in that room, before me, that were incredible DJs. But anyway, they picked me, a guy from Brooklyn, it was my first New York club. I play in a sweatbox in Brooklyn, and here all of a sudden I’m playing at the mecca of the greatest club in the world. At 21 years old. And this wasn’t about doing two-hour sets, this was about eleven-hour sets. beginning to end, 12 to 11. And you had to beg me to stop!

Can you remember how it was the first time?
I had never played for a gay audience, either. And I thought that playing for a gay audience you had to play different music. ’Cos I played for a straight audience, and when I went to Garage I went on straight night. So when he asked me if I wanted to play Friday and Saturday I said I didn’t think I could handle the Saturday, I’ve never played for a gay crowd before. He said just come here and do what you do best, that’s all I want you to do. The rest… You’ll love it. And man, I can’t tell you…

And I never played on Thorens turntables, that’s another thing. I only used the Technics. The 1200s were out at the time. I asked, can I put in some 1200s, but I had to play on the Thorens. This was belt driven, the Thorens was a whole ’nother beast, altogether.

So I’m playing at the greatest club, and yet I’m playing on turntables I ain’t never played. It’s like I’ve been driving a Volkswagen and all of a sudden I’m given a Ferrari to drive. I’ve got this fuckin’ major machine goin’ on here. I remember doing my first mix, and it was like milk.

Can you remember what it was?
It was my first two records was, one was ‘Encore’, I believe, which was Cheryl Lynn, and I can’t remember the other record. I remember going to all my friends saying it was gonna be slamming tonight, cos I just felt it. The greatest thing was that I wasn’t part of the politics, at all. I was naive to anything. So even the people that didn’t like me, the pro-Larry Levan people, because of course his people, they got their favourite DJ, come to hear him, he ain’t there, ‘Who the fuck is this guy over here? Why is he here?’ And then you got those that feel that, ‘How come I ain’t playing? How come he is?’ You know what I mean. I had people throwing darts behind my back and I had no idea. They just bounced off because I wasn’t part of the politics, I didn’t care.

A young Morales with Judy Weinstein, Liza Minnelli and Frankie Knuckles

So how many times did you play there?
About ten times. I did the Friday and Saturday, October 13th and 14th, 1983, I’ll never forget it. I still got the invitation, it’s framed. And they asked me who I could pick for my artists to sing on my night. I picked Jocelyn Brown, and the other one was Captain Rapp, at the time I think it was ‘Bad Times’. And then I came back the following February and played two weekends in a row. Friday, Saturday, Friday, Saturday. ’Cos Larry was gone for two weeks straight.

And in between you’re still playing at Ozone?
No, I wasn’t. I had Kenny Carpenter playing. He was taking over the whole night, cos we split the night by then. ’Cos I took him from this big club to play this little hole in the wall, and it was like culture shock to him but, it was great. at the end of the day the vibe was great so,

What did that lead into?
All of a sudden I was the new kid on the block. There was a new sheriff in town, so then clubs in New York approached me and I had a residency at a straight club called the Inferno, run by Vito Bruno. On 31st Street I believe. Right off Sixth Avenue. After the Inferno, I played at 1018, which is the Roxy now, and then my next residency was at a place called Lovelight in 1987 right after the Garage closed, which was on 33rd Street, and I had a residency at Zanzibar. That’s where I met Larry Patterson and Tony Humphries. Tony was Saturdays. Zanzibar was like the Garage of Jersey: tough sound system, people went to it. I had a residency there for about a year. I was doing Fridays and then I had my own night which was Wednesday. And then in 1988 I worked at The World for about a year and a half, and after the World I went to the Red Zone, in 1989.

And the Red Zone again, was your place.
Yeah. The Red Zone was where I really made a statement for the new age. I think the Red Zone was definitely the turning point on the maps for music changing.

Why do you say that? For you personally?
The only person that was really playing different stuff was Mark Kamins, ’cos Mark used to travel and bring these imports. He was at Danceteria years before, but at that time he would play at Mars, and Red Zone on other nights, which was where I had the residency on Saturdays.

In 1989 I took my first trip to England, and I brought back a lot of records. We were playing ska. ‘This Is Ska’, and ‘Ska Train’. Nobody was playing those records, and they used to lose it. I was the first one playing KLF, ‘What Time Is Love’. That was one of my biggest records. People used to run up to the booth saying, ‘What are you playing?’ ’cos it was this whole different sound that wasn’t the New York house sound. And when I started doing mixes, the Red Zone had its own sound, so there was a fusion.

Did you do any remixing before the Red Zone?
Yeah. In 1987 I did ‘Instinctual’ by Imagination, I did some more deeper stuff. But when I started doing Red Zone I started branching out away, away from pure soulful. The Red Zone dubs, that’s when I stepped away. The core mix had all the soulful stuff, the songs, and then the Red Zone dubs were more on the daring side, going somewhere different.

What were you trying to do?
It was mostly experimentation. I was making records for somewhere between here and abroad. Which was what the Red Zone represented.

With his Def Mix buddies Satoshi Tomiie and Frankie Knuckles

What was the crowd like?
Very mixed. It was a dance crowd. It had a great sound system, the lighting was incredible, and we used to put on a show. Sometimes Satoshi Tomeii would play keyboards while we were playing. We used to go off in that place, it was severe. Everybody who got to experience the Red Zone will tell you it was one of the last places of its kind. And then came Sound Factory. The big Sound Factory was the afterhours to go to. You went to Red Zone first, that closed at five, and then you went to Sound Factory.

Was remixing a natural progression.
I made remixes back in 1983, ’84, before I even thought about it. I knew guys from the pool, like Steve Thompson, or Bruce Forrest, and they used to come in and say I just mixed the new Madonna, or I just did the new Rolling Stones. Bruce Forrest he was the resident at Better Days. He introduced me to the world of samplers and drum machines and keyboards, ’cos he used to bring them in the booth. We were doing this back in 1985.

You were doing it purely for your dancefloor?
Yeah.

There was no commercial thing
No. In the club, three decks, bam! David Cole would come in, play around on keyboards. At that time it was the Chicago house sound, so it was great for all the synthesiser stuff that was going on, and it was all live: live remixing, we did it on the spot.

So anyway, from my club Ozone in Brooklyn which I had for about four years, I bought myself a keyboard and a drum machine. Even though I couldn’t play anything to save my life. Then in 1985 I remember hiring Steve Silk Hurley when it was JM Silk: him and Keith Nunnally, and I hired them to spin at the club. And that was round about the time when I started to play around with the Casio CZ101, that was my first keyboard. So anyway Bruce invited me down to the studio. I liked it, it grabbed my eye. Bought myself one or two pieces of equipment, I tried to make my own drum beats and things like that.

And then I did a record with David Cole and Robert Clivilles called Two Puerto Ricans, a Black Man and a Dominican, and we cut that at Judy’s office. I was basically mixing records, David played keyboards. It was just something we did on the fly, which was very successful. And then David and Robert went and turned it into something else, C&C Music Factory, which is a whole ’nother story.

So that was the start of you having a name as a remixer and a producer?
Yeah. I really got a lot of profile when I did ‘Instinctual’ by Imagination. That was my first real hit. I remember Larry Levan telling me, ‘Great, great job.’ I was like, Wow, Larry told me I did a good mix. I was originally an Imagination fan, from ‘Illusion’, ‘Changes’, ‘Burning Up’, and then when I heard this record that was done by Phil Harding at PWL, it sounded like a Rick Astley record. I was like, ‘Yo dude I can’t play this, this is not even Imagination, what happened here? Let me remix it.’ He was like there’s really no money to mix it, only to do promotions, I said let me do the record. Anyway, even though it was off-key with the vocals, it worked. The second one I did right after that, was Whitney Houston ‘Love Will Save The Day’, and they rejected it, it was too housey.

Really?
Of course. It wasn’t bubblegum enough. And I was traumatised, I was devastated. Because it would have meant so much to my credit at the time. I remember they had Rick Wake mix it. I was running the record pool at the time, and the promotion guy asks me, ‘How do you like the new house mix on Whitney Houston?’ I said, ‘You got to be kidding me, you call that a house mix?’ It was what those pop cornballs thought house music was. What I did was house music, that was the difference. But I think that’s what it was, it was too cool.

Do you find there’s a compromise when people hire you as a remixer? How often is there a real conflict between what they want for commercial reasons and what you want to do creatively?
Well, not too much, but sometimes it does happen where they expect a certain style. And sometimes that’s not the style I want to give it because I don’t want to have one particular style.

And sometimes the song isn’t right for that.
Right, and sometimes it don’t work for the song. What some A&R man hears in his head is totally different from what can actually work. So, I mean, I’ve had moments when they’ve said, ‘But I wanted this style, I wanted it like this and like that!’ because I don’t normally ask them what style do you want it, I want to go about it the way I hear it.

’Cos remixing started as a DJ’s tool to feed his dancefloor.
The remixing thing. It’s totally leftfield now. It’s totally in another place. I mean, let’s not even call it remixing any more. In the beginning of remixing you remixed the original tracks, existing tracks. You used what was there to create the intro, your body, your break, your tag – the end of the song.

And then it started changing: OK you change the bassline, added percussion, or you added some things, but you still had the song. You still had the artist intact. Then it came to the point where you just got rid of the original music. Now you started to put new music…

So you’ve only got the vocal track left.
And all you got is the vocal track. So now people expected to hear something totally different. Now the expectancy was: ‘Well, did he change it?’ Now they wanted to hear something totally different. It’s come to a place where now you’re changing the music and what you do to it makes the record successful. You only getting a one-time fee. In reality you’re sort of like becoming a co-writer, but you’re not getting a writer’s share.

So that’s why remixing fees went up so much?
So that’s one whole thing. When I started mixing there wasn’t too many guys, number one, and number two is if you noticed, when it comes to guys mixing songs [ie vocal tracks], there still aren’t that many. Now remixing has crossed over into R&B now which is great, there are some guys that really deserve, I think in hip hop, in remixing in the R&B is the most creative, more than the dance remixes.

Why do you say that?
Because they’re redoing the song. They all redo the song. There’s no time-stretching, you understand. they’re recutting the song. They’re adding rappers to it, so they’re producing. They’re all productions. Which is where I’ve taken remixing to now: production. I started that with Mariah ‘Dreamlover’. We said no time-stretching [digitally changing the tempo of the vocal].

You want to keep faithful to the tempo of the original
It used to be that you had waves of music, different tempos through the night. So you were able to enjoy yourselves in a club without hearing a constant four-four pounding. But now there’s no up and down tempo, now there’s just straight across, full-on. When time-stretching came around there was no more downtempo records. Everything had to be club music; they didn’t care if the vocals sounded bad. I believe the reason why I even still get a lot of work is, I do vocals. because I work with the song. You have tons of other guys…

…who just take just a tiny sample of the vocals
And not even that. It’s gotten to the point that there’s no respect for the artist any more. You’re selling the remixes, that’s what you’re selling.

Is that how you approach it, you want it to come out recognisably the same song?
Of course. That’s what the challenge is. What guys are doing today, it’s not even a question of mixing the record, or the vocals, verses, choruses – no fuckin way. They put a slamming track together in the studio. Somebody says, I need a remix of Tori Amos. So you take a piece of a vocal: ‘Bla’ and drop it into your own track. That’s a remix? That represents the artist? That doesn’t represent the artist, it represents you. And you’re giving up publishing, because you’re giving up a whole track. You’re giving it to somebody else’s name. That really doesn’t represent them. And they’ll never perform it, either!

Why did it get so out of hand with the money. It got quite crazy a few years ago?
It’s still crazy. It’s crazier. I can’t explain why you can spend so much money on a record and could have a great song, with like everything and not do anything, compared to something where there’s no effort, that’s put together in two hours and for some reason the thing just hits and that’s it! I mean ‘Stardust’ [‘Music Sounds Better With You.’] How much work you think went into Stardust? It’s sampled. Whoever went into the sample, that was where the work was. When those musicians did that, that was where the time was spent. But you know, and look how huge that thing was.

I believe you have the privilege for having the highest fee for any one remix. Michael Jackson’s ‘Scream’
Probably.

Didn’t they fly you over to LA rather than send the tapes etc…
They wouldn’t give me the masters. They flew me to LA, money was no option. It was a lot of work. It wasn’t like that was my fee for one mix. I must have did three different mixes. I mean I spent a week in Michael Jackson-land. But now hip hop guys are making that kind of money, regularly.

Do you know what the highest is ever?
Probably Puffy. Who knows.

What does he get nowadays?
I don’t know., It would be interesting. You can’t be surprised at a guy like Puffy probably wouldn’t do it for less than a hundred grand, between 75 and a hundred maybe.

’Cos you got 80 for the Michael Jackson, is that right?
Nahh. It was, I can’t say.

Did that feel a bit crazy, all that Michael Jackson-ness.
You know what, It was definitely a moment, with Michael Jackson.

Did you meet him?
No I didn’t. I should have for all of the security I went through. You would think he was coming. I mean they were guarding those tapes like it was their life. It was the first track off the album.

That’s why it was so secret.
Mission Impossible. And I felt that I compromised my sound. I went to another place. I took everybody out of a familiar environment, and we tried to recreate that somewhere else and it just didn’t work. I don’t feel like my best effort went into ‘Scream’. ‘Scream’ could have been a much better sounding record…

Do you think the DJ is an artist?
Sure

What makes the DJ an artist?
The way he puts on music. Not all DJs are artists, It’s something that has to project. It’s not something that has to be present all the time. It’s something that comes on when it’s supposed to come on. It’s like ‘Put on this show’. Most top guys, they don’t plan their records, they don’t put them in a certain order. I take more records than I need, I don’t know what the first record is, or my last. Or my second.

And you need the people on the dancefloor to make it happen
As great stuff as I have in my studio, I can’t turn it on for myself. I can’t. I got a great sounding studio, but when I make my show tapes for the radio, I can’t turn it on. I don’t come up with the creative things that come on when you’re playing live to an audience. I can’t duplicate it.

What do you get from the audience?
Well, you get the live feedback. You’re working records, you have to present them in different ways, and it’s how you present the mixing, the technical aspects of it; it’s a whole combination of things.

How do you feel like when it’s going really well?
Ohhhh man, it’s like jumping out of my skin. I dance in the booth. I jump up and down. I wave my arms in the air, you know. It’s that feeling of knowing I’m in full control, I can do anything I want. And the thing is, I like to entertain myself. It’s important to me to keep me going this far. I have to get something out of it. I can’t just do it for the money, otherwise what makes you different and special is that you give it that extra something.

Does it ever feel sexual or spiritual?
Oh for sure. For me, absolutely.

How does it feel?
Pure sex…

Yeah?
Sex and… oh absolutely. For me it’s sex.

Really?
Totally.

So you’re having sex with all the audience.
Absolutely. It’s spiritual sex. classic, spiritual sex, oh my god. A great night man, sometimes I’m on my knees in the middle of a mix, just feeling it that way, and then when you play a record, you can bring it down, you can just turn everything off and the people going nuts. And you stand back, you just wipe your forehead and, ‘shiit!’ Everybody just going nuts and just knowing that you’re right there. You could play whatever you want. Whatever you want. You got ’em from there.

And that feeling must be what makes your DJing so powerful
If I wasn’t doing something like that I wouldn’t still be one of the top players in the game. I feel I’m actually, in all of my years, at the top of my game. I’ve played at some incredible parties, before the travelling and all of that. I go back to the Ozone to Mirage, to Zanzibar. I got to experience some incredible moments, of music, that have enabled me to carry that on, that a lot of people, the new kids, haven’t experienced.

And to me the fundamentals from those days still apply. My experience comes from back then. My experience is not a new generation’s experience. My experience is an old school experience. And I do things the old school way. Now I understand records more because I make records. And that just makes you all the more better because you understand.

When you talk to the old guys they say the DJ doesn’t have to work as much nowadays, because records are made so precisely for the dancefloor, whereas in the old days… you had to change the record every three minutes.
So the 45 stage was one stage, then you had to work, and be a lot more creative, because the intro was like this [snaps fingers], Then they started doing those first mixes in the late ’70s. Tom Moulton and Walter Gibbons, when he did ‘Ten Percent’, which was the first 12-inch edit. And before the 12-inch it was albums. And it was all live drums, so you had to work, you really had to be creative. There was no such thing as blank drums for 16 bars and you got enough time to ride that beat in, hell no! You had to be creative and go up down, up, make that shit sound real smooth.

Is DJing a dying art then?
Nah, no.

Will there always gonna be people who put body and soul into it?
Yeah, absolutely. In whatever kind of music, whatever style it is, the most important thing for all the DJs that are successful is that they feel it. They have to believe in the stuff they’re playing.

The worst scenario is playing it for the sake of playing it. It’s like me playing drum and bass and playing something progressive, because hey man I need to make some money to make ends meet, and because I don’t have a name, this is what I gotta do.

The real connoisseur, whether he’s working or not, this is what he‘s doing. Even if he’s a bedroom DJ all his life, nobody’s gonna take away from him that he loves music. No matter what. So even if I wasn’t working I’d still be trying to put some records together. Even if I’m not playing out anywhere, I’d still be in my office trying to put some practice tapes. Because when I started buying records there was no two turntables, there was no clubs. Nobody ever told me I was gonna get a job as a DJ one day. And I never thought for a moment that that’s what I wanted to be.

How do you feel then when you go to places like England and Italy and everyone treats you like a superstar?
I laugh sometimes. Because you know what I mean it’s the treatment, the honour, the money, the fame, I don’t ask for it. Even if I stopped making records tomorrow, I’d still keep playing records, and I enjoy doing what I do. I get a lot of passion from it, and to be paid, and to be put on a pedestal for doing something that I love doing naturally, is mindboggling.

