Thanks to the energy and culture that flowed from its phenomenal LGBTQ activism, in the late ’80s Sydney hosted some of the most spectacular events of the acid house explosion. In 1989 i-D magazine declared it the dance music capital of the world, the Face agreed, and world-class DJs – and Grace Jones – lined up to play. The story of Sydney’s briefly world-leading party scene has never been told. Toby Hemming captures the wildness of the Hordern Pavilion parties.
It’s 1988. We’re inside a long neglected industrial space. On any given Sunday at 4am the temperature is soaring. At one end of the cavernous hall, a fearsome stack of speakers pulses with deep bass while a DJ seamlessly stitches together house, dubbed out disco, party friendly hip hop and oddball pop. Over 6,000 revellers, fashion kids, muscle boys, drag queens, celebrities and eccentric European travellers move together in euphoric unison. The dance floor is alive with the latest records from Chicago, New York and London, fuelled by a fresh wave of MDMA that turns the room into a sea of blissful abandon.
This isn’t London, Manchester or even Ibiza. This is Sydney, a city better known at the time for pub rock, schooners and sunscreen. But something was shifting. Beneath the beer and the beach tans, a nightlife revolution was quietly erupting, driven by queer culture, musical innovation and raw creative defiance. History is written by the victors, and despite gaining international praise in the late ’80s as the globe’s most vibrant scene, this polysexual, fluorescent dance culture was never really allowed to claim its place in the global acid house narrative. Sydney’s contribution has been largely undocumented, overshadowed by scenes with louder mythmaking.
At their peak, Sydney’s Hordern Parties were among the biggest indoor dance events in the world. Grace Jones, Boy George, Graeme Park, Frankie Knuckles all headlined. The crowds were wild, the outfits outrageous, the energy off the charts. London’s i-D magazine declared Sydney the Dance Party Capital of the World. But the pre-internet story of these significant cultural moments has been largely lost or forgotten.
The Hordern Pavilion was a semi-redundant agricultural hall in the middle of Sydney’s affluent eastern suburbs, a neglected and dusty space once home to livestock and floral displays. By the late ’80s it found a second life as a rave cathedral. Extravagant, hedonistic, with roots firmly in an unapologetically queer after-hours underground.
What made Sydney different was a unique collision of several forces. By the late 1980s the city had one of the most visible queer communities in the world thanks to Mardi Gras, as well as a growing international population of travellers and expats, and a thriving nightlife culture – away from Australia’s pub rock tradition – that embraced both.
The gay scene had already built a network of large-scale parties and after-hours spaces that pushed far beyond the size and ambition of most traditional nightlife spaces. When house music, new drugs and global club culture arrived at the end of the decade, Sydney already had the crowd, the infrastructure and the appetite. The Hordern Pavilion was where it all exploded into the open.
For filmmaker Mark Murphy, these parties changed everything. “I’d just moved back from a working holiday in London to Brisbane, then quickly headed to Sydney like every queer kid did back then. This was the late ’80s and word was spreading about the Hordern Parties. I knew I just had to go. My first was Sweatbox Meltdown, and walking into that space with two cherry pickers in the middle of the dance floor and thousands of people moving to house music, it blew my mind.”
Those memories stayed with him and years later the experience became a mission. “We didn’t realise what we were part of at the time. And now so much of it has gone undocumented. I had to tell the story.” Murphy is now making House of Love, a feature-length documentary currently in development. “We were in the middle of the AIDS crisis. We lost a lot of family. These nights gave people joy, escape and identity. They were never just parties.”
Long before the Hordern became a rave cathedral, the blueprint had been drawn in the queer, debaucherous heart of Sydney nightlife that grew up around the city’s Mardis Gras. “Sydney didn’t need London or New York,” says Stephen Allkins, a Sydney DJ who started going out in 1976 and has been behind the decks for nearly 50 years. “It was so vital. We had eight venues in a three-block stretch where you actually ran to get in. People ran, because every room had a different vibe.”
Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras began in 1978 not as a celebration but as a protest. Inspired by the Stonewall movement in New York, several hundred activists marched down Oxford Street demanding an end to discrimination and the criminalisation of homosexuality. The night ended badly with police violence and arrests, but it also marked the beginning of something far larger. In the years that followed, Mardi Gras evolved from a political demonstration into one of the most visible expressions of queer culture anywhere in the world.
Allkins was already out there. He frames what followed as a community claiming its full humanity. “Gay men in the ’70s were literally illegal. You could go to jail for fourteen years just for being gay. But gay men were protesting in the streets in the middle of the day. You have to have a real sense of self to do that. And that reflected in the clubs. The community got the law changed. The politicians didn’t do it for us. We did it.”
By the early ’80s the parade was part of a growing cultural movement. Around it grew a network of clubs, after-hours venues and dance parties that drew thousands of people into Sydney’s nightlife. Oxford Street became the epicentre, a place where queer culture, fashion, music and performance collided in ways that were rare at the time anywhere outside San Francisco or London. Tucked into it were figures whose influence ran deeper than most people now realise.
It is impossible to tell the story of this scene without sitting with what AIDS meant to the people living inside it. Allkins knew many of those who were lost, not as names on a list but as the brilliant, specific individuals who filled those floors and shaped that culture.
“All these strong, independent people came and lived in the [inner-city] Darlinghurst area. And I knew them all because they were smart, sexy, funny, whatever, whatever, whatever. And then AIDS hit, and all these people I knew as just people that were apt to dance into my music. They started organisations like ACON (Aids Counsel of New South Wales). They started all this work and turned into activists overnight.”
And so, as AIDS impacted, something harder and more defiant took hold. “It didn’t change everything because we stayed the way we were. And that was the amazing thing: that vibrancy for life never quit. We didn’t stop dancing. We became stronger because dancing was a ritual.” For Allkins, the grief of the time fed an elevated party sense. “AIDS made us more. It made us more joyous. Because we did all that work to help people, when we danced we danced even more.”
Key figures on the scene included Robert Racic, a three-turntable DJ who went on to produce seminal Australian electronica act Severed Heads, and became one of Sydney’s most forward-thinking musical minds, before his death from AIDS in 1995. DJ Bill Morley was a significant figure in the activist culture of the era, known for his encyclopaedic musical knowledge and inspired DJing soundscapes that took in everything from early techno to kitschy 1950s organ music. And David McDermott, widely regarded as the first openly gay visual artist in Australia, who, as a card-carrying member of New York’s Paradise Garage, provided a connection that brought something rare back to Sydney. “David explained the dance to me,” says Allkins. “That it’s a ritual. Your heart is the bass, your hips are the rhythm. People used to jump up and that’s like touching the sky. Then you’d hit the ground, touching the earth.”
The DJs of the Hordern scene. DJ Peewee Ferris, Robert Racic, Stephen Allkins, Stephen Ferris, John Ferris, and Jacqui O.
Robert Racic and Stephen Allkins
In 1982 the debauched Sleazeball party launched as a fundraiser for Mardi Gras, taking an earthier approach. “One was hands in the air and one was more sleazy and dirty,” recalls Allkins. Sleazeball pulled a respectable 500 people in its first year, but the following year drew 3,000. Something was in the air and the rest of clued-up Sydney wanted in. Allkins, who played both years, shrugs when asked what caused the leap. “Sometimes there’s no rhyme and reason. It’s organic.” The Sleazeball parties were endurance tests as much as club nights. Eight, ten, 12-hour sessions driven by American disco and Hi-NRG, they were sweat-soaked and relentless.
In 1985 Sleazeball showed what those nights could be at their peak. Allkins played solo for ten hours. That week, he’d just taken delivery of Grace Jones’s “Slave to the Rhythm”. “I did a two-copy mix of it as an encore at 7.30 in the morning. I just mixed the fuck out of it for about twelve minutes. By that stage their drugs had kicked in, and they loved that slower stuff. It just happened to come out that week – not everything can be programmed.”
Out of this ecosystem emerged the large-scale dance events that would eventually take over the Hordern Pavilion. Another key locus was the infamous Recreational Arts Team (RAT) parties, most often cited as the direct precursor to the Hordern era. These evolved considerably over time. “The early RAT parties were all about theatre, all about performance – Lindsay Kemp type of thing,” recalls Allkins. “Music didn’t matter, because they were so busy shoving shows on. It was what you’d call a happening, an arts crowd not a dance crowd. I did RAT parties where I only played three songs in a whole night.” By the ’80s, however, everybody was really dancing.
When asked about the soundtrack at the later DJ-led RAT parties, Allkins is resistant to reducing the music to a list: “When you say what was the big track, I think: which party, what time? It wasn’t one track. The whole night made them go off.” He and Razik played only imports and underground records, no top 40. The records he reaches for span the full range of what a Sydney floor was built on: “D-Train’s ‘You’re the One For Me’, Shirley Lites’s ‘Heat You Up (Melt You Down)’, Talking Heads deep cuts ‘iZimbra’ ‘Cross-Eyed and Painless’, ‘Slippery People’. Janet Jackson’s ‘Control’. West End. Afrika Bambaataa. Early Ministry, then an electro act. And there was timing to it,” he adds. “‘Slippery People’ at 5.30 in the morning. ‘Girlfriend is Better’ at one.”
“Straight kids started to come and listen to us in the early ’80s. That’s how the Hordern stuff got bigger, the whole Hard Times look, the Face crowd, the dance fashion. We got all of it.”
British expat DJ Robin Knight, who played at many of the bigger Hordern parties, remembered how fundamental the later RAT parties were. “The RATs had been going since the early ’80s because of Mardi Gras. They were playing upfront American disco, and that’s really what everything came from.” A steady stream of Qantas stewards on the popular Sydney to San Francisco route kept the scene fresh, with the latest Patrick Cowley and Hi NRG twelves adding a new direction to the disco mix.
At a time when Sydney nightlife was still conservative and segmented, the newly energised queer scene moved faster and harder. The RAT parties turned a queer arts crowd into a dance crowd, taught them to trust a DJ, and conditioned them for scale and diversity, and in doing so created the conditions for something nobody had quite seen before. A series of promoters took the RAT template and upped its ambition, outdoing each other to throw wilder, bigger and more decadent parties at the Hordern Pavilion, the venue that would lend its name to an entire era. And then, on New Year’s Eve 1987, RAT itself walked through the door of the Hordern Pavilion for CelebRAT ’88, and nothing was quite the same again.
1989 RAT New Year flyer
What followed moved fast. Paul Holden’s Bacchanalia team hosted two events within a single month in 1988, and word spread quickly. The crowd that materialised was unlike anything Sydney had seen: fashion kids and straight clubbers mixing with European travellers who had already passed through Amnesia, the Haçienda and Future and arrived in Sydney via Goa carrying the sound, the attitude and the appetite for something bigger.
And the queer energy didn’t disappear; it powered a shift to something new, and the crowd grew from 2,000 to 6,000. Competing promoters piled in behind them. By the end of 1988 there had been ten parties at the Hordern. In 1989 alone there were 28. The scene did not so much find a new home as discover what it had been building toward all along.
Robin Knight had been a DJ on the soul circuit in England before moving to Sydney in the mid-’80s. His background playing to large crowds and a deep heritage in dance music made him a natural choice for the bigger, more integrated Hordern parties. He recalls briefing Qantas contacts to bring him records. “I’d give them handwritten notes; they’d go shopping in Soho and bring back the latest upfront releases. We were right up there with London in the late ’80s. But it wasn’t a copycat. The mixture of crowds and the distance meant we could mix up and down in a way that was really liberating.”
He cites Mr Fingers’ “Can You Feel It”, Ten City’s “Whatever Makes You Happy”, LNR’s “Work It to the Bone”, Black Riot’s “A Day in the Life, Sterling Void’s “It’s Alright” and “Runaway Girl”, Inner City’s “Big Fun” and “Good Life”. While these were big in London too, the Hordern DJs were able to put their own unique spin on the sound. “Everything was mixed up, it wasn’t about genre, it was about what moved people,” says Knight. It was a real mixture of house, hip hop, bootlegs, edits.” That openness reshaped who felt welcome and what felt possible on the floor. “We could play Chris Rea’s ‘Josephine’ in the main room, the crowd were up for it.” As the nights stretched on, other influences drifted in, unexpected but perfectly timed. Gypsy Kings’ “Bamboléo.” Rob Base’s “Joy and Pain”, Adeva’s “Respect”. Tony Scott’s “That’s How I’m Livin’”. Some records simply cut through everything. There was no fixed template and no hierarchy. DJs built sets the way the nights unfolded, reacting to energy and mood. Bootlegs and edits filled the gaps, not as novelty but as necessity, bending familiar records into something new and functional for Sydney floors. “I was playing house versions of Rapper’s Delight, white label refits of soul records and early Norman Cook productions. Sometimes the samples sounded better than the original mix, anything that bought the energy,” recalls Knight.
New Year’s Eve 1988 saw Grace Jones, then at the height of her powers, headline in a way that could only be described as peak diva. She arrived fashionably late before bringing proceedings to a complete standstill over a disagreement that the sanitised narrative put down to a missing designer raincoat which had disappeared backstage. Insiders suggest the real story was much more in line with the star’s mythology, with Jones demanding a gram of coke and $10k in cash before she made her entrance. The promoters had little trouble with the first part, but tracking down that kind of cash late at night was another matter. The stalemate was only broken by a call to a shady associate on the other side of town, who arrived with a bag of used bills, no questions asked.
When she finally hit the stage at 4am, the pent-up energy of the thousands who’d been kept waiting exploded into what witnesses still describe as one of the greatest performances she ever gave, a show so fabulous it became the stuff of Sydney nightlife legend. The raincoat, needless to say, was never seen again.
Inevitably MDMA hit the mainstream and accelerated everything. “It was probably late ’88, early ’89 before it really hit and that turned on the whole scene,” says Knight. “We didn’t understand it at first. I’d been back to England and got involved, but we didn’t know this was the same stuff that had been on the gay scene for years. A couple of Mancs turned up with a bag of pills, and it just lit the fire.”
In April 1989, the i-D World Tour landed in Sydney and further lit up the scene. Despite a fiercely loyal local culture already thriving, the international exposure threw a spotlight on the city. UK house pioneer and Haçienda resident Graeme Park headlined alongside future M People star Mike Pickering. “The only time I’d been abroad to DJ was New York,” Park recalled. “Then a few months later, me and Mike flew out here.”
Graeme Park at 1989’s i-D World Tour party
There were some doubts about how house-ready Sydney really was. “We’d met a young DJ called Peewee Ferris, and he was going, ‘Well, good luck. I mean, house isn’t really a thing yet here” recalled Park. The Hordern was about to prove Peewee comprehensively wrong. Seeing the size of the venue stopped Park in his tracks. “It was just massive. Allegedly it had the world’s biggest glitter ball that night. I just could not believe the size of the space. I remember turning around and asking, are you really going to fill this place? And the guys said, ‘Oh yeah, don’t you worry about that.’”
The scale of what greeted them was unlike anything the legal scene in the UK could offer at the time. “In the UK in 1989, the only events that massive would have been the illegal raves like Blackburn,” Park said. “But this, the Hordern Pavilion…” His sentence trails off as he recalls the party.
Their approach was instinctive and carefully judged. “Started off with soul, some hip hop, slowly built it up to Jack Your Body and Love Can’t Turn Around. Then Mike came on and just played acid house.” The crowd, primed by years of the Oxford Street scene, met them every step of the way.
DJ Peewee Ferris and Frankie Knuckles at the 1989 “2000AD” party
Later parties raised the stakes to a level that had no real parallel anywhere in the world. Fully operational, flood-lit JCB diggers loomed over the crowd like industrial sculpture. Promoters competed to outdo each other, pouring thousands into lighting rigs, theatrical walkways and production values that most venues in London or New York would have struggled to match. In a blissfully pre-Health and Safety era, nobody was asking questions about safety certificates, and nobody wanted them to.
At their peak, these were not merely big parties. They were spectacles of more than 6,000 people inside a single venue, a number that dwarfed the capacity of most celebrated clubs in the world. The crowd was unlike anything else: Oxford Street originals alongside fashion kids, European travellers, curious suburbanites and international scenesters who had been to Ibiza and London and were telling anyone who would listen that Sydney was something else entirely. The Hordern had its own vocabulary of excess, its own mythology of nights that ran until the sun was high and the last bodies were still moving, because stopping felt unthinkable.
International acts felt it too. The biggest names of the time, including Inner City, Frankie Knuckles, Danny Rampling, Boy George and New York house act Kraze (whose 1988 floor-filler The Party became a Hordern anthem), added Sydney to their itineraries as its reputation spread. These were not favour bookings or promotional detours. Sydney was on the list because the Hordern was genuinely one of the best rooms in the world, and these DJs knew it.
Allkins puts the genuine peak as lasting less than two years. After that, the specialness began to dilute in the way that all extraordinary things eventually do. “Your birthday shouldn’t be every week,” he says. “People stopped caring about the actual party. Sometimes the gates were locked and they wouldn’t even know what was going on or not, they just knew they went to the Hordern on a Saturday.” Unfortunately, success had become its own quiet undoing.
When external pressure mounted, the Hordern slowed. The alleged catalyst was a refreshed partygoer peeing in the driveway of a well-to-do local who just happened to be a High Court judge, which is, in its own way, a perfectly Sydney ending to the story. The truth was the scene had simply run its natural course and grown beyond what any single venue or moment could contain.
As the Hordern era faded, the culture splintered. Its queer core endured and, in one sense, triumphed: Mardi Gras grew from an act of resistance into a genuine national institution, drawing well over a million people to Sydney each year and sitting comfortably in the cultural mainstream alongside any event Australia produces. Oxford Street held its ground too, battered but unbroken across decades of developer pressure and political indifference.
But the broader inheritance was squandered. The radical integration that had defined the Hordern years did not survive the transition. Mainstream Sydney clubbing retreated to a predominantly straight, white core, and without the cross-pollination that diversity produces, the scene never developed a sound or identity of its own. Progressive house, trance, and eventually EDM became the defining sounds, each one a borrowed template, defaulting to whatever the safest currents of global club culture were serving up at any given moment.
In the end what was lost was not momentum, but memory. The truth of where the city’s dance culture had come from: its multicultural roots, sexual adventurousness, its willingness to mix bodies, sounds and identities. This deeper story survived quietly, held by the cognoscenti rather than celebrated publicly, passed hand to hand, night to night, story to story.
That Sydney never made the hallowed list of the cities that defined dance culture is partly the tyranny of distance. A city a world away from the media tastemakers was always going to struggle to claim its place in the narrative. But it’s also a failure of Australian media. When i-D magazine declared Sydney the dance party capital of the planet, there was no local machine capable of amplifying that verdict or making it stick. The internet was still years away, the music press was concentrated in London, and so Sydney, for all its energy and ambition, was not in the business of telling its own story. That the parties happened at all, given the distance, the era and the cultural odds, makes the whole thing more extraordinary, not less.
Mark Murphy has spent years putting together a feature documentary, House of Love, to ensure none of this wild story is forgotten. Working with cinematographer Luke Rodely, he’s been shooting interviews with a sense of urgency. “A couple of the key figures had already passed away, we knew we had to move fast.” With producer Michaela Perske on board, the team has built up an incredible collection of rare photos and long-forgotten footage, including a crate of never-seen VHS tapes from the parties. When Murphy shared clips and stills through the project’s Instagram, the response was overwhelming. “It surprised me how much these parties meant to people.” He’s now close to having a cut for film festivals. “It deserves to be seen. This was a moment in time. The biggest dance parties under one roof in the world. And most people have no idea they ever happened.” You can help finish this unique record of Sydney’s unique place in dance culture by donating at Documentary Australia. Follow the project at @thehouseoflove_film
One of the UK’s original soul superfans, Pete Wingfield was switched on in the ’60s by rare US import 45s and the network of collectors, stores and reviewers that worshipped them. His fanzine Soul Beat opened the door to a life of musical adventure, and he has some priceless tales of blagging his way across America in the ’60s, when he parlayed a gap year into meeting the stars of Stax and working in a Chicago record store. As a producer and keyboard session player, Pete has made or contributed to hundreds of great records, with everyone from Hot Chocolate, Edwin Starr and The Everly Brothers, to Sugarhill Gang, Johnny Bristol, The Proclaimers and Dexy’s Midnight Runners. A hit under his own name, “Eighteen With a Bullet,” is a big track in gangland LA, and his ’70s band Olympic Runners laid the foundations for Brit-funk. As well as the inevitable record-nerdery, Bill asked him to paint a picture of Record Mirror star journalist, James Hamilton, who Pete knew most of his life.
Interviewed by Bill in London, 22.3.23
We’ll cover all aspects of your many-splendoured career, but first I want to talk about your memories of (pioneering dance music journalist) James Hamilton. He was my absolute hundred percent role model of record reviewing. I just aimed to be like him, basically. At the time, you couldn’t actually hear a new record, you had to rely on somebody else’s opinion. Well, his opinion was totally reliable as far as I was concerned. And he wouldn’t put himself into the review particularly, or score cheap journalistic points. He would just give the information about the record for people who might be interested in it. And if you weren’t interested, fair enough. And I loved that.
When did you first meet James? Mid-’60s. 1965 maybe, something like that. We came from pretty similar backgrounds. Almost uncannily similar, meaning public school, and his father, who was equally bemused by his choice of career as mine was, was a submarine captain in the Royal Navy and a war hero just as mine was.
His family was quite high-standing, wasn’t it? I would think so, yes. He was six and a bit years’ older than me. I was running this fanzine called Soul Beat, which maybe he knew of. And I was an avid reader of the Record Mirror, as everybody was at the time, because that was where you got all the SP on soul from James, from the great Norman Jopling of course, and Tony Hall. James was the number one guy as far as I was concerned.
How did you meet? When I was at school I had a band that did the odd gig around the holidays, and he let me stay on his floor a couple of times in his place in South Kent somewhere, so I was in a sleeping bag next door to this great big thing of decks and these massive boxes everywhere of records. He had one up on everybody because he had connections in the States.
Yeah. I knew that he was going over there when a lot of people weren’t. James had made these connections in New York and used to get stuff very quickly. In the wake of the Beatles’ success in the States in ’64, there was a group of Chelsea-ites, presumably young men of independent means, who had the bright idea of taking advantage of Brian Epstein’s naivete in these matters by going over to New York and presenting themselves as US marketeers of Beatles memorabilia. They called the company Seltaeb, Beatles backwards. And they made an absolute fortune in a very short time.
James was a very distinctive character. He definitely had an affected persona, or at least he didn’t try to disguise his persona for anybody’s benefit. He would just be himself. He always wore the same thing, for one thing, which was a really upper middle-class type sports jacket with elbow patches.
He’s always struck me as quite an eccentric. Yeah. He was just dedicated to what he did, really, and keen to spread the word. He wasn’t particularly “Hail fellow well met,” you know. But once he’d sussed you were alright, he was right there.
The actor James Robertson Justice has come up quite a few times as a comparison. Yes, or the comic Willie Rushton, who acted much older than he actually was. Which was a thing in the ’50s and ’60s. I don’t think James thought about it at all, he just was himself. He was quite dogmatic and didn’t suffer fools gladly, but you know, we seemed to get on.
I have a very clear mental image of him. Because he always looked the same. He never changed his style of clothes or anything. So I can picture him instantly in my mind. He must have had carte blanche in the end from the magazines. He used to riff on non-musical subjects like the relative merits of chicken shops in Wilsden. They let him write what the fuck he wanted.
The way he wrote was so idiosyncratic. He used words like jiggling and what even is jiggling? Grammatically, yeah, he had his own vocabulary which if you knew him, you knew what it meant. It was a kind of code. And you know where he got his syntactical approach from was (US music paper) Record World.They’d put everything with dot-dot-dots. News like a ticker tape, sort of a gossip column. A few words, then dot-dot-dot, then the next thing.
I think there’s also something a little bit Lord Buckley about the way that he wrote. (Bizarre 1950s jazz performance poet) Lord Buckley! My first band was named after him. It was called The Nazz.After Lord Buckley.
I love Lord Buckley. Another thing I’m amazed you know about, Bill, which is brilliant. Nobody knows Lord Buckley.
I had a musical mentor when I was very young who ran the local music shop in Grimsby. He introduced me to so much music, and he introduced me to Studs Terkel, to Lord Buckley, to Tower of Power, to Mike Westbrook, to Carla Bley.
Were you aware of James Hamilton as a DJ? Not as a mobile DJ, only as a journalist, yeah. He was Dr. Soul. I saw him vaguely from time to time, but I didn’t really keep up with him. And once he moved into the more dance music era, that’s not really my thing. I’m a soul man. When he got more into the BPM side, I’m not really with that.
There is some crossover. If I was going to be cruel and provocative about it, I would say that dance music is soul music without the soul, but anyway.
It depends which dance music.You’ve been involved in some great dance records. Yeah, okay, fair enough.
We met up again when I was part of this loose studio-based act, the Olympic Runners, that had stuff in the late ’70s. We met on the club circuit with the old DJ mafia and all that. Chris Hill and those people.
The Soul Mafia. James was on the periphery of that. He had this slightly avuncular air.
When you were doing your fanzine in the ’60s, it seemed to me there was a very close-knit community of soul aficionados. There was.
So people like Dave Godin, Guy Stevens, Dave McAleer… Tony Cummings. And Roger St. Pierre as well.
Tell me about your fanzine Soul Beat It was just a little Roneo-ed thing that I wrote up in the school bursar’s office. I used to charge a pound. One and three including postage, and advertised in Record Mirror. And I mean, it sold fantastic amounts, at least 100. And I handed it over to Mick Brown.
Mick was on talking about me on Rock’s Backpages, and although I passed the magazine over to him, I’m not sure we ever met. I think it was one of those things where I just sort of wrote a letter, the way you did at the time. I wanted it to carry on and I had to do A-levels.
But did you meet and get to know people like (UK A&R legend and early UK club DJ) Dave McAleer and those sort of guys? Only later. I did meet certainly Dave McAleer later, but more when I was a musician and he was running record labels. Most of these people I met later on, and they’d say, ‘Oh, you’re Pete Wingfield from…’
Where would you find soul records? Which record stores were you going to? The best place I used to go to was a stall called Lee’s Record Stall at Cambridge Circus right by a jellied eel stand. And this was where all the media offices were at the time, and they used to sell their review copies to him. This thing called retail price maintenance came in in 1971. Before that, you couldn’t buy a record for any less than the recommended price, unless it was second-hand. Which you had to have some sort of proof. It was absolutely ridiculous. So these were basically review copies of records that were of no interest of the reviewer in question. They’d be mouldy fig jazz guys who didn’t like anything funky. I may be wrong in exact minutiae, but the spirit of the thing was, when the actual price was 32 shillings and 11-pence, he used to charge 27 and 11. Something like that.
And Transat Imports, which was a basement in Lisle Street in Chinatown which had a lot of hi-fi places at the time. It was only open on Saturday mornings, like 10 to 12 or something. And he had the imports. I don’t know who ran it, but I suspect he might have had some sort of connection with an airline, because he had things the week they came out in America.
That must be the one that Jeff Dexter told me about. He couldn’t recall the name of it. All the very top DJs were always there. I went down there and ogled the wall because they had these things on the wall, but I didn’t buy much, because they were charging 42 and six. It was a lot. But on the other hand, they had Otis Blue by Otis Redding months before it came out here, and Walking the Dog, Rufus Thomas, I remember coveting that on the wall. And James Brown Live at the Apollo, which wasn’t issued here for ages. And where else did I used to go? Dave Godin’s shop, of course, a bit later on. Soul City in Monmouth Street, WC2. That was good.
