Category Archives: Jazz-Funk and Southern Soul

CLASSIC CLUBS: Crackers

CLASSIC CLUBS: Crackers

203 Wardour Street, London 1973-81

“Noone else could do what I was doing at that time, that type of music what I was playing. It attracted the good soul people to come down and have a good boogie, show what they can do,” George Power told BBC documentary The Last Pirates of his time at Crackers nightclub. “People come here to dance, express themselves let themselves go – whether you were gay, straight or bisexual it was just something unique.”

Crackers has made its way into London clubbing folklore for the fact it inspired a generation of soul boys to sally forth and transform the future of British music. With its first-rate musical credentials, it enticed white and black music lovers to come together on the dancefloor like never before, in a scene that helped black kids develop their own sense of Britishness. There were a few clubs around London that were channelling the same aesthetic of danceable and hot-off-the-press jazz, soul and funk – Upstairs at Ronnie Scott’s, the 100 Club, the Electric Ballroom –  but it was Crackers, located in the heart of Soho and presided over first by Mark Roman and then the much-revered George Power, that became the scene’s heart and soul.

Back in the early ’70s, as northern soul was thriving in the top half of the UK, a different breed of swing-heavy, funk-inflected soul took hold down South. Moving out from suburban clubs like Chris Hill’s Goldmine in Canvey Island, this blossoming soul movement and its largely white following started gathering for weekenders at venues across the country including Caister and Prestatyn, led by the ‘Soul Mafia’ of Hill and his coterie of likeminded DJs, Robbie Vincent, Greg Edwards, DJ Froggy and a young Pete Tong.

But while these parties concentrated on almost exclusively black music, as the scene grew, black dancers felt edged out. “The Soul Mafia things tended to be white beer boys in T-shirts, dancing to the obvious big records,” says soulboy and Crackers regular Terry Farley. The West End was a similar story, thanks to blatantly racist door policies.

George Power would go on to a long career in radio, launching Kiss FM with Gordon Mac, as well as Mi-Soul, London Greek radio and Crackers Radio

“They wanted the blackness, without the black,” agrees Good Times’ soundsystem DJ and early soul boy Norman Jay. “It was great for white kids to like black music, but they didn’t want black kids in there for some reason.” Norman recalls how things changed as football terrace culture infiltrated the scene. “I can remember the earliest things at the Goldmine in Canvey Island, and it was almost exclusively black. If you look at photos of Canvey Island circa ’74 it’s black. Within a few years the clientele had changed.”

For the black kids who went to Crackers, soul represented a move away from the reggae that was the staple of their neighbourhoods. “I was kind of divided,” says Fabio, one half of the legendary drum and bass duo, Fabio and Grooverider. “I felt reggae and soul music, but in them days, you couldn’t really be both, you had to be one or the other.” So much so that he used to lie about going to soul clubs. “A cousin of mine used to go to soul clubs, and she used to sneak me in and I never used to tell anybody.” Dancer and DJ Cleveland Anderson felt a similar divided loyalty. “It wasn’t we weren’t into reggae, but as soon as I got old enough to go out on my own, I was drawn to the soul.”

Crackers was where many British clubbers experienced a truly mixed crowd for the first time. “Blues parties [all-night ska and reggae house parties] you didn’t meet any white people in there,” says Fabio. “It was 99 percent black. But this was 50/50. That was the first time I’d ever seen that. And the first time I saw colour didn’t really matter. You could go out with a white girl and it weren’t no big thing.”

“Crackers was much more urban, a heavier London,” recalled Gilles Peterson on The Last Pirates. “A blacker London. It was less what I was used to but equally it was really exciting, and it was a whole other world.”

There’s almost no visual record of Crackers. This classic piece of archive was actually shot in Brixton’s Cloud’s club, but it features many of the great dancers of the scene.

The club was slap-bang in the middle of Soho, at the Oxford Street end of Wardour Street. Not much to look at, it was essentially a basement dive that housed a cramped dancefloor for 200 revellers – a stark contrast to some of the more swish West End clubs of the era. “Upon arrival we’d go down a short flight of stairs and the first thing that greeted you was the smell of sausages and chips,” says Farley (the food was a licensing loophole). “The carpets were dirty and sticky. The sound system whilst loud lacked any real clarity and the high end would always leave you with ringing ears the next day.”

“Crackers was more about dancing, it wasn’t to do with girls really,” remembers Soul II Soul’s Jazzie B. “For us it was just purely about the music: getting that early music before anybody else. It was mainly for dancers, because it wasn’t where you came to meet people, it was where the dancers came to burn.”

It was also markedly different from northern soul, a scene based on unearthing rare soul from the ’60s. “The difference between us and those northern kids is that we were into new things,” says Norman Jay. “New music, new sounds, new clothes. We didn’t want to look back. Looking back was rock’n’roll and dinosaurs. We wanted the latest, the hippest.”

And that’s certainly what was delivered at Crackers. George Power would be its best-known DJ, but it was Essex-born Mark Roman who set the wheels in motion in 1973. He was drafted from a residency in Leytonstone to spin records six nights a week, and given carte blanche to play pretty much whatever he wanted – which was anything from deep soul to jazz-funk to fusion to proto-disco.

It was on Tuesday nights when it started to get serious – with Roman impressing collectors and dancers alike. On Tuesdays he would play US imports only and had no hesitation in sitting the jazz-fusion of Grover Washington Jr next to the out and out funk of Bobby Byrd and Johnny ‘Guitar’ Watson.

Other tunes he made his own include Juggy Jones’ ‘Inside America’, The Blackbyrds’ ‘Rock Creek Park’, Donald Byrd’s ‘Change Makes You Wanna Hustle’, David Ruffin’s ‘Walk Away from Love’, Dooley Silverspoon’s ‘As Long As You Know,’ Fatback Band’s ‘Going Home To See My Baby’, Black Blood’s ‘A.I.E.’ and Crystal Glass’ ‘Crystal World’.

“He never mixed but kind of segued the tracks, so it was this seamless mixture of funk and soul,” says Fabio. “It was amazing.”

It took a while to get going. “Tuesday nights had a big fat zero people when I started,” Roman told Terry Farley. But then it all changed. “One night in the middle of winter we had over a thousand people there… the walls were wet with water dripping down them. That night was like no other night I have ever known, it was so rammed I used to have to piss in a glass under the decks I had no chance of getting through the crowd and back in time.”

And while Tuesday attracted the diehards, it was the Friday lunchtime dance sessions that made Crackers famous. “I used to play all my new stuff,” remembers Mark Roman on SixMillionSteps.com. “Somehow it just went down. The hot summer of ’76 was when it really peaked.” It was customary to see kids bunking off school, uniforms screwed up in duffle bags, while the grown-ups awarded themselves a half-day. DJ and producer Ashley Beedle remembers changing into his Bowie trousers in the school toilets at lunchtime. And social media is awash with similar stories. “Went every Sunday and Friday lunchtimes while still at school 1979/80,” recalls Crackers regular Lynn Gant. “Went in lunch break when started work in Holborn, then stayed until 3pm. Told friend to tell boss I was ill!”