Has the adoration and fame ever got out of hand?
One of the most incredible times I had was in Japan, a place called Yellow, and they literally wanted to climb over the walls, up to the box, and I was like wow… and when you see people standing around in the booth, just like every space, waiting for you to do magic, and “I’m just playing records. I’m not doing anything. You can do this” If you felt it. But you mean, I’m not doing anything to learn from. It’s all here [thumps heart]. It’s here and here [heart and ears] Cos that’s what its all about.

I have a party in Mykonos in Greece in August every year for my birthday. It’s full-on, it was 3,000 people last year, I’ve been playing for 20 years now, but I walk into the place and my heart is pumping. My heart is coming out of my chest. All these people here for me. I’m in the booth and the minute people see me they’re going ballistic, nuts. I started out with this record – ‘Joy’ by Kathy Brown – and the original has an acappella, and it’s this beautiful thing, and I start to break down, I’m crying man, and I’m trying to mix a record and my tears are coming down, and I’m trying not to let people see me. [He mimes keeping his head down and secretly wiping a tear. He’s speechless.] I’ve had some great experiences, It gives me the reason to still keep doing it.

© Bill Brewster & Frank Broughton

Tony Smith did it Barefoot

Tony Smith did it Barefoot

Tony Smith was one of the original cohort of DJs who were instrumental in defining what a DJ did in the modern era. Starting out playing at block parties as a teenager, before progressing onto the tiny, but influential, Barefoot Boy as a resident through most of the 1970s. He went on to play at commercial disco – and Studio 54 rival – Xenon. We talk about his early colleagues and heroes and the records they championed in an era that changed dance music forever, including his friendship with Larry Levan and the Larry impersonator who used to hang out in the DJ booth at the Garage. Sadly, Tony passed away in May 2021, having caught pneumonia during the pandemic.

Let’s start at the beginning…
I was born 20 blocks from here, in the projects, lower Manhattan. I loved music since I was a kid. My brothers  and sisters had a group, you know in those doo-wop days? So I was always listening to music. 

These must’ve been older than you.
Yeah, they’re like 14 years older than me. A brother and two sisters. I’m the baby, by a long shot. I’ve known music since I was little. And that whole R&B, Little Anthony & The Imperials, that whole sound. I started a band when I was 13 and we played in the projects, in schools and colleges and talent shows. 

What was the band called?
Soul Sound Explosion. It was good, until we kept expanding, because you had to have a bongo player, then we had a vibe player. I taught myself guitar. It was the only instrument people didn’t learn in school. And then after ’69 we had about 12 guys in the band and we were making no money and during the band breaks, I used to play the music for the party or whatever. Not calling it DJing then, just playing music.

How would you do it?
Using the PA system and two volume controls so there would continuous music. It wasn’t mixing, it was more blending. So what happened was the band broke up because everybody got greedy and, you know, personal things and I just started playing music outside. I got harassed to play music outside. Because that was before the police knew what was goin’ on; disco wasn’t out, so we could do whatever we wanted.

You say outside. Where exactly?
Right out in the park. You could hook up your system in the lights sockets; in the street lights, in places like Pierce 1 Park and the park right in the middle of Smith Projects. But then I went all around lower east side. Most people don’t know, but there’s project after project after project on the lower east side. All along the east river edge.

Was that an unusual thing to be doing with two turntables?
Oh nobody knew what I was doing. Until I had a competition. There was a battle of the DJs. There was a Puerto Rican kid and his brother who started doin’ the same thing. And we would compete for the crowd.

Do you remember his name?
Yeah, Spanky and Ice. I was just me, but I always had people watching my records, watching my sound system things like that. We started competing. I was still 16 then. The whole thing then was to get records he didn’t have and him to get records I didn’t have, just so we would draw the crowd towards us. Probably when I was like 17, I went to a gay club like in the West Village. Totally freaked me out. I didn’t know that existed. It was called The Limelight, where David Rodriguez was the DJ and he just blew me away. Before then I used to go to black straight clubs, but it was a totally different thing.

What were black straight clubs like?
In the old days the Mafia owned the real clubs, so they had the gay clubs. Most black people’s clubs were either recreational centres or restaurants in the day and they would turn into a black club at night. Or colleges like Hunter College, NYU, they would always have parties for black straights, so that’s all I really knew till I was 17.

What was the clientele at the black clubs; all ages etc?
Yeah, we were goin’ in there when we 14 and underage. No ID, no card, no alcohol, you always brought your own, they always had BYOBB. The music was… everything. I call it black music but it was all in those days. They were playing Chicago in those days, Rare Earth, Steve Winwood, Boz Scaggs, a lot of white groups mixed in with the black, James Brown, Dr. John. There was a lot of white groups that had maybe one club or R&B song and somehow or other the word would get around about it. There was maybe about four DJs who rotated around: Flowers, Maboya, Plummer and the Smith Brothers. And whenever you went they had really loud sound systems and they had a lot of exclusive records. So what happened to me was I was always around the DJ booth and I finally found out where they went to buy records, because they always had records that none of us had and that was Nicky at Downstairs. I finally got to Nicky’s in the train station and that’s when I finally wiped out everybody in my area, because I had the music that nobody had and it was like my secret store! No one knew about Nicky’s. And while I was there I got to know other DJs, because I didn’t really know that this was going on. 

What was Flowers like, because everyone says he was the best?
He was the best, but he was most egotistical, too. He was a bastard. He just wasn’t nice to you. He wanted to be so exclusive. He wanted to be the best and I guess and he thought that’s the way he had to be to be the best. 

So if you went to ask him about a record he wouldn’t tell you?
Yeah. In those days that was the one bad thing with straight jocks. As a matter of fact, they used to cross the records out so if you looked you couldn’t even see what the record was. I started doing that as a teenager, especially exclusive records. Maboya and Smith Brothers were definitely more friendly. Flowers had the best music. He had a really great sound system. 

Were they mixing back then?
It was more blending, it wasn’t mixing like say when I heard David Rodriguez. That’s when I knew I had to do some work because in black clubs it wasn’t about mixing, it was about programming. You could mix horrible, but if you played the right record everybody’d keep dancing. With the gay crowds, it was more about programming and mixing. You had to know how to mix, too, or they’d walk off. They might come back on but you’d still have a reputation for not being a good mixer. Straight clubs like that it was definitely more about programming than mixing. Finally one black disco opened up called the Cheetah.

It wasn’t the one around 18th Street was it?
No, it was different. Hey had Latin on Thursdays. They had all the groups playin’, like Kool & The Gang. I found out later that the DJ there was David Todd, which freaked me out because I was a kid then and I didn’t know there was a DJ there. I remember the strobes, because it was the time I’d seen strobes. We went every week. I was definitely underage, but I looked older for my age, so I got in. 

Describe to us your first visit to the Limelight?
I was scared. Scared shitless [laughter]. All these guys are staring at me and I just wanted to hear music.

So how did you hear about it?
I walked by. This is how I was in those days. Any time I heard music and it was something I’d never heard before. At that time I think he was playing things like Everyday People’s ‘I Like What I Like’, so that draws my attention. I used to just stand outside and listen to the music. Finally I got the courage to go in. Come on! I’m 17 and I’m scared. I didn’t know there was gay clubs. I had no clue. I stood right next to the booth. Until he got to know my face. Every time I went there I’d stand next to the booth and tell him how great he was. He was my first idol. My second idol was Richie Kaczor who worked at Hollywood. And that was like on 44th and…

It was what had been the Peppermint Lounge wasn’t it?
Yeah. Once I’d heard about Limelight, I knew they existed so now when I go to Downstairs I’m gonna ask about other clubs. Some clubs I liked, some I didn’t. Bobby DJ was good at Le Jardin. After that, I started going everywhere!

What was it that struck you about David Rodriguez. Was it the mixing?
The mixes.. but the one thing I took from him was enthusiasm. Some DJs don’t look like they’re having a good time. David always looked like he was having a great time in that booth! So that’s how I always felt when I was DJing. I always connected to him because he looked he was having a ball up there. Always smiling, always in a good mood and his music always showed. He never played filler music – you know that stuff you play to get to other things? – he didn’t really play that. He wanted you to always dance. Even if they didn’t always he wanted you to dance. He was the type that wanted to educate the crowd, which was another thing I learnt from him. You know, you can play it safe, play everything they know. But David was the type that wanted to expand their taste in music because he was playing like black club stuff, gay music and just these different styles but blending them so they went together. 

Do you remember the kinds of things he was playing?
He was playing Bohannon’s first record with ‘Stop And Go’, he was playing ‘Girl You Need A Change Of Mind’, ‘I Like What I Like’ and ‘Hum Along And Dance’ by Jackson 5. It was a wide range. That was the best thing about him. He was never boring. Some DJs are boring and I can’t really hear them more than once or twice because I know what they’re gonna do. One thing I learnt with David was that every night is a different night and you don’t know what you’re gonna do. He was totally spontaneous. He would see someone he knew and feed off of that. It was like a science to him, but at the same time he was having a good time. Then I went to Richie Kaczor. Richie was more technical than David. He was a better mixer than David. I can’t say a better programmer because they were both really good. Richie could blend much longer. Now there’s a new skill I didn’t know about.

Blending for more than five or ten seconds. For that you gotta memorise the record since all these records have different drummers and different beats so you have to know each record, because a lot of DJs would try and make mistakes. With new music you can do it, because it’s all programmed for that. Richie was good at things like ‘Newsy Neighbors’, which came out around that time. It wasn’t really disco yet but it was almost; on the cusp before disco. He was playing Blue Magic, ‘Dance Master’ by Willie Henderson; he was going into imports and all that stuff. That was when I first went towards the imports. Now Nicky’s making a mint off us, because imports were costing so much more. I don’t really remember David playing imports. You could tell Richie was hunting out for records. His range was wider. I listened to him for at least a year, didn’t want to miss him. Come to find out later that they came to hear me play, which was my biggest thrill. My four idols at that time were David, Richie, Walter Gibbons and Nicky Siano, because I was younger by five or six years…

David Rodriguez mix of Candido’s ‘Jingo’.

What was Nicky Siano like?
He was just crazy! He got famous even younger than I did. Nicky was like really young and his style was like… just crazy. He could throw anything on, he had such a rapport with the crowd. He would take any chance, that’s what I liked about him, he was very courageous. He’d play the most insane things, like soundtracks, not disco soundtracks, just soundtracks. I didn’t know whether David or Richie were takin’ drugs, but I knew Nicky was [laughter]! He could throw anything on it would work.

Can you think of any of these things?
I can remember him playing the Carrie soundtrack and then going into Love Hangover. Which is just totally bizarre, but it worked! That’s what I learned from Nicky was get your crowd to know you and then you can get away with more stuff than you can if you’re just a guest DJ. So the one thing I really wanted was to get a club. A friend of mine told me there was ads in the Village Voice for clubs. There was a club called Barefoot Boy before it opened, and it said: “DJ Wanted”. I thought, I know I’m not going to get this job. I’d only worked in straight black clubs and this was a gay white club and I only watched DJs. I hadn’t really played. So anyhow, I auditioned for this and I got the job. It still amazes me. It was like seven days a week, $25 a night. 

Would that have been considered a lot of money then?
It was for me! I was getting paid for something that I liked to do. I would’ve done it for free. Once I got that job, I’m in the record store every day because now I’ve got money to buy records. 

Tony Smith playing Barefoot Boy classics.

Where was Barefoot Boy?
It was on 39th and 2nd Avenue. Barefoot was open every night and it was packed every night. So there’s this packed night and I don’t know what the hell I’m doing! This was 1974 and I was 20 years old. There’d be a lot of people in the bar and a lot of people dancing, all gay, white. Which I knew I had to integrate, which I did eventually. I knew that to get to play all the music I wanna play I couldn’t just have all gay white. I already found out certain records that I couldn’t play. Like I couldn’t play James Brown.

Even though the gay scene was relatively new then was it already that segregated? Did you go to any black gay clubs?
I guess Nicky’s club, but it was mixed but at least blacks could go and feel comfortable. 

What about David’s crowd?
That was mixed, but it was in the West Village so it was predominantly white. They all had a little mix, but there was one black club and when I went there I was frightened out of my mind! It was Better Days and Tee Scott. I wanted to expose myself to everything so when I do finally get this job I’d be prepared for everything. A friend of mine took me to Better Days. Tee was just unbelievable and the crowd just scared the hell out of me because it was all black men staring at me and I just wanted to get into the music. But I made friends with Tee. I know how black gays are really harder to play for than white gays, but he could do that. I couldn’t do that. Mainly because I had white taste in music, but I also didn’t wanna play in a club where I was restricted. That’s why I like Richie and David and Nicky’s clubs, because they had a mix and they could play anything. I didn’t want to play just black gay music or white gay music, I just wanted to play music. 

So you had a strategy then?
At the beginning I had my straight friends come down, totally offsetting the whole thing! Straight black friends from Little Italy. Finally, the Latins came in. Once Latins come in, then everyone can come in. I don’t know why, but that’s how it is. Then my music widened even more. Barefoot never turned black, but there was always blacks in there. In the beginning, all the bartenders, busboys, coat check, waiters, everybody was white except me. 

Do you remember the first night?
I couldn’t wait until it was open. I just wanted to give a good impression on my first time, and it was packed and I really didn’t know what to play so I’m playing safe. So my inner soul has to do something crazy so they remember you, otherwise it’s just like, ‘he was okay’ which I didn’t want to be. But after the first night the owner came over and said, “You played good”. I stayed there three years. In the second year there, I got offered Garage and Studio. I turned them both down. 

Who offered you the Garage?
Mel Cheren. And Steve Rubell used to come to Barefoot. Rubell was in there all the time, he had a club called Enchanted Gardens. I used to guest there, Nicky used to guest there. I got some award from something like After Dark, I thought it was hokey, but you know, it was top ten and I was in it and so were my idols. This was when I knew Barefoot was big. I had started to find out on Mondays that Nicky, David, David Mancuso, all of them were coming to hear me on Monday nights, but I didn’t know it, they were downstairs at the bar. One day I’m going down to get a drink and I see them all at there, Richie Kaczor, all of them listening to me, at Barefoot! And Monday night was like my boring night, so now I gotta make it a better night! I felt like I was a peer to them who were totally my idols. And in Barefoot, too, which was such a dumpy little club, but there used to be lines outside the club. That was the other thing, it was free to get in, but maybe £2 at the weekend. So it’s always packed, now DJs are coming to watch me play and promoters are coming. All of a sudden I’m getting ‘Free Man’ on white label, Mel Cheren’s bringing me ‘Doin’ The Best That I Can’. I was totally overwhelmed. I was getting everything and I didn’t even have to go to a record store. 

Do you remember what you were playing at Barefoot Boy?
I’d play everything from Deodato to Yvonne Fair’s ‘Should’ve Been Me’. I used to play what I called sleazy music; slow but not boring. The only thing I really couldn’t play there, still, was black urban music.  But I still got away with ‘Doin’ It To Death’ by the JB’s but I couldn’t get away with ‘Give It Up Turnit Loose’ or ‘Sex Machine’. I was playing Fatback Band’s ‘(Do The) Bus Stop’, which was a dance. I could play African music, I was playing Osibisa’s ‘Music For Gong Gong’, Latin-sounding music, but I couldn’t play a lot of the stuff I was playing outside. That stuff was a bit too progressive for gays at that time, but they really liked female vocals.

So were you still doing outside parties [meaning block parties]?
I did Fire Island, I used to do Ice Palace. Since I was working seven days, I didn’t wanna give a day up because I knew I’d get backstabbed. After a while I knew I couldn’t work seven days I started giving a day to friends I knew like Wayne Dixon and Walter [Gibbons]. The one who backstabbed was Jerry Bossa who used to work at Buddah. I gave him the job and he undercut me. I tried to give it to Walter but he was too progressive for that crowd. Walter worked at Galaxy 21. The first time I heard him I think it was my first year at Barefoot. He blew me away. More than Nicky, Richie, all of them. Walter was just way ahead. 

François K tribute edit to Walter Gibbons.

In what way?
Mixing. See, everyone else knew how to mix, but Walter, he could remix a record live and you don’t know he’s remixing it. I never saw anyone do that. Most of the time you can hear when someone’s remixing it and I couldn’t believe he was doing it. First of all I couldn’t believe it was a white guy that was doing it and somebody I didn’t know, because he was really somebody who was unknown then. What happened was the bartenders used to bug me to go out and I was always exhausted. I was like alright I’m gonna go to Galaxy. I heard him remixing ‘Girl You Need A Change Of Mind’. You know the remix that you hear? It’s on a bootleg that loops the bongos? Walter used to do that live. And he would come out with records that no one else was playing, like Doc Severinson. He had unbelievable programming, unbelievable mixing. But he was really a bastard. He was really stuck up. He drove everyone crazy, but somehow I became friends with him and I was let through that barrier of Walter’s. Most people don’t really know what a nice person he is. He didn’t trust nobody. Come to find out later, he was smart not to trust anybody, because everyone stole his stuff! ‘Girl You Need A Change Of Mind’, ‘Erucu’, which Walter invented, Rare Earth, ‘Two Pigs And A Hog’. He used to do these live! And they used to be really hard work. I don’t know if you know how small [the part from] ‘Happy Song’ by Rare Earth is.

It’s tiny!
He used to do this live, with GLI mixer, which was just amazing. 

Really what he was doing was like hip hop DJs wasn’t it?
Yeah, and what was funny was that everyone was going to buy ‘Happy Song’ not knowing it’s like 12 seconds long! So what he did – because after a while there was just too many songs – he did quite a few Eddie Kendricks songs but the best known is ‘Girl… ‘ What he did was he went to Sunshine Sound and next thing you know everybody had his music. Nobody knows what happened. 

Well François went down there and did some stuff for them didn’t he?
Ah, François was playing the drums at Galaxy. He probably didn’t tell you that!

