Category Archives: Jazz-Funk and Southern Soul

Pete Wingfield hit the Soul Beat

One of the UK’s original soul superfans, Pete Wingfield was switched on in the ’60s by rare US import 45s and the network of collectors, stores and reviewers that worshipped them. His fanzine Soul Beat opened the door to a life of musical adventure, and he has some priceless tales of blagging his way across America in the ’60s, when he parlayed a gap year into meeting the stars of Stax and working in a Chicago record store. As a producer and keyboard session player, Pete has made or contributed to hundreds of great records, with everyone from Hot Chocolate, Edwin Starr and The Everly Brothers, to Sugarhill Gang, Johnny Bristol, The Proclaimers and Dexy’s Midnight Runners. A hit under his own name, “Eighteen With a Bullet,” is a big track in gangland LA, and his ’70s band Olympic Runners laid the foundations for Brit-funk. As well as the inevitable record-nerdery, Bill asked him to paint a picture of Record Mirror star journalist, James Hamilton, who Pete knew most of his life.

Interviewed by Bill in London, 22.3.23

We’ll cover all aspects of your many-splendoured career, but first I want to talk about your memories of (pioneering dance music journalist) James Hamilton.
He was my absolute hundred percent role model of record reviewing. I just aimed to be like him, basically. At the time, you couldn’t actually hear a new record, you had to rely on somebody else’s opinion. Well, his opinion was totally reliable as far as I was concerned. And he wouldn’t put himself into the review particularly, or score cheap journalistic points. He would just give the information about the record for people who might be interested in it. And if you weren’t interested, fair enough. And I loved that.

When did you first meet James?
Mid-’60s. 1965 maybe, something like that. We came from pretty similar backgrounds. Almost uncannily similar, meaning public school, and his father, who was equally bemused by his choice of career as mine was, was a submarine captain in the Royal Navy and a war hero just as mine was.

His family was quite high-standing, wasn’t it?
I would think so, yes. He was six and a bit years’ older than me. I was running this fanzine called Soul Beat, which maybe he knew of. And I was an avid reader of the Record Mirror, as everybody was at the time, because that was where you got all the SP on soul from James, from the great Norman Jopling of course, and Tony Hall. James was the number one guy as far as I was concerned.

How did you meet?
When I was at school I had a band that did the odd gig around the holidays, and he let me stay on his floor a couple of times in his place in South Kent somewhere, so I was in a sleeping bag next door to this great big thing of decks and these massive boxes everywhere of records. He had one up on everybody because he had connections in the States.

Yeah. I knew that he was going over there when a lot of people weren’t.
James had made these connections in New York and used to get stuff very quickly. In the wake of the Beatles’ success in the States in ’64, there was a group of Chelsea-ites, presumably young men of independent means, who had the bright idea of taking advantage of Brian Epstein’s naivete in these matters by going over to New York and presenting themselves as US marketeers of Beatles memorabilia. They called the company Seltaeb, Beatles backwards. And they made an absolute fortune in a very short time.

James was a very distinctive character.
He definitely had an affected persona, or at least he didn’t try to disguise his persona for anybody’s benefit. He would just be himself. He always wore the same thing, for one thing, which was a really upper middle-class type sports jacket with elbow patches.

He’s always struck me as quite an eccentric.
Yeah. He was just dedicated to what he did, really, and keen to spread the word. He wasn’t particularly “Hail fellow well met,” you know. But once he’d sussed you were alright, he was right there.

The actor James Robertson Justice has come up quite a few times as a comparison.
Yes, or the comic Willie Rushton, who acted much older than he actually was. Which was a thing in the ’50s and ’60s. I don’t think James thought about it at all, he just was himself. He was quite dogmatic and didn’t suffer fools gladly, but you know, we seemed to get on.

I have a very clear mental image of him. Because he always looked the same. He never changed his style of clothes or anything. So I can picture him instantly in my mind. He must have had carte blanche in the end from the magazines. He used to riff on non-musical subjects like the relative merits of chicken shops in Wilsden. They let him write what the fuck he wanted.

The way he wrote was so idiosyncratic. He used words like jiggling and what even is jiggling?
Grammatically, yeah, he had his own vocabulary which if you knew him, you knew what it meant. It was a kind of code. And you know where he got his syntactical approach from was (US music paper) Record World.They’d put everything with dot-dot-dots. News like a ticker tape, sort of a gossip column. A few words, then dot-dot-dot, then the next thing.

I think there’s also something a little bit Lord Buckley about the way that he wrote. (Bizarre 1950s jazz performance poet)
Lord Buckley! My first band was named after him. It was called The Nazz.After Lord Buckley.

I love Lord Buckley.
Another thing I’m amazed you know about, Bill, which is brilliant. Nobody knows Lord Buckley.

I had a musical mentor when I was very young who ran the local music shop in Grimsby. He introduced me to so much music, and he introduced me to Studs Terkel, to Lord Buckley, to Tower of Power, to Mike Westbrook, to Carla Bley.

Were you aware of James Hamilton as a DJ?
Not as a mobile DJ, only as a journalist, yeah. He was Dr. Soul. I saw him vaguely from time to time, but I didn’t really keep up with him. And once he moved into the more dance music era, that’s not really my thing. I’m a soul man. When he got more into the BPM side, I’m not really with that.

There is some crossover.
If I was going to be cruel and provocative about it, I would say that dance music is soul music without the soul, but anyway.

It depends which dance music. You’ve been involved in some great dance records.
Yeah, okay, fair enough.

We met up again when I was part of this loose studio-based act, the Olympic Runners, that had stuff in the late ’70s. We met on the club circuit with the old DJ mafia and all that. Chris Hill and those people.

The Soul Mafia.
James was on the periphery of that. He had this slightly avuncular air.

When you were doing your fanzine in the ’60s, it seemed to me there was a very close-knit community of soul aficionados.
There was.

So people like Dave Godin, Guy Stevens, Dave McAleer…
Tony Cummings. And Roger St. Pierre as well.

Tell me about your fanzine Soul Beat
It was just a little Roneo-ed thing that I wrote up in the school bursar’s office. I used to charge a pound. One and three including postage, and advertised in Record Mirror. And I mean, it sold fantastic amounts, at least 100. And I handed it over to Mick Brown.

Mick was on talking about me on Rock’s Backpages, and although I passed the magazine over to him, I’m not sure we ever met. I think it was one of those things where I just sort of wrote a letter, the way you did at the time. I wanted it to carry on and I had to do A-levels.

But did you meet and get to know people like (UK A&R legend and early UK club DJ) Dave McAleer and those sort of guys?
Only later. I did meet certainly Dave McAleer later, but more when I was a musician and he was running record labels. Most of these people I met later on, and they’d say, ‘Oh, you’re Pete Wingfield from…’

Where would you find soul records? Which record stores were you going to?
The best place I used to go to was a stall called Lee’s Record Stall at Cambridge Circus right by a jellied eel stand. And this was where all the media offices were at the time, and they used to sell their review copies to him. This thing called retail price maintenance came in in 1971. Before that, you couldn’t buy a record for any less than the recommended price, unless it was second-hand. Which you had to have some sort of proof. It was absolutely ridiculous. So these were basically review copies of records that were of no interest of the reviewer in question. They’d be mouldy fig jazz guys who didn’t like anything funky. I may be wrong in exact minutiae, but the spirit of the thing was, when the actual price was 32 shillings and 11-pence, he used to charge 27 and 11. Something like that.

And Transat Imports, which was a basement in Lisle Street in Chinatown which had a lot of hi-fi places at the time. It was only open on Saturday mornings, like 10 to 12 or something. And he had the imports. I don’t know who ran it, but I suspect he might have had some sort of connection with an airline, because he had things the week they came out in America.

That must be the one that Jeff Dexter told me about. He couldn’t recall the name of it.
All the very top DJs were always there. I went down there and ogled the wall because they had these things on the wall, but I didn’t buy much, because they were charging 42 and six. It was a lot. But on the other hand, they had Otis Blue by Otis Redding months before it came out here, and Walking the Dog, Rufus Thomas, I remember coveting that on the wall. And James Brown Live at the Apollo, which wasn’t issued here for ages. And where else did I used to go? Dave Godin’s shop, of course, a bit later on. Soul City in Monmouth Street, WC2. That was good.