As well as the music, Crackers was known for its forward-thinking fashions, with many an outfit patently ahead of its time. Much of the fashions that would become known as punk started here. Bondage trousers, army surplus, fluorescent colours, clear plastic jelly sandals. There was an overall atmosphere of tolerance and freedom. “It wasn’t a gay club per se, but it was hip and fashionable,” Norman Jay told RBMA’s Stephen Titmus. “Yes, the music was brilliant, but it was the coming together of different social groups and races. That was what was groundbreaking.”

By the mid-’70s, Crackers was pulling in punters on Saturdays and Sundays as well as Friday lunchtimes, as dancers flitted from one West End soul venue to another. But while they may have been dedicated to the cause, they weren’t helping Crackers turn a profit, and many remember when they turned the cold-water taps off to encourage spending at the bar. This coincided with a clash between Roman and new management who were not only unhappy at the low bar takings but were also less than delighted with his music choices, and so it was that in late 1976 Roman and Crackers went their separate ways and he moved back to Leytonstone’s Jaws, taking half the crowd with him.

As well as George Power, a fair few DJs passed through Crackers’ doors, including Andy Hunter, Pepe, and latterly, Paul ‘Trouble’ Anderson. “Andy Hunter, he was just amazing,” recalls Cleveland Anderson. “He was a white guy, skinny, kinda tall. Boy he could throw music down. He seemed to have this ability to pull out the new tunes that the heads would like and also the girls would like.” But he soon became disillusioned with the way that the music world was going and when he left George Power stepped in to the limelight.  

Power had been thrust into the multi-ethnic community of North London when he arrived from Greece aged just 15, and before long had immersed himself into DJ culture, ending up with quite a following at a club called Bumbles in Wood Green. When he left here for Crackers in 1976, Power brought with him a gay and black crowd. The music had moved from the slower funk vibe into disco, and he was quite a bit older than the kids on his dancefloor. Despite seemingly corny shoutouts – ‘Wang dang dooey, shoobedy on down’ – his music and his over-the-top flamboyance endeared himself to the Crackers’ crowd. They knew that under his wing they would hear the best music, dance in peace and come together.

“A very strange guy,” says Jazzie B. “Quite hard and a little bit militant. But very cutting edge, and he was very into that whole black thing, the whole black scene.” And this gave Crackers a big pull. “He was totally on the button, understood what black kids were about,” says Jay. “He became a legend. In our eyes, inner city urban kids, George Power was more important than any Chris Hill or Robbie Vincent. They didn’t mean anything to us. They weren’t as cutting-edge, or as up to the minute as George.”

Even his predecessor agrees. “Over many years he showed he was a true soul man,” Mark Roman told Soul Survivors magazine (??). “George was more of a person’s DJ than a lone wolf like myself. George had the knack of getting others involved, and that was his strength I guess.” And he played everything from Philly soul to jazz-funk to the staples of what were to become rare groove, including Reuben Wilson’s ‘Got to Get Your Own’. “When George took over, it went slightly more specialised,” says Cleveland Anderson. “George could go half the night playing jazz. You had to be serious to stick with it. Some people – not me – but some people would be like ‘What’s George doing, man?’. Good jazz, it would be good stuff.”

And when the music got more ‘hardcore’ so did the vibe. “The amount of girls at the club diminished and the vibe became edgier,” says Farley. “Full of young kids from some of London’s toughest estates, peace and love was not the mantra.” The trouble came from all quarters. “Towards the end of the ’70s a lot of the reggae clubs were having trouble, the girls were leaving those clubs and coming to the soul clubs,” says Cleveland Anderson. “Crackers started having problems with reggae people coming down and George used to play a whole night of jazz just to get rid of them!” But Power was no fool when it came to looking after himself, and the club. “He had the hardest geezers around him,” remembers Jazzie B. “And always women you’d never fuck with on the door. At the end of the day no matter what you did you wouldn’t mess about with the scene.”

And while dancing was always essential to Crackers, it was when Power came in that the serious dancers really took their place at the forefront. To dance here was not a casual thing. “There was a lot of rivalry in the dancing,” remembers Cleveland Anderson. “The dancefloor was tiny. Unless you could dance, really dance, you would not step over that line, you’d dance on the carpet at the side.” The style of dancing was a real contrast to the high-octane amphetamine driven Northern soul. “The southern style was tight and precise: feet made rapid tap movements, knees were bent, hips sashayed, shoulders rolled, heads bobbed,” wrote Robert Elms in The Way We Wore. “The whole effect was somewhere between boxing and bopping. And if you couldn’t cut it, you didn’t go anywhere near the floor.”

For some the dancing wasn’t just recreation, it was their day job too. “A lot of them used to go to dance classes, Pineapple studios, ballet Rambert” says Norman Jay. “All those guys were the first black dancers to feature in pop videos.”

Horace, Franklin, Trevor Shakes, Tommy McDonald, and future DJ star Paul ‘Trouble’ Anderson: the best dancers enjoyed a fame that often eclipsed the DJ. And competition between them was fierce. Cleveland Anderson recalls a time when Horace came down to reclaim his crown. “There was talk that Horace was losing it and he’d stop coming to Crackers for a while. Then he came to one Sunday. He walked in halfway through the night with this hot bird, put his leather bag down, grabs a chair, puts it right in the middle of the dancefloor and starts dancing with the chair. He was on it, around it, flicking it up. He just started freaking out and everyone backed off. The record finished, he put the chair back, grabbed his leather bag and walked out of the club. It was as though he was proving a point. Next day everyone was like, ‘Did you hear about Horace last night?’ He was the talk of the scene. That was how much a dancer meant in London then.”

George was good to his dancers. “He would use them to break certain records and focus upon them during the session, made them feel special and they stayed loyal,” says Farley. He was also generous to Anderson, encouraging him to make the move from dancer to DJ. “That’s how I started, basically, as a warmup DJ, and I did that for years and years and years for no money. It wasn’t about the money, I just wanted to play my records.”

The great Paul ‘Trouble’ Anderson rose from the dancefloor of Crackers to become one of London’s best-known DJs through the ’90s

By the late ’70s, 230 Wardour Street was leaning heavily towards punk as its Vortex nights started to become more well-attended. Crackers finally closed its doors in 1981 as the key players were let loose taking the soul, jazz-funk scene to the next level. Norman Jay went on to build the Good Times soundsystem with his brother Joey; Jazzie B formed the Soul II Soul collective and set up residency at Covent Garden’s Africa Centre; Fabio went from soul boy to jungle forefather; and Paul Trouble Anderson became a key DJ on the rave scene. It’s fascinating to consider what direction these pioneers might have gone in without their time at Crackers. As for George Power, he continued his mission to bring the dancefloor to the forefront of popular culture as he helped set up Kiss FM and of course continued to DJ, eventually setting up Crackers radio. Sadly, neither Power nor Roman are with us today, but their legacy most definitely lives on. “At the time you didn’t know that in 20-odd years you’d still be referring to this place. It was just a place you went to on a Saturday afternoon and had a wicked time in there,” says Fabio. Norman Jay sums it up best. “We felt this was home, this was our place,” he says. “We belonged, we were wanted.”

© Sarah Gregory

The Crackers community is very much alive and well, with Crackers Radio broadcasting wondrous soul 24-hours daily, and throwing parties and events in the heart of Soho.

