Opened in 1987 and still going strong, the Sub was the epicentre of house and techno in Glasgow, and to this day is one of the world’s finest dancefloors.
Starting out as a student club runner in Edinburgh in the 1980s, Fred Deakin has built a formidable career as a DJ, producer, graphic designer and lecturer. This charity shop polymath was responsible for numerous clubs, including Misery, the self-styled worst club in the world, Thunderball, Blue and Impotent Fury, all of which he distilled into his award-winning Edinburgh Fringe show, Club Life (now about to show in London). Alongside Nick Franglen, he formed the humour-laced Lemon Jelly, who went on to be nominated for a Mercury Music Prize and BRIT Award. Subsequently, he has worked as a lecturer, though he still keeps his hand in looking for vinyl treasures in bargain bins and charity shops the world over. He is Britain’s leading Nana Mouskouri fan.
Interview by Bill, 02.11.20 and 11.10.2024
How was the Club Life conceived and then how how did you construct the idea? Well I kind of had the idea in lockdown because I was just feeling isolated as we all were and I realised fairly quickly that we were all going to be stuck at home and in these little bubbles for the foreseeable and then when we reemerged clubbing was going to be the last thing on the list. It made me take stock and I remembered all the nights I’d run and all the nights I’d been to in my late teens and 20s and even 30s and just how special they were. They weren’t necessarily huge big name clubs that we all talk about, they were just the clubs that me and my mates put on for our friends and our community and that whole history had vanished into the mists of time. I just wanted to sort of pay tribute to clubbing
Misery, Edinburgh.
It’s a young person’s game to some degree. So, okay, Club Life is not a club. Is it me standing on stage telling a bunch of stories about clubbing? But does that honour the spirit of the clubs themselves? What about if I tell some stories and set the scene, describe my history of running clubs and then we have a little club section where we actually recreate some of the clubs at the time. If I want to get through sort of eight different club nights in the space of an evening, how’s that going to work?
So what about if I have a cast of young people dressed in the clothes of each particular genre coming on and representing those clubbers, and then if the audience wants to get up and dance with them and be part of that club, then they can. Well that’s an interesting idea, maybe that would work. So I had the idea and the big moment where it was going to happen was when I applied to Summerhall, an Edinburgh venue, who I’d been talking to. I teamed up with a great director and my old mate Davie Miller who was in Finitribe back in the day. I’d written a script and we put it on its feet in front of a bunch of Edinburgh people and it was a bit shambolic. It’s definitely a hybrid of club and theatre. DJing’s such a unique art form in many ways because you’re right there and you’ve got instant feedback. With something like this, though, you take it on board after each show. We did four scratch shows. I could only afford to do three day rehearsals. Then we had three days with me, Sita Piaraccini, our amazing director, and the cast of five where we basically had to go, ‘Okay, how does this work?’
Okay, so tell me about the Edinburgh run. How many shows did you do? And did it build up momentum as it went along? Well, first of all, it’s incredibly competitive. It’s possibly the most competitive audience marketplace on this planet. You’ve got, I think, 3,000 shows and apparently the average audience is six people. So that’s a lot of shows that are completely empty. We had that classic Edinburgh experience where our first show in 100 seat venue, we had eight people. I’m like, ‘Oh my God, this is so painful.’
However, you can still put on a good show, whereas five people in a club is a shit club. It doesn’t matter who’s DJing. You, me and Jesus, it’s still a shit club with five people in it. So we had eight people on the first night and it was depressing, but they all stayed for the full two and a half hours and six of those eight people were on the dancefloor pretty much every time they could be. Then about halfway through the run, a reviewer came, the fire alarm went off in the middle of the show and we had a load of 17 year olds who were in celebrating a birthday party and I was just terrified. We had 30 people in total, the 17 year olds were half the audience, so I was terrified they were going to leave. Anyway, we then got a five-star review from the Scotsman, which was great. It started to get busier, but then we got a Fringe First, for innovation and outstanding new writing. It was an incredible thing to get because it was always a punt. Even in the scratch shows, I was going, is this ever going to work? Is this just another stupid Fred idea? But that was validation. So then people wanted to come and the last two weeks were sold out. So that is your classic Fringe journey.
What are the kind of things that you think that they’re learning from it? Well, it’s a story of how somebody, in this case me, fell in love with clubbing and then found a way to have a sustainable mini-career in that world and also do some really interesting and exciting things without compromising. And that, to me, was always the gift of clubbing, because you get out of uni or school and you’ve got to support yourself and then you go into a job and nine times out of 10, it’s a horrible experience and you hate it. And you go, really? Is this the rest of my life? Of course, for the lucky ones, like you and me, you can find a way out. Doing what I loved and managing to generate enough money to be able to pay the rent and buy some records. That was all I wanted for my 20s, to be accepted, to serve the community of beautiful people around me, to have some fun, making stuff that I cared about. Clubbing gave me the possibility to do all of that. And I would argue, I learned a whole bunch of other skills that I could then turn into a slightly more professional career. I didn’t realise I was learning anything at all, but actually I was learning about audience interaction, I was learning about user experience, learning about creating a brand loyalty
How did your DJ career start? I’d made the equation. A) I love records, I love music. I wanna spend all my money on records. B) I do not have very much money. C) If the records could earn me some cash, I could then spend the money on more records. D) Become a DJ. And at that point, again, as we both know, there weren’t that many DJs. It was quite unusual to be a DJ. And it took a certain amount of courage to step up behind the turntables. And I was just managing to dip my toe in the water. When I got to Edinburgh, I told everybody I was a London DJ, which was kind of true. I had DJed at my little sister’s 11th birthday in her primary school, which I rocked. I got a little residency at a club run by White Cube’s Jay Jopling, when he was a student. But ultimately, I soon realised that the only way to do it was to run my own night. So I gritted my teeth and found a mate, and we hired a venue, and started running a night. The first night we were too scared to charge admission, we just handed out free tickets. And everyone came and that was it. We were off to the races.
When did you arrive in Edinburgh? I was there 1984 to 94. I started running clubs pretty much as soon as I got there. Initially there were only two clubs, two nights, when I first got there. There was Allan Campbell’s Hoochie Coochie, which was the big one that everyone knew about. I think he did that on a Friday and a Saturday and he put gigs on as well and that’s where all the Edinburgh contingent went. You had all the minor pop stars, like Fire Engines and Win, James Locke out of the Chimes and Paul Haig. Then there was a hairdressers’ night on a Sunday called Manifestos. I went to Manifestos on my 20th birthday and went: Oh these are my people. This is my tribe. These are proper clubbers. The fact that it was on a Sunday, because hairdressers had Monday off so that was their Saturday night. They played the good music (the Hoochie did as well) but it was much more into the dance side of things. It was a little bit casual and there were straight up trendies. I couldn’t tell you who was DJing, I can picture their faces, but can’t remember.
Yogi Haughton played there didn’t he? He might’ve done but I don’t remember. Everyone was into the rare groove but Manifestos was more into the proto-house, things like ‘Sexomatic’ by the Bar-Kays, electro-ey stuff, Full Force, Prelude-y more than hip hop. They also played mainstream stuff as well like Swing Out Sister. The hairdressers’ couldn’t resist that bob. That was my first night. Hoochie Coochie and Manifesto were it and then Juan and Ernesto started up a latin jazz club called El Cambalache that was a big hit. Suddenly there was competition and the club scene started to grow. My first night was Blue and that was fun but then I started doing crazy shit like much more irreverent. Yogi used to call me Wacky Abba Fred. I saw Mark Moore at Taboo [in London] playing Abba and I thought to myself that’s the future cos it blew everyone’s minds BITD when everyone thought Abba was the devil. So I started breaking those boundaries. I was flirting with that, playing things like ‘Copacabana’. The nights I was doing explored real eclecticism, but also playing cool stuff like Malcolm X and George Clinton.
And then house happened and it was definitely a whoah what is this?! I was one of the first to play it in Scotland because we had the A&R guy who put out the House Sound of Chicago, he came to Scotland and blagged his way onto the guest list. We were doing a night at Stirling Castle. He gave me an armful of vinyl and in return he wanted to get him and all his mates in on the list. As a result, I had promo copies of the House Sound Of Chicago. The rule of thumb in Edinburgh at the time was I’d check out what was happening in London and then about three to six months later do it in Edinburgh when they were ready for it. So we were playing house as a background thing but we hadn’t really got it yet.
Now what was the big shift? I think it was Slam. They did a party and had the balls to charge £15. They were the first people to say, we’re putting on an event and it can’t be a fiver to get in, it has to be £15. At the time it was like, what the fuck are you talking about?! No one’s gonna pay £15. They had the balls to do it and got away with it. So what we were doing was running clubs on the same scale as those clubs and I was playing acid house but I wasn’t playing just acid house, whereas Slam were pure housers. So we were getting crowds of two thousand which was pretty good for Edinburgh.
So word got out in Glasgow that this club Thunderball was doing well so we and Slam sat down with Tennants and they sponsored a tour, which actually fell apart a bit. I think that was when Slam first started using the Arches. I think it would be fair to say acid house hit Glasgow in a proper way, before Edinburgh. The music was getting played in Edinburgh, but the whole cultural shift in Edinburgh didn’t happen until it had hit the same scale as Glasgow.
We did a night in the Fruitmarket Gallery, we managed to blag five nights in there and it’s a pretty amazing venue, right by the station and it’s huge. It felt like a rave cos it’s a big box with high ceilings. I was DJing with a guy named Peter Ellen who used to run Fopp and he did a night called Hoover that didn’t really work but was great. He was very adventurous with his music. He was a fantastic DJ. I’m a crowdpleaser whereas he was like fuck everyone else, I’m playing this weird glitchy house music. For a while he was persona non grata and the crowd didn’t follow him, but when acid house happened he was suddenly this prophet. He then did a night called Acid at Shady Ladies which was the big popular venue. Everyone went there on a Friday and Saturday, a reliable student night. He started it and it went through the roof. I remember going there the week after that front page tabloid story and of course everybody in Britain immediately wanted to go to an acid house club after reading that. Everybody had suddenly drunk the Kool-Aid, sweat was dripping from the ceiling and I remember seeing Juan, who was famous for running cool, acid jazz, Latin clubs, with a bandanna on and sweat dripping. It was at that point where everyone was thinking well, am I an imposter? Who gives a shit, this is too much fun to not do. I would say that was the first proper acid house club. But then Peter and his co-promoters had a visit from the constabulary who said: You cannot run a club called Acid and I will shut you the fuck down and put you in jail if this is still running next week. So they shut the club down and re-opened as Deep but it didn’t have the same naughty cache. That’s my memory of the start of house, but Slam were streets ahead.
What effect did the presence of casuals have in Edinburgh? Well for me it had a massive impact. Thunderball was my big hit. Blue was me copying what was happening in London, whereas Thunderball was me doing my own thing with my co-promoters. We had all sorts of stupid stuff, casinos, bouncy castles, so it was very like a rave except it wasn’t acid house all night. Anyway we were getting crowds of two thousand and we ran it at the Assembly Rooms which is a big festival venue which they split up into about eight theatres but we took the whole place and rammed it. It was quite a big deal in Edinburgh at the time without wanting to blow my own trumpet. We didn’t do it every week but every other month. And then casuals came and bust it up. We were definitely targeted, I know it for a fact. At the last minute we were trying to get some bikers to bring some bikes to have on stage. The night was for charity. They said yeah we’d love to do that. But as soon as I said it was Thunderball at the Assembly Rooms one of them said oh we’re not coming. We’ve heard about the violence. I said, there’s never any violence at Thunderball what are you talking about? Anyway, on the night about 12.30, the violence started. We had security but they bottled it. They were using cans they’d bought from the bar as missiles. I was playing 2 In A Room at the time and I thought I’d incited them by playing house. It happened once, then the security tried to deal with it, then it happened again, and we thought fuck this, and shut the club down. Fortunately, because it was a charity night we didn’t have to give the money back because it would’ve bankrupted us. After that we promoted another event in the Corn Exchange which no one had used before. Having sold out the previous event we couldn’t sell tickets for this cos everyone stayed away because of the violence. So it ended that club stone dead and broke my heart because it was my first big hit. I carried on running clubs but never on that scale. One of the guys from a rival club Spanish Harlem, then said oh you should’ve had better security and better organisation and we’re glad the casuals came and did your club over ha ha. Everyone else had been really sympathetic because the Edinburgh scene was actually quite tight. The thing is acid house wasn’t as much of a revelation, in my experience, as it was in London because I found Scotland to be more egalitarian than London so it was less a revelation than it had been down there.
When did you move back down to London? Well, I moved down to London to do a degree at St Martins, because I realised that clubbing was not necessarily going to be something that I could do the rest of my life. I was ill in my late 20s, I had leukemia. That was a wake up call, because when I went back to my old life, I discovered that I couldn’t indulge in the way that I had before. I’d had this escape, the luckiest and then continue to give my health a battering with stimulants and alcohol was undoubtedly a stupid thing to do. I made all these posters and flyers for my clubs. That was always my thing. And there was very much a DIY culture coming out post-punk as well. We just had this kind of thing, didn’t we? It was like photocopy, cut-up aesthetic that you made your flyers, you made your posters, you usually just stole an image from some book or something that looks interesting, photocopied it up, stuck some type on it. Bosh, there you go. So I did that for a while and then I started going a bit more intricate about it and also realising that this was probably infringing everybody’s copyright. I never studied design, I never studied art, but slowly through making all these flyers and posters I got my chops up. So I came down London to do a Masters at St. Martin’s, I moved back in with my mum and started working for Ian Swift, Swifty, so I got to know all the acid jazz lot and Gilles and everybody and I was designing Straight No Chaser and lots of record sleeves and that was fun and I met a lot of nice people.
The first time I ever saw your artwork was when I think your sister Camilla did a magazine, but I can’t remember the name of it. It was called Gear. Gear was my idea actually because I had this, I was doing all my flyers and posters on a photocopier and there’s a thing called a colour cartridge photocopier which is arcane technology now, but you could change the cartridge from black to red and then blue and then if you put a piece of paper through three times you could get a black pass, a red pass and a blue pass. So I had been making all my posters and flyers on this photocopier. This was 1989 and ’90, and she was deep in it, she was right in the thick of things, really caning it every night and having a brilliant time. I could see that something very interesting was happening and whenever I went back to her flat, she had Boys Own, Most Excellent, and Herb Garden, and all the fanzines that were such a big part of that culture, so I said to Camilla, ‘Look, why don’t we make a house fanzine of our own, you can write it and interview everybody, because you know everybody on the scene, and I’ll design it, and then you’ve got a lovely piece of work to show to your journalism employers.’ So yeah we decided to do it and the first issue I did the whole thing. It 24 or 32 pages, A4 size, and I did 200 copies of it. I spent a week standing by photocopier just going kachunk kachunk kachunk. But it came out really nicely and we had a lot of fun doing it and everyone loved it and Camila got a job with The Face and The Face wrote about it. We did three issues in total.
So how did you parlay that into the design studio, how or when did Airside happen? I was working for Swifty and it was a studio setup andI don’t think he wasn’t really that into it because it was quite a lot of responsibility. I don’t think he’d disagree with me on that one. So that to a natural end. I was there two or three years in his studio and I learned a lot and a great time, and he’s a lovely guy. Then I left, and me and Nat and Alex started up Airside in 1998, and we just had a go at it. It was the first dot com boom, so there were no websites. The email was just about a thing, the internet was a thing, but we basically were very lucky. We had a big party to open, and loads of people came, and then… suddenly the phone was ringing the next day from people who’ve been at the party went, ‘Oh, yeah, someone said to us you gotta get a website. What’s a website? Do you guys do that? What can you do for a grand?’ So yeah, it was just very organic we’re very lucky there was this sudden need for people who could integrate design into this new digital world and make things like websites.
Okay, so so Where does Impotent Fury falling in this sort of timeline? My friend Laura was being a little bit cheeky saying to me these Lonodn hipsters they think they know about irony, they think they’ve got attitude, we should show them some of the Edinburgh style so we started Impotent Fury which was the club with the wheel and with 12 different musical categories on it and they were very wide-ranging – and we had drum and bass and hip-hop obviously but then we also had like power ballads and I think we had good old British musical at one point where I just play a lot of Morecambe & Wise and Max Miller. My mate Sally would spin the wheel and another mate from the Mutoid Waste, Wreckage, he built us this massive wheel. Every half an hour she spun the wheel and if it was two in the morning and we’d just been half an hour of techno bangers and in the wheel came up with power ballads, then I’d pay half an hour of power ballads and it would be suddenly be ‘Move Closer’ by Phyllis Nelson. The wheel’s the boss, not me, it’s not my fault.
So where does Lemon Jelly fall in all of this? Well, the Jelly was also happening at the same time, I was very lucky to have several plates spinning at the same time. Basically, the Jelly started because I was buying a lot of car boot vinyl, a lot of easy listening stuff and just hoovering up record collections, random stuff. I mean, I wasn’t the only one. I think Fatboy Slim was there as well and of course, Bentley Rhythm Ace. We’re doing it too. I was a massive hip hop head. I mean, we were very lucky to grow up with hip hop and seeing how you have those ultimate breaks and beats albums with all the compilations. And you went Oh, crikey, that break comes from that track there. So you kind of got a little insight into how hip hop was made, how it was constructed and how some sample. culture changed the way the music was made. And then, of course, I started hearing these breaks in these unusual places, like strange different records like Nana Mouskouri. So going beyond, most hip-hop samples funk and occasionally rock as well, but there is a key genre pool that certainly the early hip-hop goes to. Sure, PM Dawn sampled Spandau Ballet. So there are exceptions, but that was basically the way. But my brain kind of went, okay, so what if you start sampling stuff from other places, from different genres? What if you widen the net? And again, this is 25 years ago, so this is very much common practice now, but then it wasn’t quite so usual.
Nick [Franglen] was a mate. I knew him from my teenage gang, and I hadn’t seen him a lot since I left London. But he was deep in music production, and he worked as a kind of session musician and an engineer and programming people’s work. He worked with loads of really great people like Pulp and Blur. So I went round to his studio one day and I said, ‘I’ve got a couple of things I think would make a really interesting sample, do you fancy having a go and having a muck about?’ and he went, ‘Well why not? The first session we came up with, ’In The Bath’ which was our first track. We both thought, ‘Oh that was fun’. So I said, ‘Let’s make another couple’ and then I’ll screen print a handmade sleeve because that’s how I roll and we’ll see what happens and that was the beginning of it.
We did three EPs that became the first album. XL were fairly quick off the mark to come come around and we were definitely talking to them before the third EP came out. It was very clear exactly what we were about right from the outset. We were about joy we had a bit of sense of humour and we weren’t super banging, but we were in the dance space and we had this very strong visual aesthetic as well. If you liked it, then great. If you didn’t like it then fair enough. No problem
Lemon Jelly – Soft
The one that I remember in particular that might not even have been credited to Lemon Jelly was a cut up of Chicago that had a denim sleeve. Is that right? We did a couple of Breezebox sessions with Mary-Anne Hobbs. It was great fun, and I was a very already digging in the soft rock category, which is very much the flavour du jour these days, but back then it was like, ‘No you can’t go anywhere near that stuff.’ We’d included If You Leave Me Now’ in one of our mixes, but we chopped it up, and it started sounding really good. Originally, there was a vocal sample from a religious record over the top of it on the actual mix. But we took that sample off, and it sounded great on its own. So we thought, ‘OK, let’s just do a couple of mash-ups.’ Richard X had just done the Sugarbabes, and that whole mash-up culture had just emerged. It was very new. So we thought, ‘Let’s put one out.’ And then Laura, the aforementioned chum, I went to her with this stupid idea about the denim sleeve. I thought, you know, if we bought 250 pairs of jeans, and then you could get four sleeves out of them, one for each pocket. And then we put a lemon-flavoured condom in each pocket. It was super fun. She hand-stitched some of the sleeves as well. It was an absolute bloody nightmare for her. She said she had blue bogeys at the end of it.
How many copies were there? We did 1,000 in denim, I think.
That’s up there with New Order’s ‘Blue Monday’ in terms of a loss-making venture. It was fairly stupid. Most of the Jelly was operated on that principle. Because, we grew up with that. To us, Factory Records is like a golden icon, a blueprint of how to do things. And of course, that implied that you will probably never make any money. The Haçienda is another example of that. I think that you and I ran clubs for love first and foremost. And if the money comes later, then hooray. And sometimes it didn’t. And there’s definitely club promoters from a time I can think of where they were testing their business skills rather than their creative skills – and I don’t want to disrespect that. The older I get, the more I respect the business side of things. But I kind of feel the creativity has to have that priority. The ‘Soft’/‘Rock’ single was yet another example.
I’m assuming that it sells for loads of money on Discogs these days? I haven’t looked but I think it’s three figures, certainly. There’s a lot of pressure on us to repress the the the Jelly albums and I think it probably will happen at some point but again I have to say I’m terrible because I like seeing them on Discogs for three figures. It gives me a little little boost of excitement when I see how expensive they are.
Obviously the other thing that happened was that you were on every gardening and cooking program for several years. We were quite nervous about it at the time because we felt like we were being overexposed and there’s a thing called the blanket agreement which you can opt out of but what the blanket agreement basically says is anybody can use your any music you know 99.9% of music is under the blanket agreement and it means that if you’re a TV person you want to put a piece of music on the background you can just do it you don’t have to ask permission and pay a royalty, so we never really got approval of that stuff. Yet there was a part where we’re getting a little bit nervous about overexposure. Now there is no shame in anybody making any money out of music in any way they can because there’s so little money to be made out of any revenue stream so it’s interesting to see how the sellout notion is much less now.
There is no such thing as a bad Boy George interview. Forever the iconoclast, there are few interviewees as happy to cause a commotion as this pop star-turned-DJ. We met George in 2002, when the stage production of Taboo was about to launch in London – it was for a feature in the Big Issue – but since it also coincided with an updated edition of How To DJ (Properly), we took the liberty of quizzing him about his DJ career too, while also dwelling on his occasionally fractious relationship with the gay community.
Interviewed by Bill, 07.01.2002
Whose idea was it to do Taboo as a play? Chris Renshaw, who was the director of the King & I with Elaine Paige. He came to see me about a year ago on a freezing cold night on a barge on the Thames with Culture Club on Watchdog. And my manager said this guy’s got an idea about something that he wants to talk to you about so while we were having a break we sat down and chatted. I think the thing that excited me was that he didn’t want to do something like the Buddy Holly Story or Mama Mia. He said he wanted to include all of those people from that time, so it amalgamated with my book and Sue’s book and turn it into something. That excited me. To just do a show about Culture Club, when I’d just finished three years of touring with them… And also, he wanted me to write a new score. We are using some old songs…
How many new songs have you written? We’ve probably got too many songs, about 18? They won’t all be in the show, some I’ll use for something else.
Did you write those yourself or did you collaborate? I always collaborate. I work with mainly on the musical with Kevan Frost, who I’ve worked with for twelve years and John Themis, another collaborator, a guitar player, Richie Stevens. I’ve also written a song with Judge Jules and Paul Masterson. I actually wrote that outside of the musical, but then I thought, ‘this really fits into the show’ so I rang them and asked how would they feel about including it and they were very excited.
How involved have you been in the stage production itself? Everything. Every little detail.
Were you involved in the decision about who was going to play you? Yeah.
How many people did you see? We did a workshop last year and the guy who is playing me now was playing someone else. And a very good friend of mine, Philip Sallon, who’s also in the show, grabbed me at the end and said, “That’s you there.” I said, “Really?” “Yes, no question, he should be playing you.” So I watched carefully, and I thought yeah, he does look a bit like me when I was 17. He’s not an obvious actor in the sense of being too theatrical. He’s a real person. Now I’ve got to know him over the past year and he’s very much like me; it’s almost frightening. The day that I actually saw him in drag was probably the freakiest moment ever, because he was even behaving like I was.
Is it going to be nerve wracking this weekend? No. It was supposed to go on in November, but I think the timing of it is really good. It feels right.
Are the songs coming out on a soundtrack album? There’s an exhibition being done in Selfridges, so there’s a four-track sampler which will be given away. At the moment I don’t have a record deal so I can do what I want with the songs. I think they might have to buy something.
Taboo cast on Today show, USA.
Looking back on it now, was the 1980s a special time, in terms of music and clubs? Well it was interesting from a political perspective because you had a really Tory government and you had all this creativity. I think in some respects you do need something to rally against. If you look at the current government, it’s sort of a nothing government so it’s really hard for people to have anything to rally against. I think at that time, you’ve got to remember that new romanticism was a follow on from punk and before that was the Bowie kids. So you’d come from all of that depression in the seventies to this very opulent decade of greed and right-wing politics, but really we were children of the seventies. There were lots of interesting musical styles in the seventies, it was a real pot pourri of styles, like reggae and disco. Punk was a reaction against all of those supergroups and new romanticism was a very small scene. We kind of made a mountain out of a molehill, because it was a small club with a handful of people. But they were very attention seeking and managed to get a lot of mileage out of what they were doing. But the roots of that go back a long way. It wasn’t something that just sprung out of nowhere. Why it happened I think was because punk had became this quite serious student concern. It got political. It was no longer this about showing off. It changed into something that I personally didn’t feel part of.
Does it feel weird that such a small clique of people went on to do all of these things? I think all of those people that were involved were from similar backgrounds. Steve was from Wales, Marilyn was from Borehamwood, I was from Eltham. There’s a whole list of people who were from these disfunctional suburban families and came to the big city to seek their fame and fortune. So we had a lot in common in that respect. I mean, you had two camps. You had the art school camp, with people like Stephen Jones, Kim Bowen, Lee Sheldrick, Stephen Linard. Then you had the other lot who were kicked out of school, like myself, Jeremy Healy, and various others. At first we looked down on them, and they looked down on us. The fusion happened eventually when Jeremy Healy and Kim Bowen ended up having a love affair and that brought the two households together. It became like the Waltons. It was very romantic. The funny thing was Jeremy hated Kim and them. They were fashion students and their clothes were really well made and ours were sort of DIY Oxfam, all thrown together. Then something happened and they became lovers and the houses came together and created this new family of freaks.
Do you think that the music at the Blitz and those places gets overlooked bit in favour of the fashion? I think the people who were there were interested in the music, were obsessed with music, whether it be Cabaret or Sound Of Music or Lou Reed, Bowie, T Rex or the electro sounds of the time, like Fad Gadget. That electro scene, like Cabaret Voltaire ‘Nag Nag Nag’ were very important records. I remember the first time I saw Human League, either supporting the Gang of Four or Gary Glitter, I can’t remember which was first. Just seeing this band on stage with no instruments.
Was it at the Marquee? Yeah. It was the first time. It was like: this isn’t a band, this is performance art. That was a fascinating idea. The music industry was in its infancy in terms of ideas. If you look at it now, it’s polished and preened. It’s a money-making organism. Back then, they missed things. I think one of the downside of the information age is that news travels too quickly. The one great thing about England is that ideas, even back then, worked quite quickly. But at least there was a period when ideas had time to develop and have an identity. Nowadays, if punk happened, it’d be in a B&Q advert soon after. Like what happened with drum and bass and dance music. There was a slight difference between what you liked and your parents liked. My mother would never have dropped me off and picked me up at a Bowie concert. But then you had parents going to Take That concerts with their daughters. I talked to David Bowie about this and he said when he was into rock’n’roll, his parents told him to get a proper job. Rock’n’roll wasn’t seen as a job. Whereas now, it wouldn’t be a surprise to see ‘Pop Star Wanted: £30 an hour’. That’s the change, the romance as gone.
I agree with you, but a friend’s son wants to be a drum and bass DJ and he’s getting pressure to get a ‘proper job’… Absolutely. I went to this thing recently in Romford, which was Young DJ Of The Year. I was one of the judges. I felt like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz when she encounters the Munchkins. There were 4,000 kids face to face with a real life pouf and it was really scary. It was mostly white and they were all getting down to garage. And it was really interesting to see that up close: wow, this is what’s going on. At the moment the most rebellious thing you can be is black or into black music. If I go back to the seventies, I remember dating girls who would go to blues dances and wear all the uniform, pleated skirts and loafers, but it was quite rare.
There was a club in Peckham called the Bouncing Ball that I used to pass on the bus quite a lot and I always used to sink down in my seat in my punk gear shitting myself. People were very active with their aggression in those days. They’d get on a bus just to punch you. I think things have changed dramatically. We were listening to Bubba Sparxx yesterday and what’s happening in America is that black artist are taking white artists and manipulating them musically. If you listen to a lot of dance music at the moment, it’s very eighties influenced. It’s coming back.
Boy George playlist
Do you think the eighties will get reassessed positively? I think you need distance from any decade to appreciate it. It’s a bit like your parents. You grow older and you think, actually some of the things my mother said to me when I was 15 were spot on. I remember my mother telling me not to go out with someone because ‘He’s a pervert!”. I was thinking later, actually she was right! Someone asked me today what I would say to the 20 year old Boy George and I wouldn’t have listened to what I had to say. I did what I wanted because I wanted to change the world. I think one of the problems with young people at the moment, which sounds really patronising, I’m sorry to sound that way, but they are really complacent. A couple of weeks ago, I went to Top Of The Pops with Philip Sallon. (They’re doing this thing where they’re inviting freaks along to make it look more colourful.) And there was Philip dressed up like a dog’s dinner and pretty much every kid in there came up to me and said, “Why’s he dressed like that?” For me, being a pop star (or ex-pop star) I have a reason to dress up. When I was 15 and I saw Philip and I was drawn to him like a magnet to a fridge. I had a girlfriend then and I said, “That man’s our new best friend and we have to find a way of manipulating ourselves into his life!” That’s how it was. It doesn’t happen like that any more because everybody wants to be the same.
Everything is packaged so quickly now, including rebellion… Well, if you look at the gay community and their struggle for assimilation has meant that their sense of identity has been eroded so they’re actually more uptight than straight people in some respects. When I went on Frank Skinner’s show and talked about buggery and stuff, the letters of abuse I got on my internet site were all from gay people. All of them.
What were they saying? Well, one said you’re running the risk of becoming like Kenneth Williams, this bitter old queen. My reply to that was that because I find a subject fascinating, which I do, I find the whole subject of sexuality so fascinating and it’s something that comes up almost everywhere I go. My reputation – like Jordan’s breasts – goes before me.
Do you think that certain elements of gays, since Aids, don’t want a fuss to be made about it? I think there’s a certain element of gay culture that doesn’t like anybody to be too flamboyant or outspoken because it’s ruining their bid for respectability and that doesn’t concern me in the slightest. I know that people look back at me in the eighties and think I was a kind of clown, charming the pants off the establishment. Which I was, in a way. I did want people to like me. But part of that was growing up in an environment in which I was told there was something wrong with me. As I was growing up, I bought into that.
Who would you like to play you in a movie? Euan Morton. Without make up he doesn’t look much like me. But there’s something about his personality, behaviour and attitude which reminds me so much of myself. The only weird thing about Euan is he goes off into corners and reads books alone. Which I never did. I was always in the thick of things. When my mother was in the kitchen talking I would be in there, trying to join in the grown ups conversations. I never wanted to be left out of anyone’s conversation. I was always the last to leave a room, whereas Euan has a reclusive quality. I think all actors are mad. Certainly working with them and watching them walking round the room talking to themselves.
Do you feel lucky to be one of the survivors of the eighties? I was up early this morning and Kim Wilde was on a gardening programme and I’ve read stuff dissing her for doing that. Actually, I say hat’s off to her: she’s working. I’ll always respect anyone for working, whatever it is. The guy from Dollar, for instance. OK, so he’s running a hamburger stall. So fucking what! At least he’s doing something with his life. Good luck to him. When I get slagged off for doing this and that… I’m not motivated by money. I’ve made a lot of money, but I came from a background where money wasn’t respected. My father was a terrible gambler. He had six children. He would take the whole month’s wages, including everybody who worked for him, and put it all on a horse. So I grew up with this absolute disregard for money. And it’s only really been in the last ten years that I realised that you actually need it to survive. You need to pay bills. You have responsibilities.
Are you still friends with many of the people from the Blitz era? Yeah. Princess Julia, Jeffrey Hinton. I was always friendly with Steve Strange’s mother. His mum was a great character and I always used to joke, “How did you end up with a son like that?!”. In the last few years, Steve – and he would probably say the same about me – has become a less bitchy human being. That comes with age. At the time we were all scrambling to get to the top of the heap and Steve Strange – damn him! – got there first. Part of what we talk about in the show is that he got there, and it really bugged the fuck out of us. We all hated him for it. And you know, Steve loved to lord it. He loved to stand on ceremony and tell people they weren’t good enough to come into his club. Turn away Mick Jagger, which I thought was one of the most outrageous things he ever did. But I understand what he was trying to do: he was trying to create this exclusivity which, to be honest, never really appealed to me. I wasn’t into alienating anybody. I come from a big family of extreme characters. I’m drawn to people with something to say, regardless of what they dress like or how cool they’re meant to be.