How did you get started collecting?
I started when I was 10 years old. The basis of my collection came from a stall in Petersfield Market in Hampshire. I have no idea who he was, but he had zillions of American 45s of every sort of genre, mostly R&B. I used to go there on my bike and spend about six hours and buy two or something every month. But it all added up.

Where were you living?
Liphook in Hampshire.He used to send out these little lists with uppercase print, but so small. Even as a sharply-eyed boy, I still had trouble reading it, because he had such a huge list. That was called Lyndum House in Petersfield. He used to have demo discs, UK ones. And they were a bit cheaper. They were four and sixpence. I’ve got a lot of Motown ones with the big A on them.

The collectors’ market seems to be struggling a bit when it comes to older stuff.
All the values have just plummeted. Possibly because all the music’s available elsewhere, but ’60s soul I don’t think is the goldmine it used to be.

I’ve written a few pieces about how the market in Elvis Presley stuff has tanked because basically all the Elvis collectors are dying.
Well, yeah, the grim reaper does play a part in it, but most definitely yes. I think it’s more than that. Singles don’t seem to have the fascination that albums do amongst younger collectors. I’ll tell you where I go now just to get my fix of vinyl – Spitalfields Market. The twice monthly thing up there. It’s been encroached by all these trendy food places. It’s hilarious, you’re leafing away through the records and you can see these people, they don’t even know what these objects are. They’re looking in dumbfounded amazement.

What did you do after you left school?
I went to Sussex University, and I had a band at Sussex called Jellybread. And the posh way of saying it is we went professional in 1970, but the fact of the matter is we didn’t get proper jobs so we just carried on doing the band.

What kind of music?
It was blues, wasn’t it? We were on Blue Horizon. Very collectible, we are, mainly because we didn’t sell for shit.

That’s a good guarantee of collectability.
I just drifted into things, really. Mainly through Mike Vernon, I’d started doing sessions when I left the band

How did you meet (’60s producer) Mike Vernon?
He had a fanzine, too. R&B Monthly. Legendary. Sold it from his parents’ house. He ran it with his brother Richard. And they also had a record label called Out Of Sight. Well, they started Blue Horizon too. The first Blue Horizon record I believe was… Was it Mississippi Fred McDowell or something? No, it was Hubert Sumlin possibly.

Was that a license deal? Was it an American label?
No, they recorded some things. In the front room on a tape recorder. But they also licensed stuff. Yeah, they had a few things on Out Of Sight and what was the other label? In between things, around about 1971 when I’d left Jellybread and hadn’t joined Keef Hartley, I was working at the Blue Horizon record store, which was a short-lived thing on Parkway in Camden. I was helping out behind the counter, and we had some of these old things from Mike’s … from original Blue Horizon. Couldn’t sell them for nothing. I remember this Little Mack Simmons EP called Chicago Blues, we had a box of 25 and you just couldn’t sell them for anything. And now they’re worth 500 quid each or something ridiculous. There was a thing whereby you only printed 100 because if you did over that, you had to pay purchase tax.

That’s how I started with Jellybread. A school friend of mine was doing an internship at IBC Studios opposite the Beeb in Portland Place, and we sneaked in one Sunday and made an album, or made sort of six tracks and put a 10-inch album out of it, and put it out and made it look like a bootleg, although it wasn’t a bootleg. Letraset letters and everything. And I took it round all the hip stores like One Stop in South Molton Street and sold out the hundred really quick. And that’s also collectible now of course because of rarity. Amazing, the energy one had in those days. I thought nothing of schlepping all around with these fucking things, but I would never do that now.

I always got the impression that until punk rock it was quite hard to start your own label.
Well, it was. But I mean, this wasn’t a label. It was like a demo. We didn’t intend it to be a label. It was just a piece of product to get us a deal, which we did, with Blue Horizon.

And later on, Mike Vernon ran a label called Chipping Norton
No, I knew him before that. I knew him mid-’60s. But yeah, that was the start. They sold the premises in Camden in ’73 and built a studio in Chipping Norton, where I must have done about 40 albums, I should think. Both producing and playing on over the years.

You actually put a single out on Chipping Norton: ‘They All Came Back?
That’s right. Okay, that was Richard’s thing, yeah. I’d forgotten about that entirely.And they put out a single by the group that became The Real Thing as well, The Chants. The two Amoo brothers were The Chants.But they were in Liverpool rather than London. Liverpool was all about Merseybeat so they didn’t catch the wave there.

Where did you go out to hear music?
I’ll tell you one place which I was too young or scared to go to was The Scene in Great Windmill Street, which was the absolutely epicenter of all that hip mod soul that I loved.

Why were you scared?
Because I was quite young and it was late, basically. I was a very well-behaved middle-class boy. I used to love what we call new wave R&B, which was music with lots of major sevens, Curtis Mayfield kind of stuff. You know, the sort of major seven to minus seven that basically was the root of reggae, coincidentally. All those cool groups like The Impressions. All that Chicago stuff. I love Chicago soul. Particularly mid-’60s with all those Chess people and Brunswick, I loved all that. I spent a whole summer in Chicago in ’68 working at a place called Delmark Records that I’d been to the previous year, working behind the counter in the record store in Chicago, which was a trip.

Wow. That must have been amazing.
It was. Best summer of my life, that was. It was quite amazing. Yeah.

How did you manage to get a job at a record store in Chicago?
There was a thing called BUNAC, British Universities North America Club. You could get a cheap flight and employment for a short time. It was some sort of government thing. I had secured a place at Sussex for September of ’67, but I’d left school in ’66. So I had a sort of gap year. I did a few odd jobs and then I spent four months in the States in the summer. Bob Koester who ran Delmark was on my mailing list, so I applied for that. It was fantastic.

Which neighbourhood was the record store in?
It was Near North Side. It was just south of the area that was shortly to be redeveloped into these nightclubs and everything. It was a scuzzy area. But scuzzy in a nice way because it wasn’t overtly black or white. It was a kind of intermediate area, which was probably why Bob chose it. You used to get some real characters coming in. You know, strippers, druggies. Intellectual jazz guys like the AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative. Musicians), people like Anthony Braxton, as well as down-home blues guys. Big Joe Williams used to kip in the basement when he came to town and try to get me to give him money out of the till for his lunch. All sorts.

Did you come across any of the Chicago producers like Carl Davis?
No, no. I was pretending to be a journalist at the time. But I didn’t have any connections. I had my little band, but I wasn’t a professional musician at the time. Bob let me play on something called Sweet Home Chicago that he was doing. That was my first session ever in Chicago. But yeah. No, I wasn’t … I never met any of those blokes. They were just mysterious names on record labels.

A soul community.
Although people are as keen on music now as they used to be, the key difference was the paucity of information back then. And that made somebody who had that information very sought after, like James Hamilton, for instance. In retrospect, that soul thing in the ’60s was a real pioneering community. The pirates made the crucial difference. There were lots of great hits that were purely because they were on pirate radio, like ‘Shotgun Wedding’ and ‘I’ll Do Anything’, Doris Troy. All sorts of things the BBC would never have touched. I think I’m right in saying that Radio Caroline was started by Ronan O’Rahilly because he couldn’t get his client Georgie Fame’s record played on the radio. Isn’t that right?

That may well be right. Yeah.
I was absolutely crazy about the pirates. I used to listen all the time. There are certain moments in life you just will never forget. And when I first came over to the states, in May ’67, part of this deal with BUNAC was you went on a boat with other students from Europe. And so I was on this boat going over. We flew back but we went on a boat.

I remember coming into New York Harbor. America was like the promised land. We looked at everything from rose-coloured glasses. That attitude still maintained right through probably till Vietnam. So I’m on this boat and I have this little cream transistor the size of the palm my hand, and I went up on deck. I woke up early and I could see the Statue of Liberty looming in the distance, and I turned on the thing and it was Eddie O’Jay on WLIB, soul at sunrise. Wow, that’s Eddie OJ who gave his name to the OJs. It was the greatest thing I’d ever heard, you know? That sort of radio. I just thought, “Boy, I’m here. I’ve done it. I’ve got there.”