Cleveland Anderson sowed the soul

Cleveland Anderson sowed the soul

In the 1980s, black Britain’s soundtrack evolved from the ‘heavy manners’ of reggae and dub, washed in biblical prophecies and tales of oppression, to favour a lighter, more optimistic sound. Rather than looking to the music of the islands, the British-born children of the Windrush generation wanted some of the American soul glamour they occasionally saw on Top of the Pops. In London, this meant partying in the soul clubs of the West End and suburban hotspots like Ilford‘s Lacy Lady or Flicks in Dartford. These were places where you could hear obscure danceable jazz and the hottest American imports, and, especially in the city clubs, where intense competitive dancing was the main event. Cleveland Anderson made his name dancing and DJing across this scene, which became known as ‘jazz-funk’, as well as venturing north to play many of the all-dayers in cities like Manchester and Nottingham.

interviewed by Bill in Acton, 9.9.04

In the city clubs it was all about the dancers, wasn’t it?
Back in those days the dancers were every bit as important as the DJs and the music he was playing. People like Horace, Franklin, Danny, all those guys. They were stars. The DJs… yeah… but people actually came to see the dancers, too. People like Clive Clark, who won the Disco Dancing championships. Names like Peter Francis, he was one of the exceptional dancers of that time. These guys were characters in the club. If you didn’t have your dancers, it wasn’t really regarded as the edge. The girls would just stand there watching these guys dancing with naked chests. The music that you got there, the music would be more underground.

In which places?
Crackers, especially. Countdown, north of Oxford Street. There’s a club called Hombres there now. Paul Anderson played there. You walked in and it was like a spaceship. When I first went, I was there practically three quarters of the night trying to work out where the DJ was. He was all the way up there, in the spaceship! That was on a Friday and it was excellent. That’s where I first heard records like Celi Bee and the Buzzy Bunch ‘One Love’, Munich Machine ‘Get On The Funk Train’.

The week started with Hemel Hempstead Scamps on a Monday, Tuesday it was Sutton Scamps. On a Wednesday we would go to Bumbles in Wood Green, which was George Power and Paul again. On a Thursday, we’d go to Beagles, then Friday lunchtimes was Cracker, Friday night would be either Countdown or 100 Club all-nighters with Ronnie L. God, Ronnie was hot! Late 50s, white guy, but did he know his music!? He had people hoppin’ in there. Saturday lunchtime was Crackers.

Dancers at Clouds, Brixton, 1978

Tell me about Crackers
It was amazing, ’cos you had kids maybe as young as five or six dancing and the age group went up to 18 or 19. It was one of those places that was actually really hard to explain unless you was there. Even I could move in those days, but you should’ve seen some of those kids moving! These little kids were hot! You had that on a Saturday lunchtime. That started at half 11 or 12. That used to be Ronnie L and Greg Edwards as guest, maybe every other Saturday. What would happen then was we’d rush home and shower, then Saturday night would either be Global Village with Pepe and Norman [Scott].

What was Global Village like?
Global was excellent. It was the first club where it made me realise how much of a strong gay scene there was on the soul scene. Music was great, great atmosphere. At the time it was the most flamboyant place to go, with the most flamboyant people. In those days, soul boys were quite freaky anyway. Beagle started as a Saturday rival, but you’d only go to Beagles as a break from Global. Then on a Sunday night it was Crackers. It cost 30p. to get in. With your ticket you’d get a basket of sausage and chips.

That was a licensing loophole wasn’t it?
Yeah. Well 12 o’clock was considered late in those days. I always remember the first time I went to Crackers. I wasn’t old enough to get in so I had a birth certificate that was two or three years older than I actually was.  My heart would be pumping. I was small, so I was worried. The bouncers there, two long-haired hippie looking guys, who looked so far removed from the soul scene, and you got in there and the music was damn funky man! The music was a mixture of jazz – George Power played some great jazz – The DJs were Andy Hunter, Pepe, Paul and then later on they brought Mickey Price in. Andy Hunter, he was just amazing. He was a white guy, skinny, kinda tall, boy he could throw music down. He started getting disillusioned with how music was changing. I started DJing in 1977, and he DJed for maybe another two years and he was one of the guys I looked up to. He sold off his record collection. At the time, he was the one that people came to hear, then obviously George became the main DJ.

George Power

What was the difference between them?
I would say Andy moved you more. Andy probably had the edge with regard to the overall crowd. He seemed to have this ability to pull out the tunes something new that the heads would like and also the girls would like. Whereas George was more of a heads DJ. When George took over, it went slightly more specialised. George could go half the night playing jazz. You had to be serious to stick with it. Some people – not me – but some people would be like ‘what’s George doing, man?’. Good jazz, it would be good stuff. Then Paul came on board. He was George’s protégé. We used to get down there early because Paul was warming up.

This is Paul ‘Trouble’ Anderson. Wasn’t he one of the dancers?
Yeah, Paul was a dancer. I’ve known him for donkey’s years. I used to take my crew up to the Royalty and challenge him to a dance. Paul took over George’s spots as warm-up and George did the main spot once Andy left and it lasted maybe another three four or five years.

Paul ‘Trouble’ Anderson

When did Crackers run from?
’75 or ’76 and closed 1980? There were other clubs: Titanic in Mayfair, which was very good. Studio 21 was on a Thursday night. That was where Spats was on Tottenham Court Road. Small place, 200 or 300 people. Then there was Frisky, that was really good. These were all West End clubs. West End was ripe then. Everyone made a beeline for it. Beagles was in West Kensington, in a pub. Maze, Gullivers. Tottenham Royal was maybe 1973 or ’74. That used to draw people from all over London, on a Thursday night. Then there was the Hop Bine in Wembley. That was on a Saturday. Andy Mann was the DJ there, ran a shop in Rayners Lane. That was where I heard Mass Production’s ‘Welcome To Our World’ for the first time. It was the stomping ground of Tommy Mack, white guy, good dancer; The Wembley Footsteppers and Foot Patrol. Wicked dancers. Clinky, Tony Newman, Peter Francis.

There was a place called Bandwagon in Kingsbury on a Monday. It closed at 12. As most clubs did in those days. The bouncers scared the living daylights out of you. You had one guy that looked like Henry Cooper with a nose that had been broken a million times, and another guy we called Twitch. They didn’t speak to nobody. Twitch would twitch and Henry’d give it the nod. And then you’d walk in. Even though it was in Kingsbury and on a Monday night, it drew some serious clubbers. This was around 1979, Hudson People ‘Take A Trip To Your Mind’ was coming out. Things like the Kay-Gees ‘Tango Hustle’, Teena Marie ‘I’m Just A Sucker For Your Love’, Francine McGee ‘Delirium’, all massive records at Bandwagon. South London had some places but it was definitely more reggae. East there was definitely stuff there, but that was Froggy’s territory.

What was the racial mix in the clubs?
In the soul clubs, it was predominantly white. The reggae scene tended to cater for the majority black. It wasn’t we weren’t into reggae, but as soon as I got old enough to go out on my own I was drawn to the soul. Global Village there was maybe 50-100 black people out of 2,000 capacity. Sutton Scamps, there’d be seven or eight black people. It only started changing at the back end of the ’70s start of the ’80s, when jazz-funk started coming in. And towards the end of the 70s a lot of the reggae clubs were having trouble, the girls we’re leaving those clubs and coming to the soul clubs. Crackers started having problems with reggae people coming down and George used to play a whole night of jazz just to get rid of them!