How do you think the general public perceives you now compared to 20 years ago? There are gay people who refer to me as a pantomine dame, which I find quite offensive, because in my own way, I’m quite outspoken about what I feel and who I am. So I’m as far away from Danny LaRue as we are from Mars. So I find that insulting and it’s one of the things that aggravates me the most. But it’s the price you pay for having a style.
Do you think part of that is because you’ve refused to become a ‘mouthpiece’ for gay people generally? I talk about it in a way that I feel fit. I don’t talk about it in the way that, say, Peter Tatchell would though I have a lot of respect for him. And Peter Tatchell is as hated in the gay community as I can be. I find it weird that gay people would be like that towards him, because in his heart what he wants to do is really positive. At the same time, the downside of that is that we end up with a community – if there is such a thing – where it has no identity.
What do you think that straight Britain thinks of you? Well, judging by what happened after Frank Skinner which is the most sexually explicit I’ve ever been on TV. What tends to happen with me is that I operate in whatever mood I’m in. If I’m in a spiky mood, and I think it depends on what questions you’re asked as well. I mostly DJ in straight clubs, I rarely have abuse. Whereas in gay clubs, I have a fair amount. I’ve been in gay clubs in the past where people have come up and given me bits of paper with some really horrible things written on them. But then I guess in a straight club I feel special, but in a gay club I don’t really fit in the criteria of the perfect homosexual. That’s what was great about Leigh [Bowery]. You know, you’d see Leigh at the Fridge which was a Muscle Mary club and there’s this guy with a huge body with his arse out spoiling it for the rest of them. The fact that he would even go to that club, which was so body conscious, wearing a vagina wig, and a push up bra and his arse in everyone’s face. I can remember thinking that he was quite sexy because he was so brave. I admired him.
Do you think he’s more culturally important than he’s been given credit for? He is to me, which is why it was important for me to try and tell his story. The most important thing about Leigh was that he was fabulous. When he got it together, he was a vision to behold.
Does it annoy you’ve not been fully recognised for your songwriting? Yes, in a word. It infuriates me.
Do you think the way you dress has a bearing on it? I suppose I have to take some responsibility for that. It does bug me. I’ve always said that I’ve never been driven by the desire to be taken seriously. I don’t take myself seriously, so I don’t see why other people should. I think there are people out there who get what I do. I get letters from them, they stop me in the street. But I am who I am. I actually think we live in an era now where people respect success more than they do creativity. So there’s not much I can do about that.
Which gives you the most satisfaction: singing, songwriting or DJing? Songwriting. Because I’m a selfish writer and I write about my own shit, the stuff that happens to me and there are times when I’ve had four hours sleep and I’ll call Kevan and say ‘I’m really sorry, what are you doing? I’ve got an idea for a song. Something’s happened; I need to put it down’. I’m very much into capturing that feeling of what I’m going through at the time. For me songs are a diary. They’re my life. That’s what I write about. For me that’s why it was great to do a musical because I got the chance to actually listen to script, listen to the message of the dialogue and go and be very strict with myself about writing a song that went with the dialogue.
Was it a challenge doing it that way? Not, really, Because to a point it’s stuff that I’d been dealing with. When I did Cheapness & Beauty right after the book came out, it was completely autobiographical which is why I used all the pictures and telephone messages and stuff like that. And it was really a history of all the things I’d grown up loving from folk music to glam rock. I think I’ve carried on in that fashion. I’m currently working on a record which incorporates some of the songs on Cheapness & Beauty like ‘If I Could Fly’, ‘Unfinished Business’ ‘Il Adore’ which is in the show, and stuff I’ve written about recently, about current situations and current lovers, one night stands, people I’ve encountered. What I love doing is using actual conversations with people, things that people have actually said and putting them into a song so the person actually gets to hear it and knows what it is. Like, for example, the song that Bob Dylan apparently wrote about Joan Baez ‘You’ve Got A Lot Of Nerve To Say You’re A Friend’. I tend to get quite bitter when I write.
Do you not think that’s a more articulate feeling than being in love? I think what happens is that songs go full circle and they become about you. If you think about John Lennon, everything you read about him socially that he was actually quite vile and quite cutting. And when you listen to what he sang ‘Imagine’, ‘Woman’, there’s so many beautiful things there and I think maybe he was trying to find that within himself. As a writer I think what you’re trying to find your own goodness or make sense of what you do, how you love and how you operate in relationships. I think you always know when you’re fucking up or you’re doing the wrong thing. When you meet people you know immediately when they’re right or wrong for you. But… there’s a part of you that thinks, I can change this, I can make it different. It’s always the same, but with music it’s always been my best lover…
You’re turning into a John Miles song… Yeah, absolutely! You can say what you want to say. One of my finest moments of lyric writing was when Kirk Brandon was in the dock reading out the lyrics to ‘Unfinished Business’. I thought to myself, ‘Mmm, actually they’re really good.’ And it’s hard for to appreciate what I do. I’m hard on myself.
If you could have written any song which would it be? ‘Always On My Mind’, ‘Walk On The Wild Side’ by Lou Reed… One other one: ‘God Give Me Strength’ Burt Bacharach and Elvis Costello… oh and ‘Man From Mars’by Joni Mitchell
Who’s been the biggest influence on your life or career? Bowie and then my mum.
What’s the most thrilling thing to happen to you? I think when someone says ‘I love you’. You never believe them, but it’s nice to hear it.
How do you feel DJing to rooms full of kids on E when you’re now clean? I have no moral objection to it. We’re a Chemical Nation. We’ve embraced chemicals for many many years. There’s a kind of hypocrisy with drugs. I think if you’re a kid that’s got a job that’s shit and you hate, you’re treated with disrespect all week long. You go out on a Friday and Saturday and you get wasted, whether it’s with alcohol or drugs or cigarettes. I don’t think I’m in any position to point my finger or lecture. That said, I think the road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom is true. But nothing I say will make any difference. In the same respect, when I was growing up I knew about Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix and it didn’t stop me.
How do you think clubs compare now to when you first started going out? I think people are less individual. Things are more genre based. Tribal, but not in a style way. More in a sound way: we like this type of music not that. I enjoy that, though. When I got to clubs, I deliberately play what I want to play. I don’t play for the crowd. I don’t believe there’s any merit in giving people what they want.
Why? Because I don’t. It’s not why I became an artist. Rock’n’roll is one of the few artforms where you are constantly expected to repeat yourself.
What was it like going to the Paradise Garage? I wasn’t really compos mentis when I went there! The one thing I remember about it was the gun detector on the door. Going through this, thinking is this a good idea. What was fascinating was that people weren’t interested [in me]. They didn’t give a crap. I remember being in there one night and seeing Diana Ross saunter in wearing a fur coat. Drop it to the floor, dance around and then leave. And it was just like, it was all about the music. What was interesting about it for me was it was so stripped down and raw, because the eighties was so excessive and so layered. You’d do backing vocals and layer them; you’d do strings and there was Trevor Horn and Steve Levine and then suddenly you’re in this club listening to ‘Set It Off’ by Strafe, which had nothing on it. If you look at some of the biggest dance records at the moment and of all time, there’s nothing on them. Some little noise or an EQ or the way the bass moves that makes it great. There’s no science to it, which I love.
Is there a record you always keep in your record box? Yeah. China White Volume 2. It’s got this lyric that goes “I go out, I go out every night, to dance upon the ceiling”. It’s a stupid record, but I love it.
How does fame as a musician compare to fame as a DJ? It’s weird for me because I get more hassle as a DJ because of my history. So people get very… they’re off their heads, they’re drunk. The most common comment I get is, ‘my mum loves you’ or ‘can you sign this for my grandma’. Or when people are being extremely witty, they’ll say, ‘have you got ‘Karma Chameleon’?’. To which I reply, I’ve only got the jungle remix. I’ve been in Moroccan bazaars and at the Pyramids and people have come up and sung ‘Karma Chameleon’.
What makes a hit record? Radio play [chuckles].
Alright… how do you write a hit record? Was it Bob Marley that said, ‘say what you mean and give it a melody’? You should always express yourself in the most honest way. The early part of my career, I was much more ambiguous. What I’ve learnt from listening to Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell, especially Joni, is that there’s an honesty in her writing. She’s not scared of saying things that are very brittle and open and I think that’s something that I aspire to as a writer. I split up with someone recently and I decided to write a song using their name. One of my good friends was appalled. She was like, “You can’t do that”. Why not? If that’s what I feel. The name worked melodically, mind.
Do you remember a song you wrote, ‘Kipsy’? It came out on an album Tense, Nervous Headache and it was about a real life person who went from trying to sue me to asking me for several copies to give away for Christmas! That was the beginning of me deciding to write about really real things in a direct way. Kipsy was one of the first people to be done for dealing ecstasy and I’d just met MC Kinky. I’d written this song that went, ‘If you know Kipsy you’re gonna get busted’ and then Karen came in the studio and did this seventies chat: ‘ecstasy, because I’m in ecstasy’. Then it started getting played in clubs.
Didn’t it come out on 12-inch in Japan? It might have done. It’s one of those tracks that I’d love to remix. I’d love to get someone to do a real wicked dub to it because it’s a great track. People like Weatherall and a whole bunch of people at the time, like when I did ‘Bow Down Mister’ and ‘Generations Of Love’ ‘After The Love’. It was the beginning of me taking control of my musical career. Having been in a band. And I don’t play anything. I write everything in my head.
Was it quite liberating doing stuff like ‘Generations of Love’? Well, when you’ve come up in a band, there’s that sense of we knew you when you were nobody. Who the fuck do you think you are? In Culture Club it was always: you don’t even know what key the songs are in. I realised after a while that a lot of production is just bullshit and a lot of music was just blagging. It was just about being confident. It’s one thing about being able to play instruments, it’s another to have ideas. I think working with Malcolm McLaren was a huge revelation for me, even though it was a brief experience. Malcolm’s an ideas man and completely erratic. I remember sitting with him in a flat in Bayswater listening to him write a song called ‘The Mile High Club’ and prior to getting there I’d been picked up from my squat in Goodge Street and Vivienne had bricked the window, dressed as a pirate, because she thought he was screwing Annabella. We arrived at this flat and there were all these people in the street, from the local restaurant [does foreign accent] ‘She crazy woman, she dress as pirate and how can she go!’. Malcolm cooked me dinner and tried to get me to sign this contract. One of the greatest things my father ever did, even though he knew nothing about music was to say, “Don’t sign anything with that man. I don’t trust him. I won’t ever to tell you to do anything but please don’t sign that contract.”
What’s the biggest crowd you’ve ever DJed for? 30,000 people in Johannesburg.
Is it weird DJing in front of that many people? What was weird about it for me was there was only one black queen in the whole place. I noticed that more than anything. It was a huge auditorium. You go there thinking it’s changed. What I realised was that it’s changed in theory but not in practice. I was looking round thinking, where are all the black people? One black queen in this sea of white faces. My cousin’s boyfriend got battered by security. A heavy night. I didn’t enjoy South Africa. It was racist and homophobic.
What was the first time you ever DJed? It was at Venus in Nottingham. I brought my records in a cardboard box. I DJed alongside MC Kinky, who was far better than I was, and Danny Rampling and Jeremy Healy played downstairs. I brought these vintage house records and some other stuff I thought would work.
What was it like DJing, compared to being on a dancefloor? I’m actually a complete technophobe, so the idea of working equipment was like aargghg! But it was an education for me. A lot of the gigs I did in the beginning were in the North: Birmingham and Middlesbrough was a real learning ground for me.
The Empire? That was where I really fucked up. I did things like if the record stopped I would just get on the floor, push the button and the residents would look at me with hatred: ‘Yaugh, you’re only getting this work because you’re Boy George’ and there was an element of truth in that. But you know, I worked at it. I practised. I got my confidence. I was playing with people who were veterans like Tony De Vit, Sasha and Carl Cox and it was like [sharp intake of breath]. I can remember the first time I played with Sasha at the Pier in Hastings [Bedrock] and thinking, ‘Oh my God, what am I going to do?!’ It was so frightening. I remember reading his palm that night. It’s one of my stock chat up lines. He looks like the skinny one from Laurel & Hardy.
There are people I admire for their technical ability, like Carl Cox and Tony De Vit when he was around. He was a master. I remember giving him a track I’d just made and he put it on. And just watching him mix this record he’d never heard before, so beautifully and keeping it in for half an hour.
Have you ever spent time practising at home? In the early days. I was very obsessive about practising and when I got two records to go together I’d call everyone and shout, ‘Listen, I did it!’ When I was doing Cheapness & Beauty I took my decks to Oxford because we were in a residential studio. And I just literally, any time there was a break, I’d go up and make tapes. But it’s a bit like singing in the bath. It doesn’t compare with singing in front of a crowd. Everything changes. So you can practise as much as you like at home and you can be spot on. And then you get in front of a crowd and you brought the wrong records, you’re playing with the wrong DJ… all those rules about respecting the night… they’re gone. You get stuck on between Fergie and Anne Savage on New Year’s Eve, so what do you do? What I don’t ever do is adapt to the night. I refuse to do that. I get shit from people and people come up, but I think the thing is you’re always playing to an educated minority. That’s why.
Did have musical experience help you in any way as a DJ? Not at all. I watched DJs. I used to watch them doing that [licks finger and goes as if to hold against platter]. I used to think what are they doing there? But it’s a load of old bollocks! It doesn’t do anything! Once I’d decided how I would DJ, I DJed from the middle of the record [he motions as though touching/moving the label], pushing it. I used to watch other DJs and wonder what I was doing wrong. And I had all the beat counters, the machinery, and they never worked. I’d spend hours at home going ‘well, it’s 30 of that and it’s er…’ I bought every gadget you can think of. But really, it’s like learning to drive: you’ve got to get out there and do it. Fuck up. Make mistakes. The best bit of advice I ever got was from Jon Pleased in Manchester at the Haçienda. I did this real car crash job, like a drag queen falling down the stairs in platforms. I said, “Argh, I can’t believe I did that!” And Jon went, “Well, at least they know you’re here!”
Was Karma Chameleon influenced by the Bewlay Brothers? No. But we got sued by the guy that did ‘Handyman’ [by Del Shannon]. Do you remember that? I’d never heard it. I’d heard it after the court case. When I first played it to the band, they laughed at me. And, in fact [looks round to see if Roy Hay’s still there], Roy’s not here so I can say this. The guitar lick was a pisstake, a total pisstake. It was a diss. It was the last song recorded for Colour By Numbers and everybody was dismissive. They said, “It’s the worst song you’ve ever written”. I said, ‘It’s a Number One record’ and I fought like mad to make sure it got recorded. Perhaps Roy was right, perhaps it was the nail in our coffin. It was one of those songs you just got sick of! But it paid for his house in LA…
‘Taboo thrived in a period of right-wing politics, the Thatcher/Reagan years, and it’s proof of a basic human need to have something to kick against,’ said Boy George in 2002. ‘That’s what made it such fun. It completely upped the ante and convinced us that we were somehow being terribly, terribly naughty.’
By the mid-80s, the euphoria of the new romantic era had dissipated leaving its bloated remains to float in a sea of power ballads, alternative rock and Stock Aitken and Waterman. In actual fact, the truly radical phase of new romanticism had passed long before Duran Duran, Culture Club, Visage or any of the bands that followed in their slipstream even made it to Top of the Pops, forming a distinct lineage from those nascent days of enw romanticism through to the establishment of Taboo.
It all more or less started with Steve Strange and Rusty Egan’s Club for Heroes night at Billy’s in Soho’s Meard Street – once the infamous Mandrake, soon to become Gossip’s and just two doors down from 69 Dean Street’s Gargoyle Club. But in 1978, it was still Billy’s and when the pair were unceremoniously booted out after just a few months, they took up Tuesday night residency at Holborn’s Blitz wine bar and their circle moved with them. This was a new artistic crowd, turned on by the sounds of Roxy Music, Bowie, and bored by the nihilism of punk. While theirs was very much a DIY attitude, it was one that embraced colour, decadence and queerness concentrated on the art and fashion schools of London and the legendary Warren Street squats. This was the world of John Maybury, Jeremy Healy, Princess Julia, BodyMap and Judy Blame. Lesser household names than their musical contemporaries but all of whom went on to have an immeasurable impact on fashion and art throughout the 80s and 90s. ‘It was a mixture of people there,’ Julia, Blitz door boss, Taboo cloakroom attendant, DJ and all-round People’s Princess, told 10 Magazine in 2023. ‘People from the punk scene, rockabilly scene, soul scene, the gay disco scene. It was people who lived at the Warren Street squat, students from various fashion colleges. It was all word of mouth.’ But once the media began to infiltrate and the wannabe stars hit the big time, Blitz became a victim of its own success, losing its edge and leaving this alternative artistic community searching for a new home. It was the inimitable Leigh Bowery, waving the flag for queerness, decadence and hedonism, who answered the call.
Australian-born Bowery landed on these shores in 1980 armed with a sewing machine and hoping to make his way into the fashion business. He soon realised that his modern-day subversive dandy aesthetic was at odds with the mainstream and instead entrenched himself in London’s underground club scene using the dancefloor as his catwalk. Having missed the heyday of the Blitz, Bowery arrived in a flamboyant burst armed with a selection of headpieces, thick make-up and ludicrously high stilettos. ‘When he was hanging around with his friend Trojan, I thought they were a bit naff,’ said George in 2002. ‘I’d been painting my face blue years ago, darling! But I soon realised Leigh was taking things a lot further. He’d missed out on punk, he’d just missed the Blitz scene, so he knew that he was going to have to be extreme in order to make his mark. Well, he certainly did that!’
Bowery was not in the least interested in keeping things on the downlow and placed his and Tony Gordon’s new venture in the epicentre of the West End taking over Thursday night at Leicester Square’s Maximus. ‘London was going through a bit of a lull in terms of clubbing. Then Taboo opened. Leigh Bowery started it in 1985,’ George told Mark Ronson in Interview in 2008. ‘The first few weeks were no big deal. Then suddenly it was the place to be. There were queues outside.‘ Fat Tony agrees. ‘People go on about Taboo being amazing. Taboo was shit for months,’ he told DjHistory. ‘First three months, it was rubbish. No one went. There’d be about 20 or 30 of us there. And then suddenly what happened was it got in the papers and that was it. It went boom.’
Taboo embodied the very essence of what Bowery stood for and his maxim was ‘Dress as though your life depends on it or don’t bother’. ‘Most of the people who ran the night were gay, but the emphasis was on looking special,’ Dave Swindells told Archer magazine. ‘The meeter-greeter, Marc, would hold up a mirror and ask, ‘Would you let yourself in?’’ This was the gatekeeper disco aesthetic taken to the nth degree as polysexualism, queerness, diehard drug-taking and music all went hand in hand.
New York royalty Suzanne Bartsch welcomes Leigh for a visit
Bowery was of course the focal point, and his appearance was crucial to the reputation that he himself was generating. In the end, Bowery became the performance – ridding himself of his hair, his head acting as a canvas while his outfits became more extreme. ‘There was one peLana Pellayriod when my favourite fabric was flesh. Human flesh,’ said Bowery. ‘I didn’t wear any clothes for a while”. His fellow clubbers of course followed suit. ‘[They] didn’t just wear mad outfits,’ says Dave Haslam in Life After Dark: A History of British Nightclubs and Music Venues. ‘They became new people.’ Princess Julia was no stranger to subculture, but she remembers that Taboo was on the brink. ‘Even at the time, it felt quite insane, and I had this theory that it was something to do with Haley’s Comet.’
The interior was tacky with ‘[t]atty red velour banquettes, mirrors everywhere, strange light effects on the walls, three bars and a central dance floor with several cheap lights and a mirror ball,’ according to performance artist, Taboo cashier and close friend of Bowery, Sue Tilley as reported by Sofia Vranou. Check out the music clip of trans artist Lana Pellay’s ‘Pistol In My Pocket’, which was filmed on the premises. Dancing was strictly encouraged. Choreographer Michael Clark and David La Chapelle could be found go-go dancing. ‘Space Princess, Mark Lawrence and Mark Time who used to be in Hot Gossip and Jeffrey would do these dance routines at home,’ Mark Moore told DjHistory. ‘Teach it to a few friends so once they got into the club they’d take over the dancefloor and do this formation dancing to anyone willing to join in.’ And part of the appeal was its egalitarian approach. ‘At the time, the people were just as important as the club, as the DJs, as the music, they were the stars as much as anyone else,’ says Moore. That’s not to say there wasn’t a degree of celeb presence though, Janet Street Porter, John Galliano, Martin Fry and Fiona Russell Powell, journo from The Face all to be found on the Taboo dancefloor.
And what about the actual music? ‘All I can remember is Jeffrey [Hinton] playing everything he could get his hands on,’ Tallulah told DjHistory. ‘Including the slipmat.’ No genre was out of bounds as Hinton, Rachel Auburn, Princess Julia and others all took to the decks. Progressive for a time when female DJs were not a common feature. ‘It was totally cheesy, hi-NRG, Italo, some of it great, some of it atrocious but once you’d been in there and you were drunk or on ecstasy, it was fuckin’ amazing!’ said Moore. ‘I think what made it so great was Jeffrey would do his own edits where he would elongate the best bits with these mad sound effects over the top.’ Hinton agrees. ‘I loved sound effects at that time (I still do) so I would chop and mix up videos (video scratching they named it, I didn’t though),’ he told Taboo descendent Dalston Superstore. ‘I edited everything together: porn, Abba, operations, TV and film from around the world and my own stuff. I would project it over the dancefloor and mix it in with the music. Also, I would have tape cassettes playing sound effects and mix that into the music as well. The music would be quite random too. The whole effects was nuts, but then the club was nuts too.’ It was the dancefloor’s answer to John Waters. ‘Taboo was kind of celebrating trash, the kind of records you secretly loved, like ‘Yes Sir, I Can Boogie’, by Baccara, things that you probably shouldn’t like,’ George told Mark Ronson. ‘They weren’t credible records, but they worked. A lot of Donna Summer and things that maybe weren’t trendy anymore or weren’t hip in gay clubs, but you’d hear them at Taboo.’
Ecstasy had also really begun to find its feet on the dancefloor. ‘I didn’t realise at the time it was so crazy because of the ecstasy, but in hindsight that makes sense,’ says Moore. ‘People would come back from New York – again a mixture of high life and low life – loaded with ecstasy and give them out to people.’ George agreed. ‘People were taking copious amounts of ecstasy, which had filtered over from New York,’ he told Ronson, ’and at a certain point you were more likely to spend most of the night in the toilets at the club’. Hinton himself was also a big fan of acid as he remembers one particularly eventful night. ‘I actually thought I was in my bedroom, I was easily believing the club was my home,’ he told Hero magazine. ‘I was playing the slipmat of the deck for about 20 minutes with headphones plugged into it – it was just making this awful grinding noise. Nobody batted an eyelid though! They just carried on dancing, they were used to unusual sounds and experiences on those nights.’
But alongside the euphoria of ecstasy came the blackness of heroin. There was a lot of self-destructive behaviour,’ said George in 2002. ‘It was all about extremes, outdoing each other. We tried every drug going.’ Fat Tony remembers how smack shut the whole thing down. ‘It was busy every week. Busy busy busy. Then it ended! Cos everyone was on heroin at that point – it was right in the deepest, darkest point. So Mark died who used to do the door. He died of a heroin overdose. Mark Lawrence died. Everyone who used to go there was popping off one by one.’ Aids was also really starting to hit hard. ‘I think we all went a little mad then, some people died after all that,’ said Princess Julia in 2010. ‘Aids was getting very ‘real’, death sentence, an air of inevitability. ’85, ’86. Drugs too, MDMA, heroine [sic] jack up.’
The book of the 2024 exhibition at the Fashion and Textile Museum
Eventually thanks to exposure in i-D magazine, the tabloids got wind of what was going on and drilled down hard on the drug use and what they deemed to be highly indecent behaviour. Management got scared and took away the key. Tony Gordon tried to move the party on, but Bowery wasn’t interested and so eighteen months after opening, Taboo was no more. ‘For me, Taboo had a major impact, not so much because of the music (though there were ace DJs) but because the collision of club cultures and personalities marked it out as a sort of highpoint of mid-’80s hedonism,’ said Dave Swindells. ‘They were happy to end up in a pile of vomit and booze at the end of the night. It was antifashion, in a sense,’ George told Ronson. Bowery died aged 33 of Aids but left an immeasurable legacy. Taboo was a bridge between the dying embers of the Blitz scene and a dawn of a new wave of underground alternative clubs including the Daisy Chain, Torture Garden and Kinky Gerlinky. And Bowery’s spirit lives on in today’s underground dancefloor culture with the words ‘if you label me, you negate me’ never more relevant.
House arrived in the UK amid a whirlwind of other styles: hip hop, go-go, new beat and electro were all fighting for attention, eclecticism was the order of the day, and few people saw it as anything more than another flavour to throw in the mix. But Mark Moore was a true believer determined to give house the focus it deserved. At Asylum (which became Pyramid) he joined fellow zealots Colin Faver and Eddie Richards and pushed the club to an all-house playlist, after which he DJed at many of the emerging acid house scene’s key clubs, including Spectrum, Shoom and some of the M25 raves. Inspired by the new sound, he made ‘Theme From S’Express’, one of the first British house tracks, an international hit and a UK number one in 1988. Having been switched on by punk and John Carpenter soundtracks, Mark began his clubbing life at The Blitz and Heaven, and established himself as a DJ in those heady pre-house years. In this interview he proves himself an astute observer of the shifting times, recalling incisively how ecstasy crept in to the London scene, arriving with a crash onto the giggling dancefloor at Leigh Bowery’s Taboo in 1985.
interviewed by Bill in London, 2.12.94 and 20.07.04
Was there anything about your early musical influences – in the late ‘70s, early ‘80s – that showed where you might be heading? Everything was so mixed up. Everything was up for grabs and everything was played. You just went for good music rather than a genre. Looking back, we were listening to a lot of electronic dance music. What got me into it was this film by John Carpenter, Assault On Precinct 13. We went to see the movie and halfway through my friend’s sister said, ‘I can’t handle this,’ because it was too intense. People were leaving the cinema in droves. The music just blew me and my brother away: ‘What the fuck, this music is amazing.’
John Carpenter did his own music for his films, didn’t he. He did. I remember my brother saying ‘Mark, Mark, they’ve released the music from Precinct 13. It’s called the Human League “Being boiled”.’ It wasn’t, but it was similar and the band was great, so we went to see the Human League everywhere. David Bowie would turn up to see them. There’d be people sat at the table reading Kafka books with a pint of beer. Before that, we heard ‘Warm Leatherette’ and ‘TVOD’ by the Normal. I was buying stuff on Mute. Later, electronic stuff from the States, Bobby O, the Flirts, Divine, we lumped it in with Soulsonic Force because it was from America. I remember hearing ‘Blue Monday’ and thinking, ‘What’s this rip off of Bobby O?’
And shortly after that, hip hop started arriving The rap was coming in. I think I first heard ‘Planet Rock’ in 1982 and it would’ve been at Camden Palace, Steve Strange’s club. When we first heard it, we just thought ‘Ooh, what’s this remix of Kraftwerk?’ We thought it was something cool, but we didn’t think it was a new genre, because we’d been listening to the Human League and Depeche Mode. There was a time when it all switched over: some of my friends had been real stoners who listened to dub reggae and Lee Perry and suddenly you’d go round their house and they’d be listening to 12-inch Martin Rushent dub mixes, like the dub of ‘Happy Birthday’ by Altered Images, something ridiculously camp.
Where did you grow up? North London, Hampstead, Golders Green. I was born in University College Hospital in London, in 1965. Perhaps! No one knows for sure and I’ve lied about my age since I was 12. My mother was from South Korea. She was one of the first people to come over here after the Korean War. All her hotel rooms were bugged by MI5 because they thought she was a communist spy. She set up a property business and we were living a lovely middle-class existence. She was the Evening Standard’s Businesswoman of the Year. Then she got divorced from my father and started losing her business and went bankrupt. Suddenly we were very poor. We had a nice house but no money and we were constantly hiding from debt collectors. Then she had a nervous breakdown and me and my brother were put into care. And then into a grammar school, Wolverstone Hall, the poor man’s Eton. A lot of people went there, like the brothers from Colourbox/MARRS, Martin Offiah, Ben Volepierre from Curiosity Killed The Cat. To me it was a safe place. I worked hard and got straight A’s.
My brother got into punk rock in early ‘77 and I remember staying at my Aunty Amy’s, bored, playing my brother’s records. I put on Patti Smith’s ‘Piss Factory’ and it totally blew my mind. Then I put on ‘White Punks On Dope’ by The Tubes, and it blew my mind. Then the final test was ‘God Save The Queen’ and by the end of it, no future! I was a punk rocker.
And that led to Billy’s and The Blitz I met this girl at a punk party called Bowie Teresa, who looked exactly like David Bowie as he did in The Man Who Fell To Earth. She dragged me into the bathroom, and turned on the bath and took her clothes off and tried to get me to get in the bath with her, so immediately I thought, I love this girl. She was quite terrifying at the same time. I arranged to meet her, and she always seemed to be working late in Soho. In hindsight she was probably on the game. And she said, ‘We’re going to go to this great club, which is full of weirdos, freaks, rent boys and prostitutes. It’s called Billy’s. It’s a Bowie night and they play Bowie, Roxy Music, Kraftwerk’
It was Steve Strange’s first club, with Rusty Egan DJing, at Gossips. It was
Bowie ‘Heroes’, Roxy Music ‘Do The Strand’, ‘Editions Of You’. Rusty was definitely very influential for me. Very underrated. Along with John Peel, for the variety, and also this girl called Mandy who played at Marquee. Then Rusty Egan and Steve Strange opened another club: Hell, which was in Covent Garden, just round the corner from the Rock Garden. They opened it because Blitz was becoming quite well known, so it was a bit like the Blitz but more elitist, if that’s possible. We’d go there, and he’d be playing Grace Jones’ album where she’d switched from being disco to new wave and doing things like ‘She’s Lost Control’. And he’d be playing disco stuff like Change ‘The Glow Of Love’, which was cool, breaking down preconceptions.
My guru then was my friend Simon Green who was slightly older than me. He was totally heterosexual but covered in eyeliner and make-up looking really camp. ‘We have to listen to more Grace Jones and we have to go to more gay clubs! We can’t be punks forever.’ So we went to see Grace Jones perform at Heaven. The first gay club I ever went to. He arranged to meet me there. I went in actually petrified, I didn’t know anything – sexuality or whatever – still quite young. People were really friendly there. Went in the first bar, didn’t know the rest of the club existed, and just stayed in that bar all night. I remember seeing Amanda Lear on video there, ‘Geev a leetle beet of mmmph to me and I’ll geev a leetle mmmph to you,’ dressed in leather with a whip. But I didn’t see Simon so I went home!
My uncle and aunt moved out of their house in Finchley and let me and my cousins stay there. They were a bit older than me, but still young and from a hippie background. It was fantastic. We’d come back from clubs like Blitz, lay mattresses out on the floor and crash out there and listen to Kraftwerk and Psychedelic Furs’ first album. During the summer, rather than stay at my uncle’s I would go and have a holiday at the punk squats in Kings Cross. They were amazing. Every night you’d go to a punk gig. They were at the back of Kings Cross, towards Russell Square. There’d be loads of prostitutes in the area and they’d be giving you lectures about how shouldn’t run away from school.
At the time, did you ever think DJing was a career option? Later on, when I dropped out of my job and I was DJing my mother was like, why don’t you get a proper job, why don’t you do something with your life?’ In the back of my mind I thought, ‘I will be discovered.’ Someone will come up to me and say we want you to be in our movie or we want you to be in our band. Even though I couldn’t sing particularly, I assumed this would happen, someone would realise you were a star and would sort it out for you. At that time everyone thought that: ‘Yeah, we’re on the dole and we don’t do anything, but we’re stars!’ Boy George was a star, even though he was doing absolutely nothing. Then he realised, hang on a minute, if I’m gonna be a star I’ve actually got to do something.
How did you get into DJing? Back then anyone with an artistic bent could be on the dole and go clubbing all week and somehow survive. It was easy for artists to thrive, bands to thrive. I got myself a bedsit and they were gonna stop my dole so I thought I’d better get a job. I found the cushiest thing I could find on their noticeboard, dressed up all punky thinking they’d never give me a job like that, and they gave me the job! So I was suddenly working for the Jewish Welfare Board looking after old people and the mentally handicapped. All my money went on paying the bedsit, whereas previously all my money went on records and clothes. No one wore designer clothes then, everyone made their own. You bought second hand stuff and jazzed it up.