I got a job as a dogsbody in a hotel in the Catskills, the Hebrew Himalayas as they were known. I was cleaning the pool and everything. I did six weeks there, and then I went round on the Greyhound Bus for unlimited travel for $99. And I managed to blag going to WWRL, which was the top black AM station in New York, WWRL 1600 which surprisingly was nowhere near a black area. It was in this rather salubrious suburb right at the end of the subway in Riverside. And I went there and chatted up the program director that I was a journalist. Because this was a top 40 station playing all the hits 24/7. And they used to change the copies of the records, the physical copies they played every week, because they’d get worn, and used to let me pick the old ones out of the trash. 1967 was one of the greatest years of all time in my opinion musically, and I’ve got an incredible amount of the top R&B hits of that summer with a little chart number written on it as a sticker – the actual copies that were played in WWRL.

That’s amazing. Where else did you go?
Everywhere. Chicago, San Francisco, Texas, Wyoming, Philadelphia, Washington, Memphis.

What happened in Memphis? Did you go visit any of the studios and labels?
I surely did. This Greyhound thing was only available for people outside of the US. It was like a cheque book with counterfoils. And mine had run out. This is right at the end, September ’67. I was in Washington, DC. I’d slept underneath the Lincoln Memorial and got moved on by a cop. I’m thinking, actually, what should I do now? I was due to leave in three days’ time or something, and run out of money. And my ticket had run out. But I figured that if I just held the edge, the counterfoil bit, open, the bus driver would just take the thing. And that’s exactly what happened.

So I went to Memphis. On a whim, I just went nowhere else but 926 East McLemore Avenue, which was Stax. The Stax Review had just toured Britain. And they were absolutely blown away by the response. They had no idea anybody knew who they were at all, Steve Cropper and all these guys. I don’t think it was a hugely commercial blockbuster, but they had incredible love from the fans.

But anyway, I got there. It’s this old cinema. And they were all very well disposed to people from Europe, particularly from England. And I saw this character leaning up against the door with a trumpet, and sure enough, it was Wayne Jackson from Memphis Horns. So I went up and I was trying to be as English as I could. “Oh, excuse me. Is this Stax Records?” He said, “Hey, man, are you from London?” I said, “Yes, I am.” He said, “Come on in. We’re recording.” So he introduced me and I say hello to Deanie Parker on the reception. And I get ushered through to the studio which is a cinema with the sloping floor, and the control room is the projection room. So it’s a curious place. And all the instruments are nailed to the floor.

I can’t remember what the track is. It was some record which never came out with a girl singer, possibly Deanie Catron, Dorothy Catron or something? But all the Stax people are just in there. If they’re not playing, they’re hanging out. You know, The Bar-Kays, who were still alive. Booker T was there. Isaac Hays was there. Eddie Floyd, Otis Redding. Otis was there. It was only a couple of months before he was killed. All the bods. And he says, “Come on through,” and Steve Cropper’s in there in the control room, running things, as he does.

And he says, “This guy’s from London.” “Oh, okay, great. Come on. Anybody from London is welcome here,” kind of thing. “What’s your name?” “Pete.” “Pete, have a listen to this. We cut this last night.” I said, “Okay.” And he’s got this acetate, you know? And it’s Eddie Floyd, “Saturday Night.” You know that … It’s got that slip groove, you know? Great groove from Al Jackson. And he plays it, and of course I’m loving it. And he says, “What do you reckon?” I said, “It’s great.”

Anyway, so I put my fingers on the organ as I passed through coming back, which they didn’t mind, and Deanie Parker gave me a handful of singles as I left. I was on such a cloud nine. I just floated away. That was incredible. I mean, that was in that absolute apex.

And it was before they discovered the terrible clause in the Atlantic contract whereby they didn’t keep their masters and they had to sell to Paramount and Gulf and Western. Start again with 30 albums in one month. But it was before all that, so there was a great vibe there. They were kings of the hill, really.

Were they super well-known in Memphis at the time?
I don’t think so. You know, usual thing, no prophet in one’s own land. They didn’t have the mystique that they had acquired in Europe, no.Because they weren’t exotic. They were just blokes down the road kind of thing.

The thing that was difficult in the old days was joining the dots between different labels and different musicians. Is that by the same person that did that? It was all a mystery, wasn’t it?
It was great. It was a great sort of journey. To join the dots. At the risk of grumpy old man talk, that’s another lost art, isn’t it? Because there’s no information about music at all. The good thing is that people on YouTube and Spotify don’t have any preconceptions. Because they don’t know how old something is or where it’s from. But from the collector’s angle, I like to know where it was recorded. Who played on it, who produced it, who wrote it…

Has sampling been good to you?
Reasonable. We’ve had a few taken of the early Olympic Runners tracks, before the disco era, where we were more sort of quirky. The three or four albums for London Records. No big deal, but yeah. Used in a couple of movies. A Spike Lee movie. It’s rather fun. The things just appear, or as a writer, you have to give your say-so.

Tell me about “Eighteen With a Bullet.”
Well, I signed to Island Music as a writer around ’73 or 4. It was Richard Williams who signed me. He was the new A&R head. And the logical following was doing songs for other people.

So had you already written that before you were signed?
I wrote it around that time. I wrote it with The Dells in mind.Because it’s doo-wop. It’s got the falsetto, the Marvin Junior, the mid one, the bass, the Chuck Barksdale, the Johnny Funches. It was a lot of fun, but I don’t think they ever heard it. So I recorded it under my own name.

Classic doo-wop.
This is a surreal story. Late ’80s, early ’90s, a guy brought over a bunch of doo-wop groups for a one-off show, I think he lost an absolute king’s ransom on the thing. But I was one of the musicians in the band. One of the groups was The Spaniels who did “Goodnite, Sweetheart, Goodnite,” which is plainly what I had ripped off for “Eighteen With A Bullet,” right? So I was sitting in a pub in Stockwell, rehearsing for this doo-wop gig. And Pookie Hudson, lead singer of The Spaniels, was there, oldish guy at the time. And we were having a drink between rehearsals. And I thought, do I apologize? What do I do? So I said, “I don’t know if you know a song that I did, Pookie. I was kind of inspired by your great hit there. And it was called Eighteen…” He said, “Eighteen With A Bullet?” He said, “Yeah, we used to do that in the act in the 1970s.”

Really?
Yeah. I think they used to do a medley of current things with a doo-wop flavour.

Oh, that’s amazing. I’m surprised that more people didn’t cover it. The only cover version I’ve ever heard is the Derrick Harriott one.
And even better is the dub version on the other side.There were two other versions. One was Lewis Taylor, British soul singer.The other was I Blame Coco, which is Sting’s daughter.

There used to be a station in Los Angeles and every time there’d been a gang hit in LA, someone would request it? Do you remember this happening?
I used to get the odd phone call from these dubious sounding people in East LA asking me to come over and do a PA in a ballroom. So that’s how I learned about this. Yeah, it’s big in Hispanic American circles, particularly.

So does it get a lot of play on oldies radio in the States?
No, I don’t think so. I think a lot of it is the time signature, the 6:8. You don’t hear many things in 6:8. And also, that makes it hard to sample. It’s not the biggest money earner really now. The two Mel Brooks records I did have proved to be quite good. “It’s Good to Be the King” and “The Hitler Rap, To Be or Not To Be” I did the first one in John Kongos’ studio.

Oh wow. You worked with John Cameron at RAK a bit as well, didn’t you, during the 1970s?
Yeah, he was the big arranger for Hot Chocolate. He also did a lot of library records as well.I don’t recall ever meeting him. I think he might have done strings on some of the things that I did for Mickie Most.

You did “Are You Getting Enough Happiness” by Hot Chocolate, didn’t you?
Well, “It Started With a Kiss” is basically all me with a drum machine. I’m singing backups as well.None of the band are on it other than Errol. He was a nice guy, Errol. Great bloke.