I’ve heard Crackers was a little dodgy for handbag nicking and such?
Towards the end maybe. We became disillusioned with the amount of reggae people coming into the scene. And the music began to change as well. There was a new audience who couldn’t get down to jazz and uptempo soul records. The tempo went down. The two-step soul was really the reggae boys’ soul. Anything beyond that bpm they had a problem with. At the start of the ’80s you had Larry Graham ‘Coming Out’, Howard Johnson ‘So Fine’, Collage ‘Get In Touch’, great tunes, but they were the ones the reggae boys could get down to. A lot of us went with it cos it was still soul, but there was a change.

What was Gulliver’s like?
It was okay. It was more for your dress-up crowd. The music wasn’t bad. Slightly posey crowd. You didn’t go there to sweat.

And the 100 Club?
The 100 Club was a teen disco, but it was so good everyone used to go! You’d need to get down there by 1 or you wouldn’t get in. It would be packed solid by 1pm. It finished at 4pm. It was a sweatbox in there. It was underground and in the summer you’d be dripping. The music was Hi Tension, Cameo ‘It’s Serious’, Fever ‘Don’t You Want Me’. Greg (Edwards) played his best when he played at 100 Club. It was one of the most memorable, because it had something that a lot of clubs didn’t have, it had kids that could really dance. Kids of five dancing to Brass Construction! Not just getting down, but serious moves. It was amazing. There was a lot of black dancers coming down there, a 60/40 split.

Most of the good dancers at Crackers were black weren’t they?
Yeah. Trevor Shakes. What’s his daughter’s name, she’s a well known R&B singer now. Kelly Le Roc! Trevor Shakes was a serious dancer, you had people like Horace who was my favourite. Horace used to come down to the Clarendon in Hammersmith occasionally. One day he came and Sylvester’s ‘Mighty Real’ came on. I’ve never seen a person dance like that in my life. He danced to every word Sylvester sung. He had a move for every word. He was a trained dancer, too. Gradually everyone stopped dancing and just watched. Either he was on something that night or he was on a different planet. He was like a dancer acting out a part, you know.

There was a lot of rivalry in the dancing. The dancefloor was tiny. Unless you could dance, really dance, you would not step over that line, you’d dance on the carpet at the side. There was talk that Horace was losing it and he’d stop coming to Crackers for a while. Then he came to one Sunday. He walked in halfway through the night with this hot bird, put his leather bag down, grabs a chair, puts it right in the middle of the dancefloor and starts dancing with the chair. He was on it, around it, flicking it up. He just started freaking out and everyone backed off. The record finished, he put the chair back, grabbed his leather bag and walked out of the club. It was as though he was proving a point. Next day everyone was like, ‘Did you hear about Horace last night?’ He was the talk of the scene. That was how much a dancer meant in London then.

Horace was dark skinned, coffee looking, very slim, bald head, he looked like the model dancer. Then you had Mohammad, he used to dance at Pineapple [dance studios]. Like a lot of them. He was more light-skinned, and with a more of a rough edge about him. They didn’t like each other. Then you had another guy called Danny. He was also very good. You also had Peter Francis, very stocky, he’d do some amazing things with his feet, he didn’t move his top half, it was all about his feet. He also won the Disco Dancing championships. They were an integral part of the London scene and most of them used to follow George Power.

That must’ve been a hell of an attraction knowing George Power had this kind of following.
Oh yeah, it was. They danced at a time when dancing was taken seriously. They lived for dancing in the way that I lived for DJing. They wanted to be professional dancers. It was all they ever wanted to do and they mastered dancing like the DJs mastered their decks. Even though the minority were black, there was serious black music being played down there.

If you walked down the road, there was no mistaking the fact that you were a soul boy. The reggae boys, they wouldn’t hesitate in telling you ‘batty boy’ because the girls might have loved the soul boys, but the reggae boys hated them! Compared to then, you could argue that the dancer is non-existent now. Horace and those guys were proper exhibitionists and showmen. In fact, when George use to run the best dancer competitions, the best dancers wouldn’t even go up!

Did the DJs of the period talk on the mic?
Most of them did. The only one that didn’t was Andy Hunter. George used to speak, not all the time, but he used to speak. Most DJs did because that’s what part of the job was: to entertain. More the DJ/entertainer, Andy was getting disillusioned with this, he wanted to shut up and play the music.

What did you think of it? Did you think they should’ve shut up?
I’m a bit of hypocrite. When I was DJing I used to talk, but when I was in a club it used to wind me up. But then there was a new breed of DJ who came along like Steve Walsh, and Chris Hill…

I get the sense that they were like pop radio DJs except they played better music…
Yeah! You’re right. The DJs did strive to sound as professional as they could, but playing great music. Probably till the mid ’80s. You listen to [pirate stations] JFM and Horizon, the presentation was way up there with Capital. So you were getting great presentation and great music.

Do you think club DJs spoke because they saw one of the avenues to progress was to get on to radio?
Most definitely. Presentation was the order of the day. Even in a club. To get a residency you had to be able to present. Outside the underground clubs, you had to be able to present, to give it the showmanship. And there weren’t many underground clubs about. There weren’t many promoters. There was Brian Mason, John Shohan, who ran Americas and the Margate soul weekenders. There was Pete Hardings, he used to run the Lyceum all-dayers. And the Isle of Wight weekenders. Brian Mason used to run the Slough all-nighters. The Slough all-nighters were very good. Players Association, Breakfast Band, Level 42 played there. Steve Walsh, Alan Sullivan, Tony Hodges all DJed there. They used to cater for the more black side, because you could see there were more black people getting involved. And around this time, the sound systems started breaking in.

Did the sound systems started playing soul because it was getting harder to get into the clubs?
There had always been problems for black people to get into clubs, but at that point, we generally got in because black people were such a minority at that time.

Because you were a novelty rather than a threat?
Precisely. The problem really started towards the late ’70s and early ’80s and it got worse and worse. You couldn’t put on a soul night. They thought of soul and they thought of black people, and they though ‘nah, they don’t drink!’ It wasn’t good for business. They couldn’t afford to give over a club on a Saturday to a load of black people who were just gonna come and get down to the music. And around this time, the sound system’s started breaking in.

It drove the soul scene in a slightly different direction. The likes of me and Norman [Jay] and Rap Attack. We were the first to start soul blues [sound system house parties]. It took a while and there were a lot of knock backs before it started. I went up to Glasgow, on and off between ’81 and ’83 and when I came back I noticed there was a new generation of black kids that had nowhere to go. They was just loafin’! There were loads of empty properties. And of course there was always that blues [party] heritage there from our parents anyway. 

How did things get started?
Soul blues started round west London. When Norman [Jay] used to have his birthday, they’d empty his whole house, a three floor terrace. Or we’d go spotting empty houses. We’d go round the back, nudge the window, change the locks, make sure there’s electric in there. In those days, you were so brazen, you’d turn up at 10 o’clock in the morning offloading massive speakers and the neighbours aren’t even asking any questions! We’d walk around the streets in the area, and invite pretty girls with flyers. Then we’d string up [the cables] and come ten o’clock BAM! And the whole street would rock.