How did you get started collecting? I started when I was 10 years old. The basis of my collection came from a stall in Petersfield Market in Hampshire. I have no idea who he was, but he had zillions of American 45s of every sort of genre, mostly R&B. I used to go there on my bike and spend about six hours and buy two or something every month. But it all added up.
Where were you living? Liphook in Hampshire.He used to send out these little lists with uppercase print, but so small. Even as a sharply-eyed boy, I still had trouble reading it, because he had such a huge list. That was called Lyndum House in Petersfield. He used to have demo discs, UK ones. And they were a bit cheaper. They were four and sixpence. I’ve got a lot of Motown ones with the big A on them.
The collectors’ market seems to be struggling a bit when it comes to older stuff. All the values have just plummeted. Possibly because all the music’s available elsewhere, but ’60s soul I don’t think is the goldmine it used to be.
I’ve written a few pieces about how the market in Elvis Presley stuff has tanked because basically all the Elvis collectors are dying. Well, yeah, the grim reaper does play a part in it, but most definitely yes. I think it’s more than that. Singles don’t seem to have the fascination that albums do amongst younger collectors. I’ll tell you where I go now just to get my fix of vinyl – Spitalfields Market. The twice monthly thing up there. It’s been encroached by all these trendy food places. It’s hilarious, you’re leafing away through the records and you can see these people, they don’t even know what these objects are. They’re looking in dumbfounded amazement.
What did you do after you left school? I went to Sussex University, and I had a band at Sussex called Jellybread. And the posh way of saying it is we went professional in 1970, but the fact of the matter is we didn’t get proper jobs so we just carried on doing the band.
What kind of music? It was blues, wasn’t it? We were on Blue Horizon. Very collectible, we are, mainly because we didn’t sell for shit.
That’s a good guarantee of collectability. I just drifted into things, really. Mainly through Mike Vernon, I’d started doing sessions when I left the band
How did you meet (’60s producer) Mike Vernon? He had a fanzine, too. R&B Monthly. Legendary. Sold it from his parents’ house. He ran it with his brother Richard. And they also had a record label called Out Of Sight. Well, they started Blue Horizon too. The first Blue Horizon record I believe was… Was it Mississippi Fred McDowell or something? No, it was Hubert Sumlin possibly.
Was that a license deal? Was it an American label? No, they recorded some things. In the front room on a tape recorder. But they also licensed stuff. Yeah, they had a few things on Out Of Sight and what was the other label? In between things, around about 1971 when I’d left Jellybread and hadn’t joined Keef Hartley, I was working at the Blue Horizon record store, which was a short-lived thing on Parkway in Camden. I was helping out behind the counter, and we had some of these old things from Mike’s … from original Blue Horizon. Couldn’t sell them for nothing. I remember this Little Mack Simmons EP called Chicago Blues, we had a box of 25 and you just couldn’t sell them for anything. And now they’re worth 500 quid each or something ridiculous. There was a thing whereby you only printed 100 because if you did over that, you had to pay purchase tax.
That’s how I started with Jellybread. A school friend of mine was doing an internship at IBC Studios opposite the Beeb in Portland Place, and we sneaked in one Sunday and made an album, or made sort of six tracks and put a 10-inch album out of it, and put it out and made it look like a bootleg, although it wasn’t a bootleg. Letraset letters and everything. And I took it round all the hip stores like One Stop in South Molton Street and sold out the hundred really quick. And that’s also collectible now of course because of rarity. Amazing, the energy one had in those days. I thought nothing of schlepping all around with these fucking things, but I would never do that now.
I always got the impression that until punk rock it was quite hard to start your own label. Well, it was. But I mean, this wasn’t a label. It was like a demo. We didn’t intend it to be a label. It was just a piece of product to get us a deal, which we did, with Blue Horizon.
And later on, Mike Vernon ran a label called Chipping Norton No, I knew him before that. I knew him mid-’60s. But yeah, that was the start. They sold the premises in Camden in ’73 and built a studio in Chipping Norton, where I must have done about 40 albums, I should think. Both producing and playing on over the years.
You actually put a single out on Chipping Norton: ‘They All Came Back? That’s right. Okay, that was Richard’s thing, yeah. I’d forgotten about that entirely.And they put out a single by the group that became The Real Thing as well, The Chants. The two Amoo brothers were The Chants.But they were in Liverpool rather than London. Liverpool was all about Merseybeat so they didn’t catch the wave there.
Where did you go out to hear music? I’ll tell you one place which I was too young or scared to go to was The Scene in Great Windmill Street, which was the absolutely epicenter of all that hip mod soul that I loved.
Why were you scared? Because I was quite young and it was late, basically. I was a very well-behaved middle-class boy. I used to love what we call new wave R&B, which was music with lots of major sevens, Curtis Mayfield kind of stuff. You know, the sort of major seven to minus seven that basically was the root of reggae, coincidentally. All those cool groups like The Impressions. All that Chicago stuff. I love Chicago soul. Particularly mid-’60s with all those Chess people and Brunswick, I loved all that. I spent a whole summer in Chicago in ’68 working at a place called Delmark Records that I’d been to the previous year, working behind the counter in the record store in Chicago, which was a trip.
Wow. That must have been amazing. It was. Best summer of my life, that was. It was quite amazing. Yeah.
How did you manage to get a job at a record store in Chicago? There was a thing called BUNAC, British Universities North America Club. You could get a cheap flight and employment for a short time. It was some sort of government thing. I had secured a place at Sussex for September of ’67, but I’d left school in ’66. So I had a sort of gap year. I did a few odd jobs and then I spent four months in the States in the summer. Bob Koester who ran Delmark was on my mailing list, so I applied for that. It was fantastic.
Which neighbourhood was the record store in? It was Near North Side. It was just south of the area that was shortly to be redeveloped into these nightclubs and everything. It was a scuzzy area. But scuzzy in a nice way because it wasn’t overtly black or white. It was a kind of intermediate area, which was probably why Bob chose it. You used to get some real characters coming in. You know, strippers, druggies. Intellectual jazz guys like the AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative. Musicians), people like Anthony Braxton, as well as down-home blues guys. Big Joe Williams used to kip in the basement when he came to town and try to get me to give him money out of the till for his lunch. All sorts.
Did you come across any of the Chicago producers like Carl Davis? No, no. I was pretending to be a journalist at the time. But I didn’t have any connections. I had my little band, but I wasn’t a professional musician at the time. Bob let me play on something called Sweet Home Chicago that he was doing. That was my first session ever in Chicago. But yeah. No, I wasn’t … I never met any of those blokes. They were just mysterious names on record labels.
A soul community. Although people are as keen on music now as they used to be, the key difference was the paucity of information back then. And that made somebody who had that information very sought after, like James Hamilton, for instance. In retrospect, that soul thing in the ’60s was a real pioneering community. The pirates made the crucial difference. There were lots of great hits that were purely because they were on pirate radio, like ‘Shotgun Wedding’ and ‘I’ll Do Anything’, Doris Troy. All sorts of things the BBC would never have touched. I think I’m right in saying that Radio Caroline was started by Ronan O’Rahilly because he couldn’t get his client Georgie Fame’s record played on the radio. Isn’t that right?
That may well be right. Yeah. I was absolutely crazy about the pirates. I used to listen all the time. There are certain moments in life you just will never forget. And when I first came over to the states, in May ’67, part of this deal with BUNAC was you went on a boat with other students from Europe. And so I was on this boat going over. We flew back but we went on a boat.
I remember coming into New York Harbor. America was like the promised land. We looked at everything from rose-coloured glasses. That attitude still maintained right through probably till Vietnam. So I’m on this boat and I have this little cream transistor the size of the palm my hand, and I went up on deck. I woke up early and I could see the Statue of Liberty looming in the distance, and I turned on the thing and it was Eddie O’Jay on WLIB, soul at sunrise. Wow, that’s Eddie OJ who gave his name to the OJs. It was the greatest thing I’d ever heard, you know? That sort of radio. I just thought, “Boy, I’m here. I’ve done it. I’ve got there.”
I got a job as a dogsbody in a hotel in the Catskills, the Hebrew Himalayas as they were known. I was cleaning the pool and everything. I did six weeks there, and then I went round on the Greyhound Bus for unlimited travel for $99. And I managed to blag going to WWRL, which was the top black AM station in New York, WWRL 1600 which surprisingly was nowhere near a black area. It was in this rather salubrious suburb right at the end of the subway in Riverside. And I went there and chatted up the program director that I was a journalist. Because this was a top 40 station playing all the hits 24/7. And they used to change the copies of the records, the physical copies they played every week, because they’d get worn, and used to let me pick the old ones out of the trash. 1967 was one of the greatest years of all time in my opinion musically, and I’ve got an incredible amount of the top R&B hits of that summer with a little chart number written on it as a sticker – the actual copies that were played in WWRL.
That’s amazing. Where else did you go? Everywhere. Chicago, San Francisco, Texas, Wyoming, Philadelphia, Washington, Memphis.
What happened in Memphis? Did you go visit any of the studios and labels? I surely did. This Greyhound thing was only available for people outside of the US. It was like a cheque book with counterfoils. And mine had run out. This is right at the end, September ’67. I was in Washington, DC. I’d slept underneath the Lincoln Memorial and got moved on by a cop. I’m thinking, actually, what should I do now? I was due to leave in three days’ time or something, and run out of money. And my ticket had run out. But I figured that if I just held the edge, the counterfoil bit, open, the bus driver would just take the thing. And that’s exactly what happened.
So I went to Memphis. On a whim, I just went nowhere else but 926 East McLemore Avenue, which was Stax. The Stax Review had just toured Britain. And they were absolutely blown away by the response. They had no idea anybody knew who they were at all, Steve Cropper and all these guys. I don’t think it was a hugely commercial blockbuster, but they had incredible love from the fans.
But anyway, I got there. It’s this old cinema. And they were all very well disposed to people from Europe, particularly from England. And I saw this character leaning up against the door with a trumpet, and sure enough, it was Wayne Jackson from Memphis Horns. So I went up and I was trying to be as English as I could. “Oh, excuse me. Is this Stax Records?” He said, “Hey, man, are you from London?” I said, “Yes, I am.” He said, “Come on in. We’re recording.” So he introduced me and I say hello to Deanie Parker on the reception. And I get ushered through to the studio which is a cinema with the sloping floor, and the control room is the projection room. So it’s a curious place. And all the instruments are nailed to the floor.
I can’t remember what the track is. It was some record which never came out with a girl singer, possibly Deanie Catron, Dorothy Catron or something? But all the Stax people are just in there. If they’re not playing, they’re hanging out. You know, The Bar-Kays, who were still alive. Booker T was there. Isaac Hays was there. Eddie Floyd, Otis Redding. Otis was there. It was only a couple of months before he was killed. All the bods. And he says, “Come on through,” and Steve Cropper’s in there in the control room, running things, as he does.
And he says, “This guy’s from London.” “Oh, okay, great. Come on. Anybody from London is welcome here,” kind of thing. “What’s your name?” “Pete.” “Pete, have a listen to this. We cut this last night.” I said, “Okay.” And he’s got this acetate, you know? And it’s Eddie Floyd, “Saturday Night.” You know that … It’s got that slip groove, you know? Great groove from Al Jackson. And he plays it, and of course I’m loving it. And he says, “What do you reckon?” I said, “It’s great.”
Anyway, so I put my fingers on the organ as I passed through coming back, which they didn’t mind, and Deanie Parker gave me a handful of singles as I left. I was on such a cloud nine. I just floated away. That was incredible. I mean, that was in that absolute apex.
And it was before they discovered the terrible clause in the Atlantic contract whereby they didn’t keep their masters and they had to sell to Paramount and Gulf and Western. Start again with 30 albums in one month. But it was before all that, so there was a great vibe there. They were kings of the hill, really.
Were they super well-known in Memphis at the time? I don’t think so. You know, usual thing, no prophet in one’s own land. They didn’t have the mystique that they had acquired in Europe, no.Because they weren’t exotic. They were just blokes down the road kind of thing.
The thing that was difficult in the old days was joining the dots between different labels and different musicians. Is that by the same person that did that? It was all a mystery, wasn’t it? It was great. It was a great sort of journey. To join the dots. At the risk of grumpy old man talk, that’s another lost art, isn’t it? Because there’s no information about music at all. The good thing is that people on YouTube and Spotify don’t have any preconceptions. Because they don’t know how old something is or where it’s from. But from the collector’s angle, I like to know where it was recorded. Who played on it, who produced it, who wrote it…
Has sampling been good to you? Reasonable. We’ve had a few taken of the early Olympic Runners tracks, before the disco era, where we were more sort of quirky. The three or four albums for London Records. No big deal, but yeah. Used in a couple of movies. A Spike Lee movie. It’s rather fun. The things just appear, or as a writer, you have to give your say-so.
Tell me about “Eighteen With a Bullet.” Well, I signed to Island Music as a writer around ’73 or 4. It was Richard Williams who signed me. He was the new A&R head. And the logical following was doing songs for other people.
So had you already written that before you were signed? I wrote it around that time. I wrote it with The Dells in mind.Because it’s doo-wop. It’s got the falsetto, the Marvin Junior, the mid one, the bass, the Chuck Barksdale, the Johnny Funches. It was a lot of fun, but I don’t think they ever heard it. So I recorded it under my own name.
Classic doo-wop. This is a surreal story. Late ’80s, early ’90s, a guy brought over a bunch of doo-wop groups for a one-off show, I think he lost an absolute king’s ransom on the thing. But I was one of the musicians in the band. One of the groups was The Spaniels who did “Goodnite, Sweetheart, Goodnite,” which is plainly what I had ripped off for “Eighteen With A Bullet,” right? So I was sitting in a pub in Stockwell, rehearsing for this doo-wop gig. And Pookie Hudson, lead singer of The Spaniels, was there, oldish guy at the time. And we were having a drink between rehearsals. And I thought, do I apologize? What do I do? So I said, “I don’t know if you know a song that I did, Pookie. I was kind of inspired by your great hit there. And it was called Eighteen…” He said, “Eighteen With A Bullet?” He said, “Yeah, we used to do that in the act in the 1970s.”
Really? Yeah. I think they used to do a medley of current things with a doo-wop flavour.
Oh, that’s amazing. I’m surprised that more people didn’t cover it. The only cover version I’ve ever heard is the Derrick Harriott one. And even better is the dub version on the other side.There were two other versions. One was Lewis Taylor, British soul singer.The other was I Blame Coco, which is Sting’s daughter.
There used to be a station in Los Angeles and every time there’d been a gang hit in LA, someone would request it? Do you remember this happening? I used to get the odd phone call from these dubious sounding people in East LA asking me to come over and do a PA in a ballroom. So that’s how I learned about this. Yeah, it’s big in Hispanic American circles, particularly.
So does it get a lot of play on oldies radio in the States? No, I don’t think so. I think a lot of it is the time signature, the 6:8. You don’t hear many things in 6:8. And also, that makes it hard to sample. It’s not the biggest money earner really now. The two Mel Brooks records I did have proved to be quite good. “It’s Good to Be the King” and “The Hitler Rap, To Be or Not To Be” I did the first one in John Kongos’ studio.
Oh wow. You worked with John Cameron at RAK a bit as well, didn’t you, during the 1970s? Yeah, he was the big arranger for Hot Chocolate. He also did a lot of library records as well.I don’t recall ever meeting him. I think he might have done strings on some of the things that I did for Mickie Most.
You did “Are You Getting Enough Happiness” by Hot Chocolate, didn’t you? Well, “It Started With a Kiss” is basically all me with a drum machine. I’m singing backups as well.None of the band are on it other than Errol. He was a nice guy, Errol. Great bloke.
So was Hot Chocolate essentially just Errol? Phil Cranham on bass. Me and Chris Cameron, no relation to John Cameron, singing backups. And I’m doing all the instruments, plus Errol. I worked on twoor three hits and a couple of albums, around ’82, ’83. All for Mickie Most.
Mickie was quite a character. A lovely bloke. Didn’t take himself at all seriously. Real hedonist. He was another air-miles champion. That’s how he got a lot of songs. He used to go over to New York and get Brill Building songs recorded before any American acts because he would go over and get demos.Like Lulu and David Bowie and Herman’s Hermits. Yeah. Everything was very last minute always. You know, get the record out. But yeah, he was great to work for. I mean, his session was so short that you barely remembered it. With Hot Chocolate, it was a bit more painstaking, piece by piece because that was the time when you had the drum machine. You built it up, rather than all playing at once.
The drum machine must have really changed the way you put a song together. Yeah, it really did.
Do you remember playing on a on a Johnny Bristol album? Oh, yeah. For Gus Dudgeon. I used to do all of Gus’s stuff other than Elton John, for obvious reasons, because he’s the piano player. Johnny Bristol was a lovely guy. He came to dinner one time with us. He’s a great guy. I asked him once, “What were your favourite acts to work with in Motown?” And he straight away said two, very different. Junior Walker because it was always just like a party, and Gladys Knight because she’s the best singer out there. Since those are my two favourite Motown people, I couldn’t disagree.
Gladys is the queen, isn’t she? I’d take her over any other singer. I think I would too, you know. Even from only age 16 or whatever with “Every Beat of My Heart.”
That Johnny Bristol album has a track on it called “Love No Longer Has a Hold on Me”, which is one of my favourite disco records. Do you play on that one? Gus didn’t produce all the tracks I don’t think, and I think that’s one of the other ones, I think.
There’s a really brilliant Italian record that I really love and you played on that as well. Ivano Fossati. He had a big record in Italy called “Traslocando”. Do you remember him? You’re coming out with some amazing shit here. Come on, hit me. I can remember one guy. It could be this session. It might not be. There were two brothers who had the greatest names ever. They were Carmelo and Michelangelo la Bionda. It might have been them because they got a bunch of British guys over to Rome to do a session. That might have been it. I don’t think I ever knew anything about the artists or anything. I just was so impressed by the guys’ names.
What about Sugarhill Gang? I did the Sugarhill Gang “Lover in You”. Sugar Hill’s modus operandi was to record everything live and then they’d only even think about a 7-inch if the 12-inch had sold like 300,000 or something. And that was great.
Presumably you met Sylvia Robinson and all of the backing bands. Absolutely. Absolutely. It came about through that first Mel Brooks record, which was a cult New York record, big on WBLS. And Sylvia did her own version, “It’s Good to Be the Queen”, which wasn’t very good. She somehow found out my phone number and phoned me here and said, “Do you fancy coming over and making a record?” She was thinking she might as well use the actual guy that put the other one together. So I just got on a plane and went over. I made up a little thing on the plane, the basis of a track in my head, and just marched in and said, “What do you reckon about this?” And I got picked up at the airport by her cracking chauffeur in a gold Rolls-Royce, taken to Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, where the studio was. I mean, stories abound about the Robinsons. I’m sure you’ve heard them. Until they went bust, they had a very tight operation. They were serial bankrupters. But they had a very autonomous operation. They had the studio and pressing plant, everything right there. And they were making records under the radar that didn’t get played on the radio, were selling ridiculous amounts of copies.
I was in New York in ‘79, and there was this record store called Barry’s Stereo. And I walked past and they were playing “Rapper’s Delight”, and they just had it on constant replay with a speaker out in the street. I walked in the store and was sort of browsing about, and every single person that came in bought that record.
I’m assuming that Wood, Brass & Steel were the backing band. Skip McDonald, Doug Wimbush, Keith Leblanc. Did they all play on “Lover in You”? Yeah, they did. I was playing live. I was playing the Rhodes. The way they did it was so exciting. It was live, man. It was the moment. So I have a mic which didn’t go to tape, and I’d be just directing it, saying, “Bridge. Okay, breakdown.” You know, all that stuff. We were just fucking busking it. It was absolutely great. And then I added a bunch of Prophet-5 stuff on it. But the basic guitar, bass, drums, keyboard was live, and then he cut it down later. The band played as Wood, Brass & Steel. They’d just hang out in the parking lot waiting to be called in for a session. They moved over to the UK to work with Adrian Sherwood, didn’t they? Renamed as Tackhead.
We didn’t have an artist. I thought it was going to be a song. Then Sylvia was so keen on it that she wanted to put it out with their hottest act, that was the Sugar Hill Gang. They were lovely guys. They weren’t very cutting edge. They just kind of hopped on that bandwagon, really.
Like all those people, Sylvia wasn’t nostalgic in the slightest degree. She wasn’t impressed by her own past or anybody else’s. I did spend some time with her, but never really talked about the past at all. I mean, yeah, she had Shirley and Johnny, Shirley Goodman, the R&B duo from the early ’50s. Shirley was on the switchboard, before she did “Shame, Shame, Shame.”
Oh, wow. Yeah, and Joey Robinson, her husband then, he was the hustler. Although she’d been married before I think to somebody named Vanderpool. They operated like an old-fashioned black independent. All cash. I don’t think they ever paid any royalties. I made the mistake, being so frightfully well brought up, of going through the motions of negotiating a deal, and basically Joey said, “Yeah, great. Sure. We could do that, yeah.” Of course I never saw any fucking contract of any description. And Jane, my wife, had to take up residence in the accountant’s office in order for them to pay anything.
I don’t feel bitter about that, because I knew that’s the way things were. Had I been a bit more streetwise and said, “Yeah, before I go in the studio, I want you to give me $5,000,” they’d have just reached into the drawer and given it to me. But I wanted to be by the book. I was one of very few white guys. There was a couple, but everybody else in the company was black apart from the accountant, who was this guy Milton Walden, who had an accent like the thickest Eastern European. And the buck stopped at him, literally. He had the purse strings seriously tied up. The fact they were in Englewood Cliffs rather than New York was crucial, because once you went over that bridge into New York City, it was unions. But they didn’t really operate in New Jersey too much. They could get away with more that they couldn’t in New York.
Do you remember working with Edwin Starr? Yeah, up in Chipping Norton. Did an album, a few tracks on an album.
“I Just Wanna Do My Thing.” Do you remember that? Yeah, and there was a song I co-wrote on the spot called “Not Having You.” It didn’t have a title at the time, but we did the track and then he put words on it later. A ballad. Yeah. He ended up moving here too, didn’t he?
He did. Nottingham. Mr. Thatcher. Isn’t that his real name? Charles Hatcher.He says we’re doing the session and he comes up. He was cool, but quite in-your-face. I’m sort of doodling the piano. And he comes up, he says, “Give me a Barry White groove.” So I did an exaggerated lugubrious groove, and he said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Was that for Transatlantic Records possibly?
It was for Dragonfly Days, the album by Catherine Howe. That would be through Ritchie Gold, who I’ve kept up with. Lovely guy. New Yorker expatriate over here who worked for Nathan Joseph at Transatlantic.
Okay, well, what about The Bureau? Well, The Bureau were sort of the rump of Dexys.
But also a band called The Young Bucks. I think the lead Singer was originally Archie Brown? That’s right. Because the rest of the guys were Dexys.
I’m assuming that you got that because your involvement with Dexys before that? Yeah. I think they’d had a fall-out with Kevin or something. There’s so many internal politics going that I didn’t really keep up with it. I was cool with everybody so I wasn’t partisan one way or another.
And how did the Dexys gig come about? Roger Ames, who was the A&R head of EMI at the time, who went onto London Records after that, gave me a call. It was one of the very first productions, actually, so he must have seen me in the studio working on a session for one of his acts or something. And yeah, I ended up producing Searching for the Young Soul Rebels for Dexys. I hadn’t really produced anything up to that point. I produced a couple things for Ritchie for Transatlantic, a group called Red Beans and Rice.
What was the experience of working with Dexys? They seemed like they had their shit together. Yeah. We just did the album quick and it’s all happening. There was that business with the tapes after all that. I don’t understand really what happened, but they wanted to increase their bad boy credibility and did a late-night flit with the tapes. They wanted to hold EMI to ransom for a better deal or something.
You also worked briefly with John Martyn, playing on the Well Kept Secret album. Yeah. I don’t remember anything about that. I know I’m listed as that, but I don’t have any memory of it at all.
What about Chris Youlden from Savoy Brown? Chris Youlden. I did three albums with him. There’s a few more obscure people that I did quite a bit with. Bryn Haworth for Island, who’s still around and still plays great.
There’s a track I play sometimes by Chris Youlden called “Nowhere Road”. I don’t know if you played on that. It’s got a nice clavinet on it. That’s me. Yeah. He’s a good guy. I don’t know what happened to him. Or even if he’s still with us, I have no idea. There was a guy called Barry somebody, his manager and producer. He was a magician. He was a member of the Magic Circle.
And my final one is… Your level of knowledge is incredibly wide and far more esoteric than I expected it to be, for which you have my congratulations. Carry on.
I’m a record nerd, so… It takes one to know one. Right on. Okay. Hit me.
Okay. The Hollies. You worked with them mid-’70s? I was with them on the road and in the studio from ’74 through ’77.
There’s a song called “Draggin’ My Heels” by The Hollies. Yeah. It’s one of the few tracks I did with them. Yeah.
Check out Pete’s piano workout here.
So you played on that? Yeah.
That was a really big disco record in New York. I had no idea. To this day… That’s something new to me, Bill. I had no idea.
Do you remember playing that song on Supersonic? It was a kid’s TV show. I don’t remember that, to be honest. I don’t remember doing many TVs with The Hollies. The first gig I did then was a sort of scampi-in-a-basket place in Wythenshawe. That was my first gig with them, a week at the Golden Garter. But they were absolutely super people. I’ve got nothing but good memories of The Hollies. They treated me great, partially because there was only one of me, and they’d just come off working with an orchestra, so I was considerably cheaper, although they actually paid me very well. Because I was doing all the strings with my trusty little string machine. We used to work a lot in Germany and the Commonwealth, like New Zealand, Australia, Canada. I think we did about four tours of Germany in my time and couple in Canada. Yeah, I’ve got lots of Hollies stories. But yeah, they were great. I mean, it wasn’t really my sort of music I was known for doing, but I mean, I could handle it. And they were just great company.
Their manager, Robin Britten. I don’t know how these things happened, but there seemed to be a template for British group managers. Gay, very civilized, fiercely protective of their charges. And Robin was all of those things, and he was great. His parents ran a short-trip airline between the UK and the Isle of Wight as an alternative to the ferry. And he ran The Hollies. Everybody they worked with, they worked with for a very long time. We did a live album in Wellington, New Zealand, believe it or not. Although it doesn’t say where it is on the sleeve, possibly because they thought it might put people off, I suppose. But I didn’t know that about “Draggin’ My Heels.” Brilliant.
Yeah. It’s appeared on a few modern compilations as a disco classic. I have to have another listen. We used to do it live. It was a bit of a spotlight for me, as far as I remember.
It’s got a lot of keyboards on it. I had a very, very early synth which was an ARP Pro Soloist, with presets. There was a preset called comic wow, which was made famous by Billy Preston on “Space Race.” And there was also a steel drum thing, and I used that the solo in the middle of “Carrie Anne”. Must have sounded absolutely crap, but at least it reminded people of the original solo.
What was your favourite synth? Well, the one that was on the most hits was the Prophet-5, which is still sought after now, although it was notoriously unreliable tuning-wise. It was all analog. But it sounds great. And it was beautifully built wood. No plastic. Wood and metal. But yeah, I went through the usual ones that everybody had to have, particularly as a session player. You had to have certain things like a Yamaha DX7 and some kind of Roland.Not a 101. Either a JX-3 … a Jupiter synth of some kind.