Yeah, he did.
He didn’t know any English or nothing. He was just this annoying guy – who we all got to love later – because he didn’t know how to play drums. But he knew the owner and the owner let him play drums right in the middle of the dancefloor. It used to drive Walter crazy. Every once in a while he’d be on beat, but with Walter’s mixing he’d be – Da! – but he was a friendly guy. We came to find out later that people were recording Walter secretly. There was a wire we found and we followed it all the way up. And this is when Walter became even more distrustful and went into God. He kind of alienated me and everyone else because he didn’t trust anyone. But he was such a genius. I remember he used to talk with me on the phone while he was editing ‘Ten Percent’ and asking me should I make it three times or two times – [mimics the stabs] – he used do things so easily whereas with me it would have been a struggle.  Once I met him, I knew I gotta practise some more. The one DJ skill he had that most DJs don’t know how to do and I still freak out people when I do it. It’s the drop mix. To mix like hip hop DJs do where you have to just let it go and it was on beat. It was amazing and it used to fuck up the whole crowd. This volume is up and this volume is up and he would do that continuously. I told everybody about Walter. I told everybody about Nicky, too. My big mouth was telling everybody at Downstairs, “You gotta got to Galaxy, You gotta go to Hollywood…”  Then Garage came out and it was totally different to Walter. 

Just before you go on to the Garage, do you have any experience of those really early guys like Francis Grasso, Michael Cappello?
Oh, I forgot about that. Francis I heard at Footsteps. I didn’t know he was there till afterwards. You know Union Square? It was right around the corner, maybe 18th & Broadway. You’d have to go up 200 steps, that’s why it was called Footsteps. There was no elevator and it was a long walk up to the club. I never heard him at Sanctuary. I always heard he invented mixing. Then I heard that Alfie Davison invented mixing, then I heard Flowers mixing, so I don’t really know who invented it. 

Who is Alfie Davison?
He was this really big DJ at the time and I know he probably hung out with Francis. He was a black guy, gay, he even made a record on RCA later on.  Who I never really heard DJ, but the word of mouth I heard when I was young was it was him and Francis. Gays and straights always argue about who invented that stuff. I don’t really know. But I remember straights when I was 15 or 16 who were mixing, so there was no pause. I remember when there was a pause and I remember when Flowers and them came out there was no pause. There wasn’t any mixers yet. My first mixer was two mic amps with two pre-amps connected with them. So I don’t know who did that first. Michael Cappello was a good friend of mine, but I’m just trying to remember where he used to work. I’m thinking it was Queens. I only heard him once, but he was like Joe Palmienteri. You know they were good, but they didn’t do anything for me. Walter I would go every week. Sometimes, later, I would find out he had been tripping when was doing this stuff. I can’t even smoke and do this stuff! Kenny Carpenter was absorbing all this stuff, because used to do the lights. And he’d be amazed, too, because he’d be looking over: how can he do this? And he rarely made a mistake despite doing all these crazy things. The only bad thing about Walter was you really wouldn’t want him to come near you, because Walter was critical because you couldn’t live up to his skills. You’d do your best and Walter was still going to diss you a little! He did it live, in front of 1,000 people, on acid, and never made mistakes! But, for some reason, once he left Galaxy, he never got big. 

People say when he got religion he lost a little something.
Yeah that’s true. Then he started working at a record store. I got him a job at Xenon, which was like a really big mistake by me…

That was quite a commercial club wasn’t it?
Yeah and he tried to put this religion thing and I’m like “Walter, I’m trying to get you back into the flow of everything, you can’t do that. Xenon’s competing with Studio”.

And they don’t want to hear gospel music all night!
They don’t wanna hear gospel or Salsoul all night, because he did a lot of Salsoul records. So I was like, “Walter, you gotta play the list” meaning you heard me play there you know what this crowd wants. And that was when it was mostly all-white. I hadn’t integrated it yet. But he influenced me so much I wanted to try and help but he would not… once he got into religion it was over.

CJ & Co doing the devil’s work.

So is it true that he really wouldn’t play anything unless it had a message?
I’ve seen him break ‘Devil’s Gun’. I’m like “Walter, that record’s hot!”. There were certain records he would not play. And I said to him if you listen to the words it’s not really saying what you think it’s saying. He wouldn’t play ‘Bad Luck’ by Harold Melvin, either. ‘Bad Luck’ wasn’t a bad song either. But I think it was the titles. When he went into the extreme religion thing, we fell apart. When he didn’t keep the job at Xenon he kinda blamed me. I said, “Walter, you’re playing gospel and it’s not gonna work in Xenon!” I wish he had’ve stayed because I knew how great he could be because I gave the job to Jellybean. 

How did you first meet Larry Levan? Did you go to Reade Street?
I went to Reade Street once. I thought Larry was really good. He was a programmer. He knew what to play. Mixing was secondary to him, sometimes he mixed good, sometimes he didn’t. But that wasn’t the priority. The priority was the next record. He liked to play with words, so sometimes his records connected with the words, which I used to love, because you had to think about it. He was more cerebral than most people give him credit for. Nicky was just crazy. Nicky could think of words, but maybe just for a couple of seconds before he was somewhere else! I got to know Larry really good at the Disco Convention in California because we were like New Yorkers in California.

What year was this?
I guess ’79. Even though I knew him, this was the first time we really hung out and acted like normal people rather than DJs. We were New Yorkers in California. And we were black guys in California. I didn’t know that Larry was like cool and funny and all of these other things you don’t get to see when he’s working. It was cool for him to see me when I wasn’t working, too, because I was working in a white club and he was working in a black club, but we both still had the same musical heads on. A year or two later we spun together at Area, which was just like the best times, with Gwen Guthrie. It was a birthday for Gwen Guthrie. One other person I gotta bring because I haven’t brung him up yet and he’s one of my best friends. He didn’t influence me DJing, but influenced me musically and that’s Danny Krivit. We’ve known each other so long it’s ridiculous. Danny influenced me more in black music and I influenced him more in disco music because Danny knew black music… I remember as a 16-year-old kid, I couldn’t believe this white kid could know black music so well. We met in a music store and we were both going for the same record and I got the record. I think it was ‘Yellow Sunshine’. We became friends after that. When I went from Barefoot to Xenon there was this weird transition where Xenon was tryin’ to compete with Studio. And Ray Caviano – I’m gonna tell this story, but I don’t know whether it’s totally factually true.

But it makes a good story!
Ray Caviano gave a list to Xenon of seven top DJs. They were going through DJs every month. He gave them all the white jocks like Roy Thode, Jonathan Fearing and I was the last person on the list. Every two weeks they would try a new DJ because none of them worked but they didn’t wanna try me. Finally Howard Stein gave in. I happened to be there one night and the music Jonathan Fearing was playing was so bad they said I could have the job, right there. Just because I was there! I told them no, out of respect to Jonathan and also I was working someplace else. I remember the mix I did that just blew them away and next day I had the job. 

Patrick Labatte’s tribute to Tony.

What was it?
The mix was Patti Brooks’ ‘After Dark’ with, in the break, ‘You Keep Me Hanging On’ by The Supremes, just in the background low in the mix. It was one of those things I learned from Walter: no voices crashing. Because Walter, if the voice’s clashed, he’d give you a look! And the keys matching, too. I also did it with Inner Life’s ‘Ain’t No Mountain High Enough’ and ‘When Doves Cry’ in the background. Everyone was blown away and was asking me to do it again, but the old school way is not to repeat it but think of something better! Once I got the job at Xenon and now I’m playing for 1,000 people. At Barefoot Boy it was only 200 dancing. I love challenges and this was a challenge. But they want me to work seven nights a week. I can do that when I’m in my early twenties, so I also had to find DJs. I wanted Wednesday thru Sunday. I went to hear Richie at Studio so I could know what kind of stuff he’s playing. I was always trying to do my homework.

What was the difference between what Richie was playing at Studio compared with Hollywood?
He had to play more commercial, which was understandable. But I did, too, unless it was a special party, which I loved special parties. But what I did was – and Richie didn’t do – try to make the crowd last longer so it would have a reputation of staying open longer, after the bars had closed. In the beginning the owner resisted that, but I’m telling him if the people start coming in at 2 in the morning, they’re gonna drink until four and they’re gonna dance and come back. I’m trying to tell him this is going to be better in the long run and he didn’t have to be here, just let me play till I wanna finish. I don’t want no extra pay, I just want control of the crowd, because that’s what most DJs want. And I finally had it, I didn’t really have that at Barefoot, but I did at Xenon, where I could play anything I want. I brought my whole collection, eight thousand records, so whenever I had a whim I could go with that and I had a tremendous time. 

When did you play from and until?
From ’79 to ’82. That was one of the best years of music because you could still play all the stuff from 1973 on. There was a lot of great music in that period, new wave, rock, reggae, disco, club. Anything. 

You played at Xenon around the time that disco was collapsing, really. Did that make a difference in the kinds of records you were playing? Was that Disco Sucks feeling prevalent?
What I did was play new wave.

But did you feel resistance to disco from certain sections of the clientele?
No. I could feel it in other clubs, but as I had my crowd trained they accepted what I played. I learned that from the older DJs that I watched. If you had the crowd on your side they accept what you’re doing. Because you’re right, when the music changed, at one point, that was one of the few points I didn’t like and that’s why I went into new wave, you started to play more oldies because the new music is not as good or creative and you put more oldies in your programming to compensate for the bad music.

Telex – Moskow Disko

What new wave were you playing?
It was English imports. I was playing ‘Pop Muzik’, Gen X, ‘Moskow Diskow’, ‘Jet Boy Jet Girl’. Plus they’re still hearing ‘I Got My Mind Made Up’ and ‘Disco Circus’. 

Was it a regular crowd?
There was a hardcore crowd. As a matter of fact, it was a mescaline crowd!

A mescaline crowd?!
Yeah. They would have the sticks, they would have the tambourines, they would really give the crowd excitement. They were usually Cuban, from New Jersey and they weren’t supposed to be in the club because they were from New Jersey, but what they did was, they used to have a bag of clothes and they would change once they were in. Meaning they would dress like Xenon people on the outside.

So they’d come in in suits?
And then change into shorts, outfits and take mescaline. You know the rest of the crowd was taking coke and coke don’t make you dance it makes you talk. Mescaline makes you dance!

So these kids knew each other?
No, but they got to know each other week after week.

That must’ve felt quite subversive.
It was the best. 

Because even if the crowd’s a bit lacklustre you can turn them?
I know! You turn them on and you turn the crowd on! I focused on them and the good thing about them was that their taste was as wide as mine. As a matter of fact, they turned me on to some new wave stuff that I wasn’t up on, like ‘Moskow Diskow’. At that time Americans wasn’t playing this music. The cokehead crowd, they like the commercial disco, but the regular dancers who were the ones who were always gonna be faithful if you please them. There was never this fear of making the crowd angry at you. Since the music was changing, at one point I was playing rock. That’s how bad disco music got. Really bizarre stuff, ‘Secret Agent Man’.

What was your relationship with Larry Levan and the Garage? You said you were offered a gig there…
That was one of the few times Xenon hated it… Because I could decide when to close early and if something was happening at Garage I would close early. And they’d all know, too: Tony’s going to Garage! Bobby Shaw I took the first time and he was totally resistant. It had this connotation of being too black and too raunchy or whatever. And, of course, once you go you’re addicted. 

Bobby said the first time you took him he didn’t like it. 
But he went back! He’s used to me mixing and Larry’s not that kind of technician, so I’m telling him you gotta forget about all these things you have in your head and go and listen to the music. Once you do that, Larry’s gonna be incredible to you. You just gotta let go of all this stuff you expect. Bobby was addicted to it! Then he got to know Larry and since he had the booth – which was the ideal booth for any DJ. It was as big as this… bar! It was two booths. One for us and one for him. We could look out and see the crowd. You’d be happy just hanging out in the booth, but sometimes you just had to go out in the crowd, because even though some records would sound good in the booth you gotta hear ’em on the dancefloor because of that system. There was never anything like that system. There will never be anything like that system. Records that would sound adequate in your club, they would sound tremendous in the Garage. So you have a whole new outlook on the record. You play it in your club and wonder why the reaction is lacklustre and then at the Garage they’re screaming and stomping to it. That’s not Larry, that’s the system and how Larry worked the system. David Mancuso’s system at the Loft was crisper and clearer but it’s not heart-rending. 

What kind of records do you remember him playing?
I remember what records he wouldn’t play! He wouldn’t play too much commercial. He’d play commercial, but once they came out he wouldn’t play them. So he always wanted to be exclusively first. The best thing we all liked about Larry was how many records we heard there that never came out.

Really?
So many of us DJs were salivating, oh can’t wait till that comes out and then when they came out it was a totally different mix from the one Larry was playing.

Was this stuff he’d mixed himself?
Sometimes. Sometimes it was just stuff people gave him. 

Do you remember any examples?
Well, I always wonder who has all this stuff. 

François is supposed to have a bunch of things.
Really? Well, how come when I went to Body & Soul I never heard any of it? I would notice! Most of the West End stuff, Peech Boys, ‘Is It All Over My Face’, what happened was that Larry would have like several drafts. Like Colonel Abrams records? We would hear versions you would not believe then when it came out it was so commercial sounding.  Larry’s versions would sound so raw. There were records like ‘Stay Free’ by Ashford & Simpson and ‘Razzamatazz’, you’d hear them in there and they sounded like number one records. You play them in my club and they sounded tinny. You know they sounded cute and you liked the song… Another one is Labelle’s ‘What Can I Do For You’. You don’t know how many DJs tried to play that in a club and the crowd would just be like phht. But you go to the Garage and it’s a 20 year old record and they’re still singing it like it was number one. You say it’s Larry but it’s the system, too. But without Larry there is no system because when he had guest DJs there, he would take out certain things. There was also a Larry lookalike.

What?!
Somebody who looked like Larry when he wasn’t there and there’d be a tape playing! 

No?!
Oh he fooled a lot of people. He would do it when he didn’t feel like spinning or he was pissed off at the crowd. I always wondered how he got this guy, because when you were on the dancefloor, he looked like him. 

Surely they’d have rumbled him?
Oh he would never get close up and he did look like Larry! Ask Bobby Shaw about this one. In the old days Larry used to live in the Garage, so he might have been sleeping or he might have been pissed off with the crowd which he did. 

So Larry would come back later?
Yeah. But you would know when he came back. He made sure that you felt it. The lookalike was definitely a fact. We definitely knew it existed. You could tell it was a tape in the Garage. 

What did you do do after Xenon?
It was a down point in my life. I went to Magique. Tee Scott used to call it Tragique! [laughter]. It was an East Side club which was already a no-no and an Upper East Side club… I got fired from Xenon for not playing ‘Happy Birthday’ for Bianca Jagger. It was the middle of the night and I just did not want to do it. She was a Studio person, I was like why are you sweating it, she’s not coming back anyway?! I was pissed but… if Bianca got me fired so what! The whole crowd didn’t know. Then they got a Tony lookalike! I swear to God! Everybody came and tell me, because they could tell it wasn’t me. It only lasted about another month and then it closed. Every club I went to closed after I left. After I left Xenon I had all these offers and I wanted to transform Magique, because Magique was a bridge-and-tunnel crowd, very John Travolta. I love a challenge so I thought if I can do Xenon then I can do this. It didn’t work. This crowd was so bad. If you didn’t play a radio song…. This was 1982 and new wave is the hottest thing, Thompson Twins, Ian Dury, everybody. They said they wanted to hear Xenon music, but Thompson Twins and Ian Dury weren’t on the radio. The only time I had a good time at Magique were the porn parties, with Ron Jeremy and a few of the porn stars used to give a party about once a month and there’s naked girls everywhere and I can play anything I want. 

How long did you last?
A year. I took a vacation for a month or two. I knew I was going to lose it., You never go away if you’re a DJ. From there I went to Limelight (which Tee used to call Slimelight). I hated that, too. 

The original Limelight?
Yeah. Then I went to the Palace which is Palluccio’s restaurant on 14th St. It only lasted a year but that was a lot of fun. New wave was hot, but I could play anything I want. What I didn’t know was that on 14th St they had it advertised as a disco and on 13th St. they had people coming in the club who thought it was a new wave place. Double whammy: Why you not playing disco? Why you not playing new wave? After that I went to Funhouse. I wasn’t really a rap fan, but I liked it, so I had to evolve my DJing style to accommodate this. Some of the music was creative, but there wasn’t eight hours of good rap music to play. I liked variety. Jellybean, you know, if a record was a hit he would play it four times a night. I didn’t like to do that. The one credit I give to Funhouse is discovering Set It Off, which nobody knows about. 

Walter Gibbons’ mix of NYC club classic Strafe.

Which was the first version, Strafe?
Yeah, because Walter mixed it. Walter brought it to Jellybean two or three times, but Jellybean wouldn’t play it. The whole sound then was the Roland drum and Arthur and Shannon and it’s totally the opposite of that. I was doin’ a guest spot and Walter didn’t know I was gonna be there or that I was tapin’ the night. I taped it when I played it. It cleared the floor. All of us in the booth goin’ crazy! This was at the time when even Loleatta was doin’ that drum sound and I hated that sound. He gave me two versions, a vocal and another one. Walter takes the record and he’s totally disappointed. A month later he comes back and they’re screamin’ to this record! They were callin’ it ‘On The Left’ because they still didn’t know the name of the song: “Tony, play the On The Left”. He didn’t know I’d taped the song! It was just so different for the time. So now Strafe wanted to do a PA at Funhouse but I didn’t know that Strafe had this thing against Walter. He didn’t like his mix. Even though Strafe’s mix was like puke. At this stage nobody’s playin’ it. Not radio, not Larry. Finally I’m telling Walter you gotta go take this to the radio and Larry. He was still skeptical because no one would give Walter the time of day. If I can get these 16 year old kids to like it, don’t worry about everyone else! Strafe came and did it and the crowd went ballistic. Then he tried to do a new song, I think it was ‘React’, and he got booed off stage. Kids are very reactionary like that. But then I got undercut again but a friend Randy. He’s not a friend any more. Then I went to an all-girls club. I had a new challenge. I’d played for all men, all black, all straight, all gay. Networks it was called. 84 or 85. Now I’m like this guy who’s a total threat to these women. If I could play for them and learn about what they like compared to men.