Fantastic!
Now I think back, and I think how did we get away with it? The police would turn up and ask ‘Who’s party is this?’ ‘Oh, it’s my mate’s 21st’. ‘It’s my birthday sarge.’ ‘Okay, turn the music down.’ ‘Okay’. Then as soon as they’d gone round the corner BAM! On again. Eventually they wised up to what was going on, there were a few too many birthday parties happening! We had streets blocked off. We had a house that maybe held 300 people if you were lucky, and there’d be 1,500 descending on some small back street trying to get in.

Then they started special blues units with plain clothes officers walking round Acton High Street, looking for flyers. So we had to think ahead. We’d have two houses, one on stand-by. We’d set up a scaled down sound system in this one, but the main sound system would be in this other one. Once they’d all arrived here, we’d throw the switches on the other one, so by the time they got there it would be full and they wouldn’t be able to throw anyone out. This went on for a good while.

But it did change the music a lot. At that point, soul had definitely gone down in tempo. The fastest soul records would be Royalle Delite ‘I’ll Be A Freak For You’, Sharon Redd, those kind of things became uptempo soul. Jazz definitely went out the window. If you wanted to listen to jazz you had to go to Dingwalls on a Sunday. Also electro had come on board by now. You had certain really funky gritty records like Serious Intention’s ‘You Don’t Know, but they were the minority. You had Surface ‘Falling In Love’, Collage ‘Get In Touch’. I didn’t mind them, but you know… You still had vocal tunes coming out, Brenda Taylor ‘Can’t Have Your Cake…’

But also at that time there were the tracks that would later become rare groove. I tunes like Archie Bell & The Drells ‘Don’t Let Love Get You Down’. I remember playing that in the ’70s, but it didn’t come big until the ’80s and it came big through the reggae boys’ soul scene. And things like Jacksons tune ‘Blues Away’. And Jeffree’s ‘Love’s Gonna Last,’ which originally came out in ’78 or ’79, suddenly started to be big in 1980. It slowed the music right down. All of a sudden Archie Bell stuff became big, things like ‘Strategy’, ‘Harder and Harder’. That’s what became rare groove.

Rare groove was soul music that the reggae people liked. The soul scene hasn’t recovered since. The nearest thing to the old soul scene now is the soulful house scene. Byron Stingily sounds like Lenny Williams to me. Rare groove was the equivalent of northern soul but northern soul was proper soul music. I thought London had lost the plot. I hated it.

How did you cope with the change?
Once the scene started changing here in the early ’80s, we started going out of London more. We started going up north more. I started running coaches. The music had still changed up there. At that time Colin Curtis, Mike Shaft, Richard Searling that was the line-up there and the music was good, fresher up there. I remember going up to Manchester and it reminded me of what London had been… They had some dancers there and people from Birmingham used to travel, like Bulldog and his crew. Manchester Ritz was really good. People used to travel from Birmingham, from London, to go to the Ritz. Everyone used to descend on Manchester. All-dayers started popping up. Every week we were on the coach. Nottingham, Leicester, Shrewsbury. Every week we were going to some all-dayer.

And you played at some of them.
Yeah. I did Ritz in Manchester, Tiffanys in Sheffield, Snobs, Maximilians, Powerhouse in Brum, Rock City in Nottingham, Notts Palais.

What was different between the south and the north in that period?
Well, I used to go up north even before I was playing. We used to go up in the late ’70s to, I think it was called Angels in Burnley. That was a serious soul place. Phewww! I think it was on a Wednesday. I used to go up with Norman. He’d left school, but he was four years older than me. He used to have a blue escort van, no mattresses and it was a bumpy ride. We used to get up there and dance all night and then come straight back! And be in school for nine o’clock next morning. We used to do that every Wednesday. So, apart from reading Echoes and Blues & Soul, we were aware of the north. The Manchester scene had not yet been taken over by the reggae scene, like it had in London.

How important was the Royalty in Southgate in uniting the tribes from the suburbs and urban London?
It was probably one of the clubs that was keeping the soul scene alive once Crackers had fallen by the wayside. I used to travel from here [Acton] to there, rather than go to Cheeky Pete’s which was just down the road for me [Richmond]. We went on the Saturday nights. Froggy [Steven Howlett] done the Saturday, then you’d have guest DJs, Chris Brown, Sean French, Tom Holland, all that crew. Chris Brown and Froggy were our DJs. Then maybe Tom Holland.

Why?
We felt Froggy and Chris threw it down in a black way. It wasn’t just what they played, it was the way they played it. Froggy in the mix and Browny, even though he wasn’t a mixer, it was the records he selected. Chris Hill was the God for that [white suburban] crowd. But it was the complete opposite for us: it was Froggy and Browny. Froggy started a thing called Bentley’s on a Sunday in about 1983 and it was very very good. Me and Norman had started a thing called the Bridge on a Monday. Froggy had started this thing with Derek Bolland out in east London. You went down there and the crowd was predominantly black guys and white girls.     

© Bill Brewster & Frank Broughton

Froggy got Britain mixing

Froggy got Britain mixing

Interviewed by Bill in London, 7.9.04

After an eye-opening trip to New York in 1979, Steven Howlett, aka Froggy, showed the UK how powerful a tool mixing could be. His inspirational visits to the Paradise Garage and Studio 54 led him to own the first pair of Technics 1200s in the UK. He also built himself a monster mobile sound rig, inspired by the roadshows of radio giants like Emperor Rosko and the rigs of East London reggae don Jah Tubby. Armed with giant sound and killer mixing skills Froggy became one of the most influential spinners in the so-called Soul Mafia.

Where did you grow up?
I’m a proper cockney. Born in Whitechapel, by the Bow bells. Born in The Wright Hospital, November 8th. Age don’t talk about. I’m a veteran [he was 53.]

Did you grow up in Whitechapel?
I grew up in Whitechapel, then moved to Rainham, between 7 and 12, then moved back to Ilford. Dad worked at Plessey’s at the time, which was a big concern. I couldn’t stand school anymore and my dad had influence there and it was hard to get an apprenticeship. I wanted to do an electronics apprenticeship and in those days you could leave when you were 15, so I left just after my 15th birthday. Did that till I was 21. Went and got my City & Guilds. Covered all aspects of engineering. My thoughts were always towards the radio, studio equipment and sound systems. Started developing this skill for sound systems and radiograms.

When did you start collecting records?
When I was five. In those days, all you had was wind up record players. Clockwork, with a handle on the side. In those days, it was 78s and you had to change the needles after three or four plays. So my pocket money was a box of needles every week, and a record. So they’d lock me in my room and I’d play my records.

“There was nothing like mixing in those days.”

What sort of records?
I had a great interest in general melody stuff, things like Guy Mitchell ‘Singin’ The Blues’, ‘Rock Around The Clock’, I was a big Lonnie Donegan fan. Then Plessey’s went all electronic and they did a motor, my dad came home with it one night when I was about seven, which did away with the handle. So I could play records without using the handle. Six months after that, when I was about 8, my dad kindly turned up with a radiogram which I completely commandeered for the next ten years. It had two eight-inch speakers, real deck. Just at that time, 7-inch singles came out, so every week I had a single, and because I didn’t have to change the needles anymore… I got sweets instead of needles. Then I started building things – sound – and people started giving me speakers. My mum died at an early age, so I was pretty well going through some bad times when I was younger, so the music was a comfort… This radiogram, they made the mistake of giving me a drill, and when they came back home I’d drilled all the radiogram out, speakers everywhere. I had eight speakers in there. It blew up. But they gave me that [radiogram] box and I had it for ten years. That’s when I started collecting records. When I started my apprenticeship, you didn’t get a lot of money, about a fiver a week, I quickly became the Apprenticeship Association man, which gave me the clout to put a few do’s on. Plessey’s, at that time, had a social hall. I became chairman of the Ap. Assoc. With all my knowledge, I scrounged speakers, amplifier, and I had a couple of old Garrard decks and started doing little do’s for apprentices.