The DX7, that really reminds me of Toto. The Yamaha had different manufacturers, and there’s something about that. It had a proprietary name for their process. But it’s so spiky. Any of those records from that time, if you listen to them on a little speaker, like a clock radio, it just comes through ridiculously loud, you know? It’s some sort of sonic phenomenon. But yeah, most of the time I was playing songs on a piano Rhodes or a real piano, you know.
What music are you most proud of being involved in? Oh, Bill, difficult question. I don’t know, really. That is a hard one. I don’t really know. I don’t think I have a favourite. I never listen to anything I’ve done. Never have.
Really? The only time I listen to it is when somebody else asks me to, or for some research reason or whatever. But I mean, in common with a lot of people I know, I’ve always just moved on to the next thing.
You’ve led a pretty amazing musical life if it’s all happened by accident. Not only by accident, but nothing was ever written down. Never had a contract. You do as a producer, because you’ve got to take care of business. But as a session player, you just get a phone call saying, “Can you make such and such studio at 10:00 on Tuesday?” People are incredulous today about that because they think, “Well, how do you trust …” You just did, because if you didn’t turn up, they didn’t trust you. And if they didn’t pay, then you would never work for them. It was mutual.
But do you think that’s very much a British thing? Because I worked in the States for a few years in New York, and my experience of the States was that everyone was trying to fuck everybody else over. It was probably a little bit more civilised over here. I think a lot of it was possibly also the fact that the musicians’ union, although America’s not known for such things, but the union in America was more powerful than the British union, so there were less shenanigans going on here. But yeah, people got paid. I remember an interview a few years ago with Björn Ulvaeus from Abba, and he had a great phrase which just stuck with me, he said, “We were really lucky in that our heyday coincided with the golden age of copyright.” Which is very hard-nosed thing to say, but true because people got paid and writers got paid. Musicians got paid. They didn’t before and they haven’t been after. But during the ’70s, ’80s, when I was most active, was possibly a golden age for music producers. Not so much for consumers, but for people who made music. Because you got paid live. You got paid in the studio. Everybody got paid, from musicians to artists. Contracts were reasonable. Yeah. I really don’t know how you would go about doing all that today.
It’s much harder to make a living as a musician now. Can’t make any money from streaming, can you? And as far as live goes, I mean, Brexit just poleaxed the whole bloody thing. Nobody remembers what it was like before we were in the EU. It was shit as far as working in Europe. It was just murder. You know, so much bureaucracy. And it was light years difference when we joined the EU. Because suddenly, all that was swept aside and there was no trouble. And now it’s all back. The paperwork, you had to have a carnet for every country. The last drumstick had to be counted for. Oh, it was just absolutely ridiculous. A truck with equipment couldn’t stop more than two times or something without coming home or… It was absolutely ridiculous. And all that’s back. It’s back even worse. Brexit is the most inexplicable thing that’s happened in public life my whole life, I think. It’s got no plus side.
No, there are two sides normally. It’s all bad and none good. So what’s the fucking point of it?
I should talk a bit more about James Hamilton. I lost touch with him in the ’70s. But he obviously kept my contacts, and I got a call out of the blue in 1995 from him saying, “Pete, I’m dying and I want you to play at the funeral.” He was very matter-of-fact and he gave me a shopping list of songs he wanted me to play. I’m flattered, but I didn’t keep the piece of paper. The only thing I remembered he asked me to play was “Night Train”, James Brown style. God, it was weird, just turning up. I mean, obviously I’ve never met his family. I just turned up, nobody knew who I was. “Why are you here?” “I’m here to play piano.” “Okay.”
When I interviewed his stepson, he said you played “Love Me Tender.” That’s right. I was surprised by that, but I did. Yeah.
He also said that you’d played with The Everly Brothers at Wembley the week before. Yeah, I played with The Everlys for 18 years. They’ve been my most longstanding employer. I’d done an album with Phil Everly in 1982 including that duet with Cliff Richard through Stuart Colman, the producer who I did a lot of stuff for, Shakin’ Stevens and all that rock and roll stuff. And Stuart was producing Phil, who was a solo act at the time, who was actually signed to EMI by Terry Slater, who had been the bass player with The Everlys. And then when The Everlys reformed in ’83 to do the legendary reunion concerts at the Albert Hall, he got me in on it. The rest of the band was Cliff’s rhythm section. And then when they decided to make a go of it on the road, they called me up and I spent quite a few months every year in the States with them and elsewhere, as part of their band. And Phil became a good friend. Not so much Don, but Phil became a really good friend, and I played at his memorial service and all sorts.
Is it true they detested each other? Yeah. How long have you got? The thing with The Everlys, They didn’t really have anything to do with each other.
But they could tolerate each other enough to go and play on stage together? Yeah, yeah. That’s basically it.
Sam and Dave were another duo that were not keen on each other, weren’t they? Yeah, that’s right. With brothers, it’s different. It’s deeper, you know? And also, you had the thing of closing ranks in the face of an external threat, which they would also do.It’s probably the same with the Gallaghers, actually.Sam and Dave weren’t actually brothers. I’m big on brothers because I did The Proclaimers stuff as well.
Oh God, yeah, I forgot about that. That’s unbelievable. “500 Miles,” it’s kind of like the unofficial Scots’ national anthem, isn’t it?
Absolutely. We did that at Chipping Norton. And it was before they had a band, so it was Paul Robinson on drums, Phil Cranham on bass, and Jerry Donahue on guitar. Used to play with Fairport Convention. Just occasionally you do something and you listen to it back and you think, “Yeah, that’s it. Don’t change a thing.” And that was the case with the 500 Miles. I just thought we’d managed to capture lightning in a bottle. The Proclaimers are very much what you see is what you get. They’re completely the same off and on stage. I did two albums with them. And “Sunshine on Leith,” people seem to think that’s some sort of a classic as well. I just put the music together around them, I didn’t mess about with their material. They worked just as well as just them playing on their own, you know? It’s not naivete exactly, but a kind of straightforwardness. Nothing’s particularly metaphorical or round the houses. It’s, alright, this is it.
Thanks Pete. This has been amazing. Thank you so much. Cheers. All the best, mate.
Cookie Monster, Mickey Love, Count Cookula, Mickey Particular, Bedward, Captain Cocinero, me dad, The Grumpy DJ, The Hairy Cornflake… (and possibly a few more). Nobody gets that many nicknames without being either an evil mastermind or an unusually warm human being. Michael Cook was both. On the evil side, his humour could lacerate – like his Glastonbury T-shirt: “JUGGLING IS SHIT”. Or signing up to 4chan just to troll nazis (relentlessly); Or supporting Palestine Acton. Or punching you at 11am on a two-day bender because you won’t do another line. If shit got serious he was not a man to be crossed. Hell hath no fury like a Cookie scorned. Uncompromising.
On the warmth side of the ledger, he was alarmingly kind. Moral, generous and loving. Warm-hearted with every drop. Always happy to give up his time or advice, to send you a track, install a dodgy dongle, tune up your skateboard or rescue a hard drive. He’d give you as long as it took, although there would be grumbling.
Michael gave his life to music. His passion flamed on as a kid hearing Led Zeppelin stoned on fat seventies headphones, and he never looked back. His foundational tastes weighed towards the deep and the awkward: Beefheart, Can, dark dub and dirty house, but he was truly omnivorous and could stitch together an impeccable R&B mix like his 2005 “Some Girls Might”, a Big Chill cool-down like his brilliantly named “Podcarsed” (frequency: “When I can be arsed”), or a deep-cut reggae selection fine enough for Don Letts to tip his hat to, as easily as he could rock Sancho Panza at Carnival, or slay with a stonking off-the-deep-end house set at Low Life.
The crew of the Argonaughty
His superskill was a sense of occasion. When people praise a DJ they often remember particular sets, but with Michael it’s more precise. He gave you moments. It’s staggering how many people recall him playing a particular track on a particular night, or giving them a song that stayed with them all their life. He was a huge influence on younger DJs because he showed them taste. He put in thousands of hours digging for music and played it with maximum drama. He could turn a dancefloor round with a single brilliantly chosen record, then lead you wherever he wanted through the power of selection.
I’ll never forget when he carefully built a whole Mexican New Year’s Eve up to an explosive airing of the DFA mix of Gorillaz’ “Dare”, milking every second from its crazily relentless distortions. Or meandering chuggily up to the bombshell of Booka Shade’s “Body Language” in the bunker at Low Life – the first time anyone in the room had heard it. Dropping William Orbit’s “Water From a Vine Leaf” at Big Chill to introduce Roisin Murphy, that fat bassline exploding onto a field of sunshine. Or closing his set at Low Life’s “Law and Order” party with the incendiary original of “I Fought The Law”. He was always early with new monsters and he put in the thought to make great tracks count. He could sweep you along for hours in ten different genres then knock you for six with a weapon new to the world. Sensitive, deep, generous and complicated, the music and the man.
He had the same attitude to life: Michael lived to cultivate moments and he came prepared, a boy scout for fun. He made sure to have the implements to make the mischief go better. A Swiss party knife with a killer quip, a dark pun and an evil smile; his Big Flask of absinthe and lemonade (the cloudy kind) and a pharmacopeia to rival Hunter Thomson’s. To kickstart special occasions he would hand you a two-shot of tequila con verdita, a complicated juice made to his exacting recipe. At Glastonbury he once pitched two tents, one backstage in hospitality and one as a quiet crash pad over towards Shangri-La. He loved careful preparation if it might encourage a bit more laughter and naughtiness.
Best known in the UK as a big-hitting festival DJ and stalwart of party collectives Low Life and Sancho Panza, Michael’s DJ career took off – with a bang – in Los Angeles. In October ’86 he left Manchester and took his skateboard to LA, only to see acid house kick off back home. Realising his slip-up he decided to import the vibe, adding Deadhead LSD and dayglo paint, and became pivotal in building the west coast rave scene. He’d been DJing indie, industrial and electro before he left and with his genuine MCR credentials became one of the biggest names there, DJing at phenomenal desert raves, private islands, movie star’s houses and Indian reservations: Alice’s House, Moonshine, Double Hit Mickey, Truth, Dream, Paw Paw Patch, Narnia & Gilligan’s Island, as well as hosting Los Angeles’ first underground dance radio show on KXLU with Jason Bentley. In 1990 he brought the Happy Mondays, Adamski and A Guy Called Gerald over for their first left coast gig, at the Hollywood Palladium (808 State were originally meant to join). He was tour DJ for 808 State, Happy Mondays, Gotan Project, Thievery Corporation and many others, and his mixes were a fixture of the early days of Ibiza Sonica. In later years, Brazil and Mexico became second homes. Cookie, always a talented sunbather, played for several seasons in Rio, and in Rob Garza’s club, La Santanera in Playa del Carmen.
He DJed backstage behind the Pyramid at Glastonbury for many years. And I joined him for a lot of them. This was back in the glory days, when Pete and Kate would stumble through in green wellies and Jarvis would be making shapes on the floor. I remember Dot Cotton gracing my dancefloor, and paper cups of tea with Will Young. But as ever, Michael had the more spectacular story. He was dancing there, high as the sky, when “Blue Monday” came on, giving him an ecstatic moment he thought couldn’t get much better. Then through his blurry vision he spotted a pretty girl dancing beside him. She caught on to his bliss and danced closer. It was Kate Moss.
One of the sets of my life was playing eighteen hours together there on the wettest Glastonbury ever, after an all-nighter at Windings Lake Farm. Reasoning the booth was the dryest place we had access to, we started playing at 8am on the Friday and went through til 2am on Sat. Playing to the bedraggled-but-up-for-it meant we could keep the energy slow and low and still make it ferocious. Michael was never better.
His recorded output was written largest in a pre-streaming age. His impeccable mix CDs abound. His edit of Blondie’s “Rapture” is truly definitive, a ten-minute meditation on an already great track. But his dub of The Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows” is a stone classic, played and praised by the great and the good, and used as a hymn for at least one wedding. Completists should note his brief career as a lead singer. Deadpan Tractor were Huddersfield’s answer to The Birthday Party; they supported Sonic Youth and played a miners’ benefit. Their 1985 “Grumble” EP includes a brilliantly gravelly cover of Captain Beefheart’s “Big Eyed Beans From Venus”.
Skating was an essential part of Michael, the reason he went to LA. He was already riding vert, sponsored by Alva, when he left the UK in ’86, to hook up with the Z-Boys. Very few over-30s look good on a skateboard, but Michael flowed like water into his 62nd year, right until his myalgia put an end to it this past summer. Ever the urethane evangelist, he would drag a bunch of geriatric newbies onto longboards to bomb down the hill in Finsbury Park. He’d watch the weather forecast like a hawk and when the tailwind was perfect would call us to order.
He met Prince, he DJed Madonna’s birthday, he lived in a Frank Gehry house on Venice Beach next to Dennis Hopper. He drank with Mark Smith. Shaun Ryder gave him his first pill.
Michael with Prince’s guitar on the set of the “Batdance” video
He was a devoted United fan, and watched their post-Fergie fall with good humour, but would rage at the venality of the Glazers and the cluelessness of their many managers. The last few years he was consistently number one in an obscure league for guessing the starting line-up. Their first match after his death they turned over a 1-0 deficit to win against Crystal Palace. Michael is clearly now pulling some strings.
He soundtracked the human body in the Millennium Dome, he ran a music for film company M62 and sound design studio in Fitzrovia. He had a long residency at The Player in Soho, and programmed music for retail stores and fashion shows, including several for Joseph. He was musical director for the Street Feast group, where he continued playing incredible four-hour sets, never repeated, two, sometime three times a week for many years. All fed by days and days sifting new music. Musically, he was in his element here, playing a wild melange of wonderfully well-chosen tunes, from background to peak. If these sets had been streamed or even recorded, they would have been an incredible body of work.
But sadly they weren’t, and his audience was more interested in their pulled pork, so this often thankless residency served drip by drip to alienate him from the music he loved, and precipitated a dramatic departure from DJing. For several years, in typical Michael scorched-earth fashion, he banished music from his life entirely.
His big heart worked in colour, but his brain ran in spirals. This combo worked brilliantly most of his life, but started tripping him up when the world turned insane. He saw civilisation as a battle between empaths and psychopaths, and he took a front row seat to watch it falling to the psychos. While the rise of small-dick fascists gave his mates a steady stream of caustic commentary and hilarious shadenfreude, it didn’t endear him to the future.
He rallied in the summer and fell back in love with music, although he still refused Bill and my many requests to DJ again. He doggedly continued living a southern Californian lifestyle on the beaches of Stoke Newington, but the skies turned grey and the nights drew in. Last time we hung out we watched the Butthole Surfers’ movie and in typical Cookie-Zelig style, after watching them on screen throwing one of the most deranged gigs of their career at a festival in Amsterdam, he told me his band had opened for them that night.
The sad, sad news he has left us should be seen in light of his many dimensions of pain. If you knew him well in recent years, you’ll understand it was neither a surprise nor a tragedy. As stubborn as a mule, for Michael it was the only way. He knew people loved him, his friends did everything we could to help him outrun his demons. But after some harsh kicks in the teeth in his last month he decided he’d run out of road and carved off into sky. Mickey Particular has finally found peace and a good night’s sleep.
He was my big brother. He’d lived several lifetimes before I met him, and carried on full throttle with us through several more. His raspberries to our baby girl, his snowboard leading me and Paul into the powder, watching Arthur Lee in the sun in the sixties together, playing Sa Trinxa on Bill’s 50th, 4am in Cheshunt lakes waiting for the northern lights, watching Luke Littler win the darts on K. I’m so grateful to have swung into his mighty gravitational pull for a quarter century of adventures, learning from his music, his tan, his chilis, his joy, his humility, his olympic sarcasm and his bull-headed savoir faire. Love you Cookie.
Thanks’s to Cookie’s innate modesty, we’d known him for several years before we realised how central he had been to the Californian rave scene. A full six years after the first edition of Last Night A DJ Saved My Life came out, Frank sat down with Michael and his extensive flyer collection.
Interviewed by Frank in London 16.8.05
I moved to LA in October 86. Not long after I got there I met Randy Moore who I credit with starting the whole acid and rave movement in Los Angeles. He got together with this guy Mr Kool-Aid and myself. There were a lot of Loft parties with acid house music and weirdness and stuff that were the forebears, all done by these guys Randy Moore and Steve Ennis who DJed as Mr Kool-Aid. I met them both when I was working in Bleecker Bob’s record store on Melrose Avenue. It was starting to sell some acid and house records, and these guys used to come and shop there. Randy was from Chicago but had been living in LA for a while and in ’87 had been to London and hung out with Oakenfold and Mark Moore. Sextasy was pretty much the first acid house event in LA, which was 1987. Then Alice’s House in 1989. which was really the first serious rave style party.
So there was a British influence, even though Randy was from Chicago? Oh yeah, absolutely. Personally, I’d left Manchester just at the ideal time not to leave Manchester. With impeccable timing, I ended up in entirely the wrong place at the right time. I was going to the Haçienda fairly religiously for years before I left. Pickering was starting to play a lot of house and acid stuff before I left. Which I wasn’t particularly into at the time. I was more of a hip hop and funk fan; my background was indie into hip hop into everything else. The house thing I wasn’t particularly enamoured of it until a friend sent me a tape of his favourite acid house records and I necked acid one day [laughs] and really got into it. Personally I was trying to help create, be part of something that I was hearing about back in London.
You knew there was something going on and you wanted to see… …if we could make something similar happen there.
Did you go to his first party? Yeah. I think there were about 40 people. It was in a little bar type club. There were lots of other interesting parties around that time. OAP started, which was this guy Solomon, a DJ called Steve LeClair.
You reckon this was the first? First house party that I’m aware of. But of course there was a strong gay scene, and people mixing house into that, but it didn’t really take off with the west cost gay crowd for quite a while, they were still very much into hi-energy. OAP was much more a funk and hip-hop style vibe.
Any visuals? Very little. Just strobes and fog machines.
So, focused on the music? Yeah.
And drugs? Were there Es down there? They weren’t that widely available. I know they were around. But hard to get. So for the very earliest parties it was acid, that was what people took. They’d heard about acid house and they assumed you were supposed to take acid. The ecstasy thing filtered in about ’88-’90 I guess. When it became more widely available. I didn’t do ecstasy until that Mondays tour. Shaun Ryder gave me my first pill. And it was certainly available before then. I could have taken it but I just didn’t fancy it.
People took the name literally from the scene in the UK and thought it was about LSD? I think a lot of people did. The people involved on the scene, the DJs and promoters were certainly aware that the drug that people were taking in the UK was ecstasy, but I think a lot of the punters had just heard the term, and were kind of intrigued. Certainly a lot of the parties that myself and Randy and Steve Ennis were involved with had very trippy names and visuals. A lot of them would have a paint room. A fluorescent paint room, black lights with pots of day-glo paint in it, and people would paint each other.
Naked? Not necessarily naked but by 4 or 5 o’clock in the morning, essentially everybody in the party, whether they wanted paint on them or not, had paint either all over their clothes, their faces or whatever.
I guess acid is a very much a west coast staple. Yeah. Very quickly after, it became an ecstasy scene as well. And a lot of mushrooms. The whole vibe of it in LA was very psychedelic visually.
Did much come of these events? That begat a lot of things. The 40 people at that early party became quite focal, whether they were promoters or club kids. There were a lot of wacky characters around that became the centre of this ever-expanding scene. It’s amazing how quickly it happened really. From a little club holding 40 people struggling to pay for itself, to Alice’s House which was maybe a thousand people. It only ran for about six shows, which I think were monthly – but they could have been weekly, I don’t recall.
They were big outside things? No, they were in a venue called La Casa in downtown LA. That party scene grew up around downtown because a lot of people were living down there. Steve Ennis was living in a loft on 7th Street. They were essentially rent parties. This is all in the downtown area of LA, the old meatpacking area. There were never any police around, never anybody there after 7 or 8 o’clock at night, except homeless people, so you could get away with murder. We were breaking into abandoned warehouses and throwing parties there. And the police just weren’t that interested. For at least the first year and a half there were all these fairly small illegal parties, holding 300 to 500 people, never got bothered. Make it safe, make it so people couldn’t sneak in. Charge $5 on the door, put a sound system in there. Very renegade.
What’s the chronology here? That was all happening in ’88 and ’89. Alice’s House in 1989 was the first time we’d done anything that was overground, because that was a rented venue where it was supposedly legal for us to throw parties. After Alice’s House a lot of people hired that place and for a couple of years it was rave central. It was a community building with a huge hall on the ground floor, and lots of meeting rooms, in a very run down part of LA. Just on the fringe of downtown.
And you DJed in New York around ’91, at Limelight? That was horrible. Really fucking hardcore. Pogoing.
Did you have much connection with what was going on in San Francisco? There really wasn’t that much going on in San Fran. I started getting SF gigs myself I would guess around 1990 or ’91, I think Tonka started doing stuff around that same time. But the SF thing definitely came after those initial things in LA. I had a monthly residency at the 1015, on 1015 Folsom. from around 1990. There were a few American kids doing one-off raves around there in 1990, ’91. This was before Garth and Jeno and those guys arrived [Wicked Crew].
How big were these early parties? Initially the scale, the number of punters you could expect was tiny. The first parties I was doing, Alice’s House was the first to do around a thousand people.
What was the demographic? It was totally mixed. The interesting thing was that at the beginning in LA it was about 50% gay and 50% straight. But fairly quickly the raves became a lot more macho and the music got a lot harder. For me the golden time was ’89 to ’91 when it was a real mixture of different people. But slowly the gay crowd stopped coming. They always made it more entertaining, more flamboyant. And it got younger. Initially I’d be 23, and most of the people there were the same age as me or older. And then over the next two years you’d see more 18, 19-year-olds, and even 12-year-olds at the raves.
The candy ravers. The thing with Alice’s, there were all these little warehouse parties, thrown together, a lot of dry ice and a lot of strobes and not much else, but Randy had fantastic production ideas, just stuff he couldn’t afford. The guy that made Alice’s possible, was an entrepreneur and slumlord called Joel whose surname I can’t remember, this guy fronted the money for Alice’s house. And he lost money cos the production value was so high.
What did you do? Just a lot of lights. And lasers and projections. Projections were a very big part of the early scene, just crazy stuff.
What sprang up from there? Randy and Steve carried on doing parties. Then a little after Alice’s House there was Moonshine, which was the Levy brothers, who then did Truth at a place called the Plaza in downtown LA, which were more overground. The weird thing was, to do it legally was impossible if you didn’t have money, ’cos of venue prices, so that’s when it started moving to warehouses. Or you’d get dodgy real estate agents who would rent you a house they were supposedly selling, without their clients knowing. They’d be creaming some money off for renting these, sometimes quite luxurious Malibu mansions.
Did you play any? Yeah, lots of them. Very druggy. All kinds of stuff going on behind closed doors. They were fantastic.
What existed before all this. The LA club scene? There was a club called Power Tools, really well known, indie and industrial with occasionally a bit of hip hop, which was kind of the background I came from. That’s what I was mixing before I came to LA. There were also lots of very small, arty party events. Gallery owners would throw parties on a Saturday night and you’d turn up and there’d be a punch containing varying degrees of acid and whatever else they’d got. They were great parties, and that was all happening beforehand. A guy called Gary Blitz was doing a lot more industrial stuff, mostly in Orange County. There was a real convergence of all these different scenes: the gay scene, the industrial scene and OAP which was much more white, funk…
Sort of rare groovey? Yeah.
Did they switch to being more ravey? The promoters changed. It seemed like everybody was copying the Alice’s style. Certainly of visual presentation, not necessarily musically, but after Alice’s it started to grow quite quickly. The numbers got up to 3000 and you would start getting events out in the desert or out in weird places. There were a couple of parties in water parks which were great. Once you started getting bigger numbers, around 3000 there were people who saw there was a lot of money to be made, especially if you linked the party with selling the drugs. There was a transition between Alice’s and the early part of ’91, and it was all a very, very friendly scene. Everybody was very helpful to each other. Then you started getting a lot more competing parties on a Saturday night, with not so nice people fronting the money for them. It degenerated quite quickly to where rival promoters were calling the fire marshals. That started happening around ’91.
We got a lot of Latin kids coming to the party, who were great. DJs like Joe Curl, lots of lovely Mexican kids, but then the people who ran the drugs in those areas started getting into it and would be putting the money up for various promoters who had suddenly come onto the scene, and they would likely be the ones who called the fire marshals. It was quite a pure movement until ’91, then all of sudden there were lots of people trying to outdo each other. It got quite childish quite quickly. The kiddie rave thing hit, the themes of the parties…
Where did that come from? I don’t know.
It was the same in New York. Were they seeing pictures from London and getting the wrong end of the stick? Very quickly people started to latch onto themes. Another promoter from Orange County, Les Borsie, always seemed to come up with themes, quite funny at the time. Steve Ennis did Double Hit Mickey, based on Mickey Mouse. Mickey Mouse on drugs, so that cartoony and childlike element came into it from that. The younger element, if they were going to a party with a name like that they wanted to dress the part. There was a guy called Daven who called himself The Mad Hatter, and he did a lot of childlike themed parties. He even got married at his own rave. Did the Mad Hatter’s tea party. People did a lot of artwork. Cut-out stuff and painted stuff. There were all these fluorescent trippy looking teapots on the wall, and of course by three in the morning all these teacups and teapots and other Alice in Wonderland associated stuff had found their way onto the dancefloor and people were waving them in the air.
What about open-air parties? Initially in downtown you could get away with throwing semi-legal loft parties, or fully illegal warehouse parties ’cos the police didn’t patrol. It was only when they started getting to sizeable numbers, a thousand or so, it became an issue that the police were interested in. The fire marshals, that was how they’d close you down, whether they were concerned about you getting burnt alive or not. They would count the size of the exits and the number of heads in there.
Around the same time there’d be parties in warehouses with map points. You would buy a ticket in a record shop then you would have to go to a map point and collect a map, and the map point would only be available via a phone number. These raves were still happening downtown; they were just trying to keep one step ahead of the police.
So everyone’s driving around back to where they probably started anyway. Yeah. There was one night, maybe one of Steve Ennis’s nights, where the police tried to raid one of these map points, and the people who’ve paid all their money to buy a map don’t want the police stopping the party. There was a mini riot and somebody got shot. Shot dead I think. Or at least paralysed. Which was a real turning point, probably ’89. A punter, a Mexican kid if I remember rightly. And Alice’s House got raided by the ATF for selling booze illegally. ’Cos it was buy a ticket to buy your booze. Essentially I think that was the end of Alice’s House. Joel wasn’t prepared to throw any more money at it.
Then it started going a lot further afield. You might drive for three hours. There were parties on Indian reservations, where the police couldn’t go after you. In California. I remember driving three hours south, to a fantastic venue. This particular place was just bizarre, like you imagined somewhere built by people who built communes in the ’60s, with lots of weird rooms and trailers people had built out of junk in the middle of nowhere.
There was an event called Narnia, maybe ’93, it was halfway between LA and San Diego, a San Diego promoter, and that was on an Indian reservation. There was no threat of the police coming in. It just felt great to be on sacred land. Some of the inhabitants would come and check it out and be like, “What the fuck is this?” But yeah, that was a great swerve.
Music? Who did they get to DJ? LA, musically was always changing, and it also depended on the size of the events. It got quite hardcore and techno-ey quite quickly.
About 1991? Yeah, maybe even before. Initially the parties that Randy was doing were kind of acid house meets the start of rave. Rave in the UK was huge in ’90, and musically it was pretty similar to the UK. I imagine it was the same. All the DJs were reading the same magazines. At the time we started doing parties I’d recently married an American girl and I couldn’t leave because of my residency permit, so I didn’t leave for two and a half years.
