Read - DJ History

Cleveland Anderson sowed the soul

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

interviewed by Bill in Acton, 9.9.04

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

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

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

Dancers at Clouds, Brixton, 1978

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CLASSIC CLUBS: Sub Club

22 Jamaica St, Glasgow, 1987-present

‘The music still batters the senses, pushing boundaries, constantly reinventing and setting the tone for what’s coming round the next corner,’ says Mike Grieve, head honcho at Glasgow’s Sub Club, possibly the world’s longest-running club of its kind. ‘This is the space where underground clubs really exist, breaking new music, creating new energies, inspiring new ideas, and forging new friendships all along the way.’ With this level of excitement after almost thirty years, it’s not difficult to see why the Sub Club has firmly established itself as a Glasgow, dare we say Scottish, dance music institution.

Located on 22 Jamaica Street, the Sub Club, or ‘Subbie’, became central to the club culture explosion in ’90s Glasgow. The scene had been set thirty years before when it opened as afterhours speakeasy Le Cave – supposedly graced by the likes of Nina Simone and Louis Armstrong. By the early ’80s the same dancefloor was playing host to the likes of Primal Scream as the indie-centric Lucifer’s. In 1986 DJ Harri – who is still resident all these years later – moved in armed with his record box of dub, hip-hop and soul, and a year later in 1987 the Sub Club opened its doors.

But it was the advent of house music that really changed everything as Glasgow (along with the rest of the UK) began to experience a monumental shift in dancefloor culture. Within a couple of years, the Sub Club had become a beacon for every top house DJ in the world. Larry Heard, Derrick Carter, Sneak, Juan Atkins – and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. But it wasn’t just the guest appearances that made the Sub what it was. It was what it created. It was here that Slam found a home and it provided the birthplace for Optimo’s beloved Espacio. It’s hard to understate the importance of the Sub.

Back when it opened in 1987, house music domination was a little way away. With its rise seemingly less engineered than elsewhere in the UK, house began to seep into the consciousness of Scottish clubbers via a less direct route – gay clubs, hi-energy and Italo-disco. ‘My first encounters with house music were in gay clubs, because they were the best places to hear good music,’ explained Keith McIvor aka JD Twitch of Optimo in 2018. ‘There was a club called Bennetts, which lasted until relatively recently… hi-energy and Italo was the dominant sound in gay clubs but also in mainstream straight clubs.’ This led to a more organic rise of party culture. ‘I think initially the DJs who were playing it perhaps weren’t even aware this was this new thing, it was just that these records coming from Chicago fitted in and didn’t sound rabidly different from the Italo-disco they’d been playing.’ Around the same time, people started creating their own raves. ‘Before any house clubs per se, there was a lot of house parties… people would throw big parties, put up a few UV lights, get a load of ecstasy. Those were the first proper house music parties in Glasgow that I went to.’

The attitude to playing music was also changing. ‘I was always interested in mixing myself but the musical styles at the time were more eclectic and it wasn’t always possible until house took hold,’ remembered Stuart McMillan, one half of techno pioneers Slam. Key inspiration at this time was local mixmaster prodigy Paul Welsh: ‘I took part in the DMC mixing championships in the early ’80s. I started DJing when I was 12 at the local youth club, so that would’ve been late ’70s and I don’t even know if mixing was a big thing then – I was just learning the ropes.’ One of the judges was the legendary James Hamilton of Record Mirror – who had inadvertently introduced the young Welsh to the concept. ‘I had a good long chat with him because he was my hero. He used to do that page in Record Mirror and give you the BPM, so he saved you all the work!’ says Welsh. ‘It was trial and error when I started mixing records myself, but I didn’t fully understand that to get good at it you had to have a good understanding of tempos.’ All the same, he soon became the man to learn from when he played 22 Jamaica Street in one of its earlier incarnations – the Jamaica Inn. ‘He blew me away with how he could put records together in such a smooth fashion,’ says Harri, Sub Club legend and long-time resident. ‘He said you’re really good at holding down the beat, but you’re missing the bars. Pointing that out to me was a total revelation.’

It wasn’t long before this spread to the dancefloor. ‘Sunday night in a place called Fury Murry’s,’ remembers Harri. ‘It was fifty pence to get in and it was called Ten Bob Bop. They were playing a fair bit of house. It was probably the first exclusively acid and house night.’ Fury Murry’s also put on another night called Black Market – an early home for pre-Slam McMillan and Meikle. ‘When they started that night, I was still playing a cross section of things and then there was a deluge of house and also learning how to mix it properly,’ says Harri. ‘It started to take over, in tandem with ecstasy arriving. The two things together just made sense and went hand in hand.’

The Sub Club started off as a night at Lucifer’s but just a year later on April Fool’s Day 1987, 22 Jamaica Street re-opened as the Sub Club. All the vital ingredients were in place. Harri had joined in 1986 with his mate Gerri MacLaughlin when it was Lucifer’s. ‘We called the night ”Deep Box.” At the start of the night, we’d play reggae and northern soul and then stuff like “Rhythim Is Rhythim” mixed in with it, but it wasn’t exclusively house.‘ Paul Welsh was there too. ‘We used to do a Friday night. Harri would play mainly house and I’d play hip hop and jazz. I know this was going on in London cos I used to go to London regularly on record buying trips and I met people like Patrick Forge and Gilles Peterson and Paul Murphy.’ Current owners Mike Grieve and Paul Crawford remember the transition on their site. ‘At first it was a mix of soul, funk and hip hop with an occasional house track thrown in, then acid house blew up and that was just crazy – smiley t-shirts, kaftans, flares, whistles, smoke, strobes and a full night of acid house music. It completely changed clubbing and that was certainly a defining moment.’

Slam arrived in 1989 and things really began to change. Both regulars, McMillan remembers that it wasn’t really about the club itself back then so much as the nights that they put on. ‘Harri and Gerry had a night called Deep Box. and Graham Wilson and Nick Peacock were the residents at Lucifer’s. I was always that kid standing at the side watching. Trying to find out what the records were called.’ By this point the pair were playing Fury Murry’s. ‘It was a real mish-mash of music from House to disco rare groove and some cool hip-hop cuts like Spoony G’s the Godfather,’ McMillan said. ‘The only night the club could give us was a Wednesday night, but when you’re keen, you’re keen. We managed to fill that quite a few times.’ Steven Sweetman then started his UFO night at Tin Pan Alley where Jon DaSilva and Harri were residents and coaxed Macmillan and Orde across giving birth to their reinvention as Slam. ‘I never really liked the name,’ says McMillan, ‘but it was ideal for the night as the name was taken from Phuture’s ‘Acid Tracks’ EP. We ran that for about 5-6 months and now has become a legendary night…the scene went from quite underground to utter hysteria in the space of months. You really could feel you were living through some sort of revolution.’

By 1990, the Sub Club was thriving – Slam’s JOY became a Friday night banker from 1989, while Harri took over the Saturday night residency a year later. And it wasn’t long before the two joined forces. ‘They started a new night at the Sub Club called Atlantis, which was all about house, acid house with a slight Balearic feel,’ says McIvor. But it took a while to get going. ‘For the first few months it wasn’t that busy and then we got these UV lights and big white drapes and the club felt like you were in a big tent,’ remembers Harri. ‘The night that really kicked off for us in that club was Stuart and myself warming up for Stone Roses. They played at Glasgow Green and asked Stuart and I to do the warm-up for them and we’d never heard of them. Then we did the after party at Atlantis and we had a queue round the block and from that night on we had a queue every Saturday for the next four years.’

Atlantis, by Nick Peacock (also the header image)

This all coincided with a novel time in the City’s history. ‘Glasgow was the European Capital of Culture, so we had a 5am license for the whole year, which was unheard of in those days,’ Slam told Do Music Yourself. ‘We quickly attracted a second wave of new house music fans to join the acid house early adopters who had lasted the pace. It was at a special point in time for the scene – a point where indie bands were just as likely to get on one and join the party as ravers and clubbers.’ McIvor remembers the change. ‘The nights in the Sub Club were the ones were you felt something revolutionary was happening and everything’s changing. The dress code is changing, the attitude is changing. Before then it had been very much about what you were wearing, fashion, looking a bit moody and suddenly it was all wiped away.’

