Electrospective Poster (Design by Northern Groove)

On Saturday August 30th 2008, Manchester District Music Archive present a very special event at Islington Mill in Salford, to celebrate Manchester’s Electro-Funk and B Boy heritage. Through a mixture of talks, Q and A’s, screenings, and, of course, dancing, this event will attempt to tell the story of the city’s early ‘80s Electro-Funk scene, explaining how it sowed the seeds for subsequent developments as the decade unfolded.

Contrary to what many younger people might nowadays believe, Ibiza ’87 didn’t mark the beginning of dance culture in this country. From a Manchester perspective, the foundations were laid in clubs like The Gallery, The Playpen, Berlin and Legend, which catered to the black audience, not just from Manchester, but also places like Birmingham, Huddersfield, Sheffield, Nottingham, Bradford, Leeds, Liverpool, Stoke, Wolverhampton, Derby, even as far away as London. Manchester was always a magnet for those into the most cutting-edge black music. These nights, in turn, linked back to earlier nights at venues including Placemate 7, Rufus and Rafters. Manchester has a rich dance music heritage dating all the way back to the 60’s, when clubs like the Twisted Wheel and The Reno first opened their doors.

Whilst we hope to focus on the wider picture at a later event, taking in all aspects of the local black music scene throughout the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s, ‘Electrospective’ as the name suggests, takes its starting point as 1982, when tracks like ‘Planet Rock’ heralded a whole new epoch of electronic dance music. We will explore the legacy of the specialist black music nights, and how they influenced the city’s most famous venue, The Haçienda; what happened when Electro and Indie collided; how Manchester interconnected with other key cities like Birmingham, Nottingham and Sheffield; how Electro contributed to the House explosion of the late ‘80s; and where it went when dance culture became a whiter concern.

As the missing link between the old (Northern Soul, Disco, Jazz-Funk) and the then new (Hip Hop, House, Techno), it’s only during recent times that UK dance historians have begun to acknowledge the true significance of the Electro-Funk period. This important story will be told by some of those directly involved.

The event is particularly timely because 2008 marks the 25th Anniversary of the formation of the pioneering Manchester breakdance crew Broken Glass, and, in August, it will be 25 years since the then manager of Broken Glass, DJ Greg Wilson, took his Electro-Funk sound, so successful across town at Legends (also Wigan Pier), to The Haçienda, a club associated with students and indie kids rather than the black crowd that attended his other nights. Broken Glass would dance at the club on a weekly basis during Greg’s tenure, and appear as part of the Haçienda Review tour in Dec ’83, billed as ‘The Haçienda Break Dancers’.

The event was inspired by Tim ‘Bones’ Forde’s documentary film, ‘The Birth Of British B-Boys’, which will be shown in full as a main feature of the event. Tim, a member of Broken Glass, tells the story of how breakdancing made a massive impact in Manchester a quarter of a century ago, changing the lives of so many people in the process. It’s a heartfelt account, which really captures the essence of the era. In addition to the screening, Tim will also talk about what inspired him to make the documentary and other aspects of his B-Boy past.

Hosted by Greg Wilson, ‘Electrospective’ welcomes some of the great DJ’s of Pre-Rave Manchester – Hewan Clarke, Colin Curtis, Chad Jackson and Mike Shaft, all titans of the turntables with truly legendary status in Manchester and beyond:

Hewan Clarke is perhaps the quintessential Manchester DJ. He’s been playing quality tunes in the city for 3 decades, be it at Moss Side’s hallowed Reno, to The Haçienda, where he became the first resident in May ’82. A black music selector par excellence, Hewan has seen them all come and go down the years.

Colin Curtis is one of the most respected UK DJ’s of all. He played a key role in the development of not just one, but three major dance movements here in Britain – Northern Soul, Jazz-Funk and House, playing at a whole spectrum of influential venues in the North and Midlands, including Blackpool Mecca, The Ritz, Rafters, Cassinellis, The Powerhouse, Rock City, The Locarno, Berlin, The Playpen and Legends.