Did you have DJs from different cities. Around 1990 there was a real wave of English DJs – and an English crowd – coming to the raves.
Cos they’d heard about it back home? Yeah. Maybe after Alice’s House there was an increasingly large English contingent, and English DJs, people like Mark Lewis, he was a recent ex-pat, he was DJing for Moonshine, for the Levy brothers. Marcus Wyatt, he was American, not sure where he’s from originally. He was one of the American DJs. Dom T, who was part of the Wild Bunch, Nellie Hooper, still doing remixes and stuff. John Williams who came over with a group of English guys and did a party.
No effort to get known superstars? Their budget wasn’t enough to bring people over, so it relied on locals, or people who were in LA at the time. It was after it got bigger and up to 3000, when people could actually make money, was when they started bringing DJs over. And acts. There was more of an interest in bringing the people that were making the records, rather than the DJs initially.
Was there any effort to connect with the original New York and Chicago house people? I can’t remember there being that much interest in east coast DJs. Frankie Bones certainly came over and played quite a lot. And his younger brother Adam X. They came across. One of the things they attribute to him in the US rave book is throwing a party and pretending it was a movie. “Were shooting a movie”. That didn’t come from New York; that was LA. That was our excuse.
I co-promoted a party with the Happy Mondays in 1991 in the Hollywood Palladium. An event like that was costly, you couldn’t afford to risk it getting busted. It was great, probably the first successful legal rave with bands, that had happened in LA. It was originally meant to be Happy Mondays, 808 state and Adamski, but 808 pulled out and we got Gerald instead.
Tell me about the Happy Mondays and the Grateful Dead If only…
That would have changed the world. Totally. It was possibly on that tour, or when they recorded Pills Thrills And Bellyaches at Capitol studios, Nathan McGough met with various people and the idea of a Happy Mondays and Grateful Dead tour, or series of events, was mooted. Shame it never happened. It was a year or two after the summer of love in England, but the whole vibe of the events at that time was very hippyish, very positive. I naively thought we were changing the world with all this stuff.
Like a lot of people. Ultimately you only really change yourself.
Obviously San Francisco has that tradition, was it as strong in LA? It was very evident in the first few years.
When did you come back to the UK? I left LA in ’95. I got really disillusioned with it in about ’94 I didn’t stop DJing but got really tired. In the early to mid ’90s it just became more and more public knowledge, so this scene that had started in a divey room in LA with abut 40 people, by 1992 had grown into events for 20,000, in Universal Studios and places like that. I got really tired of that. I personally think once you get above 2000 people it stops being intimate; you can’t get people to react, you can’t make eye contact. It was a real turn-off. Because at the start of it I did believe we were changing the world, through the use of chemicals. Everybody’s life was gonna be better. Once it got to 20,000 kids with snorkels and oven gloves on…
Oven gloves? Oven gloves [creasing up]. I’ve seen oven gloves in raves in LA. And those giant mickey mouse hands…
…on 14 year olds.Where were they doing these huge ones? At theme parks, places like Universal.
So there was a point when it became legal. It was forced to be legal. More and more frequently events were getting busted, so there was this horrible time around ’92 where kids were paying however much for tickets and getting busted, and it was fruitless. So the smarter promoters started taking it overground. In theme parks or going back to the clubs. Which is a shame cos the clubs weren’t interested in it at the start. There was a promoter called Tef Foo, he relocated to SE Asia, and he’s still doing things, events with a conscience. But yeah, it went very overground and very large and very silly.
That’s America I guess. Around the time when a lot of parties were getting busted, midway through an event Devan got some fake fire marshals to come and bust the party and turn the music off, and then they did this whole theatrical thing. All these kids were like awwwwww. But they suddenly started the music back up and these firefighters started taking their clothes off. He’d hired strip-a-gram people.
Was Doc Martin from LA? No San Francisco. The scene wasn’t happening in SF if he had to move to LA to make it. After he left the Tonka crew moved in and started doing their parties.
Were they the ones who made the difference in SF? Its weird. These things became very political as soon as there was a lot of money and SF had its own politics. But after the Wicked parties established themselves they had a very hands-off approach. They wouldn’t put anybody else on apart from their own DJs. Wouldn’t book people from outside of San Francisco.
And Wicked started when? I’m guessing ’91 ’92. A bunch of people involved in Tonka came to San Francisco and started doing parties as TDK which was Tone Def Krew. Alan McQueen the guy I ran into. And Future, these people, John Williams and his mates who were essentially trying to do the same thing at the same time but in LA. John Williams came over with these people called Future and they brought Rozalla over. They just had a series of disasters. This Rozalla thing got nobody and they’d spent all this money.
What was the best party you remember? Gilligan’s Island? That one was certainly one of the most out-of-control parties I’ve ever been to. Gilligan’s Island was on Catalina Island and they hired out the ferries to take people over. It’s essentially a place for wealthy retirees. It’s got a 1920s casino and ballroom on the harbour and they rented that out and then rented a private beach for the morning. I think they got it under the guise that it was a wedding for some loaded semi-celebrity, and got all these ravers, most of whom by the time they got there were completely bollocksed. Half of them had dropped their drugs before they even got on the boat, the sea crossing was really choppy. They had oil-drum litter bins on the deck and you had four people stood around each of them puking into the bins.
I’m DJing on the boat and the boat is swaying up and down and it was a very shiny table the decks were on. I’m trying to cue up a record and as I’m doing it the turntable is slipping off the table. We get over to the island at one in the morning; there’s a sound system there and everything, and it was then that the people who managed the ballroom realised it wasn’t quite the party they were expecting. And the owners or management were pretty strict Mormons, and this unholy crew of people had landed on their island and taken over the ballroom.
The police were called at one stage because a couple were fairly inebriated on a mini riser on one part of the dancefloor and a couple were having full sex in front of a cheering and chanting, air-punching crowd, and the police were called and arrested them, one of whom turned out to be underage, and the guy was charged for statutory rape. They had the most insane punch at this party. I had a swig of it and it was just ridiculous. I don’t think I came round properly for a couple of days afterwards. From one swig. And MTV were there filming it.
There was a club nutcase called Dave 7 who thought he was the second coming. He would go to clubs dressed in a gold lame loincloth and while we were waiting for the boats to take us back he’d cut his foot on some glass at the beach party. By the time he’s got it bandaged, the second of the two boats was about to go, they’d lifted the ramp and he’s waving at them to try and get them to wait, but they wouldn’t pick him up, so he had to go and stay in the church on Catalina Island and ask a priest to lend him the money to get back to LA. Dressed as gold lame Jesus.
Probably the most influential figure in the history of nightclub audio, Alex Rosner devised the approach that survives to this day. Among his creations is the first stereo club mixer, a custom piece used to great effect at The Haven by the groundbreaking Francis Grasso. And with the Loft’s David Mancuso, he devised the tweeter array – those clusters of high-frequency speakers that hang from the ceiling. Born in Warsaw, he and his father were held prisoner in German concentration camps, and only escaped death thanks to their musical abilities. He came to America aged 12 unable to read or write but eventually qualified as an engineer. He was driven by a powerful belief in the superiority of recorded music, and ignited by the diversity and togetherness he found in New York’s nascent disco scene. After a long career building sound systems for the city’s most influential clubs, he transferred his ideas into improving sound for places of worship.
Interviewed by Bill, in New York, 5.10.98
How did you get involved in building sound systems? It was not my intention to build sound systems. I was having dinner one night in a restaurant, and there was actually a discotheque and the sound was terrible, so I put down on my card “Your sound stinks” and put it under an ashtray. My best friend, who I was with at the time, when I got up to get my wife’s coat, he took the card and handed it to the owner. And the owner came up to me and said, “You’re right! Can you come and help me?”
It was called Andiron in Flushing, Queens. From there I met somebody at the World’s Fair in 1965 where I built the first stereophonic disco system. Up until then it had all been mono. There was no equipment available at the time. There were no mixers; no stereo mixers; no cueing devices. Nothing. I had to invent the wheel until the Bozak mixer came along. And I helped Bozak design his mixer; I gave him suggestions so he could make it better. And that was the standard in the industry for a while until the Urei came along.
When did the Bozak come in? In 1968, around about. Louis Bozak, he passed away recently.
What prompted him to devise it? He didn’t devise it either. He already had a ten-channel input mixer. I suggested to him that he only needed to make minor modifications to this unit make into a stereophonic disco mixer. And he thought it was a good idea, so he did it. And right off the bat he did it the right way. That became the standard and he only modified it once. It stayed for ten, fifteen years.
What was your interest in sound? I was a sound engineer, but it was my hobby. At the time I was working as an engineer (for some company I can’t decipher) in the defence industry. And audio was my hobby. But by 1967 I quit my job and went into building sound systems full time.
Construct the sound systems for clubs? Yeah. I mean, I used existing amplifiers and existing loudspeakers and turntables that were on the market. But the cueing devices and mixers were not available so I had to sort of build them from scratch.
What existing equipment were you using? For turntables we were using Thorens TD-124, the standard of the industry at that time, it had a quick-start. You slide the lever and it lifts up the plate and stops the record. It was primitive but effective. The problem with that turntable was that there was a lot rumble. So for stereophonic application it wasn’t so good. It was only when the TD-125 came along later that was much better; and they came up with other techniques, like direct-drive. Then that became standard for turntables. So far as pre-amps and mixers, the Bozak was the standard, and before that I used one that I had developed, which was a real primitive arrangement.
Your first mixer was a simple flick switch,? Right, it was a switch with a couple of levers which were faders. And then it had another switch which gave you an output from each channel so you can cue up on either turntable regardless of which one was being fed to the dancefloor. For amplifiers we used Macintosh which was very high quality. One of the early systems used two Macintosh units, it was called the model 275 I remember. It worked; it was very effective. The loudspeakers were by Altec. Then JBL came in shortly thereafter, and I used their loudspeakers.
Which were the first systems you constructed? The first one was at the New York World’s Fair in 1965. For the Canada Pavilion and the Carnival Pavilion. One was called Carnival-A-Go-Go and the other Canada-A-Go-Go.
They were specifically made for music? They were playing rhythm and blues, all kinds. Anything that people would dance to.
They were operated by disc jockeys? Anybody noteworthy? Yes, but nobody noteworthy.
Where was your first club system? The first was the Ginza, like the Ginza in China. The owner was Richard Chu. He had built the system himself, because he was an engineer. He invited me to come and listen to the system. Which I did and I pointed out to him that it had a mono Altec mixer. In those days the standard in the industry before Bozak was the Altec 1567-A and that was a mono mixer with no cueing provisions. It was nice and good sounding, but he only had one amplifier, so when I told him he needed to make some modifications for reliability purposes, he kind of laughed at me. I was embarrassed and left.
About three months later, he called me in the middle of the night. The system had died and could I come and help him. He was rather in a panic. I’ll never forget this, because it was a very important lesson in reliability for me. This is a pivotal moment that you could say inspired me to get into this business. This was still 1965, maybe ’66. Anyway, I got down there in about 20 minutes and when I walked in the place was deserted. The dancing girls were up in these little cages, they were sitting there with their legs dangling out and just not doing much. There was a couple sitting at the bar. And this man, who was normally very calm, was very excited and very nervous, and he asked me whether I could fix this as quick as possible.
So sure enough the amplifier that he had, even though it was an excellent amplifier, had a blown internal fuse; I guess it was a bad tube. So I walked in there with a tube caddy, in those days service-men carried a tube caddie. In the other hand I had a tool case. I put a new fuse in, I put two new tubes in, I got it working. It was about half hour roughly from when I walked in. It was difficult to work because these girls were very pretty and it was distracting. I had to sit right next to them with hardly any clothes. And I was kind of a square guy; I wasn’t used to this.
Finally, when I was finished, he was so grateful and he started to calm down and I couldn’t resist it: “Mr. Chiu, why are you so excited? You’re lucky. It’s a Wednesday night, there’s nobody here. If it was a Saturday night I could understand you being excited but there’s nobody here what’s the problem?” He got about two inches from my face and said, “When I called you at one o’clock this morning, this place was packed with people. The business I lost tonight, I could’ve bought a new system.” When I heard that, the image in my mind was like a chariot in a desert in war-time. And the chariot was the sound system and it could not stop. You had to build in such a way that there were enough horses in front, so that if a horse died you could chop it loose and keep going. You’d have concentric wheels on the hub so that if a wheel broke, another wheel would carry its weight. And under no circumstances could the chariot stop because if it stopped, you get shot and you’re dead. That was the image. I resolved from that point on… It became a high stakes game. He hired me to do the entire system, so that was the first one I did. Thirty years later, we’re now talking about 400 or 500 systems.
So how did you come across Francis Grasso? I met him at some club he was playing at. I don’t know whether it was a club where I did the sound system or not. I never hung out in clubs where I did put in the sound system. I’d go to clubs where I didn’t. I’d persuade the owner that he needed a proper sound system and I would get in and… what I always remember, Francis played in that club or he played in the club after I got through with it.
You installed the system at the Sanctuary didn’t you? Yes.
Alex Rosner with Rosie, his revolutionary mixer for The Haven
Wasn’t that the first place where Francis had had some kind of cueing system? He worked at the Haven before that. I did the Haven too. The cueing system was one of my old-fashioned adventures. They called it the Rosie because it was painted red. It was really primitive. And not very good.
But it did the job? It did the job. Nobody could complain because there was nothing else around.
What was the difference with the Sanctuary? [Pioneering DJ and sound engineer] Steve D’Acquisto said it was so much better than anything that was around at the time. It’s just a matter of quality. See, I was an audiophile. I applied audiophile techniques – hi-fidelity – to commercial sound which, until then, had never been done. Most commercial sound systems sounded lousy. I made it sound good by putting in good components; there were no secrets. It was just a matter of persuading the owner that he had to spend the money to up the ante and put in the proper components. I knew where to put the loudspeakers. I knew how many to use and make it sound good. After that, little by little, I started using sub-woofers and tweeter-arrays. The tweeter-arrays were actually David [Mancuso]’s idea. He told me to build them and I said I didn’t think it was a good idea. He said, “I don’t care what you think, just make it anyway.” And I did and it was a wonderful idea.
Where does the name tweeter come from? A tweeter’s what you call a high frequency transducer, that plays high frequency sound.
So it was an existing term already? Right. A tweeter-array is where you have a tweeter facing north, south, east and west. Basically you have four of them in some kind of enclosure so that all four are mounted like a chandelier above the dancefloor. And that idea was David’s.
You thought it wouldn’t work. Why? I didn’t think was a bad idea, I thought it was too much. He wanted two of them which would have been eight tweeters and normally in a sound system, there’s one tweeter per channel and he wanted eight. I thought it would be too much high frequency, but I was wrong. It was so high up, that’s not where the pain level is. That’s not where the hardness is. The more you have up there the better. So it was actually a terrific idea. How he got inspired to think of it, you would have to ask him. I had this fellow, Angelo Di Guiseppe, he physically built the wooden enclosures for it and I got four JBL tweeters and I put them in there. Crossover at that time was about 5kHz and it worked great. From there on, I used it in every club I worked in.
Do you remember when this was? Yeah, I’d say it was 1971.
How did you come across David Mancuso? I was introduced by a mutual friend. He said I should stop by and look at his club, because I could be some service to him. Which I was. I rebuilt his club for him, and made his sound much better. He had what was basically a home system. When I got through with it, it was a disco system. When I first went to his club and saw the excitement and energy there, it was very inspirational to me. At that point I thought discos were a wonderful idea. That there was a mix of sexual-orientation, there was a mix of races, mix of economic groups. There was a real mix, where the common denominator was music. I thought that was good thing. I remember ripping off my shirt and dancing. I loved the music. It was the real stuff. It was terrific and at that time I was in between wives and it was the right time.
From there where did you go? I don’t really remember the names of the clubs, but after there were a lot and they came quite quick. Many of them were gay clubs. The gay club owners were willing to put their money where their mouth was. And they were willing to invest in high quality sound systems. These were relatively small clubs but it was before Studio 54. I never really liked clubs like that. The largest club I ever did was the Copacabana and that was much later and that club went for a long, long time and in fact is still in business but on a different site. The real big clubs like Studio 54 and the Paradise Garage… The Paradise Garage I did the actual original design and Richard Long, he and the owner became lovers, and I guess he took the job away from me.
You didn’t actually install the system then? No. I did the preliminary design. And he did the installation.
What other elements did you install in the Loft that made it different? It was the way it was configured. I put in Klipschorns and I bi-amplified it; tri-amplified it. And at that time that was something new that wasn’t done. It was just the way it was configured. Even today, even though David knows a lot about sound, he calls me and asks me to make final adjustments. It’s subtle aspects of the balance, you might say, that made that place sound good.
Why were you so good at this? I knew what reproduced sound was supposed to sound like. My whole family were musicians. I played several instruments. I knew what orchestral music was supposed to sound like when amplified. That knowledge helped to me to set these systems up so they would sound proper. Since I knew electronics – I’m a graduate electronics engineer – I was able to make the connection. And that really was what qualified me, plus there was a tremendous interest. I really liked it. To this day I like the concept of the discotheque. I like the concept of reproduced music as opposed to live music. And I thought that technology was available to make things sound good and sound realistic. I experimented a lot.
At the World’s Fair I had make this acoustically transparent curtain, so that it would sound like an orchestra playing behind the curtain. But what I didn’t realise at the time, is that the audience actually prefers to be enveloped in the music, as opposed to being hit from one direction, which an orchestra would do. But an orchestra is a live phenomenon and the liveness makes up for the fact that the music does not surround them. So when the orchestra is not there, and you only have the loudspeakers, no matter how realistic they are it turns out it’s better to wrap people around with loudspeakers rather than have them only coming from one area. Although coming from one is very realistic, because it does sound like this orchestra behind the curtain. That can be done. And I did it. Some of the selections, it really sounded like the orchestra was right on stage.
Later on, after the World’s Fair, I realised it was better to have the sound around so I developed a technique to surround the audience with mid-range loudspeakers with the bass speakers on the floor. And two flying tweeter-arrays over the dancefloor. And that four-way arrangement: the tweeters are one; upper and lower mid-range is three and bass speakers is four. With four separate amplified sections and an electronic crossover network. That’s what became the standard of the industry and I wrote a technical paper for the Audio Engineering Society Convention which I read and got published. It was the only paper on disco that was ever published in the journal. And that’s how it became the standard. Everybody took that as the bible and everyone just took those ideas and went with them. And today there isn’t a club that doesn’t have tweeter-arrays.
When was this paper published? Is it possible to get it from a library? I have a copies. It was published in the journal of the Audio Engineering Society. If you hold on a moment I’ll look up the date on it. July 1979.
What was your inspiration? Just being a fan of music? Yeah. At that time I was into Latin music. Latin music was somewhat related to black music and African music and jazz. That was something I was really into and that wasn’t far from black music. It was a natural transition. And it didn’t hurt that my girlfriend – now my wife – was black.
Do you think Mancuso was influential because he was both music fan and audiophile? That’s right. No question about it. The sound system is just a tool in the hands of the artist. But without the tool, the artist can’t do too much. The tool in the hands of a lousy artist, is a lousy machine. You need both to make it successful. David Mancuso and… I can’t think of his name
[Bill runs through the first generation of disco DJs] Michael Cappello? Steve D’Acquisto? Francis Grasso? Nicky Siano? Walter Gibbons? Walter Gibbons. I did Galaxy 21, too. All the guys you mentioned, I did all their clubs.
You’re still installing sound systems? Yeah, but in the last ten years I’ve been mostly installing systems in houses of worship. It just evolved that way. The premier churches. I’ve just finished Trinity Church downtown. They need sound systems so they can be heard by their parishioners.
That’s a nice coincidence, since people like D’Acquisto often talk about those early clubs being like places of worship. No question about it. It was a spiritual experience. I really can’t describe it. It was truly inspirational. There was a lot to it. There was a guy named George Freeman who had a club where Walter Gibbons played, Galaxy 21, and he often talked about that. He said it was a spiritual experience. He said he was providing a venue for a spiritual experience. When I said that, I said, yeah, that’s not far off.
I remember him making me install a volume control so that Walter couldn’t play too loud. There was a hidden volume control in his office. When Walter found out he quit. So I got Walter to come back and they kissed and made up. I tried to talk the owner out of putting this volume control in. I said you should talk to Walter and agree on sound levels. George Freeman says, “No, no, Walter doesn’t agree with me and I’m the boss and I own this club and I pay you to fix this sound system, so you do as I say.” So I put it in, then Walter quit and all the people went with him. George had no business, so he had to get Walter back and get rid of the volume control. True story!
How long was he gone? About a week.
Very quick then. Yeah. It was a bad idea. You can’t take the gas pedal away from the driver.
Who were your favourite DJs from that period? Nicky Siano was terrific. I loved him.
Why was he better? He built excitement. Same with Walter. And of course, David [Mancuso]. And Steve D’Acquisto, he worked at this club Tamberlaine. I built the system there. They just knew how to build excitement without making the music overly loud, they played beautiful, exciting music. They got people really excited on the dancefloor and happy to be there and want to come back. They knew how to do it. It was done with music. It wasn’t done with mirrors and smoke.
They didn’t do it with lights, believe me, the lighting systems there were very limited. I learned through experience, there were no schools for these things. I did a club called Tuesday, a jazz club. On opening night the lights failed. And the owner took a 200watt light bulb, put it on an extension cord – it was one of these work lights – and he plugged it upstairs in the bar and hung it in the corner of the room. And the party went on like nothing happened. I just scratched my head and thought, “Gee, can you imagine what would’ve happened if the sound system had failed?” So the lighting fails and nothing happened. That’s when I realised that the lighting wasn’t important. It wasn’t the meal, it was the dessert. It was not an essential ingredient in the club.
So I always told the owners, listen, “If you’re low on money, put in a decent sound system and put in whatever lighting you can. You can always improve the lighting later.” What makes the club is the sound system. I never put in a lousy sound system. I was always able to persuade the owners to put up the money to have a decent sound system. Richard Long was the only one that did decent quality work at that time. All the others were cheap stuff. Richard befriended the rich gay owners and he started doing really big clubs. He did a few clubs here and a couple of the clubs he didn’t do so well, so I had to go in and re-do them. That’s how it was.
Do you feel lucky that you were the right guy in the place at the right time? Yeah. I guess I did. I had a good time. I made money and I established myself in business. There was a period when I primarily did discotheques, though I did do other things, like restaurants, auditoriums and homes for wealthy people who wanted nice quality sound. As disco started to die I did more schools, home theatres and then the church market opened up. Jewish temples, Catholic churches. There isn’t a religion I haven’t done. Now I’m doing a mosque.
DXT, Derek Showard, or Grandmixer D.St, as he was known back then, took the art of scratching from Bronx parties all the way to the Grammys, with his precision quick-cutting style making him one of the keystone pioneers of turntablism. After drumming in local funk bands he took to DJing at the first flowering of hip hop and built himself a following north of the Bronx in Mount Vernon and Westchester, together with his MCs the Infinity Four. He played with Afrika Bambaataa at the legendary Roxy nights, he was featured in Wildstyle, and he was part of the first hip hop tour to Europe. As the turntablist on Herbie Hancock’s global 1982 hit “Rockit” his was the first DJ scratching most people ever heard.
Interviewed by Frank in Harlem 7.10.98
How did you get into music? I’m from a musical family. Grew up in the Bronx. My mother sings. She still does. She’s actually talking about putting together a gospel record.
Always gospel? Nah, she was always singing blues and pop. Really blues. Billie Holiday kind of stuff. And my sister is a professional dancer. She’s danced as long as I can remember. So my whole family was in showbusiness.
How about you? I always enjoyed music. I used to sleep in the living room on the floor by the radio. I’d spend a day just laying there changing from station to station. And instead of singing “The Love You Save” by the Jacksons, I would be singing “Benny and The Jets” by Elton John, songs by 10cc, like some longhair. The variety of music I would listen to was vast, I had an appreciation for all types of music.
And playing it? I started off as a drummer. I had my first drum set I had to be five, four, maybe younger. It had one of them British rock groups on the bass skin, like the Beatles or something. When I got into school I learnt how to play the clarinet. I was trying to play every instrument. I would borrow someone’s trumpet and sneak into the orchestra rehearsals, and the teacher’d say, “Are you in my class?” And I would just play, and I’d hit some of the notes. I would do just as well as anyone else in the class. And I noticed something about playing the horn. It’s a feeling. When you’re blowing it’s what you feel. You can actually play it if you feel what it feels like to get those sounds out.
Instinctive? Yeah. It’s an instinctive thing.
Were you always DJing as well? No. I played drums for a long time and in my neighbourhood all the musicians were older guys, and they would only play jazz. I played with these guys and I would always want to play some of the more hip stuff that was on 99X radio station, a rock and pop station. So I would only be allowed to play with them if I was gonna calm down and just play some shuffle beats. Just vibe with it, so I couldn’t play no beats. Right around ’74 I was playing jazz in the summertime. In parks all around the Bronx.
What were the names of the bands? No name, just neighbourhood musicians. They’d bring out the amps and just play outside. I became a roadie for a band called the Funkmaster’s Gang. This was a cover song band from Mount Vernon. They would do all the hottest songs. I was their first and only roadie. They were doing these local little gigs and talent shows. I would carry the cables, wires, drum parts, use a vacuum cleaner to blow dry ice on the stage.
We did a party at a Latin club and there was a DJ there when the band wasn’t onstage. He was just playing some old classics. Bobby Byrd, “Keep On Doing It”, and at that time that record was old. But just the way he was playing I thought it was pretty impressive. And to this day I don’t know who he was, but that was the first time I saw a DJ.
And then a friend of mine, James White, I called Jazzy. He was telling me about this guy Kool Herc. “Yo man, Kool Herc’s doing a party, we gotta go.” I went to see Kool Herc and I realised he has the same kind of pull that the bands have, you know the local bands. People go see him just to see him, and I just stood there and watched him DJ and I was amazed. And he didn’t cut on time or nothing like that, he just, his variety of music, the songs that he had, it was very clever. And it moved the crowd. It was a combination of the old and new and stuff that wasn’t even released yet.
Turntablism pioneer DXT with hip hop originator Kool Herc
Where was this? I went to see him at The Executive Playhouse. In ’73, ’74.
At that stage he wasn’t playing breaks? He was playing them but he wasn’t cutting. Kool Herc never cut. To this day, he don’t cut, he never cut records. Maybe most recently before he completely stopped, he may have started cutting beats on time, but back then he would play something and when the break would come up he would just move it on. He would just pan the fader over, it would be all off beat or whatever.
So he would play the breaks without cutting. Yeah. he would play the breaks without being synchronised.
Even in ’74 he’s playing breaks after breaks after breaks. Yeah.
Was he playing two copies of the same record? Yeah. yeah. So he’s actually the first guy who did that. But Flash made it to the point where he would cut them so it’s more of an edit.
On beat. Yeah. I stood there, and at the time I was a B-boy, so you know I was ready to breakdance at the drop of a dime. So I’m listening, checking out people doing the hustle, and I’m waiting for “Apache” to come on, so I could B-boy. And I’m checking out Herc. And I’m also in there breakdancing, and so he gave me the opportunity to just go there and work on my moves. So now there’s a place, there’s a guy I can go, to his party and practise my skills. Whereas anywhere else you’d just be waiting for the breaks.
So would you just be standing on the side? Most B-boys would be like this [adopts the b-boy stance]. That’s where that came from. Just waiting for the break part. Not from trying to be cool.