Sadly, it wasn’t long before Slam started to lose interest in big parties and moved back underground, heading to the nearby Arches and shifting to a more techno-centric focus. Harri stayed put, launching his new night Subculture in 1994 with Domenic and Oscar Fullone and which, remarkably, is still going strong to this day. ‘The owners of the club offered me the Saturday night with whoever I wanted to do it with,’ explained Harri in 2018. ‘After a few years Oscar left to do Mish Mash, so for the last 22 years Dominic and I have been doing it on our own. We’ve had our peaks and troughs, but they’ve always stood by us.’

Troughs indeed including a fire (started in the pub next door) in 1999 that wiped the club out for three years. ‘Paul got a phone call that the building next door was on fire and we headed straight there,’ remembered Mike Grieve in 2007 (Previously a promoter in Aberdeen and long-time associate of Harri’s Grieve took over the club in the early 1990s). ‘We never thought it was going to be that bad. In fact, we all went into MacSorleys bar for a pint while the fire brigade put it out … or so we thought.’ Three years later the club reopened. ‘It allowed us to reopen the venue with brand new fit-out and an unbelievable sound system.’

It wasn’t the first time the Sub had had a revamp. In 1997 they had a second bar installed and ‘the sticky carpet’ removed and then nine years later they had a Bodysonic dancefloor installed – road tested by Derrick Carter no less. But the Sub was far from being showy. In fact, that was a large part of its appeal particular in the era of the superclub. ‘Our punters preferred the intimacy and community of the Sub Club,’ explained Grieve and Crawford. ‘The club has always had a strong policy of inclusion – if you come down for a party, with a friendly attitude, then you’re in. It’s not about following fads or fashion. The DJs are constantly pushing music forward, seeking new tunes and sounds that will keep people dancing.’ Harri agrees on that front. ‘I might only be playing four hours a week but I’m certainly putting in a lot more than that trying to find a new music.’ And for a while it was the place everyone wanted to be. ‘I remember the captain of the Scottish football team, off his face, trying to order drinks at the cloakroom.’

Today the Sub Club’s most celebrated residents are Optimo, aka JD Twitch and JG Wilkes, with their much-loved Espacio night, which ran every Sunday until 2010. Named after the Liquid Liquid song, the duo’s big appeal was their ability to take tracks from any genre and work them together – which wowed crowds and became their calling card. Both Wilkes and Twitch had cut their teeth playing techno, but by 1997 were ready for more musical freedom. As DJmag put it, alongside techno and house you might expect to hear anything from post-punk and new wave, to dub, electroclash, Afrobeat and more. ‘Ambient Eno cuts could slot in seamlessly alongside an industrial Cabaret Voltaire banger, a Fela Kuti jam or a straight-up classic pop hit.’

It took time for the word to spread but by the time Optimo returned to the venue after the fire, queues would form around the block. ‘Their musical policy had a huge influence on my DJing and my taste in music,’ Richard Birchard aka Hudson Mohawke, who worked the Sub Club bar in Optimo’s heyday, told The Guardian. ‘The way they crafted their sets opened me up to so many things. Their influence spreads far, but they don’t often get the credit they deserve – there are plenty of people out there now doing pretend versions of Optimo sets to huge festival crowds.’ As their reputation grew, a who’s who of established names played: from good mate James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem, through to Franz Ferdinand, Peaches, the Pop Group, Gang of Four, ESG and even Rachel Stevens. But rather than let the rot set in, the duo decided to call it a day in 2010 – parodying a David Cameron campaign poster for the announcement: ‘Optimo (Espacio) 1997-2010: Getting out before the Tories get in.’

Other residencies included the The Yard with Stuart McCorisken and Gareth Sommerville in 1995, Sensu from 2007, techno residency Animal Farm, The I AM, Thunder Disco, Don’t Drop – all local faces mixed with a list of A-Class musical guests as long as your arm including Carl Cox, Green Velvet, Juan Atkins, Kerri Chandler and of course, Liquid Liquid.

Still going strong today and showing no signs of tiring, it seems that the Sub has come to represent everything that’s so vibrant and unique about the Scottish club scene. ‘I love the Sub Club. I’ve had some amazing nights there over the years,’ says Irvine Welsh. ‘Whatever genre of music it hosts, it always pulls along a great crowd of party animals who really know their stuff. Sometimes, the perception on the other side of Hadrian’s Wall is that Scotland just do the Highland fling of a weekend.’

Book club: lost in the library special

Most of you reading this will be far too young to remember the original DjHistory site. Ask your gran. Back in the before-times we published snappy book reviews about 100 words each. Of classics we loved, and new releases we managed to blag from publishers. A team of restorers has been working night and day and has pieced together the following.

Spot-on acid house daftness

Once In A Lifetime: The Crazy Days of Acid House and Afterwards – Jane Bussman, 1998

Acid house told as sit-com. A hilarious scrapbook chronicle filled with snippets, quotes, memories, and stories. If you were there, every page revives priceless forgotten details; if not, this is the best book for soaking up the sheer lunacy of the time. Bussman captures those crazy, hazy days of the summer of love better than anyone.

Foremost acid house history

Altered State: The Story of Ecstasy Culture and Acid House – Matthew Collin, 1997

With Collin as editor, i-D magazine boasted the most insightful coverage of the ’80s emerging club cultures. Altered State was the first serious book about acid house, and for a ride through the social and cultural revolution that ecstasy and house music ignited, it remains the best. The 2006 update catches Tony Blair using an E anthem to get elected.

TV spin-off house history

Pump Up The Volume – Sean Bidder

The TV documentary was strong on the origins of house, then got a little cabbaged when it tried to stand up and go anywhere. This accompanying book is similarly disorganised, but worth having for its acres of extended quotes: a veritable oral history. It would be churlish to point out the debt it owes to our own little history book, but we’ll do it anyway.

On-the-ground house memoir

Adventures In Wonderland: A Decade of Club Culture – Sheryl Garratt 1998

Former Face editor Garratt follows the arc of acid house from American origins to Clink Street, Shoom and the Hacienda, then along the M25 to raves, Ibiza and the Criminal Justice Bill, including interviews with all the major players. Having partied centre stage through it all she treads a bouncing line between history and memoir.

Scrappy happy house history

What Kind of House Party is This: History of a Music Revolution – Jonathan Fleming, 1995

When house was still in short trousers, champion raver Fleming self-published this psychedelic monster, took the pictures, did the interviews, wrote the theme tune, sang the theme tune, visited Detroit and Chicago, broke his leg, collected a load of flyers and a tall stack of his own photos, hosed it all into an stone-age version of Photoshop and hit the button marked ‘SWIRL!’

Precision-engineered rave chronicle

Energy Flash – Simon Reynolds

Step this way for ’ardkore… A rock fan bodysnatched by techno, Reynolds filters the UK dance explosion through grown-up music journalism, going deep with genre definitions and record-by-record analysis, but always coming up for air with rich writing and great musical descriptions. Dance music’s iconoclast. Published as ‘Generation Ecstasy’ in the US.

Chi-town originator stakes his claim

House Music: The Real Story, by Jesse Saunders, 2007

Though the name came from Knuckles’ disco edits and much of the musical spark from Italy, with ‘On & On’, Jesse was the very first to get Chicago’s home-grown minimalism onto vinyl, and here he stakes his claim as the originator of house music. A well-written, detailed and personal tale, evoking Chi-town’s teenage heroes and the music biz villains who stole their thunder (including a good old Tong-lashing).

Tooled up gangster house

Class Of 88: The True Acid House Experience, Wayne Anthony, 1998

‘Alright geez, hold this huge bag of money could you, I’ve just got to fix the smoke machine.’ While you were off your tits dancing in a cowshed, Wayne, founder of the Genesis raves, was coining it hand over fist, outsmarting the filth, facing down shooters, and generally living the life of smiley. Don’t worry, there’s no modesty to spoil the fun. The Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels of acid house.

US ’90s dance boom

Rave America: New School Dancescapes – Mireille Scott,1999

Written before ecstasy hysteria pretty much criminalised the flourishing US rave scene, Scott’s solid account of America’s dayglo dance teens feels like a first act in search of a climax. It chronicles NYC technophilia, west coast rave, including some great anti-Brit backlashery, and a trip to Sasha-loving Orlando, from whence emerged the cultural treasure we call breaks.