So was Hot Chocolate essentially just Errol?
Phil Cranham on bass. Me and Chris Cameron, no relation to John Cameron, singing backups. And I’m doing all the instruments, plus Errol. I worked on twoor three hits and a couple of albums, around ’82, ’83. All for Mickie Most.

Mickie was quite a character. A lovely bloke. Didn’t take himself at all seriously. Real hedonist. He was another air-miles champion. That’s how he got a lot of songs. He used to go over to New York and get Brill Building songs recorded before any American acts because he would go over and get demos.Like Lulu and David Bowie and Herman’s Hermits. Yeah. Everything was very last minute always. You know, get the record out. But yeah, he was great to work for. I mean, his session was so short that you barely remembered it. With Hot Chocolate, it was a bit more painstaking, piece by piece because that was the time when you had the drum machine. You built it up, rather than all playing at once.

The drum machine must have really changed the way you put a song together.
Yeah, it really did.

Do you remember playing on a on a Johnny Bristol album?
Oh, yeah. For Gus Dudgeon. I used to do all of Gus’s stuff other than Elton John, for obvious reasons, because he’s the piano player. Johnny Bristol was a lovely guy. He came to dinner one time with us. He’s a great guy. I asked him once, “What were your favourite acts to work with in Motown?” And he straight away said two, very different. Junior Walker because it was always just like a party, and Gladys Knight because she’s the best singer out there. Since those are my two favourite Motown people, I couldn’t disagree.

Gladys is the queen, isn’t she? I’d take her over any other singer.
I think I would too, you know. Even from only age 16 or whatever with “Every Beat of My Heart.”

That Johnny Bristol album has a track on it called “Love No Longer Has a Hold on Me”, which is one of my favourite disco records. Do you play on that one? Gus didn’t produce all the tracks I don’t think, and I think that’s one of the other ones, I think.

There’s a really brilliant Italian record that I really love and you played on that as well. Ivano Fossati. He had a big record in Italy called “Traslocando”. Do you remember him?
You’re coming out with some amazing shit here. Come on, hit me. I can remember one guy. It could be this session. It might not be. There were two brothers who had the greatest names ever. They were Carmelo and Michelangelo la Bionda. It might have been them because they got a bunch of British guys over to Rome to do a session. That might have been it. I don’t think I ever knew anything about the artists or anything. I just was so impressed by the guys’ names.

What about Sugarhill Gang?
I did the Sugarhill Gang “Lover in You”. Sugar Hill’s modus operandi was to record everything live and then they’d only even think about a 7-inch if the 12-inch had sold like 300,000 or something. And that was great.

Presumably you met Sylvia Robinson and all of the backing bands.
Absolutely. Absolutely. It came about through that first Mel Brooks record, which was a cult New York record, big on WBLS. And Sylvia did her own version, “It’s Good to Be the Queen”, which wasn’t very good. She somehow found out my phone number and phoned me here and said, “Do you fancy coming over and making a record?” She was thinking she might as well use the actual guy that put the other one together. So I just got on a plane and went over. I made up a little thing on the plane, the basis of a track in my head, and just marched in and said, “What do you reckon about this?” And I got picked up at the airport by her cracking chauffeur in a gold Rolls-Royce, taken to Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, where the studio was. I mean, stories abound about the Robinsons. I’m sure you’ve heard them. Until they went bust, they had a very tight operation. They were serial bankrupters. But they had a very autonomous operation. They had the studio and pressing plant, everything right there. And they were making records under the radar that didn’t get played on the radio, were selling ridiculous amounts of copies.

I was in New York in ‘79, and there was this record store called Barry’s Stereo. And I walked past and they were playing “Rapper’s Delight”, and they just had it on constant replay with a speaker out in the street. I walked in the store and was sort of browsing about, and every single person that came in bought that record.

I’m assuming that Wood, Brass & Steel were the backing band. Skip McDonald, Doug Wimbush, Keith Leblanc. Did they all play on “Lover in You”?
Yeah, they did. I was playing live. I was playing the Rhodes. The way they did it was so exciting. It was live, man. It was the moment. So I have a mic which didn’t go to tape, and I’d be just directing it, saying, “Bridge. Okay, breakdown.” You know, all that stuff. We were just fucking busking it. It was absolutely great. And then I added a bunch of Prophet-5 stuff on it. But the basic guitar, bass, drums, keyboard was live, and then he cut it down later. The band played as Wood, Brass & Steel. They’d just hang out in the parking lot waiting to be called in for a session. They moved over to the UK to work with Adrian Sherwood, didn’t they? Renamed as Tackhead.

We didn’t have an artist. I thought it was going to be a song. Then Sylvia was so keen on it that she wanted to put it out with their hottest act, that was the Sugar Hill Gang. They were lovely guys. They weren’t very cutting edge. They just kind of hopped on that bandwagon, really.

Like all those people, Sylvia wasn’t nostalgic in the slightest degree. She wasn’t impressed by her own past or anybody else’s. I did spend some time with her, but never really talked about the past at all. I mean, yeah, she had Shirley and Johnny, Shirley Goodman, the R&B duo from the early ’50s. Shirley was on the switchboard, before she did “Shame, Shame, Shame.”

Oh, wow.
Yeah, and Joey Robinson, her husband then, he was the hustler. Although she’d been married before I think to somebody named Vanderpool. They operated like an old-fashioned black independent. All cash. I don’t think they ever paid any royalties. I made the mistake, being so frightfully well brought up, of going through the motions of negotiating a deal, and basically Joey said, “Yeah, great. Sure. We could do that, yeah.” Of course I never saw any fucking contract of any description. And Jane, my wife, had to take up residence in the accountant’s office in order for them to pay anything.

I don’t feel bitter about that, because I knew that’s the way things were. Had I been a bit more streetwise and said, “Yeah, before I go in the studio, I want you to give me $5,000,” they’d have just reached into the drawer and given it to me. But I wanted to be by the book. I was one of very few white guys. There was a couple, but everybody else in the company was black apart from the accountant, who was this guy Milton Walden, who had an accent like the thickest Eastern European. And the buck stopped at him, literally. He had the purse strings seriously tied up. The fact they were in Englewood Cliffs rather than New York was crucial, because once you went over that bridge into New York City, it was unions. But they didn’t really operate in New Jersey too much. They could get away with more that they couldn’t in New York.

Do you remember working with Edwin Starr?
Yeah, up in Chipping Norton. Did an album, a few tracks on an album.

“I Just Wanna Do My Thing.” Do you remember that?
Yeah, and there was a song I co-wrote on the spot called “Not Having You.” It didn’t have a title at the time, but we did the track and then he put words on it later. A ballad. Yeah. He ended up moving here too, didn’t he?

He did. Nottingham.
Mr. Thatcher. Isn’t that his real name? Charles Hatcher.He says we’re doing the session and he comes up. He was cool, but quite in-your-face. I’m sort of doodling the piano. And he comes up, he says, “Give me a Barry White groove.” So I did an exaggerated lugubrious groove, and he said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Was that for Transatlantic Records possibly?

It was for Dragonfly Days, the album by Catherine Howe.
That would be through Ritchie Gold, who I’ve kept up with. Lovely guy. New Yorker expatriate over here who worked for Nathan Joseph at Transatlantic.

Okay, well, what about The Bureau?
Well, The Bureau were sort of the rump of Dexys.

But also a band called The Young Bucks. I think the lead Singer was originally Archie Brown?
That’s right. Because the rest of the guys were Dexys.

I’m assuming that you got that because your involvement with Dexys before that?
Yeah. I think they’d had a fall-out with Kevin or something. There’s so many internal politics going that I didn’t really keep up with it. I was cool with everybody so I wasn’t partisan one way or another.

And how did the Dexys gig come about?
Roger Ames, who was the A&R head of EMI at the time, who went onto London Records after that, gave me a call. It was one of the very first productions, actually, so he must have seen me in the studio working on a session for one of his acts or something. And yeah, I ended up producing Searching for the Young Soul Rebels for Dexys. I hadn’t really produced anything up to that point. I produced a couple things for Ritchie for Transatlantic, a group called Red Beans and Rice.