You’re just waiting for the break. Yeah, you’re just standing there waiting, you know… while the hustlers are doing the hustle and you’re standing there like this.
And then the break comes on and then bang. Yeah, and then you’d be doing circles.
B-boying pre-dates everything. It’s before people were playing just the breaks… Yeah, because it’s a part of dance.
When did that whole thing start. People waiting for the break, and doing those uprocking moves? That’s thousands of years old. Just like rapping. I could pull our records of Pigmeat Markham from the ’50s. And they rappin’. I seen tapes of African tribes, man, they breakdancing, man. That’s where it comes form, man. To think that we just made it up, that’s absurd. It’s a part of who we are; it’s in our genetic make-up.
So you have a bunch of guys who are waiting for the breaks, and then you find this DJ, Kool Herc, and that’s all he plays. Right.
There must have been a lot of guys like you who thought, wow, this is my DJ. I’m gonna be here every time he plays. Right, so that’s what happened. And sometimes he played the disco for the disco crowd. Then all of a sudden he would play the beats and it’s B-boy time. And some of the best hustlers [as in the dance] were some of the best breakdancers too. And back then it was still into, you know, asking a woman to dance. With some class. And now you can impress her by doing a spin on the floor. It was a great time, man. So that became it. I became a fan instantly, of Kool Herc. So ’74, ’75 I was going to Kool Herc parties. And I started going to Flash parties.
Just how legendary were they at that stage, in the Bronx? I mean, these guys were famous, man. They were incredible. And my mother had all them records so I started stealing her records. And making little tapes and blasting my music into the neighbourhood. So in my neighbourhood, I was like the Kool Herc guy, cos I was the only guy with all those records.
So you’re DJing from around ’76. Yeah. It took me a while to get a pair of turntables. I think it was ’77, I hooked up with some guys who had turntables. Before that I was making pause-button tapes. And since I was a drummer already I already knew about synchronising time. Back then you had to put the tape deck halfway in record and hold the record button so it toggles enough where it’s past the point where it’s not locked out. I was already cutting, I was already cueing. I think that helped me a lot when I made the transition to turntables, I already had that skill of being on time. I had pause button tapes all over the place. Everyone had one of my pause button tapes. I was one of the biggest pause button guys. And I did not use a pause button. Nah. I would just cut with the record button halfway down.
Did you sell them? I was just giving them away. Sometimes five bucks. When I got a tape deck with a pause button I was off the hook! Dnn, dnn, dnnn dnn. Then we started making plates, acetate plates.
When did that start? It was going on for years. We just got hip to it in the hip hop day.
Herc and them made acetates? They made plates, yeah.
What gear were you using to DJ? It was ’76, the bicentennial year actually. I was hooked up with two other guys, Shevin and Timmy, and they had two Gerrard turntables and a mixer that had four knobs. It was a mic mixer. And we started putting our records and stuff together. People were already calling me DST, which stood for D. St. I got that name cos I used to hang out on Delancey street downtown. People would say “DST – Derek, Shevin and Timmy.” but really I was D.St. which was D street.
So we started doing house parties, and we would literally have to be in a room so quiet so we can hear the record cos there were no headphones. So we would put our ear to the record, to the needle while it was playing. To cue up the next record. Like “Shhh. be quiet” and you could just hear the “ch ch chsh chush” and…
What? You’d be in another room? Yeah, we’d be in another room. And then we’d turn the four knobs, and mix, and then that went on for a while. And then those guys got with one of the neighbourhood thugs, who had the most equipment, cos he was trying to DJ too. And I just wasn’t into the rough guy scene so I started doing parties myself. My first party, as DST, by myself at my friend Charlie Hollingsworth’s private house, in his basement. I think that was ’77 or ’78. It was somebody’s birthday. I hooked up with some of my old friends I grew up with. They had some Technic turntables, I was still borrowing people’s stuff. I was a poor guy, man. I just had records. I would always have to use somebody’s mixer, somebody’s turntables.
I started going to these parties up in Mount Vernon, and I got popular up there, from dancing. So I was “Yo, I DJ, man. I got skills.” And I got in with the big Mount Vernon DJs, Rob the Gold, and his Brother DJ Smoke from the Kool Herc crowd and another guy called City Boy. They had big 18-inch woofer cabinets, and so I’m really playing on a real set now. They had 1800 turntables. the Technics, the real big heavy ones. A real mixer, he had all these records and I brought my records up there. So now I started really cutting.
And I was still going to check out Flash. And Bam. My friend Booski was tellig me “Yo, Bambaataa lives down the block man, I went by his house, he wants to meet you.” Cos I was making my own noise in my own neighbourhood, and there was also DJ Breakout up there too. So I went down to Bam’s house and we both sat there for about a half hour, nobody said nothing, then we just started talking, sitting on his balcony. It was like “Yeah man, I heard a lot about you,” and yeah, I heard a lot about you.”
Bam, Herc and Flash, those were the three guys. I got inspired by each one of them on a different level. Herc overall, just being a DJ and being able to have the ability to pull people like a rock star. Flash was being a technician, and Bam had the most impressive collection of music. I mean to this day no-one comes close. And his insight in a club. he could go into any club. There could be two people on the dancefloor, put Bam on for an hour, the whole floor is packed.
What was it like between the three of them? There was always rivalry. They were friends, but there was a rivalry. And the whole thing was, in hip hop culture, if you was hot and you was doing a party on this side of town, then everybody’s going. The second generation of DJs would have their own little crowd coming to their thing, but then the major clubs, the major crowd would go to one of the big guys. If Herc was doing a party it didn’t make sense to do a party three blocks away. You’d have to be way over on the other side of town. Like Flash is way on the other side of town, doing a party. Or in Harlem or somewhere. You couldn’t be in the same vicinity. Everybody knew that if you went to Flash you gonna see a technical show. If you go to Herc, you gonna see this huge system, magnitude five on the Richter scale. When Bam goes, you gonna hear records you never heard in your life, that’s gonna get you movin. You know.
Did they have different styles in terms of MCs? Flash was the first guy to have standalone MCs. Herc used to play sittin’ down. He would be sitting with a mic, an echo pedal and a microphone, and talking and playing. Each DJ would sit in. Coke La Rock would sit down, with his mic. Clark Kent, they would just sit there, and they were cool.
It wasn’t like a stage show, they were behind the decks? They were behind the desk. Herc would be sitting there, with the mic on a boom stand, and looking through the records. “Check it out y’all, we gonna do a sure shot, one time.” And Flash, he was a technician, so he had to stand. And he didn’t have time to talk. Bam is standing because there’s so many records coming at him. Bam normally has this little dance he does, too, when he’s DJing. So he’s not gonna be sitting down.
And what about MCs? Cowboy was the official traditional hip hop MC. He’s the first. Unfortunately he’s gone. But he was the first, and I’m talking standalone, standing beside the DJ. Toasting – is what they were actually doing.
Bigging up the crowd. Yeah, the MC was the guy who comes out onstage, “I’m your host.” The Master of Ceremonies. Cowboy was that guy, he was the first guy: to be an MC. And he started the “Hip hop the hip-hip hop hip hip the hip” Cowboy! The story goes that a friend of his was getting ready to go into the service. And he was saying “When you get in there you’re gonna be going “hip hop the hip hop, hi hip hi , and you don’t stop.” and everybody was OK, yo!” and that’s how the story stuck. True story.
The other story is that it was Lovebug Starski. Cowboy! Cowboy started all that. Lovebug Starski took it and made it the thing of the day. He expounded on it. Cowboy started it.
When did you start taking DJing a bit more seriously? Those guys Rob and City Boy up in Westchester, they didn’t know nothing about Grandmaster Flash, Afrika Bambaataa, or Kool Herc. They were still straight up disco. When I went up there, I got these beats. So I’m like Kool Herc now. So when people would come to our parties, when I’d get on I’d start playing these crazy records, and people would be like “What are you doing?”
They didn’t get it They didn’t get it.
So you would clear the floor? Yeah. I would clear the dancefloor. Until the people started going “Yo, that’s the old… Yo, I remember that song.” And then I started mixing it up, and then I had a big big following in Westchester.
How long did it take? Took a summer. One summer. Once the women got into it, that’s where the guys are gonna go. Then that was it, they caught on to the hip hop thing.
What were you calling it back then Hip hop. I mean we wouldn’t say hip hop, but that’s what it was. We would just say we’re throwing a party. We didn’t talk about culture or anything, we just said hip hop because that’s who we were. When you’re in it, you don’t really talk about it, it’s just music.
When did you start thinking you could take it maybe another step further? There wasn’t no groups during this period. And then these groups started coming up. Furious Five, and so on. So I said I gotta get some MCs now. I had Baby T and Baby Ace, two girl MCs. Then I had the Infinity Three MCs. Baby T, Half Pint, Kool Out. I actually have a flyer. I think that’s ’78. I have a flyer of that. And I went to New Rochelle, and the crowd thought I was insane, because I had people up on the table, with mics, “Yo, man, this is the B-boy thing, man. Whatch’all talking about?”
And so now we’re in high school, We were all saying rhymes. And I met this Raheim from Furious Five, he was there, all of us was in the same school, so he’d come up and we would just make these tapes, of us cutting and rhyming. And I said “Y’all want to join my group?” So now I had the Infinity Four MCs, when we really started hiting hard, making noise. It was me, Shaheim, Mike Nice, Kimba, and then we got this kid, Baron. Baby T had got fired. Shaheim wasn’t feeling her. And that was the one that blew up. Me and those four.
And then I had a guy named Little Quick, he was my understudy, I taught him how to cut. And then we had this little little white kid named Joe. He was a little boy, like nine or ten, and he was no joke. I used to stand him on a milk crate to DJ. He got a record store in New Rochelle now. We used to call him Big Joe. People used to see us with this little white boy and they’d be like “What the fuck. What are y’all doing?” Then it was like “Watch!”
So it was the three DJs, and Kool Aid, who was the master of beats. Bam is the Master of Records, but Kool Aid was the master of beats. Even Bam’ll tell you, this guy had a gift for it, ’cos he would read album covers, and he would look for specific percussionists, specific drummers, and he knew how they played. So whenever he would see those names, he knew that there’s gonna be an ill beat somewhere, He would spend his entire day, and night, in the Village, going through records after records after records. And he worked at an ice cream parlour outside Madison Square Garden making sundaes all day long. And he’d leave there and go to the Village to find records. That’s all he did.
And he was playing with you? Yeah. I had my whole entourage, it was Kool Aid: Master of Beats, Little Quick, Big Joe, Infinity Four, which was Shaheim, Baron, Kimba and Mike Nice, and Jaheim, who was the programme director. He would keep all the records in order and pass me my records. We had a whole synchronised thing. I would never look backwards, I would always go like this [mimes being handed a record from behind like it was a relay baton] And I was so fast at it they were like, “Damn, look how they work.”
Your style was just to play beats? I had the traditional disco DJ blending skills. You start there, you have to have that. But then the more radical things were the most demanding, so you practised them more…
Take me through a typical show I was the DJ at the Roxy, which was the biggest scene in New York, and the way I would do that is I would start out by playing the typical stuff that you hear on the radio, and some of the club stuff. And then all of a sudden I’d just twist the whole club. I’d throw on “Stop The Love You Save”, by the Jacksons, from the beginning with the drum and horn intro, and the whole club would go “Oh shit!” and then from that point I’d go left, completely go fucked up. And that’s what I went after. And that’s what makes hip hop so special. Because it’s a combination of everything. Hip hop is the only music genre that’s everything. I mean we would throw on Elvis, “Love my baby, and my baby loves me” [“C’mon Everybody”], that’s a hip hop classic, know what I’m sayin? And “The Name Game”, and all these old songs. These are songs that you’d play in a hip hop club.
It’s the way you’d combine them. Yeah, you could be playing “Don’t You Want Me Baby” by Human League, all of a sudden you’d throw on “Shoe Shine boy” by Eddie Kendricks, and the club would go crazy.
Tell me about scratching. How did that come about? There was Flash and Theodore, and another guy who doesn’t get no credit, DJ Tyrone from Cool DJ D’s crew. His DJ, his hip hop DJ was a kid named Tyrone. And he used to take “Apache” and he would go “Dmm-zmm, dmm-zmm, dmm zmm.” [ie scratching just once, back and forth] That’s all he would do. But it was so dope because nobody ever did it. And then he would go [he lets the beat start, then catches it again for another scratch]. That’s all he did, but it was enough to go “Ohhhh shit” And then Theodore, who was phenomenal, and he was a prodigy. He was so skilled so young, it was ridiculous. It was effortless, his cutting ability. I mean, he was faster than Flash. Flash will deny that, but he was faster than Flash. And he was articulate with the shit. Physically, you know.
What do you mean? He expressed it. Without opening his mouth, he was physically articulate, in his gestures, and in his ability to be so precise, and synchronise. Flash was good, and Flash was a definite technician, but there was something about Theodore that made him different. And remember he was a student of Flash. He had this knack for speed, and to be on time. What I mean is, it was articulate for me, cos I’m a DJ and it was a language I understood. It may be esoteric to most, but I understood it.
And what sort of things did you start doing? There was a whole system I would have from one record to the other [he mimes a show where he’s changing records over and over without looking behind]. I would never look back. Never ever would I have to look back. And sometimes when I would do tricks, he would have to put records between the feet of the decks. So while I’m playing this one, boom, I hand him that one, he takes one, he hands me one, he sticks the next record under the turntable. So I go like this [he demonstrates changing three different records] And sometimes we would do tricks together so Little Quick would come over to the turntable and he’d have his little group of records, I’d go Poww and he’d grab the needle and go poww! and I’d be on this side pow, pow pow [playing side by side on two decks]. We would do crazy shit, like I’d spin around and he’d take over, and then bam and I’d walk away, and he’d go to this turntable, wham, wham, and we would just keep circling and circling, and then we would do it switching records. It was all synchronised shit. And that’s what made us real popular. Cos like I said, I’m one of the children of the three guys: Bam, Herc and Flash.
And this grew into scratching. As a musician already, I started using my music skills to manipulate the turntables. And so I started forcing the whole threshold of the concept of being a turntablist. All of a sudden I was doing all this insane stuff, and people were like [an amazed nerd] “He did that with the turntable!” And so people started really really focusing on it and realising you could do shit with the needle on the record. It was all kinds of stuff. Like needle dropping. It almost doesn’t happen no more. But the most talented, the best DJs are the ones who can needle-drop, on cue, at will. [put the needle exactly on the start of the song by eye]
That’s what everyone says about Theodore. The best, Theodore… There was only three or four of us that mastered it. There was me, Theodore and Imperial JC, who were the best needle-droppers. And believe it or not, Little Quick mastered it, it’s just that he didn’t get the recognition, cos he didn’t get out there. But he was one of the best too. Flash was not one of the best needle droppers, that’s why he started the clock theory, spinning records back, cos he couldn’t drop.
JC was the fastest out of everybody. Out of everybody. JC was the first person to catch it like “Good, good, good, good…” with “Good Times”, he was the first person. “Good, good, good, good, good, good, good,” Cos I was still going “Good times, dum dum, good times, dum, dum…” and I got this fast “Good times, good times, good times, good times,” I mean precise. Cos when JC did it that fast the shit was all crazy and out of time, he still did it. I remember the first night I seen him do that and I went [sharp intake of breath] “I gotta go home and practise.” And he did it on Herc’s turntables. That’s when he was spinning for Herc.
And that was the whole thing about the hip hop culture. Every time you went to one of the parties, you never knew what to expect from one of the real premier DJs cos they was always home.
And look at what turntablism’s become. These new DJ battles, every time I go, now it’s off the hook. I look at these guys and I think, “We started that shit.” It’s incredible these guys, what they took from us, and there’s no end to it. I love to go there and see these guys. Me and Flash at the DMC [mixing championships], we was sitting there going “Yo man, look what we did. Look at this, man, this is ridiculous.” To actually know that you have inspired a genre, a whole movement, and we were just in the projects, doing that, with no money, just for the love of it, man. And now that shit is incredible. I should own a piece of fuckin’ Techics turntables, you know what I’m sayin? The amount of publicity and promotion that I’ve done for them.
When did you realise you weren’t just a DJ any more, you were using the turntable to be an artist? Took me a while. You know when I really felt it, when Quincy Jones came and sat in front of me, took a chair, spun it around backwards and sat in front of me like this [chin on folded arms intently observing] . This close [about two or three feet away], turntables right here. “Go ahead, play.” Just like that. And when I finished he picked me up and gave me a bear hug, and walked the fuck out. Then it was official for me. Even at that time, my whole band had no respect for me. I was stood thinking, damn, these motherfuckas don’t want to give me no props, man. But when Quincy said “Yo man, that shit is dope. That’s some dope shit you doin, that shit is so bad, it’s incredible.” He was talking music. He said “You playin’ triplets. You playin’ a lot of triplets.” I was like, “Yeah, I play triplets. And also Narada Michael Walden, same thing, he came backstage after one show and he said, “Man, that shit is so incredible.”
Herbie Hancock (in red) with his band. DXT is in the white leather.
This is when you’re working with Herbie Hancock? Yeah, The Rockit band. It took up to that point, for me, as a musician, those are my peers, so I want them to respect me. I know the hip hop crowd loves that shit. But that was my way of knocking on that wall. At that time, they thought rap was dead, it’s gonna die, shit’s over, and then here I come, with this shit, knocking on the door, yo let us in. And I was the first guy to get to that door.
How did you get hooked up with Herbie Hancock? Playing at the Roxy. I met a guy named Jean Karakos who owned a French label called Celluloid. Barry Mayo from Kiss had approached me to do a radio show, and I was like “I don’t DJ on no radio. That shit is crazy, man.” Something about it bothered me. The confinement. I can’t keep a job, cos I can’t follow orders. I told him check Jazzy Jay and Red alert, and so they ended up on the radio. WBLS.
A guy named Bernard Zachary became my agent, he said, “These guys want to give you three grand a night to play at this club called The Bains Douche in Paris.” And I was like… “I’m gone.” I went and got me a passport. They said yeah, man, matter of fact the Rolling Stones are doing a video, they want you to be the DJ in the video in Paris. They’ll fly you out there tomorrow. It was ridiculous. Plus the Roxy. Plus I was playing in another club called Armageddon on Wednesday nights in the Village and I was getting a grand.
Larry Levan was the number one DJ but all of a sudden, all of these guys from Bonds International Casino, all of these DJs one night, came to the Roxy cos it was like, “Who is this guy and what is he doing?” I also played the synthesiser in my set.
When you opened the Village Voice they had all the clubs, and once I got New York’s number one DJ, I was off the hook. And you can demand prices. I was also very aware that these people were making millions of dollars. And that’s how my fallout with the Roxy came about, which was the biggest club in America at the time. At The Roxy I was getting $2500, and that was for the whole weekend. To three grand for both days, so that’s 1500 dollars a night. I wanted a dollar off the door. One dollar. That’s all I wanted. One dollar. They sell their liquor out every night, and when I would go away, Bam would spin there, or [Afrika] Islam would spin there.
Islam was the guy brought in to replace me. And I told both of them, “Look, we have to stick together on this. They’re making millions of dollars. If they do not give me what I want, they can’t call you.” Of course you know that didn’t work. So I ended up leaving because they were making so much money.
How did your scratching develop? By that time I was off the hook. I was doing all kinds of crazy tricks and stunts. I did everything but blow up the turntable. I was running around the place, coming back, and cutting on beat with no headphones on. Breakdancing, kicking the mixer, everything.
When did it develop to where you’re just using the record to make notes. When did you start doing that? Let me just try to chronologically explain it to you. I was at my place. I was practising, and when we were just doing “chzzum chm, chzzum chm”, the simple stuff, it was just a matter of time before we’d want to do something more intricate. So as a musical person I decided that I can play rhythms, because I’m a drummer. But the idea of getting more complex than just “chzzum chm, chzzum chm”, that was an accident. One day I was doing my thing and I fucked up and Shaheim was like, “Yo, yo, that was dope!” I was like “Do what? That was an accident.” “Well do it again.” So I did it again, and it was dope, so I just started practising doing it. It was “drit dru drit; drit dru drit drrrr” [much faster and staccato than before] Just that “jig, jigga jic; jig jigga jic” where before it was just “jja, jja, ja, ja, ja”[the difference is we’re now hearing the pullback noise as well as the choppy forward scratch.] And so now it had more life to it and I started to practise that, [imitates a complex scratch which matches a breakbeat pattern], and I’m thinking, [more complex drum patterns], and now I’m humming it. Once I realised that there was something there, my musical skill kicked in and I started singing these phrases [sings funky percussion beat with a slight tune] And I started practising whatever I sang, just like when I played. And I applied my drum skills to the turntables.
And you’re going out looking for records that worked particularly well? Right. I started recording my first single with this label Celluloid, and Fab 5 Freddy did a record with them called “Change the Beat.” And at the end it has, “This this stuff is really fressshhh” [the famous whooshy much-used sample]. So when we were doing “Rockit” I was going through a bunch of records to find the sounds I wanted. It was me, Bill Laswell, Mr C, my friend Carter, and Michael Beinhome, Martin Beesy, Booski, the guy who introduced me to Bam. We’re all in the studio and I’m doing my rhythms, and I used the fresh part “wisht wshht” and everyone went, “Woah! That’s it, that’s it, roll the tape,” and I just did my part. I just did whatever I felt.
That was original to Freddy’s record, it wasn’t a sample of anything else? That was original to Freddy’s record. So I went [he does the scratch from “Rockit”], and I was just doing my thing.
Your single “Crazy Cuts” was after Rockit, yeah? I had originally done “Crazy Cuts” before. A lot of people don’t know that. “Crazy Cuts” was a concept I had even before I had met Herbie, or Bill or any of those guys. And once “Rockit” became a big hit I went back to it and said, well let me try it again.
But you used the ideas that you’d developed in Rockit? Right. The sound. I used the sound. But the idea of doing a record like that, that was old, before I even did “Rockit”. I did a few. I did one called “Scratchomatic”, I did a whole album of tracks which were just scratch solos. I have cassettes, man, “Scratchomatic” was so dope too man, oh my goodness.
Did you right away think “I’ve made the turntable into an instrument”? Yeah. By the time I got to the Rockit band I realised there was something special, with the turntables, and it was growing. But like I say I didn’t really feel the respect from the band yet. They kind of looked at me like “You can’t have a turntable in a band, man.”
They thought it was a gimmick. But there were people like Quincy, you know, big names [who thought otherwise].
What about Herbie Hancock himself? Yeah, when Herbie saw it, because Herbie, he’s totally into that. Because it’s new, it’s clever, it’s technical.
Did he hear you play before the project came about? They brought him to the Roxy. And they said this is the guy we’ve been telling you about. I didn’t meet him that night. I didn’t know he was there. They said we didn’t want to disturb you, so we was in the VIP room, just watching.
He was open-minded enough to say, I’m gonna make a record with scratching on it. Yeah. So, we did it and made history with that record. That was a great experience, That was my introduction to mainstream showbiz, and to be introduced on that magnitude, was incredible. Booom, hit record, world tours, the Grammys. It happened so fast. “What happened?” “Yo man, you got a hit record.” I never saw the effect the record had in the United States, ’cos I was gone.
You were touring, supporting it. I never was in my neighbourhood to see how people responded to it.
That’s a shame. People must have told you though. I was in and out, so I would see a few people. In those neighbourhoods people are poor, so they think you’ve made it, so now you can’t talk to nobody, so everything gets real funny. I just became so busy that your life just changes.
How long were you on tour? From ’84 to ’88. And when that band ended and I was in the Headhunters, playing keys, and singing lead by that time. And turntables. So I took the ride, you know.
What was it that made the band respect you as a musician? Just one day, it was a song we were working on, there was some trouble at rehearsal, and they were asking Herbie – “Hey Herbie, this part?” And he said “Yo man, don’t ask me, ask him, he did the damn song.” I’m a musician, man. I understand it. I can get with a bunch of musicians and have them play something, and that’s the way we did the songs.
As a DJ was it natural to move into production? I would say, as a musician it was easy to move into DJing. And so production was a normal path for me.
Do you think a DJ has a special insight? Some. I know that my DJing experience helped me to get better insight on music. On the different processes people take to create their music, and different cultures of music. We go out and get polka records, man, country and western, all genres… Because in hip hop it’s everything. It’s whatever you can turn and twist and mould into the rhythms of the day.
In the backdraft of the disco era, in a city known more for oil and politics than wild club culture, one of history’s most unlikely nightclubs was born. Built by a kitchen extractor magnate and envisioned by future design legend Phillippe Starck – he of three-legged lemon-squeezer fame – Dallas’s Starck Club rivalled Studio 54 for its mix of the monied and the magnificent. And it owed much of its success to an unlimited supply of a new drug called ecstasy, which it sold legally over the bar.
For five years between 1984 and 1989, the Starck Club sat at the epicentre of Dallas nightlife, channelling the hedonism of Studio, the novelty of New York’s Mudd Club, the style of Le Palace in Paris, and the innovation of Manchester’s Hacienda. It pre-empted a new wave of US dancefloor culture powered by a brand-new drug, and embodied a wild and revolutionary spirit that made it like no other place in the world.
By the early eighties, mainstream disco was losing favour and while there were vibrant underground dance scenes around the US, most of America thrilled to Bruce Springsteen, Madonna and Michael Jackson. Dallas at that time was best known for the TV show of the same name, the Cowboys football team and the JFK assassination (probably in that order). But thanks to the vision of local businessman Blake Woodall, a nightspot opened that signalled a new chapter in American club culture.
The Starck brought together cutting-edge Eurocentric electronic music, new wave and acid house in a purpose-built setting designed by French architect and industrial designer Phillipe Starck. “It was uniquely perched at the nexus of money, sin, sexual politics, style, recreational chemicals, and strange new musical hybrids,” Dallas musician and video director Greg Synodis told Jeff Liles in the Dallas Observer. “The Starck Club influenced people’s tastes and acceptance of what was right or wrong.” A draw for anyone who landed in the city, nothing was off limits, including then-legal ecstasy aka X, key to the club’s success, but also at the heart of its downfall.
At the turn of the decade, Blake Woodall was looking for something a little more exciting than taking over the local, albeit highly profitable, Vent-A-Hood family kitchen extractor business. He decided to open a nightclub slap bang in the centre of his hometown. But knew it was no small undertaking. “There was a design aspect, a music aspect, a fashion aspect, management aspect,” Woodall told RBMA. He managed to pull in some big-name backers including Stevie Nicks, as well as younger investors like Christina de Limur (aka Sita) who connected him to a then-unknown industrial designer destined for greatness. “I brought Philippe Starck to the deal, built the Club – my official title: conceptual engineer – and was a night manager from ’84,” she explained. “The point of the whole thing was to bring a little Paris to Texas. Bring something exotic, something different. It was a gamble, but it was a gamble worth taking,” she told the Dallas Observer. “We were at the right place at the right time. Dallas was like a boomtown then.”
Having found the perfect location – under the Woodall-Rodgers freeway – Woodall left Starck to work his magic. All went smoothly until, part-way through construction, the Frenchman was called back to Paris to work on the French President’s residence. While seemingly frustrating, the breathing space proved serendipitous – financial daggers had been drawn as costs ballooned, and while he was awaiting Starck’s return, Woodall paid a trip to Ibiza. “I was awed by the culture, the fashion and the music, and how it seemed so international,” he recalled. “We were listening to music from Barcelona, Munich, Tokyo, New York, Los Angeles. It was a remarkable music scene, and I made the decision at that point that would be the music aspect of our project.”