Southern deathbed rap

Triksta: Life and Death and New Orleans Rap – Nik Cohn, 2007

Old white music writer (a short story he wrote inspired Saturday Night Fever), dying with hepatitis, settles in New Orleans, city of his personal demons, and as a musical last rites tries to connect with local rappers. It’s all doomed; their styles are too local and they don’t want to be helped. Filled with scenes of poverty, struggle, hope, despair, and that’s even before Katrina hits. Beautiful in its futility.

Straight outta Compton

Westsiders: Stories of the Boys in the Hood – William Shaw, 2001

Compton high school yearbooks have full-page ads for funeral parlours. Brit William Shaw’s South Central travelogue brings you kids whose lives are shaped by gangs, riots, drive-bys and… hip hop. Demo tapes, sad talent shows, scraping a living putting up Alkoholics stickers. The characters and scenery are vivid enough for a novel. Plus chats with Cube, Tupac and others who made it.

Hip hop’s Rosetta stone.

Rap Attack: African Rap to Global Hip Hop – David Toop, 1984

The first great book about hip hop, written back when it was def, fly and fresh as a daisy. After talking roots – African poets, soul preachers and doo-wop groups – Toop grabs Flash, Bambaataa and the rest, adding some classic white-gloved, fat boombox B-boy pics to boot. Rap Attack is essential old school literature; updated editions leave the original text and photos intact.

20 years of Black culture

Buppies, B-boys, Baps and Bohos: Notes on Post-Soul Black Culture – Nelson George, 1993

So a black yuppie, KRS-1, a Black American Princess and a bohemian Fort Greene intellectual walk into a bar… A collection of George’s Village Voice column, collating the varied characters and concerns of ’90s black American culture, along a personal 20-year timeline that winds from the Muhammad-Frazier fight to the debut of Urkel, ‘the first hip black nerd in history’.

Hip hop’s pioneers tell their tales

Yes Yes Y’all: Oral History of Hip-Hop’s First Decade – Jim Fricke & Charlie Ahearn, 2002

From the times when dinosaurs ruled the earth and Kool Herc rocked the Bronx. Back in the day – when it was fun, spelt F-U-N. Fricke and Ahearn (Wildstyle director) take us back, effortlessly, brilliantly, merging a barrage of photos and flyers with extended interviews starring a full cast of B-boys, MCs, graffiti writers and old school pioneer DJs. To the beat y’all, and it don’t stop.

DISCO

Love Saves The Day: A History of American Dance Culture 1970-1979

Tim Lawrence, 2003

A scrupulous historical document: Lawrence follows the New York disco underground with detail to suit a forensic scientist. Forget character sketches, here’s detailed biography; instead of snappy anecdotes you get careful reconstructions. There’s charm, wit and warmth here (and great photos), but the more casual reader might not hang around long enough to find it.

Painstaking NY disco history

Disco – Albert Goldman, 1978

Best-known for digging dirt on Elvis and Lennon, Goldman became fascinated with the disco underground after interviewing Francis Grasso for Penthouse. The result, an extended essay and photo album, is one of the classic texts of dance music (now an expensive collectors’ item), not least for the respect Goldman gave to a scene most people saw as a gimmick. Profound passionate and prophetic.

Revered disco timepiece

Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco – Peter Shapiro, 2005

Peter Shapiro’s forensic examination of disco is at its strongest in his early brilliant chapters detailing its genesis from Parisian speakeasies to New York bacchanals. He excels at socio-cultural theories while still managing to convey the excitement of the music and clubs he undresses. A genre history that lovingly redresses Mama Disco’s oft-maligned reputation.

Mama Disco gets the biography she deserves

The Last Party: Studio 54, disco and the culture of the night

Anthony Haden-Guest

Debonair Vanity Fair hack Haden-Guest details the monied world of upper-crust New York clubbing in a history that climaxes the day Bianca Jagger rode a horse into Studio 54. It’s the full saga of Studio itself, populated largely by people with titles, racehorses and Truman Capote’s phone number; then Palladium, Limelight and other gossipy spots. Best picture caption: “Andy Warhol is in the rear.”

New York club vulture

CLUBBING

The Manual – Ministry of Sound:

After a total of 148 years writing about dance music, Broughton and Brewster emptied their hard disks for the men from the Ministry, found some lovely photos and added some jokes. The result was this beautifully designed coffee table book, which laid the ground for their classic, Last Night a DJ Saved My Life. A perfect present for tricky nephews. Doesn’t actually contain much Ministry.

ISBN 0747276366

Elegant clubland colourbox

Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital

Most sociology is just pub-level chat disguised in impenetrable jargon; this book is wonderfully different. Not only is it written in earth language, but it’s filled with proper research, interesting facts and provocative insight. American Thornton uses her experience as a UK clubber (plus a good deal of history) to examine why the hell we love to go out dancing.

Club sociology that isn’t wank

Night Fever: Club Writing in The Face 1980-1997 – Richard Benson (ed)

The Face and i-D were the first magazines to take clubbing seriously on a regular basis. This little time capsule fills your head with bygone dancefloors, including several classic articles that were first to shine light on a scene: Stuart Cosgrove’s ‘Seventh City Techno’, Sheryl Garrat’s Chicago House report and Steven Harvey’s 1983 NYC disco snapshot.

Classic style mag clublife articles

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Seduced And Abandoned: Essays on Gay Men and Popular Music – Richard Smith, 1995

‘Pop music’s a bit like boys. I mean, I just really, really love it.’ Smith’s enthusiasm makes for sharp insight that never forgets the cheeky fun of it all. From homo svengalis and closeted pop puppets, to fag hags, queercore and heavy metal’s gender confusion, a beautifully written account of a night in a gay club and a hilarious history of the penis in pop.

Cheeky smarts about music and gayness

The Pirate’s Dilemma: How Hackers, Punk Capitalists and Graffiti Millionaires are Remixing Culture – Matt Mason, 2008

Wonderful for spirited stories of rebellious creativity; infuriating for sloppy logic and wild overclaims (who knew graffiti ‘inspired amazing new technologies’?). Arguing for an open-source world, Mason flits from a WWII jetty with its own stamps, to tagging the president’s plane, to the DJ nun who inspired David Mancuso. Great fun, brimming with colour, but in need of a remix to bring home a serious argument about copyright.

IP plunder and copyrighting wrongs

Slumberland – Paul Beatty (2008)

DJ philosophising of a higher fidelity. Beatty cracks post-racial satire like no other, and his third novel does for music what ‘Perfume’ did for stink. Trying to erase notions of ‘negritude’, Los Angeles DJ Darky gets his blackness caressed as ‘jukebox sommelier’ in wall-time Berlin while tracking missing jazz ghost ‘the Schwa’, whose chops are destined to wail over his perfect beat.

beats-per-minute poetics

UK BASS

All Crews: Journeys Through Jungle/Drum & Bass Culture – Brian Belle-Fortune, 2004

Intensive care nurse Belle-Fortune whipped up this spirited junglist scrapbook after partying his way from acid house, through hardcore, to jungle and drum’n’bass. All Crews is the closest to a classic text on the scene, fat with snippets, interviews, quotes and an extensive overview of the players, pirates and producers, including some evocative recollections and captured moments.

Spirited junglist patchwork

State of Bass : Jungle, the Story So Far – Martin James, 1997

James follows the early years of jungle, from its origins as a dark force emerging from rave, through its evolution into drum’n’bass, enlisting A Guy Called Gerald for a rousing forward. Strong on historical details, but written a little early for much in the way of perspective. The book ends on a plea for unity as he watches the genre splinter into shards of argumentative sub-scenes.

Early jungle d’n’b history

Cut ‘N’ Mix: Culture Identity and Caribbean Music – Dick Hebdige, 1987

This classic cultural history follows Caribbean music from slavery days, through the birth of ska and reggae, up to pirate radio and Smiley Culture, and ending around the emergence of ragga. Excels on reggae’s UK collisions and evolutions, from punks and dreads in Ladbroke Grove to the Hackney birth of lovers’ rock and the Coventry melting pot of Two Tone.