Having followed Greg Wilson into Wigan Pier and Legends, as well as taking over his Piccadilly mix slot in 1984, Chad was one of the first British DJ’s to fully master the Hip Hop styles of cutting and scratching, Jackson would later go on to become the DMC World Mixing Champion in 1987, and in 1990 scored a Top 3 hit with ‘Hear The Drummer (Get Wicked)’.

Between 1978 and 1986, Mike Shaft’s Piccadilly Radio Soul Show, ‘Takin’ Care Of Business’ was something of a Manchester institution. Along with Greg Edwards and Robbie Vincent in London, Mike completed the trio of most influential black music presenters in the UK. Also a major force in clubland, Mike would move on to BBC Radio Manchester, before launching specialist black / dance music station, Sunset, in 1989. All these years on, he can still be heard, in his inimitable style, on Radio Manchester.

Following his retirement as a professional DJ, at the end of 1983, Greg Wilson left it 2 decades before making a highly successful comeback (choosing the Music Is Better night in Manchester for his return), and is now known to a new generation of clubbers literally throughout the globe, and including here in Manchester via appearances at club nights such as the Electric Chair, El Diablos, Funkademia, Aficionado, Nish Nash Nosh and Stylus, to name but a few.

Conspicuous by his absence is Stu Allan, who played a major role in championing House and Hip Hop on the Manchester airwaves from 1986, when he took over Mike Shaft’s old slot on Piccadilly. Stu had already booked a holiday on the date of the event and is ‘gutted’ that he has to miss it. His memories of the period can be found here: http://www.electrofunkroots.co.uk/interviews/stu_allan.html

Gerald Simpson (A Guy Called Gerald) is another person disappointed that he’s not going to be in Manchester (he’s touring in Japan) although, on the positive side, the event will include exclusive interview footage. Gerald was a Legends regular throughout the early 80’s who went on to make the classic Acid House anthem, ‘Voodoo Ray’, 20 years ago. You can read Gerald’s recollections of Legends and the Electro days on his website: http://www.guycalledgerald.com/radio/nosellout1.htm

Over the last few years, MDMArchive has hosted a number of sell-out music events to help fund the organization and raise awareness of its function. These have included a high-profile launch at Urbis; a punk film premiere at The Kings Arms, Salford; and a showing of a Johnny Hamp’s ‘Blues and Gospel Train’ film in Chorlton. It is a not-for-profit virtual archive designed to celebrate Greater Manchester music, protect its heritage and promote awareness of its cultural importance.

‘Electrospective’ is split into 2 sections, with talks, screenings and dance from 4pm (free admission) and a club night to follow, from 10pm – 3am (admission by ticket only). Tickets cost £6 on a first come first served basis, the venue capacity being less than 300. We expect the night to sell out well ahead of the event, so people are advised to buy their tickets as soon as possible to avoid missing out on what promises to be a unique insight into a pivotal period of Manchester dance and music history.

Electrospective Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/group

Metro Newspaper – Electrospective Feature (Click image to enlarge)

Alternative poster designs by Northern Groove

© Greg Wilson, 2012

Image by www.anti-limited.com

Hello everybody and welcome to Electrospective. Firstly thanks. It’s fantastic that we’ve got so many people down so early on. It’s mad to see all these faces that I haven’t seen for years! Great to have you all with us.