Before the grand opening night, a couple of jigsaw pieces were still missing. The first was Door Bitch. Woodall recruited the ‘Parisian Queen of Punk’, the late Edwige Belmore, doorwoman at Le Palace and frontwoman of Mathématiques Modernes who would turn away punters even when the dancefloor was half-empty. “I loved the original door girl,” Starck DJ Mark Ridlen remembered. “She would be doing the Watusi to my random mix one minute, and the next be manhandling an unruly cokehead to the nearest exit.”
The other was, of course, the music. With an opening night set to feature Stevie Nicks, Grace Jones and the Dallas Symphony Orchestra performing live, Starck recruited compatriot Philippe Krootchey on the decks. A model for Pierre and Gilles’ and a permanent fixture in the Paris clubs, Krootchey was also a musician, releasing ‘Dance on the Groove (And Do The Funk)’ as part of Love International. However, after many delays he failed to made it to the Starck’s opening night. Instead, on the advice of Grace Jones’ manager, at the last minute they pulled in New York-based Kerry Jaggers, who would be resident for the next six months.
The Dallas Morning News described the opening night as the kind of party Jay Gatsby might have thrown. To the fore was Starck’s radical design. A marble staircase led to a colossal bisected circular door which by all accounts took some welly to get open. “Once you entered beyond the red velvet curtain, it was an amazing labyrinth of walkways and hallways of a shrouded interior made up of translucent white curtains which made up cubicles,” remembered a patron on DiscoMusic.com. Kubrickian in essence.
But it was the dancefloor that really wowed the crowd. Sunk 12 feet below the DJ booth, the dancefloor housed the subwoofers, creating the sensation of actually being inside the sound system. And the floor was bisected by a giant arch which was placed there provocatively to create division. “It was the Capulets and the Montagues,” David Muir, another Starck DJ and regular told RBMA. “We didn’t go over and dance on that side and they didn’t come over and dance on our side. It was two separate worlds.” The other great talking point was the unisex bathroom. With stalls divided by glass blocks and motion sensitive TVs, people were very much left to do what they wanted. “There were honestly people that came into that club, went to the bathroom, stayed for two and a half hours, and when they left the bathroom went home,” General Manager Greg McCone added. “Never even went in the club.”
Despite the extravagant opening night, it took a while for word to spread. A strict door policy was in place, as much to protect the patrons as to create hype. “If you were of the gay culture you would want to know you were welcome,” Woodall explained. “If you were a business guy you would want to know you’re welcome. I had this idea that inside there would be green hair and then there would be some of the most remarkable, political people in the world.” In Dallas at that time, to have a dancefloor where drag queens rubbed shoulders with celebrities and aspiring politicos marked a truly watershed moment – all inhibitions and pre-conceptions to be left at the door. “There’d never been a mix of straight and gay crowds in a dance club, and it was just open season,” patron and doorman Nick Hamblen told the Dallas Observer. “I’m gay, and it was nice to go to a bar that was so incredibly mixed. The Starck Club opened the door and we never turned back.”
The dynamic of the place encouraged a broader, wilder and more creative crowd. “Part of the design and desire was to have a complete mix of all spectrums of people,” David Hynds, who ran the club’s art dept. told D Magazine. “The club was so ahead of its time, a Saturday night looked like Halloween,” remembered McCone. “People were in drag as Marie Antoinette or dressed up in tight suits painted green like Mars men. They’d come in naked with a terrycloth bathrobe on.” The club hosted fashion shows, plays, performance art. Local artists were invited in and there was an anything goes attitude. “We had these funky theme parties,” Ridlen told D Magazine. “We would make it look like a grocery store or we would make it look like a rodeo. We’d have these fun themes with appropriate music. We’d always have video exhibits, people showing their art videos. We had events just for that.”
Word quickly spread that the Starck was the hottest place in town, and by the time Grace Jones returned a couple of months later, it was the final push that was needed. Jones arrived late, very late, and insisted that the air conditioning was turned off. But she dazzled the crowd. And soon the Starck was a must for any celebrity who happened to be in Dallas – Rob Lowe, Robert Plant, Annie Lennox, Tom Cruise and Prince were all spotted. A Young Republicans fundraiser was held there with future prez George W Bush in tow. Thanks to its futuristic design, the club even featured in classic ’80s dystopian sci-fi Robocop!
The club’s other secret weapon was, famously, ecstasy. In 1984, when DJ Kerry Jaggers arrived from New York a friend gave him some with the instruction: “Spread that around. It will make it more fun.” Still legal in the US, ecstasy was made freely available at the Starck, sold by the bartenders who proudly advertised their side hustle with the t-shirt slogan “I got X.” “The money was crazy,” bartender Craig Depoi told the Dallas Observer. “Every night I’d make 600 to 800 bucks. People would slide ten or twenty hits of legal X across the bar in matchbooks.” The drug’s abundance was thanks to the crusader-like efforts of Michael Clegg, one of a group of Boston chemists who had investigated the therapeutic benefits of the drug and gone on to become one of its key producers (as well as rebranding it from Empathy to Ecstasy). Though now legendary for it, the Starck was not alone. “It was easy and clean, and all of the clubs in town were making it available to their clientele,” Mike Graff told Liles. “The whole city was overtaken by this phenomenon,” Wade Hampton told RBMA. “Southern Methodist University was completely knee-deep in ecstasy. You’ve got the children of politicians and you’ve got the parents trying to see what the kids are up to – it wasn’t unusual to see your parent’s friends out at Starck.”
As well as Grace Jones and Stevie Nicks, live gigs included Kid Creole and the Coconuts and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, but the Starck wasn’t really set up for live music. The stage was encumbered with large pillars, the acoustics were all wrong and the audience was thirty feet below. Unsurprisingly then, when it came to music it was all about the men behind the decks.
Despite failing to make the opening night, Frenchman Phillipe Krootchey was an early resident, but his punky approach meant he didn’t last long. “He would play something three times in a row and kind of sloppily scratch, throw people off in their rhythm while they were dancing. People would boo, and I thought, ‘That’s great!’” Mark Ridlen told the Dallas Observer.
Ridlen himself also played there, adopting a similarly raucous, anything-goes style. “He had more of this punchy flavour that was probably more suited for the bombastic desires of a Dallas crowd,” says Wade Hampton, producer of the unreleased documentary The Starck Project.
Kerry Jaggers brought a style of DJing that wasn’t bound to four to the floor. “We weren’t afraid of playing below 110 beats per minute,” he recalled to RBMA. “Most DJs would say, ‘Oh, no, that’s too slow. You can’t play that in a club!’” He didn’t shy away from playing more commercial tracks either – The Smiths’ ‘How Soon Is Now’, Billy Idol’s ‘Eyes Without A Face’ and even Nik Kershaw were aired there.
It was his successor, San Antonian DJ Rick Squillante, who put The Starck on the map musically. “Rick was a very Hawaiian shirt and flip-flops type of guy,” said Jaggers, who brought him to the Starck. “I had to kind of trick them together, but that was one of the best things that I probably ever did to that club.” Squillante would go on to head Virgin Records New York dance division in the ’90s, signing key tracks by Josh Wink and Armand Van Helden and helming Janet Jackson’s rise to superstar status. In Dallas, playing what became known as “Starck music”, Squillante brought a mix of deep disco, new wave and European synthpop to the club. He played Trevor Horn, Pet Shop Boys, Echo & the Bunnymen, Bauhaus and Malcolm McLaren – music that the Starck crowd had never heard before. They called it “Eurotech”. “He was playing music you couldn’t hear at any other local club… that you couldn’t hear at any other club in America – until he made it relevant,” Don Nedler, who (briefly) reopened the club in 1996, told the Dallas Observer. But while he may have had the crowd eating out of his hand, Squillante wasn’t what you would call a technician. He didn’t really mix, preferring to spend his time hosting breakaway parties in his booth. But he was always in control, deftly switching between tracks and often playing for ten or eleven hours straight. “Rick would be talking to all these people and would turn away with 30 seconds left of music, walk over, pull a record out, throw it on, and it would be right on cue and mix right into a new track,” Starck regular David Muir told RBMA.
Christina de Limur and DJ Rick Squillante
As the eighties advanced so did the music, and while Squillante was highly lauded, his successor, “GoGo” Mike DuPriest was perhaps even more influential. Embracing acid house and the burgeoning rave culture, he shifted from the melody aesthetic of Squillante to the pulsating rhythm of house music. Often using three turntables, DuPriest acted as the inspiration for many local DJs who took the new music and spread it across the US – Red Eye, Rob Vaughan, Cle Acklin, JT Donaldson, DJ Merritt, Ronnie Bruno and DJ Daisy – moved by his unmatched knowledge for this new music and flawless choice of records. “Chicago house tracks by Frankie Knuckles and Fast Eddie, Detroit Techno tracks from Derrick May and Juan Atkins alongside UK Acid House artists like 808 State, S’ Express, Baby Ford and The Beatmasters,” Jeff K told Liles in 2009. “Having come to Dallas from NYC, Mike DuPriest had the knowledge of these records and understood the movement that was upon us.” And it wasn’t just his choice in tunes; it was a whole new approach to playing music. “He was also blessed with the skill and technique to phrase, mix and generate emotion unlike any DJ I’d ever seen before,” continues Jeff K. “Prior to Starck, electronic dance music had never made me cry. That final night of Starck Club with Mike DuPriest at the helm, I wept like a child.”
All good things must come to an end and by 1986 the writing was on the wall. This was partly down to the fact the Starck was so fun, innovative and audacious that it had spawned a wealth of new clubs in Dallas and its novelty was diminished. It was also partly down to MDMA. The Club’s open drug sales meant the DEA got very antsy about it. MDMA became a Schedule 1 narcotic on July 1st, 1985, and a year later the Starck was raided. The club was served with a no-dance ban in April 1987 which they embraced by running a “No Dance” party. It carried on for a while but following one last hurrah with who else but Grace Jones, it closed its doors on July 11 1989.
“It was fun being one of the owners of one of the most remarkable nightclubs in the world,” Blake Woodall told RMBA. “Then I started seeing how big it was getting, how almost out of control it was.” Christina de Limur agrees. “All these things do have a lifespan. We had a good run.”
He has the honour of being first to bring dance music to Radio One in with his 1987 Friday-night Big Beat show. He followed this with another groundbreaking dance show, Club Culture, on Capital, along with stints at Kiss and a long-lasting show on Jazz FM. He’s also enjoyed a long and influential career behind the scenes in labels and production companies. But Jeff cut his teeth as a soul DJ, warming up for Robbie Vincent and Greg Edwards, then throwing his lot in with the new generation as electronic soul, hip hop and house started frightening off the old guard. Few DJs have such a broad understanding of how dance music moved from a world of obsessives and obscurities to the driving force of the UK music scene.
How did you get into music? I grew up in North Kent, born 1955. All I can remember is around eight years old, I just started to listen to music. And in 1963, things were pretty exciting. I listened to the pirate stations avidly, Caroline, Radio London. I was gutted when they all closed down, because the BBC’s coverage of the music I liked was pretty poor. When I was at school it was Zeppelin, Hendrix, Stones. It was the blues-based stuff. I never liked the Deep Purples and the Genesis of this world. There was always a black music thing in me somewhere. And then when I was 17, I started DJing with a friend of mine, and it was all up to Contempo to buy imports. I still kept up an interest in pop and various other bits and pieces, but black music pretty much took over my life after I was 17.
What was Contempo like? In those days, it was two rooms on the first floor of a building in Hanway Street, just by Tottenham Court Road. We used to get the train up there on a Saturday and climb the stairs, and the guys behind the counter would just be playing tunes one after the other. You’d stick your hand up and you’d buy it. They always had a little thing where they’d pin sevens on the wall, the stuff that had come in that week. They had a lot of back-catalogue as well. I can’t remember if the Blues & Soul [magazine] office was there as well or not. That was the first place we went to. Then after Contempo, we found places like City Sounds and The Groove, and Bluebird and all those other shops that had emerged.
When you started DJing, was it a mobile DJ set-up? Yeah. We I DJed in a Catholic youth club, of all places. Sunday nights, and gradually got some money together, got some gear, and then started to do weddings and that kind of stuff. A good grounding really, because you learn how to get a dancefloor and then keep it, which is something I’ve seen some people still not be able to master.
When I was around 21 me and my friends, if we didn’t go to the Goldmine, we’d go to this Golden Lion pub in Sydenham where Robbie Vincent was DJing. And one week, Robbie needed a backup DJ, and so he took a flyer. I started to do bigger gigs with him. I built up a sound system, and when he got booked, he would get me to put the sound in and then back him up. And he took to me because I never stitched the main turn-up.
You laid the ground. Yeah. I could quite happily warm a room up for an hour without playing anything. He told Chris Hill about me, and then Greg Edwards. So I ended up doing loads of warm-up gigs for these guys. Robbie then got me a gig at The Royalty in Southgate, warming up for all the big turns of the week.
What was the Goldmine like? It was a great place to go. When we first went he was doing the swing thing with the Glenn Miller business. There’d be all these kids dressed up in army gear, waiting for the 45 minutes when he’d turn the place into a swing palace, and then he would go back to the black music. We liked it as a novelty, but we weren’t unhappy when it ended. It was a good camaraderie there which carried on for years and years. It was so rare there was a fight in the Goldmine. Everyone was friendly. The weekly lot, which was probably two-thirds of the club, you knew each other after a while. It was great.
Robbie Vincent and Jeff Young (R) show off their military side
And was it very multicultural or…? It was multicultural, but I do think there was a little bit of door racism. A few people have said to me over the years, “I went down to Goldmine and they wouldn’t let me in,” which obviously hurt quite a lot. Embarrassing. You had the tribes in those days of course, the Brixton Frontline and so on, and everyone had black members in their tribes. So it wasn’t like we were a completely middle-class white audience. It was multicultural, but maybe not as multicultural as it could have been.
I guess the crowd in those days was largely working-class kids? Yeah, and they nearly all traveled. There were a few kids in there from Canvey Island, but not many. Most people drove down from all kinds of places, as they did most of the other suburban soul clubs like Frenchies and Flicks, and all these other places that sprung up.
What was Frenchies like? Frenchies was similar to the ‘Mine. Different clientele. A Sunday night, so it had a slightly different vibe. It was the first place I ever played where, a bit like the northern scene, if they really like something you played, you got a round of applause at the end of it. And that shocked me the first time it happened. I was like, “Fucking hell, what are they doing? They’re clapping.” The guy that ran it was a bit of a notorious boy, and he was quite funny. So yeah, it was great, Frenchies.
Did the music vary from club to club? It was mainly along the same lines. The jazz funk and soul-y bits, and Philadelphia International and Salsoul. There was one period at the Goldmine where it was very jazzy. The other clubs were not as jazzy as the ‘Mine, which would have been quite tough for a lot of punters [to dance to].
And what about Flicks in Dartford? What was that like? Well, Flicks was a different kind of club, in that although it had a black music policy, it was a dress smart thing, there’s a restaurant in the club, like a lot of those kind of clubs in those days.
Were there any DJs in particular that inspired you when you were starting out? Chris Hill and Robbie [Vincent] and Greg [Edwards] were the obvious ones, because they would be getting stuff even earlier than some of the import shops because of their record company connections. Chris’s music was a bit tougher than what Robbie used to play, and I liked that. Later on, I began to like people like Gilles [Peterson] and Paul Oakenfold. I looked at what some of the younger guys were playing, and I used to think they put sets together really, really well. In those days you would still play anything you wanted. So you could play jazz and you could play hip hop and you could play soul, but they would be doing it in a slightly different way. It wasn’t until the acid house thing came up that nights began to emerge where you weren’t doing too much cross-pollination.
What about your broadcasting career? You played on Radio London from very early on. Yeah. I always thought I was too Cockney for radio. These were the days when you had to have a modicum of Queen’s English to get away with broadcasting. Robbie was going away for a weekend and he put me and Graham Canter on his show on Radio London. We did that a few times, and then eventually he said to me, “Just do it on your own.”So I would do sit-ins for Robbie when he went on holiday or he’s at home cutting his grass or something. And it just developed from there.
I did go on the pirates as well. I was on JFM for a little while, but not regularly. I was working in club promotion for a major record company, and the hours were long and I was away a lot. So the last thing I wanted to do most Sunday mornings was jump out of bed and drive to Streatham to broadcast. Eventually Robbie went to Radio One, and they gave me the Radio London show. It went on at 11:30 and think it was the breakfast show for most people who we were broadcasting to.They later changed it to 8.30 which wasn’t as much fun. But soon after that I moved to Radio One.
On Radio London, were you given carte blanche to just play what you wanted? Yeah, exactly. Whoever did that show chose the music. I’ve been really, really lucky, because every radio show I’ve done that’s my own, I’ve either programmed all of it or most of it. I did have a show on Jazz FM on a Saturday and a Sunday for a little while where they wanted me to play fifty percent playlist, but I got to choose the other half, so that was okay. And even on Capital, Richard Park let me let me choose all the music, which was pretty unheard of.
I was at Capital around 2000. Saturday nights from seven to eleven. I’d left Radio One and stayed out of radio for a while. Then I formed a production company with Pete Tong and Eddie Gordon and we got Danny Rampling onto Radio One, and [Judge] Jules. The Essential Mix was our program. I did some stuff for Kiss. And then Parky came in and I went to Capital. My Capital show had more people listening to it than the relevant Radio One shows and Kiss shows added together, it was a really good platform, it was their first foray into a proper dance show really.
I did a year on Xfm, which was disastrous. So I came off radio, and I was basically listening to Ibiza chill-out music for about ten years. And all of a sudden, I got a call from Jazz FM. Robbie wasn’t well. They said, “Would you do three and a half months?” And I stayed for ten years. So, I’ve done most of the major stations in London at various times.
What about the label side of things? I was at Phonogram, which later became Mercury. I’d signed Shannon’s “Let the Music Play” to the label and I went to America with our video bloke to shoot a video for it. First time in New York, I couldn’t believe it. I’m listening to these radio stations, and I’m looking at the city, all this stuff. I realised that quite a lot of pop stations, like WBLS, would have a normal week. Then at, say 6pm on a Friday, they would become a dance station, and they’d stay like that until Sunday night, then they’d revert to their normal format.
So in 1987 I wrote a three-page letter to [Radio One Controller] Johnny Beerling telling him why he needed a dance program on Radio One, either a Friday or a Saturday. Indie music was in a bit of a doldrums at that point. I thought nothing would come of it. But all of a sudden there was a rumble around Radio One that they were thinking about doing this. And I’d actually agreed to go to Capital when Radio One suddenly rang and said, “Would you do Friday nights for us?” I nearly didn’t take it because they were on medium wave at that time. A medium wave at night was just an unmitigated nightmare. But they said, “Oh, six weeks after you join, we’re going FM.”
And did they let you get on with it? I think outside of people like [John] Peel, they’d never had anyone like me in there before. They gave me a guy to work with who was a regular Radio One producer. He’s looking at me to play the dance music that’s in the chart. And I was saying, “You know what? It doesn’t really work that way.” But I was lucky, because he went off with Mike Read to do a mammoth Paul McCartney documentary which took him out of the building for months. So I just worked on my own. I got people to make jingles for me. I started in October ’87, but it took me about six months to kind of get in the groove of the whole thing. And then they started to say to me, “Man, your figures are flying.” They never showed them to me, but they were obviously very, very happy with it. And I just kept going.
At that point, even on radio shows, you were still dodging around between genres. I kind of isolated the hip hop stuff and devoted the last hour of the show to that, because it would really break up the flow otherwise. I had three or four hours so I had plenty of time to fit in the other stuff.
What other music were you playing in ’87? Early house records would have been out by then. Yeah, early house. In those days you got letters from people saying, “Oh, you don’t play enough acid.” So I would play a bit of acid and a bit of this and that, but I didn’t go the whole hog. It was a bit of a leap of faith for me to play Lil’ Louis “French Kiss,” for example. I was always aware I was on the radio. It wasn’t in a club. There was still Salsoul and stuff buzzing about. And a lot of the British stuff that really went pop, like S’Express.
Stock Aitken and Waterman? No, I stayed off that. Even though I was working for Phonogram. We had Kool & The Gang too, but I never played a Kool & The Gang record. I wasn’t going to do that. I might have played Cameo. I can’t remember. I probably did, but yeah, the real pop end of it, I didn’t. I might’ve played “Roadblock”, but that was a scam anyway, as we all know. It was quite funny going into a shop and someone trying to claim it was an old record from back in the day, when it was being driven by a drum machine.
Yeah. Listening to it now, you’re like, How did people fall for this? It was shrink-wrapped as well. I ripped the record out of the sleeve and looked at the run-out groove, because there was the British mastering boys’ signature in the run-out groove. So you knew it was cut in London, and they had a drum machine on it, and no, it wasn’t Maceo. You know? So, yeah. Funny. Good scam.
Tell me about [Record Mirror dance columnist] James Hamilton He was a larger-than-life character on a number of levels, both his height, and he was really funny. He told it like it was. If he didn’t like something you’d done, he’d tell you, no problem at all. He would come to our gigs, he’d review them, and we’d go out to eat. And of course, the size of the bloke, he was unbelievable in restaurants: two starters, two main courses. And his obsessive BPM business was a legend of its own. But yeah, he was a really, really great guy. Proper music lover. And he didn’t mind a laugh as well. We put a couple of things in Record Mirror that were proper stunts. Fictitious clubs on a Tuesday night, people wandering around Essex looking for Candles Club at Camberwick Green.
And the Japanese jazz stunt. He printed a chart with a fictitious title, and the artist was “Can you suck a large one?” It was K-A-N-U, Sukka Larjwon, spelt like a Japanese name. And of course people fell for it again, and it started to appear in people’s charts. It was tragic when he died, it really was.He died a young man, really, in the big scheme of things.
I met him once and he really reminded me of [’50s actor] James Robertson Justice. Yeah, oh, absolutely. The whole accent thing and all that. Yeah, he was a proper lord.
In the ’80s, if you were into dance music, it was hard to actually hear it, unless you went out to clubs. Outside London, on the radio you’d get maybe two hours tops of dance music programming a week. Radio London had a couple of shows on during the week, the big one was obviously Robbie’s Saturday show, then Greg Edwards on Capital Saturday night. You’d wait for the weekend and try and zoom in on the pirates, God bless them. They all had money problems and they kept having their transmitters nicked by the DTI and they couldn’t afford to replace them. So you never knew if your favorite guy was going to be on Sunday or not. So it wasn’t until really Radio One opened up. And then of course we had Kiss, which opened up things in London.
Kiss really did change things, didn’t it? Yeah, absolutely. Kiss did open it up. They had a couple of false starts, but they finally got on. They had to do what all radio stations do: they started off with great intentions of having all these specialist shows, then they had to start whittling those down because they needed to get numbers to get ads. So it did get a bit diluted after about 12 months, but yeah, Kiss did a fantastic job. It’s unrecognisable to what it is now, of course, but yeah, it was great. It was exciting being involved. It really was. The place was buzzing because it was all young kids that were running it.
How has the fact that we have a national broadcaster in the BBC, influenced how music is programmed? What are the differences if you compare it with the US, which obviously has always been very commercial. Radio One will roll with what’s happening at any one time. When Pete took the Radio One show on and club culture did absolutely explode, it had a really big influence on what they were playing during the day as well. At the end of the ’90s, that decreased a bit as the guitar genres woke up again. I think Capital might have jumped into a bit more dance stuff than it did initially. So yeah, I think it did. I think it had a huge influence.What used to happen back in the mid-’80s, something would be the leading genre of the time, whether it’s indie guitars or dance or whatever, stick around for three years, and then it’s something else. But dance turned up and it never left the building. The ’90s were just awesome when I think about it. It’s a testament to the producers and the artists that kept it moving.
It was the first kind of dance music we were able to make here that had credibility outside of the country. Suddenly, we were making music that was comparable with America. All of a sudden you could put a studio in a bedroom, that was it. We’re off to the races. All of a sudden, we don’t have to go and record it somewhere that’s a few hundred quid a day. You can do it at home and do it very economically. The world was everybody’s lobster when technology made that leap.
When I interviewed Marshall Jefferson, he described house music as the black punk rock, and that really struck a chord with me because as a teenager, I moved down to London as punk rock was happening. And house music felt like that to me. I loved the slightly amateurish feel of it. I think it’s a really good description. People like him took the bull by the horns and just cracked it. Absolutely.
How did you go from your Radio One show to Pete taking over? I left Radio One at the very end of December 1990. And at the time, I had a very responsible job at A&M, and it was pretty pressured. I look back and probably all I needed was a month off, because I was just shattered. I listened to all the records. I did everything. Whereas I think where Pete was quite clever, he had a couple of people around him that helped him out. When I left they asked me what they should do, I said, “Get Pete Tong off Capital.” And they did.
How did [production company] Wise Buddha come about? [Radio One Controller] Matthew Bannister kept badgering Pete to do more programs, and Pete just couldn’t do it, but he decided we could form a company and deliver dance-orientated programs to Radio One. It was one of the early independent production companies: Me, Eddie Gordon and Pete. The first thing we did was get Danny Rampling off Kiss. We introduced Westwood to the Radio One people. We just sort of let them shake hands, then we stepped away. We already had the Essential Mix on air, that was another one of our programs. We kept saying, “Take Gilles,” and they did eventually, about three years later. They took a drum and bass show about eight months after drum and bass first reared its head. And that was quick for them. They asked us to do it, but we weren’t sure. So they took Fabio and Grooverider in-house and just did a show with them.
And who were you dealing with at Radio One in that period? Andy Parfitt, mostly. We said to them, “Look, we think you should get involved in Ibiza.” And they were like, “Hmm, okay, that’s interesting.” So we did a recce, decided we could do it, although we had to drive broadcast satellites to Ibiza. We didn’t trust Spanish ISDN. The first year, it was just Pete, Danny and a couple of guests did programs. The second year, we bolted on Dave Pearce. And then the third year, Radio One went mental and sent everybody. That was when Moyles went. Zoe went. Everybody went.
Is that the year that Lisa I’Anson… Yeah, that was the, “Has anyone seen Lisa?” year.
They were asking for trouble, weren’t they? It cost them a lot of money. They wanted to take everyone, which meant all the staff went as well. I would have just had two teams working on various times during the day, and that would have cut the costs down. But no, they wanted everyone, and it was like that for quite a few years.
Was it inevitable that house music would take over the world? I remember being at one of the New Music Seminars in New York. And all the top boys were on the top table jabbering away with stories and insight, the likes of Marshall Jefferson and all these early adopters. And I remember saying to Pete, “If these boys put songs on these tracks they make, they’d be really dangerous.” And eventually, that did happen, and it allowed that music to open up to a wider audience who don’t all want instrumentals or dubs or whatever. Let’s face it. There are people that need a melody with their music. And in the early days of remixes, some pop act would make a generic record. And then somebody like me would send it to someone like Marshall Jefferson and say, “Turn that into a house record for me, so I can get it played in clubs.” That’s how it rolled.
Did you have to fight to get UK remixers involved? In the early days of Janet Jackson on A&M, she was having all of her stuff done by Shep Pettibone. And we were ringing the Americans going, “Listen, this is fine, but it’s a bit like telling the same joke twice. Can you please let us get one of our guys to do it?” And we got either CJ Mackintosh on his own or him and Dave Dorrell to remix a track. She loved it. Then after that, they let us do it because what we did had more of a European flavour than just another Shep Pettibone remix. It’s always been the same. You do anything to push that record a bit further, and the remix was the tool that you use.