The Mud Club had opened, I’d been going there regularly, every week. Jay Strongman was doing the downstairs and Tasty Tim was upstairs, playing schoolboy disco, glam rock. I’d take him mad things to play, some electronic stuff and then stuff like Rupert the Bear. People would run on to the dancefloor to dance to Rupert the Bear and this whole anti-cool thing came up where it was like are you gonna dance to this or are you gonna pose and look pretty? And everyone would just let their hair down and go completely crazy. So there’d be Stingray, Captain Scarlet, Julie Andrews’ ‘Lonely Goat Herd’. And people’d be dancing to it! He asked Philip Sallon if I could DJ with him. Philip said yes but completely panicked and rang me every day saying, ‘You’d better not fuck it up!’ Anyway, I did my set and everyone went completely crazy. So he said I could DJ there every week.
The Mud Club used to do one-off balls at Heaven, which were fantastic, and they saw me DJing and got me to do their club Asylum, which turned into Pyramid. So suddenly I was DJing with Evil Eddie Richards and Colin Faver at Asylum. First it was called The Asylum, and then to reinvent it they called it Pyramid. I started there in 1984, but I can’t remember when it started, maybe ‘82. I think it was on a Wednesday. Again, it was that alternative scene, very mixed, lots of straight people, very dressy. Most of the gay scene was very generic handlebar moustaches, listening to this cheesy Eurobeat. We were definitely the black sheep of the gay scene. I remember seeing Ian Levine in print saying, ‘Oh yeah, we thought that was the freaks night’.
We started playing house music very early on. We didn’t know we were playing it. It was just another electronic import thing we were playing along with Koto and the Italo disco stuff. ‘Hypnosis by Void. Or Void by Hypnosis. Yello, ‘Vicious Games’ was huge. Klein & MBO was massive. We were playing a lot of industrial stuff like Front 242 and Nitzer Ebb, Cabaret Voltaire ‘Yashar’, and then the more poppy stuff like Pet Shop Boys, obviously New Order, Soft Cell… So the house stuff started getting slotted in as well. It was a while before we realised, ‘Wait a minute there’s loads of this stuff!’ We actually had Jamie Principal down to play, early days. Must’ve been ‘87.
What was he like? He was cool. Very camp, quite Princey, vulnerable looking.
And were you playing anywhere else? The Mud Club and then loads of warehouse parties.
Mark at Dirtbox
Were you playing the off-the-wall stuff at Mud Club and more orthodox elsewhere? Yeah, exactly. But even the Mud Club, it started to get more electronic. I’d come on after Jay Strongman who’d do the funk and hip hop, but I started incorporating the electro. The Mud Club went through so many changes. I remember after a while it became known as a hip hop and go-go club.
How long did you play at Pyramid? I left in ‘88 because of S’Express, but it was still going then.
I remember seeing you guest at the Fridge in Sept ‘87 and it was the first time I’d ever heard anyone play only house music. It was very confrontational, like you were on a mission. Did you feel that way? I did. Because most people hated house music. The whole of London was into rare groove and hip hop. I was known as a hip hop DJ in those days. I remember thinking the mixed gay crowd are really into house ‘cos it’s a progression of disco, but the straight crowd are never going to get into it, ‘cos they all smoke spliff, the main drug of London, so they want slower beats. Loads of my hip hop friends were like that. Took them to a club. Gave them an E. ‘We get it, this is amazing’. I remember when S’Express took off, in my first interview they asked me why they thought house hadn’t taken off in London and I said it was because the drugs were all wrong.
All my friends at the Mud Club were like, ‘Why do you have to keep playing this house music?’ They didn’t get it and it took ecstasy for them to get it. I was on a mission, I thought, I’m not gonna give in. I’d play ‘Strings Of Life’ at the Mud Club and clear the floor. Three weeks later you could see pockets of people come on to the floor when I played it, and dance and go crazy to it. And this was without ecstasy. And they turned out to be people like DJ Harvey. I remember at the Fridge many times thinking, ‘This is hard work, I hope no one shoots me!’.
What was the crowd at Pyramid? It was 70 percent gay. A lot of straight people who wanted somewhere to go where they weren’t hassled. Racially it was mixed, a lot of black gay guys went, they loved the house music and they also loved the soulful electronic stuff like Janet Jackson’s ‘Control’. I also had a big hip hop following from the Mud Club. A lot of the main homeboys and breakdancers went there because they were bored. First time they came they were terrified, and then one of them would go to their mates, ‘It’s alright, it’s safe,’ and then more of them would come along. And they’d be breakdancing to the house music. They even asked LL Cool J to come down one time and he came. He loved it, thought it was freaky.
Drugs weren’t that important. Maybe a bit of speed or LSD, but not huge amounts. It was more a case of have a beer. Not a lot of people would do cocaine: it was still considered a great luxury in those days, although Pyramid was very Euro jet set, very rich people would fly in from Italy. It was a mixture of rich types, rent boys, debutantes and strange axe murderers! The Pet Shop Boys would always go there, Jimmy Somerville, and one time Liza Minnelli came down, so it was a strange mixture of high life and low life.
When did you do your first E? I first heard about it when friends would come back from New York, saying, ‘We’ve had this new drug and it’s like, you feel like you’re not off your face at all, but you are totally off your face at the same time.’ What’s it like? ‘Oh, it’s like a constant orgasm for six hours.’ I remember, they’d always come back with about ten Es, and they were like gold dust, they’d sell for about £30.
I heard things about Cindy Ecstasy on the Soft Cell record, and seeing the Soft Cell ‘Non Stop Erotic Dancing’ – you know, the compilation video, and that was very drug-orientated. It had all things like ‘Sex Dwarf’ and ‘Memorabilia’, which would start off ‘Trip, trip, trip, trip, tripping.’ At first I thought they’d written it on LSD, but then I realised no, it’s this ecstasy thing.
I heard rumours that Stevo was on it all the time, and he’d go into meetings on ecstasy and come out really on top with a brilliant time. Kevin Millins, I remember him saying he got his first one off Marc Almond. Tony Gordon used to have quite a few Es in Taboo days. I remember buying one off him for £30 and it didn’t work.
My first one was at White Trash. Noel Watson was DJing and the music was a mixture of the Jackson 5 and Skipworth and Turner, spiritual and uplifting soulful stuff. I thought this was the perfect ecstasy music.
So here and there I’d take it. And then I guess I didn’t have it for a little while, just here and there it would crop up. I remember having a conversation at White Trash with George Michael about it. He said, ‘I’m sick of people in London who are on ecstasy, thinking they’re so cool, and don’t they realise it’s been around in America for years.’ He was in a corner being really miserable. I remember thinking maybe you should take one yourself George, but he was going through a lot of stress in those days.
Tell me about Taboo, then? Taboo was great. I had to finish my set at Pyramid and run over to Taboo. It was really fantastic – again a mixture of high life and low life. I didn’t realise at the time it was so crazy because of the ecstasy, but in hindsight that makes sense. People would come back from New York loaded with ecstasy and give them out.
Who were the high life element, was it pop stars like George? Yeah, Boy George, [TV producer] Janet Street Porter. I think she was going out with Tony James then [of Generation X]. There were up and coming designers like John Galliano, and ABC would be there, in their freaky cartoon phase, fresh from their success with How To Be A Zillionaire. And Fiona Russell Powell, the writer from the Face. Everyone remembers her TV appearance on the Tube with ABC where she took off her coat and she had this belt with dildos stuck all around it; it was live so it was too late to do anything. She’d be there. And the ecstasy would be dished out and somebody would just fall on the floor, and someone else would go, ‘Yeah, good idea,’ and fall on the floor as well, and then the whole place would fall down in unison, this mass bundle of writhing bodies. And that would happen every week at Taboo. It was a lame night if that didn’t happen.
You had great people like Space Princess, who was this lovely guy: Mark Lawrence, an amazing six-foot black model from the north. He used to go to northern soul clubs, then decided he was gay and came to London. Jeffrey Hinton, who was the DJ, along with Rachel Auburn. I think Princess Julia did the cloakroom. Mark Lawrence, who started DJing later at Daisy Chain.
Jeffrey, Space Princess, Mark Lawrence and Mark Time who used to be in Hot Gossip would practise these dance routines at home, with Malcolm Duffy. And once they got into the club they’d do this formation dancing with anyone willing to join in. Suddenly the floor would be taken over by people doing formation dancing. And they’d do this move with a kick and a turn and everyone would fall over in unison as part of the routine.
At the time, the people were just as important as the club, as the DJs, as the music, they were the stars as much as anyone else. The week after Pyramid there’d be a fashion show and people would be chosen out of the crowd to appear, or people would be asked if they wanted to do a drag act, a mime or weird performance art, which they’d do next week at Pyramid. It was so inclusive. I totally missed that in the ‘90s.
It was that performer-consumer dynamic wasn’t it? Yeah. I think it’s back now with the small electro clubs.
What music was played at Taboo? It was totally cheesy, hi-NRG, Italo, some of it great, some of it atrocious, but once you’d been in there and you were drunk or on ecstasy, it was fuckin’ amazing! I heard Taffy ‘Step By Step’ played to death there by Jeffrey Hinton. The Taboo anthem was ‘After The Rainbow’ by Joanne Daniels, and when you listen to it now, you think how could we have liked something so tacky? Weak electronic production, but it was so fucking brilliant at the time. Jeffrey would do his own edit where he would elongate the best bits with these mad sound effects over the top. Very underrated DJ, Jeffrey. Very trippy and some of it was completely out of beat, but it didn’t matter. It totally suited Taboo. Sometimes he would let the records clash for a full two minutes and everybody would be like, ‘Woaargh! This is fucking crazy and amazing!’
Jeffrey also used to do the music for Bodymap. In those days they always used to have fashion shows, have the models come on in freaky clothes, and one of the models would collapse and suddenly all the other models would collapse on them. That was Bodymap, which came from Taboo.
How long did Taboo run for? It must’ve been a year. About 1985, you’d go to the club and people would be missing, and you’d be like, ‘Where are they?’ People started disappearing. And you realised they were suddenly becoming ill or dying. Aids suddenly became very there. It went from this thing you talked about that was happening in America, to something very real. A lot of the creative people started dying out. You’d be wondering, ‘Where’s Space Princess? Is he just staying in tonight, or is he dead?’ Then you’d hear months later that so-and-so had died. It became a very bleak time. People started dressing down more, they didn’t want to look freaky, they wanted to look healthy, they didn’t want to be associated with this disease. So everything started falling apart and the fabulous parties started to become less fabulous.
Just when acid house was about to make an entrance. There was a void and into this void I knew there was something waiting to step in. I remember taking Philip Sallon to the Future which was in the back of Heaven and just saying ‘This is the future, literally the future. It’s what’s gonna happen next.’ He said ‘Don’t be silly they’re just kids from the suburbs.’ He just couldn’t understand what I was on about.
Had you noticed ecstasy being used in Asylum or other clubs you’d been playing in? I only noticed it at Taboo. I knew there was a New York scene where people were doing it. And then nothing for a few years [after Taboo], and then I went to Paul Oakenfold’s Future and Danny Rampling invited me to Shoom. Previous to Shoom, ecstasy never took off big-time apart from Taboo. It didn’t spread across the alternative gay scene or the trendy clubs.
I remember the gay scene being really late to pick up on the whole house revolution, besides the Pyramid. The generic gay scene was a good year or so slow to pick up on it. They stuck with their Eurobeat, but then they got stuck into it with a vengeance and made up for lost time. I definitely think The Pyramid was the first house music club in England. I’m not listening to anyone else about this!
Tell me about S’Express. How did that come about? I was living with my mother, staying on the sofa in a council flat in Harrow Road, and Rhythm King had opened up across the road, in Mute Records. I’d go and hang out in the offices and see if I could get some free imports and stuff. And I’d be like, ‘You should sign this’ or ‘Sign this, it’s great!’ I got them to sign Renegade Soundwave, I got them to sign Baby Ford. And of course, I got them their first hit with Taffy, and I got them another hit with Beatmasters and the Cookie Crew ‘Rok Da House’.
I didn’t particularly ask for anything but they said, ‘Oh you better have some money. You’ve done so much for us, can we do anything for you?’ So I said, ‘Yeah, I’ve got some ideas, can you put me in the studio with a producer. They hooked me up with Pascal Gabriel who I got on with instantly. He had the same musical loves as me, and we did ‘Theme From S’Express’ and ‘Superfly Guy’.
I made a conscious decision that even though it was a house-influenced record, I didn’t want it to be a copy of a house record, so when you compare it now it doesn’t sound very typical. Not only influenced by house, but all the other things I loved, like Kraftwerk, Giorgio Moroder, Philip Glass, punk rock. And I wanted it to be ironic as well, so it goes ‘I’ve got the hots for you’ which was definitely a comment on the crassness of disco lyrics. At the time disco was still a dirty word. I remember thinking, I’m gonna get crucified for bringing disco back.
So did you go in there with a big bag of samples? Yeah, but I wrote other bits for it like the bassline and got my friend in to do the ‘esss expresssss’ bit. We cleared everything and people hadn’t heard of clearing samples in those days. You could clear samples for £250 in those days.
How many were there, I know the Crystal Grass one? Plenty. I’d rather not say. It was early days when things were signed on backs of toilet roll!
What were the early reactions? I wondered what the DJs would make of it. I thought I’d play it at Pyramid and that would be it. I remember playing it to Kid Bachelor at an i-D Magazine shoot for all the up-and-coming DJ talent. Coldcut and everyone played their new stuff and Kid said yours is the best one there. Rhythm King pressed some up on white label, but it took ages for it to come out because of the clearances, so people had these white labels for months and months and magazines would say, ‘When is “Theme From S’Express coming out?”’ Finally, it did.
And you were thrust into a whirlwind of promotion.
I was making a comfortable living being a DJ by then. But I had to stop and promote it around the world for about a year and a half.
Doing PAs? A few, and a short tour, but it was more TV and interviews around the world. They’d film for TV while we mimed. S’Express was too early. It was breaking down the doors for dance music and people didn’t get it in a lot of places. It would’ve been easier a few years later where I could’ve just gone and done a DJ tour to promote it.
There was a lot of resistance from the powers that be, Radio 1 didn’t want to support it. Someone wrote a letter to the Musicians Union saying that Mark Moore was being interviewed saying he was a non-musician – I was quoting Brian Eno – and they said he should be thrown out of the MU and not allowed on Top of the Pops. Rumour has it this letter came from a very famous producer. But it was cool. It opened the doors for others.
I remember Derrick May being really excited that S’Express had done this. Derrick May said to me, ‘It’s like a party and you’re the only ones there and you’re waiting for everyone else to come to the party.’
How did you end up DJing at Shoom? Danny Rampling used to come to Pyramid, ‘cos that was the only place in London to hear house music: Pyramid, Jungle and possibly the Mud Club, which was a mix of hip hop and house – though it was a battle to slip in the house stuff. And when I got a test pressing of S’Xpress, Danny came running up, shouting, ‘What’s this record? I have to have one. My name’s Danny and I do this club called Shoom, and DJ at Kiss, and I have to have one!’
Can you describe your first time at Shoom. Everyone told me it was such a friendly place, but I walk in and there’s smoke everywhere, and when it cleared everyone was walking around like Night of the Living Dead, and I thought, ‘This isn’t a very friendly, happy place, what are they talking about?’ Then, about an hour later, suddenly people are coming up and hugging you and ‘What’s your name?’ ‘I love you, you’re great!’ I thought, ‘Wait a minute, they’re all on ecstasy!’
The first time there were only about 100 people. Straight away I met some guy who was the Shoom dealer, I think there were only two dealers in those days. He just came up and said, ‘Oh I’ve seen you DJ, I think you’re really cool, this is for you mate, thanks for the music.’ And when Spectrum opened he got arrested, he was probably one of the first guys to get arrested for it.
What did you think of Shoom? I’d been playing house for a couple of years, and I thought, at last a straight crowd that gets it, that understands the whole music (I’d never been to Paradise Garage). Although they had to go to Ibiza to get it, and take drugs to get it, it was another club that was doing more or less what I was doing – which was mixing up alternative stuff which they called Balearic Beats. I thought wow, I’ve found the perfect place, and then Danny asked me to DJ. It was perfect timing. S’Express was pressed and I remember Colin Faver saying, ‘I don’t know if I can play this at Shoom, ‘cos it’s really discoey, and then he played it and they went completely insane. I remember the Shoom newsletter listed S’Express as one of their top records.
How much did you get into the scene? Totally. It was totally what I was looking for. I already had the gay scene. They understood the records, but they wanted more of a garagey vibe, and I was playing a lot of acid stuff. Whereas this scene totally understood it when you dropped something like Scarlet Fantastic ‘No Memory’. The Shoom scene was so open-minded, you could drop anything that was danceable. And people’s attitudes. Just coming up and shaking your hand saying, ‘I’ve seen you on the telly mate,’ Not being all weird: ‘Oh he’s a pop star’. They were really down to earth and I could just be myself with them.
Were there a few people there you didn’t expect? I remember seeing a few people from punk days who I hadn’t seen since then. Going to Shoom and seeing Boy George, Paul Rutherford, Patsy Kensit.
Do you think ecstasy genuinely changed things? I remember you’d hear people saying, ‘Oh all the football firms are here at the Trip, it’s going to kick off, it’s going to be a blood bath’ – and it never happened. A lot of people had their minds opened up. I’ve always come from a spiritual background, with my mum being a Buddhist, so it was great to see these people discovering spirituality and things like that – and it was great talking to them. It was like a door had been opened to a lot of these people, and they realised about acceptance and tolerance.
Did E bring people out of the closet? Yeah, I think it’s true. A lot of people who were having problems with their sexuality, took an E and were set free of their inhibitions. I think it’s a great way to come out, dealing with it in that way. I think it’s done a lot of good for those people who were unsure about their sexuality.
How life-changing do you think it was? Was and is! It was very life-changing. It’s changed music. I’ve always lived by ‘Everyone is my friend until they prove they’re not’, and that was strengthened by the Second Summer of Love. I guess nowadays it’s a naive way to be. The first wave of ecstasy opened up so many people’s minds, but the constant caning of it merely helped to close them again.
You didn’t talk about that scene in interviews. S’Xpress wasn’t from that scene – it was just me listening to the house music I was playing, and Shoom was starting round about the same time so it all tied in nicely. The reason I never talked about ecstasy in the early days of S’Xpress is ‘cos I didn’t want the scene ruined. I knew if I was to mention ecstasy in interviews with the national papers, they’d jump on it – and that’s what happened. People would ask me from The Sun and the Daily Mirror, is acid house anything to do with drugs, and I remember just lying.
One day, I think it was in the Mirror, it said, ‘Next week we expose the evil face of acid house’ – and there’s a picture of me there. I got on to my lawyers straight away. When it came out it talked about the evils of acid house, and Mark Moore from the band S’Xpress who doesn’t take drugs and is a good boy. They chickened out, ‘cos they were obviously thinking to put it all on me as the leader or something.
I didn’t want to be the one responsible for putting this wonderful scene overground.
When the Trip opened that’s when it it became totally massive – roadblocks outside – the police car would come up and turn the siren on and everyone would start raving to it, dancing to the siren. I remember talking to Kevin Saunderson at the Trip, and saying, after this everybody will go to the car park, and he thought it was the name of a club. But we ended up in the car park, and he says, ‘Oh I see what you mean now,’ with everyone dancing round this one car with a tape on. He was amazed.
Before that, Paul [Oakenfold] opened up Spectrum, and round about that time the record had come out and it had been a hit. And I remember going to the first Spectrum, and there were about 200 people there – empty but such a brilliant atmosphere. We went off to Europe to promote the record, and when I came back a few weeks later, I went back to Spectrum and the queues were all the way round the block – it had exploded. There were all these trendy faces I knew from the trendy scene, who were there, and I thought yeah, it’s going to be massive.
Paul asked me to do the odd DJ spot at Spectrum, and I remember seeing Leigh Bowery turn up in a completely mad costume, and people were just off their heads going, ‘Wow what is it?’
After that came the big outdoor raves. I used to go to those things, but I can’t remember the first one I DJed at. My first impression was it was like a ‘happening’. You’d go up the motorway, and all you could see was a huge line of cars, everyone off their face in their cars.
What memories do you have of that period? I think you fell in love with your friends, which is the way it should be. It was a total love affair with your friends, without the sexual side of it. I remember it as one of the happiest days, years, of my life.
Although punk rock was fantastic, and New Romantic. I’m lucky enough to have memories of different scenes. With punks and New Romantics, you couldn’t imagine them doing everyday things like shopping in Tescos – it was like, how did they live, how did they eat? The New Romantics it was de rigeur to be bitchy, one minute you’d be best friends with someone, the next minute you’d be total enemies. I have photos of people I used to know in the New Romantic days – they were there on the Shoom scene looking totally laddy, and I have pictures of them from the New Romantic days with lip gloss and blusher. They take me aside and say please don’t show those photos. It’s like they lived two different lives.
Why were you such a campaigner for house? I knew that house music would take off. Eventually.
Why, though? Because I loved it! I thought it was so fucking brilliant and I couldn’t understand why no one else did. I just thought, ‘This music is fucking great!’ But no one else agreed with me at the time. At The Fridge in ‘87 I told them to put a sign up saying ‘We play house music here’. That way, if you had been warned, you couldn’t complain. In theory!
Which dancefloors in particular did you clear with house music? Mainly at the Mud Club. Luckily it wasn’t a constantly cleared floor. I’d clear the floor with Strings of Life and bring them back with Dead or Alive or James Brown. If you’re playing someone else’s club your job as a DJ is to entertain while still being dangerous, taking risks and retaining your own identity. However, if it’s your own club I think that gives you license to do what the fuck you want. I’m actually proud of the times I’ve cleared dancefloors. My attitude was this: the people who left didn’t matter to me whatsoever. What mattered were the one or two people that stayed on the dancefloor whose lives were changed. And those people would go on to do something else.
Like who? Pete Heller, Laurent Garnier, Trevor Jackson, Daft Punk. I get people coming up now and saying, ‘You changed my life. You played this at that club and I saw the light!’
Push hedonism too far, too long, and you’re either dead or a survivor. Fat Tony has been responsible for some of history’s greatest extended bouts of carefree craziness, but thankfully he stepped back from the edge in time, and can now regale you with ripping yarns of epic star-studded misbehaviour. From a Battersea council estate, Tony Marnach used his silver tongue to talk himself into an international DJ career across the ’80s and ’90s, putting himself in all the right places at all the right times, until he was playing a host of the most significant clubs in both London and New York. Today he’s an author, activist, fundraiser and a given at a fashion party. Thanks to his gilded circle of friends, few DJs can give interviews this rollercoaster. Whether he’s falling asleep in the Concorde toilet or DJing with Kate Moss at Harry and Meghan’s wedding, famous faces are never far away.
interviewed by Bill in London, 20.11.2018
How did you get started as a DJ? When I was 16. I was very loud and precocious, a most annoying little queen, and I worked on the door of a club for Rusty Egan and Steve Strange at the Playground, which was at the Lyceum, where the Lion King is now. And every week I complained about the music, saying, ‘Oh my God this music’s atrocious.’ It was Ian Dewhirst. Then one week Rusty said, if you think you can do better, you do it. So the following week I turned up with four records – literally four – and that was it! Within two weeks of that I had a residency there, a residency at the Wag, we started our own Tuesday night there called Total Fashion Victim. Then I took over Saturday nights at the Wag. Then they made me musical director at the Limelight at 19! A fucking fortune! I was travelling the world within six months.
How did you go from four records to that? It was all about the mouth. London was much smaller then, and the club community was much smaller. Everybody went to the same places and the West End clubs were our social media. So it was about who you knew and how you got there.
I was the first person to bring Frankie Knuckles to London. I had a residency at the age of 18 in New York at the Palladium. [Palladium and Studio 54 co-owner] Steve Rubell was like, ‘Oh my God we need you in New York’. He used to fly me over. Fucking loved it! Used to go every other week. Sometimes I never even played, I was so out of it. But they loved that whole attitude. They bought into that rock’n’roll thing that I was E’d out of my head and falling off the back of the stage. I remember Steve Rubell picked me from the airport the second time I went over and he was like, ‘Today you’re big news but tomorrow nobody’s gonna give a shit about who you, just remember that.’ And I was like, ‘Oh thanks!’
Were you resident at Nells too? Yeah, that came after the Palladium. I was doing Cafe De Paris on a Wednesday night, another one of those great London clubs that paved the way: this guy Albert from Paris, and me. Beautiful French music like ‘La Vie En Rose’ and stuff like that. Anyway, Nells, they wanted me to recreate the Cafe De Paris in Nells. And I said, you can’t recreate something in London just by bringing over a DJ. A tiny little venue with curtains! I gave it a go, but I just hated it. It was too pretentious and it wasn’t fun. But I have done some pretty amazing residencies over the years.
What’s your favourite? Probably the Wag on a Saturday night. Attitude at the Wag. We did it for nine years, it was fucking amazing. I gave Tim Simenon his first job, I gave Mark Moore his first job, they all used to come and play for us. The Wag was so straight by that point and I started doing Saturday nights and turned it into the gayest thing ever, but really mixed. Neneh Cherry used to come on the Saturday. That was a great residency. Trade Lite was amazing cos it was another one of those places where you could do what you wanted. XXXL now, love it. Men only, quite controversial. They’ve been turning away trans people.
All that from just those four records! I never wanted to be a DJ. I’ve always loved music, always had a thing for it, and all my friends were in bands, so a lot of my friends were doing Top of the Pops and stuff like that. So music was always in me, but I never ever thought, ‘Oh I’m gonna be a DJ. I’m gonna practice’. I must’ve been around the world four times before I even owned a set of decks. It was all about, ‘Oh he knows these people, everyone’s talking about him let’s get him.’ It rocketed from there.
What were your real musical passions? Always disco. First time I ever went out was to Heaven. It had just turned from Global Village into Heaven and the music then was hi-NRG disco so that was always my passion. First record I ever bought was ‘Streetlife’ by the Crusaders on 12-inch and that set the precedent. I love anything that moves me, anything that touches the soul. So when garage came along on the tail end of disco it changed everything for me. Those house beats were everything.
When I was in New York, I used to go to Paradise Garage literally every weekend. I was talking about it the other night with Ultra [Naté] because me and her went to the closing for a day and a half. We were among the last to leave, E’d off our nuts, lying on the roof. I loved house music because it came from that era of Hi-NRG disco.
House is just disco on a budget. Totally. I’ve never been a DJ that only plays one genre. It’s bullshit, I’m really eclectic. How can you say you’re a DJ if you don’t love all types of music? If you only play this, then you’re a cunt. But my career, it just went up and up and up. Of course, I got caught up in it and so did the drug intake.
You went to Ibiza early on, didn’t you. First time I went to Ibiza was in 1983 and I went every year after that. I played for Brasilio at Ku in 1983. Me, Steve Strange and Rusty Egan flew over. We did a night called No Sleep Till London. Only went over for one night, I ended up staying there for four months, courtesy of Ku! It was chaotic. In those days we didn’t have roofs. Amnesia was amazing and Sandro and Jose who owned Amnesia, I lived with them in their house.
What was Ibiza like in that pre-house period? It was an incredible time, cos it was on that tail-end of disco. The insanity they try to portray now was the insanity then. It wasn’t about sexuality, like it was thrown in your face, but you could go and be whoever you wanted to be. It’s a beautiful island, but they let Liverpool and Manchester and everyone take over and it kind of ruined it. You could feel the spirit of Ibiza back then.
Have you been recently? Yeah of course! Listen, I still love the island. I went over to DC10 a couple of months ago and I played someone’s party over there, but I don’t go to the big clubs. If I wanted to do that I’d hang out in fucking Billericay!
When did you first hear house music? At Heaven. It was that crossover period from Hi-NRG into house. Straight away I was hooked. Oh my god! It didn’t have that intensity of what everyone else was listening to and it just changed my life. That was it for me: this is the way forward.
Then I did the first house night in London, called Jungle, Steve Swindells night on a Monday. I was resident with Colin Faver. At that time I was still playing a few disco records but kind of taking it into house. All that early stuff by Marshall Jefferson and then turning into acid house.
When I do my corporate things and fashion parties I play half these tracks, they all want it, because it’s euphoric. In the past year I’ve worked with anyone from Prada right the way through. Tonight I’m doing the opening of Richard Caring’s Brasserie of Light in Selfridges. It’s a dream job, I get to play all my favourite records cos they all come from that era.
You had a residency at Fred’s didn’t you? Yeah, I was a resident there. It was one of the first private members’ clubs. They brought me in while I was running Limelight. I was in charge of the music in the VIP. But by that point I was in the total grip of my addiction. So of course, if you offer me a job where it’s free alcohol I’m gonna be there. By then Trade had just opened [its second room] Trade Lite. I ran up a bar bill of like £170 grand. So every week I’d be playing for fucking nothing, to play my bar bill off, which was hilarious.
Fred’s was amazing. That’s where I met Kate [Moss]. She used to come when she was 15 in her school uniform and get changed in the office. I used to give her long Island ice teas. She’d say, ‘Oh it tastes just like tea!’ An hour later I’d have to put her in the office under the desk asleep on the floor. It was another one of those places that everybody went to: everyone from John Galliano to Lee McQueen and we all went out clubbing at the same times. Nights like Taboo had just finished, and then Fred’s opened and it was the place to go.
Dave Dorrell told me about getting chatted up by Francis Bacon. Oh yeah Francis was always there. And Dave always played with me there. I was resident on Fridays and Saturday. It was such a cool little place. It was one of the first private members club and you kind of felt special. It was so debauched. Whatever went on behind closed doors, stayed behind closed doors. Good times.
Tony (L) with Boy George, Jean-Paul Gaultier and friends
You did a lot of Lighthouse events too, didn’t you, to raise money for AIDS charities. Of course. God you’re going back now, aren’t you? At that time I lost most of my friends. I lost my partner Tom. I was 22 and living in Old Compton Street when he died. When AIDS came it wiped London out. It completely annihilated our town. I lost probably 40 or 50 of my peers within a year. So it was a priority that we did something about it. They introduced this drug AZT which was killing more people than the disease itself. No one knew what to do, no one knew how to cope with it. It affected everybody. To be involved in those early AIDS parties, we all had to play our part.
Have you got any memory of these parties? I kind of do and I don’t. I was addicted to cocaine and everything else for 28 years. First ten of those years, I can remember everything. And then after that it got really messy and I stopped travelling. I’d get booked and I wouldn’t turn up at the airport, or I’d get to the airport and think, I’m not going.
Why? Because I didn’t have a rider at the other end. One of my turning points was, I went to Hong Kong I to DJ and I couldn’t get any coke. There was a shortage. I went everywhere trying to get it. So I ended up doing E for the whole trip. I end up setting fire to my hotel room. When I came round I was in hospital, painted orange, they’d covered me in iodine, because of my burns. I came back to London and thought I’m never travelling again.
When was that? I’ll be clean 12 years on 12th January. So this was 17 years ago, 2001. When you stop turning up to places, people stop booking you. And that world is so small. I’d be booked in Paris and I wouldn’t go and I’d be booked in New York and I wouldn’t go. I went back to New York this summer after 20 years. I just couldn’t face it because of the carnage I’d caused. So bad! The drama I caused was off the fucking scale. I felt like I had to repair everything else before New York came into play. And I went back and I’ve fallen in love with it again. I’ve got an agent out there now. Just got my work visa granted. It’s all or nothing with me. It always has been, it’s part of my addiction. I’m an addict I know my traits. Yeah, life has got a lot better.
Did you go to [singer and club face] Vaughan Toulouse’s funeral? He was one of the first ones to die. It was a really big thing. Let me show you this picture, cos Vaughan’s in the background of it. I can’t remember much of it. Sue [Tilley] was there and everyone. I can remember [artist, stylist and nightlife star] Trojan’s funeral. I went with Leigh [Bowery]. I remember it being the most heart-wrenching day, because by that point it was one away from everybody. It was just around us. Everybody was really drowning in it.
What was it like going to Taboo? It was shit. People go on about Taboo being amazing. Taboo was shit for months. First three months, it was rubbish. No one went. There’d be about 20 or 30 of us there. And then suddenly it got in the papers and that was it. It went boom. It was busy every week. Then it ended! Cos everyone was on heroin at that point – it was right in the deepest, darkest point. So Mark [Vaultier] died who used to do the door. He died of a heroin overdose. Mark Lawrence died. Everyone who used to go there was popping off one by one. It was in the middle of the AIDS crisis. Taboo on a Thursday night used to be the most uplifting part of it. Then it got ruined and full of people wearing kind of cardboard clothes.
Knock off Leigh Bowery? Yeah and there was only one Leigh. Leigh was incredible, we used to have so much fucking fun. Then it got too busy and died out really quickly. It was a victim of its own success. They moved on and Leigh and Little Tony [Gordon] opened Sacrosanct on Shaftesbury Avenue, downstairs next to the casino, which was on a Thursday as well, similar to Taboo but a bit more pretentious. It didn’t really work. Taboo was our social media so if you went there that was how you got to see your friends. Jeffrey [Hinton] played and Rachel Auburn and Princess Julia. It was just a fun place to be and Maximus was a great venue.