What do they like?
They like a lotta meaningful words. Not just party down. They liked a lot of female vocals. What I find out, once I got to know them, they liked everything that everybody else liked. There were a few things I played there that I didn’t play anywhere else, like Pat Benatar and Stevie Nicks. That lasted two years. The last club I played in was the opening of the Palladium with Jellybean. And that was because Jellybean hadn’t DJed in ages but his name was still big so he got me to play with him. Even though I’d retired, he knew I still kept up with the music. 

Danny Krivit rolled through disco

Danny Krivit rolled through disco

It’s hard to believe Danny Krivit has been DJing for five decades. He was around for the early flowerings of disco in the early ’70s. So what’s the secret to his youthful appearance? Well, Danny started DJing at the age of nine! His mum was a white vocalist on the black New Jersey club circuit; his dad, a jazz musician who managed Chet Baker. By his teens Danny was programming music on reel-to-reel for his father’s Greenwich Village club, The Ninth Circle, which was the start of him playing many of the landmark clubs of the disco era. He was resident at The Roxy, the massive west-side rollerskating venue, for four years from 1979, as it became the wild epicentre of hip hop (Quick to embrace a few scratching techniques, they called him Danny Rock). Danny was particularly close to Larry Levan and the family of DJs and music-lovers that coalesced at The Paradise Garage, and would often skate over to King Street after the Roxy and hang there, playing records. In 1996 he teamed up with Joe Clausell and another old friend, François Kevorkian, to create Body & Soul, a club that kept the flame alive for the Garage heads. More recently, his own 718 sessions have given him a residency that still delivers some of the best nights in New York. Through it all, as Mr K, he’s a creator of legendary edits, creating cuts of songs that have become the classic version. Check his great website where he posts new ones all the time.

Interviewed in New York, 06 10 98, by Bill

Where were you born, where did you grow up?
I was born in 1957 in New Jersey, we moved to Manhattan when I was four or five. Pretty much stayed in the Village my whole life. In fact, until I moved over here (E14 Street) I’d only moved about four blocks in thirty years. My step-father owned a place called the Ninth Circle, which he started in ’62. In the Sixties, it was one of the main Village spots. When I was growing up I was really around there a lot. There were a lot of rock’n’roll people there, music people. When I was seven I was already doing brunches and working as a waiter, and I served Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon. In the Village it just wasn’t that odd, I suppose. And they had a very happening jukebox. So without even knowing it, before I was even into music, I was around it. My mother was a jazz singer, my father was into jazz, an older sister into pop.

Did your mother perform?
She performed on the black circuit in New Jersey. I remember we went to Puerto Rico when I was a kid and Dionne Warwick was really happening then. She had seen her there and she said lemme introduce you to her because my mom had worked with her. And Dionne Warwick remembered her because she was a white girl doing this thing and she just stuck out. But she never really made it.

The Ninth Circle was kind of dying out by about 1970 or so and a friend of his owned the Stonewall and when that closed he said to my father I know you’ve had this great thing for years but you know the Village has really turned gay. If you just turn your place gay, all your troubles will be over and you’ll be a success overnight. And literally that’s what he did. The Ninth Circle went gay about 1971. He turned the restaurant downstairs into a disco and I started programming [reel-to-reel] tapes for him. He also got tapes from clubs like Le Jardin, Le Hippopotamus, happening places. I got in the door like that. Then he opened up a place called Ones. If you’re down near Vinyl on Hudson, there’s a Korean fruit store down there. That’s the location of Ones. I started working in 1974. It opened in ’75.

A proper nightclub?
Well, back then… It had food, it had dancing. But Ninth Circle was definitely a disco downstairs. Although there were no turntables ever there (at Ninth Circle). At Ones it started out the same thing with tapes but then it progressed to a DJ booth with decks. We didn’t have a Bozak, we had something cheaper. Probably AST, they’d just started outfitting everyone downtown.

I remember even the tapes I was making were segued. Basically, when he played these other tapes from the clubs, they were segued. I was like I can’t do the radio mix thing. I didn’t understand at first but I was going around checking things out. At that time, I was probably a little more into drugs than the music, so I’d be going to clubs to get drugs and things and I’d be standing outside waiting for somebody and I’d be hearing… They had a Limelight on Sheridan Square, and David Rodriguez used to play there. I didn’t know him at the time, but I’d be standing outside waiting for someone. And the music I’d be hearing was not the regular stuff. He’d play some really rough old stuff. But he was mixing, I was really paying attention to that. I knew what was expected of me.

Were you actually going into any of the clubs?
Back then I wasn’t really going into the Limelight. I was looking old for my age, so I could get in, but I was a little more into concerts than clubs. Especially the Fillmore East. As far as clubs go: I went to the Hippopotamus, Le Jardin, the Dom: below the Electric Circus. I ended up buying their speakers when they closed. They had these beautiful Altec Lansing cabinets; really nice wooden cabinets. I nearly killed my mother with these speakers. I showed no mercy. I remember when ‘Doctor Love’ [by First Choice] came out and I played it to death. A few weeks later, I met my neighbours in the elevator and they said, ‘You know, we never really say anything. You play music loud, but we like music. But this song: ‘Doctor Love’. We can’t get it out of our heads. You’re really doing a number on us with this song.’ I said, ‘I’m sorry.’ Six months later, my music’s off and I’m hearing ‘Doctor Love’ It burned into their heads so much they had to buy it. I remember going to the Loft.

What are your memories of the Loft?
Well, I never went to his first one, I went to 99 Prince Street. I just remember it was unique. Before that, my idea of a club was more dressy, the Saturday night out feeling. The Loft was the opposite of that: it was a professional house party. These were eccentric club people who were really into dancing. They knew music, not just the top ten hit parade, but they knew music they never heard before. That impressed me. The type of music that was being played it just had a lot more substance to it. At first, I remember congregating with a few people. There would be a regular crowd that I’d meet with: François was one of them, Steve D’Acquisto, this girl Freddie Taylor from Pearl Distributors. And we’d just be hanging out critiquing the music; bringing David some new records. David was very friendly with me and when he had the record pool, I tried to get in it when I was DJing at Ones. It had just opened and I wasn’t actually spinning there. So he said, ‘I can’t really do anything for you there.’ But he hooked me up with some of the record companies. By the time I was ready to come back to him, he was shutting his doors and I was one of the first members of For The Record [Judy Weinstein’s record pool].

What records do you readily associate with the Loft?
I remember things like ‘City Country City’ [by War]. If I heard it somewhere else it was not a big record. Here it was a record that people went crazy to from the beginning to the end. When the disco stuff started to come in heavy, he had like USA European Connection. It was extremely different. Especially as David had it on reel-to-reel, it sounded better than when it came out on vinyl. I remember in general hearing the depth of the production in stereo. It was that true feeling of, ‘I’m not on drugs, but I feel like I’m tripping on music. The music is really taking me somewhere.’ These people are just dancing. All night. Seriously.

How did the Gallery differ?
It struck me as quite a bit more gay. Definitely less about the hi-fidelity sound, more pumping. More mixing. More to do with the lights.

And Nicky Siano as a DJ?
Certainly more about drama. He would be like: I’m in the DJ booth. This couldn’t be a tape. This couldn’t be a just a record you like. I’m playing this record. He had a presence. He also was very much about drugs himself, there was a whole thing about him, especially towards the end; high, but not too high, to play the music. But there’d always be a point where it seemed like he’d collapse in a very dramatic manner: fall on the turntables and stop the music. Everyone knew what was going on, and they’d be patient and know that somehow, somebody would help him get it together and an even better record would come on. And usually it did. Certainly, both David and him, this was very different to the other clubs I’d been to. Very vibey. He’s picking a record that’s not just a hit record, but he’s picking a record that’s timely for these particular people; and he’s also talking a message, certainly creating a vibe. There’s a story being woven. With Nicky it was a vocal story. With David it was a mood story. David in general was always about love and he’d always try to stay with that. But there were a lot of instrumentals; more percussive, Latinesque things.

How did your DJing progress from there?
After Ones I opened up an after-hours with this ex-boxer. And I started working at Trudi Heller’s. It was along the lines of Copacabana, Régines. 25-30-year-olds’ club. Kind of a clip joint. But it was on Sixth Avenue right by 9th Street. All my life I’d lived on 12th Street and Sixth Avenue, even though I passed by, I never went in it. They had a Richard Long mixer. A decent set-up. It was a funky little club. Straight mainly black. Trudi Heller took it over and it went wrong. Even then I was making a bit of a mark; getting my charts out there. Then I got a job as the opening DJ at Roxy. And I played at a place called Lacey’s in Long Island from 1981 to 1991. I managed to turn some little nights into big nights. That’s how I got the job at Lacey’s. There was something about having the booth elevated and right in the middle, like they had at Lacey’s. There was something infectious about having all the people surrounding you in a circle and you in the middle. It’s not like being on the edge of the floor. The energy is focused at you. It was a rush.

And how did you get to know the Paradise Garage crew?
I was friendly with Larry Levan through the Loft. Mel Cheren [Garage co-owner] had told me he was going to open this club; and he described what he wanted. I went there; but it hadn’t really started yet. The main room was just an off-room but it was very pumping and Larry was kicking. It expanded very quickly. I was very close with Larry and I’d come there in the daytime, because he also lived there.

What, he actually lived in the club?
Yeah, before [the other Garage co-owner] Michael Brody couldn’t deal with him any longer and bought him an apartment. He used to pay for his apartment just to keep him out of there because he was causing too many problems.

(L-R) Danny with David DePino, Judy Weinstein, Larry Levan, Jeffrey Osbourne, John Brown

Was this around the time of the construction parties?
Well, he was living there during the construction parties. Basically, you go up a ramp and the first room you come into was a kinda small room that they used as the disco. What ended up being the main room, right next to that, they used as a lounge. The construction parties were this: just a killer sound system and nothing much else. But then there was another room after that which was a pretty good size and these were the offices and Larry’s apartment. Soon after, that began to be an extra room and he got Larry out of there; gave him an apartment.

But while he was living there, I used to come down in the daytime and roller-skate and play him some records from the pool. And he used to come to Roxy and skate. He told me he used to be a skate guard at Empire Roller-rink. But he was a little crazy. I remember playing ‘Girl You Need A Change Of Mind’ [Eddie Kendricks] once and he got so excited, got up, then I couldn’t see him skating. Next time I saw him his arm was in a sling. He didn’t skate much after that. He knew he couldn’t control himself. I would hang out with him a lot. I’m a passive person and he would, you know, want me in the studio with him when he was mixing. I was in the studio with him when he did ‘Bad For Me’ [Dee Dee Bridgewater], ‘Give Your Body Up To The Music’ [Billy Nichols], ‘Work That Body’ [Taana Gardner], a few others. So he wanted me to get a handle on this and get involved. His sessions were so stretched out that I was just hanging, not learning.

In what way?
He was a record company’s nightmare. Basically, he’d show up really late and while he was there it was about socialising and drugs. And eventually he would get to the mix, but he would be distracted very easily. And the mix, instead of taking a day or whatever, it would go on for weeks. This budget would be a $27,000 budget, stretched to that. I remember the Gwen Guthrie project wasn’t really even supposed to happen. He was supposed to mix a song and he ended up doing all these mixes.

Did her Padlock EP…
Well, basically, he did ‘Should’ve Been You’. That’s what he was supposed to do. He did this whole thing. I think he was in there so long that he was actually working on this stuff. It was probably one of the more productive sessions he had. But when he showed it to them, they were so pissed off at the price and how long ‘Should’ve Been You’ took that they just shelved it. For a year or two he was just playing it at the Garage and kicking it.

Had he finished the other Guthrie mixes? And was he playing them?
He’d finished them but they were rough. He was playing them and unlike a lot of other things where he mixed it seven or eight times, he did these and they worked out good rough. He kept them like that. Lots of his things, like ‘Work That Body’, the one that came out was his seventh mix. He mixed it over and over again and fine-tuned it.

What was he changing?
Really a lot of things. He’d say: ‘This is sloppy’, ‘I don’t like the sound of this bass’, ‘I played it in the club and we need to compress it a little more.’

So he’d be floor-testing at the club?
Sometimes that, other times just in the studio non-stop over-producing. So I would be invited in on some of this stuff. Some of it I was getting a little feel for it, but for the most part it was so stretched out I didn’t have patience. In general, he wanted me to get involved but the thing was I was DJing for a living. Working at Roxy and other places. I always had a weekend job. When it came to the Garage, I always came there after work and after a few years there, there were times when he couldn’t be there because of the studio and he’d have to have somebody fill in a little bit. ‘Danny if you could be here a little more often, get this feeling, I could stick you in here a little bit.’ I wanted that. But I couldn’t hang out non-stop. So I’d come at my usual time.

A couple of times he was like, ‘Why don’t you put on couple of records and we’ll have a dance’. Another time there was a pool party for For The Record and I played, Jellybean, Jonathan Fearing, Larry ended the night. I remember I was the last one before Larry. The club was just packing as I played. So I had a really good set and it was the first time I played ‘I Want To Thank You’ [by Alicia Myers]. And I kept telling Larry about this song. He came over to me and said, ‘What’s this you’re playing?’. I said it’s that song I been telling you about. He started playing it after that. Sure enough, Frankie Crocker heard Larry play it. It had already been a big hit on the roller skating for a while.

Anyway, I had a really good set, but I was a little in awe of the sound system: I didn’t want to fuck with the sound system too much. He was working the system while I was doing my mixes; really tweaking it and beefing it up. When I came on he had a switch underneath that he flicked which basically took the limiter off and he said: ‘Only for you’. So I felt really privileged. He really supported me. I was working a lot, so when push comes to shove, he really needed somebody and David DePino was close with him, right there and out of work. He was opening for Larry a lot, a few other people too. Victor Rosado, Joey Llanos.

Danny has an entire apartment where his records live.

How did you first meet Larry?
I came to the Loft to see David. But David was knocked out. His DJ booth was kind of on the second floor looking down; he had a bed right next to it. So I came up and thought Mmm, this is isn’t David, David has long hair and he’s white. Larry wasn’t rude, but he wasn’t especially friendly the first time. He was just, you know. Next time I had a few records – I don’t think he played them or whatever – I think he liked the idea that I didn’t just bring them for David. Then I would run into Larry at the record pool.

What was he like as a person?
He was bit eccentric. He was really like a little kid. Very energetic. When Star Wars came out he was like, ‘Oh, we’ve gotta go see the opening. This whole thing about lights; anything special and big like that, he loved. Big bright things. Disneyland. Even Studio 54, as a club. He liked that sort of thing.

Did he go to Studio 54?
Oh yeah, I think he played there a couple of times. Richie Kaczor was a sweetheart and we all knew him from Hollywood. And Hollywood wasn’t as commercial; it was a little more edgy and more underground. So he had a lot of respect from all the underground DJs. When he did Studio 54, instead of thinking of him as, ‘Oh, you’re just playing that commercial stuff,’ we thought of him as someone who does his own thing, but is playing the commercial stuff at Studio. Also, the whole time I knew Richie he was so down to earth. There were so many egos going on then. Even the guys that were nice would still be a little like that. But Richie was never that way. Larry was very friendly with Richie and used to go there and Richie would come to the Garage. The Garage had a very social DJ booth. It was huge. Like another club in itself. There was a real scene going on there. And for a long time, I’d find myself in the booth, that was a club experience. You were right above the dancefloor and you’d get the whole feeling of the crowd. The light show, everything.

What kind of drugs were people doing at the Garage?
Well, I was kind of out of my drugs stage by then. I was just a pot-head. I would notice a lot of coke, some heroin, tripping. More of the kids would be into tripping, but there’d be dust, too. It seemed like because I wasn’t into it, I didn’t latch on to it so much. There was a lot of drugs there.

Do you think that Larry’s drug taking eventually had a detrimental effect on his music?
I look at this way. He was definitely into drugs, but as opposed to the drugs having a handle on him, it definitely seemed like it wasn’t running his life. Towards the end, say the last year or two, it was probably clear to him, it had been said in so many words, that’s it, the Garage is closing this time, and even then, everyone else was very hopeful that there’d be another spot. You have this party and the party’s going to go somewhere and when it does, you’re going to be it, so don’t even worry about it.

But I think at that point the drugs seemed to be more obvious. He was there less. When he came in, it would be less about putting the record on, there would be a long rainstorm first. Rain effects. He would still turn it out. But he was there less. A lot less mixing, just about playing the right record and working the sound. Adjustments, like he was in a studio. Not just feeling it, but going out on the floor and checking it. Some nights he would keep the club from opening an hour or two because he wanted to rewire the whole system. He’d always have things for Michael Brody, the owner to buy, new toys. He really had put a lot into it. Towards the end there, David was playing the most, especially the last year. A lot of people who went to the Garage really just went that year [1987]. And when they remember the Garage, it was really the staples of songs that made up ‘Garage Music’.

How would you describe that?
My feeling going the whole way through was that Garage music was kind of breaking the rules. It was what he felt like playing. He’d turn you on to something. It was really about having no boundaries. A lot of rules were broken there. When [Taana Gardner’s] ‘Heartbeat’ came out there wasn’t hip hop on the radio like there is today. There wasn’t any downtempo music like ‘Heartbeat’. And when he put that record, a full club of people left the room to get food. There was not one person left on the floor. He played the record from beginning to end and they stayed off from beginning to end. And you’d hear people talking, ‘What the hell is this? It’s painful.’ Sure enough, next week he played it and a few people stayed on the floor. The week after, the floor’s not happening, but there’s a decent amount of people there. The week after that, now there are actually people running to the floor when they hear it. By the end of the month, there was no-one left off the floor when they played that record.