What was the experience of working with Dexys? They seemed like they had their shit together.
Yeah. We just did the album quick and it’s all happening. There was that business with the tapes after all that. I don’t understand really what happened, but they wanted to increase their bad boy credibility and did a late-night flit with the tapes. They wanted to hold EMI to ransom for a better deal or something.

You also worked briefly with John Martyn, playing on the Well Kept Secret album.
Yeah. I don’t remember anything about that. I know I’m listed as that, but I don’t have any memory of it at all.

What about Chris Youlden from Savoy Brown?
Chris Youlden. I did three albums with him. There’s a few more obscure people that I did quite a bit with. Bryn Haworth for Island, who’s still around and still plays great.

There’s a track I play sometimes by Chris Youlden called “Nowhere Road”. I don’t know if you played on that. It’s got a nice clavinet on it.
That’s me. Yeah. He’s a good guy. I don’t know what happened to him. Or even if he’s still with us, I have no idea. There was a guy called Barry somebody, his manager and producer. He was a magician. He was a member of the Magic Circle.

And my final one is…
Your level of knowledge is incredibly wide and far more esoteric than I expected it to be, for which you have my congratulations. Carry on.

I’m a record nerd, so…
It takes one to know one. Right on. Okay. Hit me.

Okay. The Hollies. You worked with them mid-’70s?
I was with them on the road and in the studio from ’74 through ’77.

There’s a song called “Draggin’ My Heels” by The Hollies.
Yeah. It’s one of the few tracks I did with them. Yeah.

Check out Pete’s piano workout here.

So you played on that?
Yeah.

That was a really big disco record in New York.
I had no idea. To this day… That’s something new to me, Bill. I had no idea.

Do you remember playing that song on Supersonic? It was a kid’s TV show.
I don’t remember that, to be honest. I don’t remember doing many TVs with The Hollies. The first gig I did then was a sort of scampi-in-a-basket place in Wythenshawe. That was my first gig with them, a week at the Golden Garter. But they were absolutely super people. I’ve got nothing but good memories of The Hollies. They treated me great, partially because there was only one of me, and they’d just come off working with an orchestra, so I was considerably cheaper, although they actually paid me very well. Because I was doing all the strings with my trusty little string machine. We used to work a lot in Germany and the Commonwealth, like New Zealand, Australia, Canada. I think we did about four tours of Germany in my time and couple in Canada. Yeah, I’ve got lots of Hollies stories. But yeah, they were great. I mean, it wasn’t really my sort of music I was known for doing, but I mean, I could handle it. And they were just great company.

Their manager, Robin Britten. I don’t know how these things happened, but there seemed to be a template for British group managers. Gay, very civilized, fiercely protective of their charges. And Robin was all of those things, and he was great. His parents ran a short-trip airline between the UK and the Isle of Wight as an alternative to the ferry. And he ran The Hollies. Everybody they worked with, they worked with for a very long time. We did a live album in Wellington, New Zealand, believe it or not. Although it doesn’t say where it is on the sleeve, possibly because they thought it might put people off, I suppose. But I didn’t know that about “Draggin’ My Heels.” Brilliant.

Yeah. It’s appeared on a few modern compilations as a disco classic.
I have to have another listen. We used to do it live. It was a bit of a spotlight for me, as far as I remember.

It’s got a lot of keyboards on it.
I had a very, very early synth which was an ARP Pro Soloist, with presets. There was a preset called comic wow, which was made famous by Billy Preston on “Space Race.” And there was also a steel drum thing, and I used that the solo in the middle of “Carrie Anne”. Must have sounded absolutely crap, but at least it reminded people of the original solo.

What was your favourite synth?
Well, the one that was on the most hits was the Prophet-5, which is still sought after now, although it was notoriously unreliable tuning-wise. It was all analog. But it sounds great. And it was beautifully built wood. No plastic. Wood and metal. But yeah, I went through the usual ones that everybody had to have, particularly as a session player. You had to have certain things like a Yamaha DX7 and some kind of Roland.Not a 101. Either a JX-3 … a Jupiter synth of some kind.

The DX7, that really reminds me of Toto.
The Yamaha had different manufacturers, and there’s something about that. It had a proprietary name for their process. But it’s so spiky. Any of those records from that time, if you listen to them on a little speaker, like a clock radio, it just comes through ridiculously loud, you know? It’s some sort of sonic phenomenon. But yeah, most of the time I was playing songs on a piano Rhodes or a real piano, you know.

What music are you most proud of being involved in?
Oh, Bill, difficult question. I don’t know, really. That is a hard one. I don’t really know. I don’t think I have a favourite. I never listen to anything I’ve done. Never have.

Really?
The only time I listen to it is when somebody else asks me to, or for some research reason or whatever. But I mean, in common with a lot of people I know, I’ve always just moved on to the next thing.

You’ve led a pretty amazing musical life if it’s all happened by accident.
Not only by accident, but nothing was ever written down. Never had a contract. You do as a producer, because you’ve got to take care of business. But as a session player, you just get a phone call saying, “Can you make such and such studio at 10:00 on Tuesday?” People are incredulous today about that because they think, “Well, how do you trust …” You just did, because if you didn’t turn up, they didn’t trust you. And if they didn’t pay, then you would never work for them. It was mutual.

But do you think that’s very much a British thing? Because I worked in the States for a few years in New York, and my experience of the States was that everyone was trying to fuck everybody else over.
It was probably a little bit more civilised over here. I think a lot of it was possibly also the fact that the musicians’ union, although America’s not known for such things, but the union in America was more powerful than the British union, so there were less shenanigans going on here. But yeah, people got paid. I remember an interview a few years ago with Björn Ulvaeus from Abba, and he had a great phrase which just stuck with me, he said, “We were really lucky in that our heyday coincided with the golden age of copyright.” Which is very hard-nosed thing to say, but true because people got paid and writers got paid. Musicians got paid. They didn’t before and they haven’t been after. But during the ’70s, ’80s, when I was most active, was possibly a golden age for music producers. Not so much for consumers, but for people who made music. Because you got paid live. You got paid in the studio. Everybody got paid, from musicians to artists. Contracts were reasonable. Yeah. I really don’t know how you would go about doing all that today.

It’s much harder to make a living as a musician now.
Can’t make any money from streaming, can you? And as far as live goes, I mean, Brexit just poleaxed the whole bloody thing. Nobody remembers what it was like before we were in the EU. It was shit as far as working in Europe. It was just murder. You know, so much bureaucracy. And it was light years difference when we joined the EU. Because suddenly, all that was swept aside and there was no trouble. And now it’s all back. The paperwork, you had to have a carnet for every country. The last drumstick had to be counted for. Oh, it was just absolutely ridiculous. A truck with equipment couldn’t stop more than two times or something without coming home or… It was absolutely ridiculous. And all that’s back. It’s back even worse. Brexit is the most inexplicable thing that’s happened in public life my whole life, I think. It’s got no plus side.

No, there are two sides normally.
It’s all bad and none good. So what’s the fucking point of it?

I should talk a bit more about James Hamilton. I lost touch with him in the ’70s. But he obviously kept my contacts, and I got a call out of the blue in 1995 from him saying, “Pete, I’m dying and I want you to play at the funeral.” He was very matter-of-fact and he gave me a shopping list of songs he wanted me to play. I’m flattered, but I didn’t keep the piece of paper. The only thing I remembered he asked me to play was “Night Train”, James Brown style. God, it was weird, just turning up. I mean, obviously I’ve never met his family. I just turned up, nobody knew who I was. “Why are you here?” “I’m here to play piano.” “Okay.”

When I interviewed his stepson, he said you played “Love Me Tender.”
That’s right. I was surprised by that, but I did. Yeah.

He also said that you’d played with The Everly Brothers at Wembley the week before.
Yeah, I played with The Everlys for 18 years. They’ve been my most longstanding employer. I’d done an album with Phil Everly in 1982 including that duet with Cliff Richard through Stuart Colman, the producer who I did a lot of stuff for, Shakin’ Stevens and all that rock and roll stuff. And Stuart was producing Phil, who was a solo act at the time, who was actually signed to EMI by Terry Slater, who had been the bass player with The Everlys. And then when The Everlys reformed in ’83 to do the legendary reunion concerts at the Albert Hall, he got me in on it. The rest of the band was Cliff’s rhythm section. And then when they decided to make a go of it on the road, they called me up and I spent quite a few months every year in the States with them and elsewhere, as part of their band. And Phil became a good friend. Not so much Don, but Phil became a really good friend, and I played at his memorial service and all sorts.