When you look back to the remix mania of the 1990s and triple packs of Dannii Minogue, it did get a bit mental, didn’t it? It got completely out of hand, really. But in those days there were still budgets to be had and you would do anything to get your act into the chart. And if you got it there by selling 3000 12-inches in week one, then that’s the way you did it.
I want to ask you about the splits in the soul scene in the ‘80s, because you had a foot in both camps. Tell me about the adverse reactions to the electronic soul music that was starting to come out in the early ’80s, and to hip hop. Well, it split the DJs as well as the punters, really. A lot of the DJs really didn’t like the step away from what was soul music of that time. At first, there was a bit of a kickback. What we never got into was the electro thing. We did records with drum machines, but we didn’t do electro, but we did do hip hop. And I think most people came round to that. In those days, hip hop was made using samples that we all knew, so there was kind of a perverse familiarity to it. Before you’ve even stuck a needle on, you knew there’s going to be a reference point for people, and it’s just down to them whether they want to take it in and dance to it or not, really.
The first huge one was Doug E. Fresh “The Show”. It was absolutely enormous. At these traditional soul weekenders you’d put Doug E. Fresh on and people would go absolutely ballistic. And that didn’t go down too well with some of the older members of the community. Same with radio, Pete [Tong] and I were deliberately pushing barriers all the time. We’d play hip hop records we thought were relevant or good, and then we did dance stuff. And of course, there was jazz as well. Even Prince was not acceptable for some people, but Pete and I were into that whole Paisley Park thing. We were pushing the barriers a bit on the radio, which helped with the clubs. But yeah, the split. Some people did go off and just do soul clubs instead of clubs that played across the board. But it split the DJs more than anything else, I think.
Was it mostly a generational thing? Yeah, definitely. The older ones were not having it basically, whereas the younger ones, that’s what they were up for. That was their lifeblood, keeping everything moving forward. New music, new genres. So yeah, definitely. Definitely a generation splitter.
I remember reading in Blues & Soul, Frank Elson claiming that it wasn’t soul, it wasn’t soulful To me, it was just music moving forward, music progressing. Did it have to be some sort of fist-clenching indie soul anymore? I don’t think so. We were moving on and looking for new things. I’m not surprised Frank Elson would write that. I’d be more surprised if he said, “Oh, I love all this new stuff that’s coming along.” I remember one kid writing to Blues & Soul because he looked through the back window of my car and I had a couple of Gang of Four cassettes on the back seat, and he thought that was disgusting.
How did it affect the soul scene? Was it like northern soul where some people were only playing classics? There was new soul music for those guys to play. So, there were rooms where people would go and hear that stuff, but there was a group of us that just moved away from it, because we wanted to play other things that to us were a bit more exciting. The soul thing never really went away.
What other records divided people? Gave people a real line in the sand? Particularly the early Def Jam stuff, really. “Rock the Bells”, “My Adidas”, all that classic stuff from Run-DMC, and the Beastie Boys. When I started the Radio London show at 8:30 in the morning, I opened up with “(You Gotta) Fight for Your Right (To Party!)”, just to send a little message to the people at Radio London. People had to make up their minds pretty quickly.
When I interviewed Pete Tong many years ago, he said, “When rap came along, me and Jeff Young became the embarrassment on the bill at those weekenders.” We were the enfant terribles. For example, on a Sunday afternoon we deliberately played Doug E. Fresh, knowing the next bloke on the decks was Robbie Vincent. And Robbie would come on shaking his head, “Oh, fucking hell, they’re playing this shit.” So yeah, we did it deliberately.
Did you feel you were the vanguard of the next generation and these guys were out of touch? It did feel like that. I was in a slightly difficult position because I straddled the generations. I wasn’t a young gun, yet I wasn’t one of the old gits. You know what I mean? I would be siding with the young guns, because that’s what I liked.
How important was the jazz-funk, soul scene in setting the stage for the rave scene that came later? I think we did really set that whole rave thing up. Although people take the piss out of the weekenders, they were early raves, if you see what I mean. Three thousand people in a holiday camp! Because of licensing laws, it was one, two, three, four or five sessions of music over the weekend. And a lot of those early rave DJs came out of that soul scene. When you think of Nicky [Holloway] and Pete and Oakey, Johnny Walker, those boys cut their teeth playing soul records and then developed into their own thing. I think we were the precursor to it. I wouldn’t say I would want credit for anything, but I don’t think what we did got enough recognition in terms of what rolled forward out of it.
“Noone else could do what I was doing at that time, that type of music what I was playing. It attracted the good soul people to come down and have a good boogie, show what they can do,” George Power told BBC documentary The Last Pirates of his time at Crackers nightclub. “People come here to dance, express themselves let themselves go – whether you were gay, straight or bisexual it was just something unique.”
Crackers has made its way into London clubbing folklore for the fact it inspired a generation of soul boys to sally forth and transform the future of British music. With its first-rate musical credentials, it enticed white and black music lovers to come together on the dancefloor like never before, in a scene that helped black kids develop their own sense of Britishness. There were a few clubs around London that were channelling the same aesthetic of danceable and hot-off-the-press jazz, soul and funk – Upstairs at Ronnie Scott’s, the 100 Club, the Electric Ballroom – but it was Crackers, located in the heart of Soho and presided over first by Mark Roman and then the much-revered George Power, that became the scene’s heart and soul.
Back in the early ’70s, as northern soul was thriving in the top half of the UK, a different breed of swing-heavy, funk-inflected soul took hold down South. Moving out from suburban clubs like Chris Hill’s Goldmine in Canvey Island, this blossoming soul movement and its largely white following started gathering for weekenders at venues across the country including Caister and Prestatyn, led by the ‘Soul Mafia’ of Hill and his coterie of likeminded DJs, Robbie Vincent, Greg Edwards, DJ Froggy and a young Pete Tong.
But while these parties concentrated on almost exclusively black music, as the scene grew, black dancers felt edged out. “The Soul Mafia things tended to be white beer boys in T-shirts, dancing to the obvious big records,” says soulboy and Crackers regular Terry Farley. The West End was a similar story, thanks to blatantly racist door policies.
George Power would go on to a long career in radio, launching Kiss FM with Gordon Mac, as well as Mi-Soul, London Greek radio and Crackers Radio
“They wanted the blackness, without the black,” agrees Good Times’ soundsystem DJ and early soul boy Norman Jay. “It was great for white kids to like black music, but they didn’t want black kids in there for some reason.” Norman recalls how things changed as football terrace culture infiltrated the scene. “I can remember the earliest things at the Goldmine in Canvey Island, and it was almost exclusively black. If you look at photos of Canvey Island circa ’74 it’s black. Within a few years the clientele had changed.”
For the black kids who went to Crackers, soul represented a move away from the reggae that was the staple of their neighbourhoods. “I was kind of divided,” says Fabio, one half of the legendary drum and bass duo, Fabio and Grooverider. “I felt reggae and soul music, but in them days, you couldn’t really be both, you had to be one or the other.” So much so that he used to lie about going to soul clubs. “A cousin of mine used to go to soul clubs, and she used to sneak me in and I never used to tell anybody.” Dancer and DJ Cleveland Anderson felt a similar divided loyalty. “It wasn’t we weren’t into reggae, but as soon as I got old enough to go out on my own, I was drawn to the soul.”
Crackers was where many British clubbers experienced a truly mixed crowd for the first time. “Blues parties [all-night ska and reggae house parties] you didn’t meet any white people in there,” says Fabio. “It was 99 percent black. But this was 50/50. That was the first time I’d ever seen that. And the first time I saw colour didn’t really matter. You could go out with a white girl and it weren’t no big thing.”
“Crackers was much more urban, a heavier London,” recalled Gilles Peterson on The Last Pirates. “A blacker London. It was less what I was used to but equally it was really exciting, and it was a whole other world.”
There’s almost no visual record of Crackers. This classic piece of archive was actually shot in Brixton’s Cloud’s club, but it features many of the great dancers of the scene.
The club was slap-bang in the middle of Soho, at the Oxford Street end of Wardour Street. Not much to look at, it was essentially a basement dive that housed a cramped dancefloor for 200 revellers – a stark contrast to some of the more swish West End clubs of the era. “Upon arrival we’d go down a short flight of stairs and the first thing that greeted you was the smell of sausages and chips,” says Farley (the food was a licensing loophole). “The carpets were dirty and sticky. The sound system whilst loud lacked any real clarity and the high end would always leave you with ringing ears the next day.”
“Crackers was more about dancing, it wasn’t to do with girls really,” remembers Soul II Soul’s Jazzie B. “For us it was just purely about the music: getting that early music before anybody else. It was mainly for dancers, because it wasn’t where you came to meet people, it was where the dancers came to burn.”
It was also markedly different from northern soul, a scene based on unearthing rare soul from the ’60s. “The difference between us and those northern kids is that we were into new things,” says Norman Jay. “New music, new sounds, new clothes. We didn’t want to look back. Looking back was rock’n’roll and dinosaurs. We wanted the latest, the hippest.”
And that’s certainly what was delivered at Crackers. George Power would be its best-known DJ, but it was Essex-born Mark Roman who set the wheels in motion in 1973. He was drafted from a residency in Leytonstone to spin records six nights a week, and given carte blanche to play pretty much whatever he wanted – which was anything from deep soul to jazz-funk to fusion to proto-disco.
It was on Tuesday nights when it started to get serious – with Roman impressing collectors and dancers alike. On Tuesdays he would play US imports only and had no hesitation in sitting the jazz-fusion of Grover Washington Jr next to the out and out funk of Bobby Byrd and Johnny ‘Guitar’ Watson.
Other tunes he made his own include Juggy Jones’ ‘Inside America’, The Blackbyrds’ ‘Rock Creek Park’, Donald Byrd’s ‘Change Makes You Wanna Hustle’, David Ruffin’s ‘Walk Away from Love’, Dooley Silverspoon’s ‘As Long As You Know,’ Fatback Band’s ‘Going Home To See My Baby’, Black Blood’s ‘A.I.E.’ and Crystal Glass’ ‘Crystal World’.
“He never mixed but kind of segued the tracks, so it was this seamless mixture of funk and soul,” says Fabio. “It was amazing.”
It took a while to get going. “Tuesday nights had a big fat zero people when I started,” Roman told Terry Farley. But then it all changed. “One night in the middle of winter we had over a thousand people there… the walls were wet with water dripping down them. That night was like no other night I have ever known, it was so rammed I used to have to piss in a glass under the decks I had no chance of getting through the crowd and back in time.”
And while Tuesday attracted the diehards, it was the Friday lunchtime dance sessions that made Crackers famous. “I used to play all my new stuff,” remembers Mark Roman on SixMillionSteps.com. “Somehow it just went down. The hot summer of ’76 was when it really peaked.” It was customary to see kids bunking off school, uniforms screwed up in duffle bags, while the grown-ups awarded themselves a half-day. DJ and producer Ashley Beedle remembers changing into his Bowie trousers in the school toilets at lunchtime. And social media is awash with similar stories. “Went every Sunday and Friday lunchtimes while still at school 1979/80,” recalls Crackers regular Lynn Gant. “Went in lunch break when started work in Holborn, then stayed until 3pm. Told friend to tell boss I was ill!”
As well as the music, Crackers was known for its forward-thinking fashions, with many an outfit patently ahead of its time. Much of the fashions that would become known as punk started here. Bondage trousers, army surplus, fluorescent colours, clear plastic jelly sandals. There was an overall atmosphere of tolerance and freedom. “It wasn’t a gay club per se, but it was hip and fashionable,” Norman Jay told RBMA’s Stephen Titmus. “Yes, the music was brilliant, but it was the coming together of different social groups and races. That was what was groundbreaking.”
By the mid-’70s, Crackers was pulling in punters on Saturdays and Sundays as well as Friday lunchtimes, as dancers flitted from one West End soul venue to another. But while they may have been dedicated to the cause, they weren’t helping Crackers turn a profit, and many remember when they turned the cold-water taps off to encourage spending at the bar. This coincided with a clash between Roman and new management who were not only unhappy at the low bar takings but were also less than delighted with his music choices, and so it was that in late 1976 Roman and Crackers went their separate ways and he moved back to Leytonstone’s Jaws, taking half the crowd with him.
As well as George Power, a fair few DJs passed through Crackers’ doors, including Andy Hunter, Pepe, and latterly, Paul ‘Trouble’ Anderson. “Andy Hunter, he was just amazing,” recalls Cleveland Anderson. “He was a white guy, skinny, kinda tall. Boy he could throw music down. He seemed to have this ability to pull out the new tunes that the heads would like and also the girls would like.” But he soon became disillusioned with the way that the music world was going and when he left George Power stepped in to the limelight.
Power had been thrust into the multi-ethnic community of North London when he arrived from Greece aged just 15, and before long had immersed himself into DJ culture, ending up with quite a following at a club called Bumbles in Wood Green. When he left here for Crackers in 1976, Power brought with him a gay and black crowd. The music had moved from the slower funk vibe into disco, and he was quite a bit older than the kids on his dancefloor. Despite seemingly corny shoutouts – ‘Wang dang dooey, shoobedy on down’ – his music and his over-the-top flamboyance endeared himself to the Crackers’ crowd. They knew that under his wing they would hear the best music, dance in peace and come together.
“A very strange guy,” says Jazzie B. “Quite hard and a little bit militant. But very cutting edge, and he was very into that whole black thing, the whole black scene.” And this gave Crackers a big pull. “He was totally on the button, understood what black kids were about,” says Jay. “He became a legend. In our eyes, inner city urban kids, George Power was more important than any Chris Hill or Robbie Vincent. They didn’t mean anything to us. They weren’t as cutting-edge, or as up to the minute as George.”
Even his predecessor agrees. “Over many years he showed he was a true soul man,” Mark Roman told Soul Survivors magazine (??). “George was more of a person’s DJ than a lone wolf like myself. George had the knack of getting others involved, and that was his strength I guess.” And he played everything from Philly soul to jazz-funk to the staples of what were to become rare groove, including Reuben Wilson’s ‘Got to Get Your Own’. “When George took over, it went slightly more specialised,” says Cleveland Anderson. “George could go half the night playing jazz. You had to be serious to stick with it. Some people – not me – but some people would be like ‘What’s George doing, man?’. Good jazz, it would be good stuff.”
And when the music got more ‘hardcore’ so did the vibe. “The amount of girls at the club diminished and the vibe became edgier,” says Farley. “Full of young kids from some of London’s toughest estates, peace and love was not the mantra.” The trouble came from all quarters. “Towards the end of the ’70s a lot of the reggae clubs were having trouble, the girls were leaving those clubs and coming to the soul clubs,” says Cleveland Anderson. “Crackers started having problems with reggae people coming down and George used to play a whole night of jazz just to get rid of them!” But Power was no fool when it came to looking after himself, and the club. “He had the hardest geezers around him,” remembers Jazzie B. “And always women you’d never fuck with on the door. At the end of the day no matter what you did you wouldn’t mess about with the scene.”
And while dancing was always essential to Crackers, it was when Power came in that the serious dancers really took their place at the forefront. To dance here was not a casual thing. “There was a lot of rivalry in the dancing,” remembers Cleveland Anderson. “The dancefloor was tiny. Unless you could dance, really dance, you would not step over that line, you’d dance on the carpet at the side.” The style of dancing was a real contrast to the high-octane amphetamine driven Northern soul. “The southern style was tight and precise: feet made rapid tap movements, knees were bent, hips sashayed, shoulders rolled, heads bobbed,” wrote Robert Elms in The Way We Wore. “The whole effect was somewhere between boxing and bopping. And if you couldn’t cut it, you didn’t go anywhere near the floor.”
For some the dancing wasn’t just recreation, it was their day job too. “A lot of them used to go to dance classes, Pineapple studios, ballet Rambert” says Norman Jay. “All those guys were the first black dancers to feature in pop videos.”
Horace, Franklin, Trevor Shakes, Tommy McDonald, and future DJ star Paul ‘Trouble’ Anderson: the best dancers enjoyed a fame that often eclipsed the DJ. And competition between them was fierce. Cleveland Anderson recalls a time when Horace came down to reclaim his crown. “There was talk that Horace was losing it and he’d stop coming to Crackers for a while. Then he came to one Sunday. He walked in halfway through the night with this hot bird, put his leather bag down, grabs a chair, puts it right in the middle of the dancefloor and starts dancing with the chair. He was on it, around it, flicking it up. He just started freaking out and everyone backed off. The record finished, he put the chair back, grabbed his leather bag and walked out of the club. It was as though he was proving a point. Next day everyone was like, ‘Did you hear about Horace last night?’ He was the talk of the scene. That was how much a dancer meant in London then.”
George was good to his dancers. “He would use them to break certain records and focus upon them during the session, made them feel special and they stayed loyal,” says Farley. He was also generous to Anderson, encouraging him to make the move from dancer to DJ. “That’s how I started, basically, as a warmup DJ, and I did that for years and years and years for no money. It wasn’t about the money, I just wanted to play my records.”
The great Paul ‘Trouble’ Anderson rose from the dancefloor of Crackers to become one of London’s best-known DJs through the ’90s
By the late ’70s, 230 Wardour Street was leaning heavily towards punk as its Vortex nights started to become more well-attended. Crackers finally closed its doors in 1981 as the key players were let loose taking the soul, jazz-funk scene to the next level. Norman Jay went on to build the Good Times soundsystem with his brother Joey; Jazzie B formed the Soul II Soul collective and set up residency at Covent Garden’s Africa Centre; Fabio went from soul boy to jungle forefather; and Paul Trouble Anderson became a key DJ on the rave scene. It’s fascinating to consider what direction these pioneers might have gone in without their time at Crackers. As for George Power, he continued his mission to bring the dancefloor to the forefront of popular culture as he helped set up Kiss FM and of course continued to DJ, eventually setting up Crackers radio. Sadly, neither Power nor Roman are with us today, but their legacy most definitely lives on. “At the time you didn’t know that in 20-odd years you’d still be referring to this place. It was just a place you went to on a Saturday afternoon and had a wicked time in there,” says Fabio. Norman Jay sums it up best. “We felt this was home, this was our place,” he says. “We belonged, we were wanted.”
The Crackers community is very much alive and well, with Crackers Radio broadcasting wondrous soul 24-hours daily, and throwing parties and events in the heart of Soho.
Francis Grasso was the original. If DJing is about playing a meaningful set, rather than a jumble of tunes – then he was the first. He wasn’t the first to mix and overlap records, but as he stitched rock, soul, Latin and African tracks together to keep an adoring crowd on the floor, he showed how DJing could be a performance. Before Francis, disc jockeys were waiters, bringing a menu of familiar tracks. After him, the DJ was the lord of the dance – creating a rhythm-heavy narrative from personal taste and force of personality. In New York, as the sixties ended, he stole a job from society discaire Terry Noel, added a love of thundering drums, and pioneered beat-mixing by slipping the needle into the grooves at just the right moment. As the founding father of the scene that would become disco, in clubs including Salvation, The Haven and most importantly Sanctuary – a church that was deconsecrated on a weekly basis – Francis Grasso created modern DJing by showing everyone how much was possible.
In a pre-internet age, no-one he’d inspired could tell us if he was still alive. In the end we found him in the phone book and I took the subway an hour into Brooklyn, cassette recorder in hand, to meet outside a Carvel ice cream store. Skeletally trim, with a raspy beat-up voice and a mane of fuzzy grey hair, he took me straight into Joe’s bar where I found myself interviewing the godfather of DJing over glasses of draft Bud at 10am.
Tragically, Grasso was found dead in his apartment on March 18, 2001, just as his foundational role in the craft of DJing was becoming more widely known.
Interviewed in Brooklyn by Frank, 4.2.99
So you’re from NY originally? Brooklyn. Born and bred, lived in many different places.
And you started off dancing, didn’t you? Yep. One of the original Trude Heller go-go boys. Dancing on a little platform with a live band. It was in the Village, Sixth Avenue, on the corner of 9th Street. You had 20 minutes on and 20 minutes off, and you could only move your ass side to side because if you went back and forth you’d bang off the wall and fall right onto the table you were dancing over.
What were you wearing? Slacks, you know and you’d have a partner, and they’d play ‘Cloud Nine’ by the Temptations for about 38 minutes [laughs]. It was the most exhausting job I’d ever had in my life. I was beat that night.
What was Trude Heller’s like? Was it ritzy? Kind of. Kind of like date oriented. Couples, very few recorded records, and she was just somebody who became famous. It was the hardest 20 dollars I ever made in my life. I’m going home, my muscles were killing me. I remember on the train it was…
How did you get into that? What? Dancing? I got three major motorcycle accidents, so I couldn’t co-ordinate my feet and the doctor suggested for therapy that I try dancing.
So it was a therapeutic thing? Yeah, sort of. Very very wacky sort of way. I never thought I’d go down that sort of trail, cos I’d gone to college for literature, and I never thought I’d go down the trail…
Featured dancers on the ledge at Trude Hellers, 1966.
How did dancing turn into DJing? Well, I was managing a clothing store on Lexington Avenue between 57th Street and 58th Street. It was upstairs. And the bartenders used to come in from a club called Salvation II, and I’d become familiar with Salvation One and Bradley Pierce [manager of Salvation and previously Ondine, where he’d been the first in New York to put on The Doors]. So they said come by. Back then it was couples only. And there was a disk jockey named Terry Noel in Salvation II, and I went there on a Friday night, and he didn’t show up for work. Which later I found out when he showed up at 1.30 and he’d taken acid. It’s not a good start, to a Friday night! And they so liked me they asked me if I wanted to try.
You were dancing there for money or just… No just dancing there.
And the club had the records at that time; they didn’t belong to the DJ? The club had the records. For a long time that was the way it always was.
Rek-O-Kut turntables, like this top-of-the-line B12, were the platters of choice for ’60s radio stations, loved for their massive motors and fast start times.
What was the set-up? What were the turntables? It was a Rek-O-Kut fader with two Rek-O-Kut turntables and the fader was just somewhere in the middle of both turntables. Probably not even in existence now, like radio quality at the time, motor driven. Not belt driven.
And all you had was a switch to cut between the two? No. It was a knob, a fader. It was a fader, so you could do mixes. Sort of. If you knew what you were doing. But this was my first night
Do you remember the first record you played? I don’t know, but I had a hell of a good time. And they paid me a lot of money, and I said “Wow, they paid me this much money,” and I would have paid them. I had that much fun. I know when Terry showed up he was fired.
Because he was unreliable and you were the new kid? ? Well. I played better too. He used to do really weird things. Like he’d have the whole dancefloor going and then put on Elvis Presley. I kept em juiced. He would play bizarre records… He’s still bizarre, but anyway. But he showed up at 1.30, which is now Saturday morning, the club closes at 4. It’s not the right time to show up for work. And the owners had probably had enough of his attitude.
Can you remember the kind of records you were playing the first few times? ’Proud Mary’ [by Ike and Tina Turner] was very popular. I played things like ‘96 Tears’, [by ? & The Mysterians] Temptations, Four Tops, Supremes. There was no Jackson 5 then. Uh…
Can you remember the date when you first played? Ooh no.
You remember the year. 1967 or ’68. Then Salvation II closed. So I was sort of out of work. I was doing air conditioning work. And I was at this club in Union Square called Tarots, which was on 14th Street. And I asked them if they needed a disk jockey one night and they said go. And he just had a switch, he didn’t have a fader. He just had a switch; you went from one to the other. And back then it was basically the same tunes. ‘Knights In White Satin’ was very popular.
How long did you play there? Until the bouncer from the Sanctuary came to the club on a Sunday night. He turned around and said to me, “You know the guy we’ve got at The Sanctuary really sucks, so would you like to, you know, audition?” I said sure. And at the time I had Brian Auger & the Trinity and Julie Driscoll. I went there and they were practising for a fashion show, with models. And in eight records I had the job. I thought if I can’t do it in eight I’m not going to do it all night long. Next thing I knew I was at the Sanctuary.
And they were the wild years. No. Those were the quieter years. It was when the Sanctuary was straight and it was mostly couples like Salvation II. But really it was what was really funny was that the manager of Sanctuary used to be the manager of Trude Heller’s. And we all thought the day manager and the night manager hated each other. But in reality they were shacking up, and they took off with like $175,000. [There was another scandal at the club in 1972 when manager Shelly Bloom was the victim of a mafia hit, two weeks before the club was closed for 33 drug busts in three nights.]
The Sanctuary, at 407 W43rd Street, now the Westside Theatre, was a Lutheran church turned nightclub by impresario Arnie Lord, with a decadently irreligious theme conceived by Liberian economics student Francois Massaquoi.
The DJ booth was on the marble altar. You can see Francis top right DJing in front of the organ pipes.
This is from Sanctuary? The original Sanctuary, the original owners. The one on the church. It’s the one that was called the Church first; open two weeks and the Catholic Church got an injunction to close us down [In fact the veto was from the NY Buildings Dept who refused a permit under it’s original name The Church ]. Cos we had this mural that I would face that was unbelievably pornographic. And what was interesting about it was the devil; this guy painted a distinct feature of it was that no matter where you stood in the club he was looking at you. Angels were fucking and… So what they did was they changed the name to the Sanctuary and reprinted everything, and they stuck plastic fruit in various places, bunch of grapes here, you had red grapes, you had green grapes.
To cover everything up. Yeah, cos it used to be some kind of German protestant church. But cos this guy took the $175,000 they had to change hands. So they wanted to make the first gay bar.
This is what year? 1969? And they fired everybody, cos they didn’t want women. Cos this was after Stonewall, suddenly… Well, it was the first time they’d taken the concept of a gay bar without a jukebox.
And not being secret… Well, I remember the Stonewall. I was at the Haven the night of the Stonewall riot. I remember seeing the police come in a city bus. It was like wacky. They locked the doors, the cops were clubbing people, they were throwing bricks and bottles. It was a wacked out night that night. Anyway, they were gonna keep me, to try me out or whatever. So it became evident that I had the job. We used to close Mondays and Tuesdays, now we’re open seven days a week. And we’re packed.
I used to go to the men’s room, and customers always tried to pick me up, so I remember one time I was in a urinal pissing and this guy was in a business suit, and he said something to me, I said, employer policy is that employees cannot date customers. Then I started going to the ladies’ room cos there were no ladies. I remember one time there was a fellow named Alan who used to stand by the door and greet people. And somebody was doing an article with somebody and they said do you get straight people here, and he went “Yeah, there he goes.”
I had such power at that time that two female friends of mine came to visit. They were just friends, at two o’clock in the morning, a weekday night, and I had James Brown Live At The Apollo on, 25 minutes and 32 seconds, and I said if you don’t let them in, you better get somebody up there to change that record. So after about five minutes of this stalemate, they let them in. Jane Fonda filmed the movie Klute there. She had a big argument with Seymour and Shelly because they wouldn’t permit lesbians in the club. I’m the disc jockey in the movie, and I had like three weeks work, doing the whole thing. It was fascinating to watch. Only thing is I was doing double duty, I was showing up at the movie set at 7.30, driving home, to Brooklyn, walking my dog, shave and showering, going back to work, till 4 o’clock in the morning. It took its toll.
I bet. It was like summertime and they would have a big table with coffee and bagels and doughnuts and everything that you wanted. And then the cops came in, cos to get the feel of real hookers they had real hookers. Then they sent the cops in cos there was a lot of drug-dealing going on – in between takes! It was a lively crowd!
So you didn’t play at the Sanctuary that long? Oh, about a year. Then I remember when I was working at the Haven, the [Sanctuary] manager, Michael Crennan called me up and said somebody been fooling around with the cartridge in the back. And could I take a look. I said I could stop up there before I go down to the Haven to work. And when I walked in and the customers saw me behind in the booth, they all applauded, there was this big cheer. I’m like [shrugs] I’m not staying.