Where you using two decks, then?
There was nothing like mixing in those days. All you had was a big hi-fi amp, a Leek 70 or quad amplifier, which was the crème de la crème, and both of those had two decks plugs, so you could switch from one to the other. I had a couple of Garrard turntables and an amp and a couple of speakers. And I already had quite a collection and those records were quite appropriate for these do’s. Towards the end of my apprenticeship, I’d saved quite a bit of money, and I went and got two sheets of eight by five and at that time the only 12-inch speaker you could get, associated with Plessey was a Wharfedale, so I phoned the company up to get the specs and built two cabinets with tweeters in, in my house. That was my first two disco speakers. Continued with my apprenticeship. I’d heard there was a little place starting up at the Bird’s Nest in Chapel Heath. They were Whatney’s pubs with a little room in each pub and they were interviewing for DJs. So I went along and got it straight away. I asked for my own night and started with nothing and built it up till it was packed. And it was on a Monday night. So soon as I’d finished my apprenticeship, the day I finished, I jacked it in the next day. I wanted to go professional. To my horror it wasn’t as easy as I thought. I bought a little Thames van for £100, put some gear in it. Proudly walked in the next week and told them proudly I was a professional disc jockey. They laughed me all the way out of the door, because you really could not get insured for any kind of entertainment then whether you were a golfer or DJ. I had to go round posing as an electrician. Anyway, got the Bird’s Nest going, packed out every Monday night, different promoters started coming in, liked what I did, liked what I played. I was a good entertainer, and good on the mic. So other owners from other places got my number and started booking me. So six months after I’d gone professional I’d managed to sustain a wage from doing it.

Which other places were you doing?
Bird’s Nest was my main one. The Robin Hood in Dagenham on Thursdays. Then one day a guy came to see me at the Bird’s Nest, within the first year, and he said I’ve got a guy who deals with all the bands, manages them, and at the time he was managing Joe Brown who, at the time, was doing quite well. He used to have a venue, and he’d had it for 18 years then. By this time I had a little mobile kit. Couple of speakers, Numan Audio, couple of decks. Anyway, I rang this guy up, George Cooper, and he put on every year in Scunthorpe – and you can imagine what it’s like up north, they didn’t have any entertainment.

Was this Scunthorpe Baths, by any chance?
Yeah.

I’ve played there as well!
Yeah, if you visited it in the winter you couldn’t imagine it being a swimming pool.

Well it isn’t now they’ve filled it.
So for 30 weeks of the year, George Cooper used to put bands in as a package. He came round to see me, little short man, arrogant bugger, for £50 off I went. Two weeks later, I found myself on my way to Scunthorpe, which is probably the hardest ride imaginable. Set off at 8 in the morning to get there at 5 at night to get there in time for the bands. At that time the bands that were big were The Sweet, T Rex, Slade and I had some great fun working with those bands. Only problem was the loneliness going there and back cos I only had a Thames van it was a bloody long drive. There were no motorways then and I used to come home and it did knock the balls out of me.

I did that for four years. First year it was all bands. I realised I didn’t have enough equipment to do such a big room, and they were talking to me one day, the manager and George and they said do you know much about any of the radio jocks. So I said I was a big fan of Emperor Roskoe. So they said get him down here. First one they booked was Johnny Walker, then came Rosko, who was my hero and he had this big lorry load of equipment, it was the bollocks and he actually came and sat and spoke to me. He actually let me plug my deck into his system and – boom – I was gone then. Soon as I got back I started buying every speaker, borrowed money wherever I could, filled the van up with speakers, built up these amplifiers and, next, they booked Dave Lee Travis. The good thing about this night was he commented on how sharp I was. When he looked I always had that awareness so I had a record already cued up, so he’d tell a few gags and entertain. To my amazement at the end of the night he said, ‘could I have a word with you?’ We went back to the dressing room. He said, ‘Been wanting to do it for a long time but just haven’t found the right person. I really enjoyed working with you tonight. There’s something about your timing and the music you played. Are you interested in doing some gigs with me?’ I said I’d love to.

He said I want to get together a roadshow. Within three weeks, I went round to his place, had a talk. He said he wanted to tour and it can be quite hectic. He wanted two dancers, me before and after. So we got two good dancers, I brushed up the sound equipment and off we went and did our first couple of shows. We didn’t have anywhere open after 2 in those days so we’d do ten till one thirty. So we had the DLT Roadshow with my name in subtitles. It was so successful we toured the country four or five times. We toured for five years. Dave bought a Winnebago. We had a couple of road crew. Dave was at the peak of his career then so it opened a lot of doors for me, as you can imagine, and they’d often book me back on my own to do a set on a club night and that’s how I built up my name all over the country. The Froggy name came from the Bird’s Nest because we all had to have nicknames. There was a Scottish DJ called Jock The Jock, and because I was quite wiry and so it became Frog and then Froggy. I then got asked to do one of the biggest clubs in the country – I’d played there twice as the DLT Roadshow – which was the Southgate Royalty. Just at that time Jeff Young was playing and the manager said ‘would you come down and do one with your sound system’ because by that time I’d built it up into quite a nice system. So I went back and did it on my own, played a lot less commercial stuff, more what Jeff was playing. They said it was great and they offered me a residency. And by that time I’d been touring all the time and I was tired out. I wanted to have a base, so I took it on. Bit of a bumpy ride for 6 months, because I had to find someone to cover for me with Dave, but eventually I left because I really wanted to stick with the Royalty.

“I was one of the few people that Richard Long let up to see what was in the Paradise Garage.”

What year did you start doing it?
Years are a bit difficult to quote you. Within the first year I was there, it really built up. I was playing a lot more imports. But I was breaking imports while I was on the road, too. Because I worked at the Royalty, they’d have a bag of tune for me literally everything that came in. I’d pick ‘em up and pay for them sale or return. In that first year, they did the New Music Seminar in New York. Well, New York was about the biggest place to go, so just inside that year I went over there with a few DJs

79?
Yeah. I went over with the Mafia team. Chris Hill, Chris Brown, Sean French, Robbie Vincent, me. I’ve never experienced anything like it in all my life. It changed my life completely. I’d heard all about it, and I’d heard all about mixing techniques. I was always good at mixing, but not in the way they did it. I always had a good idea of beats and how you could weave music in and out. The first day meeting everyone which I found great. Then we got invited to the Paradise Garage. I never knew nothin’ about it. But Chris Hill said to me, when you see it, you’ll understand what I’ve been going on about, because he’d been going on about it for ages. So we left at midnight, we’d all had loads of champagne and everything else. And I’d never seen anything like it. Sound system was the most incredible I’d ever heard. The room was the most electrifyin’ I’d ever been in. The DJ was just… incredible. The tunes he played were quite fantastic. The two stations then were WBLS and WKTU and BLS was linked with Paradise Garage and was much more streety and WKTU was linked to Studio 54. I experienced this whole night, from twelve till seven listening to this jock and the lighting and the sound was just so incredible, I couldn’t believe it. The following evening we went to Studio 54 and experienced the big queue outside and being picked – we had special passes – and also the Richard Long sound system which was the same as the Garage one. The music was much more lighter, but just as entertaining and brilliant. Came back and decided, with all the information I’d got, I spoke to Richard Long quite a lot, who was fascinated by my interest in sound systems, made lots of drawings and notes and came back and got myself in a load of facking debt. I went out and borrowed every penny I could, bought a lorry and built a big system up. Went to see a mate of mine in Southend and he built these big bins for me and I took two guys on full time. We fitted it into the Royalty every week and people used to come for miles. By this time, I’d had my mixer modified and redesigned.