What about your night, Abba? Me and Dave Dorrell?! [laughs] We really wanted to work together and we started it on a Tuesday night cos no one went out on Tuesdays. Dave came up with the name Abba. He said they’re going to make a big comeback soon. The whole idea of it was that we could play ’70s and disco and early Wham! and all of that stuff that people were too scared to fackin’ play. It was at Double Bass in Earls Court Road. Then we moved it to Bar Industria in Hanover Square.
My friend Anna Goodman used to do the door there. Oh, I know Anna, she lives round the corner from me! She looks exactly the same, with a black bob! Then George Michael used to come and DJ on a Tuesday night. I remember one night it was him and Linda Evangelista DJing. I don’t keep press cuttings and things from the past. I live for today. It’s part of my recovery. Today is my past and tomorrow is going to be even better. My boyfriend found all these press cuttings in an envelope and there were these front page covers from the Sun about me beating George Michael up at the Wag!
Did you? Yeah, on New Year’s Eve. Me and Leigh Bowery did a party together at the Piccadilly Theatre on NYE and Curiosity Killed The Cat and Neneh Cherry played. Oh my God. I hadn’t seen that clip for 100 years.
There’s a famous photo of you in the Face… Naked? That was with Sue Tilley.
But with a dog or something? Oh, no, no, no! When I was 15 I did a drag act called Diana Dog. Princess Julia was in it, Sue Tilley June Lawrence, Leigh, there 16 people in it, we used to do it at Camden Palace and Heaven. It was massive! Lily Savage used to come and see us. We did this massive show and they asked me to be naked in the Face. So I said, I’m not doing it on my own, I want someone fatter than me to be in it, so I got Sue Tilley to be in it so I did it with a wig on.
What do you think is the most important British gay club of all time? Shoom, because although it wasn’t gay, it had no gender. You had these Boys Own parties and stuff like that going on and everybody went there regardless of sexuality, and I think that was important, especially for that time. Jungle was really important because before that gay clubs were really like poppers and fans, and suddenly this new breed of gay club opened and it totally changed the world. Also important was Trade without a doubt. Winner hands down. Trade changed so many people’s lives. It was one of those first places you could go and be who you wanted to be regardless of anything. Primarily out of all of them, though, Heaven. Heaven back in the day. It was revolutionary – this fucking gay mecca in a place of hatred, and you could go under those arches and your world changed. It was the first place I ever went. Cha Cha’s on a Tuesday night behind Heaven. They all have a part in who we are today. Cha Cha’s was run by Scarlett and it’s where everyone used to go. It’s where I met Leigh. The beauty of it was it was so small and nobody went out on a Tuesday, but it was so amazing because it was pre-drug, so it was poppers. Dave Swindells has loads of good pictures. Heaven was the one that changed the world. On a Saturday you would see Nancy Nova, you could see Sylvester. I saw Divine there, I saw Earth Kitt there.
Nancy Nova was Bob Holness’s daughter right? Yeah, her record ‘The Force’ is one of those records that set the pathway for today. I got to see Sylvester play live. I went out clubbing with Freddie Mercury. I hung out with Andy Warhol for a year in New York.
What was a night out with Freddie Mercury like? Freddie was the first person ever to give me a line of cocaine! At the time I didn’t think anything of it, because I wasn’t a Queen fan, to me it was just a party sex thing. I met him the same night I met Marc Almond at Heaven. Then Freddie took me to my first leather club.
Where was that? The Soundshaft. And we went to one in Earls Court as well, like downstairs in a basement of a hotel.
What’s the best club you’ve ever played in and why? I’d like to say, size-wise and feeling, The Palladium [New York] because it was just insane. Where else would you have Studio 54 come down from the ceiling on to the dancefloor. So many clubs within a club. Trade Lite: loved it. Changed my life. I used to turn the music off and say, ‘No K, no play!’ People brought me drugs and I’d put the music back on. They used to joke that DJ stood for Disco Jesus because I could turn 12 records into a 12-hour set and get away with it. My records used to crackle because they were covered in cocaine. I stole the acetate of Alison Limerick’s ‘Where Love Lives’ from the studio where they did it. I was the first person to play it. I was besotted with that record, probably the only record I ever took care of, the rest I didn’t give a shit. Towards the end when I was resident at Fiction and The Cross, The Egg and all those places, that was the tail end of my addiction, so that was a means to getting more drugs. It got really dark. I didn’t look at a dancefloor for four years, I didn’t look at anyone in the face, because I couldn’t cope.
Were you still buying records when you were in that state? People were sending me them. That was the only good thing – I was getting sent music. I never went out. Why would I spend money on records? Everything went on drugs. The last ten years… I pulled all my teeth out on crystal meth in the last year or my addiction. I was psychotic. I wanted to kill myself. I wanted to die. Every day all I ever thought about was my own funeral. I’d sit in rooms rocking backwards and forwards digging out my gums because I had a thing called meth-mouth where my mouth would get infected and I thought they were running alive and insanity took over.
The very last night of me and clubbing was at the Cross at Fiction on a Friday night and my partner walked in. For months, years even, he’d been saying, ‘You’re going to find him dead on the dancefloor one day, you need to stop employing him.’ I’d say, ‘He’s mental he’s trying to get in the way.’ All he was trying to do was save my life.
He came into the back room and just said, ‘What happened to you?’ And I looked at him and couldn’t answer the question. That was the breaking point that changed my life. I weighed seven stone and I had one tooth and one pair of trainers. And the trainers weren’t even mine.
All I’d thought about for the past year was who would be at my funeral, who I didn’t want at my funeral. I was going to be brought in with ‘Teardrops’ by Womack & Womack, and was going to be burnt to ‘No More Drama’ by Mary J Blige. I used to listen to that Mary J Blige album word for word and cry my eyes out.
Today I think about life. I love life. Another song that changed my life was ‘Believe’ by Soldiers of Twilight. If you believe you’re halfway there. My hairs stand up when I hear that song. That’s the power of music. Listening to Ce Ce Rogers ‘Someday’ changed my life. That’s the beauty of doing what we do – and what music is. Six years later I was working with Mary J Blige! I told her that story and she said, that person was never you.
What helped you get through it, was it something you did on your own? No. No I could never have done it on my own. I took drugs on my own. I got clean with other people. Because it’s about acceptance of help. When you ask someone for help that’s the biggest step. When you say I’m an addict and I need help; that’s the start.
You took my friend George to his first NA meeting. George really needed it. He’s now 11 years clean. Kate is now 13 months clean. Naomi. I’ve got so many sponsees, seven young kids. I keep my serenity and freedom by helping other people. However busy my life is it’s never too busy to pick up the phone. There’s no greater gift than seeing someone get that glint back in their eye. People say, ‘Don’t you miss it?’ I’m like, ‘Are you fucking mental?!’ Today I have everything I’ve ever wanted. I can go and do and be and see everything I want. I’ve taken it back to what it always should have been and that’s music. I moan all the time about having to go to the airport, but how blessed am I that I can lay down at the airport and not have to sit by the bogs any more! I’m blessed and doing it sober.
Is it true that you’d fly Concorde to play at the Palladium? Yeah, I went on Concorde five times. I was meant to go on it a sixth but I missed it! I had to come back on BA first class. I was gutted. First time I went to New York for my 18th birthday. It was a birthday present. I went there then I flew back with [Boy] George. DJing was one of those jobs where I thought I’d do it for a couple of months, and I’ve never worked a day since. They asked me to be in a documentary about Concorde and Bose headphones, because everyone use to steal them off the plane. I remember once I was asleep in the toilet on Concorde. Passed out. And they were waiting to take off. I took a McDonalds on to the plane with me and I was eating a burger and I woke up. They’d had to force open the door and I got up and walked down the plane and everyone was booing me. I remember sulking for the whole flight not taking in the fact that I was on Concorde. Again. I was more concerned that people had booed me. I’d been up for three days.
Tell me about your Instagram account. I get more attention for that than anything else. I’m walking down Oxford Street and people stop me and ask if they can take a picture. It’s not even like I’ve got 500k followers it’s because of who I am. I’ve got everyone from Paris Hilton following me, David Beckham following me. I DJed at Meghan and Harry’s wedding, right. At the end, Harry came up and said, Your Instagram is the funniest ever.
What was it like playing at their wedding? Boring. It was mad. Idris [Elba] was on before me. It was the private bit at the end. It was like playing at Annabel’s. It was fine. I had to sign an NDA. Wasn’t allowed to talk about it before or after. This is the insanity of what I do now. I did Mykonos in the summer, the opening of Nammos.
Is this the one you did with Kate Moss? Fat Moss?! Yeah so we do Fat Moss for big budget things. We did one for Grace Jones. Me, Grace Jones and Kate.
What does Kate do? She dances and DJs. She’s got great choice in music because she comes from that era. I do it with Naomi as well.
Fat Campbell? No, we don’t have a name for that one. There are a few made up names for it but I won’t go into that! [Whispering] They book me and Naomi because they can’t afford Kate, cos it’s £150k.
Really?! Well, thereabouts, yeah. For Nammos, they flew us in by helicopter and landed at our villa. I was just laughing the whole time. Some of these things you get asked to do and I’m like, ‘OK, fine by me. What? For an hour?’ I can buy a house in Manchester for that! Funny as fuck. But it’s amazing. I get to do what I want to do. I play what I want. I do XXXL once a month.
Is that in Vauxhall? No. I don’t do Vauxhall. The clubs are awful.
Has Grindr killed the gay scene? It did for a long while, yeah. A lot of places like to blame Grindr for their demise but it’s more because they’ve not moved forward. When it first arrived it took out the going out and meeting people part. But now people go out and have sex and then they go out. The clubs that haven’t moved with the times, they’re the ones feeling it most. Things grow and become big and beautiful and then they die. And then small things come, and right now we’re at the small thing stage. We’ve got major clubs like Sink The Pink, Kinky Gerlinky… That should be in that little list of gay clubs that changed the world. Michael and Gerlinda, they changed London. They were the first clubs doing it on a mass scale, you know, at the Empire in Leicester Square! Catwalk shows!
What’s the funniest thing to happen to you when you were DJing? One time when I was at the Palladium, my friends met me at the airport with little bottles of MDMA and we were doing the five dots on the thumb. I got to the club and I was DJing and I bent down and I was like, ‘It’s not working, give me the bottle.’ I bent down and when I came back up I was like the Cookie Monster, with one eye hanging shut. So I was like, ‘We’ve gotta leave.’ I’d only played two records. So I left the record playing and just left. The next day they rang me, ‘Oh my God your set was amazing last night!’ To this day I don’t know what happened or who went on after me. But it wasn’t me. Things like that used to always happen. I’d always do those society parties. I played one and got Mick Jagger dancing, you’ve got Noel Gallagher dancing to ‘Vogue’ by Madonna. That’s funny, moments to cherish.
Do you take a different approach to a celeb party to playing Dalston Superstore? Oh, totally, yeah. I’m still me, though. If I’m playing a driven, techy-house set at XXXL, or a society gig or celebby gig or fashion, my job is to read that crowd. A couple of weeks ago, I went to Paris for Maison Margiela, John Galliano. Before I went on it was all hip hop and I thought, how am I going to go on after this? But you know what, you have to be you. I went on, the place went mental. They’d enough of that other stuff. It’s about taking the risk and reading the crowd.
You’re very much back in the game, now. I’m more relevant now than I’ve ever been. It’s mad. In that Tony De Vit documentary I was saying I hated Tony De Vit because everyone else loved him and there wasn’t room for two Tonys at Trade. And when Trade Lite came in, I came in and took it over from the Sharp Boys and I had this war with them for years. Stupid banter because I was so unhappy within myself that I hated everyone else. George and Stephen, they don’t DJ any more but they were fucking brilliant. They were amazing, Sharp Boys were incredible. But I spent most of my time hating them because I was jealous. Thanks god I’m in a place now where I’m not thinking everyone’s trying to steal my job. When I do my party Private Life, we put on so much new talent, cos they’re the future. So many kids who are incredible that don’t get a chance to play.
In 1999 David Morales won a Grammy for Remixer of the year, only the second time it was awarded (his friend and Def Mix Productions compadre Frankie Knuckles won the first). This was a major milestone in the rise of DJing, industry recognition that a remixer could play a huge role in chart success. At the time a Morales house mix was a surefire way to get R&B and pop artists played in the clubs, and through the ’90s he was in constant demand to create dance smashes like Mariah Carey’s ‘Dreamlover’, Alison Limerick’s ‘Where Love Lives’ and Jamiroquai’s ‘Space Cowboy’. At the same time he was making sumptuous underground music under his own name and in his Red Zone dubs. Morales now has over 500 remixes to his name, the bulk of them big-name stars. A Brooklyn DJ fired up by visits to David Mancuso’s Loft, he joined New York clubland’s inner circle in the early ’80s, when he was Judy Weinstein’s assistant at her record pool, from which he was chosen in fairytale fashion to replace Larry Levan at the Paradise Garage, followed by residences at Zanzibar, Red Zone, The World and Club USA. In this brilliant 1999 interview, conducted in the Times Square studio where he was mixing the Pet Shop Boys, he remembers his rise to fame, gives us an insider’s view of the evolution of remixing, and describes the passion which defines DJing greatness: the musical love, instinct and emotion that lies at the heart of his success.
Interviewed by Frank in Manhattan, 4.2.99
What was the music you heard growing up? Born in 1962 and raised in Brooklyn, grew up in Flatbush, parents are Puerto Rican. I guess I liked music from when I was really little. I remember taking this record from a friend of my mothers, ‘Spinning Wheel’ on RCA Victor [by Chet Atkins]. I must have been three, four. I always liked black music, I didn’t like the Spanish music. There used to be a social club downstairs, and I was free to roam around. Once the morning came the door was open and it was ch! I found myself in the craziest places. As a child you just wander.
What clubs did you go to? I mean real like ghetto neighbourhood clubs. Painted black with black glow paint. I mean real primitive shit. And that’s when ‘Mr Big Stuff’ [Jean Knight] was out, I remember. ’68, ’69? I remember ‘Want Ads’ [by Honey Cone].
How did you get into DJing? I used to be the one appointed to play the music. We all be hanging out and I be the one hanging out by the stereo. Picking the tunes. And this is with just one turntable. It wasn’t about two turntables at the time. I never saw that yet.
When did you take it to the next level? When I was 13 there was my prom. And this is when ‘Ten Percent’ [by First Choice] came out, that was the first time I saw two turntables, and a guy mixing, and this was outside.
Who was that? I think the guy’s name was Grandmaster Flowers. He was doing black block parties, people hanging out in the park and then they be playing music, and I was like, Wow!
When I first started mixing with the mixer and headphones, I was about 15, and ‘San Francisco’ was out by the Village People. And I remember we was in my friend’s sister-in-law’s apartment and the decks were in the kitchen. Forget about having monitors, the monitors were the speakers in the living room way over there. I put on the headphones, and I’m sitting there looking at the mixer ’cos I never worked one before. The first mixer I tried was a mic mixer, where there’s no cueing. And you’re sort of doing shit backwards because you’re not supposed to really plug a turntable into a mic mixer. Anyway, it worked and that’s how I used to phase shit in and out. So that’s how I started without headphones.
How did things come to another level?. After doing house parties I started going to a club called the Loft, on Saturday night, probably like 1980. The Loft was Saturday nights and a lot of people from my neighbourhood used to go. I used to hang out and dance. I used to be there for like 12, 15 hours, dancing. I was one of the ones who got there early and I was one of the last ones to leave as well.
What was that like for you? It was amazing, ’cos up to this I was what you’d call a commercial DJ, I bought the hits, I bought the records you bought in the mom-and-pop shops; that’s what I knew. When I went to the Loft I heard all this different music. I thought wow, I like this. Then it was all about where I could buy these records. That’s when I went to Vinylmania. And I was going to Downtown records since I was 14. So that’s when I started going to stores to collect music.
There were a lot of people there who would go on to be part of the dance industry Well, people I saw, I saw François [Kevorkian], but I never met him at the time. David Mancuso, Steve D’Acquisto. Those are really the people that I remember from the business, ’cos I was going there from such an early stage, and I wasn’t in the business.
It was after Frankie and Larry had been hanging out there. Larry would come after The Garage, because the Loft stayed later than the Garage, and he used to bring certain records. I used to go to the Garage. I went to the Garage as well, a couple of times on a Friday, and the reason it was only a couple of times was I was doing my own parties. I started doing my own parties in 1981.
As a mobile DJ? No, no, no, as a summer resident DJ. I was mobile from the minute I started, I went everywhere.
Where were you resident? I started at a place called the Ozone Layer in Flatbush. I use to do it on Friday nights, somewhat based around the way the Loft did stuff: I gave fruits away and tried to make it a party. But it was a smaller venue. My girlfriend at the time, her girlfriend was going out with one of the owners from the club. She had asked to do a party of her own, and asked me to play. I drew the invitation, cos I was a graffiti artist, and at the end of the day the people that really came out were my friends, people who I had invited, people that I used to invite to house parties. But the house parties were free, whereas this was pay.
Then I approached the owner and asked him to let me do some parties on my own. I just wanted to play records so I would hire other people to promote the parties, to be co-host, and I just asked for a fee for playing. And they wanted to give me some sob story they weren’t making money at the bar, at the door, all this kind of nonsense, they give me some bullshit trip. So anyway, after going through that a couple of times, there was a core audience, and that was my audience. And I started to realise that I didn’t need these folks. People were coming for me. They’re coming for my music. So I said, I’ll run this. I got it together with my girl. She handled the front, I played the music.
What kind of music were you playing back then? Were you picking up on records from the Loft? Yeah. The Loft and the Garage. Plus the new stuff, the underground stuff, at the time. Of course with some other commercial records.
Were there any which were really your records, that weren’t being played anywhere else? I was the first guy to play ‘Set It Off’ [by Strafe] at the Garage, because Larry wasn’t playing it.
How did you get in with those guys? That’s the funniest story. I had been to the Garage five times.
Just to hang out. Yes. I come dressed up, trying to get in out there, ’cos it was a private club. ‘Yo get me in, get me in…’ And I’d be the last one out. I’m always one of the last ones out. Not to mention the kind of stuff I used to do to stay there! But anyway, it was part of growing up, like everybody else.
How old were you? I had to be 20 so it was ’82, ’cos I didn’t play there until 1983. I was one of those kids that sat there and looked at the booth and was like [whispering reverentially] ‘Oh my god…’ Just fantasising. This room was incredible. Even before I went to Garage, I heard stories: four turntables, the guy’s incredible, and all of this, you know.
I used to go to the Loft but the Loft wasn’t about mixing. David had two decks, but Mancuso, he’d play the record from beginning to end, the way it was made. And that was his philosophy: no artificial flavours, no MSG; and that’s the way his sound system was too. Everything was straight. No processors in between, no crap. Just pure, you know. It’s like eating organic food.
Whereas the Garage was the monster system. It was a showcase for [sound engineer] Richard Long. It was his room. So anything new that he built, it was here. It was Larry’s house. He had a carousel for the record bin that schwoooo, spun around. I mean… You see pictures of Mick Jagger and Grace Jones. The Garage had a booth unmatched by any booth there’s ever been in the world.
Even now? Even now.
The first time you went, did he really impress you, did he blow you away? Naaah, he didn’t. I mean, the music was ch, incredible. Couldn’t say anything about the music, but you know, as a DJ I had this vision, I thought I was gonna hear science. And at the time I didn’t get the whole picture, because to me the mixing part, I wasn’t impressed by the mixing. There were some mixes that were awesome, when I first heard him do the acappella of ‘Love is the Message’, which he was the first one to play, that shit was like…
How did he play that? Well, that was when they started doing acappellas.
So he would just kill everything and play that? No, no, no, he would play ‘Love Is The Message’ over ‘Don’t Make Me Wait’. That was it man. He would play some of his productions of Peech Boys at early stages, just ideas, and people would go wild.
He could be quite temperamental. He could be SHIT for seven hours, and then he could take 15 minutes, and kick the shit out of you, and that made your night! That’s what it was about. There was nobody that was able to do that. And he didn’t care either. You be like ‘Aww man, what is this guy up to today?’ I actually think I caught him on a bad night. Which was alright. Second time I went I thought, ‘Oh, caught him on two bad nights’.
Tell me about how you got to play the Garage. Here comes 1983. I joined the record pool. I got in because of this DJ, Kenny Carpenter. He was playing at a big club called Bonds International, which was a huge club, six, seven thousand people it used to hold, right in Times Square. They used to have people like the Clash there, and Planet Patrol, Soulsonic Force, all that shit. And Kenny lived in my neighbourhood. I had met him through a mutual friend, and Kenny took me to the record pool, which is For The record, Judy [Weinstein]’s pool.
It was a privilege to be in that pool, all the big guys were in it, a serious roster. There was a waiting list to get in at the time. I’m talking to Kenny Carpenter, and another friend of ours, late friend of mine, Larry Patterson, my mentor, who used to play at Zanzibar and Better Days. I gave them some tapes, and the pool director at the time was David DePino, and they were looking for somebody new, so they referred me.
Then we’re in my house listening to some new records and I get a phone call: ‘Hi, my name is Mike Brody, I own a club called the Paradise Garage, I’d like you to play my club.’ I was like, ‘Yeah?’ and he’s talking: ‘You’ve been highly recommended.’ He said, quote, ‘Our DJ’s been playing like shit lately, and we’d like you to come in and do a spot.’
So by now I’ve sunk to my knees and I’m trying to write with a pen and a piece of paper to my friend, who I’m speaking to on the phone. He’s like [excited speechless noises], and I’m like ‘Yeahh’, and he says, ‘I have two dates available.’
How did it come about? Did he hear your tape? Didn’t hear nothing. Totally recommendation. From Judy and David Depino.
Was she managing you then? Naww. There was nothing like that at the time. No, she had her record pool, that was it. I was 21 years old. I was not making music, I was working at a restaurant… and doing parties… I had my Friday thing going now, full-on, every single Friday. So it was me taking off from my own night, and at the same time, worried about losing business from my Friday night, you understand?
Taking people with you… I had people come to me and say ‘How did you pull that off?’ because there were other people that were a lot more worthier of playing in that room, before me, that were incredible DJs. But anyway, they picked me, a guy from Brooklyn, it was my first New York club. I play in a sweatbox in Brooklyn, and here all of a sudden I’m playing at the mecca of the greatest club in the world. At 21 years old. And this wasn’t about doing two-hour sets, this was about eleven-hour sets. beginning to end, 12 to 11. And you had to beg me to stop!
Can you remember how it was the first time? I had never played for a gay audience, either. And I thought that playing for a gay audience you had to play different music. ’Cos I played for a straight audience, and when I went to Garage I went on straight night. So when he asked me if I wanted to play Friday and Saturday I said I didn’t think I could handle the Saturday, I’ve never played for a gay crowd before. He said just come here and do what you do best, that’s all I want you to do. The rest… You’ll love it. And man, I can’t tell you…
And I never played on Thorens turntables, that’s another thing. I only used the Technics. The 1200s were out at the time. I asked, can I put in some 1200s, but I had to play on the Thorens. This was belt driven, the Thorens was a whole ’nother beast, altogether.
So I’m playing at the greatest club, and yet I’m playing on turntables I ain’t never played. It’s like I’ve been driving a Volkswagen and all of a sudden I’m given a Ferrari to drive. I’ve got this fuckin’ major machine goin’ on here. I remember doing my first mix, and it was like milk.
Can you remember what it was? It was my first two records was, one was ‘Encore’, I believe, which was Cheryl Lynn, and I can’t remember the other record. I remember going to all my friends saying it was gonna be slamming tonight, cos I just felt it. The greatest thing was that I wasn’t part of the politics, at all. I was naive to anything. So even the people that didn’t like me, the pro-Larry Levan people, because of course his people, they got their favourite DJ, come to hear him, he ain’t there, ‘Who the fuck is this guy over here? Why is he here?’ And then you got those that feel that, ‘How come I ain’t playing? How come he is?’ You know what I mean. I had people throwing darts behind my back and I had no idea. They just bounced off because I wasn’t part of the politics, I didn’t care.
A young Morales with Judy Weinstein, Liza Minnelli and Frankie Knuckles
So how many times did you play there? About ten times. I did the Friday and Saturday, October 13th and 14th, 1983, I’ll never forget it. I still got the invitation, it’s framed. And they asked me who I could pick for my artists to sing on my night. I picked Jocelyn Brown, and the other one was Captain Rapp, at the time I think it was ‘Bad Times’. And then I came back the following February and played two weekends in a row. Friday, Saturday, Friday, Saturday. ’Cos Larry was gone for two weeks straight.
And in between you’re still playing at Ozone? No, I wasn’t. I had Kenny Carpenter playing. He was taking over the whole night, cos we split the night by then. ’Cos I took him from this big club to play this little hole in the wall, and it was like culture shock to him but, it was great. at the end of the day the vibe was great so,
What did that lead into? All of a sudden I was the new kid on the block. There was a new sheriff in town, so then clubs in New York approached me and I had a residency at a straight club called the Inferno, run by Vito Bruno. On 31st Street I believe. Right off Sixth Avenue. After the Inferno, I played at 1018, which is the Roxy now, and then my next residency was at a place called Lovelight in 1987 right after the Garage closed, which was on 33rd Street, and I had a residency at Zanzibar. That’s where I met Larry Patterson and Tony Humphries. Tony was Saturdays. Zanzibar was like the Garage of Jersey: tough sound system, people went to it. I had a residency there for about a year. I was doing Fridays and then I had my own night which was Wednesday. And then in 1988 I worked at The World for about a year and a half, and after the World I went to the Red Zone, in 1989.
And the Red Zone again, was your place. Yeah. The Red Zone was where I really made a statement for the new age. I think the Red Zone was definitely the turning point on the maps for music changing.
Why do you say that? For you personally? The only person that was really playing different stuff was Mark Kamins, ’cos Mark used to travel and bring these imports. He was at Danceteria years before, but at that time he would play at Mars, and Red Zone on other nights, which was where I had the residency on Saturdays.
In 1989 I took my first trip to England, and I brought back a lot of records. We were playing ska. ‘This Is Ska’, and ‘Ska Train’. Nobody was playing those records, and they used to lose it. I was the first one playing KLF, ‘What Time Is Love’. That was one of my biggest records. People used to run up to the booth saying, ‘What are you playing?’ ’cos it was this whole different sound that wasn’t the New York house sound. And when I started doing mixes, the Red Zone had its own sound, so there was a fusion.
Did you do any remixing before the Red Zone? Yeah. In 1987 I did ‘Instinctual’ by Imagination, I did some more deeper stuff. But when I started doing Red Zone I started branching out away, away from pure soulful. The Red Zone dubs, that’s when I stepped away. The core mix had all the soulful stuff, the songs, and then the Red Zone dubs were more on the daring side, going somewhere different.
What were you trying to do? It was mostly experimentation. I was making records for somewhere between here and abroad. Which was what the Red Zone represented.
With his Def Mix buddies Satoshi Tomiie and Frankie Knuckles
What was the crowd like? Very mixed. It was a dance crowd. It had a great sound system, the lighting was incredible, and we used to put on a show. Sometimes Satoshi Tomeii would play keyboards while we were playing. We used to go off in that place, it was severe. Everybody who got to experience the Red Zone will tell you it was one of the last places of its kind. And then came Sound Factory. The big Sound Factory was the afterhours to go to. You went to Red Zone first, that closed at five, and then you went to Sound Factory.
Was remixing a natural progression. I made remixes back in 1983, ’84, before I even thought about it. I knew guys from the pool, like Steve Thompson, or Bruce Forrest, and they used to come in and say I just mixed the new Madonna, or I just did the new Rolling Stones. Bruce Forrest he was the resident at Better Days. He introduced me to the world of samplers and drum machines and keyboards, ’cos he used to bring them in the booth. We were doing this back in 1985.
You were doing it purely for your dancefloor? Yeah.
There was no commercial thing No. In the club, three decks, bam! David Cole would come in, play around on keyboards. At that time it was the Chicago house sound, so it was great for all the synthesiser stuff that was going on, and it was all live: live remixing, we did it on the spot.
So anyway, from my club Ozone in Brooklyn which I had for about four years, I bought myself a keyboard and a drum machine. Even though I couldn’t play anything to save my life. Then in 1985 I remember hiring Steve Silk Hurley when it was JM Silk: him and Keith Nunnally, and I hired them to spin at the club. And that was round about the time when I started to play around with the Casio CZ101, that was my first keyboard. So anyway Bruce invited me down to the studio. I liked it, it grabbed my eye. Bought myself one or two pieces of equipment, I tried to make my own drum beats and things like that.
And then I did a record with David Cole and Robert Clivilles called Two Puerto Ricans, a Black Man and a Dominican, and we cut that at Judy’s office. I was basically mixing records, David played keyboards. It was just something we did on the fly, which was very successful. And then David and Robert went and turned it into something else, C&C Music Factory, which is a whole ’nother story.
So that was the start of you having a name as a remixer and a producer? Yeah. I really got a lot of profile when I did ‘Instinctual’ by Imagination. That was my first real hit. I remember Larry Levan telling me, ‘Great, great job.’ I was like, Wow, Larry told me I did a good mix. I was originally an Imagination fan, from ‘Illusion’, ‘Changes’, ‘Burning Up’, and then when I heard this record that was done by Phil Harding at PWL, it sounded like a Rick Astley record. I was like, ‘Yo dude I can’t play this, this is not even Imagination, what happened here? Let me remix it.’ He was like there’s really no money to mix it, only to do promotions, I said let me do the record. Anyway, even though it was off-key with the vocals, it worked. The second one I did right after that, was Whitney Houston ‘Love Will Save The Day’, and they rejected it, it was too housey.
Really? Of course. It wasn’t bubblegum enough. And I was traumatised, I was devastated. Because it would have meant so much to my credit at the time. I remember they had Rick Wake mix it. I was running the record pool at the time, and the promotion guy asks me, ‘How do you like the new house mix on Whitney Houston?’ I said, ‘You got to be kidding me, you call that a house mix?’ It was what those pop cornballs thought house music was. What I did was house music, that was the difference. But I think that’s what it was, it was too cool.
Do you find there’s a compromise when people hire you as a remixer? How often is there a real conflict between what they want for commercial reasons and what you want to do creatively? Well, not too much, but sometimes it does happen where they expect a certain style. And sometimes that’s not the style I want to give it because I don’t want to have one particular style.
And sometimes the song isn’t right for that. Right, and sometimes it don’t work for the song. What some A&R man hears in his head is totally different from what can actually work. So, I mean, I’ve had moments when they’ve said, ‘But I wanted this style, I wanted it like this and like that!’ because I don’t normally ask them what style do you want it, I want to go about it the way I hear it.
’Cos remixing started as a DJ’s tool to feed his dancefloor. The remixing thing. It’s totally leftfield now. It’s totally in another place. I mean, let’s not even call it remixing any more. In the beginning of remixing you remixed the original tracks, existing tracks. You used what was there to create the intro, your body, your break, your tag – the end of the song.
And then it started changing: OK you change the bassline, added percussion, or you added some things, but you still had the song. You still had the artist intact. Then it came to the point where you just got rid of the original music. Now you started to put new music…
So you’ve only got the vocal track left. And all you got is the vocal track. So now people expected to hear something totally different. Now the expectancy was: ‘Well, did he change it?’ Now they wanted to hear something totally different. It’s come to a place where now you’re changing the music and what you do to it makes the record successful. You only getting a one-time fee. In reality you’re sort of like becoming a co-writer, but you’re not getting a writer’s share.
So that’s why remixing fees went up so much? So that’s one whole thing. When I started mixing there wasn’t too many guys, number one, and number two is if you noticed, when it comes to guys mixing songs [ie vocal tracks], there still aren’t that many. Now remixing has crossed over into R&B now which is great, there are some guys that really deserve, I think in hip hop, in remixing in the R&B is the most creative, more than the dance remixes.
Why do you say that? Because they’re redoing the song. They all redo the song. There’s no time-stretching, you understand. they’re recutting the song. They’re adding rappers to it, so they’re producing. They’re all productions. Which is where I’ve taken remixing to now: production. I started that with Mariah ‘Dreamlover’. We said no time-stretching [digitally changing the tempo of the vocal].
You want to keep faithful to the tempo of the original It used to be that you had waves of music, different tempos through the night. So you were able to enjoy yourselves in a club without hearing a constant four-four pounding. But now there’s no up and down tempo, now there’s just straight across, full-on. When time-stretching came around there was no more downtempo records. Everything had to be club music; they didn’t care if the vocals sounded bad. I believe the reason why I even still get a lot of work is, I do vocals. because I work with the song. You have tons of other guys…
…who just take just a tiny sample of the vocals And not even that. It’s gotten to the point that there’s no respect for the artist any more. You’re selling the remixes, that’s what you’re selling.