Is it true they detested each other?
Yeah. How long have you got? The thing with The Everlys, They didn’t really have anything to do with each other.

But they could tolerate each other enough to go and play on stage together?
Yeah, yeah. That’s basically it.

Sam and Dave were another duo that were not keen on each other, weren’t they?
Yeah, that’s right. With brothers, it’s different. It’s deeper, you know? And also, you had the thing of closing ranks in the face of an external threat, which they would also do.It’s probably the same with the Gallaghers, actually.Sam and Dave weren’t actually brothers. I’m big on brothers because I did The Proclaimers stuff as well.

Oh God, yeah, I forgot about that.
That’s unbelievable. “500 Miles,” it’s kind of like the unofficial Scots’ national anthem, isn’t it?

Absolutely.
We did that at Chipping Norton. And it was before they had a band, so it was Paul Robinson on drums, Phil Cranham on bass, and Jerry Donahue on guitar. Used to play with Fairport Convention. Just occasionally you do something and you listen to it back and you think, “Yeah, that’s it. Don’t change a thing.” And that was the case with the 500 Miles. I just thought we’d managed to capture lightning in a bottle. The Proclaimers are very much what you see is what you get. They’re completely the same off and on stage. I did two albums with them. And “Sunshine on Leith,” people seem to think that’s some sort of a classic as well. I just put the music together around them, I didn’t mess about with their material. They worked just as well as just them playing on their own, you know? It’s not naivete exactly, but a kind of straightforwardness. Nothing’s particularly metaphorical or round the houses. It’s, alright, this is it.

Thanks Pete. This has been amazing. Thank you so much.
Cheers. All the best, mate.

Jeff Young let the music play

He has the honour of being first to bring dance music to Radio One in with his 1987 Friday-night Big Beat show. He followed this with another groundbreaking dance show, Club Culture, on Capital, along with stints at Kiss and a long-lasting show on Jazz FM. He’s also enjoyed a long and influential career behind the scenes in labels and production companies. But Jeff cut his teeth as a soul DJ, warming up for Robbie Vincent and Greg Edwards, then throwing his lot in with the new generation as electronic soul, hip hop and house started frightening off the old guard. Few DJs have such a broad understanding of how dance music moved from a world of obsessives and obscurities to the driving force of the UK music scene.

How did you get into music?
I grew up in North Kent, born 1955. All I can remember is around eight years old, I just started to listen to music. And in 1963, things were pretty exciting. I listened to the pirate stations avidly, Caroline, Radio London. I was gutted when they all closed down, because the BBC’s coverage of the music I liked was pretty poor. When I was at school it was Zeppelin, Hendrix, Stones. It was the blues-based stuff. I never liked the Deep Purples and the Genesis of this world. There was always a black music thing in me somewhere. And then when I was 17, I started DJing with a friend of mine, and it was all up to Contempo to buy imports. I still kept up an interest in pop and various other bits and pieces, but black music pretty much took over my life after I was 17.

What was Contempo like?
In those days, it was two rooms on the first floor of a building in Hanway Street, just by Tottenham Court Road. We used to get the train up there on a Saturday and climb the stairs, and the guys behind the counter would just be playing tunes one after the other. You’d stick your hand up and you’d buy it. They always had a little thing where they’d pin sevens on the wall, the stuff that had come in that week. They had a lot of back-catalogue as well. I can’t remember if the Blues & Soul [magazine] office was there as well or not. That was the first place we went to. Then after Contempo, we found places like City Sounds and The Groove, and Bluebird and all those other shops that had emerged.

When you started DJing, was it a mobile DJ set-up?
Yeah. We I DJed in a Catholic youth club, of all places. Sunday nights, and gradually got some money together, got some gear, and then started to do weddings and that kind of stuff. A good grounding really, because you learn how to get a dancefloor and then keep it, which is something I’ve seen some people still not be able to master.

When I was around 21 me and my friends, if we didn’t go to the Goldmine, we’d go to this Golden Lion pub in Sydenham where Robbie Vincent was DJing. And one week, Robbie needed a backup DJ, and so he took a flyer. I started to do bigger gigs with him. I built up a sound system, and when he got booked, he would get me to put the sound in and then back him up. And he took to me because I never stitched the main turn-up.

You laid the ground.
Yeah. I could quite happily warm a room up for an hour without playing anything. He told Chris Hill about me, and then Greg Edwards. So I ended up doing loads of warm-up gigs for these guys. Robbie then got me a gig at The Royalty in Southgate, warming up for all the big turns of the week.

What was the Goldmine like?
It was a great place to go. When we first went he was doing the swing thing with the Glenn Miller business. There’d be all these kids dressed up in army gear, waiting for the 45 minutes when he’d turn the place into a swing palace, and then he would go back to the black music. We liked it as a novelty, but we weren’t unhappy when it ended. It was a good camaraderie there which carried on for years and years. It was so rare there was a fight in the Goldmine. Everyone was friendly. The weekly lot, which was probably two-thirds of the club, you knew each other after a while. It was great.

Robbie Vincent and Jeff Young (R) show off their military side

And was it very multicultural or…?
It was multicultural, but I do think there was a little bit of door racism. A few people have said to me over the years, “I went down to Goldmine and they wouldn’t let me in,” which obviously hurt quite a lot. Embarrassing. You had the tribes in those days of course, the Brixton Frontline and so on, and everyone had black members in their tribes. So it wasn’t like we were a completely middle-class white audience. It was multicultural, but maybe not as multicultural as it could have been.

I guess the crowd in those days was largely working-class kids?
Yeah, and they nearly all traveled. There were a few kids in there from Canvey Island, but not many. Most people drove down from all kinds of places, as they did most of the other suburban soul clubs like Frenchies and Flicks, and all these other places that sprung up.

What was Frenchies like?
Frenchies was similar to the ‘Mine. Different clientele. A Sunday night, so it had a slightly different vibe. It was the first place I ever played where, a bit like the northern scene, if they really like something you played, you got a round of applause at the end of it. And that shocked me the first time it happened. I was like, “Fucking hell, what are they doing? They’re clapping.” The guy that ran it was a bit of a notorious boy, and he was quite funny. So yeah, it was great, Frenchies.

Did the music vary from club to club?
It was mainly along the same lines. The jazz funk and soul-y bits, and Philadelphia International and Salsoul. There was one period at the Goldmine where it was very jazzy. The other clubs were not as jazzy as the ‘Mine, which would have been quite tough for a lot of punters [to dance to].

And what about Flicks in Dartford? What was that like?
Well, Flicks was a different kind of club, in that although it had a black music policy, it was a dress smart thing, there’s a restaurant in the club, like a lot of those kind of clubs in those days.

Were there any DJs in particular that inspired you when you were starting out?
Chris Hill and Robbie [Vincent] and Greg [Edwards] were the obvious ones, because they would be getting stuff even earlier than some of the import shops because of their record company connections. Chris’s music was a bit tougher than what Robbie used to play, and I liked that. Later on, I began to like people like Gilles [Peterson] and Paul Oakenfold. I looked at what some of the younger guys were playing, and I used to think they put sets together really, really well. In those days you would still play anything you wanted. So you could play jazz and you could play hip hop and you could play soul, but they would be doing it in a slightly different way. It wasn’t until the acid house thing came up that nights began to emerge where you weren’t doing too much cross-pollination.

What about your broadcasting career? You played on Radio London from very early on.
Yeah. I always thought I was too Cockney for radio. These were the days when you had to have a modicum of Queen’s English to get away with broadcasting. Robbie was going away for a weekend and he put me and Graham Canter on his show on Radio London. We did that a few times, and then eventually he said to me, “Just do it on your own.”So I would do sit-ins for Robbie when he went on holiday or he’s at home cutting his grass or something. And it just developed from there.