And now, of course, they had to go to Vinylmania and bug Charlie for that record. He would break rules. He would play things and you thought, ‘Oooh, this is a commercial record.’ Pat Benatar ‘Love Is A Battlefield’ Someone said he could never play that there. That was reason enough for him to play it; and make it happen, too. Those things stuck out a lot more than the so called staples that you associate with Garage music.

That’s Garage music, sure, but it’s the other things that make more of an impression on you. He would take a chance. He would play ‘Why D’Ya Do It’ by Marianne Faithfull. When he played that, it was a violent record; it got a violent response. He had this thing with the lights where he had an elaborate light system and Robert Da Silva was his light man and he was a great light man. Larry had this clear arrangement with Robert – because he had been a light man too – he had a mini light board on a track with a handle and he would just pull it over in front of him. And without saying anything, he would just start working this song, or part of a song. Robert would just accept that. I remember when he did things like Marianne Faithfull. It was like: I’m doing this and you can tell Larry’s doing the lights: very extreme, very violently emotional. He made you remember that song. He would do that with a lot of the music. That was the thing I remember about the Garage.

The difference between this and the other places, is that he’s controlling the entire environment. At the end, it was far less about him. David [DePino]was told to play not the newest records, but the staples. That’s how the club was then. And Larry was more into drugs, and even if he played well, you related a little less to him personally.

After the club closed, there was a period when I didn’t really see him. Then I started seeing him at the World a little bit, and Trax, behind the Roxy. Basically, Trax was David DePino’s club and it was a huge success but it was basically built on what Larry had started at the Garage. At that point, he didn’t have another situation where he could control the entire vibe. As a DJ he would come in and do his thing but he couldn’t hit that mark like before. He was an excellent DJ, so he could still play well, and mix it up, bring in a few boxes to beef up the system, play a better selection of music. But it didn’t have what people were getting at the Garage. The system wasn’t there, it wasn’t his people, and you would notice more that drugs had a little more of handle on him. Not that he was more high, just that he was more affected. When I had Ninth Circle, my father had passed away, and I ran into him. Larry would come by to me and I had so much respect for him as a mentor, he’d hit me up for a bit of money. I knew what he was going through. And I wanted him to get out of it in a way, but I couldn’t say no to him. It was a real struggle. More than that, it was because of this: how could I deny him? He was such a major part of what I am and what I’m doing.

Is it true that he kept selling his records to pay for drugs towards the end?
That probably has some truth in it. I knew I would find big chunks of it – in a flea market once. He had his records stored all over and, because he wasn’t playing that much and he was into drugs, the people keeping his records weren’t taking them seriously and they’d just get rid of some of them. I remember finding a bunch of things, this particular record, I found an acetate of ‘Can’t Shake Your Love’ by Syreeta. It was a remix that only he had. It was scratched up and didn’t play well. When I saw that, I thought this other stuff must be Larry’s collection. I had a done a lot of edits for bootlegs. I saw Larry after that, and I mentioned this and said, well, it’s not like they’ve got your name on it, but there’s this acetae of ‘Can’t Shake Your Love’. He was like, ‘I need that.’ I said it’s unplayable, but I’ve done these edits of it and you can have that.

How did you get into editing?
My first mix was ‘Chill Pill’ on Sleeping Bag. The first record on Sleeping Bag. [credited to The Sounds of JS126 Brooklyn]. It was a rock thing. Will Socolov I’d grown up with. We did this, and during the session, I knew what I wanted but the engineer… kept saying, ‘Oh we’ll fix that in the editing’. And towards the end he started to do an edit, but he couldn’t do it. I had a reel-to-reel at home, but I’d never done any editing. I was getting frustrated with this guy, literally half the session was this guy trying to do this edit. We salvaged it. I walked out of there thinking I know how to edit, just from seeing what he did wrong. Same thing happened next time: ‘Oh, we’ll fix it in the editing.’ A DJ friend of mine Jonathan Fearing, was into editing, working at WBLS, I was telling him about it and he finally just gave me a quick pep talk and said it’s really just about the ear. I went home and I edited ‘Funky Drummer’ and it ended up being ‘Feeling James’. I gave it to this guy who bootlegged it.

What, the thing on Tommy Boy by Fresh Gordon?
No, it was a bootleg. That may have sampled it. Anyway, there was this guy Tim Rogers at Polygram, he was hanging around the Garage, instead of being a big record exec, he was actually into all this editing and bootlegs and stuff. He found out that it was me and he said, ‘I’m working on all this stuff and I want to put out “Funky Drummer”. Do you wanna do a mix?’ Whenever I’d do an edit, it would turn into a legitimate job. Like I did one of ‘Touch And Go’ [by Ecstasy Passion & Pain] and [future Maxi label founder] Claudia Cuseta was working at Sunnyview at the time, gave me a job to remix the song. The second edit was ‘Rock The House’, which wound up becoming ‘Put The Needle On The Record’. I knew Arthur Baker. I’m just a DJ and I’m doing something that just ends up being a bootleg, so I can’t call anyone a thief. But basically, he took my edit ‘Rock The House’ and he had Gail King play it over this drum beat. That’s all it was. When I saw him in a club, I came over to him and said: ‘Oh is that your record?’. He says, ‘Yeah’. ‘I did ‘Rock The House’. He got so defensive. ‘You did “Rock The House”? You’re a thief anyway, who you calling a thief?’ I said, ‘I’m not calling anyone a thief, I’m just letting you know that I did “Rock The House”’. After that I got a few jobs with him.

Danny with his great friend and Body & Soul collaborator, François Kevorkian

You did the MFSB bootleg of ‘Love is the Message’ as well didn’t you?
Well there are two and they both sample Gil Scot-Heron. I did the white one that has ‘My First Mistake’ on the other side. It’s on T.D. Records. It’s just basically ‘Love Is The Message’ and ‘Love Break’ put together. The other guy that did the other one, this guy who worked at Vinylmania. Speak to Charlie about him. I’ve done a lot edits for that guy, though. By then those were the two main ones. Mine was after the other one, but they were close: early Eighties.

When David Mancuso was playing MFSB was he playing the ordinary version?
Right from the beginning he was probably playing the quad mix on the album. The original album also came in quad. I collect quad and usually since quad wasn’t a bit hit, they had to make things a little different so that even if you played it on your regular stereo you knew it sounded different. Sometimes it was a different version of the song. ‘Rocksteady’ Aretha Franklin, instead of ending at the fade out, it goes on for another two minutes and slows down to a complete stop. It’s got a completely different horn part in it. Apparently in ‘Love Is The Message’ there were a lot of loose keyboard parts that they edited out of the final mix because it was sloppy. In the quad mix, they put them in to make it sound different. Played that till the Tom Moulton Philly Classics mix came out, then played that.

When Tom Moulton remixed it without the frilly bit at the front?
The original and the Tom Moulton mix both had that on it. But the original didn’t go on much and Tom’s kept going.

Has your version of MFSB ever come out legitimately?
No. But MFSB is probably the quintessential bootleg mix.

[Danny was kind enough to let us release his 11-minute mix for the first time on the original compilation for Last Night a DJ Saved my Life (Nuphonic)]

Which other edits have you done?
I stuck to things that were either long gone or impossible to find. As far as other ones: ‘Just Us’ by Two Tons of Fun, ‘Sugar Pie Guy’ [Joneses], ‘Bra’ [Cymande], ‘You Got Me Running’ Lenny Williams, ‘Let’s Start The Dance’ [Bohannon], I had a version that never came out, I just kept going with the guitar.

Is that ‘Let’s Start The Dance III’?
I think it was II. The one with the rapper over it. I did a version without the rapper on. ‘My First Mistake’. I was really proud of that.

I assume that you were doing them to make them better for DJs to play?
Yeah. I’d do something that I knew Larry was into, like ‘Family Tree’ (by Family Tree). I have the original here, it’s one of the most rare records. It’s one of the first 12-inches. Something Larry played and it was such a rare record that even if you owned it you didn’t want to play it in case you scratched it up. When I brought him that he was happy. Also it was a really good edit.

What do you think was the first 12-inch?
It was ‘Dance Dance Dance’ by Calhoun. Definitely. Warner Spector. It was a terrible record. It was a bad way to try and get into the market. I remember immediately after that, the second 12-inch I got, because at the Ninth Circle, I was getting a lot of stuff in the mail. And at that time I was getting a lot of 7-inch 33s, before the 12-inches. Seven minute version on a 7-inch. All of a sudden I started getting these 12-inches in the mail. And I started hearing that this was the new thing. The next song was Floyd Smith on Salsoul, very Barry White sounding, but it wasn’t a big hit. This was a better example of something sounding good. Then there were a few 12-inches. Motown, 20th Century.

Tom Moulton says he did one that he thinks is the first? Al Downing ‘Dreamworld’?
If he did that and that was the first 12-inch, then I’ve never even saw that to this day. The thing about Tom Moulton is, for instance ‘Free Man’, he made a couple of 12-inches himself. Because the record label weren’t going to. I’ve a feeling that if he did a 12-inch of Al Downing, it could’ve been something that just 20 copies were made. If it was the first, it was kind of unheard of. These things were promos, but you’re still talking about 100 copies at least. They got around the US. I’m an avid record collector and I’ve never seen Al Downing. Atlantic’s first one was ‘Mellow Blow’ by Barrabas. People weren’t impressed to start because they really weren’t putting the best stuff on them. Everyone was, ‘Well, there are a lot of hits out there, why are putting these songs on there?’

It was a marketing ploy, basically?
Definitely. This was the age of promotion and this was how to promote these records. Soon after it was almost like 12-inches were going to be laughed at, so they started putting some good songs on there. ‘Ten Percent’ etc.

When The Garage closed and Junior Vasquez started Bassline, what was the reaction to him. Was he seen as a Larry copyist?
Definitely that, but kind of like the way I was describing David DePino at the Garage. Junior was taking it a step further. He had nothing to do with the Garage and yet he was just playing this hit parade. When Junior was playing some great music, but it was rehashed in a time when people really weren’t rehashing music. It was not about retro then. When you heard retro then, it was like what’s wrong with this picture. It was only because the Garage had closed and people were still hanging on to that that it seemed okay. They were good songs and he was mixing. I thought it was fad, and it would fade away, but it kept getting bigger. But then it slowly changed. He was always friendly with me, but he was out of the loop; I crossed a lot of circles and he wasn’t in any of them.

Do you think they turned playing records into a performance?
Totally. And also broke ground. They didn’t take the new hot record and break it when it would have been a hit anyway. They broke a record that would not have been otherwise. They educated people.

Can you think of any examples?
With David [Mancuso] there was such a long line of them. Things like ‘City Country City’ [by War], or ‘Woman’ [by Barrabas]. Those were Loft records. Without the Loft, they were just records. People would scream when they heard a record for the first time, not the tenth. One of the legacies they left is that fever for hunting down records. These are records that were rare the moment they came out. There was a DJ, Tony Smith, from Barefoot Boy, there was a record store on 8th Street, Daytons. I met him because we’d always be looking for those kind of records. A lot of jazz-funk. They’d play something, and if I liked it, it always seemed that Tony would want it too. It was underground even then. Forget about now, back then some of these records were hard to track down too.

What do you think the legacy of these DJs is?
There’s a lot of marks that they made that might go unnoticed. Certainly, I think that Mancuso is one of the main ones. The thing that David expressed, and came out in Larry and Nicky, was playing a positive vibe in the club. When I went to other places I was always amazed at how negative the vibe was. Weaving a message, rather than wandering all over. David made people realise the DJ was important. Before that most people thought a band or DJ: what’s the difference?

© Bill Brewster & Frank Broughton

Eddy Grant defined the frontline

Eddy Grant defined the frontline

Eddie Grant arrived in Britain in 1960 on a mission to show the country its musical future. He was taking bands into the studio and writing and producing hits with them when he was still getting pocket money from his parents. In The Equals he gave us Britain’s first multiracial pop band, challenging the dour monochrome of his adopted home with the defiant optimism of ‘Black Skin Blue Eyed Boys,’ and the timeless groove of ‘Funky Like A Train.’ A slew of ’60s and ’70s projects pushed soul, ska, reggae, soca and even rock into new shapes, giving black British dance music firm foundations. As a musical magpie, he combined styles from across the Caribbean, Africa, the UK and US, pioneering a cross-cultural approach that would underpin decades of future British sounds. Under his own name he’s a chart star with a barrel of international hits your mum knows: ‘Electric Avenue,’ ‘Living on the Frontline’, ‘Walking on Sunshine’. He’s also a relentlessly experimental producer, creating flagrantly unique tracks like ‘California Style’ and ‘Timewarp’, that are sampled, stolen and re-edited to this day. He launched his own labels Torpedo and Ice, and opened perhaps the first black-owned studio in Europe. At one stage, to capitalise on massive export success, he even bought his own pressing plant. Eddy Grant is an artist who mastered the industry rather than let it ever control him.

Interviewed by Bill, 16.10.02 in Stamford Hill, London

Describe what it was like for you arriving in Britain.
It was December 1960. I was 12, and when I landed it was cold and wet and I can still remember the exact smell and look of the place. The very first thing that grabbed me was the smell of coal burning. It was asphyxiating because I was used to wide open spaces. Everything was grey and black. England had two colours in its decorations: brown and cream, and they permeated everything. Cars were black or very dark colours. Men wore dark suits. Dustmen wore suits, so I thought, ‘This country’s gotta be happening! A guy’s a dustman and he’s wearing a suit!’ You never saw anyone in a suit in the West Indies unless someone was dead or very important.

My dad took us to Burleigh Road in Kentish Town and said ‘Okay, we’re going to our new home now.’ I could see this house with about 50 doors and I thought ‘Jesus, my old man has really arrived.’ But he said come this way, down to the basement and I found out what a basement was. It was cold, damp, and there was this lino on the floor, and he showed us into this room, which was gonna house the four of us, and my father and mother would sleep in the front room. That was a culture shock for me. I never conceived we’d be living underground.

Where did your parents come from?
Guyana. My mother’s from Plaisance and father’s from Berbice. My dad came over in 1957 and my mom a few months after that. Three of us three years after that. I’m the eldest. My father was a musician, primarily. He also mended bicycles and cars. Here, he worked at Blackman’s Motors in Kentish Town. He also had his own little garage that he would go to work in after work, and before playing gigs at night, so my father held three jobs.

What was his music?
Dad played the music of the time, which was Harry James, some jazz, Caribbean and all of that. Like all the musicians of that time, he played with different people. In Guyana he played primarily with a band called the Luckies [The Lucky Strike Orchestra]. When he came to London it was a similar situation. He’d play society parties, anywhere the band got booked, in clubs, pubs… There were pubs like the Tally Ho in Kentish Town that were very popular for music, trad jazz in particular. It was a very esoteric time, you had West Indian musicians playing with English musicians in all kinds of formats. Guys like Harold Beckett, Joe Harriott, Ivan Chinn. Iggy Quayle, the keyboard player, was a contemporary of my father and played in the same bands. Harry Beckett played with Herbie Goins and the Night Timers, but he was like a gun for hire. Herbie was around when the Equals, Jimmy James, Geno Washington, Georgie Fame, Zoot Money, The Gas, a whole circuit of bands. It was called the ‘Gunnell circuit’ because the Gunnell Agency controlled it, which was the Flamingo, the Manor House, Eel Pie Island, The Witch Doctor in Catford, they were the local gigs.

Did you learn music from your dad?
My dad was always interested in me learning to play. I can remember being four or five and taking my dad’s trumpet under the bed from the night before and making the most unbelievable racket, and he would come down and grab it off me. I learned the embouchure of the trumpet very early on by watching him. Once I came to England I didn’t touch the trumpet much more, though I did play bugle in the Boy’s Brigade. The drum was my instrument there. My dad tried to send me for piano lessons, the teacher was a woman called Mrs Philadelphia, Her first name was Prophet. She was a great teacher. My brother Derrick couldn’t absorb it as quickly as she would like so she would take a ruler or pencil and hit him across the knuckle. And I got totally pissed off because nobody hits my brother, so I started skiving off. My older uncle who had charge of us in the house found out, and he beat us so bad! We never went back to piano lessons. So that was the end of my musical education.

What did you listen to in Guyana?
Everything. Guyana is a totally multiracial society. In Guyana I’m hearing Indian music, African, western, American, Latin and Dutch on the radio at night, calypso from Trinidad. I heard everything that there was and listened to everything. I had a very eclectic base and my music shows in that.

When I came to England even more so. There was African, and early bluebeat, and British artists were copying Americans and doing their own version of it. Lonnie Donegan was a particular favourite of mine. I really liked trad jazz, I loved Kenny Ball & the Jazzmen, Acker Bilk, Monty Sunshine, Humphrey Lyttleton. Because I played trumpet as my first instrument, I was really into Freddie Hubbard, Clifford Brown, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie.

So at the same time as listening to trad and modern jazz, I listened to pop, the Shadows, the Beatles, and then the Rolling Stones who I listened to a lot, because they were playing real hot rhythm and blues from the American standpoint. I soon realised they were playing Chuck Berry’s music so I made a beeline for him, although he was in prison at that time. When he came out I saw him with the Nashville Teens at the Finsbury Park Astoria [later the Rainbow]. That was the moment that changed my life. I suddenly saw my mission in my life. I saw something in Chuck Berry on stage and thought I had a chance as a musician.

Why did he have such an effect?
There were very few people that can play like him. It’s accessible and accessible to your spirit, and he’s very articulate. He writes little stories so it’s like calypso. Early on in my life, apart from my father, my first hero was Mighty Sparrow. When I heard Chuck Berry it was similar. Little stories being told. But I still spoke West Indian, so I would have to learn that vernacular. I had a West Indian soul and I would now have to find an English soul. Chuck Berry delivered the path.