UK reggae culture classic

The Two Tone Story – George Marshall, 1990

A fan’s gushing love affair with ‘a stylish little number decked out on black and white checks.’ It charts Jerry Dammers’ biography and the rise of the Coventry scene, then lovingly chronicles each Two Tone release, complete with discography, scrapbook pics and details only a spotter could love.

Loving spotters guide to Coventry

SIXTIES

Wonderland Avenue: Tales of Glamour and Excess – Danny Sugerman, 1991

It’s not widely known but the seventies were nearly cancelled due to a lack of drugs. This was because Danny Sugerman had taken them all. Classic rock craziness by the one-time manager of the Doors – groupies, overdoses and cars in swimming pools. Whenever you get used to the excess, a stripling Iggy Pop arrives with three girls and a family pack of angel dust to warm things up a bit.

Original rockstar behaviour

Give the Anarchist A Cigarette – Mick Farren, 2001

An angry punk let loose at the heart of London’s sixties psychedelic love-in. Farren’s memoir paints the decade (and after) with hard photographic detail where his peers have only managed glowing romantic impressionism. Rings hilariously true.

bit more

The muck-flinging sixties

NYC

Disco Bloodbath: The Story of Michael Alig, King of the Club Kids – James St James

He came, he partied, he killed. The true story of New York superfreak club promoter Michael Alig, who killed his drug dealer for being tacky, then hailed a yellow cab to take the corpse to the river. Elegantly written by co-freak St James, it pins down the candy-coloured drug-skewed ‘Club Kids’ scene of New York misfits in a surprisingly moral tale.

NYC killer club kid shocker

Downtown – Michael Musto, 1986

Village Voice clubs scribe Michael Musto sweeps you on a mid ’80s clubland safari, armed with an Andy Warhol cover quote no less, showing off New York’s post-Studio 54 places, faces and social graces. The arty be-seen scenes of Pyramid, Mudd Club, Danceteria and Palladium are the main stops on his tour; Paradise Garage doesn’t even merit a drive-past.

Eighties NYC nightlife safari

SOUL, FUNK

Nowhere To Run – Gerri Hirshey

Along with Guralnick’s Sweet Soul Music, one of the greatest books ever written about soul music. Scores of original interviews, beautifully written and with rare passion, it will make you, like any good music book, want to own the songs it documents.

bit more

The In Crowd: The Story of Northern Soul and the Rare Soul Scene – Mike Ritson/Stuart Russell

The Northern soul scene is littered with well-meaning but rubbish books. The In Crowd is passionate, put together with style and a soul nut’s eye for detail. There’s only one book you need on Northern soul and this is it.

bit more

The Death of Rhythm and Blues – Nelson George, 1988

The classic account of how black music carved a place for itself in apartheid America, how ‘race records’ evolved into rhythm and blues, then soul and funk, helped by some wily entrepreneurs and the rapid social climb of the first black radio DJs. The ‘death in George’s story is when black music found white acceptance with the era of Motown pop.

Black music takes America

fashion style culture

Street Style – Ted Polhemus

The 1994 original was issued to Japanese fashion students at the UK border. Now this classic spotters’ guide to ye olde street tribes of England is repacked and beefed by the lovely folk at PYMCA. Insightful essays about the evolution and importance of street fashion, and stacks of brilliant pics. Thanks to Ted Polhemus Japanese cities have a shopping mall crew assigned to each chapter of the book.

tribal gathering

Leigh Bowery The Life and Times of an icon. Sue Tilley

I saw him ‘give birth’ at Heaven. Some Italian boys were so horrified they were flicking lit cigarettes at him. Now that’s what I call an impact. From Club Kids to nu-ravers, so many have fingered Bowery’s ideas, we lose sight of what a revolutionary he was. A fearless explorer, he did for dressing up what Picasso did for painting or the drum machine did for dance music. An affectionate revealing biog written by his best friend.

Life.

Garments as legend

Club Kids: From Speakeasies to Boombox and Beyond – Raven Smith (ed), 2008

A sparky volume on the club faces who’ve led pop’n’fashion, from ’20s flappers to nu-rave. A few lapses: Leigh Bowery ranks next to Duchamp as a revolutionary artist, so it’s a crime to give him less space than some of the cheeky Hoxton peacocks currently recycling his ideas. Still, this is their book and if they want to portray the history of clubbing as merely a lead-up to Boombox, fairy nuff.

Shoreditch crowns a century of clubbing

Skins & Punks: Lost Archives 1978-1985 – Gavin Watson, 2008

Subculture-liggers will grab this as an eye-spy style manual. In fact the skinhead thing is close to irrelevant; better to see these photos as tender and revealing portraits of a gang of mates tumbling through life together. A first tattoo, at the fairground, outside dad’s, after school at my house… The last pic shows the day the world changed thanks to acid house (Gavin’s next book!).

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The Look: New Romantics – Dave Rimmer, 2003

With their post-glam, post-punk love of Bowie, Roxy and Berlin, the New Romantics definitely did their bit for the European eyeliner mountain. The Blitz kids also launched eerie synth futurism, scads of proper pop and the self-transformational genius of Leigh Bowery. Rimmer’s clued-up account details the movement’s influences and influence to show the substance behind the foundation. Forgive the clumsy ’80s pastiche design and buckle that swash.

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MUSICOLOGY

The Recording Angel: Explorations in Phonography – Evan Eisenberg, 2005

Before recording, to hear your favourite tune took a special occasion and a roomful of musicians, and owning or collecting music was unimaginable. In this quirky and thought-provoking treasure Eisenberg muses on the culture-quake of records and the love affairs with music they made possible. Originally published in 1987, the new edition adds digital musings.

Our love affair with recorded music

Will Pop Eat Itself: Pop Music in the Soundbite Era – Jeremy J Beadle, 1993

The guy who invented the sampler laughed when someone suggested it might be the future of music. Written in the aftermath of the ’90s remix revolution, with a resolutely chart-based pop perspective, this chronicles the rise of post-modern musical recycling, from scratching, through Stars on 45 pop-medleys and Coldcut’s cut-and-paste collages to the rise of house and techno.

Soundbites and sampling in pop

Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain – Oliver Sacks, 2007

What’s your problem? Fear of music? tunes cause you pain? it’s all just noise? Call Oliver – ‘My wife’s not a hat’ – Sacks, famous neurologist, to help and explain with odd tales of melodic malfunction. Sadly it’s all genteel case histories with a classical bent – he blithely ignores the millions of brains who’ve done their own weekend pharma-musico-neurological experiments.

Star neurologist on music

Big Bangs: The Story of Five Musical Discoveries That Changed Musical History – Howard Goodall, 2001

Not content with writing the Blackadder theme tune, Goodall is on a mission to educate the masses in the mysteries of classical music, focusing on five ‘big bangs’: the inventions of written music, the piano, opera, recording and some cleverness called equal temperament, the secret that keeps the world in tune. A fascinating intro to the principles behind all music.

The foundations of (classical) music

This Is Your Brain on Music: Understanding a Human Obsession – Daniel J. Levitin

Explain the unspeakable magic when rhythms enter a human. How can vibrating air build emotions to bring you to your knees? Did music come before language? Exciting questions with astonishing answers. And Levitin, a neuroscientist rock producer, is the man to give you them. But his writing travels like treacle, his explanations meander endlessly. Dejected, you lose interest and put some music on.

Music, language, rhythms and emotion

SOCIAL HISTORY

Satan In The Dance Hall: Rev. John Roach Straton, Social Dancing, and Morality in 1920s New York City – Ralph Giordano, 2008

Once they’d hoodwinked the country into banning alcohol, America’s fundamentalists targeted dancing. Lincoln Nebraska outlawed eye contact between dance partners, while many cities banned ‘animal’ (ie black) dances, like the scandalous Charleston. Forgive the lifeless academic prose, this is a book of amazing revelations, leaving no doubt that jazz culture was more threatening than punk.

the original dance revolution

Social Dancing in America vol 1 & 2 – Ralph G Giordano, 2006

The author’s passion is clear, so it’s a shame he’s written this truly epic two-volume history in a style so neutral it might be aimed at Vulcans (at one point he even stops to define ‘house party’). From 1607 up to the twist, it’s an unbeatable academic reference, packed with social context and cultural insight. There’s not much thread to pull you along however, and it creaks badly once it reaches disco.

academic history of dance

Swing Under The Nazis: Jazz as a Metaphor for Freedom – Mike Zwerin

Quiffs, platforms, cut-off zoot suits, sunglasses and pop-socks, set off with a Neville Chamberlain umbrella and a smirk: les Zazous of wartime Paris kick-started club culture with swing records in secret cellars. Along with jazz musicans across Europe they showed up the Nazis as the squarest, grouchiest daddios in history. A laid-back look from American Parisian Zwerin.

Jazz sticks it to Hitler

The Twist: The Story of the Song and Dance That Changed the World – Jim Dawson, 1995

Despite the cancer of Strictly Come Dancing, most of us shake it without worrying about the rules; we can thank the twist. A bum-wiggling transatlantic dance craze, it ushered in the shocking idea of dancing without a partner, showed the new power of youth culture and niftily de-coupled dancefloors forever. Along the way there’s racism, payola, mafia dons and a ton of great stories.

Screwy dance revolution

Teenage: The Creation of Youth – Jon Savage, 2007

The teenager is a post-war creation, but what were the ingredients? American industry spat out ‘juvenile delinquents’ as early as 1810, while in Victorian London gangs of hooligan scamps ran wild. WWI thinned a generation of dreamers and turned the survivors wild and weird, leaving the Hitler Youth to take advantage. When American swing and rock’n’roll turned up, the job was already done.

Glorious prehistory of the teenager

Low Life: Drinking, Drugging, Whoring, Murder, Corruption, Vice and Miscellaneous Mayhem in Old New York – Luc Sante, 1998

In 1860s New York, the poorest drank poisonous alcohol from rubber tubes and whole families lived in the cupboard under your stairs. ‘Suicide Saloons’ had hatches in the floor for the cleaners to drop bodies in the river, and warring fire brigades would leave buildings burning while they fought their rivals. The bare-knuckled reality of ‘Gangs of New York’-era Manhattan.

Wonderfully grim 1860s NYC

Out Of It; A Cultural History of Intoxication – Stuart Walton, 2001

Not enough drug books are written by wine writers. Walton’s thesis is that getting fucked up is a human right and a biological imperative, and he shows us piss-head hamsters and silver Edwardian ladies’ syringes to prove it. He treats legal and illegal drugs alike, arguing with a flawless objectivity that mainlining skag is not so far removed from necking too much Kenko.

A refreshing look at refreshments

Cocaine: A Definitive History – Dominic Streatfeild, 2002

Your gram of toot left an acre of virgin rainforest drowned in petrochemicals and made sure a peasant family can’t grow their own food. Sobering tales, smugglers adventures and a deal of hidden history to bore your mates with in this ripsnorting read about the devil’s dandruff. Not least, the truth about Coca-Cola’s central role in the worldwide trade in blow. Not to be sniffed at.

Full speed down the white line

TECH HISTORY

How to Wreck a nice beach: The Machine Speaks – Dave Tomkins

The Vocoder started life as a phone scrambler for Churchill – five tons of valves and some self-destruct double decks, went on via late funk, early electro, Kubrick, Stalin and the Muppets – and ended up as the autotune chip that powers X-Factor and wibbles out of every sodcaster’s mobile. A bonkers story, but an exhausting read – as if in tribute to his material Tomkins writes so obliquely you have to decode every sentence.

The amazing life of the Vocoder

Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music Paperback – Greg Milner, 2010

Is recorded music ever the real thing? Or always better? A mesmerising tale of man’s relationship with music, detailing the leaps of recording technology and the genius of producers who made the studio their artform. You learn how the industry’s obsession with volume prevented CDs reaching their potential, and is marching us into a world of over-compressed flatness. Curious, fascinating, poetic.

Curious history of recorded formats

The Long Player Goodbye – Travis Elborough, 2008

Wagnerian epics to triple concept albums: the LP brought it all home. A smart history of listening, from 33 triumphing over 78 in the speed wars, up to the iPod uprising. Great details – his charity shops theory of tastelessness, the scandalous first edit (an operatic high C), even the well-worn pop stories feel fresh. But Elborough don’t dance: DJ-mix albums, a key innovation, get no mention.

Charting the album

Old rare new: The Independent Record Shop,

In Lincoln’s ‘Rockabilly Shop’ Colin and Mary Chapman sold me battered James Brown albums. Here’s a book of people who measure their time on earth in dusty vinyl: collectors sleeping in warehouses, shopkeepers too attached to their stock, handmade signs, groaning shelves. Inspired by a US road trip (film to follow), and centred on a touching memoir from Bob Stanley. Lovely and loving.

The record shop has its day

TECHNO

Modulations: A history of electronic music – Peter Shapiro (ed), 2000

The least inviting book I own – actually a ‘multi-media exploration.’ If martians read this they’d think dance music was an industrial process done in vacuum chambers to rigorous health and safety standards by academics in white coats and Polyveldt shoes. There might be some interesting things in here: interviews with Robert Moog and Giorgio Moroder perhaps, but the layout is designed to appeal to barcode machines, so I have no idea.

electronic chronicle killed by design

Techno Rebels: The Renegades of Electronic Funk – Dan Sicko, 1999

The allure of Detroit to eggheads means most books on techno are written for cyborgs. Sicko’s sharpened pen cuts through the crap, with great humour and precision, finding the human stories behind all that Third Wave futurology. Later chapters spread thin into a global checklist of techno’s many tendrils, but his journeys through Detroit’s pre-techno scene are outstanding.

Fine Detroit techno primer

GENRES, sounds AND LABELS

Ninja Tune: 20 Years of Beats & Pieces – Stevie Chick and Peter Quicke, 2010

‘We are ninja, not geisha’. Ninjatune was always about stealthy insurrection more than anything else, as it snatched the hip hop aesthetic for the UK and took it into the future and beyond. From Coldcut to Scruff to Roots Manuva, the label’s big guns paved the way for legions of research mixologists. The best labels have an unmistakeable identity, and this jam-packed retrospective nails it beautifully.

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BLACK DOG COSMIC BOOK?

As definitive a book of long-haired German Kosmiche freaks as anyone could desire, packed with knowledgable essays and an abundance of information: band by band, label by label, plus enough tripped-out psychedelic artwork to set off most smoke alarms. Its only fault is a lack of discographies, but an ausgezeichnet Buch nonetheless. Worth buying alone for a shaggy shot of pre-haircut Kraftwerk.

Tangerine Dream posing by a wall of computers.

WAX POETICS ANTHOLOGY VOL 1, 2008

If DJhistory smoked bigger doobies, knew Pete Rock, lived in Fort Greene and did capoeira at the weekend it would be Wax Poetics. We’d be kicking back with Idris Muhammad, Bernard Purdie, the RZA, Prince Paul, cat’s like that. We’d have James Brown’s drummers, graffiti nostalgia, and acres record porn. The best of the studious magazine’s first six years. Fine, detailed, earnest and pure.

WAX POETICS ANTHOLOGY VOL 2, 2009

meets more powerhouse musicians who keep the samplers in business, plus the intense-looking beatmasters who’ve done the sampling. Scrupulous collector-stiffening pieces on Sun Ra, Deodato, Randy Muller and 90s A&R wunderkind Dante Ross, and much more. Danny Krivit picks out 12s, and DJ Premier confesses he’s a Smiths fan. Mind you, I still think ‘Wax Poetic’ would have been a cleverer name.

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The Sound of Philadelphia – Tony Cummings, 1975

With the march of an obsessive, and some friendly words from the musicians, Cummings traces Philly soul power from its gospel and doo-wop roots, up to Gamble and Huff, Sigma Sound Studios, the O’Jays and MFSB – ‘a rag-bag assortment of leather-capped soul brothers and near-sighted Jews, renegade jazzmen and moonlighting symphonians.’ With some less-than-household names for the spotters.

Dedicated Philly groove

Warp: Labels Unlimited – Rob Young, 2005

It was originally going to be called Warped records, trivia fans. A scrap-packed coffee-table compendium on the Sheffield label, from the bleep era, through the ‘intelligent’ techno rave-backlash, up to cutting edge filmmakers. Despite a section on Sheffield’s electronic prehistory, it’s fairly light on context. Lashings of Designers’ Republic artwork and a solid 1989-2005 discography though.

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1000 Songs to Change Your Life – Will Fulford-Jones (ed), 2008

The inevitable lists are well wrapped in engaging essays, as Time Out guidemaster Fulford-Jones collects music for goosebumps, adding smart top tens (Thatcher’s Britain, dance crazes, awkward time signatures…) and clips from the T.O. cupboard. Many of its 1,577 tracks will be old news to obsessives like you, but there are plenty of off-piste trails among them.

Bucket-list xxxxxxx

The Olivetti Chronicles: Three Decades of Life and Music – John Peel, 2008

When he died, a generation (or three) were as bereaved as if he were family, such was his place in our musical lives. So here’s another chance, via 30 years of his articles, to let the great man’s wearily mellow tones and life-affirming sarkiness infuse your evenings. All you need to complete the picture is a can of Tizer, some maths homework and your finger on a cassette-recorder pause button.

Keep it Peel

The Human League: Perfect Pop – Peter Nash, 1982

Written like an Ultravox video, every sentence swirls around in dry ice and contrast lighting, wearing a batwing blouse. Though clearly a chart-friendly cash-in there’s also a solid biog in here, including interviews with Oakey and the girls, quotes and clippings from the Heaven 17 half of the band, plus a decent discography and clever Martin Rushent telling production stories.

No longer working as a waitress

DJing

Danny Rampling

Why settle for just learning to DJ when you could learn the secrets of success and positive thinking at the same time? On the one hand this is a comprehensive DJ manual written by a spiritual figurehead of house music, filled with clear tutorials and solid insider advice. Turn to the second half and it’s a self-help programme written by The Danny Lama himself. Follow it to the letter and Mr Rampling will, ‘personally GUARANTEE your life will take on a whole new level of depth, happiness and success.’

DJ yourself into a brighter future

DJ Culture Ulf Poschardt

I was a wanker when I was a student; this book has much the same faults: it believes everything that it’s read on the subject, adds nothing new, regurgitates it with the best pseudo-intellectual vocabulary it can lay its hands on, and expects you to admire it for being original. Anyone who references Hegel and Descartes to explain DJing is not really at the same party as everyone else.

Scholarly guff with Nietzsche in the mix

superstar DJs Here we go

‘Yeah, I used to be a superstar DJ. Do you want fries with that?’ As Mixmag Editor through the ’90s, Dom had the beans to spill. A personal record-bags-to-riches-to-ditches journey, from the rise of Sasha, Cream and Ministry of Tescos, to Millennium Eve when things finally went all Paul Oakenfold. The icing on the cake is that since few jocks racked up any catalogue assets, most are destined to haunt Chinese superclubs until they die. Great, on their dosh, dirt, snort and skirt – Sasha mislaying a car, his mate Sparrow burying squillions in his gran’s garden, and the truth about how drugs actually keep Dave Beer alive.

Confessions of the superstar DJs

Last Night A DJ Saved My Life: The History of The Disc Jockey – Bill Brewster & Frank Broughton, 2006

Bill and Frank’s classic chronicle digs deep to find DJing started in 1906, the Nazis invented clubbing and Jimmy Savile be a hero to all should. Arguing that DJs not musicians are pop music’s true revolutionaries, it details with love all the scenes that matter. The new edition is beefed up with entirely new chapters covering techno, acid house, Ibiza, jungle, UK garage and cosmic disco

Extended remix of the classic dance history

How to DJ (Properly)

Best-selling DJing bible, fat like a car manual with pictures and diagrams, taking you from first day at school to beat-juggling and stadiums. Practical, no-bullshit advice with plenty of laughs. Bill and Frank instill a healthy attitude in the young and/or jaded, putting a love of music and personal taste above all. And who could miss ‘How to get into a helicopter without looking foolish’?

The Haynes manual of DJing

The Manual (How To Have A Number One The Easy Way) – Bill Drummond & Jimmy Cauty 1988

Back when number one was tops, this tiny book told you exactly how to get there – smash-by-hit. From those nice KLF boys, it’s a mash-up of devious cynicism, industry wisdom and gleeful Top-of-the-Pops-loving innocence. It’s also an uncannily accurate prediction of the sample-based no-experience-necessary future of music-making. I left a million quid on that table, anyone seen it?

KLF pranksters’ pop insurrection

Design After Dark: The Story of Dancefloor Style – Cynthia Rose, 1991

The story of the eighties club scene told through its visuals, from the early days of i-D and the Face’s influential Neville Brody right through to acid house and the post-house graphics of Trevor Jackson and Derek Yates. Filled with flyers, posters, record sleeves and magazine layouts, plus biographies of the era’s leading designers, it’s essential reading for fans of graphic art.

Nightlife on paper

PARTYING

Last Nights Party

“Yeah luv, it’s for a magazine/website/casting couch/really important wank – could you just get your knickers off, snog your friend and smear tequila on your boobies.” For Merlin Bronques it not only gets him laid, but thanks to lastnightsparty.com it’s made him famous, too. Erectile images of wasted kids and lurking slebs at slutty Williamsburg parties; with better tattoos, stronger drugs and skinnier, more expensive genes than you’ll ever fit into. All those times I took my camera to clubs, I knew I should have put some film in it.

EDIT

“Yeah, it’s for a magazine/website/really important wank – just get your knickers off, snog your friend and smear tequila on your boobies.” For Merlin Bronques it not only gets him laid, but thanks to lastnightsparty.com it’s made him famous. Slutty images of kids wasted at Williamsburg parties; with better tattoos, stronger drugs and skinnier, more expensive genes than you’ll ever fit into.

Happy Daze: A Personal Insight Into The Acid House Era – Samantha Williams

It’s great looking at pictures from your rave-past, great to make a personal album with flyers and stories. But to give it a 30 quid price tag? Sam runs RaveReunited.co.uk and this is her time capsule, mostly of the early ’90s free parties. It’s zigzaggy jpegs, and acres of average snaps. But though the images are flat the moments are timeless, and hey, isn’t that what it was all about?

Discombobulated: Dispatches From The Wrong Side – Simon Morrison (2010)

We were somewhere around Brighton on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. Morrison’s low-level international mayhem is not quite as out-there as he thinks. Still, he writes with real panache and the scenery flits by too fast for you to care. As he lurches between far-flung clubs and surreal celebs (Judith Chalmers) he turns a phrase like an intoxicated David Attenborough.

MANCHESTER

24-hour Party People – Tony Wilson,

Manchester’s slippery culture uncle traces the proud, daft idealism of Factory and the Haçienda – all the way to Sean Ryder selling Eddy Grant’s sofa for crack. No-one enjoys pricking Tony Wilson’s pompous Baudelaire-quoting ego more than Wilson himself, and for hilarity and detail his mythologised memoir outstrips even the glorious lunacy of the movie.

075222025X

The Haçienda Must Be Built – Jon Savage (ed), 1992

Despite the fact most of them were mooching around Rafters in dirty overcoats Rob Gretton was convinced Manchester kids needed a glossy New York disco. The rest is all hit and myth. A completist’s account, with joyous pics of the hallowed dancefloor, interviews with everyone involved, acres of Peter Saville flyers and complete event listings to May ’92.

The Haçienda

“We had a fookin’ blast, if only we’d known it was our own money.” Hooky manages to rewrite this sentence enough times to fill a whole book. There are solid anecdotes and much detail (a complete events list, including some DJ set lists). But as he sets the record straight, and you wade through talk of licensing boards, bar managers and operating costs, you realise you much preferred the legend.

Do Not Sell at Any Price – The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World’s Rarest 78rpm Records

You’re not a true collector until you’ve battled a river for records. DJ Shadow tells a story about rescuing private press discs from a flooded basement while the Colorado river is coursing in. Amanda Petrusich goes a few steps deeper – her search for the world’s rarest records sees her scuba diving in the Milwaukee River, scrambling in its ‘brown and nearly opaque’ water for country blues records from the 1920s. History notes that Paramount Records, an offshoot of a furniture manufacturer (and no relation to the film company) once had a busy pressing plant on the riverbank. Paramount specialised in the street-level blues releases that are now most highly prized by collectors, and in 2013 someone paid $37,100 for Tommy Johnson’s ‘Alcohol and Jake Blues’, one of only two copies known to exist. Petrusich is risking life and limb in a wetsuit because there’s a chance she might strike gold. Apparently, when they closed the pressing plant in the 1940s, disgruntled Paramount employees spent their last day frisbeeing the remaining discs into the waves. She imagines these treasures, ‘deteriorating at the bottom of the Milwaukee, providing shelter for crawfish alongside crushed Schlitz cans and rusted car parts.’

On her mission to sequence the collecting gene, we visit record fairs, reissue labels and private listening rooms, meeting entertaining oddballs with immaculately organised shelving. Petrusich’s collectors are from the rarified world of 78s – those brittle shellac 10-inches that spun round at double speed (78rpm) and were phased out by the 1950s. Thanks to their age and fragility, they’re so rare that some copies are the only ones in existence.

While researching a story on the resurgence of vinyl, someone told her ‘I can introduce you to plenty of guys who are obsessed with LPs, but if you really want to talk to someone who’s totally bonkers, you need a 78 collector.’ This breed is so rooted in their well-bounded world, few are interested in any music after the ’40s. But they have stories, emotions and dilemmas any vinyl junkie will recognise. Why this and not this? Why the record and not just the recording? Are you a treasure hunter or a preservationist? What’s the difference between an archive and a hoard? When should you say no to an expensive purchase? Or as collector John Heneghan put it, ‘I knew it would be a financial burden beyond what any rational mind would consider a wise decision.’ Some are strange loners; others more communally minded: ‘I could not live with myself as a “collector” without at least one person I could share sounds with,’ says one. Do Not Sell At Any Price is a meditation on the soul of record collecting.

Aside from the nutters, collecting has serious implications – collectors’ subjective tastes are what have defined our view of past music styles: ‘The music that gets collected is also, by default, the music that is preserved and endures.’ She quotes blues historian Elijah Wald: ‘As white urbanites discovered the ‘race records’ of the 1920s and 1930s they reshaped the music to fit their own tastes and desires, creating a rich mythology that often bears little resemblance to the reality of the musicians they admired. The more records an artist had sold in 1928, the less he or she was valued in 1958.’

Immersed in pre-vinyl music, Petrusich brilliantly conjures the early days of the recording industry, a time when America was on the move, with south migrating north and country folk pouring into the cities, bringing the blues and countless other rural styles with them, with recent immigrants throwing global flavours into the mix. The first record companies made the most of this haphazard melting pot, sitting anyone with a guitar and fiddle – or a jug or a banjo, a balalaika or a laughing mule – down in the studio. This produced a wealth of oddities, and one of the great joys of the book is the stream of lovable obscurities it gives you.

The records she picks out are time capsules of human quirks. Wind up your Spotify and wallow in the utter lament of Geeshie Wiley’s ‘Last Kind Word Blues’. Or hear the sheer god-given urgency of Rev FW McGee in ‘Fifty Miles of Elbow Room’, as he and his choir belt out the good word fit to bust. Marvel at the strangeness of Arthur Miles’ ‘Lonely Cowboy’, which sounds conventional enough until Arthur spits bars of eery polyphonic throat-singing, as if he’s straight out of Mongolia. Like a flash of eye contact with a long-dead face in an old photo, these tracks give you human connections that dissolve a century. 1922’s ‘Okeh Laughing Song’ is one of the daftest things ever recorded – a couple of people cracking each other up for three life-affirming minutes. And you have to hear ‘Flat Wheel Train Blues’ from 1930, where Red Gay and Jack Wellman use their guitar and fiddle to create the steady beat and mournful whistle of a steam train. With their Appalachian drawls rambling over this locomotive rhythm track, it’s as as sparse and motorik as any Kraftwerk. Towards the end they spot a lonely mule who races the train, mewling at being left behind. ‘You’d holler too like that if you was to get left,’ says Jack.

As well as these gems she directs you to archivists and compilers who offer further treasures: like the Secret Museum of Mankind, or the Excavated Shellac and Dust to Digital websites. One delight was Opika Pende; Africa at 78rpm, a hundred recordings from 1909 to the ’60s. Do Not Sell At Any Price is a door into a wide world of long-gone music you’ve probably never bothered with, but that you’ll be grateful to have heard. They may be scratchy and trebly, but these selections have a humanity that deepens your feel for the early twentieth century. 78 collectors look down on the rest, suggesting it’s ‘comparable to collecting pebbles versus collecting diamonds’ By bringing you tunes filled with exuberance and life, Amanda Petrusich shows you there’s some truth in this.

And her adventures with the more bonkers end of the collecting spectrum are hilarious in any case, as these 78-hunters epitomise the mad optimism of the crate digger. To help her find those records in the depths of the Milwaukee River, she brings in someone with expert experience. ‘Steve worked part-time rescuing golf balls from the bottoms of nearby lakes; he knew a little about blindly digging around in mud.’ Frank Broughton

James Hamilton’s Disco Pages 1975-82

DJ and journalist James Hamilton was a force to be reckoned with, a 6’8″ giant of the British music press. His review columns for Record Mirror stitched together the community that became the UK dance industry. On his death in 1996, Eddie Gordon, head of A&R at Manifesto, underlined Hamilton’s importance: ‘He started a kind of national awareness among DJs. Via James’s columns people were able to find a link and find out what other DJs were playing.’ Paying similar tribute, Pete Tong praised the authority of his reviews. ‘He was drawing on such a wealth of knowledge that even if you didn’t agree with what he said, you had to respect his opinion.’ DMC founder Tony Prince simply reckoned, ‘The music business owes him a standing ovation.’

James Hamilton’s Disco Pages 1975-82, published by Greg Wilson’s SWS imprint, gathers seven years of Hamilton’s columns in a single volume. This labour of love was put together by Mike Atkinson, building on the amazing online resource jameshamiltonsdiscopage.com. Mike notes how the columns – along with Hamilton’s forceful personality – helped form the tastes of a generation of DJs, and actually drove the development of the craft in the UK. ‘He had a vision of how he wanted dance culture to be, and he willed that into being.’

Hamilton was a posh and imposing figure, a pedant and perfectionist. His DJ career began with a residency at the Kray Twins’ Knightsbridge club, Esmerelda’s Barn, and throughout his career his upper-class connections meant gigs playing debutante balls in country houses. In the mid-’60s he was in the States working for Seltaeb, promoting Beatles’ merchandise, but also indulging his love of soul and meeting stars including Sam Cook, Diana Ross and James Brown, whose first UK visit he helped arrange. On his return, as ‘Doctor Soul’ he was resident at famed mod spot The Scene, released a soul compilation on Guy Steven’s label Sue, started contributing expert black music reviews to Record Mirror, and set up as an early mobile DJ. But it was for his later 1979-84 residency at Gullivers, London’s premier funk and soul club, that his DJing is best remembered.

His greatest contribution was to popularise mixing among British DJs, a technique which was de rigeur in most American clubs by the mid ’70s, but which didn’t catch on in the UK until the rise of house. The well-financed Embassy club had brought American mixing DJ Greg James over in 1978, and he taught several Brits to mix, including northern soul star Ian Levine, who was evolving his sets towards disco. But with few exceptions, well into the ’80s, most British club DJs aspired to the slick patter of a radio jock, and talking between records was seen as an essential part of the job.

So, as a forceful evangelist of the wonders of mixing, it was James Hamilton who drove its development in the UK more than anyone. Already aware of the possibilities of beatmatching, his passion for ‘New York style mixing,’ was ignited after seeing Larry Levan at the Paradise Garage. Soon afterwards, in 1979, determined to bring UK DJs more in line with their US cousins, he organised a field trip to New York for UK jocks to experience the Garage and meet Levan. One pilgrim, DJ Froggy of the ‘Soul Mafia’ collective, declared himself a convert, and armed with the first Technics 1200s in the country, became a poster boy for the new style.

At the start of the same year Hamilton also began noting the tempo of all the tracks he reviewed, explaining the value of this in a piece titled ‘To BPM or not to BPM’. And while mixing remained contentious, with Neil Rushton documenting both sides of the argument in ‘Does the Talking Have to Stop?’ in Disco magazine, it was Hamilton’s dogged BPMing of records that inspired thousands of British DJs to give it a try. He offered mixing tips and even suggested mixable record combinations in his ‘Mixmaster’ playlists. And while Pete Waterman beat him by two weeks to be the first to publish BPMs, his were far more accurate. He was so scrupulous with his stopwatch he’d even note fluctuations in a record that might upset a mix, (certain jazz-funk tracks clocked up a dozen different BPMs).

It was because he wrote explicitly for DJs, reviewing records with a DJ’s understanding, and used his distinctive ‘squiggly, diddly, boppy writing style,’ (as Mixmag’s David Davies described it) to bring the music to life, that James Hamilton had so much influence. As dance music evolved, he was fiercely progressive, taking the right side of history as black music became more electronic, and introducing numerous new charts as the music he loved split into distinct genres, such as ‘Futurist’ reflecting the rise of synthpop, or ‘Boystown,’ charting the tastes of the UK’s gay clubs.

All this makes James Hamilton’s Disco Pages 1975-82 an essential chronicle of the British disco scene, filled with charts and reviews and nuggets of history with a similar richness of detail as Vince Aletti’s Disco Files. It’s taken five years to put together, with the reviews organised monthly, multiple indexes and a playlist for every month. Not to mention forewords by Norman Cook, and Greg Wilson, whose research has done so much to highlight Hamilton’s importance. There’ll be a second volume in a year’s time covering 1983-89.

Remembering James Hamilton – by Les Adams

Les Adams was a club DJ and DMC in-house remixer – and one half of dance hitmakers LA Mix – who helped James Hamilton splice together his renowned end-of-year megamixes on London’s Capital Radio every New Year through the ’80s. Les shared memories of his great friend on the DjHistory forum.

James was my best and dearest friend for many years and was best man at my first wedding. We produced the Capital Radio New Years Eve mix tapes together and were constant companions as judges on the DMC World Mixing Championships.

James’s role in promoting the use of BPM was invaluable and without him many DJs would have remained fumbling in the dark. A lot of people back then considered it cheating – but that’s like saying a motor mechanic doesn’t need to organise his tools in some sort of order and can have them all mixed up in a box. The best mechanic knows exactly where the 10mm spanner is so he doesn’t have to fumble around looking for it.

I used to teach mixing skills at The Academy of Contemporary Music. BPM was always the first lesson and those who bothered with it were the ones who got the best results. BPM is about being organized. Some rhythms can be deceptive and give the illusion of being faster or slower than they actually are, so the BPM is the only way to get an accurate measure of pace. BPM also suggests tunes that may mix together that you wouldn’t have thought of otherwise. For example, ‘Sweet Child of mine’ by Guns ‘n Roses is about 126bpm, the same as Dennis Ferrer’s ‘Hey Hey’. If I hadn’t calculated the BPM I would never have guessed the tempo is the same. Experimenting in this way could often lead to some very interesting possibilities, and it’s how James and I constructed the Capital Radio mixes, where we would mix everything from Kylie and Pet Shop Boys to Elvis Presley and the Clash, all seamlessly. We used the BPM to suggest tunes that just might mix together, all we had to do was try it and see.

The best mixes are those that follow the musical structure or use it correctly to make things happen at the right time. A good mix is when a bassline, vocal or break is timed to perfection. None of this happens by accident, it requires an understanding of the beat and bar structure of every tune, or it will go wrong. Excessive use of the varispeed is one of my pet hates. Or not following the 4/4 bar structure, mixing vocals over vocals and key clashes. Sometimes DJs forget that music has rules, just as a language has punctuation, sentences and paragraphs.

James’s home was a record library, every room was absolutely covered floor to ceiling with records in racks, shelving and crates. To make extra space for the records, he ripped out his kitchen appliances and cooked on a small stove in between racks of vinyl. His bedroom and half his bed were also covered in records. There was a record deck and a typewriter at the side of his bed where he used to write his reviews. He had a huge 13×2-inch letterbox cut in the front door so records would fit through it.

He was a keen photographer and had thousands of photos he took at music events. I don’t know what happened to them, but they alone could be made into a historical account of soul music and venues.

When James and I made the Capital FM house party mixes, he used to load his car up with countless boxes of records, both 7- and 12-inch, and arrive at the studio with every bit of space in his Nissan ZX crammed with vinyl.

Every sleeve was covered with his wonderful reviews and comments all over them. I’d tease him that writing all over the sleeves was going to devalue the records, but I wasn’t taking into account the value of his writing. He never intended to sell them in any case – what mattered to him was the music in the grooves. He said he needed a reminder of each record: ‘I’m buggered if I can remember what everything sounds like!’ So his reviews were as useful to him as they were to other DJs.

The New Year mixes were produced for Capital FM in London, although the last one we did together was for BBC Radio One. I did all the mixing with James making the track selections. He had great ears and a good understanding of which tracks would work together, especially when mixing cross genre.

We used his records as they were all mint and mine were well played in clubs. He passed me the tracks and I mixed them on two Technics SL1200s with Ortofon OM Pro styli, The mixer was a GLI 3990 and we recorded and edited on a Revox PR99 2 track open reel. We then dubbed to DAT for broadcast because the master tapes had hundreds of splices and we were worried one of them might come apart during playback! We used countless reels of Ampex 456 tape and ate a lot of food!

James was always late for everything. Even at his funeral, at his request, he arrived late. If you wanted him to be somewhere at 9pm, you’d tell him to be there at 5! I recall one occasion when he was due to be at my studio to work on a Capital mix at 3pm on a Friday… he eventually arrived at 9pm Sunday and proclaimed, ‘Sorry I’m Late! It’s too late to start working now and I’m hungry, let’s go and have dinner!’ The only thing he was ever on time for was his Record Mirror deadlines!

My most surreal memory of James was sitting with him and Flava Flav of Public Enemy after a DMC convention listening to them discuss doo-wop music! Two more different looking people you could not imagine, yet totally on the same musical wavelength with mutual and total respect for each other. At the end of the conversation, James peered at the huge clock the rapper used to wear on a chain round his neck and said, ‘So that’s how you know what time it is!’

James was a very honest, loyal and dedicated man who loved life, music, food, the countryside, and his wife Sally, who he married when they both knew he was dying of cancer. Sadly, she passed away shortly after him, I suspect of a broken heart.

He was forthright and often brutally honest in his views and could be infuriating at times, but nobody could wish for a better friend. Never one to give false praise, he was always the first person I went to for an opinion on my music, or anything else for that matter, knowing I would get an honest answer.

James was hugely admired by his colleagues and by most people in the music industry – except maybe those who got a less than favourable review in his column – but then they didn’t know the man behind the words. As much as he could be scathing in his remarks, he would also rave about a record he liked and most DJs and music fans would buy a record without hearing it, based only on his trusted word.

He was a big man in every way, stature and personality. I still miss being able to pick up the phone and chat to him about music, food or any other topic. He lived life to the full.

I loved him dearly and miss him to this day. If there is a funk heaven, my wish is to end up on the same cloud so we can once again sit and chat about music… and eat good food!

RIP my dear friend. Professionally and personally, nobody could ever replace you.

– Les Adams.

The Radiophonic Workshop saw the sines

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

Interviewed by Bill, 6.11.2018

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

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

What involvement had you had in studios prior to that?  
PH: Oh lots.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reversed chants lead the way in this 1968 track made for a TV drama about a robot uprising.

A handy DIY guide to making electronic music, ’60s-style.

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

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

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

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

RL: Analytical.

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

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

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

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

PH: And there was musique concrete too.

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

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

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

PH: Stands alone really.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RL: They were Synthi 100’s really.

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

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

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

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

PH: Oh really!

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

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

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

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

PH: It was the first sampler really.

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

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

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

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

PH: Sounds like one of my school reports!

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

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

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

PH: That’s the paradox.

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

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

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

Matthew Collin was wise to our Altered State

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

Interviewed by Bill in London, 7.3.2018

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read some of Matthew’s Dream Machine interviews here

Martyn Ware built Electric Foundations

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

Interviewed by Bill in London, 28.5.13

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fred Deakin spent a life in clubs

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

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.

“>Buy tickets for Fred Deakin’s Club Life here –>

Boy George broke all taboos

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

Interviewed by Bill, 07.01.2002

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Taboo cast on Today show, USA.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Boy George playlist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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