I did go on the pirates as well. I was on JFM for a little while, but not regularly. I was working in club promotion for a major record company, and the hours were long and I was away a lot. So the last thing I wanted to do most Sunday mornings was jump out of bed and drive to Streatham to broadcast. Eventually Robbie went to Radio One, and they gave me the Radio London show. It went on at 11:30 and think it was the breakfast show for most people who we were broadcasting to.They later changed it to 8.30 which wasn’t as much fun. But soon after that I moved to Radio One.

On Radio London, were you given carte blanche to just play what you wanted?
Yeah, exactly. Whoever did that show chose the music. I’ve been really, really lucky, because every radio show I’ve done that’s my own, I’ve either programmed all of it or most of it. I did have a show on Jazz FM on a Saturday and a Sunday for a little while where they wanted me to play fifty percent playlist, but I got to choose the other half, so that was okay. And even on Capital, Richard Park let me let me choose all the music, which was pretty unheard of.

I was at Capital around 2000. Saturday nights from seven to eleven. I’d left Radio One and stayed out of radio for a while. Then I formed a production company with Pete Tong and Eddie Gordon and we got Danny Rampling onto Radio One, and [Judge] Jules. The Essential Mix was our program. I did some stuff for Kiss. And then Parky came in and I went to Capital. My Capital show had more people listening to it than the relevant Radio One shows and Kiss shows added together, it was a really good platform, it was their first foray into a proper dance show really.

I did a year on Xfm, which was disastrous. So I came off radio, and I was basically listening to Ibiza chill-out music for about ten years. And all of a sudden, I got a call from Jazz FM. Robbie wasn’t well. They said, “Would you do three and a half months?” And I stayed for ten years. So, I’ve done most of the major stations in London at various times.

What about the label side of things?
I was at Phonogram, which later became Mercury. I’d signed Shannon’s “Let the Music Play” to the label and I went to America with our video bloke to shoot a video for it. First time in New York, I couldn’t believe it. I’m listening to these radio stations, and I’m looking at the city, all this stuff. I realised that quite a lot of pop stations, like WBLS, would have a normal week. Then at, say 6pm on a Friday, they would become a dance station, and they’d stay like that until Sunday night, then they’d revert to their normal format.

So in 1987 I wrote a three-page letter to [Radio One Controller] Johnny Beerling telling him why he needed a dance program on Radio One, either a Friday or a Saturday. Indie music was in a bit of a doldrums at that point. I thought nothing would come of it. But all of a sudden there was a rumble around Radio One that they were thinking about doing this. And I’d actually agreed to go to Capital when Radio One suddenly rang and said, “Would you do Friday nights for us?” I nearly didn’t take it because they were on medium wave at that time. A medium wave at night was just an unmitigated nightmare. But they said, “Oh, six weeks after you join, we’re going FM.”

And did they let you get on with it?
I think outside of people like [John] Peel, they’d never had anyone like me in there before. They gave me a guy to work with who was a regular Radio One producer. He’s looking at me to play the dance music that’s in the chart. And I was saying, “You know what? It doesn’t really work that way.” But I was lucky, because he went off with Mike Read to do a mammoth Paul McCartney documentary which took him out of the building for months. So I just worked on my own. I got people to make jingles for me. I started in October ’87, but it took me about six months to kind of get in the groove of the whole thing. And then they started to say to me, “Man, your figures are flying.” They never showed them to me, but they were obviously very, very happy with it. And I just kept going.

At that point, even on radio shows, you were still dodging around between genres. I kind of isolated the hip hop stuff and devoted the last hour of the show to that, because it would really break up the flow otherwise. I had three or four hours so I had plenty of time to fit in the other stuff.

What other music were you playing in ’87? Early house records would have been out by then.
Yeah, early house. In those days you got letters from people saying, “Oh, you don’t play enough acid.” So I would play a bit of acid and a bit of this and that, but I didn’t go the whole hog. It was a bit of a leap of faith for me to play Lil’ Louis “French Kiss,” for example. I was always aware I was on the radio. It wasn’t in a club. There was still Salsoul and stuff buzzing about. And a lot of the British stuff that really went pop, like S’Express.

Stock Aitken and Waterman?
No, I stayed off that. Even though I was working for Phonogram. We had Kool & The Gang too, but I never played a Kool & The Gang record. I wasn’t going to do that. I might have played Cameo. I can’t remember. I probably did, but yeah, the real pop end of it, I didn’t. I might’ve played “Roadblock”, but that was a scam anyway, as we all know. It was quite funny going into a shop and someone trying to claim it was an old record from back in the day, when it was being driven by a drum machine.

Yeah. Listening to it now, you’re like, How did people fall for this?
It was shrink-wrapped as well. I ripped the record out of the sleeve and looked at the run-out groove, because there was the British mastering boys’ signature in the run-out groove. So you knew it was cut in London, and they had a drum machine on it, and no, it wasn’t Maceo. You know? So, yeah. Funny. Good scam.

Tell me about [Record Mirror dance columnist] James Hamilton
He was a larger-than-life character on a number of levels, both his height, and he was really funny. He told it like it was. If he didn’t like something you’d done, he’d tell you, no problem at all. He would come to our gigs, he’d review them, and we’d go out to eat. And of course, the size of the bloke, he was unbelievable in restaurants: two starters, two main courses. And his obsessive BPM business was a legend of its own. But yeah, he was a really, really great guy. Proper music lover. And he didn’t mind a laugh as well. We put a couple of things in Record Mirror that were proper stunts. Fictitious clubs on a Tuesday night, people wandering around Essex looking for Candles Club at Camberwick Green.

And the Japanese jazz stunt. He printed a chart with a fictitious title, and the artist was “Can you suck a large one?” It was K-A-N-U, Sukka Larjwon, spelt like a Japanese name. And of course people fell for it again, and it started to appear in people’s charts. It was tragic when he died, it really was.He died a young man, really, in the big scheme of things.

I met him once and he really reminded me of [’50s actor] James Robertson Justice.
Yeah, oh, absolutely. The whole accent thing and all that. Yeah, he was a proper lord.

In the ’80s, if you were into dance music, it was hard to actually hear it, unless you went out to clubs. Outside London, on the radio you’d get maybe two hours tops of dance music programming a week.
Radio London had a couple of shows on during the week, the big one was obviously Robbie’s Saturday show, then Greg Edwards on Capital Saturday night. You’d wait for the weekend and try and zoom in on the pirates, God bless them. They all had money problems and they kept having their transmitters nicked by the DTI and they couldn’t afford to replace them. So you never knew if your favorite guy was going to be on Sunday or not. So it wasn’t until really Radio One opened up. And then of course we had Kiss, which opened up things in London.

Kiss really did change things, didn’t it?
Yeah, absolutely. Kiss did open it up. They had a couple of false starts, but they finally got on. They had to do what all radio stations do: they started off with great intentions of having all these specialist shows, then they had to start whittling those down because they needed to get numbers to get ads. So it did get a bit diluted after about 12 months, but yeah, Kiss did a fantastic job. It’s unrecognisable to what it is now, of course, but yeah, it was great. It was exciting being involved. It really was. The place was buzzing because it was all young kids that were running it.

How has the fact that we have a national broadcaster in the BBC, influenced how music is programmed? What are the differences if you compare it with the US, which obviously has always been very commercial.
Radio One will roll with what’s happening at any one time. When Pete took the Radio One show on and club culture did absolutely explode, it had a really big influence on what they were playing during the day as well. At the end of the ’90s, that decreased a bit as the guitar genres woke up again. I think Capital might have jumped into a bit more dance stuff than it did initially. So yeah, I think it did. I think it had a huge influence.What used to happen back in the mid-’80s, something would be the leading genre of the time, whether it’s indie guitars or dance or whatever, stick around for three years, and then it’s something else. But dance turned up and it never left the building. The ’90s were just awesome when I think about it. It’s a testament to the producers and the artists that kept it moving.

It was the first kind of dance music we were able to make here that had credibility outside of the country. Suddenly, we were making music that was comparable with America.
All of a sudden you could put a studio in a bedroom, that was it. We’re off to the races. All of a sudden, we don’t have to go and record it somewhere that’s a few hundred quid a day. You can do it at home and do it very economically. The world was everybody’s lobster when technology made that leap.