What were your first impressions of England?
I saw it as opportunity, because my dad had worked really hard to bring us here, so I had to make the best use of it. I made English friends very quickly so I could get into their homes and learn how they speak. That was a conscious thing. I read a lot. I had to get my head into English racism. I had to get to understand why they were like they were. They reacted to us in a different way and I’d never met that way. I was planning to be a doctor, train here and go back to Guyana so I thought none of this would matter once I’d gone, anyway.

Where did you go to school?
I went to Acland Burghley, an incredible school. It produced a lot of very talented people, I played in the school jazz band with Derek Griffiths, a great actor and musician, Maurice Lavey, Danny Dukowski, Gus Ibegbuna. All the teachers were great role models and there were no black teachers there, either. It was 99.9% white pupils. I was in the vanguard of the black invasion of the school, so to speak. All the black kids did well there. My brother Rudy was a fantastic footballer, brilliant. He played with all the great players of the time, the Bowles and Bests and Marshes.

Were there any notable role models for you in Britain?
I have to call the name of [St Lucian-born pop singer and sound engineer] Emile Ford. When I came here I saw Emile and he was black and he was in a position where people looked to him as a star. [Actor/singer/songwriter] Kenny Lynch also was a star. In a funny kind of way they didn’t belong to the community because they’d been appropriated by the white society. But nevertheless they were black people and they represented a vanguard. So I knew it was do-able.

There was the injustice of race, though. England was quite inclement to its foreign children. I’ve seen great musicians give up because of their race, and great artists, too. Although I’ve done well I am the one out of hundreds and thousands that gave up on the way, like the one salmon who made it up the stream to mate.

They seemed to accept what was given to them. When the time came for me, which was with the Equals, I knew it wasn’t going to be like that for me. We were going to be the first multi-racial band of its kind and, as such I had to establish a whole new modus operandi.

Did you know the early black London DJs like Count Suckle and Al Needles?
Suckle played the Roaring Twenties with his sound system. I became very close with him many years later. Suckle moved on from just being just a DJ to owning the Q Club in Praed Street, where I played early in my career. It was the premier black club in London. That and the All-Star Club which was owned by Ken Edwards in Artillery Passage in Liverpool Street. They were the two main black clubs in London during the ‘60s.

I played all of them, every ballroom, every church hall, every barmitzvah in this country. All of them. The Equals were a very popular band. Money was good. And the food, too! We played youth clubs, we played Blytheway Mansions, we played York Court.

How did you get your first break?
This friend of mine Georgie took me to meet a rasta one night. At that time rastas were very serious men and you didn’t see them around London really. He was called Roddy and he said he knew Admiral Ken, a disc jockey who owned the All-Star Club. He was just about to go to Ethiopia but he took me to the All-Star the night Stevie Wonder was appearing. It was jam-packed, black with people. Afterwards he took me to meet Ken [Edwards] and asked him to give me an audition.

We came down and he loved us. There was us, the Rick’N’Beckers, and Heart & Soul. All black bands. Rick’N’Beckers played more ska-oriented soul, Heart & Soul were total soul, and we played anything from James Brown, Rufus Thomas, Sonny Boy Williamson, Rolling Stones, Chuck Berry, really eclectic. We had no bass guitar and no organ and no saxes and you couldn’t play a black club without at least an organ. But we went into the All-Star and mashed it up! Just pure energy. Our first gig supporting was Wilson Pickett and he came on and he was awesome. He had a pick-up band. Sometimes they’d use Herbie Goins. We gave those guys a good run for their money. One night when we played with Solomon Burke, the crowd didn’t want to let us off. Every major black artist that came to England we supported.

How did you meet the other guys in the Equals?
I had just made my first guitar in woodwork in school. I’d started to play a little. My father taught me some chords and some guys who lived in our house helped me. One day a guy called Andy Vassilliou invited me to come to his house for a jam session. Very good musician. Exceedingly good. We’re jamming in Mrs Hall’s room, who was John Hall’s mum, who became our drummer. A fantastic atmosphere. I said to John one night, this is all well and good, but it ain’t going nowhere. Do you want it to be a group? ‘Yeah, I’d like it to be a group’. Well let’s put it together, let’s look for a singer and guitarists. So there was a guy called Eddie Faisems, an Indian guy who could play the guitar better than me, the Gordon brothers, they were at Barnsbury School but had left to go to work. I was the only one still at school. Pat Lloyd came one night. Eddie left because he was into his girlfriend. And then we were five.

Was it a conscious choice not to have bass and organ?
I decided early on we were gonna be different. Being the musical head, I never encouraged having bass in the live line-up. We recorded with a bass guitar, Calvin Fuzzy Samuels became our regular bassist on record, and there’s only one song we recorded without it. Not having saxes or organ hastened our demise. Ken Edwards our great benefactor kept on at me ‘Yout! Why don’t you get a little organ or sax in the band an’ be like the ‘Beckers, bwoy’. We used to rehearse upstairs at his club and one day he’d locked us out because we wouldn’t get a ‘little organ or bass’! I could see through the keyhole other equipment that wasn’t ours, but we never did find out who replaced us.

How did you get discovered then?
Gene Latter, he was a popular singer in Europe, he made me angry when he said he could dance better than James Brown at a time when James Brown was my God. But I didn’t know he lived next door to me! We were rehearsing one night doing ‘I Won’t Be There’, which I’d just written. There’s this knock at the door and this guy says, ‘Who’s that song?’ I said ‘It’s mine.’ ‘You didn’t copy it from Rufus Thomas or Wilson Pickett or anybody?’ ‘No, it’s mine.’ He said, ‘How would you like to record it? I’d like to make a record of it. I know somebody who would take a listen.’ And he took us to Eddie Kassner at President [transatlantic music mogul who also managed The Kinks]. He took us into the basement at Kassner House, 25 Denmark St and set us up among the sheet music. Eddie came down, liked it, and by the time we left, Gene was our manager and Eddie Kassner was our record company.

What motivated you to write in the first place?
My good friend Gus. He said there was this guy Bob Dylan and he writes his own songs, I’m sure you can do that. You can play chess and you know science, I’m sure you could do it. Then a guy called Lee Shepherd who became our manager said to me, ‘You should really write songs, you have that kind of intellect.’ But I had no way of knowing how. I started humming things and eventually a couplet started to come and I’d write them down. Nothing significant happened until a girlfriend gave me a tape recorder. Then I started really seriously. I’d write ten songs in an evening.

I started writing songs with other people in mind. I remember writing ‘Hold Me Closer’, which started as the A-side of ‘Baby Come Back’ and ended up as the B-side, and offering it to all my friends at the time. I eventually gave it to Lincoln, who was always a good spar for me in the Equals. We became really good friends. ‘When’s your birthday, do you wanna a piece of my song?’ It wasn’t till later I realised what value a song could be.

The Equals were big in Germany before the UK.
Yeah. Equals used to do weekend gigs in Germany and we took over there in a really big way. ‘Baby Come Back’ was a hit 18 months before it was a hit in England. And remember, I was still at school. The other guys were content to get up and play all over the place but I could really only go out at weekends and when we went abroad my dad would come with me. We’d get off the boat at Bremerhaven, drive to Bremen, do a big club, do the clubs around north of Germany, Hamburg, Gütersloh, then we stretched out into Dortmund, the Ruhr, Stuttgart, Berlin.

Were you still at school when you had a hit?
We got a hit in Germany in 1967. I didn’t leave school until after ‘Baby Come Back’. When you talk about boy bands, the Equals would have to have been the first! There was just not anything like the Equals. You remember I talked about England being two colours brown and cream, the Equals were the first to dress brightly. We would be multi-coloured people in our multi-coloured clothes. We loved it. It was strong. From that we went wilder and wilder till eventually I wound up with the white hair.

How were you received in Germany playing as a multi-racial band?
Never had a problem. The Equals, because we were not girlish, we got big respect from guys, We could play Club 51, the rocker’s heaven, and we played places like the Shoreline Hotel [in Bognor Regis], the first youth hotel.

Was that like a YMCA?
No. It was a number of different caverns, which could all house different groups, one playing this bay, another playing that bay, and more women per square foot than you can imagine. You had kids taking pills, everybody was on pills [amphetamines]. Dozens of kids sleeping outside on makeshift beds. How that was allowed to carry on in that time, god only knows! Great environment.

Back in London did you get to play Flamingo?
Yeah, that was standard fayre. We played Tiles, where Jeff Dexter DJed. Twisted Wheel in Manchester, Top Hat in Newcastle. We played every gig in this country. Sherwood Rooms in Nottingham. We took over from Geno Washington because we had the added benefit of getting a hit record. I said to Geno, ‘It’s okay mashing it up in the clubs but you gotta have records.’ He was big, he was god. To upstage Geno, we had to be doing very well. I got the right education in the music business, and I took it very seriously. I learnt the studio inside out, I learnt all the instruments, I learnt to dance. I learnt about property though my father.

When did you sign with President?
It would have to be ’65. I made ‘Train to Rainbow City’ [by The Pyramids] in ’66.

You suffered a heart attack very young, didn’t you?
Twenty-three! The heart problem precipitated my departure. You don’t know who is who until something like that happens. I saw the light in so many regards. That was January 1st 1971. it knocked me out for a year and other people had to come into the band. I got the vision for the future.

So what happened to the Equals after that? What was your vision?
That wasn’t to do with music it was to do with people. The greatest thing in this world is love, it blinds you to everything. And the first love of my life was the Equals. I would’ve died for the Equals. I didn’t go out to clubs, I wasn’t a drinker, I wasn’t into drugs, I wasn’t into girls. I just wanted to play music and these guys were my instruments, they gave substance to everything I thought about. I could visualise incredible things for the band and for the music.

You had to leave the band but you continued writing and producing.
I thought the illness would kill me, so I had to do this and come out the band and hoped the guys would understand and allow me to do the thing I loved the most which was to make the records.

You built our own studio early on, didn’t you?
My manager Lee Shepherd was an ex-actor, RADA, and involved in property in a big way. He had a brochure from an estate agent on his desk. I noticed one that had a property in Clapton with a coach house on the corner. It was 25 grand which was a hell of a lot of money then. I went to look at it; it was a mess, falling apart, a dump. Lee said it was a bad buy but I bought it anyway. I bought it in 1973 – exactly at the time when there was a depression in the property market! It took 28 skips to clear the rubbish out. Eventually I got to the point where I could call it a studio. Bought some equipment from Dave Robinson [of Stiff Records] and some from Manfred [Mann], who had owned the Maximum Sound Studio in Old Kent Road.

So I built the first black-owned recording studio in Europe. It opened late 1974, early 1975. I got Frank Aggarat who became the first black engineer in this country, through giving up a very lucrative job as a technician to do this job and make the dream a reality. We really tried things. And because we were new and totally idiotic, we did things and they happened.

Did you use Coach House for everything?
I did, in the early stages. Anything that required more than eight tracks was done outside. Things like the Pioneers I would have started pre-production at Coach House and then gone over to Maximum Sound. Some of the Equals would have been done at Coach House and then gone on to Manfred’s studio. I’d know if I heard them because Coach House sounded really different to anywhere else. It helped me to establish myself through that sound, you know.

The Pioneers’ ‘Racial Segregation’

What was the inspiration for ‘Funky Like A Train’? It’s quite different to anything that the Equals had done till then.
Well you know the music can never be one way, because I was always looking for something else. So experiments continue and occasionally when you experiment you find a germ of an idea, a germ of a song, and that stands out from the rest. ‘Funky Like A Train’ just happened to jump out of the group of tracks because I had to approach it in a special way.

It’s mainly based around a clavinet, right? And Ron Telemacque on drums?
It’s the two of us on drums! Like James Brown. I think Lincoln played bass, Ron was on drums, I overdubbed drums, I overdubbed all the other things, the synths and so on. For me the most remarkable thing about it is the actual sound of the train and the synthesis of the voices to make it sound like a train. Even though I did it and I know how I did it, it can still fool me.

Yes, but why are trains funky? Where did the concept come from?
The whole idea is that the funk of a train is quite magical. It sounds like absolute nonsense but when you actually check it out it’s like, ‘Oh yeah I see what’s happening’. The lyrics came to me in a certain kind of way.

Did they think you were barmy when you brought them the song?
You don’t know how much shit I got with regard to the Born Ya and Mystic Syster albums. In the end the record company were asking me every other second, ‘Is that the synthesiser? Is that the synthesiser?’ It was early days for synthesisers and people could only see it making those warbly sounds that some bands had used it for.

How did you get into production?
I was always in the role of making music. When Eddie Kassner signed us he got a guy in called Tony Clark, a Decca producer, who didn’t like the music and wouldn’t stay. I remember going in there and having to sit with Adrian Ibbotson the engineer and he said ‘Okay, who’s producing the session?’ I’m looking at him and I don’t know what it means. I say, ‘You better ask Mr Kassner’. ‘Mr Kassner will only come in and check at the end.’ And so I became the producer of the Equals. After a while it became my band, if there was a piano part, I played it; if there was a bass part and Fuzzy wasn’t there, I played it. In the early years Mr Kassner took all the credit and later he gave me a half credit, but long-term he acknowledged I was the producer of those records.

Marco [aka Eddy Grant] ‘I’m Coming Home’
Tony Morgan & Muscle Power ‘Racial Segregation’ (note similarity with ‘I’m Coming Home’
Coach House Rhythm Section ‘No Such Thing’ (basically a later dub version of ‘Racial Segregation’)

Did you get producer royalties?
No, no, no, no! No. We didn’t have a proper hit until ‘Black Skin Blue Eyed Boys’. When I wrote it, I had to demo it myself. I put down all the tracks and I remember playing it to Mr Kassner. He listened to it and he said ‘What the fuck is that? A hit, my ass!’ I said ‘I wanna do it.’ ‘Not at my studio with my money.’ I went into ABC Studios in Portland Place and recorded it. When I came back to play it to him I said you’re not having your name on this right? ‘That’s right.’ I played it to him, he says, ‘Edward, my son, you’re making a great mistake.’ I got Lee Shepherd in to help promote it. It was one of the biggest records I’d ever had. It was released on November 17th. Hendrix was dead and immediately thereafter I nearly went.

Tell me about The Pyramids
When the Equals wasn’t happening, I used to go in the studio and experiment with ska. In my father’s house in Kentish Town was a guy I called Georgie but was actually called Roy Knight, who had just joined a group called the Bees, who were backing Prince Buster on a national tour. These were the guys who would become the Pyramids. I went out with them on a few gigs. I was about eight years younger than Roy; I’m a little kid hanging out. Buster wore this little pork pie hat and I got the job of holding Prince Buster’s hat before he went on stage. He’d do a song or two first and then he’d say, ‘Yout’!’ and I’d come on stage and give him his hat, he’d put it on and the whole place would go crazy.

I asked Roy if he would organise with the guys to come and do a session with me. We went to the studio on the basis that I make I will get some royalties whenever it sells. So this guy who’s taking them in the studio is really a schoolboy earning 2s 6d a week pocket money! Remember I told you I can write ten songs in a night very easily? Well, I was about to demonstrate it. We’re in the studio, an idea comes out. Off they go. Anything out of my head. Another song. There are other guys from the Equals there. My brother Patrick and I created a party atmosphere and I started to talk about the things that were happening in Jamaican music. I started talking about the black women in Skaville, bad people that lived in Phoenix City, even though I didn’t know where Phoenix City was. I’d never been to Jamaica. My only interface with Jamaican culture was hearing the sound system playing in the clubs or having parties next door.

We did maybe 15 or more songs. And they’re done, one take. This guy Jimmy Spencely, the second engineer, he came up at the end of the session and says ‘Love the session Eddy but what about the money? The studio costs, the tape. The money is ten pound a man.’ But I don’t have that kind of money. ‘Well, you better find it.’ Any half of them could have killed me. Mr Kassner came down, paid for the studio and the guys. Then when they’d gone, Kassner says ‘Play me the tape. You did all of these today? Jesus!’ So we signed a deal, and I was so glad to have got out of the shit that I didn’t care what happened.

We were in Germany a few weeks later and Eddie Kassner turned up. ‘Edward, something very serious has happened, you know those songs you did, I put them out and people can’t get enough of them.’ I called the band and said if you want you can become the Pyramids; change your name from the Bees. And so they were out there earning more money than we were. ‘Train to Rainbow City’ was the first British-produced ska record to chart. The next record I made with them was ‘A Wedding In Peyton Place’, which again used my voice. I did an album called the Pyramids with them singing. The original session all appeared on an album called Club Ska or something.

What about Symarip?
The guys in the Pyramids eventually ended up being called Symarip, which is Pyramids spelt backwards. ‘Skinhead Moonstomp’! I wasn’t involved in the track but I owned the song; they sold it to me. There are two songs in my entire life that I own but didn’t write, one is ‘Skinhead Moonstomp’ and another one called ‘Why Build A Mountain’.

You produced a couple of all-black rock bands. Sundae Times and Zapatta Schmidt
Sundae Times was Conrad Isidore, Wendell Richardson who went on to sing with Osibisa, Calvin Fuzzy Samuels, who played on all those Equals hits and then went on to play for Crosby Stills Nash & Young and everybody else. They were the greatest group of black rock musicians in the world. There was no band that could touch them. One night Stephen Stills saw the band and he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. So he nicked them. He broke up my band, a band I loved and recorded. They were my alter ego, we played funky soul music with the Equals, and hard rock with Sundae Times. I bought them equipment, I bought them a van, I roadied for them, even when the Equals were selling millions of records I was out on the road with them.

I produced them. I gave them pieces of my songs but I don’t think I wrote anything for them. The album Us Coloured Kids was recorded in about ’68 or ’69. When you listen to the playing, it’s awesome. Conrad Isidore is the baddest drummer I’ve ever heard, period. His brother Reg Isidore played with Robin Trower and his youngest brother Gus plays with Seal. Musical family.