What sort of records was he playing and how did that influence the Royalty?
The Garage wasn’t about one particular type of music, you’d hear ‘Can You Handle It‘, two copies running, I’d buy two copies of records and do phasing and overlaps. He’d put ‘Another One Bites The Dust‘ in the middle of it! Wow! I remember going to some downtown record shop just to get the Queen acetate. I came back to the Royalty and whacked it on and blew its stack off. The whole idea of the Garage was any good record could be a dance track, which was great: ‘Love Injection‘, ‘We Got The Funk‘, ‘Another One Bites The Dust‘, so I started doing all these little inserts. Pete Tong was so impressed, he was like that’s a fucking brilliant idea and that started to influence him a lot. ‘Every Way Which Loose‘, ‘Love Injection, D-Train ‘You’re The One For Me‘, ‘Can You Handle It‘, all the Prelude stuff. One of the biggest labels at that time was West End. They really did have loads of leftfield tracks, there’s one that’s still getting used now, Loose Joints‘ ‘Is It All Over My Face‘. It took me a year to break that track, no one could get into that. Peech Boys ‘Don’t Make Me Wait‘. Then on the jazz funk side you had all the British bands coming up. You had Level 42, I Level… So in your set you’d include Lonnie Liston Smith ‘Expansions‘, ‘Always There‘ Willie Bobo, then you’d have the jazz stuff to go in there. So jazz funk included Willie Bobo, you never heard jazz funk stuff at the Garage, it was all club music. But in this country, you mixed them together. So ‘Expansions‘ and you’d play Sharon Redd after it. 

When Froggy met Larry

In terms of the sound, what were you using exactly?
When I was over there, I was one of the few people that Richard Long let up to see what was in the Paradise Garage. He used Thorens decks at the time and they were mounted up from a gimbal in the ceiling. When I had a look at one, they were just too slow for the work I was used to. I needed a quicker start. All the DJs who were doing blend mixing were using the Technics 1200 Mk I which to my horror, I brought two back from New York and I just couldn’t work with them. I practised on them for two months, then I went to play up north at the Warehouse

In Leeds?
Yeah, he had guys like Greg Wilson playing up there. When I went up there to play, I fluffed it, couldn’t use them; they were too slow, so I flogged them. Anyway, I went over to New York and I’d heard about a new version of the 1200 that they had out, the Mk2, when I went over and played on them, I did a little guest spot, the deck was quick it had a hi torque motor in it. That changed the whole industry. I bought two back with me.

Was the mark 1 the one with the little LED screen on it?
No that was the 1500 Mk2. I had the first 1200s in the country. I modified my whole deck to fit them in, feedback problems everything, but once I’d got into them – I’ve still got them now – off I went. And the mixing, I studied Larry Levan, Tee Scott, Shep Pettibone, went to KISS FM and watched them. And then adopted it at the Royalty on the Saturday night. Within eight weeks, Chris Hill came up to me and said I was definitely on par with the Americans. So it went on from there.

Were you aware of guys like Greg James at the Embassy?
Yeah, I’ve got a lot of respect for him. They used these lazy decks which weren’t right for what I was doing, but I used to go and watch Greg, he was great. But when the 1200s came out it opened a lot of doors. Also, I’d always had a reel-to-reel, so I started editing. Dave Atkin, from Radio 1, Dave Lee Travis’s producer, good friend of mine, taught me. I used to and watch him produce shows, watched him edit singles down for radio. He said, when you get it right, you can have a little mix each week on Peter Powell’s show. What I was doing was making the mixes up, but I couldn’t edit properly. He taught me to edit properly and I practised and practised. So I’d take him a mix in, have a chat about what was in Blues & Soul, Record Mirror, so then I started doing a lot of mixes [edits] for radio, 7-inch mixes. Capital heard me and gave me a late night show.

What kind of stuff were you playing when you did the Peter Powell?
Well, if you had most of the papers like RM for instance, the biggest was Record Mirror, for the industry there was a two page supplement written by James Hamilton every week. So you’d read the column and then you’d feature the tracks. We’d ring him up and give him information as to what the big tracks were. It was a bible for the industry. Blues & Soul had a two page segment that Bob Kilbourn wrote. Within a short space of time, the Mafia, what we played was so upfront; they would look up to us what to buy. At the Royalty, they’d book Greg Edwards every month, Robbie Vincent and gradually a team formed to do Caister. I was already doing Caister before the soul ones started. I was doing the 18-30s, great laugh, general music, I did about eight of those. Shagged myself into a coma. Then Robbie Vincent did one of the 18-30s with me and took it back to Showstoppers at the Royalty and said look why don’t we do a soul one? In that two and half years at the Royalty, it opened a lot of doors, I was doing radio, it started to get on top a wee bit. The sound system became expensive to keep running and I took a break at one stage. I put the sound in at Caister and because I’d designed it I was always getting phone calls about it, which just made me too tired. I wasn’t concentrating on my work. Then I left it alone for a year and then Brian Rix took it over.

What, the sound system?
No Caister. I came back after a year, had a word with Brian and said ask the boys if it was okay and I came back. I asked him about the sound system, the guy doing it was a friend of mine, and what he put in, I thought I couldn’t compete so I left him to it, but at the next Caister, they made me stay in the dressing room until they announced it and I got a bit of a standing ovation for that year I’d taken off.

Do you remember what year that was?
They’re a bit of a blur. When you get to 65… [he’s making that up to throw me off] Anyway, it was a good year and a half I missed. I must admit that, although Brian Rix can be a difficult person to deal with, he runs that event very well and keeps it going, so I do that twice a year.

Didn’t you hire out your system to some of the rare groove guys during the late 80s? I’m sure Norman Jay said he was blown away by Derek B when he saw him in Canning Town and he was using your system.
The problem was there became a lot of jealousy. There are only certain boys that can run a sound system. Where I got a lot of my knowledge from were people like Jah Tubby, Jah Whoosh and those guys. They were telling me about increased costs. You can’t just have idiots lugging the gear around, you gotta have a few technicians with you, too. So I started to hire it out and I found I was using it so much to hire it out that I wasn’t using it myself. So the last couple of years it has been in storage, so I don’t know what to do with it.