Is that how you approach it, you want it to come out recognisably the same song? Of course. That’s what the challenge is. What guys are doing today, it’s not even a question of mixing the record, or the vocals, verses, choruses – no fuckin way. They put a slamming track together in the studio. Somebody says, I need a remix of Tori Amos. So you take a piece of a vocal: ‘Bla’ and drop it into your own track. That’s a remix? That represents the artist? That doesn’t represent the artist, it represents you. And you’re giving up publishing, because you’re giving up a whole track. You’re giving it to somebody else’s name. That really doesn’t represent them. And they’ll never perform it, either!
Why did it get so out of hand with the money. It got quite crazy a few years ago? It’s still crazy. It’s crazier. I can’t explain why you can spend so much money on a record and could have a great song, with like everything and not do anything, compared to something where there’s no effort, that’s put together in two hours and for some reason the thing just hits and that’s it! I mean ‘Stardust’ [‘Music Sounds Better With You.’] How much work you think went into Stardust? It’s sampled. Whoever went into the sample, that was where the work was. When those musicians did that, that was where the time was spent. But you know, and look how huge that thing was.
I believe you have the privilege for having the highest fee for any one remix. Michael Jackson’s ‘Scream’ Probably.
Didn’t they fly you over to LA rather than send the tapes etc… They wouldn’t give me the masters. They flew me to LA, money was no option. It was a lot of work. It wasn’t like that was my fee for one mix. I must have did three different mixes. I mean I spent a week in Michael Jackson-land. But now hip hop guys are making that kind of money, regularly.
Do you know what the highest is ever? Probably Puffy. Who knows.
What does he get nowadays? I don’t know., It would be interesting. You can’t be surprised at a guy like Puffy probably wouldn’t do it for less than a hundred grand, between 75 and a hundred maybe.
’Cos you got 80 for the Michael Jackson, is that right? Nahh. It was, I can’t say.
Did that feel a bit crazy, all that Michael Jackson-ness. You know what, It was definitely a moment, with Michael Jackson.
Did you meet him? No I didn’t. I shouldhave for all of the security I went through. You would think he was coming. I mean they were guarding those tapes like it was their life. It was the first track off the album.
That’s why it was so secret. Mission Impossible. And I felt that I compromised my sound. I went to another place. I took everybody out of a familiar environment, and we tried to recreate that somewhere else and it just didn’t work. I don’t feel like my best effort went into ‘Scream’. ‘Scream’ could have been a much better sounding record…
Do you think the DJ is an artist? Sure
What makes the DJ an artist? The way he puts on music. Not all DJs are artists, It’s something that has to project. It’s not something that has to be present all the time. It’s something that comes on when it’s supposed to come on. It’s like ‘Put on this show’. Most top guys, they don’t plan their records, they don’t put them in a certain order. I take more records than I need, I don’t know what the first record is, or my last. Or my second.
And you need the people on the dancefloor to make it happen As great stuff as I have in my studio, I can’t turn it on for myself. I can’t. I got a great sounding studio, but when I make my show tapes for the radio, I can’t turn it on. I don’t come up with the creative things that come on when you’re playing live to an audience. I can’t duplicate it.
What do you get from the audience? Well, you get the live feedback. You’re working records, you have to present them in different ways, and it’s how you present the mixing, the technical aspects of it; it’s a whole combination of things.
How do you feel like when it’s going really well? Ohhhh man, it’s like jumping out of my skin. I dance in the booth. I jump up and down. I wave my arms in the air, you know. It’s that feeling of knowing I’m in full control, I can do anything I want. And the thing is, I like to entertain myself. It’s important to me to keep me going this far. I have to get something out of it. I can’t just do it for the money, otherwise what makes you different and special is that you give it that extra something.
Does it ever feel sexual or spiritual? Oh for sure. For me, absolutely.
How does it feel? Pure sex…
Yeah? Sex and… oh absolutely. For me it’s sex.
Really? Totally.
So you’re having sex with all the audience. Absolutely. It’s spiritual sex. classic, spiritual sex, oh my god. A great night man, sometimes I’m on my knees in the middle of a mix, just feeling it that way, and then when you play a record, you can bring it down, you can just turn everything off and the people going nuts. And you stand back, you just wipe your forehead and, ‘shiit!’ Everybody just going nuts and just knowing that you’re right there. You could play whatever you want. Whatever you want. You got ’em from there.
And that feeling must be what makes your DJing so powerful If I wasn’t doing something like that I wouldn’t still be one of the top players in the game. I feel I’m actually, in all of my years, at the top of my game. I’ve played at some incredible parties, before the travelling and all of that. I go back to the Ozone to Mirage, to Zanzibar. I got to experience some incredible moments, of music, that have enabled me to carry that on, that a lot of people, the new kids, haven’t experienced.
And to me the fundamentals from those days still apply. My experience comes from back then. My experience is not a new generation’s experience. My experience is an old school experience. And I do things the old school way. Now I understand records more because I make records. And that just makes you all the more better because you understand.
When you talk to the old guys they say the DJ doesn’t have to work as much nowadays, because records are made so precisely for the dancefloor, whereas in the old days… you had to change the record every three minutes. So the 45 stage was one stage, then you had to work, and be a lot more creative, because the intro was like this [snaps fingers], Then they started doing those first mixes in the late ’70s. Tom Moulton and Walter Gibbons, when he did ‘Ten Percent’, which was the first 12-inch edit. And before the 12-inch it was albums. And it was all live drums, so you had to work, you really had to be creative. There was no such thing as blank drums for 16 bars and you got enough time to ride that beat in, hell no! You had to be creative and go up down, up, make that shit sound real smooth.
Is DJing a dying art then? Nah, no.
Will there always gonna be people who put body and soul into it? Yeah, absolutely. In whatever kind of music, whatever style it is, the most important thing for all the DJs that are successful is that they feel it. They have to believe in the stuff they’re playing.
The worst scenario is playing it for the sake of playing it. It’s like me playing drum and bass and playing something progressive, because hey man I need to make some money to make ends meet, and because I don’t have a name, this is what I gotta do.
The real connoisseur, whether he’s working or not, this is what he‘s doing. Even if he’s a bedroom DJ all his life, nobody’s gonna take away from him that he loves music. No matter what. So even if I wasn’t working I’d still be trying to put some records together. Even if I’m not playing out anywhere, I’d still be in my office trying to put some practice tapes. Because when I started buying records there was no two turntables, there was no clubs. Nobody ever told me I was gonna get a job as a DJ one day. And I never thought for a moment that that’s what I wanted to be.
How do you feel then when you go to places like England and Italy and everyone treats you like a superstar? I laugh sometimes. Because you know what I mean it’s the treatment, the honour, the money, the fame, I don’t ask for it. Even if I stopped making records tomorrow, I’d still keep playing records, and I enjoy doing what I do. I get a lot of passion from it, and to be paid, and to be put on a pedestal for doing something that I love doing naturally, is mindboggling.
Has the adoration and fame ever got out of hand? One of the most incredible times I had was in Japan, a place called Yellow, and they literally wanted to climb over the walls, up to the box, and I was like wow… and when you see people standing around in the booth, just like every space, waiting for you to do magic, and “I’m just playing records. I’m not doing anything. You can do this” If you felt it. But you mean, I’m not doing anything to learn from. It’s all here[thumps heart]. It’s here and here [heart and ears] Cos that’s what its all about.
I have a party in Mykonos in Greece in August every year for my birthday. It’s full-on, it was 3,000 people last year, I’ve been playing for 20 years now, but I walk into the place and my heart is pumping. My heart is coming out of my chest. All these people here for me. I’m in the booth and the minute people see me they’re going ballistic, nuts. I started out with this record – ‘Joy’ by Kathy Brown – and the original has an acappella, and it’s this beautiful thing, and I start to break down, I’m crying man, and I’m trying to mix a record and my tears are coming down, and I’m trying not to let people see me. [He mimes keeping his head down and secretly wiping a tear. He’s speechless.] I’ve had some great experiences, It gives me the reason to still keep doing it.
Tony Smith was one of the original cohort of DJs who were instrumental in defining what a DJ did in the modern era. Starting out playing at block parties as a teenager, before progressing onto the tiny, but influential, Barefoot Boy as a resident through most of the 1970s. He went on to play at commercial disco – and Studio 54 rival – Xenon. We talk about his early colleagues and heroes and the records they championed in an era that changed dance music forever, including his friendship with Larry Levan and the Larry impersonator who used to hang out in the DJ booth at the Garage. Sadly, Tony passed away in May 2021, having caught pneumonia during the pandemic.
Let’s start at the beginning… I was born 20 blocks from here, in the projects, lower Manhattan. I loved music since I was a kid. My brothers and sisters had a group, you know in those doo-wop days? So I was always listening to music.
These must’ve been older than you. Yeah, they’re like 14 years older than me. A brother and two sisters. I’m the baby, by a long shot. I’ve known music since I was little. And that whole R&B, Little Anthony & The Imperials, that whole sound. I started a band when I was 13 and we played in the projects, in schools and colleges and talent shows.
What was the band called? Soul Sound Explosion. It was good, until we kept expanding, because you had to have a bongo player, then we had a vibe player. I taught myself guitar. It was the only instrument people didn’t learn in school. And then after ’69 we had about 12 guys in the band and we were making no money and during the band breaks, I used to play the music for the party or whatever. Not calling it DJing then, just playing music.
How would you do it? Using the PA system and two volume controls so there would continuous music. It wasn’t mixing, it was more blending. So what happened was the band broke up because everybody got greedy and, you know, personal things and I just started playing music outside. I got harassed to play music outside. Because that was before the police knew what was goin’ on; disco wasn’t out, so we could do whatever we wanted.
You say outside. Where exactly? Right out in the park. You could hook up your system in the lights sockets; in the street lights, in places like Pierce 1 Park and the park right in the middle of Smith Projects. But then I went all around lower east side. Most people don’t know, but there’s project after project after project on the lower east side. All along the east river edge.
Was that an unusual thing to be doing with two turntables? Oh nobody knew what I was doing. Until I had a competition. There was a battle of the DJs. There was a Puerto Rican kid and his brother who started doin’ the same thing. And we would compete for the crowd.
Do you remember his name? Yeah, Spanky and Ice. I was just me, but I always had people watching my records, watching my sound system things like that. We started competing. I was still 16 then. The whole thing then was to get records he didn’t have and him to get records I didn’t have, just so we would draw the crowd towards us. Probably when I was like 17, I went to a gay club like in the West Village. Totally freaked me out. I didn’t know that existed. It was called The Limelight, where David Rodriguez was the DJ and he just blew me away. Before then I used to go to black straight clubs, but it was a totally different thing.
What were black straight clubs like? In the old days the Mafia owned the real clubs, so they had the gay clubs. Most black people’s clubs were either recreational centres or restaurants in the day and they would turn into a black club at night. Or colleges like Hunter College, NYU, they would always have parties for black straights, so that’s all I really knew till I was 17.
What was the clientele at the black clubs; all ages etc? Yeah, we were goin’ in there when we 14 and underage. No ID, no card, no alcohol, you always brought your own, they always had BYOBB. The music was… everything. I call it black music but it was all in those days. They were playing Chicago in those days, Rare Earth, Steve Winwood, Boz Scaggs, a lot of white groups mixed in with the black, James Brown, Dr. John. There was a lot of white groups that had maybe one club or R&B song and somehow or other the word would get around about it. There was maybe about four DJs who rotated around: Flowers, Maboya, Plummer and the Smith Brothers. And whenever you went they had really loud sound systems and they had a lot of exclusive records. So what happened to me was I was always around the DJ booth and I finally found out where they went to buy records, because they always had records that none of us had and that was Nicky at Downstairs. I finally got to Nicky’s in the train station and that’s when I finally wiped out everybody in my area, because I had the music that nobody had and it was like my secret store! No one knew about Nicky’s. And while I was there I got to know other DJs, because I didn’t really know that this was going on.
What was Flowers like, because everyone says he was the best? He was the best, but he was most egotistical, too. He was a bastard. He just wasn’t nice to you. He wanted to be so exclusive. He wanted to be the best and I guess and he thought that’s the way he had to be to be the best.
So if you went to ask him about a record he wouldn’t tell you? Yeah. In those days that was the one bad thing with straight jocks. As a matter of fact, they used to cross the records out so if you looked you couldn’t even see what the record was. I started doing that as a teenager, especially exclusive records. Maboya and Smith Brothers were definitely more friendly. Flowers had the best music. He had a really great sound system.
Were they mixing back then? It was more blending, it wasn’t mixing like say when I heard David Rodriguez. That’s when I knew I had to do some work because in black clubs it wasn’t about mixing, it was about programming. You could mix horrible, but if you played the right record everybody’d keep dancing. With the gay crowds, it was more about programming and mixing. You had to know how to mix, too, or they’d walk off. They might come back on but you’d still have a reputation for not being a good mixer. Straight clubs like that it was definitely more about programming than mixing. Finally one black disco opened up called the Cheetah.
It wasn’t the one around 18th Street was it? No, it was different. Hey had Latin on Thursdays. They had all the groups playin’, like Kool & The Gang. I found out later that the DJ there was David Todd, which freaked me out because I was a kid then and I didn’t know there was a DJ there. I remember the strobes, because it was the time I’d seen strobes. We went every week. I was definitely underage, but I looked older for my age, so I got in.
Describe to us your first visit to the Limelight? I was scared. Scared shitless [laughter]. All these guys are staring at me and I just wanted to hear music.
So how did you hear about it? I walked by. This is how I was in those days. Any time I heard music and it was something I’d never heard before. At that time I think he was playing things like Everyday People’s ‘I Like What I Like’, so that draws my attention. I used to just stand outside and listen to the music. Finally I got the courage to go in. Come on! I’m 17 and I’m scared. I didn’t know there was gay clubs. I had no clue. I stood right next to the booth. Until he got to know my face. Every time I went there I’d stand next to the booth and tell him how great he was. He was my first idol. My second idol was Richie Kaczor who worked at Hollywood. And that was like on 44th and…
It was what had been the Peppermint Lounge wasn’t it? Yeah. Once I’d heard about Limelight, I knew they existed so now when I go to Downstairs I’m gonna ask about other clubs. Some clubs I liked, some I didn’t. Bobby DJ was good at Le Jardin. After that, I started going everywhere!
What was it that struck you about David Rodriguez. Was it the mixing? The mixes.. but the one thing I took from him was enthusiasm. Some DJs don’t look like they’re having a good time. David always looked like he was having a great time in that booth! So that’s how I always felt when I was DJing. I always connected to him because he looked he was having a ball up there. Always smiling, always in a good mood and his music always showed. He never played filler music – you know that stuff you play to get to other things? – he didn’t really play that. He wanted you to always dance. Even if they didn’t always he wanted you to dance. He was the type that wanted to educate the crowd, which was another thing I learnt from him. You know, you can play it safe, play everything they know. But David was the type that wanted to expand their taste in music because he was playing like black club stuff, gay music and just these different styles but blending them so they went together.
Do you remember the kinds of things he was playing? He was playing Bohannon’s first record with ‘Stop And Go’, he was playing ‘Girl You Need A Change Of Mind’, ‘I Like What I Like’ and ‘Hum Along And Dance’ by Jackson 5. It was a wide range. That was the best thing about him. He was never boring. Some DJs are boring and I can’t really hear them more than once or twice because I know what they’re gonna do. One thing I learnt with David was that every night is a different night and you don’t know what you’re gonna do. He was totally spontaneous. He would see someone he knew and feed off of that. It was like a science to him, but at the same time he was having a good time. Then I went to Richie Kaczor. Richie was more technical than David. He was a better mixer than David. I can’t say a better programmer because they were both really good. Richie could blend much longer. Now there’s a new skill I didn’t know about.
Blending for more than five or ten seconds. For that you gotta memorise the record since all these records have different drummers and different beats so you have to know each record, because a lot of DJs would try and make mistakes. With new music you can do it, because it’s all programmed for that. Richie was good at things like ‘Newsy Neighbors’, which came out around that time. It wasn’t really disco yet but it was almost; on the cusp before disco. He was playing Blue Magic, ‘Dance Master’ by Willie Henderson; he was going into imports and all that stuff. That was when I first went towards the imports. Now Nicky’s making a mint off us, because imports were costing so much more. I don’t really remember David playing imports. You could tell Richie was hunting out for records. His range was wider. I listened to him for at least a year, didn’t want to miss him. Come to find out later that they came to hear me play, which was my biggest thrill. My four idols at that time were David, Richie, Walter Gibbons and Nicky Siano, because I was younger by five or six years…
David Rodriguez mix of Candido’s ‘Jingo’.
What was Nicky Siano like? He was just crazy! He got famous even younger than I did. Nicky was like really young and his style was like… just crazy. He could throw anything on, he had such a rapport with the crowd. He would take any chance, that’s what I liked about him, he was very courageous. He’d play the most insane things, like soundtracks, not disco soundtracks, just soundtracks. I didn’t know whether David or Richie were takin’ drugs, but I knew Nicky was [laughter]! He could throw anything on it would work.
Can you think of any of these things? I can remember him playing the Carrie soundtrack and then going into Love Hangover. Which is just totally bizarre, but it worked! That’s what I learned from Nicky was get your crowd to know you and then you can get away with more stuff than you can if you’re just a guest DJ. So the one thing I really wanted was to get a club. A friend of mine told me there was ads in the Village Voice for clubs. There was a club called Barefoot Boy before it opened, and it said: “DJ Wanted”. I thought, I know I’m not going to get this job. I’d only worked in straight black clubs and this was a gay white club and I only watched DJs. I hadn’t really played. So anyhow, I auditioned for this and I got the job. It still amazes me. It was like seven days a week, $25 a night.
Would that have been considered a lot of money then? It was for me! I was getting paid for something that I liked to do. I would’ve done it for free. Once I got that job, I’m in the record store every day because now I’ve got money to buy records.
Tony Smith playing Barefoot Boy classics.
Where was Barefoot Boy? It was on 39th and 2nd Avenue. Barefoot was open every night and it was packed every night. So there’s this packed night and I don’t know what the hell I’m doing! This was 1974 and I was 20 years old. There’d be a lot of people in the bar and a lot of people dancing, all gay, white. Which I knew I had to integrate, which I did eventually. I knew that to get to play all the music I wanna play I couldn’t just have all gay white. I already found out certain records that I couldn’t play. Like I couldn’t play James Brown.
Even though the gay scene was relatively new then was it already that segregated? Did you go to any black gay clubs? I guess Nicky’s club, but it was mixed but at least blacks could go and feel comfortable.
What about David’s crowd? That was mixed, but it was in the West Village so it was predominantly white. They all had a little mix, but there was one black club and when I went there I was frightened out of my mind! It was Better Days and Tee Scott. I wanted to expose myself to everything so when I do finally get this job I’d be prepared for everything. A friend of mine took me to Better Days. Tee was just unbelievable and the crowd just scared the hell out of me because it was all black men staring at me and I just wanted to get into the music. But I made friends with Tee. I know how black gays are really harder to play for than white gays, but he could do that. I couldn’t do that. Mainly because I had white taste in music, but I also didn’t wanna play in a club where I was restricted. That’s why I like Richie and David and Nicky’s clubs, because they had a mix and they could play anything. I didn’t want to play just black gay music or white gay music, I just wanted to play music.
So you had a strategy then? At the beginning I had my straight friends come down, totally offsetting the whole thing! Straight black friends from Little Italy. Finally, the Latins came in. Once Latins come in, then everyone can come in. I don’t know why, but that’s how it is. Then my music widened even more. Barefoot never turned black, but there was always blacks in there. In the beginning, all the bartenders, busboys, coat check, waiters, everybody was white except me.
Do you remember the first night? I couldn’t wait until it was open. I just wanted to give a good impression on my first time, and it was packed and I really didn’t know what to play so I’m playing safe. So my inner soul has to do something crazy so they remember you, otherwise it’s just like, ‘he was okay’ which I didn’t want to be. But after the first night the owner came over and said, “You played good”. I stayed there three years. In the second year there, I got offered Garage and Studio. I turned them both down.
Who offered you the Garage? Mel Cheren. And Steve Rubell used to come to Barefoot. Rubell was in there all the time, he had a club called Enchanted Gardens. I used to guest there, Nicky used to guest there. I got some award from something like After Dark, I thought it was hokey, but you know, it was top ten and I was in it and so were my idols. This was when I knew Barefoot was big. I had started to find out on Mondays that Nicky, David, David Mancuso, all of them were coming to hear me on Monday nights, but I didn’t know it, they were downstairs at the bar. One day I’m going down to get a drink and I see them all at there, Richie Kaczor, all of them listening to me, at Barefoot! And Monday night was like my boring night, so now I gotta make it a better night! I felt like I was a peer to them who were totally my idols. And in Barefoot, too, which was such a dumpy little club, but there used to be lines outside the club. That was the other thing, it was free to get in, but maybe £2 at the weekend. So it’s always packed, now DJs are coming to watch me play and promoters are coming. All of a sudden I’m getting ‘Free Man’ on white label, Mel Cheren’s bringing me ‘Doin’ The Best That I Can’. I was totally overwhelmed. I was getting everything and I didn’t even have to go to a record store.
Do you remember what you were playing at Barefoot Boy? I’d play everything from Deodato to Yvonne Fair’s ‘Should’ve Been Me’. I used to play what I called sleazy music; slow but not boring. The only thing I really couldn’t play there, still, was black urban music. But I still got away with ‘Doin’ It To Death’ by the JB’s but I couldn’t get away with ‘Give It Up Turnit Loose’ or ‘Sex Machine’. I was playing Fatback Band’s ‘(Do The) Bus Stop’, which was a dance. I could play African music, I was playing Osibisa’s ‘Music For Gong Gong’, Latin-sounding music, but I couldn’t play a lot of the stuff I was playing outside. That stuff was a bit too progressive for gays at that time, but they really liked female vocals.
So were you still doing outside parties [meaning block parties]? I did Fire Island, I used to do Ice Palace. Since I was working seven days, I didn’t wanna give a day up because I knew I’d get backstabbed. After a while I knew I couldn’t work seven days I started giving a day to friends I knew like Wayne Dixon and Walter [Gibbons]. The one who backstabbed was Jerry Bossa who used to work at Buddah. I gave him the job and he undercut me. I tried to give it to Walter but he was too progressive for that crowd. Walter worked at Galaxy 21. The first time I heard him I think it was my first year at Barefoot. Heblew me away. More than Nicky, Richie, all of them. Walter was just way ahead.
François K tribute edit to Walter Gibbons.
In what way? Mixing. See, everyone else knew how to mix, but Walter, he could remix a record live and you don’t know he’s remixing it. I never saw anyone do that. Most of the time you can hear when someone’s remixing it and I couldn’t believe he was doing it. First of all I couldn’t believe it was a white guy that was doing it and somebody I didn’t know, because he was really somebody who was unknown then. What happened was the bartenders used to bug me to go out and I was always exhausted. I was like alright I’m gonna go to Galaxy. I heard him remixing ‘Girl You Need A Change Of Mind’. You know the remix that you hear? It’s on a bootleg that loops the bongos? Walter used to do that live. And he would come out with records that no one else was playing, like Doc Severinson. He had unbelievable programming, unbelievable mixing. But he was really a bastard. He was really stuck up. He drove everyone crazy, but somehow I became friends with him and I was let through that barrier of Walter’s. Most people don’t really know what a nice person he is. He didn’t trust nobody. Come to find out later, he was smart not to trust anybody, because everyone stole his stuff! ‘Girl You Need A Change Of Mind’, ‘Erucu’, which Walter invented, Rare Earth, ‘Two Pigs And A Hog’. He used to do these live! And they used to be really hard work. I don’t know if you know how small [the part from] ‘Happy Song’ by Rare Earth is.
It’s tiny! He used to do this live, with GLI mixer, which was just amazing.
Really what he was doing was like hip hop DJs wasn’t it? Yeah, and what was funny was that everyone was going to buy ‘Happy Song’ not knowing it’s like 12 seconds long! So what he did – because after a while there was just too many songs – he did quite a few Eddie Kendricks songs but the best known is ‘Girl… ‘ What he did was he went to Sunshine Sound and next thing you know everybody had his music. Nobody knows what happened.
Well François went down there and did some stuff for them didn’t he? Ah, François was playing the drums at Galaxy. He probably didn’t tell you that!
Yeah, he did. He didn’t know any English or nothing. He was just this annoying guy – who we all got to love later – because he didn’t know how to play drums. But he knew the owner and the owner let him play drums right in the middle of the dancefloor. It used to drive Walter crazy. Every once in a while he’d be on beat, but with Walter’s mixing he’d be – Da! – but he was a friendly guy. We came to find out later that people were recording Walter secretly. There was a wire we found and we followed it all the way up. And this is when Walter became even more distrustful and went into God. He kind of alienated me and everyone else because he didn’t trust anyone. But he was such a genius. I remember he used to talk with me on the phone while he was editing ‘Ten Percent’ and asking me should I make it three times or two times – [mimics the stabs] – he used do things so easily whereas with me it would have been a struggle. Once I met him, I knew I gotta practise some more. The one DJ skill he had that most DJs don’t know how to do and I still freak out people when I do it. It’s the drop mix. To mix like hip hop DJs do where you have to just let it go and it was on beat. It was amazing and it used to fuck up the whole crowd. This volume is up and this volume is up and he would do that continuously. I told everybody about Walter. I told everybody about Nicky, too. My big mouth was telling everybody at Downstairs, “You gotta got to Galaxy, You gotta go to Hollywood…” Then Garage came out and it was totally different to Walter.
Just before you go on to the Garage, do you have any experience of those really early guys like Francis Grasso, Michael Cappello? Oh, I forgot about that. Francis I heard at Footsteps. I didn’t know he was there till afterwards. You know Union Square? It was right around the corner, maybe 18th & Broadway. You’d have to go up 200 steps, that’s why it was called Footsteps. There was no elevator and it was a long walk up to the club. I never heard him at Sanctuary. I always heard he invented mixing. Then I heard that Alfie Davison invented mixing, then I heard Flowers mixing, so I don’t really know who invented it.
Who is Alfie Davison? He was this really big DJ at the time and I know he probably hung out with Francis. He was a black guy, gay, he even made a record on RCA later on. Who I never really heard DJ, but the word of mouth I heard when I was young was it was him and Francis. Gays and straights always argue about who invented that stuff. I don’t really know. But I remember straights when I was 15 or 16 who were mixing, so there was no pause. I remember when there was a pause and I remember when Flowers and them came out there was no pause. There wasn’t any mixers yet. My first mixer was two mic amps with two pre-amps connected with them. So I don’t know who did that first. Michael Cappello was a good friend of mine, but I’m just trying to remember where he used to work. I’m thinking it was Queens. I only heard him once, but he was like Joe Palmienteri. You know they were good, but they didn’t do anything for me. Walter I would go every week. Sometimes, later, I would find out he had been tripping when was doing this stuff. I can’t even smoke and do this stuff! Kenny Carpenter was absorbing all this stuff, because used to do the lights. And he’d be amazed, too, because he’d be looking over: how can he do this? And he rarely made a mistake despite doing all these crazy things. The only bad thing about Walter was you really wouldn’t want him to come near you, because Walter was critical because you couldn’t live up to his skills. You’d do your best and Walter was still going to diss you a little! He did it live, in front of 1,000 people, on acid, and never made mistakes! But, for some reason, once he left Galaxy, he never got big.
People say when he got religion he lost a little something. Yeah that’s true. Then he started working at a record store. I got him a job at Xenon, which was like a really big mistake by me…
That was quite a commercial club wasn’t it? Yeah and he tried to put this religion thing and I’m like “Walter, I’m trying to get you back into the flow of everything, you can’t do that. Xenon’s competing with Studio”.
And they don’t want to hear gospel music all night! They don’t wanna hear gospel or Salsoul all night, because he did a lot of Salsoul records. So I was like, “Walter, you gotta play the list” meaning you heard me play there you know what this crowd wants. And that was when it was mostly all-white. I hadn’t integrated it yet. But he influenced me so much I wanted to try and help but he would not… once he got into religion it was over.
CJ & Co doing the devil’s work.
So is it true that he really wouldn’t play anything unless it had a message? I’ve seen him break ‘Devil’s Gun’. I’m like “Walter, that record’s hot!”. There were certain records he would not play. And I said to him if you listen to the words it’s not really saying what you think it’s saying. He wouldn’t play ‘Bad Luck’ by Harold Melvin, either. ‘Bad Luck’ wasn’t a bad song either. But I think it was the titles. When he went into the extreme religion thing, we fell apart. When he didn’t keep the job at Xenon he kinda blamed me. I said, “Walter, you’re playing gospel and it’s not gonna work in Xenon!” I wish he had’ve stayed because I knew how great he could be because I gave the job to Jellybean.
How did you first meet Larry Levan? Did you go to Reade Street? I went to Reade Street once. I thought Larry was really good. He was a programmer. He knew what to play. Mixing was secondary to him, sometimes he mixed good, sometimes he didn’t. But that wasn’t the priority. The priority was the next record. He liked to play with words, so sometimes his records connected with the words, which I used to love, because you had to think about it. He was more cerebral than most people give him credit for. Nicky was just crazy. Nicky could think of words, but maybe just for a couple of seconds before he was somewhere else! I got to know Larry really good at the Disco Convention in California because we were like New Yorkers in California.
What year was this? I guess ’79. Even though I knew him, this was the first time we really hung out and acted like normal people rather than DJs. We were New Yorkers in California. And we were black guys in California. I didn’t know that Larry was like cool and funny and all of these other things you don’t get to see when he’s working. It was cool for him to see me when I wasn’t working, too, because I was working in a white club and he was working in a black club, but we both still had the same musical heads on. A year or two later we spun together at Area, which was just like the best times, with Gwen Guthrie. It was a birthday for Gwen Guthrie. One other person I gotta bring because I haven’t brung him up yet and he’s one of my best friends. He didn’t influence me DJing, but influenced me musically and that’s Danny Krivit. We’ve known each other so long it’s ridiculous. Danny influenced me more in black music and I influenced him more in disco music because Danny knew black music… I remember as a 16-year-old kid, I couldn’t believe this white kid could know black music so well. We met in a music store and we were both going for the same record and I got the record. I think it was ‘Yellow Sunshine’. We became friends after that. When I went from Barefoot to Xenon there was this weird transition where Xenon was tryin’ to compete with Studio. And Ray Caviano – I’m gonna tell this story, but I don’t know whether it’s totally factually true.
But it makes a good story! Ray Caviano gave a list to Xenon of seven top DJs. They were going through DJs every month. He gave them all the white jocks like Roy Thode, Jonathan Fearing and I was the last person on the list. Every two weeks they would try a new DJ because none of them worked but they didn’t wanna try me. Finally Howard Stein gave in. I happened to be there one night and the music Jonathan Fearing was playing was so bad they said I could have the job, right there. Just because I was there! I told them no, out of respect to Jonathan and also I was working someplace else. I remember the mix I did that just blew them away and next day I had the job.
Patrick Labatte’s tribute to Tony.
What was it? The mix was Patti Brooks’ ‘After Dark’ with, in the break, ‘You Keep Me Hanging On’ by The Supremes, just in the background low in the mix. It was one of those things I learned from Walter: no voices crashing. Because Walter, if the voice’s clashed, he’d give you a look! And the keys matching, too. I also did it with Inner Life’s ‘Ain’t No Mountain High Enough’ and ‘When Doves Cry’ in the background. Everyone was blown away and was asking me to do it again, but the old school way is not to repeat it but think of something better! Once I got the job at Xenon and now I’m playing for 1,000 people. At Barefoot Boy it was only 200 dancing. I love challenges and this was a challenge. But they want me to work seven nights a week. I can do that when I’m in my early twenties, so I also had to find DJs. I wanted Wednesday thru Sunday. I went to hear Richie at Studio so I could know what kind of stuff he’s playing. I was always trying to do my homework.
What was the difference between what Richie was playing at Studio compared with Hollywood? He had to play more commercial, which was understandable. But I did, too, unless it was a special party, which I loved special parties. But what I did was – and Richie didn’t do – try to make the crowd last longer so it would have a reputation of staying open longer, after the bars had closed. In the beginning the owner resisted that, but I’m telling him if the people start coming in at 2 in the morning, they’re gonna drink until four and they’re gonna dance and come back. I’m trying to tell him this is going to be better in the long run and he didn’t have to be here, just let me play till I wanna finish. I don’t want no extra pay, I just want control of the crowd, because that’s what most DJs want. And I finally had it, I didn’t really have that at Barefoot, but I did at Xenon, where I could play anything I want. I brought my whole collection, eight thousand records, so whenever I had a whim I could go with that and I had a tremendous time.