From what I’ve read, the Sanctuary was a wild place. Did it change? It got wilder. In the summertime they were having sex in people’s hallways.
Not in the club? Did that go on? Only me! ’Cos we were open all night. We’re a juice bar now. We lost the liquor license. So they had to be doing something. We were staying open till 12 o’clock in the afternoon – Saturday afternoon. And Sunday afternoon, and they’d be so smashed, in the summertime they’d be in peoples vestibules, in their hallways… It was a very. I have articles on it. I still have them. Daily News used to call it a drugs supermarket.
What drugs were people doing back then? Back then? The biggest drug people were doing back then was Quaaludes, the small ones, 300 milligrams, the pills. And you had the capsule which was 400 milligrams, and back then they went for 5 dollars apiece. I had a pharmacist friend of mine and he used to get them in a sealed bottle and I’d sell them for a buck a piece, to my friends, who came in. made a lot of swaps for tapes, back in those days. It got pretty… I’d be out walking my dog; people like scream out your name on the street, in the supermarket. I would do average things; they’d yell “Francisss”
But that must have been great! It must have just been people you knew from the clubs. You’d be surprised. If you put an average of 1500 people in a room, for however many years I was playing: 17 years, a lot of people are gonna get to see you… I made a lot of fans in New Jersey. I made a lot of fans everywhere.
Cos you were pretty much the first DJ that had that kind of following, there were guys before you, what were you doing differently? There wasn’t really guys before me. Nobody had really just kept the beat going. They’d get them to dance then change records, you had to catch the beat again. It never flowed. And they didn’t know how to bring the crowd to a height, and then level them back down, and to bring them back up again. It was like an experience, I think that was how someone put it. And the more fun the crowd had, the more fun I had. See I really loved the atmosphere. I just wouldn’t have wanted to have been a customer. I loved being in the room, but I couldn’t see myself like being amongst one of the customers, being on the dancefloor, because I couldn’t handle that. I really hate crowds. But it’s fun to absorb it.
So how did you develop all of that? I was a dancer! I was a dancer, so it was rhythmically… not hard. And I play a few instruments.
Really, what do you play? Well, I started on the accordion. I was young then. Then I went to guitar and then drums and saxophone.
You say musically it wasn’t a problem, and I can understand that. If you’re a dancer you know what you want to dance to, but technically, technically it must have been a real problem… with the equipment you had back then… Today you’ve got a disc jockey that puts on a 20 minute 12 inch. I’m changing records every 2 minutes and 12 seconds, on average. These guys don’t really work today. Unh-uh. I mean if you’re playing mostly 45s… I had like certain bathroom records, certain records you played only when you had to go to the bathroom.
What were they? James Brown Live At the Apollo, then I used to play the Befour album, Brian Auger & the Trinity. I played a lot of English music. I had gotten a lot of imports over my time. I would hear things and I would have a deal with the record store where I used to live. He would let me take in all the new 45s, go in the back with this little portable Victrola, listen to them.
So technically, you pretty much invented slipcueing right. How did that come about? Well, to tell you the truth, when Bob Lewis was a disc jockey on the radio, at CBS, before they went to oldies, way back when they played rock and roll, the engineer had taught me. But I found with the two slide faders, that I had gotten so good, cos you see the reflection off the record, you can see the different shades… of the black. And I got so good I would just catch it on the run.
You would just drop the needle on it? No I could catch it in the beat.
But that’s by holding the record. No, without. The records spinning, you put the needle in it, right into it. And you just practised. I guess I practised live. I guess. You start out with records like, say, The Staple Singers’ ‘I’ll Take You There,’ now that’s a slow beat, and you build slowly and slowly, till you get them dancing fast. Like I used to play ‘Immigrant Song’ by Led Zeppelin, I loved playing that. I discovered a lot of records too: Abaco Dream, which was really Sly And The Family Stone, [a tune] called ‘Life And Death In G&A’ was a biggie, discovered James Brown’s ‘Sex Machine’.
So when did slip cueing come in with felt pads? Not till around the disco convention started. And the Bozak started coming in, the Bozak mixers. But by this time I had already been tired of disco, because they had basically put everything except Mary Had A Little Lamb with a disco beat. It was just the same sound; there was no variance. Went to a club, it was like moronic.
So what year were you able to beat mix, and completely segue? I was able to beat mix right away.
That must have been so difficult with the records back then. It was very difficult.
What were your peak records? ’You’re The One’ by Little sister, which was also Sly And The Family Stone. ‘Hot Pants’ was very big, by James Brown, when it came out.
How long were you at the Haven? Oh, I think about ’69 to er… things were starting to happen. People were approaching me with business deals and stuff, always wanting to make a dollar quick. And I always loved that phrase; “well we don’t have enough money!” And I would make a deal with them, could you invest it in equipment, cos I had always believed I was only as good as my equipment. The only limitations I would put on myself was the equipment I was working with.
Who were you working with equipment-wise, Alex Rosner? At first it was Alex Rosner, then it was Dick Long. Not Casey that much, he came in later on. Richard Long used to be Alex Rosner’s fix-it man. If something happened during the night, he’d send Dick Long out. Then they had some kind of disagreement or whatever and Richard, he outbid him, he outperformed him, and he out-equipment-wised him. Dick and I used to have some really serious conversations about… Dick was into perfecting it and making it more and more reliable.
What was the first system he built for you? ? Who Richard Long? Um, I would say the one I had in my apartment, when the equipment was stolen along with my records. It was called Disco Associates; it was a Beyer with a triple volume control, single headset. Richard was really on the cutting edge. And gave me separate microphone, and he was always toying with improving it.
Was it a big celebrity scene at Sanctuary? Did famous people come in? Oh yeah, all the time. I dated Liza Minnelli for a while. When it’s people like that you’d just nod hello. Recognition is like… people expect it to be really cool, but a lot of times it isn’t cos you’re expected to be always on. My second fiancée took a picture of me once, waking up. My hair was like this, you know, She’s caught me in the middle of a yawn. And she went ”This is the real Francis.” Because I was so vain and my hair always had to be impeccable. Even my dungarees had a crease. I’m serious.
The Haven was where sound engineer Alex Rosner installed Rosie, the first stereo mixer designed for nightclub use, developed with Grasso in mind.
That’s what you wore in the booth. At Sanctuary? No, I wore dress clothes. But at the Haven I made dungarees popular. The 501 Levis. Button fly.
Were you able to see what your influence was on other DJs? Yeah. I taught, two of the most prominent: Michael Cappello and Steve D’Acquisto.
How did you meet up with them? Hanging out. From them coming in as customers. And I basically needed somebody reliable and who knew what they were basically doing, at least had an idea. I had to teach somebody. I was teaching in secret because it was really hard to do what I do. I may teach you the basic moves, but it’s your interpretation that makes or breaks you. Then I had that business of opening Club Francis. I had this idea of starting like the apex technical school – see that commercial? – said I wanted to open a disc jockey school they said I was crazy. Then we had Club Francis which was the old Cafe Wha.
What was the story behind that? I forget what year.
But that was after everything else? It had to be around ’73, ’74. I knew a lot of famous people. Knew Jimi Hendrix very well, fact when he died, his main old lady, after she flew his body back to Seattle, when she came back to New York, she moved in with me. She wasn’t a fiancée, a little off the wall! For my… Not too stable. But nobody was stable back then.
What kind of kick did you get out of it? When you first played. It was just feeling the excitement the electricity that was in the air. It was just it was phenomenal. I said I would pay them (they didn’t know it). It was that much fun. It wasn’t until the middle ’70s when everybody got into disco and Saturday Night Fever, and then it became so routine and mundane, and everybody wanted to be a disc jockey. Like hey, everybody’s a disc jockey. Everybody and their mother’s a disc jockey actually.
Tell me about Club Francis. Did you actually open it in the end? Yeah, we did. I dissolved the partnership.
Wasn’t the story that you got really badly beaten up? What was that? That was opening up Club Francis. My nose has been broken about 12 times. Least that’s when I stopped counting.
That was from another club? Yeah, the Machine.
Cos you were so successful. Yeah they didn’t want me to leave. And they had the Mafia sit-down. The guy in the corner had instructions not to hit me, but to scare me. Only the guy they sent got carried away.
Shit! How bad was it? Kept me home for three months. Bad. I remember sitting in St. Vincent’s hospital. I told the cops that I was went out to get a breath of fresh air, from the club, and these guys were coming up McDougal Street, and they hit me with beer bottles. And I remember these two doctors, I was in the emergency room of St Vincent’s hospital in Manhattan, said, “shame, must have been a good looking guy.” I had to reinvent myself so to speak, sitting at home for three months. And really when I walked my dog people thought I was Frankenstein. I was a teenage Frankenstein looking with the bandages the whole bit.
Was that the end of Club Francis? No that was the beginning. That was the first night of Club Francis.
You were home for three months. What happened with the club? It went on…
Where was it? On MacDougal Street, over the old Cafe Wha,
And were they the real wild years. I mean if there were women in there…? Oh, I was caught so many times getting oral sex in the booth it was disgusting.
While you were playing? I would tell the girls bet you can’t make me miss a beat. Gave them a little challenge and away they go! In fact one time the manager waked in. Michael Krenne. He walks into the disc jockey booth, in the Sanctuary, and he sees this girl on her knees, and I says, don’t bother me now. If you’re gonna yell, yell later.
What were the other rewards? You got pretty well paid? Oh I was making a lot of money. I think my drug bill was… at that time drugs were a lot cheaper, was about two-fifty a week. And that was for what I’d give away. I’d go to work I’d have 20 joints. I’d buy pot by the pound, bring 20 joints to work with me. Buy an ounce of speed.
Did you get any interest from the record companies recognising the promotional value of what you did? Yeah, some, but back then everyone was caught up in their own thing. It was like I’m doing my thing, leave me alone.
I know you were noted for your mixing. What sort of records were you mixing together? I had been known to make mixes like Chicago Transit Authority’s ‘I’m A Man’, the Latin part, into ‘Whole Lotta Love’ by Led Zeppelin. I played a lot of African music. I started African music in nightclubs. Michael Olatunji’s ‘Drums Of Passion’, which bothered me when Santana came out because they didn’t give Michael Olatunji credit for Jingo, and it’s not even pronounced that way.
What were some of the other big mixes that you would do? I was responsible for bringing Osibisa’s ‘Music For Gong Gong’, Earth Wind And Fire, ‘Sweet Sweetback’s Badaasssss Song’. Mitch Ryder went with the Memphis sound. Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels went to Memphis and it was called the Mitch Ryder Experiment, which was very good.
Did you ever have two copies of the same things and extend things? ‘You’re The One’ [by Little Sister] was similar, with part one and part two on the other side.
So how would you work that? Well, you always get two copies, cos you only had like two minutes.
You had two copies of everything? Mostly. If they were really big, like James Brown’s ‘Hot Pants’, that was big. Cos people wanted to dance , it’s summertime, the tube tops were in, no bras, the whole bit.
If you had two copies, how long would you work it? I’d never push it more than three times. On Little Sister’s ‘You’re The One’, part one ended musically, part two would begin with a scream, so you could blend right into the scream, and then go back to ‘You’re The One’. Or the scream twice. Play it twice, part two, flip it over and play it, twice. They didn’t know I was playing two 45s.
But you didn’t cut it up any more. You didn’t say right I’m gonna play the intro, then another ontro, that kind of thing. Did you do that? Occasionally. It would depend. I just basically tried everything there was to try.
When did you call it a day? 1980, 81.
And that was because…? I got disgusted… this bullshit. And the people had changed. As it turns out I was lucky to get out, cos it was just the advent of AIDS and I had always thought that AIDS would develop into a heterosexual disease too. And Richard Long died of AIDS. I lost 38 friends. Then I found out Richard Long died, it was 39, all of AIDS.
So what’s your greatest memory behind the booth? I think its that one night, when I went in to fix the cartridge when they just saw me up there and applause just started. People stood up; the house lights were all on.
Did you ever make tapes and sell them? ? I traded. For clothing. I’d make like cassettes for clothing and things like that. But as far as going into making a tape, like I’d do it for friends. If somebody… Albert Goldman had a fourth of July party one time; I made a tape, reel to reel that he played at his party.
You were friends with him? Yeah.
Did he get it right in his book, Disco? Is that all correct? Basically he got it right. The Penthouse article that it was taken from, my mother went out and bought so many copies. She had framed the picture of me in Penthouse. Its like a centrefold, they took the staples out. So you see this naked broad Ginger and then the next page is me.
How come you never wrote a book about it all? It’s not over yet. My life is an adventure.
What do you think makes a great DJ? A lot of persistence. And a lot of being aware of your surroundings, and you gotta have a natural feel for rhythm. I mean guys that work at weddings they work four or five hours they get paid 500 dollars. I went to two weddings. I sounded better than that practising.
What makes a bad DJ then? [laughs] The wrong records.
We licensed this amazing photo (by Slim Aarons) for the new edition of Last Night a DJ Saved My Life, but we knew very little about Slim Hyatt, shown here DJing at the Egyptian-themed Shepheard’s in New York’s Drake Hotel in 1964, other than the important fact he was America’s first discothèque DJ, having introduced the French-derived craft at Le Club on New Year’s Eve 1960. The only source we had was Albert Goldman’s book Disco. Now, thanks to the mighty powers of the internet, and the tireless detective work of our friends Mark and Barney at Rocksbackpages, we know a lot more. Check out the 1965 piece from Hit Parader below. As well as a night out with Slim, it contained another nugget of gold: the mention of Annette Clark and Orell Gaynor, discaires at swanky members club L’Interdit.
Slim Hyatt was a former military man from Panama who was butler to pianist and bandleader Peter Duchin and who fell into the role of pioneering club DJ by accident. When wealthy French hotelier Oliver Coquelin opened Le Club, the first Parisian style nightclub in New York, he asked Duchin to find him a DJ and Duchin recommended Hyatt. At 416 East 55th Street, Le Club opened its doors on New Year’s Eve, 1960 with Hyatt at the turntables. Musically, however, things didn’t go so well that first night. We’ll let Goldman pick up the story:
Opening night at Le Club (1960), from Disco, by Albert Goldman, 1977
The society girls were delighted by the host’s good taste and found the ladies’ room especially kicky: on the vanity was a one-gallon jug of Arpège secured to the table by a gold-link chain. The men were impressed by the clubby atmosphere and the wine list. The plan of entertainment was to start the evening off on a low key by playing the then-fashionable continental music (which had taken hold in America thanks to the currently popular French and Italian films), then escalate gradually to more and more lively strains till the belles and the beaux were doing the Twist.
Everything went to plan and the opening was adjudged a success, but Coquelin was deeply aggrieved by the music, which instead of describing a smooth arc of mounting excitement, started and stopped, faltered and fumferred, as if the discaire hadn’t the faintest idea of what he was doing. In fact, he hadn’t.
America’s first disco DJ was a very pleasant and deferential black gentleman named Slim Hyatt. He had been recruited for the club by society bandleader Peter Duchin. Coquelin had asked his friend Peter for an unemployed musician to spin the discs. Duchin had replied: ‘I have just the man you want.’ When everything went wrong on opening night, Coquelin called Hyatt on the carpet. ‘What sort of instrumaint do you play?’ he demanded. ‘As a matter of fact, I don’t play any,’ confessed the embarrassed Hyatt. ‘Then, you are a dansair?’ queried Coquelin. Again the reply was in the negative. ‘A singair?’ persisted the perplexed proprietor. ‘No, sir,’ replied Hyatt. ‘As a matter of fact, I am Mr Duchin’s butler. You see he didn’t have the money to pay me jes now, so he said I should take this job.’ Coquelin hit the ceiling, but after he had tried a couple of real musicians with uniformly dismal results, he went back to Hyatt and gradually trained him in the old French art of spinning.
French New Yorker, founder of Le Club and Cheetah, Oliver Coquelin
Slim Hyatt, New York’s first discothèque DJ (and former butler) at Le Club.
Coquelin, known as ‘Disco Daddy’, would go on to open a series of society nightclubs, most famously the kaleidoscopic Cheetah in 1966. Hyatt continued as a DJ and after his shaky start, by 1965 was an impressive forebear to DJs like Terry Noel and Francis Grasso, ‘creating moods, manipulating crowds, playing God in the universe that is Shepheard’s,’ as we read here in this vivid snapshot.
Dancing in New York, From Hit Parader magazine, by Jane Heil January 1965,
SOMETHING’S happened to dancing that never happened before, all at once several million people of all ages, on several continents, have discovered that their hips can do all kinds of wonderful new things they hadn’t even thought possible. Why? Some say it’s the sound: Ray Charles, the Beatles, Trini Lopez. Some say it’s the high cost of floor space; you can’t move your feet so all that’s left are your hips and arms. And there are others who will tell you it’s because boys don’t want to dance with girls… because dancing this way expresses our turbulence and releases our tensions… because teens are setting the standards these days.
Everybody has a theory — but what it all boils down to is this: the whole world’s doing the Frug, the Watusi and the Monkey and having a ball!
I recently spent three weeks around New York looking, listening — and dancing. Here’s what’s happening at the swingingest places in town.
SHEPHEARD’S Shepheard’s is the most popular place in New York, and don’t accidentally stroll down those two little steps between the bar and the tables, or it’ll cost you four dollars. It’s only been open since New Year’s Eve, and it hasn’t had a less-than-capacity evening since. It’s the only true discotheque, with no live music at all, only records. There used to be live music: six musicians who’d switch off, three playing along with every record. But then the union had to find out about it, and now there aren’t any more musicians at Shepheard’s.
But there is Slim Hyatt, a popeyed Panamanian who presides over Shepheard’s three turntables and 2,000 records. I slithered around in back to talk to him, and believe me, he’s an artist. He doesn’t just play records; he creates moods, he manipulates crowds, he plays God in the universe that is Shepheard’s. ‘I got to keep them on the floor,’ Slim says, in his slightly manic but very personable way. ‘I got to keep them dancing.’
‘Do you introduce each song like a disc jockey?’ ‘No. No time for talkin’. Talkin’ kills the whole scene.’ Slim looks through a peephole at the dancers, studies their reactions to his music like a scientist studying the reactions of animals undergoing an experiment. ‘I start to compile the whole thing together… minute I see them fading away, I change it. My job is to keep all people on the floor,’ he reiterates, sliding records on turntables, looking at ‘his’ dancers, turning knobs, gauging, judging. ‘You got to pick the right moment, the right time. I might even play a bunny hop — if it was the right time! The whole thing is psychic.’
What’s big at Shepheard’s? ‘French songs… The Beatles…mambo… cha cha. This one’s good: “Where Did Our Love Go,” by the Supremes. I know music,’ Slim says, watching his turntables and, like a puppeteer, using his music to control the people dancing out in front.
Shepheard’s at the Drake Hotel, NYC, 1964
THE PEPPERMINT LOUNGE It all started with the Twist, and the Twist started at the Peppermint lounge. After nearly four years, they’re both still going strong. The place was packed. The twisters were twisting, Sharon Gregg was singing, the Epics were playing, the tape machine was blasting, and I was sitting there wondering where you do an interview in a place that’s never quiet.
In the kitchen, turned out to be where. Among the glasses and the waiters and the sinks, Ralph Saggase told me how it was in those days. Saggase, a former policeman who come out of retirement to try his hand at running a nightclub, showed me a Cholly Knickerbocker column dated Friday, October 6, 1961. Dukes, duchesses, millionaires and just plain movie stars were coming every night, it said, to do the Peppermint’s own dance called the ‘Twist.’
Well, you know how it is with us followers; everybody rushed over to West 45th Street and started twisting. Mr. Saggase thinks it had a lot to do with megatons: ‘People got tired of all that testing, all those megatons.’
Anyway, Hank Ballard wrote a song called ‘The Twist’, Joey Dee played it every night. Chubby Checker recorded it. I needn’t tell you what happened then. The Peppermint Lounge and the Twist set off an explosion all its own. There was a lag for a while, then — Pow! Along came The Beatles who, Mr. Saggase believes, have rejuvenated the whole entertainment industry. Twisting, he thinks, is an egotistical dance. ‘You can have a lot of fun all by yourself.’
I thanked him, squeezed past the waiters, and went back to the Lounge. The dancers were still dancing (today it’s all Frug and Monkey at the Peppermint as everywhere else). Tommy Hunt was singing, the Young Philadelphians were playing, Herkimer Strubbles was monkeying, the audience was clapping, and the noise was deafening. But it looked like fun, so I dropped my pencil and pad and started dancing. As Ralph Saggase says, ‘It takes two to tango, but it only takes one to Twist.’
Featured dancers on the ledge at Trude Heller’s, 1966
TRUDE HELLER’S Once upon a time there was a woman named Trude Heller, and she had a place in the Village called The Versailles, and it was a bomb. So she turned it into ‘Trude Heller’s,’ put in continuous live twist music, hoisted her house twisters halfway up the walls [one of these paid dancers was pioneering DJ Francis Grasso], and stood back in awe as it took off like a rocket. There’s always something happening at Trude’s. The lights flashing on and off, the bunches of colorful balloons, the smallness of the room, all makes it seem more like a very swinging party than a nightclub. When the Larks aren’t playing, the Jimmy Castor Quartet is. Trude’s is where I learned the truth about feet-on-the-floor dancing. I chanced a cha cha, and a girl wearing the sharpest heels in the world stepped on, if not through, my right foot. So even if you get the chance to move your feet, take my advice, don’t.
THE EIGHTH WONDER If The Eighth Wonder, around the corner from Trude Heller’s, looks something like it there’s a good reason; Trude’s son Joel owns it. I stopped in early to talk to him before the noise started (having learned my lesson at the Peppermint Lounge), but there was a group onstage auditioning so we had to vell anyway. After the group had plugged themselves in (‘Meet the arranger: Con Edison. They get ten per cent’), Joel shouted to me across the tiny table, ‘I come from the Nina Simone, Count Basie school, and I always looked down on this kind of music! But it gets to you after a while!’
‘Do you dance yourself?’ I screamed. ‘Yes! I’m basically shy, but this kind of dancing makes you lose your inhibitions. It turns you on. They’re things anybody can do. You just look at somebody and get up and pretty soon you’ve got it. And if you don’t, so what? Nobody cares.’
Who’s dancing at Trude’s and the Eighth Wonder? Everybody, says Joel Heller. Models, socialites, college kids, young people, old people. ‘The older ones come to watch and end up dancing. One night we had a woman here about seventy. Maybe eighty. She didn’t even look like she could walk! But she got up and started dancing.’
The auditioning band left and the regular band, the Starlights, came on. The house dancers jumped up on their little boxes and started doing the Frug. ‘See that girl?’ Joel said, pointing. ‘She’s putting herself through medical school by dancing here.’ The dancers are to inspire customers and for entertainment. If they start getting too intricate, Heller makes them simplify their dancing so as not to discourage the customers.
At that point somebody asked me to dance. He didn’t dance like me, and I didn’t dance like him, but as I say, it doesn’t make the slightest difference. There’s another clue to dancing’s new popularity; the number of possible partners has multiplied by the thousands.
THE GOLD BUG A few blocks further downtown, on West 3rd Street, one discovers the Gold Bug, the only club in New York City with dancing plus a big rock ‘n’ roll show every weekend. Bob Santo Pietro, a former dealer in Las Vegas, took the club over from his father not long ago.
‘First we had jazz,’ the 25-year-old Santo Pietro says, ‘And it died. Oh, did it die. Besides, I hate jazz with such a passion I had to leave every time they started to play. I used to feel like I was in the Twilight Zone. You know what? They never played the same song the same way twice!’ (The jazz, needless to say, had been his father’s idea.) ‘I figured it was my place, I’d do what I want. I put in rock n roll, and it was packed from the first night. They do the Monkey, the Frug, the Hully Gully, the Dog…. They’re still Twisting… the Swim…’ Mike Scott and the Nightriders play for dancing; on weekends Santo Pietro presents such stars as The Bobettes, the Ronettes, little Anthony, Ruby and the Romantics. ‘Strictly top selling acts, million sellers.’ Everybody from celebrities to tourists come to the Gold Bug, but Santo Pietro has a special place in his heart for teenagers, and the crowd there is the youngest of any place I visited.
L’INTERDIT L’Interdit is another of the three or four true discotheques in New York City. Like the others, it was inspired by the discotheques the Jet Set saw in Paris three or four years ago. A private club, L’Interdit is not the sort of place one could just stop in at on a short visit to New York, since you have to make application for membership first. The atmosphere is truly European: small, dimly lit, intimate. Orell Gaynor and Annette Clark, the disco-technicians, play a great many French and Italian records, plus the Beatles and Trini Lopez. Sometimes records are discovered by far-roving socialites who bring them back for Orell and Annette to play, perhaps for the first time anywhere in this country.
Annette Clark, one of America‘s earliest club DJs, or ‘discaires’, who played at the exclusive L‘Interdit in 1965
Vogue called L’Interdit a ‘New York discothèque with Paris boite manners.’
At L’Interdit all the men are handsome and all the girls are pretty. Incidentally, I saw more real discotheque dresses here than anywhere (discotheque dress: a dress that, the first thing a girl does when she puts it on, is wiggle). Everybody you ever wanted to be belongs to L’Interdit, and Robert, the charming, handsome European manager, is groovy too.
The champion dancer of New York is Killer Joe Piro, so one bright day I hustled over to his dance studio on West 55th Street to see what the master had to say.
Killer Joe sits behind what looks like a bar but is actually a desk. Several lithe young men hovered around, and behind closed doors a Frug played over and over. I hopped on a bar stool and asked Killer Joe how come everybody’s doing the frug.
‘The twist caused the explosion. It’s not new, you know. Cab Calloway was doing it thirty-five years ago. But all of a sudden everybody discovered they have a bottom.’
‘Sound is most important. The sound makes you move. The boys are happy because they’re not touching the girls — boys are scared of girls, did you know that?’ (I didn’t) ‘The girls don’t care as long as they’re dancing. And what the kids do, the parents do. The trend is to youth. The youngsters are running the country!’
The phone rang, and while Killer Joe was talking, one of his assistants came over and gave me a quick dancing lesson ‘We call this contra-body motion,’ he said, doing the frug as taught at Killer Joe’s. ‘It’s just like you walk — the arms swinging just the opposite of the feet.’
Killer Joe, off the phone now, said, ‘The dances start in the Negro sections and on the Coast. I learn them in Harlem, or St. Louis. And whenever a new sound comes out, I see what my kids are doing. They’re the ones that know what’s happening.’
The Killer cited space — or rather the lack of it — as a major reason for stationary dancing. He also said, ‘When wars break out we dance together… between wars we dance a part.’
‘Anything else?’ I asked.
‘Yes. Everybody should learn the fox trot. It’s our national dance.’
I thanked him, slid off my stool, and took my leave. I never did see Killer Joe dance.
Here are some other comments I’ve heard about the new sound and the new dancing. An older friend — who doesn’t like it — says, ‘They’re not doing anything, they weren’t doing anything before, but at least they were doing it together.’ Another: ‘You used to touch a girl once in a while — now you just send signals.’ But the teenagers at the Gold Bug say, ‘It makes you swing. It makes you happy.’
Everybody’s got something to say about the Frug-Watusi-Twist-Monkey Craze, that’s for sure.
Me? I just think we should all turn on some music — and dance. It’s like Slim Hyatt says:
Talkin’ kills the whole scene.
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