When I interviewed Marshall Jefferson, he described house music as the black punk rock, and that really struck a chord with me because as a teenager, I moved down to London as punk rock was happening. And house music felt like that to me. I loved the slightly amateurish feel of it.
I think it’s a really good description. People like him took the bull by the horns and just cracked it. Absolutely.

How did you go from your Radio One show to Pete taking over?
I left Radio One at the very end of December 1990. And at the time, I had a very responsible job at A&M, and it was pretty pressured. I look back and probably all I needed was a month off, because I was just shattered. I listened to all the records. I did everything. Whereas I think where Pete was quite clever, he had a couple of people around him that helped him out. When I left they asked me what they should do, I said, “Get Pete Tong off Capital.” And they did.

How did [production company] Wise Buddha come about?
[Radio One Controller] Matthew Bannister kept badgering Pete to do more programs, and Pete just couldn’t do it, but he decided we could form a company and deliver dance-orientated programs to Radio One. It was one of the early independent production companies: Me, Eddie Gordon and Pete. The first thing we did was get Danny Rampling off Kiss. We introduced Westwood to the Radio One people. We just sort of let them shake hands, then we stepped away. We already had the Essential Mix on air, that was another one of our programs. We kept saying, “Take Gilles,” and they did eventually, about three years later. They took a drum and bass show about eight months after drum and bass first reared its head. And that was quick for them. They asked us to do it, but we weren’t sure. So they took Fabio and Grooverider in-house and just did a show with them.

And who were you dealing with at Radio One in that period?
Andy Parfitt, mostly. We said to them, “Look, we think you should get involved in Ibiza.” And they were like, “Hmm, okay, that’s interesting.” So we did a recce, decided we could do it, although we had to drive broadcast satellites to Ibiza. We didn’t trust Spanish ISDN. The first year, it was just Pete, Danny and a couple of guests did programs. The second year, we bolted on Dave Pearce. And then the third year, Radio One went mental and sent everybody. That was when Moyles went. Zoe went. Everybody went.

Is that the year that Lisa I’Anson…
Yeah, that was the, “Has anyone seen Lisa?” year.

They were asking for trouble, weren’t they?
It cost them a lot of money. They wanted to take everyone, which meant all the staff went as well. I would have just had two teams working on various times during the day, and that would have cut the costs down. But no, they wanted everyone, and it was like that for quite a few years.

Was it inevitable that house music would take over the world?
I remember being at one of the New Music Seminars in New York. And all the top boys were on the top table jabbering away with stories and insight, the likes of Marshall Jefferson and all these early adopters. And I remember saying to Pete, “If these boys put songs on these tracks they make, they’d be really dangerous.” And eventually, that did happen, and it allowed that music to open up to a wider audience who don’t all want instrumentals or dubs or whatever. Let’s face it. There are people that need a melody with their music. And in the early days of remixes, some pop act would make a generic record. And then somebody like me would send it to someone like Marshall Jefferson and say, “Turn that into a house record for me, so I can get it played in clubs.” That’s how it rolled.

Did you have to fight to get UK remixers involved?
In the early days of Janet Jackson on A&M, she was having all of her stuff done by Shep Pettibone. And we were ringing the Americans going, “Listen, this is fine, but it’s a bit like telling the same joke twice. Can you please let us get one of our guys to do it?” And we got either CJ Mackintosh on his own or him and Dave Dorrell to remix a track. She loved it. Then after that, they let us do it because what we did had more of a European flavour than just another Shep Pettibone remix. It’s always been the same. You do anything to push that record a bit further, and the remix was the tool that you use.

When you look back to the remix mania of the 1990s and triple packs of Dannii Minogue, it did get a bit mental, didn’t it?
It got completely out of hand, really. But in those days there were still budgets to be had and you would do anything to get your act into the chart. And if you got it there by selling 3000 12-inches in week one, then that’s the way you did it.

I want to ask you about the splits in the soul scene in the ‘80s, because you had a foot in both camps. Tell me about the adverse reactions to the electronic soul music that was starting to come out in the early ’80s, and to hip hop.
Well, it split the DJs as well as the punters, really. A lot of the DJs really didn’t like the step away from what was soul music of that time. At first, there was a bit of a kickback. What we never got into was the electro thing. We did records with drum machines, but we didn’t do electro, but we did do hip hop. And I think most people came round to that. In those days, hip hop was made using samples that we all knew, so there was kind of a perverse familiarity to it. Before you’ve even stuck a needle on, you knew there’s going to be a reference point for people, and it’s just down to them whether they want to take it in and dance to it or not, really.

The first huge one was Doug E. Fresh “The Show”. It was absolutely enormous. At these traditional soul weekenders you’d put Doug E. Fresh on and people would go absolutely ballistic. And that didn’t go down too well with some of the older members of the community. Same with radio, Pete [Tong] and I were deliberately pushing barriers all the time. We’d play hip hop records we thought were relevant or good, and then we did dance stuff. And of course, there was jazz as well. Even Prince was not acceptable for some people, but Pete and I were into that whole Paisley Park thing. We were pushing the barriers a bit on the radio, which helped with the clubs. But yeah, the split. Some people did go off and just do soul clubs instead of clubs that played across the board. But it split the DJs more than anything else, I think.

Was it mostly a generational thing?
Yeah, definitely. The older ones were not having it basically, whereas the younger ones, that’s what they were up for. That was their lifeblood, keeping everything moving forward. New music, new genres. So yeah, definitely. Definitely a generation splitter.

I remember reading in Blues & Soul, Frank Elson claiming that it wasn’t soul, it wasn’t soulful
To me, it was just music moving forward, music progressing. Did it have to be some sort of fist-clenching indie soul anymore? I don’t think so. We were moving on and looking for new things. I’m not surprised Frank Elson would write that. I’d be more surprised if he said, “Oh, I love all this new stuff that’s coming along.” I remember one kid writing to Blues & Soul because he looked through the back window of my car and I had a couple of Gang of Four cassettes on the back seat, and he thought that was disgusting.

How did it affect the soul scene? Was it like northern soul where some people were only playing classics?
There was new soul music for those guys to play. So, there were rooms where people would go and hear that stuff, but there was a group of us that just moved away from it, because we wanted to play other things that to us were a bit more exciting. The soul thing never really went away.

What other records divided people? Gave people a real line in the sand?
Particularly the early Def Jam stuff, really. “Rock the Bells”, “My Adidas”, all that classic stuff from Run-DMC, and the Beastie Boys. When I started the Radio London show at 8:30 in the morning, I opened up with “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party!)”, just to send a little message to the people at Radio London. People had to make up their minds pretty quickly.

When I interviewed Pete Tong many years ago, he said, “When rap came along, me and Jeff Young became the embarrassment on the bill at those weekenders.”
We were the enfant terribles. For example, on a Sunday afternoon we deliberately played Doug E. Fresh, knowing the next bloke on the decks was Robbie Vincent. And Robbie would come on shaking his head, “Oh, fucking hell, they’re playing this shit.” So yeah, we did it deliberately.

Did you feel you were the vanguard of the next generation and these guys were out of touch?
It did feel like that. I was in a slightly difficult position because I straddled the generations. I wasn’t a young gun, yet I wasn’t one of the old gits. You know what I mean? I would be siding with the young guns, because that’s what I liked.

How important was the jazz-funk, soul scene in setting the stage for the rave scene that came later?
I think we did really set that whole rave thing up. Although people take the piss out of the weekenders, they were early raves, if you see what I mean. Three thousand people in a holiday camp! Because of licensing laws, it was one, two, three, four or five sessions of music over the weekend. And a lot of those early rave DJs came out of that soul scene. When you think of Nicky [Holloway] and Pete and Oakey, Johnny Walker, those boys cut their teeth playing soul records and then developed into their own thing. I think we were the precursor to it. I wouldn’t say I would want credit for anything, but I don’t think what we did got enough recognition in terms of what rolled forward out of it.

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.”

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

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.

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.

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.

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 8^th. 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 15^th 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.

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 2^nd 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.

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