When did you play from and until? From ’79 to ’82. That was one of the best years of music because you could still play all the stuff from 1973 on. There was a lot of great music in that period, new wave, rock, reggae, disco, club. Anything.
You played at Xenon around the time that disco was collapsing, really. Did that make a difference in the kinds of records you were playing? Was that Disco Sucks feeling prevalent? What I did was play new wave.
But did you feel resistance to disco from certain sections of the clientele? No. I could feel it in other clubs, but as I had my crowd trained they accepted what I played. I learned that from the older DJs that I watched. If you had the crowd on your side they accept what you’re doing. Because you’re right, when the music changed, at one point, that was one of the few points I didn’t like and that’s why I went into new wave, you started to play more oldies because the new music is not as good or creative and you put more oldies in your programming to compensate for the bad music.
Telex – Moskow Disko
What new wave were you playing? It was English imports. I was playing ‘Pop Muzik’, Gen X, ‘Moskow Diskow’, ‘Jet Boy Jet Girl’. Plus they’re still hearing ‘I Got My Mind Made Up’ and ‘Disco Circus’.
Was it a regular crowd? There was a hardcore crowd. As a matter of fact, it was a mescaline crowd!
A mescaline crowd?! Yeah. They would have the sticks, they would have the tambourines, they would really give the crowd excitement. They were usually Cuban, from New Jersey and they weren’t supposed to be in the club because they were from New Jersey, but what they did was, they used to have a bag of clothes and they would change once they were in. Meaning they would dress like Xenon people on the outside.
So they’d come in in suits? And then change into shorts, outfits and take mescaline. You know the rest of the crowd was taking coke and coke don’t make you dance it makes you talk. Mescaline makes you dance!
So these kids knew each other? No, but they got to know each other week after week.
That must’ve felt quite subversive. It was the best.
Because even if the crowd’s a bit lacklustre you can turn them? I know! You turn them on and you turn the crowd on! I focused on them and the good thing about them was that their taste was as wide as mine. As a matter of fact, they turned me on to some new wave stuff that I wasn’t up on, like ‘Moskow Diskow’. At that time Americans wasn’t playing this music. The cokehead crowd, they like the commercial disco, but the regular dancers who were the ones who were always gonna be faithful if you please them. There was never this fear of making the crowd angry at you. Since the music was changing, at one point I was playing rock. That’s how bad disco music got. Really bizarre stuff, ‘Secret Agent Man’.
What was your relationship with Larry Levan and the Garage? You said you were offered a gig there… That was one of the few times Xenon hated it… Because I could decide when to close early and if something was happening at Garage I would close early. And they’d all know, too: Tony’s going to Garage! Bobby Shaw I took the first time and he was totally resistant. It had this connotation of being too black and too raunchy or whatever. And, of course, once you go you’re addicted.
Bobby said the first time you took him he didn’t like it. But he went back! He’s used to me mixing and Larry’s not that kind of technician, so I’m telling him you gotta forget about all these things you have in your head and go and listen to the music. Once you do that, Larry’s gonna be incredible to you. You just gotta let go of all this stuff you expect. Bobby was addicted to it! Then he got to know Larry and since he had the booth – which was the ideal booth for any DJ. It was as big as this… bar! It was two booths. One for us and one for him. We could look out and see the crowd. You’d be happy just hanging out in the booth, but sometimes you just had to go out in the crowd, because even though some records would sound good in the booth you gotta hear ’em on the dancefloor because of that system. There was never anything like that system. There will never be anything like that system. Records that would sound adequate in your club, they would sound tremendous in the Garage. So you have a whole new outlook on the record. You play it in your club and wonder why the reaction is lacklustre and then at the Garage they’re screaming and stomping to it. That’s not Larry, that’s the system and how Larry worked the system. David Mancuso’s system at the Loft was crisper and clearer but it’s not heart-rending.
What kind of records do you remember him playing? I remember what records he wouldn’t play! He wouldn’t play too much commercial. He’d play commercial, but once they came out he wouldn’t play them. So he always wanted to be exclusively first. The best thing we all liked about Larry was how many records we heard there that never came out.
Really? So many of us DJs were salivating, oh can’t wait till that comes out and then when they came out it was a totally different mix from the one Larry was playing.
Was this stuff he’d mixed himself? Sometimes. Sometimes it was just stuff people gave him.
Do you remember any examples? Well, I always wonder who has all this stuff.
François is supposed to have a bunch of things. Really? Well, how come when I went to Body & Soul I never heard any of it? I would notice! Most of the West End stuff, Peech Boys, ‘Is It All Over My Face’, what happened was that Larry would have like several drafts. Like Colonel Abrams records? We would hear versions you would not believe then when it came out it was so commercial sounding. Larry’s versions would sound so raw. There were records like ‘Stay Free’ by Ashford & Simpson and ‘Razzamatazz’, you’d hear them in there and they sounded like number one records. You play them in my club and they sounded tinny. You know they sounded cute and you liked the song… Another one is Labelle’s ‘What Can I Do For You’. You don’t know how many DJs tried to play that in a club and the crowd would just be like phht. But you go to the Garage and it’s a 20 year old record and they’re still singing it like it was number one. You say it’s Larry but it’s the system, too. But without Larry there is no system because when he had guest DJs there, he would take out certain things. There was also a Larry lookalike.
What?! Somebody who looked like Larry when he wasn’t there and there’d be a tape playing!
No?! Oh he fooled a lot of people. He would do it when he didn’t feel like spinning or he was pissed off at the crowd. I always wondered how he got this guy, because when you were on the dancefloor, he looked like him.
Surely they’d have rumbled him? Oh he would never get close up and he did look like Larry! Ask Bobby Shaw about this one. In the old days Larry used to live in the Garage, so he might have been sleeping or he might have been pissed off with the crowd which he did.
So Larry would come back later? Yeah. But you would know when he came back. He made sure that you felt it. The lookalike was definitely a fact. We definitely knew it existed. You could tell it was a tape in the Garage.
What did you do do after Xenon? It was a down point in my life. I went to Magique. Tee Scott used to call it Tragique! [laughter]. It was an East Side club which was already a no-no and an Upper East Side club… I got fired from Xenon for not playing ‘Happy Birthday’ for Bianca Jagger. It was the middle of the night and I just did not want to do it. She was a Studio person, I was like why are you sweating it, she’s not coming back anyway?! I was pissed but… if Bianca got me fired so what! The whole crowd didn’t know. Then they got a Tony lookalike! I swear to God! Everybody came and tell me, because they could tell it wasn’t me. It only lasted about another month and then it closed. Every club I went to closed after I left. After I left Xenon I had all these offers and I wanted to transform Magique, because Magique was a bridge-and-tunnel crowd, very John Travolta. I love a challenge so I thought if I can do Xenon then I can do this. It didn’t work. This crowd was so bad. If you didn’t play a radio song…. This was 1982 and new wave is the hottest thing, Thompson Twins, Ian Dury, everybody. They said they wanted to hear Xenon music, but Thompson Twins and Ian Dury weren’t on the radio. The only time I had a good time at Magique were the porn parties, with Ron Jeremy and a few of the porn stars used to give a party about once a month and there’s naked girls everywhere and I can play anything I want.
How long did you last? A year. I took a vacation for a month or two. I knew I was going to lose it., You never go away if you’re a DJ. From there I went to Limelight (which Tee used to call Slimelight). I hated that, too.
The original Limelight? Yeah. Then I went to the Palace which is Palluccio’s restaurant on 14th St. It only lasted a year but that was a lot of fun. New wave was hot, but I could play anything I want. What I didn’t know was that on 14th St they had it advertised as a disco and on 13th St. they had people coming in the club who thought it was a new wave place. Double whammy: Why you not playing disco? Why you not playing new wave? After that I went to Funhouse. I wasn’t really a rap fan, but I liked it, so I had to evolve my DJing style to accommodate this. Some of the music was creative, but there wasn’t eight hours of good rap music to play. I liked variety. Jellybean, you know, if a record was a hit he would play it four times a night. I didn’t like to do that. The one credit I give to Funhouse is discovering Set It Off, which nobody knows about.
Walter Gibbons’ mix of NYC club classic Strafe.
Which was the first version, Strafe? Yeah, because Walter mixed it. Walter brought it to Jellybean two or three times, but Jellybean wouldn’t play it. The whole sound then was the Roland drum and Arthur and Shannon and it’s totally the opposite of that. I was doin’ a guest spot and Walter didn’t know I was gonna be there or that I was tapin’ the night. I taped it when I played it. It cleared the floor. All of us in the booth goin’ crazy! This was at the time when even Loleatta was doin’ that drum sound and I hated that sound. He gave me two versions, a vocal and another one. Walter takes the record and he’s totally disappointed. A month later he comes back and they’re screamin’ to this record! They were callin’ it ‘On The Left’ because they still didn’t know the name of the song: “Tony, play the On The Left”. He didn’t know I’d taped the song! It was just so different for the time. So now Strafe wanted to do a PA at Funhouse but I didn’t know that Strafe had this thing against Walter. He didn’t like his mix. Even though Strafe’s mix was like puke. At this stage nobody’s playin’ it. Not radio, not Larry. Finally I’m telling Walter you gotta go take this to the radio and Larry. He was still skeptical because no one would give Walter the time of day. If I can get these 16 year old kids to like it, don’t worry about everyone else! Strafe came and did it and the crowd went ballistic. Then he tried to do a new song, I think it was ‘React’, and he got booed off stage. Kids are very reactionary like that. But then I got undercut again but a friend Randy. He’s not a friend any more. Then I went to an all-girls club. I had a new challenge. I’d played for all men, all black, all straight, all gay. Networks it was called. 84 or 85. Now I’m like this guy who’s a total threat to these women. If I could play for them and learn about what they like compared to men.
What do they like? They like a lotta meaningful words. Not just party down. They liked a lot of female vocals. What I find out, once I got to know them, they liked everything that everybody else liked. There were a few things I played there that I didn’t play anywhere else, like Pat Benatar and Stevie Nicks. That lasted two years. The last club I played in was the opening of the Palladium with Jellybean. And that was because Jellybean hadn’t DJed in ages but his name was still big so he got me to play with him. Even though I’d retired, he knew I still kept up with the music.
Frankfurt Airport, Frankfurt Am Main, Germany, 1978-2000
Before the Panorama Bar and Berghain and even long before the Front in Hamburg, there was the Dorian Gray in Frankfurt. Secreted in a terminal in Frankfurt Main Airport, the Gray opened during disco’s heyday, and ran through to 2000 when it finally closed. It was the crucible in which the German trance scene was defined and developed – plus, it was also the only location in Europe which had a Richard Long sound system. Sarah Gregory takes a soft landing to central Germany to find out more.
Think Dorian Gray, think Oscar Wilde’s immortal libertine. The ideal name then for a nightclub intended to be Germany’s answer to Studio 54. A club whose impact was so far-reaching that even today, the roots of Berlin’s Berghain can be traced all the way back to November 28, 1978, when The Gray opened its doors to the Hi-NRG beats of Sylvester’s disco anthem ‘(You Make Me Feel) Mighty Real’.
‘As a DJ, I got to know hundreds of clubs,’ says DJ Dag, techno specialist and Gray resident from 1988-1993. ‘But none were as cool as Dorian Gray.’ Located in Hall C, Terminal 1 of Frankfurt Airport (and in turn providing the template for the airport club), the Gray was the brainchild of Gerd Schuler and Michael Presinger, who decided to create their own centre of musical decadence in the middle of Europe – spending 2.5 million Deutschmarks in the process (about £3m. in today’s money.)
‘It was all built very simply,’ says Ralf Holl, dancer and Gray resident from 1980-83, as he talked to Frankfurter Rundschau about the magical effect of dancing in darkness, the long hallway, the neon lights – even the smell! With three floors catering to every dancer’s need (Runningman, Studio 54 and Chillout), The Gray absolutely followed up on its promise of emulating New York’s disco powerhouse. ‘My life was just one huge party back then,‘ says the club’s first resident DJ, Bijan Blum. ‘I was constantly meeting people and there was a lot of partying.’ VIP Playboy and Formula 1 parties were staged there, beauty pageants for a while; even camels and elephants were brought in – a step-up from Bianca and her white horse.
And the comparisons don’t stop there. With a very similar door policy, security had no hesitation in turning hopeful punters away – not that that put people off trying. The Gray became the in-place for the hoi polloi of Frankfurt… and Roger Moore. But it wasn’t just about the moneyed or the social set, the Gray appealed to everyone – attracting converts and the newly initiated. Holl, for one, had been highly sceptical when he first crossed the threshold – a Zappa acolyte and vehemently not a fan of disco. But within 15 mins he was sold. ‘When you were in it, it was a world of its own,’ he remembers. ‘You forgot where you were for hours.’ He saw it as a place where people could be whatever they wanted. ‘The first gays were seen at Gray,’ Holl remembers.
Spanning two decades of immense cultural change, the musical content shifted accordingly. The late ’70s was all about disco, funk and soul – in keeping with its Studio 54 template, while the mid-80s saw a move to electronic music – house and techno – and by 1992, ‘urban’ had even found its place. With Blum instilled as the Gray’s first resident (having been courted by the club’s founders while playing at Malesh in Dusseldorf), seven-day work schedules were de rigueur, as the German courted the crowd with the likes of Chic’s ‘Le Freak’, ‘Dancer’ by Gino Soccio and Instant Funk’s ‘I Got My Mind Up’ from 9pm to 8am. Blum did manage the occasional night or two off though, as other early DJ spots were also taken by Michael Munzing, German producer and co-creator of Europop combo Snap! and Ulli Brenner. Plus, guest DJs often made an appearance. When Blum went to Aschaffenburg’s disco palace Aladdin’s, Peter Römer came over from Hamburg’s Trinity to fill his spot.
And despite the sensibility of excess, excess, excess, the music was never sidelined. Imported records was where the hits were, and Gray DJs would travel to ensure that they had all the latest; the rest of Europe providing the source. ‘The DJs went to Amsterdam and bought imported records that you couldn’t get here,’ says Holl. ‘You have to keep a store like that at such a high level for so long.’ Blum agrees. ‘I went to Amsterdam and Paris and flew to London especially.’ But the dancers in those early disco days trusted the DJs – ready to embark on whatever musical journey lay ahead. Some have called the club avant-garde and DJ Dag confirms that the freedom that was part of the club’s appeal. ‘I experimented,’ remembers DJ Dag. ‘That was possible at the Gray.’ As recalled in Frankfurter Rundschau, he would turn all the lights out, and as the fog started billowing would drop The Doors’ ‘Riders on the Storm’; Dag wasn’t averse to throwing in the odd whale song either.
DJ Dag at the Dorian Gray, 1992
What made the club even more special was its sound system – built by none other than Richard Long; student of Alex Rosner (who had constructed the Loft’s sound system) and sonic innovator for the Paradise Garage. The system was built on a JBL and Gauss-Alnico base with Thorens turntables inevitably giving way to Technics over time. And given that the club opened at the height of disco, there was a light system to match. Red, green and orange lights were reflected in the mirrors that adorned the dancefloor; lasers had their place too even renowned producer Alexander Metzger was a VJ there.
By the mid-1980s, the sound and general aesthetic of the Gray began to change as the music gradually shifted from disco to techno playing host to some of the great German DJs: the sadly-missed Mark Spoon (one half of Jam & Spoon and veteran Love Parader), Torsten Fenslau (originator of Culture Beat and ‘Mr Vain’) and of course, Frankfurt techno DJ and producer Sven Väth alongside other big names including Oakenfold, Paul Van Dyk and Carl Cox. DJ Dag is even credited with triggering a worldwide passion for trance at the beginning of the 90s. ‘Something completely new emerged in Frankfurt,’ says DJ Dag. Gone were the sequins and glitter – this was a wholesale change.
Welcome To The Dorian Gray by Crazy Malamute.
Alas, however, as is often the case, technical problems brought the club to a close in 2000. A fire at Dusseldorf airport had ushered in stricter fire regulations which put paid to the Gray – it would have just been too expensive to renovate – so the owners cut their losses. But that’s not before going out with one last big bang on New Year’s Eve climaxing with the vocal brilliance of Minnie Riperton’s ‘Lovin You’. The owners tried opening a new venue in Berlin in 2003, but it barely lasted a year, although a sister venue does live on in Stuttgart.
The Gray closing party in 2000.
At its peak, the Dorian Gray was packed out with over 2,500 dancers – at the forefront of the German dancefloor scene and an inspiration for clubs and DJs worldwide – a dedicated fanzine called Frontpage even sprang up. Sadly, largely forgotten in the minds of partygoers, without The Gray things may have been very different.
It’s hard to believe Danny Krivit has been DJing for five decades. He was around for the early flowerings of disco in the early ’70s. So what’s the secret to his youthful appearance? Well, Danny started DJing at the age of nine! His mum was a white vocalist on the black New Jersey club circuit; his dad, a jazz musician who managed Chet Baker. By his teens Danny was programming music on reel-to-reel for his father’s Greenwich Village club, The Ninth Circle, which was the start of him playing many of the landmark clubs of the disco era. He was resident at The Roxy, the massive west-side rollerskating venue, for four years from 1979, as it became the wild epicentre of hip hop (Quick to embrace a few scratching techniques, they called him Danny Rock). Danny was particularly close to Larry Levan and the family of DJs and music-lovers that coalesced at The Paradise Garage, and would often skate over to King Street after the Roxy and hang there, playing records. In 1996 he teamed up with Joe Clausell and another old friend, François Kevorkian, to create Body & Soul, a club that kept the flame alive for the Garage heads. More recently, his own 718 sessions have given him a residency that still delivers some of the best nights in New York. Through it all, as Mr K, he’s a creator of legendary edits, creating cuts of songs that have become the classic version. Check his great website where he posts new ones all the time.
Interviewed in New York, 06 10 98, by Bill
Where were you born, where did you grow up? I was born in 1957 in New Jersey, we moved to Manhattan when I was four or five. Pretty much stayed in the Village my whole life. In fact, until I moved over here (E14 Street) I’d only moved about four blocks in thirty years. My step-father owned a place called the Ninth Circle, which he started in ’62. In the Sixties, it was one of the main Village spots. When I was growing up I was really around there a lot. There were a lot of rock’n’roll people there, music people. When I was seven I was already doing brunches and working as a waiter, and I served Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, John Lennon. In the Village it just wasn’t that odd, I suppose. And they had a very happening jukebox. So without even knowing it, before I was even into music, I was around it. My mother was a jazz singer, my father was into jazz, an older sister into pop.
Did your mother perform? She performed on the black circuit in New Jersey. I remember we went to Puerto Rico when I was a kid and Dionne Warwick was really happening then. She had seen her there and she said lemme introduce you to her because my mom had worked with her. And Dionne Warwick remembered her because she was a white girl doing this thing and she just stuck out. But she never really made it.
The Ninth Circle was kind of dying out by about 1970 or so and a friend of his owned the Stonewall and when that closed he said to my father I know you’ve had this great thing for years but you know the Village has really turned gay. If you just turn your place gay, all your troubles will be over and you’ll be a success overnight. And literally that’s what he did. The Ninth Circle went gay about 1971. He turned the restaurant downstairs into a disco and I started programming [reel-to-reel] tapes for him. He also got tapes from clubs like Le Jardin, Le Hippopotamus, happening places. I got in the door like that. Then he opened up a place called Ones. If you’re down near Vinyl on Hudson, there’s a Korean fruit store down there. That’s the location of Ones. I started working in 1974. It opened in ’75.
A proper nightclub? Well, back then… It had food, it had dancing. But Ninth Circle was definitely a disco downstairs. Although there were no turntables ever there (at Ninth Circle). At Ones it started out the same thing with tapes but then it progressed to a DJ booth with decks. We didn’t have a Bozak, we had something cheaper. Probably AST, they’d just started outfitting everyone downtown.
I remember even the tapes I was making were segued. Basically, when he played these other tapes from the clubs, they were segued. I was like I can’t do the radio mix thing. I didn’t understand at first but I was going around checking things out. At that time, I was probably a little more into drugs than the music, so I’d be going to clubs to get drugs and things and I’d be standing outside waiting for somebody and I’d be hearing… They had a Limelight on Sheridan Square, and David Rodriguez used to play there. I didn’t know him at the time, but I’d be standing outside waiting for someone. And the music I’d be hearing was not the regular stuff. He’d play some really rough old stuff. But he was mixing, I was really paying attention to that. I knew what was expected of me.
Were you actually going into any of the clubs? Back then I wasn’t really going into the Limelight. I was looking old for my age, so I could get in, but I was a little more into concerts than clubs. Especially the Fillmore East. As far as clubs go: I went to the Hippopotamus, Le Jardin, the Dom: below the Electric Circus. I ended up buying their speakers when they closed. They had these beautiful Altec Lansing cabinets; really nice wooden cabinets. I nearly killed my mother with these speakers. I showed no mercy. I remember when ‘Doctor Love’ [by First Choice] came out and I played it to death. A few weeks later, I met my neighbours in the elevator and they said, ‘You know, we never really say anything. You play music loud, but we like music. But this song: ‘Doctor Love’. We can’t get it out of our heads. You’re really doing a number on us with this song.’ I said, ‘I’m sorry.’ Six months later, my music’s off and I’m hearing ‘Doctor Love’ It burned into their heads so much they had to buy it. I remember going to the Loft.
What are your memories of the Loft? Well, I never went to his first one, I went to 99 Prince Street. I just remember it was unique. Before that, my idea of a club was more dressy, the Saturday night out feeling. The Loft was the opposite of that: it was a professional house party. These were eccentric club people who were really into dancing. They knew music, not just the top ten hit parade, but they knew music they never heard before. That impressed me. The type of music that was being played it just had a lot more substance to it. At first, I remember congregating with a few people. There would be a regular crowd that I’d meet with: François was one of them, Steve D’Acquisto, this girl Freddie Taylor from Pearl Distributors. And we’d just be hanging out critiquing the music; bringing David some new records. David was very friendly with me and when he had the record pool, I tried to get in it when I was DJing at Ones. It had just opened and I wasn’t actually spinning there. So he said, ‘I can’t really do anything for you there.’ But he hooked me up with some of the record companies. By the time I was ready to come back to him, he was shutting his doors and I was one of the first members of For The Record [Judy Weinstein’s record pool].
What records do you readily associate with the Loft? I remember things like ‘City Country City’ [by War]. If I heard it somewhere else it was not a big record. Here it was a record that people went crazy to from the beginning to the end. When the disco stuff started to come in heavy, he had like USA European Connection. It was extremely different. Especially as David had it on reel-to-reel, it sounded better than when it came out on vinyl. I remember in general hearing the depth of the production in stereo. It was that true feeling of, ‘I’m not on drugs, but I feel like I’m tripping on music. The music is really taking me somewhere.’ These people are just dancing. All night. Seriously.
How did the Gallery differ? It struck me as quite a bit more gay. Definitely less about the hi-fidelity sound, more pumping. More mixing. More to do with the lights.
And Nicky Siano as a DJ? Certainly more about drama. He would be like: I’m in the DJ booth. This couldn’t be a tape. This couldn’t be a just a record you like. I’m playing this record. He had a presence. He also was very much about drugs himself, there was a whole thing about him, especially towards the end; high, but not too high, to play the music. But there’d always be a point where it seemed like he’d collapse in a very dramatic manner: fall on the turntables and stop the music. Everyone knew what was going on, and they’d be patient and know that somehow, somebody would help him get it together and an even better record would come on. And usually it did. Certainly, both David and him, this was very different to the other clubs I’d been to. Very vibey. He’s picking a record that’s not just a hit record, but he’s picking a record that’s timely for these particular people; and he’s also talking a message, certainly creating a vibe. There’s a story being woven. With Nicky it was a vocal story. With David it was a mood story. David in general was always about love and he’d always try to stay with that. But there were a lot of instrumentals; more percussive, Latinesque things.
How did your DJing progress from there? After Ones I opened up an after-hours with this ex-boxer. And I started working at Trudi Heller’s. It was along the lines of Copacabana, Régines. 25-30-year-olds’ club. Kind of a clip joint. But it was on Sixth Avenue right by 9th Street. All my life I’d lived on 12th Street and Sixth Avenue, even though I passed by, I never went in it. They had a Richard Long mixer. A decent set-up. It was a funky little club. Straight mainly black. Trudi Heller took it over and it went wrong. Even then I was making a bit of a mark; getting my charts out there. Then I got a job as the opening DJ at Roxy. And I played at a place called Lacey’s in Long Island from 1981 to 1991. I managed to turn some little nights into big nights. That’s how I got the job at Lacey’s. There was something about having the booth elevated and right in the middle, like they had at Lacey’s. There was something infectious about having all the people surrounding you in a circle and you in the middle. It’s not like being on the edge of the floor. The energy is focused at you. It was a rush.
And how did you get to know the Paradise Garage crew? I was friendly with Larry Levan through the Loft. Mel Cheren [Garage co-owner] had told me he was going to open this club; and he described what he wanted. I went there; but it hadn’t really started yet. The main room was just an off-room but it was very pumping and Larry was kicking. It expanded very quickly. I was very close with Larry and I’d come there in the daytime, because he also lived there.
What, he actually lived in the club? Yeah, before [the other Garage co-owner] Michael Brody couldn’t deal with him any longer and bought him an apartment. He used to pay for his apartment just to keep him out of there because he was causing too many problems.
(L-R) Danny with David DePino, Judy Weinstein, Larry Levan, Jeffrey Osbourne, John Brown
Was this around the time of the construction parties? Well, he was living there during the construction parties. Basically, you go up a ramp and the first room you come into was a kinda small room that they used as the disco. What ended up being the main room, right next to that, they used as a lounge. The construction parties were this: just a killer sound system and nothing much else. But then there was another room after that which was a pretty good size and these were the offices and Larry’s apartment. Soon after, that began to be an extra room and he got Larry out of there; gave him an apartment.
But while he was living there, I used to come down in the daytime and roller-skate and play him some records from the pool. And he used to come to Roxy and skate. He told me he used to be a skate guard at Empire Roller-rink. But he was a little crazy. I remember playing ‘Girl You Need A Change Of Mind’ [Eddie Kendricks] once and he got so excited, got up, then I couldn’t see him skating. Next time I saw him his arm was in a sling. He didn’t skate much after that. He knew he couldn’t control himself. I would hang out with him a lot. I’m a passive person and he would, you know, want me in the studio with him when he was mixing. I was in the studio with him when he did ‘Bad For Me’ [Dee Dee Bridgewater], ‘Give Your Body Up To The Music’ [Billy Nichols], ‘Work That Body’ [Taana Gardner], a few others. So he wanted me to get a handle on this and get involved. His sessions were so stretched out that I was just hanging, not learning.
In what way? He was a record company’s nightmare. Basically, he’d show up really late and while he was there it was about socialising and drugs. And eventually he would get to the mix, but he would be distracted very easily. And the mix, instead of taking a day or whatever, it would go on for weeks. This budget would be a $27,000 budget, stretched to that. I remember the Gwen Guthrie project wasn’t really even supposed to happen. He was supposed to mix a song and he ended up doing all these mixes.
Did her Padlock EP… Well, basically, he did ‘Should’ve Been You’. That’s what he was supposed to do. He did this whole thing. I think he was in there so long that he was actually working on this stuff. It was probably one of the more productive sessions he had. But when he showed it to them, they were so pissed off at the price and how long ‘Should’ve Been You’ took that they just shelved it. For a year or two he was just playing it at the Garage and kicking it.
Had he finished the other Guthrie mixes? And was he playing them? He’d finished them but they were rough. He was playing them and unlike a lot of other things where he mixed it seven or eight times, he did these and they worked out good rough. He kept them like that. Lots of his things, like ‘Work That Body’, the one that came out was his seventh mix. He mixed it over and over again and fine-tuned it.
What was he changing? Really a lot of things. He’d say: ‘This is sloppy’, ‘I don’t like the sound of this bass’, ‘I played it in the club and we need to compress it a little more.’
So he’d be floor-testing at the club? Sometimes that, other times just in the studio non-stop over-producing. So I would be invited in on some of this stuff. Some of it I was getting a little feel for it, but for the most part it was so stretched out I didn’t have patience. In general, he wanted me to get involved but the thing was I was DJing for a living. Working at Roxy and other places. I always had a weekend job. When it came to the Garage, I always came there after work and after a few years there, there were times when he couldn’t be there because of the studio and he’d have to have somebody fill in a little bit. ‘Danny if you could be here a little more often, get this feeling, I could stick you in here a little bit.’ I wanted that. But I couldn’t hang out non-stop. So I’d come at my usual time.
A couple of times he was like, ‘Why don’t you put on couple of records and we’ll have a dance’. Another time there was a pool party for For The Record and I played, Jellybean, Jonathan Fearing, Larry ended the night. I remember I was the last one before Larry. The club was just packing as I played. So I had a really good set and it was the first time I played ‘I Want To Thank You’ [by Alicia Myers]. And I kept telling Larry about this song. He came over to me and said, ‘What’s this you’re playing?’. I said it’s that song I been telling you about. He started playing it after that. Sure enough, Frankie Crocker heard Larry play it. It had already been a big hit on the roller skating for a while.
Anyway, I had a really good set, but I was a little in awe of the sound system: I didn’t want to fuck with the sound system too much. He was working the system while I was doing my mixes; really tweaking it and beefing it up. When I came on he had a switch underneath that he flicked which basically took the limiter off and he said: ‘Only for you’. So I felt really privileged. He really supported me. I was working a lot, so when push comes to shove, he really needed somebody and David DePino was close with him, right there and out of work. He was opening for Larry a lot, a few other people too. Victor Rosado, Joey Llanos.
Danny has an entire apartment where his records live.
How did you first meet Larry? I came to the Loft to see David. But David was knocked out. His DJ booth was kind of on the second floor looking down; he had a bed right next to it. So I came up and thought Mmm, this is isn’t David, David has long hair and he’s white. Larry wasn’t rude, but he wasn’t especially friendly the first time. He was just, you know. Next time I had a few records – I don’t think he played them or whatever – I think he liked the idea that I didn’t just bring them for David. Then I would run into Larry at the record pool.
What was he like as a person? He was bit eccentric. He was really like a little kid. Very energetic. When Star Wars came out he was like, ‘Oh, we’ve gotta go see the opening. This whole thing about lights; anything special and big like that, he loved. Big bright things. Disneyland. Even Studio 54, as a club. He liked that sort of thing.
Did he go to Studio 54? Oh yeah, I think he played there a couple of times. Richie Kaczor was a sweetheart and we all knew him from Hollywood. And Hollywood wasn’t as commercial; it was a little more edgy and more underground. So he had a lot of respect from all the underground DJs. When he did Studio 54, instead of thinking of him as, ‘Oh, you’re just playing that commercial stuff,’ we thought of him as someone who does his own thing, but is playing the commercial stuff at Studio. Also, the whole time I knew Richie he was so down to earth. There were so many egos going on then. Even the guys that were nice would still be a little like that. But Richie was never that way. Larry was very friendly with Richie and used to go there and Richie would come to the Garage. The Garage had a very social DJ booth. It was huge. Like another club in itself. There was a real scene going on there. And for a long time, I’d find myself in the booth, that was a club experience. You were right above the dancefloor and you’d get the whole feeling of the crowd. The light show, everything.
What kind of drugs were people doing at the Garage? Well, I was kind of out of my drugs stage by then. I was just a pot-head. I would notice a lot of coke, some heroin, tripping. More of the kids would be into tripping, but there’d be dust, too. It seemed like because I wasn’t into it, I didn’t latch on to it so much. There was a lot of drugs there.
Do you think that Larry’s drug taking eventually had a detrimental effect on his music? I look at this way. He was definitely into drugs, but as opposed to the drugs having a handle on him, it definitely seemed like it wasn’t running his life. Towards the end, say the last year or two, it was probably clear to him, it had been said in so many words, that’s it, the Garage is closing this time, and even then, everyone else was very hopeful that there’d be another spot. You have this party and the party’s going to go somewhere and when it does, you’re going to be it, so don’t even worry about it.
But I think at that point the drugs seemed to be more obvious. He was there less. When he came in, it would be less about putting the record on, there would be a long rainstorm first. Rain effects. He would still turn it out. But he was there less. A lot less mixing, just about playing the right record and working the sound. Adjustments, like he was in a studio. Not just feeling it, but going out on the floor and checking it. Some nights he would keep the club from opening an hour or two because he wanted to rewire the whole system. He’d always have things for Michael Brody, the owner to buy, new toys. He really had put a lot into it. Towards the end there, David was playing the most, especially the last year. A lot of people who went to the Garage really just went that year [1987]. And when they remember the Garage, it was really the staples of songs that made up ‘Garage Music’.
