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.