The end of Sundae Times was that the two of them went off with Stephen Stills and played with all those rock’n’roll artists. And Wendell took all the equipment and the van and formed Osibisa. The music industry is so racist, though. Osibisa is the greatest afro-rock band in history, I was meant to be their first producer. Tony Visconti did it instead, and maybe Tony Visconti can produce David Bowie, but he can’t produce Osibisa. So all that great music came out sounding like a little tin cup rolling down a hillside. Kofi is my percussionist when I play live now.

What about Zapatta Schmidt?
I produced them. But they were a bona fide band. A great band too. Zapatta Schmidt and Sundae Times were the two great black rock bands There were not many at that time. When Stephen Stills broke up Sundae Times, I had no one to play with, so when I saw Zapatta Schmidt playing upstairs at Ronnie Scott’s, I thought, yes here’s another great bunch of musicians. So I made a record with them. They were Tony Zak-Edmonds keyboards, Ronnie Telemacque drums, he’s now playing with the Equals, Marcus James, who’s now married to Marcia Barratt of Boney M, then there was Vince Clark the singer and Joe Blanchard the guitarist. All black. They could rock the shit. I used them as my backing band after Vince left them, on my first gigs I did as a solo artist.

When was your first solo record?
My first solo record was made in 1972 as Eddy Grant. It came out on Torpedo first. That’s the album which nobody knows about, the Hello Africa album. It’s just called Eddy Grant. Then it came out on Ice in 1974 in the Caribbean.

I want to ask you about ‘Nobody’s Got Time.’ Why did you come back to it so often. You’ve managed to reinterpret it in so many different ways.
I did it on the very first album, Hello Africa, with a guitar synthesiser. I played that sound on that and on ‘Georgetown Girl’. That album was done in ’72. Then I did ‘Nobody’s Got Time’ again which came out on Ice, the version with the harmonica, part one is the vocal and part two is the harmonica. Part three is ‘Timewarp’. I’ve also done ‘Nobody’s Got Time’ with the Equals on Mystic Syster. They’re all different. That’s what remixing is really supposed to be about. If you’re going to revisit the song you must give it some degree of originality.

And ‘California Style’. Two different records in one tune, what was that about?
Well as I’ve grown and got better facilities, my work has taken on a different shape, but the central feature is that I’m a Caribbean person who has influences from the world, and that Caribbean-ness must stand firm in that firmament. If you listen to the lyrics of ‘California Style’ you’ll hear it talk about me basically. All the music of me. You’ll hear the way in which I’m prepared to stretch and groove and with very limited resources quite successfully. The music of ‘California Style’ and ‘Nobody’s Got Time’ and all the others is me being able to stretch the boundaries of a song, either sonically, rhythmically or lyrically.

What about the second half of it?
The jam? Since it came out there has not been a Trinidad party where that’s not been played. There has not been a successful record out of Trinidad that has not incorporated some part of that record. It’s like a well that people go to for inspiration. That song stands till today.

Were you aware your records were so popular in New York?
I had no idea. After having all the success in the Caribbean, Trinidad in particular, [Ensign Records founder, then at Phonogram] Nigel Grainge had arranged for me to go over to New York. I hadn’t been successful in the States since ‘Baby Come Back’. None of my music, as far as I knew, was meant to be here and yet people knew it. All the guys who were playing in the gay clubs, people like Larry Levan, Jellybean Benitez, all those boys were playing my music. I thought this was incredible, but it was not on a level that could take me into the charts; that didn’t happen until much later. Here I was the underground, so I came back to the UK with a renewed vigour. I’m getting through. It’s not massive, but I’m getting through. People like Arthur Baker were getting my records, my brother sent stuff over to him.

I met Sylvia and Joe [Robinson] at All-Platinum Records [they later launched Sugar Hill], and a bunch of other people. When I finally got through to Epic and Columbia there was this guy called Vernon Slaughter in black promotion and he championed me to that company. He told them, ‘If you wanna know what’s happening it’s this’, and he threw ‘Walking On Sunshine’ on to the table. Eventually they signed me. I went to LA and was a guest of my friend Mike Parrish who took me to meet Stevie Wonder. Stevie wanted to record ‘Walking On Sunshine’ with Aretha Franklin but it had fallen apart. Of course Arthur [Baker] did it, Bill Summer also did a version.

Tell me about ‘Timewarp’
I’d made Nobody’s Got Time again. It’s obviously a track I love. Something about that track fascinates me, and every time I make it I find something else and I add something else. This time I’m playing around and I’m starting to hear an instrumental. So I got the synthesiser and I started to play. I thought it was alright. Then everybody who heard it told me how brilliant this track is. Anyway, we put it out as the B-side of ‘Nobody’s Got Time’ and everybody flipped the record and all the gay clubs were playing it. All the Larry Levans were playing it. They were using it for catwalks and fashion shows. So I thought surely this has got a life of its own.

Not only had it refused to die, but I went to Xenon in New York one night after having been to the Paradise Garage and I heard a wall of sound playing ‘Timewarp’, ‘Nobody’s Got Time’ and ‘Walking On Sunshine’ and they were like absolutely new records. I couldn’t imagine that’s what I had made. Xenon really was like a wall of sound, so many different speakers, and it imbued these records with a whole new set of dynamics. It stunned the hell out of me and gave me a whole new focus. From then on I started to concentrate very heavily on the bottom end of my records. The synth bass, I must’ve been one of the very first people to use it, that bass that’s on ‘Timewarp’ it’s only now that people are using that sound on their records.

What about Nigeria? You spent some time out there, didn’t you?
Nigeria was like Trinidad for me. They both came at a very important part of my career and they afforded me the celebrity and money to be able to do other things that transported me to another level. I’d been successful in Nigeria with the Equals in the first configuration in the ’60s. I couldn’t believe that I would ever be more successful than the Equals were. It happened in Nigeria, so much so that I ended up recording in Yoruba, two albums for Nigeria specially which were immensely successful. Tunes I’d had originally done in English and lengthened. ‘Wipe Mon Fe E’ which is Say I Love You and that was 18 minutes long. One side of the album. I loved the record. It was a moment in time for me and Nigeria. We were selling so many records into Nigeria, I bought a pressing plant – the British Homophone pressing plant in New Cross. I was manufacturing so many records for myself and shipping out to these places that I thought it would make sense to own my own factory,

So did you meet Fela?
I did interface with most of the other artists at the time, like Sonny Okosun who really introduced me into Nigeria. But I didn’t come into contact with Fela at the time because he’d just been beaten by the army.

Did you tour in Africa?
No. Although The Equals went to Zambia at the end of it all. In ’71 and ’72.

When did you leave the UK?
November ’81. It was time. I’d promised myself when the time came I’d know. I’m not one for the cold weather. It was a particularly cold winter and I was driving my daughter down to school at Parliament Hill and my brother’s car, going down the hill, wouldn’t stop. It was going straight for the crossroads and I turned to jam on it onto the kerb. And I thought no, leave the country right away. It came to me like that. I told my wife I was going out there to find a house to fix it up and then left quicktime. Not many days after.

Mind you, when I left I lost all my baggage with all my songs for my next album. When I got there I didn’t have a studio, nothing. No clothes, no songs. A German record company were threatening to sue me over non-delivery of my album. I had to build a studio quickly. I got one in about six weeks, and the album was Killer On The Rampage which would spawn ‘Don’t Wanna Dance’, ‘Electric Avenue’, ‘War Party.’ That album was the quickest flash of recording. I went there in November 1981 and by the end of 1982 the album was out.

What motivates you as a songwriter?
To tell a story in a short time in a way that nobody else would, that is the ultimate for me. That’s why I like songs like ‘War Party’, ‘Gimme Hope Joanna’, ‘Living On The Frontline’. They would be called protest songs, but in a way that nobody else would protest. Always just to do something slightly different, because slightly can be a whole heap in musical terms. The difference between G and G sharp is only one little step but it’s a whole heap in terms of music.

© Bill Brewster & Frank Broughton

Strange Things Happened To Richard Norris

Strange Things Happened To Richard Norris

To celebrate the publication of Richard Norris’s excellent memoir, we’ve exhumed this brilliant 2010 interview from our capacious vault. In this wide-ranging interview, we cover lots of ground that Richard writes so well about in Strange Things Are Happening, from his teenage punk band, the Innocent Vicars, through to Jack The Tab with Genesis P. Orridge, The Grid and his solo project Time & Space Machine. A vivid account of clubland and beyond (the wizard’s sleeve).

What thing are you most proud of?
The thing that I’m most proud of is generally just the ability to keep making records really. Looking at it as a long haul rather than instant gratification is the thing that I’m proud of and I think the way I make records now has definitely got that in mind. I’m aware of current trends but I’m thinking a little bit like what they’ll sound like in twenty years’ time as much as two weeks’ time. In terms of music, probably ‘Floatation’, The Grid’s first single, I would’ve thought would be up there just because it was quite a timely record in that it was sort of the peak of Balearic Ibiza period but just managing to kind of marry John Barry with Café Del Mar was quite an achievement. More recently, I think one of my favourite things has been the mix of ‘Roscoe’ by Midlake which, in terms of the Wizard’s Sleeve, is probably the one that, if we were going to do it again, we wouldn’t change at all. [Laughs]

How do you make sure the machines that you use don’t force you to make music their way?
I think there’s two parts to that. When people come round to my studio they’re quite surprised because I haven’t got racks and racks of gear. I only use very very minimal bits of equipment so my first thing is therefore melody and ideas rather than, ‘How does this computer’s internal logic work or how do I turn the reverb off?’ Also, I’ve been working on making a record and I’m writing the whole thing on just the one sound, which is just a quite, cheap Fender Rhodes copy, which is quite neutral. With modern technology you’ve got unlimited sources of sounds that you know that every time you do put up a sound it can lead you in different areas so I’m trying to pare it down to this one noise at the moment.

On the other hand, I like the machines talking as well so it’s like a bit of both. The thing I like the most is the bit where you can hear that it’s humans and machines, so it might be a very stark and very motorik rhythm but it’ll have a very human melody. That’s probably my favourite thing about music really, like Neu! where it sounds very machine-like but it’s actually quite human as well.

Do you always know when you’ve made a hit?
I don’t think so. I always think I’ve made a hit [laughs]. But yeah, I am an eternal optimist. When we [The Grid] did ‘Swamp Thing’ which was such a big hit, the record company said, ‘Right, well the last one’s got to number three so the next one’s got to be number one’. So we were going in to make a record with the pressure that it had to be number one. And you can’t really write like that and I think that if you do write about music thinking that it’s going to be a hit, it’s never going to be because it’d be just too contrived.

Do you think that’s because of who you are because I’m sure that someone like Stock, Aitken and Waterman would just knock them out, because that’s what they did.
Oh yeah, I think so. For me personally, it’s more difficult to make pop music than it is to make leftfield music but that may be just me, I’m sure Stock, Aitken and Waterman would tell you the opposite or Elton John would say the opposite. But I don’t know, I think because of the changing nature of the music business and also how I think about music, I’m not that interested in having a hit, but then success and a hit doesn’t necessarily have to be the same thing. Our [Beyond The Wizard’s sleeve] mix of ‘Roscoe’ was a hit to me.

Well, hit as in a song that has legs rather than necessarily getting into the charts.
I think you know when to finish, definitely. That can be quite hard if you’re working on your own, as I was doing with The Time & Space Machine record. There’s a natural period when you’ve done it and sometimes – particularly with remixes – if you do something and the record company come back and say, ‘Ooh, can you just change one little thing?’ It’s quite hard because you’ve kind of done it and the arc of it has gone to beginning, middle and end and you’re like, ‘Well, I can’t really…’

Why do you think DJing leads so naturally into producing and remixing?
The bit where it’s great is when you are remixing and then can go and play it out. I remember playing things out where the new T Bar is downstairs, they’ve got a lovely Funktion 1 system and just playing a few things on that before people were in the room and just hearing this great sound and how it’s going to work on the dancefloor really did affect what I did with the records. So it’s kind of hand-in-hand.

I mean, I started off aged fourteen playing guitar and shouting in a kind of Buzzcocks type band and so the music bit came first before the DJing. I’ve never really put myself up technically as an amazing DJ. I know how to do it but I’d say I’m much more a musician than DJ. They go together because of the process. If you are out and playing all the time and listening to other things and being in that environment and then you can bring that into the studio. And that kind of energy that you get on a Saturday night if you can bring that into the studio on a Tuesday morning then that’s great!

You said you were in a band at fourteen, what was the band?
We were called the Innocent Vicars.

Where did you grow up?
In St Albans and we did a little single and got my dad to drive me up to London, and it was the first time I’d come up to London. I’d kind of read about Rough Trade in the back of NME but I’d never been to any of them… So we stopped off at Rough Trade and they took half of the records and paid us money out of the till straight away so we paid for the whole pressing really with one stop at Rough Trade. And it was quite intimidating that shop. But, you know, they were great.

Then we went from there to the BBC and took the records to John Peel and just went up to the desk and asked to see him and he came down, took it and played it the next day so [laughs] so from then on I was like, ‘Right, this is what I want to do’. I think part of that was it was quite an interesting Undertones-y kind of record, but also because there was a little period of time where if you were really young and were writing and putting out records, it was really really encouraged by the generation above. There was a St Albans label called Waldo’s and they had bands like The Tea Set, The Bears and The Bodies and that became Bam Caruso Records which is the psychedelic re-issue label which I worked for later on. I remember going around to see them and they were really welcoming. As a little kid you thought they’d tell you to eff off but there was a definite period – I don’t know if it was particularly PC to encourage the kids? It was very open. It was lucky we hit that thing, I hope it’s the same for anyone that’s fourteen and making music. I hope the avenues are open like that. Because that was it for me after that, I knew what I wanted to do.

What happened to the rest of the Innocent Vicars?
Bloody hell! I don’t know actually! I think the drummer Cali looks after Nick Drake’s estate. The rest of them, I’ve got no idea. I haven’t heard from them in a long time. I have tried to track them down on numerous occasions. But I also found out that there’s another band called the Innocent Vicars in America who did a funk album but I’ve never found it. I’m wondering if this record actually exists because why would there be two bands called the same name when it’s such a ridiculous name?!

How did you wind up at Bam Caruso? Was punk your formative influence?
Yeah, pretty much. Just the excitement of it. There’s two things really. One was the DIY bit of it. But the other thing was the romanticism. Malcolm McLaren is looked upon as a bit dubious really but I like how he always seems to have a story, he has a romantic vision for everything. I really like that. I was always much more a Pistols person than a Clash person because of that. I just like the ideas he was bringing to it. Putting odd things together that didn’t really work, as he did later on with lots of other projects. I like the idea of DIY and of something dramatic.

I got into Bam Caruso through Waldo’s, run by this guy Phil Smee and Cali (who was the drummer in Innocent Vicars). Phil’s done a lot of sleeves for Ace and Charly; he did a lot of Elvis Costello records, designed the first Motorhead logo. He’s an amazing record collector. I used to go in the school holidays and work for him. He’s got this big house, there’s probably more records than furniture. I don’t know how many thousands. We used to sit there all day just making up cassettes of disco. I remember acquiring someone’s mobile disco collection and just sitting there all day making disco cassette tapes. We’d invent genres like ‘cosmic cowboy’, which was psychedelia but it had to have a slightly trippy edge to it. Phil invented the word ‘freakbeat’ which is basically mod gone a bit wrong. It was the most idyllic apprenticeship for 19 year old trainspotters. It was perfect. It was psychedelic university. Probably the most formative influence of my career was Phil. He was a very, very generous sort of character. Just allowed me to do what I want. We had a magazine called Strange Things Are Happening, which I was really encouraged in.

So after you were in the Innocent Vicars, were starting to produce in your bedroom?
Mainly guitars and little amplifers and…

TEAC four tracks and things like that?
Yeah a bit but I don’t think I even got that far. I used to get old radiograms from jumble sales. I used to get those and take the speakers out and weld them together and do different things with them. I used to do tape experiments with two tape recorders, very primitive double tracking.

Was that inspired by Cabaret Voltaire?
Pretty much. There was a record on Waldo’s called ‘X. ENC.’ by Nigel Simpkins, which was the same sort of period as Cabs. In that they cut up very old records and certainly Cali and Phil when they made tapes they would put in spoken word bits, I got really interested in that from then. By the time My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts came out I was fairly aware of using spoken word and stuff like that but that then was a big step for me. Even today there’s a strangeness about it that’s really appealing and it’s got a darkness but it’s got a funk to it as well. If there is one record that is most influential, I would say it’s that. It’s a fairly obvious one for people coming from sampling and stuff like that. But it was Phil and Cali that inspired me more than Eno.

What was the link between that and Jack The Tab?
Well we were writing this magazine Strange Things – it was a slightly more cult and fan-based version of Mojo. There’d be comics and books but anything that was slightly towards ‘60s psychedelia. I went to interview Genesis P. Orridge in about summer of 1987, ’cos we found out he was a fan of Bam Caruso and psychedelic records. Previously I thought he was some kind of strange Alastair Crowley nutter. I didn’t really think of him as being someone who was into the sort of records that he was. So we went to interview him about it and he was fascinating. I wasn’t a big Throbbing Gristle fan – they had a slight love/hate relationship with the press. But he was a real enthusiast. He introduced me to things like Martin Denny and he was really into Tiny Tim and he was massively into psychedelia as well. In terms of things like exotica, it hadn’t really surfaced yet and he was massively into that. He had a great dark sense of humour that was obviously being lost on people. People thought he was a po-faced mad magician or something. So we went to interview him and he said, ‘Have you heard of acid house?’ and I was like “No! but it sounds great… psychedelic dance music. Brilliant! Let’s do it.” He hadn’t heard any records either, he had just heard the words “acid house” because I don’t think there were any records then? There probably were some records. X-Ray’s ‘Let’s Go’ was probably earlier but we hadn’t heard anything. We just thought, “That sounds amazing, let’s go into a studio next week.”