How would you describe that? My feeling going the whole way through was that Garage music was kind of breaking the rules. It was what he felt like playing. He’d turn you on to something. It was really about having no boundaries. A lot of rules were broken there. When [Taana Gardner’s] ‘Heartbeat’ came out there wasn’t hip hop on the radio like there is today. There wasn’t any downtempo music like ‘Heartbeat’. And when he put that record, a full club of people left the room to get food. There was not one person left on the floor. He played the record from beginning to end and they stayed off from beginning to end. And you’d hear people talking, ‘What the hell is this? It’s painful.’ Sure enough, next week he played it and a few people stayed on the floor. The week after, the floor’s not happening, but there’s a decent amount of people there. The week after that, now there are actually people running to the floor when they hear it. By the end of the month, there was no-one left off the floor when they played that record.
And now, of course, they had to go to Vinylmania and bug Charlie for that record. He would break rules. He would play things and you thought, ‘Oooh, this is a commercial record.’ Pat Benatar ‘Love Is A Battlefield’ Someone said he could never play that there. That was reason enough for him to play it; and make it happen, too. Those things stuck out a lot more than the so called staples that you associate with Garage music.
That’s Garage music, sure, but it’s the other things that make more of an impression on you. He would take a chance. He would play ‘Why D’Ya Do It’ by Marianne Faithfull. When he played that, it was a violent record; it got a violent response. He had this thing with the lights where he had an elaborate light system and Robert Da Silva was his light man and he was a great light man. Larry had this clear arrangement with Robert – because he had been a light man too – he had a mini light board on a track with a handle and he would just pull it over in front of him. And without saying anything, he would just start working this song, or part of a song. Robert would just accept that. I remember when he did things like Marianne Faithfull. It was like: I’m doing this and you can tell Larry’s doing the lights: very extreme, very violently emotional. He made you remember that song. He would do that with a lot of the music. That was the thing I remember about the Garage.
The difference between this and the other places, is that he’s controlling the entire environment. At the end, it was far less about him. David [DePino]was told to play not the newest records, but the staples. That’s how the club was then. And Larry was more into drugs, and even if he played well, you related a little less to him personally.
After the club closed, there was a period when I didn’t really see him. Then I started seeing him at the World a little bit, and Trax, behind the Roxy. Basically, Trax was David DePino’s club and it was a huge success but it was basically built on what Larry had started at the Garage. At that point, he didn’t have another situation where he could control the entire vibe. As a DJ he would come in and do his thing but he couldn’t hit that mark like before. He was an excellent DJ, so he could still play well, and mix it up, bring in a few boxes to beef up the system, play a better selection of music. But it didn’t have what people were getting at the Garage. The system wasn’t there, it wasn’t his people, and you would notice more that drugs had a little more of handle on him. Not that he was more high, just that he was more affected. When I had Ninth Circle, my father had passed away, and I ran into him. Larry would come by to me and I had so much respect for him as a mentor, he’d hit me up for a bit of money. I knew what he was going through. And I wanted him to get out of it in a way, but I couldn’t say no to him. It was a real struggle. More than that, it was because of this: how could I deny him? He was such a major part of what I am and what I’m doing.
Is it true that he kept selling his records to pay for drugs towards the end? That probably has some truth in it. I knew I would find big chunks of it – in a flea market once. He had his records stored all over and, because he wasn’t playing that much and he was into drugs, the people keeping his records weren’t taking them seriously and they’d just get rid of some of them. I remember finding a bunch of things, this particular record, I found an acetate of ‘Can’t Shake Your Love’ by Syreeta. It was a remix that only he had. It was scratched up and didn’t play well. When I saw that, I thought this other stuff must be Larry’s collection. I had a done a lot of edits for bootlegs. I saw Larry after that, and I mentioned this and said, well, it’s not like they’ve got your name on it, but there’s this acetae of ‘Can’t Shake Your Love’. He was like, ‘I need that.’ I said it’s unplayable, but I’ve done these edits of it and you can have that.
How did you get into editing? My first mix was ‘Chill Pill’ on Sleeping Bag. The first record on Sleeping Bag. [credited to The Sounds of JS126 Brooklyn]. It was a rock thing. Will Socolov I’d grown up with. We did this, and during the session, I knew what I wanted but the engineer… kept saying, ‘Oh we’ll fix that in the editing’. And towards the end he started to do an edit, but he couldn’t do it. I had a reel-to-reel at home, but I’d never done any editing. I was getting frustrated with this guy, literally half the session was this guy trying to do this edit. We salvaged it. I walked out of there thinking I know how to edit, just from seeing what he did wrong. Same thing happened next time: ‘Oh, we’ll fix it in the editing.’ A DJ friend of mine Jonathan Fearing, was into editing, working at WBLS, I was telling him about it and he finally just gave me a quick pep talk and said it’s really just about the ear. I went home and I edited ‘Funky Drummer’ and it ended up being ‘Feeling James’. I gave it to this guy who bootlegged it.
What, the thing on Tommy Boy by Fresh Gordon? No, it was a bootleg. That may have sampled it. Anyway, there was this guy Tim Rogers at Polygram, he was hanging around the Garage, instead of being a big record exec, he was actually into all this editing and bootlegs and stuff. He found out that it was me and he said, ‘I’m working on all this stuff and I want to put out “Funky Drummer”. Do you wanna do a mix?’ Whenever I’d do an edit, it would turn into a legitimate job. Like I did one of ‘Touch And Go’ [by Ecstasy Passion & Pain] and [future Maxi label founder] Claudia Cuseta was working at Sunnyview at the time, gave me a job to remix the song. The second edit was ‘Rock The House’, which wound up becoming ‘Put The Needle On The Record’. I knew Arthur Baker. I’m just a DJ and I’m doing something that just ends up being a bootleg, so I can’t call anyone a thief. But basically, he took my edit ‘Rock The House’ and he had Gail King play it over this drum beat. That’s all it was. When I saw him in a club, I came over to him and said: ‘Oh is that your record?’. He says, ‘Yeah’. ‘I did ‘Rock The House’. He got so defensive. ‘You did “Rock The House”? You’re a thief anyway, who you calling a thief?’ I said, ‘I’m not calling anyone a thief, I’m just letting you know that I did “Rock The House”’. After that I got a few jobs with him.
Danny with his great friend and Body & Soul collaborator, François Kevorkian
You did the MFSB bootleg of ‘Love is the Message’ as well didn’t you? Well there are two and they both sample Gil Scot-Heron. I did the white one that has ‘My First Mistake’ on the other side. It’s on T.D. Records. It’s just basically ‘Love Is The Message’ and ‘Love Break’ put together. The other guy that did the other one, this guy who worked at Vinylmania. Speak to Charlie about him. I’ve done a lot edits for that guy, though. By then those were the two main ones. Mine was after the other one, but they were close: early Eighties.
When David Mancuso was playing MFSB was he playing the ordinary version? Right from the beginning he was probably playing the quad mix on the album. The original album also came in quad. I collect quad and usually since quad wasn’t a bit hit, they had to make things a little different so that even if you played it on your regular stereo you knew it sounded different. Sometimes it was a different version of the song. ‘Rocksteady’ Aretha Franklin, instead of ending at the fade out, it goes on for another two minutes and slows down to a complete stop. It’s got a completely different horn part in it. Apparently in ‘Love Is The Message’ there were a lot of loose keyboard parts that they edited out of the final mix because it was sloppy. In the quad mix, they put them in to make it sound different. Played that till the Tom Moulton Philly Classics mix came out, then played that.
When Tom Moulton remixed it without the frilly bit at the front? The original and the Tom Moulton mix both had that on it. But the original didn’t go on much and Tom’s kept going.
Has your version of MFSB ever come out legitimately? No. But MFSB is probably the quintessential bootleg mix.
[Danny was kind enough to let us release his 11-minute mix for the first time on the original compilation for Last Night a DJ Saved my Life (Nuphonic)]
Which other edits have you done? I stuck to things that were either long gone or impossible to find. As far as other ones: ‘Just Us’ by Two Tons of Fun, ‘Sugar Pie Guy’ [Joneses], ‘Bra’ [Cymande], ‘You Got Me Running’ Lenny Williams, ‘Let’s Start The Dance’ [Bohannon], I had a version that never came out, I just kept going with the guitar.
Is that ‘Let’s Start The Dance III’? I think it was II. The one with the rapper over it. I did a version without the rapper on. ‘My First Mistake’. I was really proud of that.
I assume that you were doing them to make them better for DJs to play? Yeah. I’d do something that I knew Larry was into, like ‘Family Tree’ (by Family Tree). I have the original here, it’s one of the most rare records. It’s one of the first 12-inches. Something Larry played and it was such a rare record that even if you owned it you didn’t want to play it in case you scratched it up. When I brought him that he was happy. Also it was a really good edit.
What do you think was the first 12-inch? It was ‘Dance Dance Dance’ by Calhoun. Definitely. Warner Spector. It was a terrible record. It was a bad way to try and get into the market. I remember immediately after that, the second 12-inch I got, because at the Ninth Circle, I was getting a lot of stuff in the mail. And at that time I was getting a lot of 7-inch 33s, before the 12-inches. Seven minute version on a 7-inch. All of a sudden I started getting these 12-inches in the mail. And I started hearing that this was the new thing. The next song was Floyd Smith on Salsoul, very Barry White sounding, but it wasn’t a big hit. This was a better example of something sounding good. Then there were a few 12-inches. Motown, 20th Century.
Tom Moulton says he did one that he thinks is the first? Al Downing‘Dreamworld’? If he did that and that was the first 12-inch, then I’ve never even saw that to this day. The thing about Tom Moulton is, for instance ‘Free Man’, he made a couple of 12-inches himself. Because the record label weren’t going to. I’ve a feeling that if he did a 12-inch of Al Downing, it could’ve been something that just 20 copies were made. If it was the first, it was kind of unheard of. These things were promos, but you’re still talking about 100 copies at least. They got around the US. I’m an avid record collector and I’ve never seen Al Downing. Atlantic’s first one was ‘Mellow Blow’ by Barrabas. People weren’t impressed to start because they really weren’t putting the best stuff on them. Everyone was, ‘Well, there are a lot of hits out there, why are putting these songs on there?’
It was a marketing ploy, basically? Definitely. This was the age of promotion and this was how to promote these records. Soon after it was almost like 12-inches were going to be laughed at, so they started putting some good songs on there. ‘Ten Percent’ etc.
When The Garage closed and Junior Vasquez started Bassline, what was the reaction to him. Was he seen as a Larry copyist? Definitely that, but kind of like the way I was describing David DePino at the Garage. Junior was taking it a step further. He had nothing to do with the Garage and yet he was just playing this hit parade. When Junior was playing some great music, but it was rehashed in a time when people really weren’t rehashing music. It was not about retro then. When you heard retro then, it was like what’s wrong with this picture. It was only because the Garage had closed and people were still hanging on to that that it seemed okay. They were good songs and he was mixing. I thought it was fad, and it would fade away, but it kept getting bigger. But then it slowly changed. He was always friendly with me, but he was out of the loop; I crossed a lot of circles and he wasn’t in any of them.
Do you think they turned playing records into a performance? Totally. And also broke ground. They didn’t take the new hot record and break it when it would have been a hit anyway. They broke a record that would not have been otherwise. They educated people.
Can you think of any examples? With David [Mancuso] there was such a long line of them. Things like ‘City Country City’ [by War], or ‘Woman’ [by Barrabas]. Those were Loft records. Without the Loft, they were just records. People would scream when they heard a record for the first time, not the tenth. One of the legacies they left is that fever for hunting down records. These are records that were rare the moment they came out. There was a DJ, Tony Smith, from Barefoot Boy, there was a record store on 8th Street, Daytons. I met him because we’d always be looking for those kind of records. A lot of jazz-funk. They’d play something, and if I liked it, it always seemed that Tony would want it too. It was underground even then. Forget about now, back then some of these records were hard to track down too.
What do you think the legacy of these DJs is? There’s a lot of marks that they made that might go unnoticed. Certainly, I think that Mancuso is one of the main ones. The thing that David expressed, and came out in Larry and Nicky, was playing a positive vibe in the club. When I went to other places I was always amazed at how negative the vibe was. Weaving a message, rather than wandering all over. David made people realise the DJ was important. Before that most people thought a band or DJ: what’s the difference?
He burned bright and left us at the age of 38. If he’d stuck around, on 20 July 2024 Larry Levan would be celebrating his 70th birthday. In the history of DJing, he epitomised the young craft’s possibilities and inspired a generation. As the DJ became a force for record promotion, as the DJ entered the recording studio to become producer and remixer, and as the DJ learnt how to generate shared moods of grand intensity, the biggest most influential DJ making those moves was Larry Levan. To celebrate his life, and to remind anyone who calls themselves a DJ what the job is really all about, we’ve polished up these epic sleevenotes from our 2000 Nuphonic compilation, Larry Levan Live at the Paradise Garage. Read to the end and there’s a visual treat – star-studded photos from Larry’s 1984 birthday.
by Frank Broughton and Bill Brewster
Putting a roomful of people in the moment. Amazing them, surprising them, challenging, even confusing them; pushing, electrifying, loving them; carrying them with you towards a better place. Shaking the dull daylight out of their bones, waking them into their other life.
Few people know what great DJing is really about. Today’s global club culture, with its lightshows and rootless brand-name jocks, has bred dancers with a painfully short attention span. Our dancefloors might throw their hands in the air for a clever technical mix, a swift key change or a bombastic snare roll, but they’re largely immune to anything that takes a bit longer to achieve – like pacing, building, teasing, exploring. Sadly, these days most of us just want to pay our money and get an immediate dance fix. We’re happy to be switched on by manipulative drug-pop and thrashed around at fever pitch all night. It’s rare today to find a DJ brave enough to take a crowd down as well as up. Or to reflect emotions more complex than mad-for-it ecstasy, or to play music outside the narrow focus of their niche. Or to throw a risky curveball or two and ‘cleanse’ the dancefloor for a fresh start. When you find a DJ willing to do more than stitch together a bunch of surefire floorfillers, shake their hand.
Larry Levan played records back when a DJ had to sweat for a living. When he started in 1971, a DJ’s set was built from 7-inch singles and uptempo album tracks. The album tracks had to be painstakingly unearthed and the singles had to be changed every three minutes. There were just a handful of records released each week and almost all of them were aimed at radio or home listening. There were no ten-minute dubs, no extended remixes, no minimal beat tracks, no easy-to-mix intros. Records were all made with live drummers, with often wildly wavering tempos, and record decks were mostly fixed-speed monsters taken from the world of radio.
DJing as we know it evolved from all these unimaginable restrictions. In New York a small band of explorers worked themselves to the bone to dig up danceable music from whatever sources they could find, and distorted, extended and manipulated it until it met the energetic demands of their dancers. In doing this they forged the DJ’s craft, pioneering almost everything that DJs do today. In clubs like Arthur, Sanctuary, Salvation, The Loft and The Gallery, DJs Terry Noel, Francis Grasso, David Mancuso, Nicky Siano, Michael Cappello and Steve D’Acquisto built a whole new world, the world of dance music we’ve inherited.
Eventually we’d call their scene ‘disco’ and we’d think of its music as a single genre. But originally it was far from a homogenous, definable form. It was an amalgam of anything people would dance to: rock, Latin,soul, funk,rhythm and blues. It was simply music you heard in a discothèque, which back then was probably just a black loft, hot with bodies.
This was a small, close-knit world and despite the basic decor of the first disco clubs, something else invariably filled the room: the dancers’ togetherness, their sense of redemption, their feelings of escape from a racist and homophobic reality. ‘More than anything, disco was driven by an underground idea of unity,’ says Vince Aletti, the first journalist to write about disco. ‘The manifesto was the music. Love Is The Message.’
Larry Levan was an early child of this scene. He danced in its clubs, he learnt from its originators, and he joined a growing band of DJs who were filling New York with thrilling, loving music. And later, in his own club, The Paradise Garage, as disco was declared dead he took it underground, nurtured and developed it and allowed it to take its first steps as something new.
HEAVEN IN A PARKING GARAGE
‘You have to un-learn everything you’ve ever experienced about clubs to understand The Paradise Garage,’ insists DJ and pioneer dance producer François Kevorkian, explaining what made this particular nightclub such a mythic inspiration for so many of the world’s greatest DJs, producers, clubs and dance labels.
The Garage was where, a decade or so after taking its first steps, black, spiritual underground disco reached its peak. It was quite simply the largest and most powerful expression of the original disco spirit. As disco became mainstream and occasionally moronic, it was at the Garage that the underground sound and the scene’s strong sense of community were preserved. Outside, insurance men in brown suits were knocking their knees to Abba, dreaming of the coke-and-celebrity-fuelled nonsense of Studio 54. Inside the Garage, the original disco family were continuing and amplifiying their tribal rituals. And at the centre was Levan himself, a DJ who enjoyed such a passionate relationship with the people on his dancefloor that they worshipped him more or less as a god.
Closing party, 26 Sep 1987
‘This is the Paradise Garage in a nutshell,’ says New York DJ Johnny Dynell. ‘One night, Chi Chi, my wife, was bartending at the Garage. And, having worked at Danceteria doing the same, she couldn’t believe it when she saw these boys making everything so clean. They would take the garbage out and then wash and scrub the garbage can, then dry it, and put a new garbage bag in. She was in awe at the love these kids showed that garbage can. Because to these kids, it’s the temple. It’s sacred. This isn’t just a garbage can, this is a garbage can atthe Garage. It’s very Old Testament. And for everyone there, it really was the temple. It was sacred ground.’
The Paradise Garage inspired an unparalleled reverence. It dominated gay New York’s dance vista for more than ten years, with only the Saint – which catered for a very different crowd – as a serious rival. For its members the Garage was a sanctuary from an increasingly cruel and voracious city, a role made poignantly necessary as AIDS cut through New York. Dance there and you were treated as an honoured guest, with a level of courtesy and respect that is virtually unheard of in clubs today. ‘You felt special,’ says Danny Tenaglia, one of many DJs inspired by early visits to the Garage. ‘You felt like you were an elite group, with people who were on the same level of understanding about music as you.’ In a drab district in south west Manhattan, it created a private world based on disco’s original ethos of loving equality. In stark contrast to the harsh city lights outside, the Garage offered freedom, compassion and brotherhood.
Dave Piccioni, owner of London’s Black Market records, then living and DJing in New York, was a regular at the Garage in the late eighties. ‘It was New York cut-throat money time,’ he remembers. ‘Everybody was sticking knives in each other’s backs. It was dog eat dog. Aggressive. Dealing, 60,000 people living on the street. It was a dog of a place to live in. And then you’d go to this little oasis, where people were really well-mannered and friendly to each other. You just felt completely comfortable. People of a like mind who shared something, and that was an open mind. America is a very narrow-minded place. The thing they had in common wasn’t just getting high, like it is here – it was much more than that. That was what was so great about it.’
Flyer for Larry Levan’s Birthday Bash by his friend Keith Haring
PREPARE FOR TAKE-OFF
You entered the Garage along a long darkened runway lit by tiny flickering egg-strobes. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever looked forward to going up a ramp as much’, smiles DJ Joe Claussell, who today runs Body & Soul, the New York club founded on reclaiming the atmosphere of the Garage. ‘At the top was The Garage logo in neon. It was like going to church. Once you got up that ramp and paid your money, you were in heaven. Paradise.’
‘You walked up the ramp and you heard this ‘wooof, wooof, wooof, wooof’’ remembers Louis, another Garage regular. ‘And then, as soon as you got into the tunnel people would start this scream, and you knew you were going into somewhere special.’
In his evocative book Disco!, Albert Goldman wrote that ascending into the Garage made you feel like a character in a Kafka novel. ‘From overhead comes the heavy pounding of the disco beat like a fearful migraine. When you reach the bar, a huge bare parking area, you are astonished to see immense pornographic murals of Greek and Trojan warriors locked in sado-masochistic combat running from floor to ceiling. On the floor of the main dancing room are the most frenzied dancers of the disco scene; black and Puerto Rican gays, stripped down to singlets and denim shorts, swinging their bodies with wild abandon.’
Inside there were changing rooms, a chill-out area where movies were shown, a non-alcoholic bar, the large, beautifully-appointed booth, and the giant, relatively spartan dancefloor. In the summer you could climb through the cinema onto the roof, which itself was half the size of the club. Dancers would take a breather from their intense workouts and hang out under the stars among fountains, flowers and brightly coloured lights, watching the majestic New York night until Larry threw down another unmissable tune, perhaps ‘A Little Bit Of Jazz’ by Nick Straker Band or Spark’s ‘Let’s Go Dancing’, and there’d be a rush for the floor.
The Garage was located on 84 King Street in west SoHo in the echoing expanses of a cast-concrete parking garage. Levan was its pilot from the beginning, but the club was the creation of a tireless young clubber named Michael Brody. As disco grew to define gay life in post-Stonewall New York, Brody dreamt of recreating the atmosphere of its earliest clubs on a much larger scale.
His prototype had been 143 Reade St, set in a two-floor warehouse space which he ran from the summer of 1974 till it was forced to close in 1976. Here a gay and predominantly black crowd had gathered to sweat to the young Larry Levan’s increasingly exciting sonic experiments. ‘Reade St was very free and open,’ chuckles clubber Yvon Leybold. ‘I remember going there dancing topless. It was hot in there, but it was so much fun that you wanted to take your clothes off.’
Reade St gave Brody the confidence and experience to proceed, and proved his hunch that as a DJ Levan was exceptional enough to build a club around. However, the Garage would be an altogether more massive undertaking. He borrowed $110,000 from friends and relations, including $30,000 for sound equipment lent by his ex-lover Mel Cheren, founder of West End Records, but quickly found that this was a tiny fraction of the money he’d need to renovate such a huge space. He continued running it as a parking garage, but this was never going to generate the necessary sums, and parking cars all day left him with no time or energy for anything else.
The solution was to open a small fraction of the space as a club and enlarge it bit by bit. So the Paradise Garage opened in early spring 1977 with a series of ‘construction parties’, held in the Grey Room, what would eventually become the entrance area. For its first months, the club was just a raw space with an amazing DJ, the germ of a phenomenal sound system, a small but loyal crowd and a whole universe of possibilities.
Things grew steadily, until, in January 1978, Brody felt it was time for an official opening. He planned a grand launch party and invited the cream of Manhattan nightlife. Disaster ensued. Blizzards had been raging, delaying the arrival of a new sound system, which had spent several days sitting on a runway in Kentucky. And true to form, Levan refused to hurry the installation process, instead spending days incorporating it with the existing equipment and ironing out problems. This perfectionism continued right into the night of the planned opening, and even as thousands of people waited outside in sub-zero temperatures, the DJ refused to open the club until he was ready. Naturally, most of the waiting A-list clubbers stormed off. Those that were finally admitted found themselves in a vast club, not much warmer than outside, with plenty more glitches to meet them throughout the night. Few ever came back. As Cheren writes in his memoirs, Keep on Dancin’, ‘These queens never gave a disco a second break.’
Paradoxically, this failure was the defining moment for the Garage. Brody deeply regretted the club never held the attention of the A-list and he worked hard to entice the more upmarket (and mainly white) gay crowd. (He even at one time arranged free buses to and from the gay beach resort of Fire Island, 60 miles away.) However, in the long run their absence was the making of the club. Had the Garage opening gone smoothly, it may have ended up as chi-chi as Studio 54 or with the hi-NRG music tastes of The Saint. Instead, rather than being an instant hit with the in-crowd it was forced to grow organically, filling up gradually with dancers who came simply for Levan’s music.
TIME TO DANCE
In a city which usually decides a person’s importance by their money, their clothes or their race, the Garage became a rare place of equality. ‘One of the great things about The Garage was that it was very mixed,’ says François. ‘It was a place where everyone would mingle together – whether you were a superstar or whether you just happened to have a regular job. No heavy door scene. There is no alcohol for sale. The point of the club is dancing.’
Every weekend, regular as church, the club filled with people who came to shake their troubles away. But more than escaping the harsh outside world; they came to the Garage to feel close to each other. The atmosphere made them feel part of a huge, inclusive family. And this sense of communion was powerfully infectious. The club regularly welcomed stars like Mick Jagger, Diana Ross, Eddie Murphy, Boy George, Mike Tyson and Stevie Wonder. But when celebrities came to the Garage they didn’t draw attention to themselves the way they did at Studio 54, they dressed down and joined the crowd.
‘You didn’t know who would party there,’ recalls musician and songwriter Ray Reid of Crown Heights Affair. ‘Diana Ross, Calvin Klein, everybody came to the club. Russell Simmons tried to get in there. The common celebrities went to Studio 54 for the dressing up thing; that glamour, that little fuck parade. But everybody knew if you really wanted to party you had to go down to the Garage. Celebrities would go there in their jeans and be inconspicuous, and no-one would run up on them. You could party next to your number one hero. You’d just be minding your business and enjoying yourself.’
The majority of Garage regulars were far from wealthy; some could barely scrape together the price of admission. They were predominantly black and Latino, although the Garage was never an intentionally ‘black club’ as such. It was simply a place where, unlike most well-appointed New York nightspots of the time, skin colour was no barrier to admission. As Mel Cheren writes, it was ‘the one place that truly reflected the rainbow that had produced disco’s pot of gold. The potent intersection of rhythm, race and realness that had produced disco in the first place – black as it was gay, gay as it was black – all came together here.’
One thing was never in doubt: this was where you found the city’s most devoted clubbers: kids who danced for seven, eight hours, or more every week. They knew the records that were played, they screamed with excitement for their favourites, and they booed with bitchy contempt at visiting performers who didn’t cut it (including the young Madonna, who bombed badly when she first performed at the Garage). As Cheren writes, ‘There was no attitude here, no cliques defined by their muscles, no fashion victims, no A-list. These people were dancers.’ And this is what made the atmosphere at the Garage so electrifying – it was driven by the energetic input of its clubbers. ‘The intensity of the disco pyrotechnics was unlike anything anywhere. Venturing onto the dance floor was like swimming into an undertow – you were sucked into the vortex, and you surrendered, for hours at a time.’
FAMILY MEMBERS ONLY
This dancefloor singlemindedness was possible because only members and their guests were admitted. And as the club gained in popularity, fairly stringent measures were taken to ensure that its population of hardcore devotees was not diluted by an influx of curious onlookers.
‘The Garage was underground. There was no advertising’, explains David DePino, one of Levan’s closest friends and one of the few other DJs to have played at the Garage. ‘We were not an off-the-street club – it was a private, 100 per cent membership thing.’ Prospective members had to turn up in person and submit to an interview before they were accepted into the family. These membership days were kept virtually secret. Nevertheless, as DePino remembers, ‘so many people would line up at the door, there’d be a line round the corner twice.’
Initially the Garage only opened on Saturdays, and efforts were made to keep it almost exclusively gay. However, in answer to the growing number of women and straight men who wanted to get in, a mixed Friday night was launched which was, as people recall, much straighter and blacker. But the Saturday nights kept their reputation for being wilder and more explosive and straight guys would swear that they were gay to try and get Saturday night membership. Few succeeded.
For those who danced there, the Paradise Garage felt like home. It was run for the benefit of its members, and changes were made not with profit foremost, but with the impact of the party in mind. It was open during an unprecedented boom in nightclubbing and all around it businessmen were raking in the disco dollars. The Garage could have easily shared in this, yet its owner Michael Brody rejected commerciality as far as possible. ‘He could have made a fortune,’ says DePino. ‘But he was never money greedy. The party was first.’
Fruit, coffee and soft drinks were served free, as were lemon ices in the summer, while at Christmas and Thanksgiving clubbers were even served turkey with all the trimmings. ‘In the winter time we’d be baking brownies and popping fresh doughnuts and pastries,’ laughs DePino. ‘We’d be in the kitchen tripping our brains out wondering if we turned ovens on or not and then screaming when we touched them. Then we’d realise that Larry was pumping it, run out onto the dancefloor, and forget we were cooking in the kitchen, and all the muffins would be burnt. So I’d go up into the booth and say, ‘Larry, don’t play any more of our favourite records, we’re trying to bake brownies.’ Then we’d be back in the kitchen but he’d put on our favourite records and we’d run back up to the floor. Then it was like, ‘Get the fire-extinguisher, we’re burning all the muffins again.’ That’s the kind of thing that went on.’
There was no alcohol, a reflection of the serious focus on dancing. This also let the club escape the scrutiny of the notoriously draconian New York Liquor Commissionand stay open as long as it liked. Most of the dancers energised themselves with drugs, however, selecting from the era’s range of misappropriated chemicals: speed, poppers, cocaine, acid and angel dust, with newer confections like MDA and ecstasy creeping in as the years progressed.
It is an open secret that for the first three-to-four years – until the crowds grew too big, increasing the risk that someone would get hurt – the punch was spiked with acid, ‘In the early days, you took a glass of electric punch and you were going, boy!’ recalls DePino. ‘It was never enough to actually make you trip, just enough to make you have a fantastic time and not know why. We knew what was in it though, so we’d drink 12 or 13 cups of punch and we’d be flying!’ Surprisingly though, the euphoria on the dancefloor had less to do with illegal substances than it does in most clubs today. ‘It was the music,’ continues. DePino. ‘There were lots of kids there who did drugs and there were a lot of kids that didn’t.
The Garage opened around midnight and allowed admissions until 6.30am, after which the doors were closed and the party would continue until midday or later. As well as Levan’s music, there were live acts, and Chaka Khan, Dan Hartman, Loleatta Holloway, Gloria Gaynor, Al Hudson and the Jones Girls were all regulars on the club’s stage. One weekend Michael Brody booked Patti Labelle to perform for the princely sum of $20,000. A snowstorm on the ‘straight’ Friday night kept all but 500 people at home. But on the Saturday, raging blizzard or not, there were 4,000 queens there for her, some crying as she sang, and the club scraped through to break even.
DISCO CHILDREN
Disco was revolutionary. In its spirit it rescued the best elements from the swinging sixties and refined them for a new decade. As rock turned into a ‘progressive’ head trip, disco reclaimed its peace and love agenda, together with its original emphasis on dancing, and made them its own. Indeed, while disco is usually seen as glittery and mindless, it actually had a tangible political agenda – an enduring obsession with equality and togetherness. The 1969 Stonewall rebellion had opened up American gay life forever, black people too were enjoying greater equality. In the first disco clubs, as gay and straight, black and white, rich and poor danced together, the word ‘love’ in a hundred songs took on a forceful reality.
The Paradise Garage was perhaps the grandest expression of this. In its intimacy, in the way it treated its guests like an extended family, it was a direct descendent of the earliest disco clubs. It was from two places in particular that Michael Brody took his inspiration.
Opening on Valentine’s Day 1970, David Mancuso’s Loft had been a clear bridge between the decades, a place that would redefine clubbing forever. Mancuso filled his home, a Broadway loft, with balloons, friends and beautiful music played on an audiophile quality sound system. At this time nightclubs were the preserve of the jet-set, scenes of aspiration and exclusivity. The Loft showed that a club could be in-clusive, an interracial, pansexual celebration of humanity. With guests who shared a love of music and dancing, brought together by invitation and word of mouth, it was a professional house party. It would stay open, in various locations for the next 25 years.
In 1971 the teenage Nicky Siano opened the Gallery, the first properly commercial club to follow Mancuso’s inclusive, dance-driven blueprint. He hired the city’s leading sound engineer Alex Rosner to repeat the magic he’d worked for Mancuso, and armed with a similarly shattering sound system, drove New York wild with his soaring mix of music.
And, as DJs, Siano and Mancuso were also Larry Levan’s main inspiration. (He had brief affairs with each) and he never hid his obvious debt to his forebears: ‘Nicky Siano, David Mancuso, Steve D’Acquisto and Michael Cappello, David Rodriguez,’ Levan told Steven Harvey. ‘This is the school of DJs I come from.’
Lawrence Philpot was born on 21 July 1954 in the Bedford Stuyvesant neighbourhood of Brooklyn, the son of a dressmaker named Minnie Levan. Her other children, a twin brother and sister were 18 when baby Lawrence arrived, so he enjoyed the attention usually granted to an only child. His parents never married and in later years he chose to take his mother’s name, becoming Larry Levan
Most of Levan’s teenage years were spent in the company of his lifelong friend Frankie Knuckles from the Bronx, also destined to become one of history’s most important DJs. The two met at a Harlem drag ball in 1969, while sewing beads onto a costume for a lavish queen known as The Duchess. They became so inseparable that people regularly confused their names. And as they danced across the city together, they were soon known in Manhattan’s clubs as energetic party catalysts. Their adventures started in a tiny gay bar called the Planetarium, but soon they were regulars at the Loft, where Levan was mesmerized by David Mancuso’s musical mastery. When Nicky Siano opened the Gallery, he recruited the two club bunnies to put up the decorations, set out the buffet and pop acid blotters into the mouths of arriving guests.