But Derek B was using it wasn’t it?
Derek B was a protégé of mine. He was like a black version of me. The problem was he too greedy too quick. I was working with Simon Harris, at the time, doing production work. And Derek B started putting gigs on everywhere saying it was his sound system, so we had a massive row, punch up and everything. Derek B then got a deal with a record deal, Simon Harris got a deal and bad young brother was Derek B, so we went our own ways. I did Derek B’s first big edit for his album, which he rejected, he then got Simon Harris to do it and he rejected that and the company blew him out. So he got his own in the end. He was out to shit on everyone and he’s not been heard of since. And I have.

How was the racial composition in these clubs?
The biggest problem you had was the mixed race thing. Very very difficult to keep it predominantly white, as such, because you were playing black music. To my horror in the first few years I got knocked a lot outside of that for playing black music. The biggest problem was no club owners wanted a heavy – over 50% black – so keeping a happy medium was very hard. I did find myself not playing the more leftfield stuff to keep that down a bit. It was heavy. The Royalty was 60/40 when it started. But that was just the way it went.

So were you getting pressure from the owners?
You would get pressure from most of them. Lots of clubs were the doormen kept it under control. Only problem was there was lots of nicking – not the older ones, but the younger kids – they’d go in for this handbag snatching so black music got branded as the cause of thieving and stuff going on. But I’d gone so far into it, I couldn’t go back and do ordinary gigs anymore. That was what I was known to play. The thing is with the black crowd, the white people had a lot more money. So what it was… the black fraternity would come and watch someone play the music because they couldn’t afford to buy it. So it did get a bit out of hand and embarrassing at times.

What about the electro scene that came up after…
I remember talking to Tim Westwood, and he saw the hip hop scene growing, because he saw in the jazz funk scene that there needed to be music that people without a lot of money could be associated with and had their own identity. Tim was the first person to kick that off and it took a lot of the weight away from us soul jocks. Suddenly, Morgan Khan clocked on to that and started doing Electro and Hip Hop and it became very big. Tim stayed with it all the way through. For instance, they would never put an electro night on at the Royalty. Too heavy. Even today if you get a Westwood gig, it’s mad. It has separated the scene totally.

So did you play any of the electro stuff?
No. I grew to like it quite a lot. At that time, Morgan was doing the jazz funk and he was on his 2nd album and he wanted a mixed one and there wasn’t many jocks around that could mix on reel-to-reel. So I did an electro album for him, me and Simon Harris. So when I did Capital, one of the jocks who did electro before me left, so I would do the electro hour before doing my stuff. Didn’t touch the hip hop stuff. Planet Force and that label it was on…?

Tommy Boy.
Yeah, that was a big concern, did a lot of work for them.

Where you playing any of that stuff in clubs?
No, I never played it out. But on the radio I did editing work and mixing for them. I used to do it incognito, never used to put my name on it much. I didn’t want to be associated with it too much. I grew to like it, because I like music in general, but hip hop is not for me, Don’t like it at all. Far too heavy. Unfortunately, it’s become very big.

Were there any people who influenced you when you were younger?
Well when I was growing into my teens there was only one radio station. The only one you could get was Radio Luxembourg, Tony Prince was a big name on there, so I used to tune into Tony Prince and Paul Burnett. They were great, big influence radiowise. They broke away and did Radio Caroline, which was the forerunner to R1, as you know. As far as live work it was Emperor Rosko, he was always playing live, Johnny Walker for contemporary stuff and clubwise, I didn’t really see any DJ in this country who did anything that I couldn’t do better than myself. It wasn’t until I went to America that I saw something completely different. The jocks in NY, although technically brilliant, never said a word, though. Combine the two and it gave me something special. Technically I studied three good jocks in America: Larry Levan, Shep Pettibone and Tee Scott. Those three were the ones that did something for me. So then I could mix the tunes and rap over the top which became a very good entertainment package.

What was it about Rosko you liked?
I was always a Wolfman Jack fan. He had such a unique style. He used to play to a lot of the campus students. Emperor Rosko was like a British version of him. Basically we became quite close friends, I watched him work live and I was his protégé, no doubt. He had to move back to America because his dad, the famous film director Michael Pasternak died. When he left, my sound system that I built was virtually identical to the one he had, so when he came back to the UK he’d play on my system.

I got myself into a lot of debt when he left actually, I borrowed about 6 grand. I went to Orange [equipment suppliers], a guy from up north lovely guy, Matt Fry, he built all Emperor Rosko’s gear and he built mine. Proper valve amps and everything. I started to admire certain jocks around me, for instance I couldn’t help but be fascinated by Chris Hill’s entertainment value. He wasn’t particularly brilliant technically, but he had this fantastic ear for picking tracks off of albums. For instance, that is where he will be credited on my new single the Pacific Eardrum track that is now called Universal Love was Chris Hill’s discovery [I think he means the artist is called PE, but the track from the album isn’t called Universal Love, this is what he’s called his sampled version of that track…] The most influential DJ I’ve ever met. Chris Brown was good, Jeff Young, all the Mafia team.

Did you go to the Lacy Lady and the Goldmine?
I didn’t hang out there, because I was very busy. I didn’t like the Goldmine much. I didn’t like Canvey Island much, but it did have a lot of weight. I preferred the Kings near my hometown. I’d go there as much as I could.

What was the difference in crowd composition between Goldmine and Royalty?
No difference at all. Stan eventually sold the Goldmine and they went to another place. They went to some place in the country, but that didn’t work that well so they came back to the Seven Kings. So the Lacy Lady carried the name wherever it was held. I did a disco at Ilford town Hall for juniors for ten years I did that. And a lot of them would then go on to clubs round there. I preferred the Kings out of all of them.

Why was the Kings good?
It was a lovely room, great acoustics, it had a great atmosphere the way it was laid out.

Were you doing gigs in the north playing more underground music?
Yeah, well what it was travelling around Dave Lee Travis, I was still well into my imports. I remember breaking ‘Do Ya Think I’m Sexy‘, no-one had ever heard it before and I dropped it at Young Farmer’s do in the west country and everyone went crazy. Out of the maybe 15 singles and one or two albums, I’d select five that would work everywhere. Play them in my set and then play them later in Dave’s set because he grew to like them, stuff like ‘Love Injection‘, he featured them on his show when they came out on British labels, and I was able to spread the word around all round the country. One year, Disco International, to my surprise, rang me up and said I’d won DJ of the Year award. James Hamilton was always interested in what I was playing and what was breaking because I played all over the country. Crown Heights Affair ‘Sexy Lady‘, I played that everywhere. Because you had capacity crowds everywhere you could really work the track. D Train and ‘Can You Handle It‘, instantaneously, they worked. But I didn’t overdo it, I’d pick five at a time and work them. All the other Radio 1 jocks who went out and did their roadshows didn’t have a fuckin’ clue, but Rosko was on the ball and we were. We were the only ones with two and half self-contained show, us two were the only ones to book.

When Radio 1 did their summer roadshows, was it your sound system they used?
Yes. The Outside Broadcasting Unit was very basic in its early days. Smiley Miley who worked for Radio 1 doing all the promotions for them – bit of a sod – came up with a design with sponsorship for a whacking great big bloody caravan where the stage would fold down and the DJ console inside.

It looked like a big chip van, didn’t it?
Exactly. Speakerwise, you could only really have four of those and well away from the caravans because of the OB. We had four Bose. Otherwise you’d get feedback. What we’d do in the evening was put on shows for charity. I’d do the warm-ups for them and they’d do their sets.

© Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton