The votes have been counted, the adjudicators have adjudicated and the king has abdicated (subject to confirmation). The number one slot on this year’s Furtive 50 goes to the Mancunian scourge of worldwide discos, Ruf Dug, aided by the delightful Private Joy, with their wistful paean to streetsoul, ‘Don’t Give Up’. We caught up with the Dugster, tending to his ferrets on the allotment, and asked him a few questions. Answers (and the full rundown of the Furtive 50) below.
So tell me about the genesis of Don’t Give In? How did you meet Private Joy and how did the tune come about? I genuinely can’t remember making the beat. To me the Rhodes sounds like ‘Summer Madness’ and the piano solo is a cross between ‘Promenade Sentimentale’ from the Diva soundtrack and Moby. I sent an instrumental demo to Gerd Janson with a bunch of other tracks and this was the one he was really crazy for, but I couldn’t quite see it myself. It was his mega A&R skills that led to the vocal, he texted me one day saying, “Do you know anyone who can sing on it?” Private Joy is Pops from Lovescene who I’d previously collaborated with on ‘Make This Right’. This track seemed tailor made for her genius.
How do you make music, is there a set process? Do you fiddle about with machines until something emerges or is it a bit more focussed than that? Yeah it’s just constant fiddling and hoping that what I’m doing manages to keep my attention held long enough to finish the fucker. If I can get to 80% done without being totally bored of the tune I can usually finish it then. I’m definitely not one of these producers who has their workflow nailed and bangs out an album a week.
When you’re making tracks/songs in the studio what are you visualising; how other people will hear them playing in a club, playing on the radio? Or what? I don’t know if I visualise much when I’m actually making the tracks… Defo more moods and feelings rather than images and even then I think the feelings are kind of abstract: dark/light, up/down…
How did you get into dance music in the first place? Xmas 1984, got my first ever Walkman and a Now That’s What I Call Music tape, put it on and heard Giorgio Moroder & Phil Oakey’s ‘Together In Electric Dreams’ and that synth line at the start totally reprogrammed my brain and things have never been the same since.
Did you always want to be a DJ/producer or was it a happy accident? About a similar time we were on holiday in Ibiza, I would have been about 10, and saw a mobile DJ in a bar somewhere, playing all the hits. It was the first time I’d ever seen two decks, slip-cueing, headphone monitoring etc and I was hooked.
What’s your most memorable gig and why was it so good? My first ever gig was at an outdoor squat party in Sydney down the end of the runways of Sydney airport. The sun was rising, I was playing with a broken hand and a bunch of ravers were mooning planes as they were coming into land.
Which is more fun: DJing or producing? And why? DJing. I’m a pretty decent producer but I’m a fucking amazing DJ and I love it.
If you had to pick one record you’ve produced that best represents your sound, which one would it be? I’m very fond of ‘Don’t Give In’ and you’re only as good as your last tune right? This is the one for me.
Have you ever seen a DJ playing who changed the way you approached the job? Derrick May, Theo Parrish, Simon Caldwell, DJ Gemma… all DJs I saw in Sydney when I was first starting out that informed me on a million different levels.
What are your plans for 2023? Working on my audiophile system more and doing more parties, more broadcasting and more tunes. Many thanks to all who enjoyed ‘Don’t Give In’ enough to vote for it! DjHistory has been one of my biggest teachers over the years so to receive this honour is genuinely meaningful to me. I’m buzzing a LOT!
FURTIVE 50, 2022
Furtive 50, 2022
RUF DUG X PRIVATE JOY – Don’t Give In
ALEX KASSIAN – Strings Of Eden
PINKY PERZELLE – No Games (VS&THOG Mix)
RHEINZAND – Facciamo L’Amore
LADY BLACKBIRD – Lost & Looking (Cosmodelica Remix)
ETERNAL LOVE – Altar EP
CONFIDENCE MAN – Holiday (Erol Alkan Rework)
A MOUNTAIN OF ONE – Star
STR4TA – When You Call Me
LANOWA – My Fantasy EP
SAY SHE SHE – Forget Me Not
EDDIE CHACON – Holy Hell
MAGREHBAN FT. OMAR – Waiting
NAT HOME – Witching Hour
COYOTE – Kate’s Bush
GENIUS OF TIME – Sunswell EP
CRUISIC – Pacific 707
CHRONIXX – Never Give Up
LEA LISA – Love To The End
DANNY TENAGLIA – The Brooklyn Gypsy
CHERRIE BEA – Jafar’s 21st
BOLIS PUPUL – Neon Buddha/Rendez-Voodoo
EMMA-JANE THACKRAY – Venus (BSO Remix)
TORNADO WALLACE – Dream Corner EP
TIGERBALM – Kete (Mang Dynasty Remix)
THE ZENMENN & JOHN MOODS – Out Of My Mind
JUSTIN DEIGHTON, PETE HERBERT, LEO ZERO – Sentiments Of Soho Theatre
ATHLETES OF GOD FT. LADY BLACKBIRD – Don’t Wanna Be Normal
JAMES ALEXANDER BRIGHT – Wheels Keep Turning
DJ LEINAD – Souvenirs (Deep Dean Remix)
CANTOMA FT. QUIN LAMONT LUKE – Alive (Conrad’s Vacant Lot Remix)
HIDDEN SPHERES – You Are Not Your Body
DAVID HOLMES FT. RAVEN VIOLET – It’s Over If We run Out Of Love
OMAR S – Can’t Explain
ALEX BOMAN FT. BELLA BOO – Nowhere Good
CAPINERA – Suonno
MAU P – Drugs From Amsterdam
BSS – De Regenboog
GUINU – Palago (Jose Marquez Remix)
HAAI & JON HOPKINS – Baby, We’re Ascending
JAMES RIGHTON FT. BENNY ANDERSSON – Empty Rooms
JACK J – Only You Know Why
GRAMRCY & JOHN LOVELESS – High Dive
OVEOUS X DON KAMARES – Legacy
PIG&DAN – Make You Go Higher (David Morales Stereo Mix)
CARLOS NIÑO & FRIENDS – Actually
RCHARD SEN – My Definition Of Funk
MAXINE SCOTT – Erykah U Bad (North Street West Vocal)
Mudd Club, Danceteria, Ritz, Area… Despite having spun at many of the greatest spots in New York clubland through its transformative ’80s, Justin Strauss is not one to dwell on his past. He’s more interested in his next remix than the nearly 300 he’s clocked up; thinking forward to playing Panorama Bar rather than looking back to those dancefloors of downtown legend. Nevertheless, ask him about those sparkling years, when rents were cheap and Manhattan was a crucible of creativity, and the stories start rolling. And it all begins with an amazing tale of little Justin signed to Island as a teenage glam sensation. His recent production projects include Extra Credit with Marcus Marr and Hot Chip’s Joe Goddard; and Each Other, which is Justin and Max Pask. For the perfect reading soundtrack, scroll down for his great 1987 mix live from the last night of Area.
What’s the greatest thing that’s ever happened to you in music? Wow. You’re starting with the tough questions. When I was 17 years old, my band Milk ’n’ Cookies got signed to Island Records in the UK, which was unheard of back in 1974. We were a New York band, just making demo tapes in the basement. We loved Sparks, and we sent our tape to their manager, and they got back to us saying, ‘We’ve played your tape for Island Records, and they love you, [songwriter and A&R legend] Muff Winwood’s coming to see you play in your basement’. That changed my life. I’ve been doing music ever since,
What was it like performing for Muff Winwood in your basement? It was quite fun, actually. We had all our friends down there and Muff was a fun guy, and he just signed us on the spot. He told my parents, ‘Well, we’re taking your son to England and he’s going to record an album with his band for Island Records.’
Amazing! It was an incredible experience because England was always my musical inspiration, and it was my first trip to Europe. They put us up in a townhouse in South Kensington and we recorded our album in Basing Street Studios with Muff and Rhett Davis, who went on to produce B-52’s and all the Roxy Music, Bryan Ferry stuff. It was magic – just being here at that time, and with the people at Island at that time, like Sparks, Roxy Music, Eno. The Wailers were in there recording one of their early albums before anyone knew who they were. Someone took me into the studio where they were recording and I couldn’t see a thing. There was so much smoke.
It was just like a dream come true, but then everything went sour and the dream became sort of a semi-nightmare. The first single came out and it didn’t do what was expected. Then they got cold feet. We were this glam, pre-punk kind of thing. We recorded pre-punk and it was supposed to come out in ’75. Then the punk thing exploded in 1976 and they were like, ‘Wait, we have this Milk ‘n’ Cookies album, let’s put it out’. We imploded so I moved to LA with one of the other band members and re-formed the band out there.
Milk ‘n’ Cookies. Justin Strauss, Ian North, Sal Maida and Mike Ruiz
How did the band start in the first place? I went to high school in Long Island, which is like the suburbs. This is mid-’70s. My classmates were into the Allman Brothers, the Grateful Dead if they were into music at all. And sports. And I wasn’t that guy. I was into music 24/7. Every week I’d run and get Melody Maker, NME, every magazine I could … Cream, Rolling Stone, whatever it was. I was obsessed.
I saw this girl one day in the hall and she looked amazing, and different than anyone else. I had to meet this girl. I was kind of shy, but a friend of mine was in a class with her. She introduced me. We started going out and she somehow knew the other guys. So, we just got together. They said, ‘We want to get a singer. You look like a singer.’ I wasn’t a singer, but I gave it a try. My dad had a TEAC four-track tape machine, so I started recording them in my basement. I joined the band, and then we just started making demos and rehearsing. That’s how that happened. I mean, music has been my whole life, and basically still is.
When you were a kid, who was the first artist or band that really captured your imagination? The Beatles. I was seven years old, and the Beatles came on Ed Sullivan. And that was the moment, this blew my mind. My dad was into music and I remember going with my dad to the record store. I bought my first Beatles single, ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’. to sing the beat. And from that moment on, all I cared about was music.
And every Beatles album was an event when you were a kid. You didn’t know what it was going to be… From Rubber Soul to Revolver, to obviously Sgt. Pepper. I mean, it was just insane how they developed. But I was also into James Brown and funk and Motown and soul records as well.
You said you were really into British bands. Yeah. Beatles, Stones, Kinks, Who. Then all that followed. I super got into David Bowie. He was a major, major influence for me. Into glam, into Sweet, into T. Rex, David Bowie, Sparks. Then the New York Dolls happened, and I started going to all these New York Dolls shows, and that’s what kind of made it seem that something we could do.
They were pretty crap as well, weren’t they? No, they were amazing. They were amongst the best things I’ve ever seen in my life.
In terms of the show, or…? The Beatles and all that stuff seemed far away and didn’t seem like we could ever do that. But here’s this New York band who… They were what they were, but it was exciting. And they got a record deal. We started this little band and I was like, ‘Maybe we can do that.’ It made it seem possible for a New York band like ours to happen.
So how did you start DJing? I was in LA after the band broke up and when I got a call from an ex-girlfriend. I said, ‘I want to come home.’ She said, ‘Yeah, come home. There’s this club that just opened, the Mudd Club. You should DJ there.’ I said, ‘I don’t DJ. I’ve never DJed.’ I didn’t even really understand. And she said, ’It doesn’t matter. You have tons of records and I’m friends with the DJ, so I’m sure you can try it out.’ Lo and behold, I came back and the DJ said, ‘Why don’t you come one night and bring some records?’ I played, and the owner of the Mudd Club said, ‘Hey, I like what you’re doing. Do you want to work here on Thursday nights?’ That’s how I started DJing.
What kind of music were you playing at the Mudd Club? It was really just stuff from my record collection, which was a lot of soul, funk, early punk, all the new wave stuff, to the leftfield disco stuff and reggae. It was a real mix, and I was just playing new and old records together. I didn’t really know the concept of mixing records. The Mudd Club didn’t have 1200s or a real mixer. [The booth] was literally perched at the end of the bar, but it was an amazing scene. Studio 54 had been the focus up to then. Then that scene became very commercialised and people were bored. Mudd Club was the first place where a lot of the artists gathered, a lot of the cool people who didn’t want to go to Studio 54, because they thought it was too chi-chi and the music was boring.
What did the club actually look like? Whereabouts was it? 77 White Street in Tribeca, a few blocks below Canal Street, right by Chinatown, in the middle of nowhere. There was nothing happening back there. The guy who started it, Steve Mass, just got this building. The first floor was a long bar and at the end of it was the DJ ‘booth’. There was a small dancefloor, and then the bathrooms in the back, which were semi-notorious for tomfoolery. And upstairs was a space where they had some gallery shows, performance art. You had a lot of amazing people in New York at that time: Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kenny Scharf would all do things there. And there was also Club 57 going on in New York. So there’s this real new thing happening. Nothing planned, nothing organised, but it just felt right.
I mean, you could afford to move to New York back then in 1980. You could get a place for $200 a month, because no one wanted to live there because it was ‘dangerous’. The city was in shambles at that point. Real estate was more affordable. So, you had people who could come and do their art and go out at night, and it was a really special time.
What was the Mudd Club crowd like? It was just a lot of kids dressed up. A lot of downtown artists and people. It was kind of your friends. It felt like walking into your living room or something, because you knew everyone. Everyone knew each other. It was a small scene. The New York scene back then was maybe a couple of hundred people.. It was like, on any given night, anything can happen.
And then the uptown crowd. Andy Warhol was kind of a connection between the uptown and downtown, because he could mingle with both. And so he became friends with Keith [Haring]. He became friends with Jean-Michel [Basquiat], and then people like Mick Jagger, David Bowie would come and hang out at the Mudd Club. And so you had a really great mix of people, which always makes the best club.
The doorman from the Mudd Club just put out a book, detailing his experiences. It’s pretty interesting; he had a little chain and he would let downtown people in before he would let the cool or uptown socialites. They’d be made to wait outside while some kid would just get in. It was well-curated, so to speak. It was a really fun experience.
When did you start to realise the possibilities for DJing? I’d always been interested in dance music. I always collected a lot of records from funk to soul, I bought the first 12-inches that came out. Me and my girlfriend, we were 16. We would get let into Studio 54, and we went to 12 West. We went to Infinity, but it didn’t really hit me till I went to see François K. I had met him at the Mudd Club and he invited me down to see him play at this after hours club called AM/PM in New York. And he was the first one that I really saw mixing records together, and it just blew my mind. He showed me the basics. I didn’t have two turntables in my house, and I still don’t. I’ve never practiced DJing.
How long did you play at Mudd Club? Maybe a year or a little less. And then I got the job at The Ritz, which was a much bigger club. It’s where Webster Hall ended up. It was massive. Mudd Club was maybe 100, 200 people in there tops. And The Ritz was like maybe a thousand. And they had three turntables there. By that point they had the early Technics. I forget what model it is before the 1200. And they had a Bozak mixer, so I started just doing it, trying to mix all these records together from different genres. The Ritz was primarily a new wave rock club, as they were called back then. But I was really influenced by what François was doing.
Then he took me to The Garage one night. And that of course just opened my mind to what a DJ meant, by listening to Larry Levan. What a DJ could do and what it meant to be a DJ and play that music for people, and connect with them. Emotionally and physically. And I tried to bring that to what I was doing, because it really had a powerful effect on me. And I developed my own style of all these genres and making it work together. You know, Arthur Russell records mixed in with Yazoo, or whatever was going on at the time. That was exciting.
Everyone played at the Ritz. Band-wise it was the dream. Everyone from Kraftwerk to Prince to Kid Creole and the Coconuts to Tina Turner, Depeche Mode, Human League, Gang of Four. Anyone you’d ever want to see, and I’d play before, in between, and after the bands.
Justin in the booth at the Ritz
Did it end at midnight? No I’d stay till four. And they were also the first club to have videos, before MTV. They had a huge screen that came down, one of the first massive video projectors. It was huge and cost like $250,000. An amazing experience to be part of that and be part of something new.
You also played at Danceteria. Tell me about that. Danceteria was an amazing place. It moved a few times, but it was multilevel, so you had different DJs on different floors. My friend Mark Kamins was playing there. He would also go to the Garage so he was doing some amazing stuff. But he brought his own thing to it where he’d take these acapellas, these Arabic things, Israeli records, play them over crazy stuff, mixing a lot of Euro disco with new wave and creating his own sound.
There was so much going on creatively in New York at that time, like it was just an explosion. It was a time where we had hip hop coming. It was a new art form. You had disco and left-field disco. You had punk and new wave, all new records, all new music just kind of happening at once. What was so special about that time and those clubs was that everyone was playing everything, because it was all new music and it didn’t matter. No one cared, and people just danced. It was a very free and open vibe.
There was this thing in New York called Rockpool, which was a record pool for more left-field DJs.Bambaataa was in it, which was crazy. You got some disco records, but you also got all the new wave stuff, you got early industrial records, you got… They somehow hooked up deals with labels from England, so we were getting all kinds of imports. Like I remember getting a white label of Bostich from Rockpool and I still have it.
Was Mark Kamins an important inspiration for you? Danceteria was a legendary club in New York. Madonna would go there. She met Mark and he produced her first record. Mark was fearless. He reminded me a lot of Larry. He had a whistle around his neck. Mark was a party in motion, you know? He was quite an amazing force in the New York scene, and everyone looked up to him. He had this connection with Manchester, and became good friends with Mike Pickering and Graeme Park. So he was doing mixes for Quando Quango, and there was this great cross-pollination between Manchester and New York where New Order would come and play. I remember I was DJing at The Ritz when Section 25 and Quando Quango played their first gigs And Mark had done remixes for ‘Love Tempo’, which is an anthem, and a few others: ‘Atom Rock’. Groups like New Order were being totally influenced by the New York sound. You had 99 Records. You had Liquid Liquid. You had ESG, Konk, Bush Tetras. It was an amazing time musically.
How did your remixing career start? Being a DJ, I started hearing all these records, and obviously I knew François and Larry, so remixing was something I was always interested in. And one day someone brought me a record from RCA. It was this group called Wax. I said, ‘Hey, well, I hear something in this song, but I don’t think it’s really right for the clubs yet. I’d love a shot at remixing it.’ And it just takes that one person that’s going to give you that shot, and hopefully you don’t mess it up too bad. Because you don’t know what you’re doing.
But at that time, you know, you worked with engineers, you worked in real studios. And so it came out pretty good. I formed a partnership, Pop Stand Productions, with another DJ I knew called Murray Elias. And I just learned how to do it. I bought an SP-12 drum machine and I found a keyboard player that nobody else was using. My girlfriend said, ‘Oh, I know this kid. His name’s Eric Kupper.’ And so she introduced me to him and he’d never played on a record before, so I sat him down and I played him a bunch of stuff, and he became my keyboard player and played on all my remixes.
How old was he then? Must have been pretty young. Yeah, he was… We were all young, you know. This was all in the early ’80s. I worked with amazing engineers, amazing producers and editors, which is a lost art. I worked with Chep Nuñez, he edited most of my records, Tuta Aquino, a couple of the Latin Rascals. So it was really a team effort.
Who were the engineers? I worked with Hugo Dwyer, who had done a lot of dance records. I worked with Jay Mark, who had come from Sigma Sound. I worked with a French guy who I’d met on a Duran Duran remix we did. His name was Daniel Abraham, we worked together on a lot of records. Frank Heller, who worked on 808 State with me.
Frank worked with Bruce Forest a lot, didn’t he? Yeah. He also worked with Marley Marl. He did a lot of hip hop, worked with Def Jam. He was just an amazing engineer. I feel really lucky to have come of age when that was still happening, to work with engineers and editors and musicians who really knew what they were doing and knew their way around the studio. I learned so much from just being around them.
Which studios did you work in? Right Track, Soundworks, Soundtrack. Those were the main ones. Soundworks was in the basement of the building where Studio 54 was. Teddy Riley worked there. Shep Pettibone did most of his stuff down there at that point. François bought a studio called Axis and put it up on the penthouse of the same building.
Working on a track with Eric Kupper
And back then record companies budgeted serious money for remixes Yeah, it was crazy… I mean, you had budgets for remixes because they could actually sell them and make money, unlike today.
What would a typical major label remix budget have been? Twenty to 25,000 dollars, which when you think about today, it’s insane.
I know! People don’t get album budgets for that much. But again, like I said, you were paying for studios. You were paying for engineers, paying for keyboard players, paying for editors, paying for your tape. I mean, you’re paying for a lot of things. You’re paying your manager’s fee. I mean, you could still obviously make money at the end of the day. It was an industry, really. The studios were making money. Engineers were making money.
I worked at Electric Ladyland too a lot, which was an exciting thing because obviously it was Jimi Hendrix’s studio and they still had the murals on the wall, the psychedelic stuff. It was quite something.
Didn’t you come to the UK to remix some stuff? I did a lot of records for the UK, but always did them in New York because my team was there. And a lot of my remixes did really well here in the UK. The UK dance culture embraced a lot of what I was doing, It was very exciting. I came over when Ministry Of Sound opened, and played there. I spent a lot of time in the UK. I became good friends with CJ Mackintosh. There’s this thing at that time: DJs didn’t travel. But Ministry brought Larry, Tony. And Mark came and actually was again probably one of the first people. He travelled to Manchester early on. He went to Japan before anybody did.
If you had to name one, which is your favourite remix and why? I’ve done a lot of remixes. I’m super fortunate because I wasn’t pigeonholed, like, ‘Oh, he does disco,’ or, ‘He does alternative.’ I’ve been lucky enough to do everything from Luther Vandross to Skinny Puppy to Depeche Mode to Tina Turner. I mean, I’ve done probably close to 300 records. I really don’t have a favourite. They all have something special to me at a time and place. And one thing I’m really grateful about is a lot of people still play them. And I still play them, and they still sound okay. A lot of that sound is still referenced today, and it’s kind of in vogue, so to speak, or timeless maybe.
Who did you admire most as a remixer? Shep Pettibone was my number one influence as a remixer. When I started hearing his records, and then when he started working with New Order and Depeche Mode… and Pet Shop Boys especially. When I heard his remix of ‘West End Girls’, I fell in love. His manager Jane Brinton approached us and said, ‘We want to manage you.’ Shep was super supportive, and that time, he was getting offered every record under the sun because he’d had so much success. And if he didn’t have time or want to do it, he would recommend me for mixes, which was really great and very nice.
What was he like as a person? Because he’s become very reclusive He has, and really. I guess after the Madonna thing… [their professional partnership ended abruptly]
Yeah, I heard through the grapevine it really hurt him the way it ended. Yeah. I mean, I don’t know the dirt. He was great though. At that time, he couldn’t have been nicer to me. He had this boyish charm about him, you know? He was a very handsome, very out, very friendly to me anyway, and super cool. And still an inspiration to so many people. He never was really a club DJ. He was this kind of radio DJ, and then became a producer. I would see him in studios or see him at a party. He had parties, his birthday party. He was very friendly, very warm, and then he just kind of disappeared. It was this kind of enigma, like…
He moved to Jersey. Yeah, he opened this resort and this club, and he actually still spins there. I know people have approached him. Even New Order approached him again to remix a record or get in the studio, but he just doesn’t want to. And it’s pretty amazing because he is the top of everyone’s list. And I guess he wants to keep it that way.
The legend. For me, Shep and Larry and François, who’s still going strong, they were my heroes for remixing and DJing. Larry’s life ended on a very sad note, and he was a god to me. And Shep’s still there, he’s preserved in this special place. And it’s okay. He doesn’t have anything to prove.
What do you think made Larry so special from your point of view? There was a fearlessness and a confidence in himself as a DJ to do anything. If he wanted to play five minutes of silence, he could just have minutes of silence, or play the same record 10 times in a row. When he was working on Gwen Guthrie, The Peech Boys, he’d bring those tapes in. And those things really didn’t sound like any other records at the time. Like, you didn’t know what… ‘Heartbeat’ even, which was a slow 98 bpm … Who knows? He would just throw that on in the middle of the night and people didn’t know what to make of it at first. They would just stand there with their arms crossed. That’s the only time anyone ever looked at the DJ booth, when they were kind of upset with Larry or just didn’t get what he was doing, and they would stand there and look at him, and he didn’t care. He would just shut the lights, put it on again until it became the biggest record at the club.
He knew what a great record was, and he knew that you would fall in love with it too, and he knew how to make that happen. And that takes some kind of guts and some sort of confidence in yourself. This is not a jukebox! This is my creative output, and I’m going to share that with you. And obviously he turned me on to so much music I didn’t even know. Walking into The Garage for the first time, I walked up that ramp and I heard Martin Circus, which I’d never heard before in my life. And I said, ‘What is this?’ To François. And of course François mixed it.
He took me up to the booth and I met Larry and we became fast friends. I would hang out in the booth and learn records I didn’t know. And he would come hang out at Area. He would come to a lot of shows at The Ritz. So it was, yeah, a really great cross-pollination. But it was his fearlessness and his taste really that made him so special to me. And people say, ‘Oh, he wasn’t such a great mixer, and I don’t agree with that. I heard him mix his ass off if he wanted to. Or not. It didn’t really matter.
But he controlled that whole environment. I mean, even though they had an amazing light guy, he had his own light thing above the DJ booth where he could override. And he would just make the club pitch black. I mean, even turn off the exit signs, which is unimaginable today. It was beautiful. He just knew how to make that environment so special. I would go in there with him some days during the week, and he would just tweak the sound, getting it right for the weekend. He was obsessed, and I think that’s a very special thing.
Yeah, definitely. So yeah, he was my number one. Saturday nights after Area, I would go four or five in the morning to The Garage and hang out till the wee hours. You would go check out François, what he was doing, check out Larry. People would go to New Jersey to check out Tony Humphries. Bruce Forest was an amazing DJ. But for me, Larry was the one.
So, tell me about Area. When did Area open? 1983. There were four guys. Eric Goode, Chris Goode, Darius, and Shawn Hausman. They had done some projects at the Mudd Club. They were doing these parties and then they found this space on Hudson Street. They showed me the space, and I was like, ‘Wow!’ And they told me their idea: that they were going to change the theme of the club every six weeks. It was incredible, really, what they did. They’d transform this club every six weeks into something totally different. It was an art project with a Richard Long sound system. It was only up three years. It wasn’t even supposed to be open that long. Other than the Paradise Garage, where I never DJed, it was the most amazing club experience in New York.
And the opening of a new theme every six weeks was a major event.The whole street was clogged with people trying to get into this party. I mean, you could walk into that space and not recognize things. Jean-Michel Basquiat would DJ in the smaller room at the bar. I was DJing in the main room.
Johnny played as well. Johnny Dynell, who is amazing. He’s still going strong too, ruling on the dancefloor. And it was still a great dance club. Despite all the crazy art stuff… I mean, Andy Warhol could be in a display case, just standing there for six hours. It was unheard of. They did a book recently about the club, and looking at that book, it seems unimaginable. Even having even been there, I was like, ‘How did this even happen?’
I mean, just the expense of it, the space they had to do that with, the team they had. They literally had a workshop upstairs where it was like Geppetto’s. The invites, everything about it, the graphics, it was quite something. I would recommend anyone who’s interested in New York club life to pick up the Area book. The first invite was a pill: a little capsule that you dissolved in a cup of water, and the paper came up rising to the top with the details.
There was something going on in New York every night of the week. Area, Tunnel, Limelight, Palladium, which was a massive club, packed. There was an insane scene going on in New York.
You’d go out to the Mudd Club, you’d see everyone you knew, because this is where everyone went. It was just kind of the destination, or Area or Danceteria. Those were all clubs that people focused on. And we’d move around from club to club. You’d say, ‘Okay, where are we going first? We’ll end up at Area, and then we’ll start at Danceteria.’
Area was 10 or 11 till four, I don’t really remember, but normal clubbing hours. And then you had the New York after hours scene, places like The Continental, The Jefferson, Arthur Weinstein and The World. And you have The Pyramid, which is still going somehow. I mean, it’s very different, but there was a whole scene born out of that club.
You also played at Limelight. In the ’90s it was notorious for the Club Kids and techno; what was it like to play at in the early ’80s? Limelight really was a weird place. I was there before the Club Kids took it over. It was opened by this guy, Peter Gatien and although I worked for the guy for years, I never really met him. It’s in a church. I never loved it. The DJ booth was really high up, so far from the dancefloor. There was an underground New York filmmaker who I was working with there who did the lights and videos, Beth B, so there was kind of an arty thing going on. But musically, it never really had an identity. It was never my favourite club. There were some fun nights. It later became this thing when the Club Kid thing happened and it got very ravey and candy coloured and very exciting at that point.
Yeah, yeah, with Keoki. Keoki and Michael Alig, for better or worse. And I guess it was around when ecstasy was really taking hold in the clubs in New York. It was that place at that moment in time, for those kids of that age. When the Club Kids started happening, it was a major force in New York, but I wasn’t spinning there any more.
What advice would you give to someone who’s starting out in music? God. Don’t do it. No. You know, it’s a different world. I meet kids, and I just say, ‘You really have to find your way to do something that stands out.‘ It’s hard. It’s finding a way to put your own spin on whatever’s going on. And be adventurous!
When I started this job, nobody wanted to be a DJ. I didn’t even want to be one. I just fell into it. I loved music, and I was able to find avenues to express it, whether it was being in a band, being a DJ, or being a producer. It’s harder now because everyone wants to do that,
I’m totally still excited by new music. As much history as I have, it’s the new music that’s exciting. I go out all the time, and I think that’s the best place for me to get turned on still to new music. It’s just keeping your ears open and keeping your eyes open too. I don’t feel any different than I did when I first walked into a DJ booth. You know, I never did any drugs and I don’t drink. It’s only music for me that’s still exciting.
Were you never tempted? To me, it was like, I was at the Paradise Garage on a Saturday night. It isn’t getting any better than this, really. For me, that was enough. That’s probably why I am still here doing this today and still excited about what I do. I’m not burnt out. I’m not jaded. I’m still excited by music and it’s still my number one thing – from that time I saw The Beatles on Ed Sullivan to DJing at Panorama Bar.
Harold Heath’s self-deprecating book Long Relationships tapped into the innate slapstick that has always been present in club culture. Pitched somewhere between knockabout comedy and quiet tragedy, Heath manages to surf perfectly between the two and, as he points out in the interview, shows just how close these two emotions actually are. We asked him just how he got from semi-successful DJ to semi-successful writer.
interviewed by Bill in London, 16.11.22
What I loved about your book obviously was the humour, but also underneath that, there are all kinds of little lessons for DJs. I think anyone starting out would get an awful lot out of it about what could go wrong and what to avoid. There’s something very real about your experiences. Honestly, there was no plan to make it like that, but looking back at it, a few people have said it’s kind of like a guidebook. I was so obsessive about DJing and parties that I just had this big store of things I thought were worthy of sharing. I had this huge sheet made out of A4 paper taped together, full of different ideas and I’d draw lines between them. It was like a crazy man’s map of what the book was going to be. All the things that go wrong, man, they’re a huge part of the story. They’re the making of every DJ. Things going wrong is funny.
Given that 95% of people’s professional musical experiences end in failure, there are very few books about it. I know that you’re a real fan of another book which is about failure, James Young’s Nico, Songs They Never Play On The Radio. Such a wonderful book.
That’s the epitome of failure, that book. It’s hilarious, it’s really sad, and it’s brilliant. Why do you think there are so few books about failure in music? There really ought to be more. Yeah who cares that you were successful? It’s great reading about the crazy adventures in hotel rooms for a while. But I think tragedy and hilarity are really close. For me, as an autistic person, sometimes I get quite confused between those two extremes of emotion, the tragic and the hilarious Sometimes they blend together into this whole weird thing. And those two extremes of emotion, the way they exist in dance music at the same time, the sublime and the ridiculous, right? The fact that it’s a really important thing for us all, it can be really transformative, but also quite ridiculous. I love the contrasts, the conflicts.
When did you first have the idea for a book, and did you have an idea before you started that the book that you finished was the book you were going to write? The answer to the second bit is no, I didn’t at all. I started writing the book around 2016 or 2017. All that happened was I used to fart around on Facebook quite a lot and I used to really like getting lots of likes for my funny little statuses, and I realised I kind of had this knack to write little funny DJ things that resonated with other DJs. Then I wrote a piece for Vice about this awful DJing job I had – in Los Locos in Covent Garden – and that went down really well. So I thought, there’s something here and I really enjoy talking about this stuff, it comes really easy to me. So I just started writing recollections of funny DJing stories and the book just came together organically. There wasn’t a general plan for it to end up how it did. It was essentially just a collection of funny stories, really. Then I realised I needed to link that together with stuff, so I put in everything I’d ever thought about DJing, which I then had to edit it down until just the good bits were left.
Can you tell me a bit about the period between your DJ career slowing down and you starting to write? There was a chunk when I got quite ill, and I was a bit confused. I wanted to work in and around music, so I thought I would train as a music technology teacher. I did two years part-time at a college with 16 to 18-year-olds who hadn’t had a good experience of education. I started the two years thinking, ‘I can make them all stars’; they’re all going to be famous. By the end of the two years, my goals had been lowered just to seeing if I could get them to come in the room without starting a fucking punch-up. If I got that done, I’d won the day. hat whole process really wore me down. I got one teaching job after that. I got made redundant a few months later and I never went back to teaching. I never thought of it ever again.
But you had to do loads of written work when you trained to be a teacher, and it really ignited my love for writing. And my poor tutors, man. I used to turn in these fucking essays, they were like four times as long as they needed to be and I’d done this amazing research and they were beautifully crafted. I was top of my class all the time. I was a proper nerd. I won an award for my fucking work. It was ridiculous. So it really ignited my love of writing while reinforcing the sad truth that I was not a good teacher. I was quite ill for a while. I had chronic fatigue syndrome, which is probably now I would say related to an autistic burnout and ADHD issues. Then I just started writing freelance. Russ at iDJ, I think he’d seen some of my funny Facebook posts and said, ‘Why don’t you do a column for me?’ He was the first person who gave me a job writing online. I did columns for him for years, and from there it just kind of grew. It takes a long time to get taken seriously as a writer, I found. I was lucky that I had a family that were happy to support me during those tough times. I still feel I have quite a lot to do, a lot of goals to reach in terms of writing. It still feels like it’s early days.
How important is humour in writing, particularly in dance music where a lot of people take themselves quite seriously? Our thing is sublime and ridiculous at the same time. So you’ve got to embrace both of those things. So for me, it’s phenomenally important. I think it’s fine to take it seriously. It’s really important. It’s been the centre of mine and your life for our entire lives. It’s a really important thing, and I do take it really seriously. But I also think it’s really silly and it’s fun, and I think we should be having fun because we’ll all be dead soon. We should just have some fucking fun, right? I think people who find the funny in dance music and performing are providing a really important public service in our little scene. Keeping everyone grounded. Having fun is a really important thing.
Did you learn anything about the craft of DJ while you were writing the book? I re-evaluated the whole thing a bit, and by the end of it, possibly because I’d got a couple of years older, I was a little bit more at ease with the fun approach to DJing and a little bit less obsessed with being a serious DJ. So getting all that stuff out about the pride and the passion, but also the silliness of DJing and club culture. It didn’t specifically change anything. Maybe it just made things a little bit more balanced in my head. I’ve always been a person of extremes, but maybe by the end, I had a more balanced idea of what DJing was.
DJing is an instant high. When you’re playing you know whether you’re fucking it up or not. But when you’re writing, you’re doing it in a vacuum, and I’m wondering how you cope with the difference in that? It is very much a vacuum, and you never know when it’s gone wrong, but you do know when it’s gone right. I think those moments when you write something and it’s like, “Oh, that’s really fucking nice. Where did that come from?” You get that straight away. That’s the writing equivalent of the crowd going crazy, I dropped the right tune. But it’s horrifically lonely, and you’re plagued by self-doubt the whole time. I had terrible self-doubt about my writing, but also I have a secret confidence in how brilliant it is as well. I go between the two. You have to overcome that whole imposter thing and just have a bit of self-belief, while still completely doubting that any word you’re writing has any fucking brilliancy at all.
Where does that self-doubt come from? Other writers. I read other writers. I read a lot of books. I like books. And I often read other writers’ books and I’m like, ‘Oh, you cunt’. There’s something I read the other day. I’m not going to tell you, because I don’t want to big them up, but someone else had written something beautiful that I read and I just thought, ‘I wish I’d done that’. I think those kind of things, comparing yourself to other people, that can derail you.
Good writing is really about reading, and it’s certainly where my inspiration came from. What was your journey from reader to writer like? All these books definitely I would say have created the writer that I am. There are some writers who I’ve literally looked at their structure and been so knocked out by it, I stole some of it. I might’ve mentioned this to you before. David Simon wrote that book, Homicide. He’s the guy from The Wire and there’s a passage that is just so brilliantly punchy, the way he just drives the narrative on, it’s astonishingly good prose. I nicked it. I just nicked his style. I nicked the size and the shape and the feel of it. Wholesale. Much like a sample, and just interpolated it in my own words. I used to do that with my productions as well. Now I do it with books. It drives you to have self-doubt, but also for you to be better because it’s inspiring, isn’t it? Have you read Night Moves by Jessica Hopper?
No. Tiny little book, and it’s just about a woman who rides around on her bike and goes to gigs and DJs. It’s just a collection of these vignettes. But it’s fucking perfect and even just reading that, it’s kind of inspiring and you think if you can just get a bit of that. But also, it broadens what you think is a suitable subject. I’ve had loads of lovely times riding around on my bike, going to parties, listening to tunes. Never really thought that would be a subject that you could make a whole little book out of. Books like that help you rediscover the magic of writing. It’s finding something to write about that you didn’t think had value and then something comes from doing it.
The thing with writing is you have to sit there and write in order for the good things to come out. You start the day having no idea what you’re going to say or what you’re going to write, but it’s only by following the act of writing that suddenly things come out of you that you didn’t know were in there. It’s funny you say that, because in all the interviews I’ve done since I did my book and people ask me, ‘What is your tip for writing?’, and that’s my tip. Never ever wait for the idea. You’ll spend your whole life waiting for it. It’s pointless. Soon as you sit down, there’s something about that process, right? Little things just happen and it’s inexplicable, and they never happen unless you’re just doing the job. I get commissions and think, ‘I don’t know what to write about this’. And I procrastinate, waiting for that opinion to crystallise. Don’t need to do that, ever. Just start the thing and there it is. It’s the strangest thing. It’s like writing unlocks something that you didn’t quite know was there.
Senior Airman Heath pilots the 45s.
If you could go back in time, is there anything that you’d change about your DJ career? I don’t know. Sometimes I think I’d change everything about it and sometimes I think it was perfect as it was. I spent a lot of time in the book having a bit of therapy with myself and coming to terms with the idea of success and failure and what it meant, and how much I actually got out of it. But I say in the book, if I’d been a slightly more sociable, approachable person, I might have been a bit more successful, because that networking side of things is quite important. It became more important to a DJ’s success, I think, as time went on, and it’s something that hasn’t always come naturally to me. Were I to do that, though, it would involve changing my personality.
I would’ve liked to have taken more chances. When you’re in your mid-twenties, you feel like there’ll always be more opportunities, so you’re quite blasé about things that come and go. I think when I was researching the book, I went right back to the very start of when I was using email and I was looking at the very first records that I was getting signed to other labels and stuff. And my mate, Fannah, who’s in the book, was acting as a manager for me kind of thing. And there was all sorts of really interesting ideas coming through at that time about people I might remix or where I might go and DJ. And we were just like, ‘Yeah, whatever, we’ll come back to that.’ And I think now as I approach a much older age, I feel like I would grab stuff more.
Which do you prefer, DJing or writing? Which do you prefer? DJing, you can get really fucking pissed, can’t you?
They’re such contrasting activities. The effect of writing doesn’t happen until much later. Sometimes it’s years and years later. Whereas DJing, you can’t deny that that instantaneous thing is such a buzz that it’s very difficult to replicate that with anything else. I guess I don’t get anxious before I start writing. I don’t really need a pee before I start writing. You don’t have a crowd of people going fucking mad when you write a good sentence, either. I guess DJing is more instantly fun, isn’t it? It’s like comparing do you like sleep or do you like donuts? I like them both.
What’s really weird about DJing is that it must be one of the most precarious jobs that exist, because if you work for a company, you go in on a Monday and you work till Friday. DJing, you’re playing on a Friday and a Saturday, and in a couple of months you can go from being really busy to being redundant, irrespective of how good you are, how old you are, how venerated you are. Why would anyone do it? I don’t even know if I answered that question in the book, and that was what I started out to address. It was like, why the hell do we try and do this? Why do we go through so much? Why are we in our thirties and forties with rooms full of records with one gig every two months, still calling ourselves DJs? Why are we doing this? Stop the pain. We just keep walking into the pain all the time. I don’t know. There’s no answer to it, is there?
Do you think it’s purely about musical passion? I think the thing that drives my interest in it all is, on a Saturday, you’ve got all these new tunes that you’ve discovered and you want people to know about them. It was the same when I was a teenager. I would buy a record and then I would invite people round and play them the record. They could look at the cover and I’d be like, ‘What do you think of that? It’s good, isn’t it?’ And if they liked it, I could play them another one. And whatever urge that is, that just grew to exactly what you say. It’s just some essential excitement, a joy from showing, ‘Look at this fucking brilliant thing. This is great. You’re going to fucking love this.’ That’s an unbeatable feeling, right? There’s an inherent joy in the sharing of a beautiful thing. That’s always been the reason why I did it, and I love it. Who doesn’t love it when you’re going out to a gig and you’ve got that new stash and you know it’s going to just be killer? It’s the best feeling in the world.
When I was a teenager, before I even knew what DJs did, I was making little pause button compilation tapes and giving them to mates and girlfriends and forcing my opinions on them with my musical taste. Really, all we’re doing now with DJing is that, but in an even more megalomaniacal way. That’s a brilliant way of putting it. I’ve never thought of it like that, but yeah, that’s exactly it. I would also buy them records for their birthdays, like records that they didn’t fucking ask for: ‘I know you’ll like this.’ And then I gave them mixtapes: ‘You have to listen to that.’ And then you finally get to do it in public and get paid for it and you’re like, HA HA HA, finally you will listen to me.
Even though a lot of the fun of your book is about the things that go wrong, I think in a lot of ways, anyone that manages to live their life without a proper job is triumphing in some important way. You’ve managed to get to this age without really doing anything that could constitute being called a job. Is that a source of pride? I can’t agree enough that being a bohemian is winning in this fucking society. I actually did do a full-time job for maybe three years at the end of the ’90s. I worked in an office. It was horrific, and I abused drugs every day to get through it. So I don’t know if that really counts or not, because I wasn’t really doing the job properly. But yeah, aside from that, I have definitely lived that particular lifestyle.
Are you pleased with the reception of the book? So, so pleased. I’ve read maybe one weird negative review on Amazon, and I think everything else has just been perfect. I couldn’t be happier, really. I didn’t even know it was going to be received like it was. So the affection that people have held it in is nice. It’s weird, isn’t it? When your book’s released, it kind of gets away from you. People put their own slant on it and it becomes their book. I never imagined that happening, but that whole process has been really fucking lovely. I really liked it.
There’s a lot going on in Harold Heath’s brilliantly readable DJ memoir. In the first place it’s an endearing story of a DJ’s struggle towards success – the slow career climb of a professional in dance music. There are details any working DJ will recognise – like a drunk promoter kicking him off the decks so he can have a go himself, or a wildly mis-booked gig that has Harold desperately searching through his box for something that won’t utterly bomb. It’s full of smart descriptions of the craft and the sheer pleasure to be had making people dance.
The bittersweet opening scene is pure Spinal Tap, as he plays rave classics at a gig he assumes must be the end of his career. ‘In the marquee this afternoon, the bleeps and sub-bass of LFO’s UK house classic ‘LFO’ take on a surreal air, as toddlers and children are encouraged to dance by eager parents, whilst some of the other Mums and Dads look on with a mixture of emotions ranging from bemusement to teary-eyed nostalgia.’
However, after the unspoken shame of playing for under-fives, a few pages later he gives you the 180-degree counterpoint, describing a perfect overseas booking where everything comes together beautifully: the crowd, the setting, the vibe. ‘We are at an open-air bar in Varna Bulgaria, on a hill overlooking the Black Sea, on a magical summer evening.’ Amid this beautiful scenery he captures a peak moment as he recalls ‘playing one of my own productions, on a beautiful high-end hand-carved artisan sound system which was forged in the embers of a dying sun.’ This mix of highs and lows is what makes the book such fun, with Harold happy to share the details of both extremes. The journey he takes us on is unflinchingly honest and often hilarious.
The other side to the book, which elevates it to another level, is a brutal study of the scorched-earth decimation of the ‘dance industry’, as we used to know it, at the hands of the digital revolution. As a tech-house DJ scraping an okay living from playing and production, Harold is perfectly placed to detail the incremental changes that destroyed his livelihood. We follow each twist of the business as the money drains away from middling DJ-producers like him, and into the hands of the big music platforms and oxygen-depleting superstars. Around the mid-noughties his career is ticking along nicely. He’s scaled the heights of ‘tier five, maybe briefly tier four’ in the DJ pyramid, playing bigger gigs and travelling regularly to eastern Europe. After this, though, the ground is pulled inexorably from under him.
‘Once music could be converted into digital zeros and ones and be instantly swapped between hard drives around the world without cost, then everything changed and the equilibrium that had existed before simply disappeared.’ He sees deals get worse, advances fall, vinyl distributers go bust, remix fees fall to hobbyist rates, and earnings from releases nosedive. As streaming takes over and social media begins its climb, he dutifully takes to MySpace, and then Facebook, and watches an army of amateurs muscle in on all the previously skilled areas of the business. He describes all this with a perspective gained by hindsight, but also with the eyes of a frontline soldier.
‘As the structures of the traditional music industry crumbled around me, I continued to spend my time DJing underground house parties and producing underground house music, the profits of which couldn’t possibly sustain me financially in the long term… Looking back, I’m still not really sure why though. It seems trite to say, but at the heart of it, I just really loved it.’
In a culture so often defined by its winners, Long Relationships is brilliantly observed reporting from the coalface of dance music. It illuminates the slog of everyday promotion and the occasional glittering moments behind the decks that provide the strength to keep going. It’s a love letter to a culture, and also an important document of the unstoppable economic forces that did their best to vapourise it.
‘The music industry no longer made sense: the kids paid a monthly fee to huge corporations so they could steal music from their favourite artists. DJs had become awful faux-rock stars, thousands of people stood in rows looking at them instead of dancing together to their music. In the face of reality where the old certainties had fallen away, producers and DJs like me retreated online. We created a simplified, cartoon sketch of ourselves and… retreated to the warm glow of the internet even as it started to reduce us.’ Frank Broughton
Can we review our own book? Let’s see. Those paying attention will have noticed Last Night a DJ Saved My Life is back in the shops, provoking many questions. Why bother? What’s new and different? Are Swedish House Mafia in it? What about Nervo? But most of all, is it worth shelling out for a new copy? Well, yes it is. It’s the best it’s ever been. And the heaviest. With absolutely the best cover – thanks to that amazing photo by Adam Friedman, captured at the last night of Talking Loud in 1990. We’ve done a lot of interviews about the book lately, radio takeovers, international book tours and such, so here are some of the bon mots those skilled interviewers teased out of us.
Last Night a DJ Saved My Life – The History of the Disc Jockey was first published in 1999. Twenty-three years later so much had changed, and we didn’t want it to end up as a museum piece. We wanted someone who’s 25 to be able to pick it up and read it and make sense of it. Problem was, we were trapped in a contract. Our original UK publisher was known for of-the-moment titles, and not much interested in a book that stayed in print for more than 20 years. So it wasn’t available because they were only printing enough copies to hang on to the rights.
Then Lord Weatherall aligned the stars for us. Lee Brackstone, the wild man of British publishing, was giving a eulogy at Andrew’s memorial service – he’d been working with him on a possible memoir. Afterwards, Lee got talking to Bill and mentioned he’d love to publish Last Night on his new imprint, White Rabbit Books. But still Headline refused to give us the rights back, so for months it looked like this would stay a frustrating dream. We’d updated it once for the UK paperback and again for the US edition, but it looked like we’d have to leave it frozen in time around 2006. And then… we realised that Headline and White Rabbit were both owned by the same parent company. After a boardroom handshake and a pound changing hands it was on.
Lee was a great editor because he made us actually edit it. There are over a quarter of a million words in there and we’d never really sat down and found where we could streamline things. But Lee said we could only add new bits once we’d made space for them. In the end we painstakingly cut out 20,000 words and added 23,000. Which makes it a real rollercoaster read. There’s no excess, so it barrels along.
One of the things we wanted to address was the fact it’s such a male story. We wanted to hear more women’s voices in the book. Some of it is inescapable. DJing was a very male profession for so long, a lot of the action was centred on gay clubs in New York and Chicago, and it was almost a masonic process where men passed on the sacred baton to other men, with very few women interrupting their cosy flow. Until quite recently a woman behind the decks was seen as noteworthy. So even though we can’t change the story, what we could do is bring in more women as commentators – clubbers and contemporaries. And go deeper into the lives of the women DJs we’d written about in the first edition. Originally they had been in the ‘Outlaw’ chapter because women DJs were freedom fighters battling for recognition. For the new edition we expanded their story into a whole chapter.
From ch 20 WOMAN: Fight The Power, p672
It’s 6am under the vast dome of The Saint, the most spectacular audiovisual play-palace in the world. Thousands of half-naked men have been dancing through the night under the electric stars, safe in the warmth of each other’s bodies and the sense of refuge from the destruction outside. It’s 1981 and the city’s gay population is pummeled by fear and grief as people begin to grow sick and die. They don’t know it yet, but by the time the emergency fades, these people will have lost half of all their friends. The music is fast, escapist disco and the turbulent male ocean of the dancefloor expects this tempo to last another six hours.
But it drops to silence.
Then darkness.
Then light.
Then slowly, but insistent, as lights ripple over people’s faces, a ballad begins. It’s a song from childhood, from a musical, and they all know it by heart. But through their adult lives it’s earned a deeper meaning – This is the anthem that symbolises their hope, their protest, their yearning for equality, more than any other. The death of its singer sparked their uprising; its lyrics even inspired their flag. It is unashamedly camp, and its campness is at the core of their rebellion.
But… as the song soars through the speakers, it’s not the version they know. This is bolder, defiant, vastly more soulful, with the barely suppressed anger of a spiritual. And it flies higher… and higher…
When Sharon White halted everything at peak time to play an acetate, fresh from the singer herself, of Patti Labelle’s ‘Over The Rainbow’ to six thousand gay men in the frightening months at the start of the Aids crisis, the intensity of the collective emotion in that enormous room was possibly unequalled in human history.
‘It was unheard of to stop the floor for a ballad at six in the morning.’ she told Claes at disco-disco.com. ‘I took a big chance playing it then, but the entire room stopped and people held each other, people were in tears… It absolutely soared on that sound system. When it ended, the applause wouldn’t stop.’
Sharon found herself swept away, lost in tears and hugging her best friend, lighting director Mark Ackerman, as time stopped and the room held on in flames. ‘It was such an overwhelmingly emotional moment that everyone shared,’ she remembers ‘It was the one moment I craved my entire career… To have so many people on the same emotional plane…It was magic.’
Sharon White was the first woman to play The Saint. She was a regular at The Garage – playing when Larry was a no-show – and thus the only DJ who ever played both clubs. She also graced Studio 54, Limelight, Roxy and The Sound Factory Bar. She was the first DJ reporting her charts to Billboard who wasn’t male. As the first female DJ in a major New York nightclub, she opened a small door into the future. ‘Since I was the only woman playing those venues, I was considered a trailblazer. I’m glad I made a difference. I tried to make people aware that gender has nothing to do with your ability to present music.’
It was great to also find a few new names we weren’t aware of. Like Celeste Alexander, who was one of the rare female DJs to play on the Chicago scene when house music was evolving. You can read her full interview on the site here.
From ch 20 WOMAN: Fight The Power, p 687
Celeste Alexander had grown up with creative parents in the bohemian multiracial neighbourhood of Hyde Park and was the kind of girl who didn’t take no for an answer. At junior college with future producer Steve Hurley, she was taken by the idea of DJing and asked him to teach her.
‘I had a real crush on him. We became friends and mixing, or ‘hot mixing’ as we called it back then, was all he really talked about.’ When Celeste asked Hurley why other girls weren’t DJing, he told her it was because they didn’t think they could. ‘The guys thought it was a specific thing for them to have that hand-to-eye coordination in order to mix and blend. That got my attention immediately.’
As well as establishing herself solo, in answer to the city’s famous Hot Mix 5, Celeste was briefly part of an all-girl alternative. The Fantastic Four hot mix crew was Celeste, Chrissie Hutchison, Kenya Lenoir and Berlando Drake, or sometimes Steve Hurley’s sister Angie, who had to play first to be home by 8pm for her strict parents.
Celeste went on to impress Ron Hardy, one of the twin gods of Chicago house, to the point that he invited her to play at the Music Box. The first time she warmed up for Hardy he’d been listening incognito from the other side of the room, and when he came to congratulate her and start his set she was so nervous she barfed on his shoes.
Another find was the woman who had been Sharon White’s mentor, a radio DJ called Alison Steele who became a revered late night ‘freeform’ DJ on New York radio.
From ch 20 WOMAN: Fight The Power, p 678
Radio had provided Sharon White’s route in, first at college, then at WNEW in New York. Her mentor at the station was a talented radio DJ with her own pioneering story: Alison Steele, who rose to fame on-air as ‘The Nightbird’. In 1966 the station had launched its FM offering with an attention-grabbing all-female format. Eight hundred women applied for ‘Air Personality’ roles and Steele was one of the founding four, drawn from TV and theatre. The press release noted she’d previously been the star of her own TV show, the ominously titled, ‘You And Your Figure.’ Eighteen months later, when the station failed to hit audience targets, it shifted from its schmaltzy MOR (Middle of the Road) format to Progressive Rock and jettisoned most of the women presenters. Thanks to her love and knowledge of the music, Steele was the only one they kept, and found herself introducing the west coast FM ‘freeform’ format to New York. She was given complete creative freedom, and wove poetry, Indian music and Andean flutes into the blossoming rock music of 1967 onwards. ‘She was an incredible DJ as well as the first woman on that scene,’ lauded White. In later years Steele became a CNN producer, opened a cat boutique and was the in-flight DJ for Trans World Airlines.
We also found new stories from the very early years. In the 1940s, in wartime, there were literally men in sheds tinkering with electronic equipment, and they became the first mobile DJs. Read more about them here.
From ch 3 BEGINNINGS, CLUBS: Night Train, p 54
Ron Diggins was a professional radio engineer in Boston, Lincolnshire, with a business providing public address systems. ‘I’d been playing background music and doing voice-overs out the back of my van at school sports days and the like,’ he told the Boston Standard. ‘It was nothing to do with dancing – that was the last thing on my mind.’ But in September 1947, the farm girls from the Swineshead Land Army decided Ron’s gear could be put to better use: ‘They were passing the office, saw the van and came in to ask if it could be used for dancing. They were having a harvest supper with some of the Italian POWs. Well, I’d never thought of it before, but I didn’t want to lose the booking – so I said I’d give it a go.’
It was men like these who took the available technology from fairgrounds and cinemas and gave it new life as travelling disco rigs. In 1949 Diggins built his ‘Diggola’ a wonderful art deco mobile DJ booth modelled on the bandstands of the jazz era. It came complete with double decks for 78s, a home-made mixer, lights, microphone, amplifier and ten speakers. ‘We couldn’t get plywood in those days, so soon after the war. So I had to make it out of coffin boards.’
Savile is still in there. Our legal advice for the first edition was to avoid calling him ‘odd’ as he was so litigious, but we dropped the ‘odd’ bomb regardless. Following the epically grim revelations, the new edition gave us a chance to confront him head on. We weren’t going to rewrite history by deleting him, he was a hugely significant figure in shifting the UK from dance bands to DJs, but we’ve pointed out that the way he exploited his DJ status is a theme running through history and not just a bizarre aberration.
The spring clean led us to shuffle a few sections around for clarity. One result of this was we gave jazz-funk a chapter of its own. It was previously in the Acid House chapter as one of the scenes that laid the groundwork for the Summer of Love, but it made more sense to give it room to breathe its own air.
From ch 14 JAZZ-FUNK: Expansions, p 500
In the mid seventies Britain was not a pleasant place to be. An oil crisis had reduced the country to a three-day week, with power cuts as an added bonus. With constant confrontation between government and unions, and IRA bombs almost monthly, paranoid right-wingers even talked of staging a military coup. The country was brown, as if colour had been rationed. In fact everything seemed to be in short supply: petrol, sugar, jobs, fun.
In stark contrast, jazz-funk’s early aficionados were colourful, brash and stylish. Many of them were Bowie kids and early punk rockers; sharp and street-wise. Mohair sweaters, peg trousers, wedge haircuts, cap-sleeved T-shirts – these were all sure signifiers that the wearer knew how to dance and probably owned some Kool & the Gang and BT Express albums.
The scene’s landmark venues read less like citadels of glamour than a particularly ribald pub crawl: Lacy Lady, the Orsett Cock, Frenchies, the Rio, Flicks, the Belvedere. If suburban jazz-funk was born anywhere, it was in Canvey Island, an ugly lump on the Essex coastline with an oil refinery for a view. Canvey’s best-known musical export, pub rockers Dr Feelgood, dubbed it (only half joking) the Thames Delta. Here, in a club called the Goldmine, a former worker at Dagenham’s Ford car plant named Chris Hill combined an encyclopaedic knowledge of black dance music with some over-the-top showmanship.
At its height in the later seventies the Goldmine attracted travelling fans from all over the country. Coaches would come down from Scotland and the dancers would sleep in the car park overnight. It was a magnet for fashion-oriented youth, with future stars like Spandau Ballet, Depeche Mode and Culture Club present, as well as punk vanguard the Bromley Contingent (including Siouxsie Sioux and Billy Idol). Punk’s future wardrobe was clearly in evidence.
One of the best reasons to buy the new edition is James Murphy’s foreword. It’s been heartwarming over the years to connect with so many people who’ve enjoyed the book, and to realise it’s been inspiring to people, not just as a piece of history, but as their doorway into a deeper appreciation of music. But it’s pretty mindblowing when Questlove picks it out as one of his favourite reads, or when LCD’s James Murphy emails to say thanks because, as he put it, ‘it literally changed the course of my life’.
And of course Lee knows James, because Lee knows everyone, and he asked if he’d write a foreword for the book. And James said yes. But he was really busy. And then he got covid. Finally, he handed it in, literally the last day before they had to send it to print. He wrote this beautiful story about how he was playing in a band, uninspired and not very successful, how he hated dance music and expected the whole DJ world to be ‘idiotic’. And then suddenly, he became friends with a DJ and started seeing how, when you go to a DJ event, it’s a bit more fun.
From FOREWORD by James Murphy
And then I read this book. It’s hard to explain the effect it had on me. I went, quickly, from thinking we were renegade geniuses, to understanding that we were, instead, lucky to accidentally find ourselves part of a long and beautiful tradition of evangelists, hosts, caretakers, maniacs, etc., whose job was more about making a place for the people who were willing to come listen and dance than it was about, well . . . us. So, this here book quickly and firmly disabused me of any egotistical DJ notions I might have been harbouring, and changed my life for the better.
It was a miraculous and humbling gift to read about Francis Grasso, playing records for fourteen hours straight at the Haven, just steps from my first apartment in The Village. Or about David Mancuso, the Herc/Bambaataa battles, Ron Hardy, Deep Space Soundworks . . . To read about Larry Levan’s uncompromising vision and work with the Paradise Garage sound system . . . I had been a sound engineer for years. It was my living. I was obsessed with making things hit you just right – so loud you had that fear response, but never hurting your ears. Just deep. It was so strange to find this kinship and inspiration in a world to which I had never given much thought.
This book also taught me something new about the universality of feeling – the body feeling that I was always chasing. It taught me that there were tribes upon tribes, as in awe of music as I ever was, throwing themselves into it with love and weird, blind fury.
This journey – from thinking of dance music as flippant and throwaway, to recognising that it’s a vital part of musical history – is something that’s happened on a wider scale. The biggest change for our book in the last 23 years is the context it falls into. When we first wrote it it was provocative to pay so much attention to the DJ. Dance music was a global culture by 1999, but it was a bit much to suggest it deserved any kind of historical scrutiny. Back then you’d go to a music bookshop (when such things existed), and there’d 36 books about the Beatles and what they had for dinner, and nothing about DJs or dance music beyond David Toop’s Rap Attack and Matthew Colin’s Altered State. Or you’d read in the Penguin Encyclopedia of Popular Music that disco was ‘a dance fad of the ’70s, with profound and unfortunate influence on popular music.’ So when we first wrote Last Night we were on a mission. We were really conscious we had to fight for the DJ’s place in history and earn dance music some respect. Now, of course, there are lots of books taking our subject seriously and the battle is largely won. So one of the subtle changes in the book is that we’ve come off our soapbox. There were several endearingly tub-thumping passages that we quickly removed. As we wrote in the new preface, ‘Thankfully, we can now relax. The idea of dance music having a history is no longer preposterous.’
For Shovell, drumming is life, communication, ‘a way of transmitting power, positivity and gratitude’. His hand percussion has summoned the gods on everything from the deepest tribal house tracks to Primal Scream, Jamiroquai and Nightmares on Wax. His story is testimony to the power of music to transform lives, an acid house odyssey that goes from Lewisham plumber to international drum warrior, taking in pop-stardom in M People, a Pacha residency and sidelines in cranio-sacral therapy, Nichiren Buddhism, and the Last Night a DJ Saved My Life Foundation. And that’s without even mentioning the stunning secret his family kept from him.
So, tell me about the music you heard growing up in south-east London. I used to hang out by this place that had been a morgue in Deptford. We’d hang out on the corner of Watson Street and New Cross Road, because there was a fish and chip shop there, and one evening we could hear this music, live music, coming out of the morgue. So we knocked on the door. ‘What’s going on?’
The council had moved out the dead people and replaced them with musicians and instruments, predominantly to get kids like me off the corners of streets getting into bits of bother. They would literally go, ‘This is called a saxophone. This is what it does. This is a drum. This is what does. Singing: this is what it is.’ And they were all really acclaimed musicians in their own right.
I never, ever paid anything. It was an open musical house for youngsters. I went in there when I was 14, and started mucking about, just having a laugh, but before I knew what was happening, I was part of a reggae band and went to support my mate’s older brother at a gig in a place called Chats Palace in Homerton.
I didn’t realise the eclectic mix of music that I was getting. I was born in Greenwich Hospital, and brought up in New Cross and I was there till ’71. It was a very mixed bag of people, so there was Africans and Irish and Greeks and Turks, Indians, West Indians, Caribbeans and Pakistanis. I thought the whole world was like New Cross and Deptford.
I used to muck about on my mate’s mum and dad’s bongos. After this gig, this guy says, ‘You’re pretty good. Get yourself some drums and you can join a band.’ I failed everything at school and I’d probably be labeled ADHD if there was such a thing back then. I was just a pain in the arse. I was always tapping and banging on chairs and people’s backs and my legs and pencils, everything. And that’s why the drums came in, gave me a way to use up my energy.
Were you aware of other drummers and percussionists in bands at that age? I knew Charley Charles, so Ian Dury and the Blockheads was a massive influence on me, as was Bob Marley. But I couldn’t tell you, ‘I want to be like him,’ or any specifics, I was just having a great time. I wasn’t causing any mischief. I wasn’t able to stay in one place longer than about 90 seconds. I couldn’t even sit down and play the drum kit, because I used to get electricity in my arse. I couldn’t sit.
But then I became a plumber, because I never ever thought that I’d do music as a living. I was a plumber for nine years on Lewisham Council. The bricklayer played a bit of keyboards, the electrician sat in a bit, the labourer played a bit of bass guitar. We used to rehearse on the Catford one-way system. I went from reggae and had another band, more of a sort of pop/rockish group called Profile. We played in empty pubs on the Old Kent Road. Thought we were going to make it, but didn’t. There was another band of fellas upstairs, who were the hippies. Me and the guitarist and the drummer left Profile, and we started talking to these hippies, and said, ‘Do you want to jam?’ There was another plumber in there, a painter and decorator, guy who ran a playground centre, and a car valet.
It was the late ’80s, house music had just started, it was at the back of the Downham Tavern pub in south-east London, they had a massive hall. And I got asked to play some drums, I thought with the DJ, but actually they stopped the DJ, and it was just me playing drums on the stage to about, I don’t know, one or two thousand people. I mentioned I was in this band Natural Life and they went, ‘Do you want to do a thing?’ We started playing there, and we did a cover of ’Another Brick in the Wall’, four-to-the-floor version. There was a guy filming there. He knew Adamski’s manager, and he said, ‘That track’s really good,’ One thing led to another and we got a record deal.
You went to Shoom, right? Yes I did. So I was in a club in Croydon called Easy Streets, with my jacket and gold chains on, trousers and shoes. My mate Martin Davey, his dad owned the fitness centre and we’d go there for a little late drink. One night, Martin went, ‘Oh, there’s this new thing down at me dad’s gym. We should go down there.’ In them days, clubs finished about 1 am, didn’t they? All piled in a cab, went down the gym, all with our jackets on. Turned up, went to the bar and ordered four pints, then this dungaree-wearing guy comes up to us with a kaleidoscope thing. Steve Hill, his name was. I walked down the little hallway to the dancefloor, and it was like I’d landed on another planet. The music, the smoke, the people had T-shirts on. No one had a jacket or formal trousers. It was all dungarees and shit, sweating like nutters and doing this dancing I’ve never seen before.
I said, ‘What’s going on here?’ And he went, ‘Here, have half of that.’ You can imagine, half hour later, jacket’s off, I’m out there. Monday morning, straight down the sports shop, T-shirts, jogging bottoms, and I resigned as a plumber six months after that. It changed my life. I was going there every weekend, thinking about it every moment of the week, waiting for the weekend.
Didn’t you also play at Monkey Drum? Yeah, I was playing Monkey Drum on Gray’s Inn Road on the Monday night. I met Alfredo. He said, ‘Why don’t you come to Ibiza? I can sort it out’. So I went to Ibiza in ’90 for the summer with Alfredo. Meant to stay there a week, stayed five. Ended up looking like I’d served three missions in Vietnam, couldn’t get home, all my money had gone. It was the greatest worst time of my life there. Billy Nasty’s mum used to work in a travel agents so I phoned him: ‘Can your mum …’ Got me a flight home.Anyway, Natural Life ended up getting signed to Hollywood Records, which was Walt Disney’s record label, for £100 grand.
Were Yothu Yindi on the same label? They were signed to them as well, yeah.
I remember seeing a Yothu Yindi showcase, at the Marquee on Charing Cross Road, and I’m pretty sure you guys supported them. We did. It was ’91. Because the label folded in ’92. We got 100 grand in the January of 1991, and we were minus 30 grand by October. And we hadn’t bought a car, a house or anything. We had a live-in studio, ‘Let’s write it all in the studio.’ And everyone around us went, ’Yeah, do that. Brilliant.’ So you can imagine, invited everyone up, and set up these parties, massive amounts of weed….
I resigned as a plumber in the April of ’90. InJune, I was on Top Of The Pops with Kenny Thomas doing a cover of ’Outstanding’, who I’d met through Glen Gunner, who was at Monkey Drum (Simon Dunmore signed it to Cooltempo). So I’d gone from a plumber in April, to Ibiza, Top of the Pops, and I was like, this game’s easy. What’s everyone going on about?!
We were touring as Natural Life, but because we weren’t signed anymore (Hollywood went out business by this time), and no one was giving us money, my mum and dad paid for our last tour. You know when a relationship’s not working, but you’re still there? It was like that. The keyboard player walked offstage in the middle of a gig. It was all falling part. One of our last gigs was at Brixton Academy, 1992. Brand New Heavies, Jamiroquai, Natural Life and M People. Apart from Jamiroquai, I didn’t know really any of the others. As we were finishing sound-checking, Mike Pickering and Paul Heard [from M People] said to me, ‘Look we’ve got a percussionist. He’s broke down on the motorway. Can you stand in on the sound-check?’ And I was like, ‘Give us 50 quid and I’ll do the gig later for ya.’ Did the sound-check, didn’t think anything of it. They took my number. The fella turned up, played, and then they phoned me about a month later, and said, ‘Got a gig in Middlesbrough. Do you want to do it?’
Heather was live, I was live, the rest was on DAT. Had a great gig. And then there was another few club gigs. I was never the most shy and retiring sort of person, so they liked me and I kept the firm jolly. Heather didn’t know what to make of me at first, but she soon got to know me, and yeah, they wanted me around. Then the club gigs became college gigs. Then the album was released and ’Moving On Up’ come out and we were on Top Of The Pops. Then there were arena gigs, and then I was bloody flying all around the world.
When I was a plumber for nine years, I would literally have my hand down a toilet pan or down the drain, or lying on me back putting on bath taps on council estates in Lewisham. And I dreamed: all I want to do is be in a band. I just want to make one record and do a few gigs. That’s all I want. So this felt unbelievable. I remember flying first class to Australia, and I think we did three nights at the Hordern Pavilion. It was like 12,000 capacity. Mick Jagger turned up. Mick Jagger was a big fan of M People. It was ridiculous. Everyone knows your name and all that.
But all through this, I was carrying a lot of trauma. I’m adopted. I’ve been fostered; so that was bubbling. I didn’t know it at the time, but I had ADHD, anger issues, concentration issues, getting into trouble issues. I was an extreme character, I’m a drummer, I am Keith Moon, I am Animal out the Muppets, I am John Bonham. That is me. That’s what we do. So I dived into that character. That’s who I thought I was. I had a massive hole and I was trying to fill it externally with as much partying and sex, drugs and rock and roll. Yeah, bring it on. Here I am! Massive flag-waving. I can stay out longer than anyone. I’ll do more than anyone. That’s what it was like for years and years. But after ten years it sort of tailed off. Then Heather said she wanted to do a solo album. That was at the very end of December ’99, that was when things started crumbling inside. Hit a wall. and it coincided with finding out who my real mum was. And it was a massive shock, because it was an incredibly close family member.
So I was adopted. My mum’s white, my dad’s white, my older brother is white and I’m not. Even as a kid, it didn’t even really register what that meant. And when I did, I just bottled it somewhere, put it away. So it was revealed to me that my mum, who’d adopted me, was actually my birth mother. So I’ve gone 33 years of living in a house with my mum, who I didn’t know was my mum, because she’d said I was adopted.
What a head fuck. She’d had an affair with a Jamaican guy, and I was the result of the affair. And then they came out of hospital, and told everyone that they’d had a still birth, and I was fostered, and months later, they adopted me. And no one knew. My mum and dad, and that was it. So on that night, my mum didn’t even say a word. My dad said to me, ‘Look, we was going to take this to our grave but you’ve asked, so I’m going to tell you.’
It spun me out, man. That year, I drunk more than I’d ever drunk before. I did more gear than I’d ever done before. I was angrier than I’d ever been before. Then in January 1999, 13 months later, I was in a studio in Manchester talking about a drum pattern. I remember I was looking at a screen, going, ‘Well, if we put the…’ And I started convulsing, then I started crying and sweating in the middle of the sentence. Got in the car and drove straight back to London, had this ridiculous cathartic, I’m going to name it spiritual, an incredible few hours of seeing my decades of trauma coming out of my body. The girl I was with was getting bath towels to soak this off, just lying there just sweating and wailing. Beyond crying. And then, and this is my truth, this is my truth, there was black smoke coming out of my stomach. Looking down, I could see black smoke coming out.
Drove to my mum and dad’s the next day, spoke to my mum and just needed to be held. She was so ashamed of what had happened, she didn’t do anything on that night. Very Freudian, I suppose. I needed to be held, told me that she loved me, and it helped me a bit, but it knocked me out, because it’s PTSD. And so it led to one of the lowest moments in my life. I was just like, ‘I’m out of here, man. I’ve had this pain now for so long.’ It felt unstoppable. And I don’t really want to go into details about it, but it didn’t happen, obviously, because I’m sitting here right in front of you. Needless to say, I was in a really incredibly dark place.
So I had to work out who I was. I started doing yoga. I was doing yoga, I was a vegan. I was the healthiest I’ve ever been. I started running, I was up the Kronk boxing gym in Kentish Town. End up doing a white collar fight. So I was doing boxing training, boxing, yoga three times a week and running. Because I wasn’t drumming. But I was doing it for the first time positively, because I felt like I was so worn and fragile, that I couldn’t do any gear. By 2004, I was in a pretty good way. I started doing a bit of TV.
Didn’t you present the football? Yeah, I did a football show called 90 Minutes, Shovell’s Travels, which was flying round the world interviewing footballers. I was a presenter on the Guinness Book of Records, Record Breakers that Roy Castle, Linford Christie did… I was on that with Fearne Cotton. But unless it was about things I wanted to interview people about I’m not interested. I’m not interested in what insulation you’ve got. I don’t care. What are you doing, really? I’m a presenter, but only if it’s football, music… Passions.
Then music raised its head again. The drums took on a whole different meaning and texture and sound, even. They were very healing. I felt like, in a lot of clubs it was me and the drums, and I didn’t have to run around meeting everyone and shouting, and I know this may sound a bit bonkers, but they’re my family: the congas, the bongos, the timpanis, It’s my island, it’s my world, and I can go there without using substances. It’s beautiful. I haven’t had a drink or anything else since February the 4th 2010. Ten years in February.
Wow. Met my wife in the April of 2010. Well, I didn’t know she was going to be my wife. Moved to Ibiza in July playing all the clubs: Pacha, beach parties, private. My rider was a pot of green tea and some bananas, and I’d go all through to six, seven or eight in the morning on that, drumming all night. Started studying shamanism there in 2011, met a shaman.
That was life-changing. When you’re blindfolded in someone’s house. I was blindfolded, she’s playing shamanic drums and rattling, and you’re in a trance dance to go and find your power animal. If all my Arsenal lot was looking through the window now, ‘What are you doing, you mug?’ And I was there. I’m loving it, and I’m thinking, you know what? I don’t care. This is amazing. Such freedom. I did five years with that woman.
How did all this feed into the music and what you played and how you played? There I am for years thinking I’ve invented this character called the Drum Warrior, and I wear all this face paint and tribal clothing. And I bless the drums with sage, and I have a staff. And I invented that. My ancestors are African, man. Slave drumming, rhythm. African. Black. It’s not a theory. Everyone else is walking out in all their gear, and I’ve got a bright pink smock on with face paint. I’m Arsenal, do you know what I mean? I’m from south-east London. It wasn’t easy, Bill. The sage and the smoke…
It’s the 21st century, and everyone thinks we’re so intelligent and we know what’s what, and we can hit two buttons and get every single artist, and we can play computer tennis with a guy in Tokyo but fundamentally, what we’re doing is dancing to a beat of a drum. This is tribal, and we’ve been blessed and given it by the ancestors. It’s a gift of the universal rhythm that the ancestors sent us.
And when there’s a full moon, and you start playing drums out on a full moon, and you’re a bit conscious of that, and I’m on green tea and bananas, honestly I’ve never felt so energised. So the drums and the music took on a massively deep, spiritual gifting, healing, ancestral, momentous, infinite, eternal meaning. The gift that I’m blessed with, oh my goodness gracious.
Was it Simon Dunmore that brought you back into playing clubs? So we was on Defected when ‘Drums Of Ghodrat’ came out. Simon had Copyright, and was in the same studio and I knew Simon from the Kenny Thomas days. I was doing separate things in Ibiza, and it was like, ‘Well, why don’t you start doing something with Defected?’ Then it just got bigger and bigger and it’s like a family. I felt at home. There I am going, ‘Sime, what do you reckon? Is this all right?’ Like the face paint and headdresses and he was like, ‘Yeah, all right. Go on.’ It was a beautiful platform. It was a wonderful environment to play with some great DJs, to play in some great places around the world, with this new way of being. I was doing a lot with Nightmares on Wax and George [Evelyn] encouraged it: ‘Get some more sage. More sage! More face paint, Shovell! Be it! Be it!’
Do you see that now as much as almost like a kind of a master of ceremonies, as well as playing the drums? It feels much more than just being a percussionist in a band. Yeah, 100%. No one else needs to know what I’m doing. If they ask, I’ll tell them. But if they just see a nutter with a massive bit of sage and blessing the crowd and blessing the sky and blessing my drum, they think, what’s he doing, this fella? Ive ended up blessing people that come to the front, and it’s not me blessing them, it’s the universe that’s coming through and blessing them. I’m a deeply rhythmical, spiritual, ancient heart of a very modern, technologically-based environment.
Reflecting back now, what could you say about the impact that acid house had on you, and just that revelation of going to Shoom for the first time? Oh, every time I see Rampling, he sort of walks the other way, because he knows what’s coming. ‘Dan! Dan, do you remember? I walked in a plumber and walked out a musician.’ [laughs] By taking that half a pill, and I’m going to be honest, that’s the first time ever in my life I had felt love. The first time I ever heard Martin Luther King’s speech over the top of a house track, on half an half a pill, does it get better than this? It meant masses to me, and it still does.
Then on Monday morning, I’d go into my council yard at Lewisham to start getting me time sheets to go and unblock toilet pans and I’m looking round the yard at people in their 60s still there, been there 40 years, andthought: I ain’t doing this. I felt musical love. I felt the rhythm. I felt the rhythm of the gods, man. I never felt love like that, never. Am I going to give that up just to get my pension?
Then very quickly, as I’ve said, Monkey Drum, Ibiza, Alfredo, Kenny Thomas, Simon Dunmore… Get out of my way! live it. I might have a massive international plumbing business by now, Shovellino’s: the bath’s on us. But that was not my passion. Music is/was my passion, and so that allowed someone like me from south-east London, who was talking to DJs who spoke like me, and couldn’t read music, and didn’t go to university, but who was holding a crowd magnificently. So my circumference went from two mile radius, from my front door in south-east London, to an international circumference, to a global, to…
Cosmic. Cosmic. Exactly that word. Cosmic. Infinite, eternal. And through music, so when I’m playing the drums now. That’s such an important word. When I’m playing the drums now, as well as listening to the DJ of course, that is what’s coming through, the cosmic, infinite, eternal power of the one love.
I’m a Buddhist, I am. When my dad died in December 2014, I’m at his bedside, holding his hand, and he’s on the way, last breath scenario. They’d been married 63 years, all that stuff. Her affair. He’d forgiven her. My dad did nothing but love me, this mixed race kid who was a constant reminder of his wife’s betrayal. And all my dad ever did was love me to bits.
That’s an amazing thing for anyone to do. I’d been in a relationship of unconditional love. My dad did it. My dad forgave. He’d been in the war, got shot in the leg. He was 91 when he died. He’d forgiven his wife, and loved her and loved me. Took me everywhere, helped me with the drums, with the gigs. When I was in the reggae bands, playing in south-east London, black Rastas and weed, my mum and dad would be sitting there supporting me. At NYNEX Manchester, 18,000 people, my mum is waving at me. She loved it.
In my opinion, we spend far too much time not talking about death. We should talk about death every day. We should make it a reality in our lives, that we’re all going to die, so that we live, we live as happy and as free and as lovingly as we can. We think we’re eternal, so we live accordingly. So that sharpened me up to life, its fragility and its preciousness, and even underlined the importance of music as a gift in that, as something that blends through all of this sorrow and aches and pains, and can hold all these memories and emotions.
My wife got pregnant but my mum was in a nursing home in Crystal Palace, so I grabbed my shamanic drum and drove down there. I didn’t plan. You can’t plan these things. I put the drum down, I lit a candle, started playing drums and singing these Ecuadorean chants, just giving gratitude to the end of life. I picked up the drum again and I’m playing it above her as she’s dying. Talk about the importance of music, its benefits and its healing power. And I’m thinking, thank you, a blessing, and mum on your next journey. We got the call at half five that she’d died Monday morning. The ebb and flow of life is drums, it’s the rhythm of life.
I have been blessed with a gift to connect life’s rhythm through these drums for us all. Whether it’s a little drum or whether it’s what I just did in the studio, or it’s a massive 15,000 people Defected festival, or if it’s Ibiza… Wherever it is, my bit of that is to connect all of this with the energy that is life, which is birth, living, illness and death. And I’ll celebrate the whole bloody lot.
Hearing The World’s Famous Supreme Team between the tracks on Malcolm McLaren’s Duck Rock album was mind-blowing. I wanted to be where radio was this exciting. This great book goes behind the scenes at the birth of hip hop radio to document the characters driving it and the forces pushing it in certain directions. The established black station owners knew rap was a ratings-grabber but saw it as too streetwise for their buppy aspirations. Frankie Crocker hated it but couldn’t fight the dollar signs. Mr Magic built his own show with his bare hands by buying airtime and promoting the hi-fi store he worked in. Hip hop history is mostly made of records and clubs, John Klaess shows decisively that radio deserves more of a look-in, arguing that these on-air communities were key to the development of the culture. There are great little insights, for example it was having a fully equipped radio studio at his disposal that let Marley Marl lay down the aesthetics of sample-built recordings. It’s an academic book, but written with stories and style and love for its subject. I talked to author John Klaess about the early hustles that took rap onto the airwaves, and where to find the best of the amazing recordings that exist online.
Frank Broughton: Why was radio so important in the early days of hip hop? John Klaess: It helps to remember that when we’re talking about hip hop in the late 1970s and very early 1980s, we’re not necessarily talking about hip hop as we know it today. The concept of the “rap record” didn’t exist yet. The foundations of hip hop, like rapping, looping breaks, and creatively cutting records together were in place, but hip hop was mostly a live practice in the black and brown neighbourhoods of New York. There wasn’t an obvious or agreed upon way to take a three-hour park jam and convert it into a record. And it wasn’t clear that there would be a big enough audience to support those records that were made, not to mention that early on major labels weren’t interested in signing an unproven minority youth music. Radio wound up being a perfect medium to pull all of these threads together, accelerating the creative, commercial, social trajectory of the music.
For one, DJs treated the studio like a laboratory. Each week they’d bring new mixes, tracks and experiments to share on the air. If you listen to mixes of the Rap Attack over time, you can hear Marley Marl getting increasingly sophisticated and adventurous with his mixing techniques in a way that presages beat-making techniques and sampling later in the decade. The Awesome 2 talk about how radio, in particular, was a great medium for experimentation because listeners were tuning in from contexts that weren’t the club. You can try out different combinations of records and sounds when you aren’t trying to drive a dancefloor. The aggregate of all of this weekly experimentation is a slow but distinct evolution of the genre over time.
Maybe more obviously, radio has historically been one of the most important distribution mediums for record labels, and this was also true for rap. As indie and major labels started to sign hip hop acts, they looked to hip hop DJs with access to radio to get the word out about their product. Early hip hop radio DJs would get mountains of records delivered to them, and they were essential tastemakers.
Finally, it’s hard to overestimate radio’s role in building an audience for rap music. If we go by shout-outs, early hip hop radio shows were mostly for, by, and listened to by people in the know in New York. That changed when two of the most listened to stations in the world programmed rap radio shows. In addition to the reach and validation these shows gave rap music and hip hop culture, listeners taped episodes and mailed the tapes around the world.
Radio was uniquely suited to taking a nascent urban culture and facilitating hip hop’s ascendence into one of the most important creative and commercial forces of the twentieth century.
Your book is a powerful argument for giving radio more space in the history. What do we miss when we only think about the records and the clubs? I think we miss, first and foremost, that the music industry is a dynamic web of work and relations that includes but isn’t limited to radio, records, and the club. It’s really hard to think of any one of these institutions without paying attention to how it’s interrelated with the others. I don’t use the metaphor in the book, but it’s more productive to think about musical ecosystems where a host of individuals and institutions work together in both symbiotic and competitive relationships that determine what we hear and what’s produced at any given time.
I think we also miss an entire shadow history of artists and sounds and styles and communities that get cut out when we focus too heavily on discography. So many important artists never cut record deals, and so much important musical activity happens outside the purview of record labels. When you write from the point of view of records, you’re necessarily going to highlight artists with significant record catalogs, and you risk overemphasising records that loom large in historical memory, not what was played most at the time. If you listen to broadcasts of shows from the 1980s, there are plenty of commercial records, sure. But you also hear this wildly social, communal, musical event that’s not governed by what labels thought was important or worth hearing. I wanted to give an account where amateur, homemade mixes are just as important as Def Jam records, and where listeners who tuned in to deliver a shout out or hear what’s going on in their neighbourhood are just as important to the history as people who buy records.
It’s heartwarming to read how much effort those pioneers put in. Mr Magic and The Awesome 2 were not only piecing their shows together, they were also hustling to find the sponsors and advertisers to keep them on the air. How would hip hop history be different if it showed us all the trials and efforts instead of just the successes? I’m really happy you asked this question. There’s a narrative tendency in history to focus on triumphal achievements and big successes – especially in hip hop history. Paying attention to all of the small labours that go into funding a show forces us to look at what it takes to make and maintain a scene over time. When what matters to the history isn’t the magnitude of a success but the hustle itself, you have to tell the story from a different perspective. With the Awesome 2 in particular, paying attention to the work they put in helps us understand what it took to commercialise hip hop. It’s not like a label just signs an act and, voilà, hip hop is a global music. The Awesome 2 were drumming up sponsors for their show, building a record pool, hosting hip hop nights at the Latin Quarter, and doing management and production work for artists. Taken together, this is the work it takes to make a music and run a scene. This is definitely a thread I hope more authors pick up down the line, because I’m sure there are more stories to tell here.
Another great thing about the book is the way it creates a bigger context for the history, showing the connections to the disco scene for example. Clubs like the Paradise Garage and industry figures like Frankie Crocker. What were some of the unexpected connections you found when researching it? One of these connections that’s gotten a lot of attention recently is the intermixing between the uptown hip hop scene and downtown club scene in the early 1980s. DJ Afrika Islam could be the poster child for this. As a protege of Afrika Bambaataa, DJ and dancer with the Zulu Nation, and regular at the Paradise Garage. Islam’s radio show, the Zulu Beat, he fits neatly between these worlds. One of the most unexpected connections was that Ruza Blue AKA Kool Lady Blue, a staple in the downtown scene, funded some of the early episodes of the Zulu Beat. If you listen to some of the tapes, you can hear Islam announce that “This show is a KLB Fun production, a Kool Lady Blue production.” I lost it a little when I heard that for the first time because it was evidence of just how interwoven these two scenes were.
My intro to this world was hearing the World Famous Supreme Team in between the tracks on Malcolm McLaren’s album Duck Rock. What was their story and what happened to them? Why don’t they figure more in your book? I think the Supreme Team were a lot of folks’ first foray into hip hop, and their show was one of the earliest to feature hip hop music. I also think you’re totally right in that they don’t figure as heavily in the books as their influence suggests they should.
Part of the answer is that they never responded to my requests for interviews, which is fair – as a historian you can’t force yourself into peoples’ lives. So from there I was left with what I could get from other sources. There wasn’t a huge record of contemporary Supreme Team interviews or other material beyond the tapes, and with the sources I had I didn’t feel like I could tell that story in a new way without risking misrepresenting something. I opened the book with a vignette from the World Famous Supreme Team show because I wanted to quite literally put them front and centre as a way of gesturing to their importance, and as a way of making up for the fact that their radio show is regrettably underrepresented in the body of the book.
I’ll maintain that distance here, but for folks who are familiar with the World Famous Supreme Team from their connection to Malcolm McLaren, I would highly recommend checking out broadcasts of their radio show. The broadcasts I’ve found are everything that’s interesting about early hip hop radio. You have long stretches of shout-outs, great banter and routines in between cuts, rap/disco tracks of five-percenter texts, and more. They’re just excellent listening.
Internet radio and podcasts have ushered in a new era of radio creativity. Who do you think is keeping up the tradition of the great hip hop radio pioneers? There are so many it’s hard to count! By far my favorite online radio resource is nts.live. Some of the rap shows I like best are Screwboss Radio, Scary Things with DJ Bempah and JK (mostly UK Drill and Grime), PU$$YRAP with Jody Simms, when it was on the YGG show for grime, ONY for a mix of hip, soundtrack, and chopped and screwed, and Hit a Lick Radio for newer hip hop and trap. I find myself listening to a lot more dance music recently, and NTS is so strong there. Some shows and DJs I consistently listen to are Moxie, Kaizen with Madam X, Martha, Spinee, Ben Sims, and DJ Taye.
Can you give us links to your favourite archived radio shows from history. I can give a good example of each show I write about in the book. I also encourage folks to spend time looking for recordings. A lot of the hosting platforms I used when I was doing most of my collecting seven years ago aren’t up anymore.
Interviewed by Bill in Marple Bridge, October 2022
He’s one of the most inspiring collectors you could meet, digging deep in the vinyl mines for accidental masterpieces. His reissue label Finders Keepers is a parallel musical universe, and has had Nas, Madlib, even Jay-Z queuing up to source beats from it. But Andy Votel didn’t much like music to start with – not until he heard it hacked into breaks and samples. For the latest release on his hip hop label Hypocritical Breakdown, he’s returned to his lifelong craft of rapping for an album of his own beats and rhymes, under the name Violators of the English Language (VOTEL in case you hadn’t twigged), which is a crew name that dates right back to his “kamikaze rapping“ childhood.
Violators of the English Language is essentially you being an artist, and that’s something you hadn’t been for a while. It took something as crazy as lockdown to actually think, well, we’ve been saving this potential project for a rainy day. Like, a very rainy day. A rainy day where you’re not even allowed to leave the house. I essentially rung six or seven mates that I used to rap with as battle rappers in a long gone previous life. I said, “How do you fancy being 17 years old again?” Much to my surprise, nobody said no. Somebody should have said no, but nobody said no. And we hadn’t rapped together for 27 years. But yeah, it was like a fish to water, really. It’s been an elephant in the room in my house. I don’t know how Jane [Weaver, Andy’s wife] feels about it. I go out walking every Thursday with a solid group of mates, as many as 20 walkers, and nobody talks about Andy’s rap record.
What effect did hip hop have on you as a kid? Oh, man, it saved my life. When I started secondary school, I went to this vibrant landscape of goths, metallers, mods, psycho rockabillies, skins. It was brilliant. I seemed to be the only hip hop kid. Maybe one other. Five years later when you leave school, everyone was the same, everyone was into house music or Madchester.
A lot of my core group of friends, in later years following school, they really sort of fell apart. I’m from a nice area. It’s a middle-class, rural leafy area. It’s not The Bronx. But hard drug abuse really did heavily affect two of my core group of friends. And I didn’t even see it happen. But rap well kept me away from that. Totally kept me occupied. I was majorly addicted to buying records and making music. I used to work at the butcher’s, used to work at this factory, and I’d go out and buy the hip hop record. The next week, I’d be finding the original sample, and that’s all I did. I was just obsessed with doing that. It was everything.
And that’s how I learned to DJ, really. Because I didn’t have a disposable income, I was like, how can you afford to buy two copies of the same record? It’s so boring. So instead of buying two copies of the same record for doubling up, I’d buy the hip hop record and buy the original sample. So that was my USP, playing the original sample next to the hip hop record. And that was what got me gigs at Dry Bar and Haçienda, and noticed by what became the Fat City people. And then I was just playing, god knows, whether it be psych or Hungarian jazz or African records or whatever.
“Guru met me outside [the International 2]. He gave me a T-shirt and took me in the gig. I was Guru’s guest. How crazy is that? At that given minute, I said, ‘You know what? I’m never going to get a real job. This is me from now on.’”
So it all started very young for you. My dad was really encouraging. He taught me to make tape loops inside compact cassettes when I first got into LL Cool J. He also taught me how to control varispeed turntables using a Hornby power regulator off a model train track. So that’s how I’d learnt about the mechanics of music.
I was that one-off kid that used to go and play snooker on a Sunday night with my dad, and it clashed on with Leaky Fresh’s Out to Distress Rap Show in Manchester. I was in the car and I hadn’t seen my dad for a week. And I wasn’t that chatty, a bit agitated, and he was like, “What’s wrong?” I said, “Gang Starr are going to be on the radio tonight and I really, really want to listen to them being interviewed.”
My dad just said, “Well, why listen to the radio? Why don’t we just go down to the radio station and meet them?” And I was like, “That’s outrageous! We can’t do that!” And he goes, “Of course we can.” So he drove to Sunset Radio. He knocks on the door and Leaky Fresh said, “Yeah, no problem, just come upstairs.” So, I guess I was 16, maybe 15, I met DJ Premier, and I rapped my lyrics to Guru and Premier like that. Like, kamikaze style, you know, no self-awareness whatsoever. I just did it.
And I wasn’t even a confident kid. I was just so driven and confident in that medium. I wouldn’t have been able to ask out a girl to go to the pictures or something. I didn’t like standing up and reading in class. But the kamikaze mentality – it was just there. I’d never drunk beer at that point in my life. I’d never had sex. This was my outlet.
Anyway, Guru said to me, “Are you coming to the gig tomorrow night?” I said, “I’m not old enough.” And he said, “Well, don’t worry, I’ll put you on the guest list.” And the night after, at the International 2, Guru met me outside the gig. He gave me a T-shirt and he took me in the gig. I was Guru’s guest. How crazy is that? At that given minute, I said, you know what? I’m never going to get a real job. This is me from now on.
Amazing. But what was beautiful as well that night, I got a job answering the phone for the radio station. And the second week I went, this local hip hop crew from Northwich had won a hip hop competition in Manchester, and they were called Violators of the English Language. This is Mark Rathbone: Boney Fresh. I met Boney and and he became my hip hop pen pal. I had a little studio at home that I’d made out of bits of old record players and whatnot. And he said, “Oh, we’ll come over and make some music.” So he brought his entire record collection to my house. There was like four seats in the car full of records and boxes. Got it, took us two hours to load it in, had a chat for an hour, and then he had to get back again.
And he tells me, ”At home, I’ve got a record shelf.” I’m like, “A what? How many records have you got where you need a shelf to put them on? You’ve got your own shelf?” Who knew years later he’d have filled two houses and he had to keep lockups away from his wife because he had secret stashes of too much vinyl, with like 20 copies of Remember My Song by Labi Siffre propping up the door.
So, we were basically our own switchboard for finding the original samples, and we just carried on digging and digging and digging and then making music together. And that became Violators of the English Language.
Who were your role models as far as British rap goes? When I was leaving school, I’d turned my back on American hip hop and I was strictly into Britcore. And that was super niche. I mean, you couldn’t really buy much Britcore hip hop at places like Eastern Bloc or Spin Inn. You had to go to Piccadilly Records. And the Britcore: your Gunshot and Black Radical Mk II and Son Of Noise, that was filed with the punk. I think the common thread may be something like Tackhead or something which linked it all together. So even in Manchester, Britcore was hard to swallow for a lot of hip hop fans. And then things like that Low Life scene from Nottingham, and the next generation of Bristol hip hop.
Ruthless Rap Assassins must have been an inspiration? I kind of separated Ruthless Rap Assassins from hip hop. They were their own thing. And in answer, yes, they were hugely inspirational. The sleeve to the Killer Album is one of my favourite sleeves of all time. It was a huge influence on the Badly Drawn Boy – Hour Of Bewilderbeast sleeve that I did. And the way the record was put together, with massive big samples of Beatles records next to radio stuff. I don’t even know if Ruthless Rap Assassins considered it a straight-up hip hop record. It was just a brilliant, brilliant mix tape.
They never influenced me as rappers. Whereas Krispy 3 from Chorley, they certainly influenced me as a rapper. There was a certain time in my life where Mikey D.O.N. from Krispy 3 was my Rakim. Even though it was hard to tell which one was him and his brother when they were on the record, because you know, a Chorley accent is a strong accent, right? Well, the fact that they never deviated from their accents was hugely important. And I will never, ever know how that was perceived outside of Manchester. Even outside of Preston.
“I didn’t like music. It was only when people started breaking the rules of music and destroying music that I became really interested. When sampling and scratching came out, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. This is brilliant. They’re totally ruining everything.“
Do you remember the first hip hop record you heard? Well, I’d heard hip hop and tried to figure out what it was, and I remember being hugely confused. I think ‘Just Buggin’’ by Whistle and ‘Amityville (The House On The Hill)’ and all those sort of records. They weren’t just reappropriating James Brown, they were also reappropriating the Inspector Gadget theme. And as a kid, that meant something.
Up until that point I would go as far as saying I didn’t like music. I wasn’t a music fan. You remember when you’re watching The Muppet Show as a kid and then this music thing would come on, I’d be like, get it off, let’s get the puppets back on. I don’t want to see these weird American celebrities singing.
It was only when people started, to my eyes, breaking the rules of music and kind of destroying music that I became really interested. When sampling and scratching came out, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I was like, this is brilliant. They’re totally ruining everything. You know, it’s great.
What was it about that, though? I don’t know. I’ve definitely always been more interested in the mechanics of music, and I always hark back to when I was a kid, the fact you weren’t able to touch a record player. Mums and dads really treasured their records and kids weren’t allowed to touch the needle. You most certainly weren’t allowed to touch the surface of the record, right? You’re just going to ruin it or get electrocuted.
So when compact cassettes became omnipresent, slowly and surely, vinyl started to just be in the back of the cupboard. And in the early or mid-’80s nobody cared anymore, so I’d get all these records out. No one was telling me off any more. So I’m like, right, okay, I wonder what’d happen if you did scratch the record or if you played it backwards. And then the idea of putting Sellotape and Tipp-Ex on the groove and watching it jump back to the same point, to make loops. I was doing that without liking music whatsoever. I was just doing silly stuff. Sitting Star Wars figures on the records and watching them go around, and then wait until they crash into the needle and turning the speakers up really loud. Then to see someone like the Fat Boys or Run DMC do that on TV was incredible. I mean, that’s how I started.
And then as I got older and emotional, I started to love music. So, there’s always been that yin and yang, you know? The destruction and the emotion. As you get older and older, it’s really few and far between where you hear that piece of music which sets your heart on fire, because you’ve listened to so much stuff in your life. It’s still always there, that massive burst of energy in my heart. But on the most part I’ve always been looking for records that kind of sound wrong. If I could count my favourite records of all time, a high percentage of them would’ve started with a cringe.
That moment where you first heard Turkish psych and you’re like, That’s not right! Or when you first heard the German language on a Krautrock record. It’s just that little bit where things get wrong. Them crossovers from kosmische into disco or those crossovers from sort of ye-ye into symphonic rock or from country into folk and funk. You’re crossing a line that you shouldn’t cross. And personally it’s that first cringe moment that makes it become my favourite thing ever. There’s no other word for it rather than wrongness. I love wrongness in music.
So you started digging very young? I was buying ’60s and ’70s records as a kid, and the code was pretty much look for anyone with an afro, and it’s probably going to have something funky on it. And then when you grow up and mature, you realise that, well, maybe the best hip hop records you bought this year sampled Frank Zappa or Jefferson Airplane or a cover of a Neil Young tune or a George Benson version of a Jefferson Airplane tune, and all those amazing records that came out of Chicago on Cadet-Concept, and all those sort of bands that they called mixed race at the time.
It’s almost like you got on a secret mission then, and there’s actually, what’s the phrase? – a You-can’t-judge-your-book-by-its-cover mentality. You don’t know, but on this record with the dude with a cowboy hat on the front is the biggest breakbeat you’re ever going to hear. And that’s really exciting. In your early 20s when you start to make those connections, it’s like, wow. This hobby could last my entire lifetime.
Andy Votel in the Finders Keepers’ storeroom
And at the same time you’re rapping and battling I was that awkward kid at school who was kamikaze-ing off at girls’ 15th birthday parties getting the mic off the DJ to start rapping. My self-awareness hadn’t kicked in yet. We were Violators of the English Language, and we could do this. We could rap. We were good battle rappers. It’s accents, vocal tonality, upbringing, success notwithstanding. It’s a total previous life. People who have known me for 25 years remember me as a rapper.
And then it just ended quite quickly. Hip hop went into its purple period and stopped for a bit, and then came back 20 times harder, at which point I guess we’d all grown up and got proper jobs, or something that resembled that. I went to art school and that’s where I did meet people who were into rap. I met Rick Myers who’s a brilliant artist and graphic designer who in later years did all the artwork for Doves and Lamb. And a brilliant scratch DJ. And I met a guy called Derek Edwards who raps under the name Figure of Speech. So we actually had a crew by that point who would make records, make tracks every week, and we would make demos and send them to Cold Sweat and Music Of Life and all these independent hip hop labels.
So at that point, Violators of the English Language became a group, and we started to take it seriously to some degree. And we had enough original samples and stuff that people had never done before. Always made on two turntables, the old fashioned way. We were a graffiti crew as well, which was another big thing. When we left college, unfortunately one of us passed away and we started going our separate ways.
I was like a bar fly at Fat City Records which had just started up, and people kind of knew me at a lot of record shops in town: Out Of the Past, Rod and Caroline’s shop, Dean from Expansions, all the rare groove shops, they’d save records for me. I knew my way around town, got some DJ gigs with like I say [Manc arts impresario] Barney, Michael Barnes-Wynters who was hugely supportive. And then he got us a remix for Mr. Scruff. So, we remixed ‘Sea Mammal’ and we sampled an Ella Fitzgerald record, an Arthur Lee record, and Led Zeppelin and the Wicker Man soundtrack taped off the telly. It’s not bad for your first ever commitment to vinyl, is it?
So at that point, people were really interested in what we were doing, but they wanted nothing to do with the vocals. For some bizarre reason, they didn’t like the nasally Stopfordian accents that we were committing to these anthemic rap tunes.
Two or three months after that I became the designer at Fat City and Grand Central. So I had a job. And we’d go to places like Dublin, which was amazing, or Liverpool where I’d never been, and Marseille, and Düsseldorf. And that’s where I discovered Turkish records. I didn’t know what they were. For ages I was telling people to check out these Israeli sitar records because I was that stupid and young. In the same way that when I first found Welsh records, I thought they were Hungarian.
When you started digging for foreign language records, was that just coincidental or were you consciously trying to find more obscure stuff? It became very obvious I was going to have to start hunting for strange noises and samples in odd records outside of my comfort zone. So I didn’t buy any English language or American language records at all, hardly. That was my rule. I’m not going to buy anything on a major label, and I’m not going to buy anything English language, because I had enough friends around me who did that anyway. Staying away from predetermined genres as well. I’m not trying to be stubborn, but music which is custom made for the dancefloor has never appealed to me. Trying to find the gaps in between genres is much more interesting. And then if you do find a country record or a Polish jazz record which just so happens to sound like a hip hop record or just so happens to sound like a house record or a disco record by mistake, that’s really exciting.
You start to learn stuff which you had no interest in your entire life in learning, like geography, politics, history. But when you discover Czech records and Polish records and East German records, which all came out on the same compilations, it’s just like, wow, I now have got some weird interest in communism. It’s amazing: in the same way that hip hop kept me away from my best friend’s drug habits, records in general have taught me about stuff that I never had any intention of learning
And it became not only a label, but a way of life. The amount of times I’ve spent with people’s families in Poland through Finders Keepers, or going to stay at someone’s house for a weekend in the South of France and meeting someone’s widow or someone’s children. The record release almost becomes secondary, because as cheesy as it always sounds coming from a label owner’s tongue, there is a genuine family here.
There is a core group of people all over the world that help us, make connections for us. In the first records we did at Finders Keepers with Jean-Claude Vannier, he introduced us to loads of people in French studios. Just by hanging out with him and spending time with him, and not just chasing the signature on a contract and becoming a friend. This whole worldwide community that we’ve built through it has been a nice thing.
How did you go from finding records that hip hop producers had sampled to putting together your folk-funk collection Folk Is Not A Four Letter Word? What’s the trajectory? That idiom, that lazy tag of folk funk, even at the time I found it hackish and a bit crappy. But it existed, and it’s exactly what it was. Because these were records which featured any number of attractive blonde girls on full frame record sleeves, but with Phil Upchurch playing bass or Bernard Purdey hanging out somewhere.
I’m never going to be able to tell stories where I was surrounded by music as a child. I just wasn’t at all. My dad had some fantastic records by John Renbourn and John Fahey and people like that, but he didn’t really like them. You know? Just his mates had told him to get them. But country and folk was a little bit around when I was a kid, so I could identify with that. And I’ve always been alright at reading the back of records and making connections. And that’s the Tetris mentality again. It all seemed fairly obvious to me that the folk funk thing was going to fill some weekend, you know? And it was really well received in Manchester.
You’ve also helped shine light on people that had been forgotten. To see people suddenly start maybe writing new music or gigging or whatever must be heartwarming. And you’ve done it quite a few times. When a film like Searching For Sugar Man comes out and everyone says what an amazing story it is, well, it is truly an amazing story for something like that to happen. But there are many reissue labels where that happens every day. If you think of every band that didn’t make it, every band that got caught up in some political conflict or were excommunicated or didn’t meet the record label’s expectations. That difficult second album, or the demos that never made the cut, this could go on forever and ever and ever. It’s a beautiful, beautiful thing. Private press records made for people that have gone to the army. It’s just endless.
There’s obviously mathematically much more interest in music that hasn’t been released than has. If the music industry only releases 1% of all the music made in the world, there’s far more interesting music out there. It’s amazing to think what is between the cracks. And it’s only obvious that this stuff needs sharing, because there’s now an ability to share it.
The person who’s going to drop a heavy psych record in the middle of a full dancefloor where people have been listening to R&B, that person’s got balls. But you know what? In three or four years’ time, someone’s going to sample that record and you’ll all be listening to it in a totally different regurgitated way. It’s a fantastic thing, really. So, it just seems obvious for me.
I should mention the fact we’re headed to the football, which is why I’m here interviewing you, basically we’re actually both going to the same game today, which is Grimsby vs Stockport County. Something I could never imagine myself committing to a microphone is the fact that I’ve recently got into football, having never been to a game previously in my life. Major League football, your Man Citys and Man Uniteds have got no interest to me. They’ve put me off football my entire life. But I didn’t realise there were private press football teams. I didn’t realise there were small football teams with a DIY punk aesthetic. I said to my son recently, “I’m never going to a football ground which is any less than 95% asbestos.” This is what I look for in music. You know, it’s the same thing. And I’m sure you agree with that mentality.
Yeah. I mean, it’s always puzzled me why someone could hate the Tories and buy really underground music but support Liverpool. Makes no sense.
Whereas supporting Grimsby makes total sense to me. It is like I’m supporting a private press football team. Absolutely, yeah. Exactly, yeah.
How do the compilations gestate? Like, say the Massiera compilation. Do you just end up amassing a certain amount of tracks and then you’re like, “We’ve got enough to do an album”? Or do you approach people and build it slowly? What’s the process? Massiera is really interesting and a hugely influential person at the label, because he was a genuine enfant terrible. His history in sampling and stealing other people’s music early doors was truly brilliant. One of the first things I ever asked him was, how could you afford to get these early synthesisers? You know, pretty much at exactly the same time that pioneers like Pierre Henry and Jean-Jacques Perrey were using the same methods and the same very expensive tools. And he said, “Oh, I didn’t have any synthesisers. I just stole the noises off their records.”
And when you discover Joe Meek, they’re like two peas in the pod. They were destroying music early doors, which was in a very positive, anarchic and forward thinking way.
Massiera lived it. There’s so many sides to Massiera. After surf, he went into psych then he went into novelty records, then he went into disco. I didn’t even know, when he was still alive, how much hip hop stuff he produced, and I’m talking rapsploitation, I’m talking hip hop for the holiday makers in Nice that summer, but great stuff, and R&B and soul, and it still keeps on going. The question, where do you start with someone like Massiera? It seems achievable. You know. Massiera and Jean-Claude Vannier, there’s a finite number of tracks, you’d think. That’s exciting because you’ve made some sort of rules. You think you can do a pretty concise compilation of Massiera music. It is kind of achievable. And within that structure, exciting things can happen. When you do find one shard that you’d missed or something pops out the woodwork.
What I will say about Massiera, there’s probably things that he tried to sell to me then which I wasn’t interested in which I’m really interested in now. So he’s like, “Did you hear these breakdance records that I made?” And I was like, “No thanks.” And he’s like, “I did this thing in 1991 with these Native Americans.” And I was like, “No thanks.” And now I’m just like, ah, I really wish I’d listened more.
So you like to impose some kind of finite limit on your collecting? I’ve got a hell of a lot of Bollywood records. 90% of them are horror soundtracks, right? When I decided to start buying Bollywood, I had to find a niche which was controllable. Or Italian library records, I only buy female composers. Because there has to be some rule, otherwise it just goes haywire. So there’s an achievable part. There’s an achievable way to do it, otherwise you’ll go mad.
I don’t want a record collection which is bigger than the house. I don’t want a record collection which only an accountant could have thought to buy. There has to be some sort of reality there.
It’s happened to you a million times, Bill, where someone said to you, “Will you have time in this lifetime to listen to all these records?” Well, no, of course you won’t. But you might have time to listen to all the female Italian composers. I only buy female punk now. I’ve got a hell of a lot of punk records, but now, if there’s not a girl involved, I’m not doing it – because I need to retain some sanity.
Any other rules? Like particular dates or periods? I remember when I was buying funk at school, you’d read the date and if you saw 1982, you’d just throw it away. And then you realised later that a lot of the best records from Sri Lanka were all made in the ’90s, or a lot of great African stuff was made in these different eras you wouldn’t have expected. “What? That was made in the days of TV-am and The Clothes Show? It sounds like it was made in 1972.” Turkish music especially. It’s almost like 10 years out of date from what your ear’s accustomed to. It was foolish to dismiss things from the wrong dates early doors.
I’m really, really interested in private pressed post-rock now, because there’s some absolutely amazing stuff there. There’s so many bands that tried to imitate Stereolab when they came out, which just disappeared into nowhere. Just imagine.
Really? I had absolutely no idea that even existed. I’m kind of regretting telling you.
I can delete it from the tape for a fee!When someone like Nas or Jay-Z comes to you for a sample, how does that benefit the label? Do you have publishing? We don’t own publishing, but we have master rights. We have sync rights for stuff. There’s some stuff that we own. There’s some stuff we do own publishing for, yeah. We own bits of catalogue. So yeah. You just hope that …
I mean, are those sort of transactions things that help keep a label like yours afloat? Yeah. What’s the phrase? Windfalls, I guess. We definitely don’t expect this to happen. We’ve never sat there and said, “Oh, don’t worry, mate. It won’t be long before Nas comes and samples us again.”
There was a time when only mods bought our stuff. Then people would be like, “Finders Keepers, oh, that Turkish record label.” So when it does repeatedly get embraced by hip hop, it’s great. There’s a big difference between some independent hip hop crew from Texas or mid-America or France or Hungary than there is to Jay-Z. When Jay-Z samples your record and denies it, and then you have to get a musicologist to prove the absolute obvious, well, yeah, that pays the bills. The artist on the label might get to wipe out the mortgage on his daughter’s house. Finders Keepers gets to pay a huge tax bill that we’d had hanging over ourselves for years.
Is it still fairly wild west out there? I think doing things correctly, clearing samples, even meeting the original artists and having a full awareness of where this music comes from is part of the sport now. People want to do it right. The bootlegging thing and the mix tape culture and even the Ultimate Breaks and Beats thing that founded this whole culture couldn’t exist by today’s standards, because they’re missing out that component of the sport. Anyone can bootleg a record. You meet someone, “Oh, we’ve just done this compilation of brilliant Turkish psychedelic music,” or whatever. And it’s like, “Alright, did you get the rights to that?” “No, we’ve put it aside just in case they ever get in touch.” Well, you don’t qualify anymore. It’s not just about having your credit card, going on Discogs, getting a piece of music and sticking it on a compilation. There’s much more to it. The real record diggers are the guys that go that extra mile. The days of doing things wrong and illegally is bullshit.
And I think a lot of the best hip hop producers live by them rules, which is refreshing and good. The aesthetic of hanging someone out of a 40-storey window and watching the change come out the pockets is over. You know what I mean?
I love it when rappers get in touch with the original artists and the label. Czarface did it recently. And I’ve loved MF Doom and I loved 7L & Esoteric. I love that whole scene. That’s been with me most of my life. So for him to ring us and say, “Oh, we really want to sample this and we love what you do,” and they recognize it as a Finders Keepers record.
I’d got to the stage where so many people were coming to the label, whether it be Madlib or Action Bronson, or eventually people like Nas and Jay-Z, and then Kanye West coming for samples, which vindicated the subliminal reason why I set up the label in the first place. Because I’ll never stop listening to music with that tempo, without that sort of scavenger hunt sample mentality in my head.
Speaking of that, what’s the most you’ve ever spent on a record? I’ve always said my interest in vinyl was more akin with scrap metal. Whoever came up with the phrase vinyl vulture, that encompassed everything really. When you start buying money, trophy hunting, you’re losing. You’re failing. It’s not why you ever did this in the first place, and you should be ashamed of yourself.
As a collector there’s a danger you end up forgetting that what you love is music and not the format. I think we’re talking about trophy records here. Anything that’s on the wall and costs anything that resembles a month’s mortgage or an electricity bill is just totally inappropriate, especially in this day and age. This culture of people now going on the internet pairing very expensive bottles of wine with very expensive records is thoroughly inappropriate. You, like me, will go on social media and see a record which sounds good. You’ll click through and try and buy it and it’s 500 quid. That’s just game over. Inappropriate, boring. The fun’s been taken out. I’m very happy to say I’ve been out-priced from that game now. And there’s so many nuances in it, especially with jazz records, you know, music that was made to galvanise black communities in America in the early ’70s and now can only be afforded by white highfalutin accountants.
But trolling the pound bins will always be my game. It’s hard to go somewhere like Utrecht Record Fair and not be snow-blinded and get competitive and get into this knowledge battle about very rare records, because I can still do that, but the real trick is going and to not be distracted by that, and getting your hands dirty looking for stuff no one’s ever heard before and nobody even wants. And it’s still doable. I feel like we’re doing it a little bit now with the Occitan music. I’ve been doing it with Breton music for a while. These things are really exciting to me at the moment.
Final question. You’ve done a lot of things, worked with a lot of interesting people. What’s the proudest moment of your career? The more I hear myself talking about the community and the family, I start to think I sound like Berry Gordy or somebody, but it’s really important, the family in Finders Keepers. We’ve got the pillars that are Jean-Claude Vannier and Suzanne Ciani. They are the king and queen of this label. And it’s a really beautiful thing that we can genuinely say they’re truly friends, confidants, and they’ve taught me lots about music.
There’s always bits of trouble around the corner, and there’s always gripes. But I have to say out of 200 artists, there’s probably only four people who’ve been awkward and a real pain in the ass, and three of them are from Manchester. So, other than that…
I guess I’m proud that we’ve stuck with it for so long. But it all does come back to the community and the alternative, almost imaginary musical landscape we’ve created. Jean-Claude Vannier is our Elvis and Suzanne Ciani is our let’s say Dolly Parton. Well, that’s it – we’ve created a whole alternative spectrum. There’s a whole alternative universe here which, when I’m feeling my lowest, I can look back on and go, “Wow, we’ve kind of rewritten something here.” Which is nice, right?
With his production partner Jacques Morali, Henri Belolo was the architect of the Eurodisco sound, giving us disco confections The Ritchie Family and Village People. For the video for the Village People’s ‘In The Navy’ he managed to blag a free warship, planes and 200 sailors. Just one of the ways he smuggled the iconography of gay America into the charts. He was also one of the first French DJs, playing from the start of the ’60s
I have been a DJ myself, when I was a little younger, in Morocco.
Really, tell me Born in Casablanca, I was exposed to American music. My father was a sailor before, and he settled, married my mother, who was a model, and he was working in the harbour at Casablanca. And working there he had a lot of ships coming from around the world. A lot of American ships with American sailors in. I was born in 1936, so when the war started there I was six, seven years old. The American troops came to Morocco around 1943, because of the Germans invading North Africa. They opened American army bases with radio. So I was a youngster going there and listening through the loudspeakers to Glenn Miller and ‘Moonlight Serenade’ and jazz and blues. That’s how I started really young being exposed to the American music.
And on top of that I was exposed to the rhythm because in Morocco we had a tribe of black people, Muslims, called Gnawa. They came from Ghana. They play heavy percussion, and when I was young I’d hear that in the street, and the combination of the American jazz, blues, gospel, and this I assume grew inside of me, and made my ears and my mind open for melody and percussion.
“In France we have this tradition of beautiful lyrical melody: the chanson. Then when you add these melodies to the hard dance rhythms, more of Africa, that is why French disco is so strong.”
When did you come to Paris? I studied in Casablanca – business. Out from university, I was 22. I had to decide what I want to do in life. So I decided to come see Paris, spend six months going to see my favourite jazz clubs. You know jazz life was very, very, very bright in those days. That’s where I bumped into a man called Eddie Barclay who runs a very famous record company called Barclay. The first man in Europe to represent American companies. For example he started to work with Quincy Jones when Quincy was really a youngster. Anyway I bumped into Eddie Barclay because I was playing music in jukebox in cafe, I was choosing anything from Otis Redding to Louis Armstrong, to Dizzy Gillespie, and to the premises of rock and roll, and my choice was so good, so sophisticated, that that man came to me and told me, hey your music is good. He said from where are you? I’m from Casablanca. What do you intend to do? I don’t know I might go back. He said why you not open my record company there?
And here I am, at 23 now, flying back to Morocco, and opening my first record company, independent. I was just an agent for him, importing records, selling them to the stores, and promoting them. And promotion was through the radio, at that time. And the clubs, it was very new, but we had very good clubs in Morocco, in Casablanca. So I started to promote my records, and to do so I was going every Saturday night in the famous club and seeing the DJs and playing my own records. I was only 23, and I’m talking about the year 1959, OK. So I started being a DJ 50 years ago.
Did you have any musical training? Not at all. The music came naturally in my ears, and naturally from my ears to my heart and my brain. And from my brain to the people. I was used to seeing the percussion, I used to sing, to play percussion, bang on things, my mother was going crazy, because I was trying to imitate the Gnawa in the streets. I bought a double tumba, and my left hand did the kick, the bass drum, and the other hand was doing [he taps out an African rhythm].
What were the clubs like? Clubs in Morocco and especially in Casablanca were very international and trendy for that time. They were really in advance because we had that unique combination of American troops living in Morocco, French people living in Morocco, and that mixture was giving an incredible result that the people in the clubs were a mixed population and the taste of each one was slightly different. And we had to find a link, to put all those people together on the dancefloor. So as a DJ I was perhaps playing Charles Aznavour, in the ballad, but also I was playing Bill Haley, or bluesman, or rock and roll. It was a unique combination. At that time in Paris in clubs they were playing mainly French pop, American rock and roll and jazz, but the combination was not so ethic, ethnical. Morocco, it was Africa, we always had rhythm feeling.
Did you play African records? Oh yeah. I used to import records from Ghana and Senegal, and I was trying to mix them but we didn’t have the technology at that time.
What did you have in the booth? Oh boy, I had a small turntable, just one, and one day I decided to try to mix African drums from Ghana with a rock and roll. OK, I said, I can’t do it, I just have one turntable, so I asked the owner of the club if he may be kind enough to let me buy another one. He didn’t understand why but I said let me try. So I bought the second turntable…
What year was this? It was ’61, ’62. And I tried to link them to one amplifier, but it was very hard because it only had one entry for one turntable, not two. So I ask a man that was a specialist, so we did a bizarre link between the two, we had a lot of noise but it was working, but I had no fader.
So it was all or nothing. Yeah. My cut was plain. This is why I was playing something like [sings a rock melody] and suddenly I cut into the drums [sings tough African beat], and back to the other one, but I was not able to cross fade.
So it was a cut. That’s still mixing. It was really working a lot at that time.
What was the name of the club L’Abreuvoir, because that was where the horses went to eat and drink. Another one called the Zoom Zoom.
When did you move to France? I was five years running my music business. Morocco is a small country. I wanted to move to Paris to start working for the industry. So I was lucky to be hired by Polydor records. At that time was a label on its own, not a major, and Polydor had an extensive catalogue of pop, rock, jazz and classical and so on. During a few years I worked at Polydor I have to say humbly I raised very fast from go-for-the-coffee to one of the youngest general managers of a label. By doing so I learned how a record company works, I learnt how a production system works, because I was going to the studio I was producing myself big French stars and selling millions of records. But here I am in the year 1960 becoming a very important man in the recording industry, but my salary was not so extraordinary, so when I produced two or three albums that sold each one of them more than two million copies I did not sleep.
Which were those? A Frenchman called George Moustaki and another movie star called Serge Renée, who died not long ago and a French movie star called Jeanne Moreau. We were mainly in French pop, French rock/pop.
So local signings? Local signings for Polydor, but I was taking care of the Bee Gees through the international licensing, I brought James Brown to Paris at the Olympia, bringing jazz musicians, and so on. I was really immersed in that life.
But you wanted to break out on your own In the middle of the year ’60 I decided to be independent, which was very new for that time. We had no independents in France, so I resigned from Polydor and I formed my own record company. Scorpio Music, which it still is today. That’s when I started to produce my own records and to be attracted by dance. For example I was the one that signed for France such early beginners in dance like ‘Kung Fu Fighting’ by Carl Douglas, through my friend Henry Stone at TK Records in Miami, George McRae ‘Rock Your Baby’, Gwen McCrae, KC and the Sunshine Band. Here I was, with all my background, suddenly rediscovering dance.
Where did you find out about these acts? I was going out, every night to the clubs, friends with the DJs, they showed me what was buzzing.
When did you go to the states? Immediately after France, what is the next goal? America. I moved to America in 1973. I dared opening my own record company, called Can’t Stop Productions, which is still there. Can’t Stop the Music. I always was attracted by the sound of Philadelphia. OK. So I opened my office in New York, and I opened a small talent scout office in Philadelphia.
What attracted you to Philly? Gamble and Huff sound. Teddy Pendergrass, Lou Rawls, all this combination of lush strings, drumming by people that were from the gods, like Earl young, the first drummer, or Charles Collins, the arranger. Vince Montana was playing vibes for me in the arrangement of my first recordings. All of them were there. I became friends with them. I said to myself if I ever have any idea to do something I would come back to Sigma Sound.
How did you meet Jacques Morali? I wanted to be a producer in America but I was looking for an idea. And in January ’75 I bumped into a young guy called Jacques Morali. He came to my office because on top of being a producer in France I was also a publisher. Very good writers in my roster. Jacques was a salesman at the record shop at Orly at the airport, then he was hired at 24 as an A&R at Polydor for French artists. So he came to see me looking for a good French song. I gave him the song, that song became a nice success. It was not dance it was pop, but we became friend.
He told me I am always dreaming of going to do a recording in England, because I want to have a record that may work in the dancefloor in St Tropez. In France when you want to start promotion with a record you start with St Tropez in the summer, and after it crosses in the fall into the main cities like Paris.
One month later he came back and said ‘OK, Henri, do you remember the musicals of the ’40s in America?’ I said of course, Busby Berkeley, things like this, he said, ‘Yes, I watched a movie on TV yesterday of Brazil with Carmen Miranda, why we don’t do this for the dancefloor for this summer in England?’ So I looked at him and said we’re not gonna go to London, we’re going to go to Philadelphia. And then here we are in March at Sigma Sound doing a casting, hiring the three Ritchie Family girls, going to the studio with an arranger called Richard Rome, that’s why we called the girls Ritchie Family. Vince Montana, the vibes, Earl Young the drums, the best. I cut the record, I go back to New York, try it in the clubs, enormous success, and here we are on the road of success.
Which clubs did you break it in in New York? Well, mainly at the beginning in the gay discotheques, like the Ramrod, the Saint. We were played in all the underground clubs in San Francisco, In Los Angeles, in Philadelphia, but the record crossed to the radio station, thanks specially to a radio station in New York called WBLS, with…
…Frankie Crocker Frankie Crocker, that became a friend, Frankie felt in love with that record and here we were en route for stardom. Crosses to pop, first success, 1975, ‘Brazil‘ Ritchie Family. This record become success worldwide.
He was the link to radio success. He was the link, exactly. He liked the record and to bring in the ears of the radio listeners that new sound, and it was adopted by the people that when we started to do the crossover from club charts, dance, disco charts, to the mainstream through the local radios that were brave enough to play it. And when they saw the success of this on WBLS in New York, the big radio networks in America started to play disco music. That’s where it exploded and became what they call mainstream.
What was the process of putting the Ritchie Family music together? We write together, Jacques was writing the music, I was writing the lyrics. My English was OK but not to the point where I would understand all the meanings of everything. This is why I was always writing lyrics hand in hand with local American adapters, lyricists. So if you look at the labels you will see Morali, Belolo, Victor Willis; or Morali, Belolo, Peter Whitehead.
And the arrangements, where did all that come from? In France we have this tradition of beautiful lyrical melody: the chanson. Then when you add these melodies to the hard dance rhythms, more of Africa, that is why French disco is so strong. We were French but we were so much into dance and club and we were exposed to the African rhythm and also I was in love with salsa and Latin music and percussion. In order to put the French music of Morali in a way that it would sound American or English, we were using American musicians and American rhythm section, but the melody was very strong.
What reference points were you thinking of? I started to go to discotheques in Morocco when I was 16. What I was missing on the dancefloor was the beat that will give me that 1,2, 1,2, 1,2, and all the records at that time were mixed, not for the dancefloor, they were mixed for radio, and I was always frustrated that they were really scared to put the rhythm too much in front in the mix. That’s why we recorded in Philadelphia, and at the mixing we are pushing the bass foot and the snare, and the guitars and the strings went in the holes, and the combination between the drums, the tambourines, the guitar with their picking and the way we were mixing it, you had to jump from your seat and go on the dancefloor. And we punctuated our mixing with gimmicks like ‘hooooo’ that were typically gay at that time, and we started to write lyrics about the joy of dancing.
This was radical, because working in the industry you knew that the way to make money was through radio. Especially in America. Totally.
What made you realise you could do it through the clubs? I was going very early to America, starting in ‘72, ‘73, I wanted to go out in the clubs, and I heard no music done for the clubs. I was listening to the hits of the month on the dancefloor but it was not really something pushing the people to dance to the point where they were screaming.
I’m trying to find more about the early nightclubs in Paris. You had three big club owners in Paris that really were among the first. You have Régine. Régine’s was called Jimmy’z. Around the same time, we’re talking about the end of the ‘50s, a very important man called François Patrice, and you had a third man called Jean Castell, that had a club, still has a club, called Castell.
When did clubs start to play records instead of having bands? This goes with the emergence of the recording industry. Really the vinyl started to take off at the end of the war in France. One of the first men to bring vinyls to France was Eddie Barclay and his wife. He already had a small record company and was used to going to America very often. He discovered the vinyl there, brought it to France, and because he was importing vinyls they were in stores and people were looking for the vinyl and the first vinyl factory started to open up in France and Europe. In clubs they were not able to play the first 78s, they were no good. At the end of war, between ’45 and ’50, we had more records available. The turntable factories resumed and with the invention of vinyl they had to invent a turntable that was able to turn at 45, not 78.
But with the vinyl you were able to import the music, it’s as if you were importing the bands, 150 different bands. So the band started to disappear and they started to play records. At the beginning it was a mixture: band playing an hour and we are playing the records half an hour. And the more new records we had, the more the bands left the dance scene, and really the DJ was born. Because to spin the record, the owner was doing it at the beginning, but very soon he realised that he needed someone. So that someone was not a pro DJ, it was a young guy in love with music, that learned his business in vivo – on the dancefloor. So he was pushing the records, that’s what I used to do in Casablanca in the ’50s.
So you would DJ in between bands? Oh yes, there were bands as well, and I was going, doing my set. The band were a little jealous because I was playing a record with a 50-piece band, who were mixed, and they were live. And the clubs were not really equipped to play a band live. You need amps for everyone, so the sound of the band was not so good.
The records sounded better It sounded better.
Which records did the bands particularly not like? Rock and roll. Oh yeah, yeah. When we started with Bill Haley and the Comets and things like this. The band were not able to play rock and roll. I mean… they knew how to play jazz, but not rock and roll. The drummer, the bass player, they had to learn. And in the meantime the record was so magic, you don’t need the band any more. That’s where the first DJs started to come into the scene.
Which were the first clubs then that really emphasised records instead of bands? The clubs I mentioned never had a band.
All three of them had only records? Never had a band. They started at the beginning of the ‘50s, directly with the records.
They were quite small places Small places, private, so already you had to fight at the door to get in.
Did you go to any of these? Oh yes, when I was a youngster coming to Paris. Going to jazz club, I was going to Jimmy’z, and Castell, and François Patrice.
Can you describe them for me? Describe Jimmy’z Well, what I may call a caricature of a dance club. You already had the round, the what you call it… with a spot on it, the boule…
Oh the glitterball. The glitterball yes. Banquettes, a small DJ booth, not too big. A big counter where people are drinking, very amazingly everyone was seated, at tables and at the bar, everyone was seated. No-one was standing except the people in the bar.
And the dancefloor. On the dancefloor people were dancing. And when the DJ started the record people had to go from one table to another table to invite the girl.
OK. Very formal. Very formal. And everyone was standing in line the same dance, when it was called the twist, la bustel or the madison. You had a kind of communality between the people because it was very what you call convivial.
These were private members clubs. Private, but of course you can get in. Depends how you dress and if you know already another very important man or woman, the doorman. The, what you call, the ‘physiognmist’. And also the music was not too loud, except on the dancefloor,
And the DJ set-up was two turntables? Two turntables, on really a table, a pile of vinyls, and that’s it.
And what mixer set up? He was not mixing one record into another. Fade out, fade in with the new, or stop playing
They would never fade one over the other or segue them? No the technology of blending records was not available yet. That technology came I believe at the end of the sixties.
That was Jimmy’z. Were the others the same? They were all very much the same. The interior design was different,
[Suddenly remembering] There was a fourth club. I should not forget this one because it is very important. Called Keur Samba. That club was very particular. Why? because that club was owned by a black man from Senegal. He was very tall, very good looking, and in that club you had a very trendy population of people, black and white mixed together, very good looking girls. And we were going there because the blacks were dancing very well, and in that club they were playing trendy records but also Latin and salsa music. Already.
What sort of year is this? ’63? ’62, ’63. It was in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. All the girls were falling in love with Keur Samba, and the ambience was really different from Castell, Regine and St Hilaire. It was less formal. Much more like this but very trendy. because salsa music and Latin dance was quite new for us too, the way you were dancing cha-cha. And the combination of the salsa music and the trendy records was unique.
Especially with the African as well. Exactly, and really the dancers were incredible, and you can see some of the guys in the first black and white movies that France did at that time with Brigitte Bardot. A movie called Et Dieu… Crea La Femme – And God Created Woman.
It was filmed in that club? No it was filmed in a club in St Tropez, but Keur Samba was acting in that movie as one of the dancers who does incredible salsa music very lasciviously and erotic with Brigitte Bardot, and Brigitte Bardot‘s fiancée is really jealous. Roger Vadim who did the movie used to go to Keur Samba and took from his memory what he put in that movie.
Did you know Régine? I knew a lot of them because I was in the music industry. At first I was bringing my records to the DJs, second I was a trendy guy: young, good-looking, with a good income, and cruising. And of course, something we should never forget: we were, and we still are, going to clubs to cruise. To dance, but to cruise, to meet people to socialise, but to cruise. We always go back to the same thing and if people are honest they will tell you, seduction, what a unique way to meet people, and what a unique way to share with a girl, or a man that you invited depending if you like girls or men, something that you do in common, dance.
When did you first hear the word discothèque? When did they start using that? When we had that shift from the place where you had a band. They were called ‘dancing’ because you were dancing with bands. Strangely enough, even in french it was an English word. I go to le dancing. And in France it was bands playing mostly accordion, because the dance at that time was musette, the waltz, tango. People were dancing, they were always dancing.
When we started to play records we needed something with a sound more appropriate, and more cosy. That’s how the first places that will be called discothèques started to be built and designed. End of the ’50s. So you had to give a name to those places. ‘Dancing’ was not representing what it was – it was those big place where bands were playing. So they called them discotheque, because discothèque means like a bibliothèque means shelves with books, discothèque is also a French word, being a Latin word, it means a place where you store your records. If I tell you come see my discothèque, you gonna see two things. You’re gonna see a physical place where I store my records, but it means also the amount of records I have are my discothèque. My library.
[so it means the collection as well as the place]
So it was obvious to be called discothèques. That’s where you played disques.
When did it get shortened to disco? To be quite frank with you, we already would use this, us French, as a contraction of discothèques. Very often in slang when we are talking amongst us, instead of saying the long word we just say we’re going to the disco. It was a place.
The story is that the first discothèques were in Marseille. Do you know about that? I don’t know. As far as I’m concerned the trendy place, the starting place, was Paris, but it is true that on La Côte D’Azur and perhaps even more St Tropez or Cannes or Nice, the people going in the summer after the war were dancing in outside place, not inside, in outside place, with bands. OK and they were very trendy because that’s where you were going during the summer. I’m sure you hear about it. Of the ’40s, early beginning of the ’50s, so Marseille was known as a cosmopolitan place and it is possible because when the Americans and the English came to liberate France they started with the south. So Marseille was a big city, so perhaps the mixture of the American music brought by the GIs triggered something there. It’s very possible. But I’m not quite certain. I really think that the entrepreneur that believed in it were based in Paris. And were emigrating every summer, as they still do, to the Côte D’Azur. At one point Régines had a winter place in Paris, but she had a summer place in Monaco.
Which of the club owners is still alive? Régine. Eddie Barclay, François Patrice, Jean Castell died a few years ago, but his club is still open.
How about the guy from Senegal? Keur Samba? Quite frankly I don’t know.
Tell me about Eddie Barclay. Eddie Barclay was a tall good-looking man. He knew how to play piano. He was a jazz fan, and he was one of the first amongst the music and the people in the industry in France who dare to go to America. His English was barely good. Still today I ask him how did you make yourself understand? he say well I have a translator with me. Anyway, he was a good-looking man, very attractive, and his wife was also very attractive. His wife at that time, because he had eight wife.
Seriously. Yes, he got married eight times.
And he started the modern record industry in France A lot of record companies, who were not already the majors, gave him their representation for France. So in France he was really the trendy man, and he stayed like this for 50 years. He gave the biggest parties and all the stars were in his house. Mick Jagger, Otis Redding, James Brown, you name it. He sold his company I think 15 years ago to Polygram, and that became Universal, and Barclay is still a label, a part of Universal. Barclay is still alive, he’s old now, he’s over 80, and he still loves music. He’s still a party-goer.
Yeah? Oh yeah. he goes to clubs, he sits there, he watches people dancing. And really he is someone I admire a lot.
Did he teach you a lot? He taught me by the way he was, and the way unconsciously I wanted to be. He told me one day, wow god, you did something I was never able to do. You are successful in America. And I told him, I am successful in America because some of my challenge was to do better than you. He said you’re right, you did it son. And we were back in business, many years after I was his employee, when I produced Patrick Juvet with Jacques. ‘I Love America’. Big hit.
So you gave him his hit in America. Exactly. And Barclay loved America always.
How did he get into it? Well, he had a bar. He had a bistro, we call it, so his family was coming from a region of France called Auvergne. He was an Auvergnier, a lot of bistro here are run by Auvergniers. So he always used to go by night and play pianos in piano bar. He loved to play piano. So that’s how he started to get acquainted with musicians, and he started to hire some of them to have his first record company. And he told me that the records he was selling to the few stores himself with a bicycle and some trolley behind it. He started like this to become one of the most successful men in the recording industry, even in America, if you speak to Ertegun anybody, they will tell you that Eddie, he’s the guy with big cigar. He had the best chef in his house, his parties were splendid, Hugh Hefner’s parties were nothing compared to the ones Eddie used to throw. So he was really the man in the recording industry. And he was used to go dancing. Every night he was at Regine’s or Castell.
What about Régine? What was she like? She was the hostess? No, she was less than the hostess at the beginning. She was at the door. She was doing the door, and hanging the coat-check. And she had that reputation to be a bitch at the door. It was very difficult to enter.
This is which club?
Jimmy’z Monte Carlo, with nightlife pioneer Régine (L)
This is Jimmy’z. She became successful because she’s a very talented woman in public relations. She was good looking, she was cruising a lot, and she started to be very trendy, and in the jet set cycle, very soon. The Duke of Windsor and the Duchess of Windsor used to come and learn the twist on her dancefloor. So when she formed her own name, Régine’s club and ended up ultimately with Régine’s in New York, and in Florida with Régine’s she was not only a club owner, she was also a PR inside, she was dancing with everyone, going around making sure… She was I think one of the first who invented the notion of having a restaurant inside the club. That was very new. We were going to clubs to dance, and suddenly we have a club where we can eat near the dancefloor, or you can stay seated at your table and go dance and come back, or from your dining table go into the VIP area near the dancefloor. She was among the first to create a club with a dining room and a dancefloor, and it was Régine’s.
That was the place for the Nouvelle vague. Yes, of course. If you wanted to be trendy you had to go to Régines.
Can you remember going there? I was trying to dress well, because contrary to François Patrice at St Hilaire you had to dress well, so you needed a tie, at the beginning. You needed to be well-mannered. She did not like someone behaving strangely. But the most beautiful good-looking girls of Paris were there. The most trendy people. When I had a record company, it was important for me to go there because I was meeting all the newspaperman, the people from the radio, the TV. Everyone was there. So it was a very strange place, where you were the actors of a night scene and everyone was watching the other and cruising the other and making his business with the other. We were going out from the club only when it was five, six o’clock in the morning.
And the dancing was wild? Yes. Very wild. Always. A lot of ambience on the dancefloor. Everyone dancing. Of course you are taking out your tie and your jacket and you go out dancing. And you are dancing near Jean Moreau, Brigitte Bardot. For us, we were not known at tat time, we were so proud, we mixed with those… Like when we are going to Studio 54, and there you were there with Bianca Jagger, Andy Warhol, Steve Rubell doing his thing, everything.
So tell me more about working with Jacques Morali. The story of the Village People. Morali was gay, I was straight. We were getting along very well. I was lucky because through Morali I understood the gay attitude and the underground scene.
So he would take you clubbing. Yeah. Very hard clubs sometimes, on the West Side, oh god, leather and… But the music was very good.
Can you remember any in particular? One was the Ramrod, it was a leather hardcore club but the music was incredible. The DJs were very good. Only men dancing between themselves. I was dancing with everyone. I didn’t care at all. But through that I understood the gay scene, the gay mentality, and how interesting it was, because those people were very alive, enjoying life, enjoying the nightlife.
What other places? He took me to Fire Island, in the tea dance party, incredible. The best DJs in town, the sunny terrace. We were dancing four, five thousand people dancing on the terrace and looking at the sea. It’s Ibiza of today, we were watching the sun set, and the DJ as the sun set went from uptempo to midtempo. The Ice Palace, because we put the name on one of our first songs, called Fire Island. It was a thank you. Jacques told me about the bushes on the beach where people go there to do their thing.
The ‘meat rack’. That’s where I wrote, ‘Don’t go to the butchers, don’t go, someone might grab you, someone might stab you’. It was a double entendre.
And where did you get the idea for the Village People? Jacques, because he was gay always wanted to do something for the gay community. One day I will do something. We didn’t know it would be a group with male characters. Around ’78 the big one. We were walking down the street in the Village. I think it was Christopher Street. Jacques and I we heard bells, and this man dressed like an Indian he passed by and we saw him with his foot bells going into a bar. Jacques look at him, very interested and told me, ‘Oh god, he is good looking, I’m thirsty!’ So we entered into the bar, and the Indian is Felipe, young and skinny and he was a bartender there, and every 15, 20 mins he was going on top of the bar and doing disco stuff in his Indian attire. There was a DJ in the bar and they were mixing the music between disco and some Indian tribe music.
So we’re looking at the Indian, and on my left I saw a cowboy, like the Marlboro cowboy. Stetson on his head, a moustache, good looking, looking at the Indian dancing. And Morali turned to me and said, ‘Oh god, are you thinking what I’m thinking?’ I said yes, but two guys only, it will be vaudeville, so we started to think about what are the male characters that mean something to the gay community, with that double entendre. So we took a piece of paper.
You actually wrote it down. Yes. We even thought about putting in what Jacques was calling the man-next-door or the boy-next-door. Very good looking, preppy. the plain straight guy with his attache case, the businessman going from Wall St. But finally we end up in building the six characters of the Village People on the piece of paper. Jacques was very outspoken and told him, hey you, Indian, you want to be in a group? that’s how Felipe the first one to join us.
Then we did a casting. We put an advertisement in the Village Voice and two nights later we were in a big warehouse. It was madness. We had around 60 people all dressed up because we said what characters we wanted…
So you had a bunch of policemen, a bunch of construction workers… Exactly. I remember a guy came up to me, said Sir, this is not Halloween. I said no, we want to form a group. Finally we had five characters, we needed to find the sixth one, the lead singer, that would become the cop. So the night after we were invited to a play on Broadway called The Wiz. And that black guy on stage had an incredible voice, Victor Willis.
He was the Wiz? Yes. We went backstage, I went to the guy, He was straight, not knowing anything about the gays except that he was not really liking them. And we told him what we wanted to do, and at first he said go to hell. Until he heard some of the music.
The first Village People album we launched it through the clubs. It was very new at that time to have the groups going to the clubs and playing for free. We shot the video clip outside of New York in the Catskills. We sold 100,000 albums like this, just through the clubs. And for the American record industry it was a revelation because we were showing them that we were able to sell 100,000 albums with no play on the radio.
What about Casablanca Records? With the Ritchie Family, and Patrick Juvet, and Dennis Parker, and a lot of our acts we went to Casablanca. It was a very trendy label. Neil Bogart was known as an entrepreneur who had guts to take risks and he was a very good promoter, he had a very good relationship with the radio pluggers and things like this. So I called him one day. He said I’m glad you called, do you have something for me? I said we just finished an album I cannot explain on the phone what it is. I’m coming to visit you with Morali.
So we fly to Los Angeles, we go to the Beverley Hills Hotel, in the grand manner, and the night before going to that meeting, we tried the music for the first time in a club. At three o’clock in the morning I see 3,000 people on the dancefloor, the DJ link the Village People ‘San Francisco’ to another record and we watch it from the DJ booth, and we are scared like hell. Half of the people leave the dancefloor. Thirty seconds later, when the hook comes, we hear a big scream and the people got back to the dancefloor, and that DJ played that record twice, one after the other, and the people were screaming. So he looked at us and he said, ‘You got something guys.’
So you can imagine what state of mind I was in the day after when I was in Neil Bogart’s office. So I look at Neil Bogart and I say, ”OK, why did you call your record company Casablanca?” He said, ”Well, because of the movie Casablanca. My real name is Bogatz, OK, but because of Humphrey Bogart I called my record company Casablanca.” I tell him, well you know I’m born in Casablanca. So I took out my wallet to show him my ID: born in Casablanca. He pushes the intercom and tells the 45 employees, you gotta come here. I’ve got a surprise for you. So here we are 45 people looking at us because I’m born in Casablanca. But I was very lucky because I had all the staff in the same room, so Neil played the Village People. He played the whole album. And everyone was raving and shouting at the end of the play. Kissing. And that’s how we started with Casablanca. We were lucky because he really knew how to promote the records. And he was hot with Kiss, with Donna Summer, I mean he was really on top of it at that time.
There was a lot of craziness at the label. Oh yes, definitely.
Sex and drugs and rock and roll? Surely true. At regular hours a car would go in the parking lot and some delivery of pizza or something, and some plate with sugar on it. I was not into it. And I said, ”Oh I understand why so many people are rolling the one dollar bills.” That’s how Casablanca was. But on top of it it was a very serious record company. We were very lucky to be with them.
Did you feel you were being subversive, because of the Village People characters? Not only subversive, also provocative.
Did you think about the political side of it? gay liberation and things like that? Not at the beginning, not really. We were keen of doing something for that, because Jacques was gay, and I was feeling that an injustice was done to the gay community. And I did not like that American mentality of bigotry and hypocrisy. And I didn’t see why thee people would be treated like this. Like black people as well, I did not like the way they were treated. So I was not doing this really as a businessman trying to make a fortune, and it happens any way after. But I always say what comes from the heart goes to the heart. I really did it as a provocative, subversive way of telling you this is the way it is.
But I have to say in the group in all honesty, not all of them were gay. I’m not asking someone his sexual preference. They were very natural about it. I’m gay, I’m gay, and that’s the way it is. When we had the success with YMCA and Casablanca Records asked us to do a real live show and the movie, Hollywood started to be interested and wanted to do a movie about disco music, Jacques and I we really went deeper into the double meaning.
“They told me we love your song, we think it can be a perfect spot for Navy recruitment.”
And the US Navy actually used ‘In The Navy’ for its recruitment ads? Video clip was something very new, you know. So I was in my New York office and I had a call from an advertising company that was in charge of budget of the American Navy. The recruiting was going down and they wanted to do some advertisement for young people to engage in the navy. They told me we love your song we think it can be a perfect spot for Navy recruitment.
And so I am having the nerve to say, ‘I have nothing against it but I want the Navy to help me. I don’t want any money, I want them to give me a loan, I want a warship and 200 navy men. And five planes’. He said ‘OK, I’m going to call you back’.
And here I am later, at the Pentagon, meeting this admiral, and his aides and going through the campaign and what is needed. They showed me pictures of big warships that were in the naval base of San Diego, California, and they said OK which one do you want, so I picked out one, and I wanted 200 navy men and you want planes? I said yes, because in the clip I want the planes to do like a star.
So we do the video clip, the navy starts their advertisement campaign, I’m back to NY and same week: catastrophe! the New York Times, the Washington Post make the headlines ‘the American Navy is using the tax money of the people to finance a video clip of a group with unknown sexual, dot, dot, dot. So the navy cancelled their advertisement and they said that it was for budgetary reasons.
He shows me a framed certificate from the US Navy:
“To Henri Belolo of Village People, in recognition of the outstanding contribution of your new release In The Navy to the morale of USS Reasoner, to the cause of Navy retention and the support of Navy recruiting, the commanding officer USS Reasoner takes great pleasure in designating you an honorary Reasoner sailor with all rights and privileges, none of the duties and responsibilities that go with it.”
For a long time America really didn’t see through the stereotypes. Oh yes. That’s how we took fantasy to the dancefloor, and up to today people are dancing YMCA and Macho Man, and strangely enough, all those gay stereotypes ended up in Friends, In Terminator with Schwarzenegger, with Eddie Murphy in Dr Doolittle dancing to ‘Macho Man’. The miracle was in Morali’s melodies. They were so popular. The melodies are so strong, they have a so strong virus and hook in them, that when you hear them from in a Village People song with the rhythm, what stays in the mind of the radio listener is the melody and the hook. It became pop history. And it’s part of culture, of American heritage. And people are often surprised to discover that two French guys were behind it, amazingly enough.
Music-obsessive Paulette went to her first club aged 14 and never looked back. From 1992 she was resident at Flesh, the mixed/gay spectacular at The Haçienda, and as British clubbing discovered glamour, she was welcomed into a flamboyant nationwide family, where her fiercely expressive approach to DJing (and DJ attire) earnt her residencies at many of the best nights across the UK. After a sojourn in Paris she’s now back in Manchester, writing a book and creating unapologetically fabulous shapes out of dancefloors worldwide.
Can you remember the first time you ever went to a club? I started clubbing in Manchester when I was 15, but the first club I went to, I was 14, it was 1980, and I went to Cagneys in Liverpool to hear Steve Proctor play. At the time, I was buying Melody Maker, NME, The Face and New Sounds New Styles. They were my magazines. I was into post-punk, Sheffield electronic sounds. So, Cabaret Voltaire, early Human League: Travelogue, Reproduction. And Gary Numan, John Foxx, all sorts of electronic. And then post-punk: Dead Kennedys, Killing Joke, that kind of thing. I was really into that.
It was the Blitz Kids in London, Princess Julia and Rusty Egan who were playing all this. And I couldn’t get that far, but Liverpool seemed doable. And in all the magazines, they talked about this DJ in the north of England who was playing that kind of music. My sister’s friend Karen was best friends with Steve Proctor. So she was like, ‘Oh, just come to Liverpool and I’ll put you on the guest list.’ Never mind the fact that I was 14, but these were simpler times in the ’80s, when you could just take somebody else’s paper birth certificate to the club as proof of age and look a bit grown-up.
And I went wearing a really beautiful big print, it was like plants and leaves, big Monstera leaves on this jumpsuit which was green and olive and gold. It was beautiful. You know, one of those jumpsuits with the diagonal zip. And yeah, I went to Cagneys in Liverpool. The first record he was playing when I walked in was Gary Numan, ‘Cars’, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is fantastic,’ I got on the dance floor, and that was it. I think I was going once every two weeks or once a month or something. And then I started studying for my marks and it got a bit of a drag going all the way to Liverpool after school on a Friday.
Then my sister Elizabeth started working at a club called Pips behind the bar, and she said, ‘Why don’t you come to Pips? They’re playing your music.’ Because I was the only one in my family that was into that. Everyone else was into soul. They were following Greg Wilson, Colin Curtis, Mike Shaft, Ewan Clarke. They’re like family friends. And I was just like, ‘I love that music, but this is what I want to follow.’ So Liz is just like, ‘Come. I’m on the bar, so I can keep my eye on you. I can get you in, but you know, you can get a membership.’ And that’s what I did, and I was there probably three nights a week until it closed. I was a steady 18 for three years, because I just used to use different sisters’ birth certificates to get membership.
And Pips became your home from home It was absolutely fantastic. First of all, Pips has everything to do with how I built my record collection, because it was a bit of everything. It had four rooms; a ’60s room, a soul room, a Bowie room, and a Roxy room. You had all the punk stuff in the Roxy room, Siouxsie & The Banshees, Dead Kennedys, Deutsch Amerikanische Freundschaft, all that kind of shit. And the Bowie room was where they were playing all their new romantic stuff: Bowie, Roxy, Simple Minds, which was more self-expressive, Visage, that kind of thing. The dress-up, the performance thing.
And Pips had everything to do with why I DJ the way I do, because it’s all to do with expressing yourself to the music at the same time as it’s playing. So, dancing along, singing along, miming along. Every time they played a Bowie record, everyone moved off the dance floor, and the Bowie-heads moved on, and it was a dance floor full of Marcel Marceaus miming along to it. I used to be really good at it.
Was it quite big? Yeah. It was massive. It was a massive basement club, four rooms. You could definitely fit I would say 150, 200 in each room. Probably about 800 in total, maybe 1,000 at a squeeze.
Did you ever go to The Haçienda before acid house kicked in? Of course I did, yeah. Because we used to go and listen to Hewan Clarke and Mike Pickering at Nude and go to gigs there and everything. It was just a place to go and listen to music and dance, you know? Sometimes really empty and sometimes really good. It was a really good place to dance, a really good dance floor. It was like a playground to me. The Ritz, The Gallery, Pips, Haçienda, Boardwalk, DeVille’s, Berlin, Legend, I’ve done them all. I was there on the dance floor. That’s how I grew up. I was clubbing probably three nights a week from 14.
Out of all of them, you would say Pips was the most formative. Yeah, there’s never been another club like it, and I don’t think they could ever make it again, just because of the mixing of tribes. Even at festivals, you don’t really get that mixing the way you did there. Because at Pips, you’ve got the ’60s room, you’ve got the soul room, you’ve got the Bowie and the Roxy room, but people didn’t just stay in those rooms. Everybody moved around. So you’d get the soul boys in the Bowie room in their waffle cardigans and their cords and their loafers watching all the dressed up new romantics dancing to Grace Jones or David Bowie. And then you’d get these six-foot-four punks with full mohicans, chains, makeup, the lot, standing in the soul room, dancing to flippin’ Donny Hathaway. You know? It was just like a real mind meld.
Though culturally, 1980, 1981, and 1982, if you looked even remotely different, you were a fag, you were a queer, you were a puff. And if you actually were, then it was even worse, you know? You got it in the street, but you didn’t get it in the club. People seemed to leave that outside the door, and once in the club, everyone was alright with everyone being there.
All of the different tribes would mingle in one space, because you knew you wouldn’t get beaten up and you knew you could hang out there. I suppose Pips and then DeVille’s and Berlin were my soft introduction into the full gay scene of Manchester. That was kind of how I drifted into finding that side of myself.
“The reason it happened in gay clubs is because they didn’t see having women behind the decks as a bad thing or a weakness. They saw it as a strength.”
When did you start hearing house music? I think I was more aware of house music coming through my sisters, because Paula and Elizabeth were raving and I wasn’t, and they were bringing the music back, and I was hearing it on the radio.
But not in clubs? I was married really early. And my ex-husband didn’t like clubs at all. And for the years I was with him, we kind of went to clubs, but it was all very polite. So it was only really like the wine bar-y ’80s, and Simply Red-y sort of stuff. We split up after seven years. So probably the first time I heard house music in a club was after I went, ‘Fuck this, I’m out of here,’ and started dancing at The Number One, in 1991.
Tell me about The Number One. I used to go there as well. The Number One was funny. I always seem to be attracted to these dark, seedy basements where all sorts of shit happens. You lose control and you find yourself. I was working for Piccadilly Radio, and me and my friend went to The Number One one day after work, and it was chrome and mirrors and carpet, and they were showing Divine on the videos: Female Trouble, and I remember that very clearly.
Then fast forward to 1991, I went back. The carpet was sticky and dark. The chrome was there but it had all been painted over black, and it was a proper rave spot. I was there one night dancing, and I remember dancing to Prince’s ‘Gett Off’, and I lost the plot. Absolutely lost the plot. I don’t know whether it was because I was free from my husband for the night. I remembered Tim Lennox played this Junior Vasquez mix and I went into this routine which just was a complete release, and when the manager saw me dancing, he just came over at the end and he went, ‘Oh my God, that was fantastic. Do you want to work for us?’ So I was like, ‘Doing what?’ And he said, ‘I’d like you to dance on a podium every Friday and Saturday night. If you can do that from nine till two, I’ll pay you 50 quid.’ And I was studying, so it was quite a lot of money. I said yes, much against my husband. He wasn’t happy about it at all. It was nearly all of the mortgage though. So he’s like, ‘Okay, then.’
But I wasn’t allowed to leave the house in the clothes I was wearing, so I had to change at the club. It was all a bit mental. But this club was, wow, because Tim Lennox was playing. And that was where I heard DSK, Inner City, Kevin Saunderson, Mr. Fingers, Larry Heard, and then all the vocal stuff that was coming through.
Who were the DJs who influenced you most? There was Hewan, there was Tim Lennox, there was Mike Pickering, and Barney – Michael Barnes-Wynters from Bristol. He used to run a party called Hoochie Coochie in Manchester. He’s just a incredible, switched on, very politically black, very right on, black power, civil rights kind of person. He’s an artist now. And musically, because he was from Bristol, he had an edge that Manchester music didn’t necessarily have. They were the four pillars of my understanding of what it takes to build a set, play a set. What kind of music can you play all night, which is basically fucking everything. And the quality, really, and also vocals. They all played vocals.
Any women? I didn’t have any female influences. There were never any women behind the decks when I started DJing. Even on the posters, on the flyers, there were no women’s names on them ever. Ever, ever, ever. I wasn’t moving in the lesbian circles either, so I wasn’t aware of that side of things. From my tunnel vision I was always following male DJs.
When you first started DJing, all of the women seemed to come through the gay scene, even if they weren’t actually gay. Princess Julia, Vicki Edwards, Rachel Auburn, people like that. It was like female DJs hardly existed on the straight scene. Well, they didn’t exist on the straight scene because it was big boys club, and they were never going to give any woman a job. There’s a reason why there weren’t any women on the flyers or the posters, because there weren’t any there. It changed a lot in the ’90s, but in the ’80s the only women you really saw in clubs were behind the scenes. They could manage the bar. They could manage the kitchens, the offices, the record labels, everything, but they weren’t the high profile figureheads. Ang Matthews was managing The Haçienda, but you never saw her giving any comments on the news. It was Tony Wilson, Peter Hook, Rob Gretton. You wouldn’t have been aware that women were running anything to do with The Haçienda, or the Factory, but they were.
There was a woman who designed The Haçienda who never gets mentioned: Sandra Douglas. It’s always Ben Kelly. I mean, it’s in everything. It’s not just in clubbing. It’s the same in the arts. It’s the same in science, politics.It’s not unusual to clubbing, per se. We live in patriarchal society. That’s how it is. Things are systemically embedded in society. That’s when it becomes political, because it’s not just an isolated case of you not knowing there were women there, or they’re not promoted, or they’re not pushed, or they’re not accepted. That’s just the way it was. And there weren’t really very many women.
I think the reason why it happened in gay clubs is because they were alright with having women around. They didn’t see having women behind the decks as a bad thing or a weakness. They saw it as a strength. They saw it as something else that would attract another crew of people.
And also, they knew that if you had a lot of women there, it changes the environment completely. You know yourself, if you play a record that brings all the boys to the dance floor and makes all the girls disappear, your dancefloor will go really quickly, because you really do need to keep that balance of men and women. With the gay clubs, they were working more on the holistic atmosphere of the event, rather than it just being a club playing records.
How did you get the gig at Flesh? I started DJing in 1992. It was by accident because I never planned to be a DJ. I didn’t set out thinking, ‘I want to DJ at The Haçienda.’ I was offered a spot at a party that a friend of a friend of mine was running, and she’d run out of money because she paid for the hire of the club, she paid for the posters and everything, and then couldn’t afford to pay for a DJ. So she asked her friend Tommy, did he know anyone? And he knew I had loads of records because I’d been secretly building this record collection, even though my husband had said no, I couldn’t. I spoke to Adele. She said, ‘I want you to play at The Number One from nine till two. I’ll give you 30 quid,’ which seemed like a really good deal to me. So I said yes, spent my entire grant for that term on records, which was 150 quid. I played that party, and it went really super, super well. I did it on my own. I’d never played in a club before, and I played the entire night. I didn’t lose anyone. You know, nobody walked out. Nobody said it was shit.
And from that, it had really good feedback from the gay community, because it was a gay party. And news filtered back to Paul Cons and Lucy Scher, who were moving Flesh from The Academy to The Haçienda. And then Adele said to me ‘I think we should ask them if we can play their second room.’ So we did. Lucy Scher, there’s another woman, god rest her soul, she died three years ago. If it hadn’t have been for Lucy, neither myself nor Kath McDermott would have played at The Haçienda.
Before this, Lucy did a party there, I think it was called The Summer of Lesbian Love, and it was one of the biggest parties they’d had – absolutely packed and made loads of money. So that persuaded the people at The Haçienda that maybe it was a good thing to start a new gay night, so they started Flesh. I was downstairs in the Gay Traitor. They renamed it the Pussy Parlour, and I played there every month from ’92 till ’96, bar two when I took my finals.
When all of the problems were happening at The Haçienda, with gangs taking over the door, was Flesh unaffected by that because it was a gay club? It was for a while. At some point, some of the gangs used to come into Flesh, and it was just a place where they could hang out and be left alone, and nobody would bother them, and they could enjoy the music. They did occasionally come in. Certain of them, not all of them, but in large, it was a safe space for gay people and their mates.
And you juggled DJing with a career in promotions I moved to London in ’94. and I’m working at Mercury Records. And by 1996, I’m full on into Talkin’ Loud, Manifesto, Ibiza, you name it. It was just too much. Flesh was a Wednesday monthly. I couldn’t keep taking a Wednesday every month off work, so I had to stop. Also, they didn’t want to pay more, and they didn’t want to pay my travel. I was at Mercury Records from ’94, and then I was at Azuli and Defected in ’98, and then by ’99, I was just working solely on Azuli as the promotions and art director. And then 2000 I was really struggling to keep the timing of working a full-time job as a promotions director for a record label and my weekend DJing which had really picked up. They wanted me to do an American tour, so I made the leap in 2000 to go full-time.
And you lived in Paris for a while I started touring internationally for the Ministry of Sound, and various other things happened. I had a load of problems with my flat and then I sold it. I met someone, and it was just like … I’d always wanted to live in France anyway, so I just decided that it would be a good idea in 2004 to make that leap. So December 2004, I moved to Paris.
One of Paulette’s low-key outfits for Flesh. “If you’re gonna make yourself visible make yourself really visible” Photo: Daniel Newman
Did the novelty factor of being a woman help or hinder you in the early part of your DJ career? Both. Both. I mean, in terms of bookings, I would say absolutely helped on the gay scene. It didn’t help me on the straight scene at all. I had to kind of divorce myself from playing those nights in order to start playing on the straight circuit, to start working at your Ministry of Sounds, your Cross, your Bagleys. You didn’t get gay DJs playing on this straight scene and you didn’t really get straight DJs playing on the gay scene. They just didn’t meet. I was with Concord Artists, and when they were suggesting me for booking, people wouldn’t book me because I was ‘that gay DJ’. So I had to lose that tag, which is really upsetting. Looking back on it, that’s fucking discrimination. You really wouldn’t be able to do that now. And if people found out about it, they could rightly kick off.
But in gay terms it was fantastic because the persona that I had built meant I was picked up by Wayne Kurz at The Zap for a weekly residency. And the same with playing for James Horrocks and Thomas Foley at Garage at Heaven with Princess Julia and Rachel Auburn and Stephen Sharp. James Bailey had seen me, so I went to play at Venus in Nottingham, and Trannies With Attitude booked me for Vague. They had all seen me and heard me play out Flesh. Patrick Lilley was always, always at Flesh. And when I moved to London, I became a good friend and consequently played for a lot of his nights: Queer Nation, One Nation Under A Groove, you name it. All of those big mythic gay nights and gay locations. Everything those people did, I was able to play because I was part of the family. It enabled me to meet all these really powerful, important people and play at some of the best parties in the world
And in what ways did it hinder you? I was thinking about it the other day. When I started DJing I didn’t know, how do I get these cool records? It was about ’93, so I’d split up from my husband and was seeing Simon Bushell, who was in charge of a distribution company that supplied all the record shops in Manchester. One Saturday afternoon, he took me to Eastern Bloc, and he says, ‘You should put a bag of records aside for Paulette. She’s a really good DJ. She’s up and coming,’ and somebody said ‘Why should we give her any records? She only gets the gigs because she stands there playing records in a fluffy bra and bikini knickers.’
It was just like, god, the straight guys don’t think I’m remotely relevant in terms of music. All they can see is a woman behind the decks. And not just a woman, because I think if you’re going to make yourself visible, make yourself really visible, so I’m not standing there in twin set and pearls; I’ve got fuck-all on. It was just clear that they didn’t think I deserved the term of DJ, because all I was to them was window dressing. For people who know me and know what was in my head musically, they would know my life is music. But for the people that couldn’t be assed, all they saw was a fluffy Wonderbra.
“David Guetta’s around 20 million a year. There’s not a female that’s earning even close to that. “
Have you noticed things change over the past 25, 30 years? I think a lot more in the last four years. We can talk about this stuff now, and we can actually say, ‘Hey, this is right. This is wrong. This needs changing. This doesn’t. We’ve got a whole new generation of females that are running things. They’re running their own labels. They’ve got radio shows on Radio 1, 1Xtra, Reprezent Radio, Rinse, you name it. They’ve all got their brands. They’ve got their labels. You’ve got people like Anz, and Jamz Supernova, and Jaguar, and Afrodeutsche. There’s a whole new generation of really powerful, vocal, political black women coming up. And that’s where I would see the change as well because I’m seeing a lot more black women too in there. When I was doing it, I was a bit of a needle in a haystack.
Is it really that recent that it’s changed? Yes. Absolutely that recent.
Are there places even now where you still get treated differently as a female DJ? Yeah. I mean, of course there are, because there isn’t a single place that pays women the same money as they pay men. That gender pay gap is absolutely horrific. For one of the projects I’m working on I was looking at the statistics for wages for female DJs. The highest paid male DJ, I think it’s between Calvin Harris and Marshmello. I think Calvin Harris earned 80 million last year. And Marshmello earned 38.5. The highest earning female DJ, I bet you can’t even guess who that is.
Nina Kraviz? Not even close.
One of the Eastern European techno DJs? Not even close.
I’ve got no idea, then. The highest earning female DJ, and this is such a con even putting her on the list because she is an heiress anyway…
Oh, God. …is Paris Hilton.
Okay. There isn’t any female DJ that is earning even remotely near the amounts the guys are earning. I think David Guetta’s around 20 million a year. There’s not a female that’s earning even close to that. There isn’t a female equivalent to Carl Cox. There isn’t a female equivalent to David Guetta. The closest you can get is Nervo, and I’m telling you, they are not earning anywhere near the same.
Annie Mac is just an absolute mega-god in terms of what can be done and what can be achieved. But if Annie Mac doesn’t come up in the 20 highest earning DJs, then seriously, we’ve got a problem. When she left Radio 1, the last post she did said, ‘There’ve been so many changes and it’s great to see so many women at Radio 1, but we still have so far to go.’ And it’s just really frustrating. I’ve been DJing for 30 years and I think it’s changed a lot in many ways. But really, when you put the stats together, it’s not changed at all.
Is dancing political? For me, yeah. Everything. Everything’s political for me, everything from my head down to my toes. Everything is political, much to the annoyance of my family. But I really do see that if we have this platform, it has to have some use. It can’t just be, oh, I’m playing this nice record and then that nice record. If you’re going to influence people, make it count. If you’re going to entertain people, entertain them in such a way that they can take some kind of message away. A positive message, a positive political message.
Music is universal. I will never stop loving music, and I’m not going to stop playing music unless the ears fall off the side of my head or I go deaf. And I think even if I go deaf, I’ll still have a go. Everything about dance is political, down to the colour I am, the gender I am, the age I am, everything. Absolutely everything is political. And I hope that just by my even standing there, I am saying to people it is okay. And that’s why I keep going. It’s okay. Just whatever you want to do, if you have that dream, if you have something you want to do, just do it. It’s okay to be who you are. Just be who you are when you wake up in the morning. It’s fine. Go party.
And yes, dance is political. We have a platform that we can use to transmit messages. So, I do occasional bits of fundraising. I will use my music and my platform to transmit that message and to raise money or to raise awareness. And I think we can really make a difference in that way. So yes, dance music is political and it always should be. We’re fucked if it’s not. We really are.
Why is music such a force for rebellion? It isn’t for everybody. There are some people who manage to use dance music as just a money-making tool to line their own pockets and to buy huge mansions. But music has always been a tool for rebellion, right back to Negro spirituals and gospel music. It wasn’t just a nice song. They were giving directions to people to get out of the fields. The songs they were singing, they were maps. Music has always been really political. I think if you can get a song that sticks in people’s heads, it’s a lot more powerful than a pamphlet or a politician.