So we went into a studio in Chiswick – it was probably September ’87 when we went in, there just happened to be this guy, Richard Evans, who went onto become the main engineer at Peter Gabriel’s studio years later. There was an Akai S950 and an Atari computer. I bought a load of people from Bam Caruso and Genesis brought a few of his mates including [Soft Cell’s] Dave Ball which is the first time I met him. We just sat there with piles of records and loads of videos and tapes and stuff and just put it all into the computer. And we had a rule that we had to record and mix a track in an hour. This guy was so fast on the computer and there were 12 of us in three rooms, including children and a dog and stuff and people sort of splicing a bit of tape over here and finding a bit on the VHS and throwing it all in. And everything was first take. There were a couple of keyboard players and so we just bunged it all in. And ever since, I always thought everything takes too long in studio because I was used to making records in an hour, which is such a weird concept these days. But it was great! It was just an amazing thing. So we made this record which we thought was acid house and by the time we’d finished it we’d heard some acid house. So we put out this one single which incorporated elements of an Adonis track, ‘No Way Back’. That was the first one we’d heard and by then we’d started hearing them and then we started going to Shoom just a bit after that.

Who’s ‘we’?
Me and Genesis P. Orridge, we all used to go to Shoom. And the first person we met was Andy Weatherall, walking down the stairs. Who very proudly showed off his Psychic TV tattoo which I think he’s since had covered up. And ever since Gen thought he was the King of Acid House because he thought he invented it. I really think he thought, ‘These are my people and this is my time’ and in a way, in his mind, it was. But I don’t know if anyone else would’ve felt the same. I remember everything was very kind of loved up at the time and he sent in his picture for his Shoom membership card wearing a T-shirt with “Hate” written on it and Jenni Rampling wasn’t very impressed. Didn’t quite fit into the peace and love manifesto [laughs]. We used to go down there every week. Lots of people couldn’t get in and we’d make sure we’d go before 12 and we’d always bring something, like a T-shirt or a record or something and they’d go, ‘Ah great, come in!’ It sort of dovetailed into going out really.

There’s something that I quite like about British music is when you hear something second-hand and you make up your own idea of what it would be like. The same happened in psychedelia, hearing about San Francisco and all that. To get the records it took quite a while, there was probably a delay of about a year.

Well, they all sound like Lewis Carroll Does San Francisco…
Yeah I think that’s partly ‘cause there wasn’t a war going on that affected the British people in that they might get drafted. We were allowed to revert back to childhood. It was our idea of what psychedelic music with sampling would sound like. And the weird thing about it is that it sounds like Beyond The Wizard’s Sleeve. I’ve kind of gone full circle.

Obviously you saw the connection between psychedelia and acid house – it’s quite weird because it was a big break in dance music in this country because of all the old soul boys who had obviously been alienated by the psychedelic nature of it. But yet there were other people like Pete Tong who were quite straight in a lot of ways, embraced it. It was quite a strange time. Did the psychedelic aspect of it appeal to you?
Yeah, absolutely. Having worked at the psychedelic re-issue label and writing about that period, I was really disappointed that I’d missed it basically. So I thought, ‘Right, this is it, this is my time for something to go on.’ And it did feel really special. There was a self-consciousness about it, you knew there was something going on. Even though there weren’t that many people, not to start with anyway. The psychedelic thing, there are different strands that go together. I can definitely see it from Mancuso and his going to see Timothy Leary’s League of Spiritual Discovery talks and bringing that into The Loft. Because there’s definitely a psychedelic link there. Also there was a mix that we did of Findlay Brown’s ‘Losing The Will To Survive’ and Mancuso really liked it but he wouldn’t play it because the lyrics were negative. And I thought that was really interesting that there’s this thing that goes through all the records that he’s played. So there’s definitely a link there, although obviously I didn’t know it at the time.

Did it feel like it was going to be something massive when you were involved in it? Did you think it was going to explode or did it feel like this little secret thing that you liked?
The one thing that was really interesting about it was that it seemed to change very quickly. So from people going to this Gilles Peterson thing on a Sunday at Dingwalls where people were wearing very kind of Gaultier, uptight, black and white with very shiny shoes to completely the opposite: very loose, quite hippie. That was almost overnight; it was certainly no longer than two months. And because it was so quick, you didn’t have time to think of it as ‘your little thing’. But I do remember walking down the street in Euston Road at four in the morning in the early summer of ’88 and I was wearing a Shoom T shirt and someone over the road was shouting at me and they were wearing a similar T-shirt. There were like these lone beacons of acid house-ness and that felt like, ‘Oh right! There are more of us out there!’ I never wanted to keep it elitist even though at the time I was definitely quite snobby and wouldn’t go to the big raves because anything over 2,000 I thought was a bit too big – which was a shame because I’m sure I missed out on some great things. So I did have some elitism but mainly I wanted as many people as possible to get into it really.

I think it was so caught up in it, I didn’t really feel a need to keep it small. Even when the press got to it. Having read Sidney Cohen’s Folk Devils & Moral Panics: The Creation of Mods and Rockers and the way the press reacted to that and even that Marek Kohn’s Dope Girls about the 1910s to 1920s which is an amazing book about moral panic. It was the same thing – you could almost mirror acid house in what happened then. It didn’t really bother me, I thought it was quite funny. I think for a lot of people reading about it in The Sun was the first thing they’d heard about it. I loved how within days they had ‘Buy Our Smiley T-Shirts’ on the same page saying, ‘Drugs Are Really Bad’ and ’10 Bad Things About LSD’ by our doctor Vernon Coleman. They really went for it for a few days.

How did you get together with Dave Ball?
We did one track and we just got on really well…

Did he go to Shoom as well?
He was a big northern [soul] kind of guy and used to be able to the backflips and everything. Not sure whether he went to Shoom, he probably did. He’s always been a clubber really. We didn’t go that many places together actually, not until a bit later on. But I think he had his moments… and he still does. After Jack The Tab we were going to do an album as The Grid and The Grid was initially me and Genesis and…

Was The Grid named after the Lime track?
It wasn’t, but then we found the Lime track at almost exactly the same time and did a cover of it. We just had a list of names, including The Matrix, which was one of them and various other things. And Dave knew the Lime stuff and was very keen on that end of things. And stuff like Klein & MBO. Loved all that era. We were both massive Hi-NRG fans anyway. So it kind of fitted.

Genesis was going to be in The Grid and then we had some meetings with some record labels and Gen kind of didn’t want to do it because it was Warners and they’d had a deal with them before and it didn’t happen so we said, ‘Alright so we won’t do it’, and the guys from Warners said, ‘We want you to do it on your own’. So the plan was to do an album which would use house music or dance rhythms but as a kind travelogue. So you’d have an English one, an American one and a Latin one and do it with a load of different producers. But then Mark Kamins did something almost exactly the same and I was like, ‘DAMN! I really wanted to do that’, so that got scuppered. But I was signed to Warners (East West) on a solo deal and still was going to use loads of different producers but the first person I worked with was Dave and it worked so well we thought, ‘Sod it! We’ll just do it together’. So for the first album Dave wasn’t even signed, he was on the production end of it. But it changed from the second album.

So what was The Grid experience for you? It was sort of a changing era of music…
Part of it was great because it was coming from our slightly more ‘art school’ approach, slightly more experimental end of things. The bands that me and Dave really bonded on were basically the Hi-NRG, Suicide and Kraftwerk and a general art school mentality. But then that’s just one end of it. On the other end of it we had quite a lot of commercial pressure because we were signed to big labels. So there was always this kind of thing of ‘You’ve got to have a hit record’. We got signed and dropped from three major labels. It was quite schizophrenic really… our taste was quite broad. We loved pop music and we loved experimental music so it was trying to marry the two that sometimes worked really well and sometimes didn’t work at all. And a lot of the time we were putting those records out so we were making our mistakes in public. There is a great compilation album of The Grid to be had but there is also a not-so-great one as well!

The fact that that hasn’t come out is due to the three record label situation?
Yeah. We got dropped after we’d just done ‘Floatation’. We didn’t have a deal at all. The only reason we got a deal with Virgin was down to Boy George. We did a mix for him and he just completely championed us. No one was going to touch us because we’d just been dropped. It’s very rare to get dropped and picked up again. But he just really, really went with a real enthusiasm to Virgin and they picked us up for the second record and at the same time we got a new manager called David Enthoven. He hadn’t been doing anything for years – he’d been basically doing NA and AA and any kind of ‘A’ that you want. He had last been seen when he was managing Squeeze, being stretchered out of Madison Square Gardens for some kind of rock‘n’roll-related accident. In the ’70s he’d been this massive manager. He’s the ‘E’ out of EG Records, he managed Roxy and T-Rex. He was quite a player for the late ’60s through the ’70s but then had fallen into a bit of disrepair. But then we were signed to Virgin, he called me up and said, ‘I heard your first album and I cried’. A real posh, Chelsea, kind of slightly Austin Powers-esque type character. He said, ‘Yes, yes it reminds me of first Roxy Music, I have to manage you’. So I was like ‘Brilliant! Well, I’m not going to turn him down, he sounds amazing!’. So he started managing us. He was an amazing character and pulled in for the Four Five Six album, most of Roxy Music on it and Robert Fripp and loads of other people. Sun Ra did a bit on it, we got an insane list of people on the album, pretty much down to David. Who then went on to manage Robbie Williams and make stupid amounts of money! He met Robbie through us actually, through one of our guys. A fantastic character, worthwhile just for the stories.

Dave had quite a lot of success with Soft Cell so does he have an innate pop sensibility?
Absolutely. Certainly in terms of arrangement and simplicity and in terms of ‘hook’-iness. He’s very good at that. He’s a massive soul fan and also a massive Throbbing Gristle fan so quite wide Catholic taste. We are also drawn to dance music that’s based on a gay tradition. We’re drawn to ‘camp’, we’re drawn to artifice and to Hi-NRG; to Divine and Bobby O. Not in an ironic way. We absolutely love them. Some of those influences coming out and presenting them to the public can sometimes be misread as us ‘trying’ to get a hit. But actually we’re just trying to sound like an Italian disco record from 1982.

What’s the connector between The Grid, Beyond The Wizard’s Sleeve, Time And Space Machine and acid house?
I think mainly it’s the music of ‘sensation’. That’s the main thing. All studio-based rather than performance-led. For me, lyrics wouldn’t be the number one part of the song. It’s the melody and the sounds. Using the sounds as thematic hooks as well. It might just be an echo noise or a reverb or a little backwards sound. And then repeating that and making that the focus of the record rather than the singer or the performance of the song. It’s probably something that’s tied to the late 20th century and early 21st century. Recorded music is only something we’ve had for a short period of time. Recorded studio music is the link.

So live performance is not something that attracts or interests you?
It’s something I’d really like to do but we’ve never really found a really satisfying way of creating a great electronic sound live. I’m sure people can do it but it’s personally not something I’ve found.

Time and Space Machine is the first thing you’ve done on your own. You’ve always collaborated with people. What’s the difference?
It’s good because I don’t have to second-guess it. I can go up on my own path quite a lot more. It’s bad because you can lose perspective and you can go up alleyways that probably you shouldn’t. I’m really enjoying it. It’s probably the only record I’ve made where most of the decisions are mine. Not in a controlled way but in that it’s more ‘me’ than any record I’ve done before.

Where does the self-discipline come in when you’re on your own? Because the self-discipline comes from the collaboration usually doesn’t it?
I work in short bursts – I won’t work more than about six hours a day on the music because I think I get as much done as I would in twelve. Because you have to be on it and focus. I’m quite good at that, it’s never been a problem. Same for remixes as well. I kind of set a time and get that done. I think sometimes the opposite. Sometimes the collaborative ones can be a bit more unwieldy.

A bit more unfocussed… I suppose when you get two people trying say something….
Yeah, but also great as well. Certainly with Dave and with Erol, I’ve always found the things that we’d do on our own would be different. Some part of two people creating something else is really really useful.

What’s the difference between working with the two?
With Dave, it feels more like a duo, felt more like a band. Wizard doesn’t feel like a band. Wizard’s definitely more like a project than a band. But maybe that’s because of the way we approached it.

In what way?
In terms of we’d do gigs, it felt more like a band thing. With the Wizard it feels something we come together to do occasionally. Me and Dave have very different backgrounds but me and Erol, it does feel like two people coming from different places and the things that we get out of it are very much what we wouldn’t get on our own. Other thing with me and Dave, we’ve worked together a lot longer. I think with me and Dave we would just go and do something, we’d go and explore and just try stuff. With me and Erol, it’s a lot more considered, it’s a slightly different method of working. It’s quite difficult to describe.

Is that just to do with the different personalities involved?
Yeah, yeah I think so.

[bandcamp width=100% height=120 album=4088249139 size=large bgcol=ffffff linkcol=0687f5 tracklist=false artwork=small]

Which comes first, DJing or producing?
For me, definitely producing, making records comes first. But then again I go through periods where I get massively into DJing again. And it’d be down to one great gig, with one great sound system. And you’re like, “Right! I want to do that again and again”. In fact that happened last year, I just hadn’t played any warm, analogue, big room, electronic sets for ages and I just did one at Cargo and it just worked so well I was like, ‘I want to do this all the time…’ So I’d say production really. Going into somewhere with silence and then creating something.

How did you get into doing the Richard Noise writing for the NME in the late 1980s?
I was still working at Bam Caruso and I used to go out and take them our albums and the Strange Things magazine and James Brown was really interested and like, ‘Oh! You’ve done a magazine? Tell me all about it…’ Then I did the Jack The Tab album and I took that up to them. As I was taking the Bam Caruso records, I was saying to them – this was probably from September ’87 until the summer of ’88: ‘You’ve got to write about acid house, it’s really really important because this is our punk’. And I just remember people like Steven Wells saying, ‘Ah, nah that sounds rubbish, like bad Gary Numan’. There was no-one really championing it. And then Jack Barron started but it took a long time. It took almost nine months. It took until it was almost on the pages of The Sun before they did anything about it because it was quite strange because you’d have thought they’d be really on it.

So, why did you do the Paul Oakenfold book? It’s a pretty epic task writing one.
It started off as an acid house book…

So did you get commissioned or did you start something first?
I just met someone who was working at the publishers at a party and said, ‘Ah, I used to write’ and they said, ‘We’re looking for some more music books’. So I just gave them a few ideas. I was going to do a Scissor Sisters book at one point. They basically wanted to do books around acts really other than subject books as I initially came in saying I wanted to an acid house book. And that kind of mutated into the Oakenfold book. And it was their idea to hang it around Oakenfold. In hindsight I would’ve rather done the acid house book. Not knocking Oakenfold but it does set it in one particular time and space. I could’ve done a more general history, and it would still be about. Having said that, his career was quite useful, he’d done stuff at Profile and Def Jam and been in New York quite early on and the Ibiza bit and Goa. It had kind of wrote itself in the timeline of his career and so every pointer along the way I managed to get in a bit about the southern soul scene, pre-acid house, which hadn’t really been written about much. But I found him very generous really. He gave a lot of his time and was a really nice guy and I really enjoyed working with him.

What do you do when you’re not making music?
Look after my daughter quite a lot at the moment. There isn’t much time, I do make music almost every day. I listen to music is the answer to that! I have got interests outside – I just got a qualification as a psychotherapist actually so that’s what I do. I’m interested in the brain and how it works.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7pkjQZKRganbSyKPoeNRDa?si=629ea61b360f4a2e
The soundtrack to the book Strange Things Are Happening

How does that impact upon the music and making music?
I don’t know yet. It’s just a new thing. I’ve just got my first qualification. I think it impacts a lot on the way I just experience the world.

What do you use when you DJ?
I usually use CD and vinyl. I’ve not gone Traktor or Ableton as yet. It took me quite a while to even just work out how to be great at CD DJing. And then Andy Carroll showed me one trick, and that was it, I worked out the bit I was going wrong. I just thought of it as a Technics deck so when you’re trying to spin back and cue up. Basically he said, ‘When you do that start on the vinyl button and when you try to do the other bit and you just want a slight jog, switch it to the CD button’. That’s all I needed…

Where’s your favourite club that you’ve played at recently?
At Istanbul the other month. It was a tiny club, probably 100-120 people. It was run by about 8 people and it was the first night and there hadn’t really been anything like that in Istanbul for ages and so it was just an amazing atmosphere, they were all really, really up for it. And about 5 minutes before, they’d just finished painting it. They were all really, really nervous but it went really, really well. That was great. It’s ongoing and it’s quite a big thing. There’s some great DJs, there’s a guy called Baris K in Istanbul. A real kind of crate-digger guy for Turkish stuff. So we hung out together, looking for Turkish music…

What’s the most superstar thing that’s happened to you?
They did a decibel counter for the Smash Hits Poll Winners party in about 1994 when we were playing, it – the event, not us – got the loudest screams in history or in Guinness Book of Records or something. Probably when Take That were playing rather than us. I remember we were introduced by Superman, or rather the bloke who played Superman on the telly, so that was quite good. We’ve been introduced by some quite strange people. We’ve been introduced by Angus Deayton on TOTP, which was quite weird…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LavM8PLJ9-g
The Grid on Top Of The Pops, with added Angus Deayton

What’s the one record that never leaves your record box?
I really like that Hardfloor version of ‘Yeke Yeke’ by Mory Kante. I play that quite a lot. In fact, that has left my record box, in which case probably ‘Dirty Talk’ by Klein and MBO.

What do you hope to be doing in ten years time?
Music. I just recently decided that. I just want to still be making music in some way. Whether I get paid or not, it doesn’t matter, I’ll still be making music.