Siano also schooled the duo in DJing, as Frankie recalls: ‘He showed us how to work the equipment and taught us an appreciation of the music, how to put it together and what a song is supposed to do. Nicky was the first DJ at that particular time that came remotely close to making beats match, and what happened was that Larry pretty much perfected it after that.’
By 1971 they were making money as DJs. Knuckles landed a six-month stint at a midtown club called Better Days, and Levan’s job working the lights for DJ Joseph Bonfiglio, turned fortuitously into DJing. ‘I was doing the lights and the DJ walked out,’ he told Collusion magazine. ‘The manager, who was like a six-foot three-inch Cuban guy, said, “You’re going to play records tonight!” I told him that I didn’t have any records. “You’ve got five hours!” It was Memorial Day weekend. I went back to Brooklyn and borrowed records from my friend Ronnie Roberts, who had everything. I went back and worked three straight days.’
This was at the famous gay spa complex, the Continental Baths, and at first Knuckles refused to visit his friend in the Bacchanalian ‘Tubs’, as it was known, even though Levan was now living in an apartment there. When he finally set foot in it, he didn’t leave for three weeks. After Levan left, Knuckles became the Baths’ resident, playing there until its closure, when he, famously, moved to Chicago and forged house music.
Levan’s next great break came when he started dating Richard Long, a talented sound designer who had once worked on the door at the Planetarium. Together, the couple turned Long’s showroom, at 452 Broadway, into a club that became known as The SoHo Place. Levan, still only nineteen, built this up to bursting point. From here he went to Reade St, starting his long partnership with Michael Brody, and when this was forced to close promised not to play elsewhere until bigger premises could be found. These would of course be the Garage.
INSPIRED ANARCHY
‘The Paradise Garage was open for so long and it was so obviously and blatantly superior to anything else going on,’ insists François Kevorkian. ‘You had the best sound-system around, the most talented DJ you can imagine, with amazing records that no one else could get: things he’d made himself and things others had made exclusively for him.’
The Garage holds an almost supernatural place in the history of dance music, and it would be pointless to try and separate the myth of the club from the legend of its controlling genius. Larry Levan is regularly hailed as the world’s greatest ever DJ. Listen to this performance and you’ll get a hint of his power, a glimpse of the way he could turn mere records into a soaring, probing, energising narrative.
You may well be surprised to hear a few sketchy mixes, but surprise turns to excitement when you see the bigger picture –the connections he makes with the meanings and feelings of songs, the way he teases just the right moments from each record. The variety of styles and tempos. Levan’s greatness is proof that technical prowess is but a tiny part of DJing. Technically speaking, he was no match for the likes of Walter Gibbons or Nicky Siano or, indeed, most of the early disco-mixers. His mixing was slapdash, and he’d often prefer to slam something in awkwardly rather than seamlessly blend. What made him great was his sense of drama, his obsessive control of all aspects of his clubbers’ experience, and his heightened ability to transmit his personality through the very grooves of his records.
‘He yearned for more than technical perfection,’ writes Cheren. ‘He wanted inspiration. Ecstasy. He wanted to spin the way he lived – in inspired anarchy.’
‘Larry himself was a wizard when it came to DJing,’ says Joe Claussell. ‘But I don’t think many DJs today understand his philosophy. Everyone is still with the pretty mixes, making sure that it’s all on-beat but they don’t have a clue what it takes to present their music to a crowd.’
For Claussell Levan’s greatness came from his almost psychic understanding of the people on his dancefloor: ‘It was his combination of different music and the fact that he knew how to read a crowd, he knew what record to play at what time; he knew the crowd intimately and what record would move what part of the dancefloor. It was magical to watch.’
Kenton Nix, who produced some of the classics most closely associated with the Garage (including Taana Gardner’s ‘Heartbeat’), agrees. ‘He would have a feel of people’s records, he would read peoples’ minds. He was the puppet master and he controlled your emotions.’
Justin Berkmann, a Garage regular and later the DJ who envisaged the Ministry of Sound (originally based firmly on the Garage) remembers watching Levan standing in his booth, conducting the crowd as if he was controlling their very movements.
‘He’d go into the booth and say, ‘Those people over there aren’t dancing, watch this,’ recounts Berkmann. ‘Then he’d put on a record, and they would just go off. That’s how well he knew his dancefloor. After ten years, he knew everyone in the club and he knew what got each group going. That’s something very few people get. Most of the big DJs now are flying all over the world, and most of the time they go into a club and they haven’t got a clue what people want.’
François believes Levan was the first DJ to show that such a profound understanding between DJ and dancers was even possible. ‘To have a relationship with the crowd. It’s not larging it; it’s a lot more spiritual than that, and it’s something that’s life-long. Not just something that lasts for a couple of hours while you’re on drugs. That’s what the spirit of The Garage was about. Something that was so powerful, it actually changed your life, and let me tell you, it sure changed a lot of our lives.’
Larry’s idea of control went far beyond the music. Thanks to his different club jobs – from decorating the room and spiking the punch at the Gallery to doing the lights at the Continental Baths – he strived to make a visit to his nightclub a total experience. At Reade Street, where the dancefloor was in a refrigerated meat warehouse, he even used the temperature as a way of manipulating mood, letting the airless room heat up to extraordinary levels and then cranking up the cooling equipment. Frankie Knuckles recalls stepping in as the temperature dropped suddenly below zero. ‘I would go into the booth and yell at him, ‘Somebody’s gonna catch pneumonia, you can’t do that.’ And he’d just say ‘Miss Thing, you’re getting on my nerves!’ and throw me out of the booth.’
He also loved to work the lights. Although the Garage had a very talented light man in Robert DaSilva – who had also worked the lights at the Gallery and Studio 54 – Levan had a second set of controls fitted on a rail along the top of the booth. When the mood took him – when he was ready to take people for a ride – he would draw the console towards him and decant the booth of its occupants. It was like clearing the flight deck for take-off.
‘They used to do these blackouts and they would switch all of the lights out,’ recalls Johnny Dynell. ‘Exit lights and everything. Totally illegal, you can’t turn exit lights out! You couldn’t see a hand in front of your face.’ He would build the intensity to a peak and then let fly with an acappella or sound effect – one time Dynell recalls him playing the Wizard of Oz – before the system would crank up and – BAM! – he’d hit the crowd with another favorite. ‘Oh, man, it was fabulous. He would just take control,’ sighs Dynell.
Jellybean, Larry and a young David Morales in the booth at the Garage
PLAY ME A STORY
One facet of Levan’s performance which is all but lost today, is the use of lyrics. Disco was largely centred on real songs, and the words they contained were far from mere vocal decoration. The era’s messages of inclusivity, love and togetherness may sound banal after decades of repetition, but back then they were vitally important to people. Following his mentors, Mancuso and Siano, Larry rejoiced in telling stories with his music.
‘Larry was able to use songs – songs with lyrics – and he used those lyrics to talk to people,’ says François. ‘It was very common for people on the dancefloor to feel like he was talking to him directly through the record. ‘He built sets that were built on stories that went into each other.’
Mel Cheren had first-hand experience of this kind of communication. ‘Larry and I had our ups-and-downs. He did a lot of mixes for my West End record label, and we’d have a disagreement and sometimes we wouldn’t be talking. And if he was upset with you, you knew about it. If he was angry with me, he played songs that said, ‘Fuck you, excuse me’ – he actually had a record that said that.’ Other times, as Cheren recalls, Larry would use music to ask forgiveness after a fight. ‘One night we hadn’t been talking for a while, and I was dancing, and he was playing ‘Gotta Get You Back Into My Life’ and songs like ‘I Love You’. All of a sudden I turned around and there he was. He’d left the DJ booth and gave me a big hug.’
Levan explained his technique in Collusion magazine: ‘Out of all the records you have, maybe five or six of them make sense together. There is actually a message in the dance, the way you feel, the muscles you use, but only certain records have that.’ He went on to give an example. ‘Say I was playing songs about music – ‘I Love Music’ by The O’Jays, ‘Music’ by AI Hudson and the next record is Phreek’s ‘Weekend’, that’s about getting laid, a whole other thing. If I was dancing and truly into the words and the feeling and it came on, it might be a good record, but it makes no sense because it doesn’t have anything to do with the others. So a slight pause, a sound effect, something else to let you know it’s a new paragraph rather than one continuous sentence.’
MASTER OF SOUND
If Levan was a virtuoso, his instrument wasn’t just the turntables, it was the whole system, the whole room. Elements of the Garage’s sound system are copied to this day in clubs around the world. To most who heard it, it has never been bettered. Designed by Richard Long, it managed to recreate the intimate crystal clarity of Mancuso’s Loft on an unimaginably vast scale. Levan rejoiced at having this phenomenal instrument at his disposal and used it to the full. He became a master of the crossover controls, using these to cut out certain frequencies, to boost particular instruments, even to isolate particular words in a song.
He would spend hour-after-hour lovingly honing, manipulating and adjusting the sound system. Often, Richard Long would optimise the room’s EQ levels, only to come back and find Levan holding a screwdriver changing the whole thing around. Several times, with the club about to open, he’d insist on rewiring or repositioning speakers, making his disciples wait outside while he made perfect some tiny – but to him, essential – aspect of the peerless system. Klippschorn speakers, a quartet of JBL bullet tweeter arrays, a Bozak mixer: these were items of recently-perfected equipment that came together wonderfully in the Garage. And Levan would experiment ceaselessly, doing things like progressively upgrading the cartridges throughout the night from the most basic up to $150 Grace models.
‘Larry managed to fine-tune the sound over the club’s 10 or 11 years until it was so incredibly superior to anything else you ever heard,’ says Francois. ‘There has never been anything remotely close to it ever since. The Ministry system is a copy of what the Garage was 10, 15 years ago, but The Garage was never a static thing. Larry’d spend all these hours after the club was closed moving speakers around, changing amplifier levels and trying out different cartridges and other different things. It’s not just about building it, it’s about maintaining it, improving it, tweaking it and taking care of it. No one does that now.’
‘It was the antithesis of The Saint,’ says Sharon White, recalling how different the Garage sounded compared to the other great room of the time. The only DJ to have played both clubs, she told DJ Jaguar: ‘The Garage was all highs and mids, and The Saint was bottom and hard.’ Sharon makes it clear how much the club was inseparable from its DJ. ‘I was a resident at many clubs, but at The Garage I was considered a guest. We did special functions in the space or held the room for Larry Levan, but that was HIS house.’
‘He didn’t want the biggest sound-system and the best booth to fuel his ego,’ says David DePino. ‘He just wanted what he thought would be incredible for the people. Speakers got moved around every week. Lights got changed every single week to give a different atmosphere. And if it didn’t happen, he’d go crazy and fire people. He never wanted it to become stale, he never wanted it to become regular. He always said, ‘The people won’t come. They’ve gotta know that it’ll be different.’ And they did. People never came into a stale place.’
On occasion, Levan’s attention to detail would even mean a pause in the music. ‘I’ve seen nights where everyone was rushing around to get things open and they’d forget something like cleaning the mirror-balls,’ recalls DePino. ‘It’d be 1am and Larry would run onto the dancefloor with a ladder to clean all six mirror-balls. The record would run out and everyone would be standing there waiting. Not booing, nothing mad… just waiting. And when he finished, he’d go up and put the next record on and people would go mad again. They loved that. The fact that even though he was the DJ, he’d spend half an hour cleaning all the mirror-balls. That would never happen today, DJs are such divas!’
DJ BRAVERY
As well as his fierce controlling instinct, Levan had a dark self-destructive streak. In his personal life this manifested itself in tireless drug abuse. In the club it provided an aura of intense drama. Each week was a lesson in improvisation, an unscripted performance on the emotional level of high opera. What would be served up on a particular night depended on any number of variants, with only one thing certain: Levan gave good show. He could shock you. He could thrill you. He could amaze you. He could even appall you. The only certainty was that he would surprise you. He was an audacious programmer. His high-octane, seat-of-the-pants DJ style was the aural equivalent of a highwire walk across Niagara Falls.
Rarely has a DJ’s mood been broadcast quite so powerfully to a dancefloor. By the records he played and the order he played them in, you could tell whether he was feeling good or bad, whether he’d just had an argument, whether he was tired or whether he was ready to party.
David Morales, who was lucky enough to play at the Garage as a young DJ, says Levan’s mood swings were dramatic. ‘He could be shit for seven hours and he could take 15 minutes and kick the shit out of you, and that made your night! That’s what it was about. There was nobody that was able to do that.’
He could drive dancers wild with desire or work them into a fury of frustration, often at the same time. Sometimes he would simply disappear from the booth. Occasionally, he would play an hour of dub reggae, or the same record three times in succession. Once (while sitting on a rocking horse), he had the whole club dancing to nothing more than a few of his live keyboard doodles, unaware that the record he was accompanying had finished minutes ago. Occasionally he would collapse in a stupor; somehow always managing to keep the party – if not himself – going. One time François remembers him putting on a movie instead of music. ‘What are you gonna do? There’s two and a half thousand people there and you suddenly play Altered States. That’s the kind of freedom that I think people need to know exists.’
‘He had attitude,’ remembers Cevin Fisher, another DJ/producer whose formative years were spent on the floor at King Street. ‘He would leave the DJ booth and the record would end and just spin around. Who knows what he was off doing… Actually, we all know what he was doing! And he would come back into the DJ booth totally trashed, lift the needle off the record and start it again. People got off on that.’
DJ Harvey, who played with Levan on his 1992visit to London, recalls how perfectly he could tease an audience. ‘He’d be playing one of his favourite records and just when it was getting to the best bit, he’d turn the system off, put the record back to the beginning and let it play again. He could do that three or four times and then not let the record play in full until an hour later. So people have been waiting for their favourite bit of that record for quite some time and they go barmy to it.’
‘There was no norm for Larry at The Garage,’ says David DePino. ‘It was his home and he didn’t follow no book. He didn’t care what happened. The freedom and the nonchalance he had up there was what made 2,000 people come together as one.’
Sharon White lived close to the Garage and was often called to cover when Levan hadn’t appeared. But she would always stick around when he finally did. ‘I’d go down and start the room up and then at 8 o’clock in the morning he’d come sliding in, fresh from wherever, with a smile on his face. He’d always come with gifts because he’d know attitudes would fly. Then the night would start all over again. You wouldn’t leave when Larry arrived, because that was when the party really started.’
‘Everyone has certain talents, natural abilities,’ adds Mel Cheren. ‘Some people are born with the talent to paint; some people are born with the talent to write. Larry had the talent for music and he could take 2,000 people and make them feel like they were at a house party.’
GARAGE MUSIC
‘Garage’ is one of the most mangled terms in dance music. The term derives from the Paradise Garage itself, but it has meant so many different things to so many different people that unless you’re talking about a specific time and place, it’s not much help. Part of the reason for this confusion (aside from various journalistic misunderstandings and industry misappropriations) is that the range of music played at the Garage was so broad. The music we now call ‘garage’ is a very distant relative, evolved from only a small part of the club’s wildly eclectic soundtrack.
The Garage opened just as disco was enjoying its greatest mainstream success, and the music played there initially would be broadly categorised as disco by modern ears. Yet as Eurodisco took hold and the sound grew ever more formulaic, Levan took his sonic palette in the other direction. ‘It’s boring when it’s the same thing all the time,’ he would say, arguing that dance music should have as much contrast and diversity as possible. So he married solid gold disco classics, burnished at the Gallery and the Loft, with disparate elements that took in rock, pop and weird electronic oddities, as well as soul, rap, funk and post-disco releases. The Garage was Yazoo’s ‘Situation’ as well as Loleatta Holloway’s ‘Love Sensation’. The Garage was Steve Miller Band’s ‘Macho City’ as well as Gwen Guthrie’s ‘Seventh Heaven’, Van Halen’s ‘Jump’ as well as Diana Ross’s ‘Love Hangover’ and Chaka Khan’s ‘Clouds’. The Garage was Grandmaster Flash and Eddy Grant. The Garage was MFSB, Marianne Faithfull, Talking Heads and the Clash. In short, he played anything good, accepting no boundaries of style, tempo or ‘coolness’.
Levan could even take records that every other DJ in the city had long been playing and make them recognisably his, ‘Love Is The Message’ being the most famous. The fact that it all converged so seamlessly and effectively is testament to his personality. ‘Garage music was kind of breaking the rules,’ says DJ Danny Krivit. ‘It was what he felt like playing. It was really about having no boundaries.’
Levan took this to extremes and was a determined manipulator of his clubbers’ tastes, pushing unusual, sometimes bizarre records on them and making them work through his immense force of will. One such record was Yoko Ono’s sonic sonnet, ‘Walking On Thin Ice’. A rock mantra in which Yoko’s dissonant eastern wail weaves around a wall of heavy percussion, it was the song John Lennon had been working on the night he was murdered. Levan loved it. Another example was Pat Benatar’s ‘Love Is A Battlefield’, one of several extremely unlikely Garage anthems. ‘Someone said he could never play that there,’ chuckles Danny Krivit, a key New York DJ. ‘That was reason enough for him to play it – and make it happen, too.’
And he would just as easily champion a commercial record as the most obscure underground cut. Dave Piccioni remembers him playing ‘Fascinated’ by Company B, a real electro-pop commercial record. ‘It was tacky in the extreme. But, fuck me, he played that for 20 or 25 minutes and you could not help but get into it. He thought, ‘I like this record and it’s gonna sound great in the club, and I don’t really care if you like it or not.’ And he got away with it because he had talent and creativity.’
‘People would be gagging,’ adds DePino bluntly, ‘but eventually they accepted it. He was the bravest DJ I ever knew.’
LEVAN’S LEGEND
There is no doubting Levan’s magnificence as a DJ. His famous inconsistency was the payoff for his bravery in exploring the power and the freedom he had in his booth. In truth, however, his legend grew from several sources besides his actual performances. Remember, he had the city’s most intensely dance-oriented nightclub at his command, a fact which greatly magnified his genius. Even more importantly however, he was a shining example of the new possibilities of his profession. This was a time when DJs were first emerging from their booths and entering the recording studio as producers and remixers. They started having the power not just to tailor their music live for their dancefloor, but to record original material and have it released commercially. With the support of a growing network of independent dance labels and with the inevitable attention of key radio DJs, they could even use their clubs to push records (including their own) into the mainstream charts. Few DJs expressed this new power as well as Levan. More than anyone else at the time, he showed where the DJ profession was heading.
He was a powerful tastemaker. Knowing they’d hear the best and latest tunes at the Garage, the city’s other key DJs would attend religiously ‘Two o’clock on a Sunday afternoon after the night before, he’d have a thousand people sitting on the floor,’ recalls DePino. ‘He’d be playing these obscure wild records and they’d be snapping their fingers and moving their heads around. Then he’d run down and dance, then run back up to change the record.’
‘After several years of being open, the word got around that this was the place where you had to break your record,’ adds François. ‘So everybody would bring Larry their tapes months and months ahead of time. He had access to the very, very best music months in advance.’
His friendship with radio DJ Frankie Crocker (the airwave equivalent of Barry White, known variously as ‘Lover Man’, ‘Fast Frankie’, ‘Chief Rocker’ and ‘Hollywood’) gave him even greater influence, to a level unprecedented for a club DJ. A record could go from the floor of the Garage one night and find itself on the platter at WBLS the next. After that the rest of America would join the party. It became an informal industry test centre. Veteran producer Arthur Baker recalls bringing ‘Walking On Sunshine’ by Rocker’s Revenge to the Garage for Levan to play. The following day, Crocker gave it its first airing on the radio. With such influence, Levan naturally shot to the top of the list of DJs when it came to receiving new product. One record promoter pointed out, ‘He’s someone to whom top record industry people hand-deliver new albums. When a record goes here, we know we’ve got a hit.’
But Levan rarely dwelt on his growing commercial power. Instead, he concentrated on increasing the pleasure of his clubbers and extending the range and possibilities of his music. The result was a striking combination of artistic freedom and commercial influence. By the early eighties, just 10 or 15 years after modern DJing was born, Levan was everything a DJ could be. No wonder he remains the central inspiration for almost every New York DJ above the age of 50. David Morales, Danny Tenaglia, Cevin Fisher, Junior Vasquez, Danny Krivit, Kenny Carpenter, François Kevorkian, Joe Clausell and many, many more. They all readily acknowledge their debt to Larry Levan. So many clubs too, have been based on the Garage. The Shelter, now Vinyl, home of the well-known Body And Soul nights, was founded more or less wholly on preserving its memory. The mighty Sound Factory too was a conscious copy of the Garage and at its early best came close to the same feelings of community.
And besides all this, Garage lore has been made more enduring by the fact that Levan died at the tragically young age of 38, after suffering heart failure (Levan had a life-long heart condition, though his legend-affirming drug habit can’t have helped). Music mythology loves nothing more than a good-looking corpse, which lends Danny Tenaglia’s description of Levan as the Jimi Hendrix of dance music yet more aching resonance.
DISCO’S REVENGE
Another crucial reason that Levan enjoys such a prominent place in the history of dance music is that his club presided over its most creatively fertile period: the death of disco and its rebirth in a hundred forms. As the eighties dawned and the mainstream was twisting disco into a camp cartoon, the Garage was paving the way for its many offspring to take their first steps. House and techno would soon emerge from the experiments of several innovative young DJs (Levan and his great friend Frankie Knuckles included). And the silicon revolution would make bedroom producers out of a generation of clubbers. Already in New York there were hectic collisions of underground energy and music. Hip hop and electro were blossoming onto record, funky new wave was rising from punk’s corpse, and after Bob Marley’s passing in 1981, reggae was about as popular as it would ever get in Gotham City. As disco boomed and busted, DJs were forced to search that little bit harder, that little bit longer to find the right records to feed their dancefloors. Levan was already the master of this magpie approach. Naturally the Garage became a key link between disco and the musical forms which evolved from it.
Levan’s role in this was to transfer his eclecticism to the studio ‘If you could see my collection, you’d know I like all music – you’d think it belonged to four different DJs,’ he explained. ‘And because of this, I found myself taking things from here, from there – reggae, pop, disco, jazz, blues – and using lots of things as a base to take things from.’
His first studio sortie, in 1978 was, bizarrely enough, to remix a novelty disco record by Sesame Street’s Cookie Monster called ‘C Is For Cookie’. The following year he remixed Taana Gardner’s debut single ‘Work That Body’, but his real breakthrough was the international hit ‘I Got My Mind Made Up (You Can Get It Girl)’ by Instant Funk. The record went Gold and suddenly Levan’s studio career snowballed. His most prolific period was in the early-to-mid eighties when he created a series of classic productions many on Salsoul and West End. These included his dense, hypnotic remix of Gardner’s sensual disco workout ‘Heartbeat’, Jocelyn Brown’s anthemic remake of ‘Ain’t No Mountain High Enough’, Edna Holt’s funky ‘Serious Sirius Space Party’ and a string of productions and mixes for Gwen Guthrie including ‘Ain’t Nothing Goin’ On But The Rent’.
His late seventies remixes – such as Cognac’s ‘How High’ and Dee Dee Bridgewater’s ‘Bad For Me’ – sound much like the regular disco mixes of his peers. But by the turn of the eighties, he was experimenting with drum machines and synthesizers and, like François Kevorkian around the same time, forging a new electronic, post-disco sound. This was epitomized by his group Peech Boys – Levan, keyboard player Michael de Benedictus (who had worked on ‘Heartbeat’), and vocalist Bernard Fowler – and their digital-funk excursion ‘Don’t Make Me Wait’. It took Levan a year to complete the final single mix; he constantly tested the latest version in the club, before going back into the studio to make adjustments. When finally released it was a significant breakthrough; one that gave him worldwide acclaim in the dance community (it was even a minor pop hit in the UK).
‘Everyone was influenced by the Peech Boys record,’ says Arthur Baker. ‘When those handclaps started whipping around the place… oh, man.’ Fired by this new sound, Baker produced ‘Walking On Sunshine’ by Rocker’s Revenge. ‘ ‘Walking On Sunshine’ was specifically made for the Paradise Garage,’ he says emphatically.
With reggae making its presence felt, Levan had started absorbing dub as an influence. His interest in its warping basslines and luxuriant wide-open spaces came, no doubt, from the people he encountered while doing remixes for Island Records. Jamaican producers Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare, and in particular the engineer Steven Stanley, were to exercise an important influence on his tastes. He started airing many of the tracks coming out of Nassau’s Compass Point studios – records like Will Powers’ ‘Adventures In Success’, Ian Dury’s ‘Spasticus Autisticus’, and a succession of Grace Jones singles.
Levan would use echo and reverb to dramatize records in much the same way that Jamaican sound system DJs had done. The flitting handclaps on ‘Don’t Make Me Wait’ were an approximation of a reverb trick he would often do live. And on the Garage’s superb system, certain dub-inflected records sounded simply awesome.
WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
But the Garage couldn’t live forever. In 1987, with Michael Brody tiring from AIDS and with some ugly financial conflicts within the club, when the lease expired he made no effort to relocate the Garage. The club finally closed on 26 September 1987. The last days were a truly bittersweet affair.
Judy Weinstein, one of Levan’s closest friends, now manager to Frankie Knuckles and David Morales, recalls the loss people felt: ‘It was a very sad moment when the club closed. It was devastating to both Larry and the 5-10,000 people that were members. But in retrospect it closed probably at the right time for where music was going at that point.’
‘It wasn’t until the last few weekends of The Garage that Larry really realised that it was definitely closing,’ remembers Mel Cheren. ‘Somehow he thought that Michael was going to come back and say that he’d found another space and everything was OK, but he didn’t. The last few weekends he finally realised this and began playing like it was a funeral march.’ However, Levan eventually saw it was wrong to bow out in a petulant sulk. And from then on the music was incredible.
The Paradise Garage ended its eleven-year house party with an amazing closing event that ran for more than two days. An estimated 14,000 people came through the doors, it was rammed to bursting throughout, and Levan played music as if his very breath depended on it. People came from all over the world to be there. Artist Keith Haring, whose graffiiti paintings decorated the club, flew in from Tokyo to attend. Regular Garage performer Gwen Guthrie, whose biggest hits were also produced by Levan, was carried on-stage garnished in diamonds and furs. ‘You know why I’m wearing these?’ she asked the ecstatic crowd, ‘Because you bought them for me.’
After the marathon session, the exhausted crowd gathered at the front of Levan’s DJ booth on a dancefloor littered with ‘Save The Garage’ stickers, and pleaded with him not to go. But the sands of time had finally run out.
‘There can never be another Garage,’ reflects Judy Weinstein. ‘It was what it was. There was a time for it and that’s what it was. ‘There are all these clubs that fancy themselves to be the next Garage,but when I go to The Ministry, or places of that magnitude, with their huge sound-systems and their claims to be the best club in the world, I realise that nothing could ever come close to the warmth and the feeling you got from The Paradise Garage. It wasn’t just the sound, it was the whole thing, and there will never be anything like it again.’
KING WITHOUT A KINGDOM
The closure of the Garage, though long anticipated, had a deadening effect on New York clubland. ‘It was like somebody had died in my family,’ says Charlie Grappone, whose Vinylmania record store was almost an annex to the club, built on selling, as so many customers requested, ‘the tunes Larry played last night’. Then, on 28 December, only two months after the club closed, Michael Brody died. In the last five years, AIDS had been claiming more and more of the club’s family and now it had taken its creator.
For Levan himself, it was all simply devastating. He knew that without the Garage he would never achieve that same level of communion with a crowd. ‘He was now a king without a kingdom,’ says Mel Cheren. ‘Even before it closed, he had entered into a steep decline in which his DJing was running second to his drug use, which now included heroin. Friends began to view the DJs actions as a kind of slow, deliberate suicide. In the final year, he was relying increasingly on the club’s alternate DJs, David DePino, Joey Llanos, Sharon White and Victor Rosado.
‘When Larry knew The Garage was going to close, he freaked,’ exclaims DePino. ‘He went on a self-destructive binge. He took drugs to spite people, to hurt them. The more you would say, “Larry, please don’t do so many drugs”, the more he would do them, right in your face.’
He put his records in storage but missed the payments and the stirage company sold them. After the closure of the Garage, whenever Levan was booked to DJ, his friends had to trawl the rummage sales to buy back his collection, just so he could fulfil the date. Danny Krivit remembers finding Levan’s unique acetate remix of Syreeta’s ‘Can’t Shake Your Love’ on a record stall and realizing that most of the other records there were his also.
Frankie Knuckles recalls a night in 1992, when Levan paid a visit to his Friday residency at the Sound Factory Bar. David Morales was there too, and they stood together in the booth, playing records and having a ball. Larry was moved to confide something in Frankie: ‘He said, ‘I’m really proud of you and what you’ve done with your life. I hope you use what I’ve done with my life as an example of what not to do.’
Shortly before his death, Levan went on a successful two-month tour of Japan with Mel Cheren and François Kevorkian. He was treated like a star, a living legend. ‘Larry went into a set of Philadelphia classics which was just so poignant,’ recalls François. ‘It was so emotional because the message of all the songs said he was really hurting. We all felt it at the time, but I think he pretty much knew he was dying and all the songs he played were so deeply related to how fast life goes. He played Jean Carne’s ‘Time Waits For No One’ and The Trammps’ ‘Where Do We Go From Here’, and I realised that this was one of the best moments of greatness that I had ever witnessed in my life. It was so obvious, so grand, such a drama to it that you just knew.’
Larry Levan died two months later on 8 November 1992. He died of endocarditis, an inflammation of the lining of the heart, which was exacerbated by his excessive drug use. He was 38. Nearly 800 people attended his memorial service, friends, colleagues and Garage kids alike. He was, as DePino puts it ‘the last DJ who could touch people in that way’.
JIMI HENDRIX OF THE TURNTABLES
Now that the world is so full of DJs we need a few more Larry Levans. We need people to remind us that playing records is fun; that up in the booth you have a joyous freedom which you should revel in. DJs who make no mistakes are just not taking enough risks. There’s no safe road to paradise.
‘Larry was awful, he was too loud, he’d leave big gaps and let records jump, he’d play ballads in the middle of the night,’ laughs DJ Bruce Forest, one of his contemporaries. ‘But that was only five per cent of it. On the other hand, he had an atmosphere nobody will achieve ever again. He made it seem like he was playing records to you in his living room. His rapport with the crowd was immense. If you went to the club one week and a light bulb was red and the next week when you returned it was blue, people would say, ‘Larry changed the bulb this week.’
David Morales remembers his wilfulness: ‘Sometime the audience would get uptight with Larry – but it was his home and he did what he wanted to. If he wanted to go off on a Samba kick for an hour, that’s what he did. But make no mistake he was my hero and a genius. It’s only now that I fully realise just how much of a genius he was. Now that I’m older and a little wiser I can understand what’s required to entertain an audience. It’s more than just a tune. It was how he handled the system, how he talked and related to people. How he was able to work them up into a frenzy with them standing in the same spot.’
‘He was like the Miles Davis of the trumpet, the Jimi Hendrix of the guitar, the John Coltrane of the sax,’ reflects Joe Claussell. ‘He was the man of the turntables.’
Johnny Dynell says Levan showed him what DJing was really all about: ‘When you’re creating that magic on the floor. When they’ve thrown their hands up in the air, and they’re totally lost and abandoned into this other world. And you’ve taken them to that other world. That’s what DJing is. Before that I was just playing records, which is not DJing at all.’
‘There’ll never be another Larry Levan, just like they’ll never be another Paradise Garage,’ concludes David Morales. ‘There are a lot of other great DJs and awesome great clubs, but there’s never been a DJ that commanded an audience as strongly as Larry Levan.’
In recalling Levan, most people are also thinking back to their nights in his club, for many the best times they can remember. But equally, for those who were close to him, memories of the Garage are inseparable from memories of Levan himself. ‘He was very special,’ says Mel Cheren. ‘He was a genius. I miss him a great deal. So many people do. But you have to go on and keep things going.’
‘Larry was adventurous, he was daring, he was a risk-taker,’ reflects Frankie Knuckles. ‘He was a dark character, but a lot of young kids gravitate towards dark sounds, feelings, moods. He was very, very funny. He was always the odd man out, but he had something about him that automatically drew people to him. People were just drawn to Larry like a magnet.’
Another close friend, David DePino sums up what Larry brought to the world. ‘He was able to get 2,000 people to feel the same emotion and peak at the same time. He could make them feel like one. They loved him for his insanity and his genius. I miss him. I miss him very much. It was just like going over the rainbow every Saturday night.’
This is a lightly edited version of the sleevenotes to the album Larry Levan live at the Paradise Garage (Nuphonic), which in turn was an extended version of the Paradise Garage section of our book Last Night A DJ Saved My Life. Thanks to DJ Jaguar and Lewis Dene. And a big shout out to the Nuphonic diaspora.
Larry Levan and Keith Haring’s Party of Life, celebrating Larry’s birthday in 1984, from The Vinyl Maniac fanzine, courtesy of Charlie Grappone.
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