The whole point of the event is to draw attention to the pre-Rave period. A lot of people in Manchester assume that it all started in ‘88, ‘89 with the dance explosion at The Haçienda, and the House scene. That was a fantastic era and what happened there was really special. But there was a lot that happened beforehand. Basically going back to the 60s there has been a rich dance culture in Manchester, it goes back to the Twisted Wheel and from the black side, places like The New Reno in Moss Side which opened in 1967. The particular period that we are looking at today and that were interested in is ’82 to ’88. The period where music started changing and taking on an electronic dimension. The electro music that came through from 1982 with tracks like ‘Planet Rock’ by Africa Bambaataa and The Soul Sonic Force here and that moved on into the Techno and the House music that came, and also, of course, the Hip Hop. The whole scene started to change at that point and what was happening in Manchester on the black scene, in clubs like Berlin, The Gallery, Legends and The Playpen, that was where the foundation was laid for it. But if you go into the history books it’s very rare that you see these things mentioned. The DJs that we’ve got here today that we’re going to talk to all played a very influential role in that. Again, sadly not mentioned anything like enough with regards to the history. Later on in the day, as a centrepiece to the event we are going to be showing Tim Forde’s film ‘The Birth Of The British B Boy’, which basically looks back on his experience with the breakdance crew Broken Glass from 1983 onwards, and how things started from there. Also, other great Manchester breakdance crew are in effect tonight – in full effect; Street Machine, they are down with us and so later on hopefully they’ll be busting some moves on the floor for us.

I’d like to thank Manchester District Music Archive www.mdmarchive.co.uk for staging this event, it was their idea to put this on and it’s a fantastic thing to be involved in.

Electrospective Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/group

Electrospective at Islington Mill (Click image to enlarge)

To view a fullscreen panoramic 360° of the above image visit here

(Images courtesy of www.anti-limited.com ©2008-11. All Rights Reserved)

Electrospective Production Team:

Abigail Ward (MDMA)
Alison Surtees (CRIS & MDMA)
Dan Smith (Northern Groove)
Dave Rofe (MDMA)
Gecko (Graffitti Artist)
Greg Wilson (Electrofunkroots)
Mark Carlin (Islington Mill)
Matt Norman (MDMA)
Shaun Clarke (Camera & Sound Engineer)
Tim Forde (The Birth Of The British B Boy)
Wendy Green (Girl Friday)

© Greg Wilson, 2012

Interviewed by Greg Wilson 30.08.08

Image by www.anti-limited.com

Full transcript of interview:

GW: So with any further ado, I’d like to introduce you to our first guest tonight. He’s a gentleman who’s been DJing in Manchester since the 70s. He was on the radio; Piccadilly Radio from 1978, to I think it was 1986, he’s still on radio in Manchester today, and he’s one of the greats of radio in this city… Mike Shaft.

GW: As I say Mike, you came onto this scene in the 70s, was the first main club that you were doing, was that Rafters?

Mike Shaft on the decks at Rafters

MS: Rafters it was, it took me ages to get a regular gig in Manchester. I remember going down to Rafters, and they’d advertised for a DJ, I went upstairs into Fagins, it was one club, I don’t know if you knew that, and did a demo, live, with an audience in Fagins, and then the manager said let’s go down to Rafters and talk. We spoke, he said he had three people that he wanted to DJ there regularly, so he wanted to try and work out which was the best. He said he wanted me to do the first night; the other two would do the next two Saturdays. Then half way through the evening he came up and said “I tell you what, I’ll get you to do the last Saturday”, so straight away I thought; I’m in here. I did the last Saturday of the three, he came up and said “I want you to do the gig”. He said “We need a theme tune for you”. So he goes away, comes back with a 7” single on Stax – yellow Stax. The ‘Theme From Shaft’, he says “From now on we’ll call you Mike Shaft!”.

GW: Aah, so it was a given name?

MS: Aye, I was ready!

[Laughter]

Rafters (Later The Music Box)

GW: Just for the younger people in the audience, Rafters is the same club that is The Music Box where Electric Chair and Scruff does his nights and stuff, So it’s still a key venue within the whole Manchester scene. So from Rafters, you where involved in, there used to be a club called Pips, behind the cathedral?

MS: Pips, wow!

GW: I mean, I remember this club because there used to be TV adverts on about this club in Manchester, and it had loads of rooms.

MS: Pips came out of the blue. There were two clubs there… Time And Place, and Nice And Easy, 2 clubs. Nice And Easy was the one on Fennel Street, and Time And Place was the one just around the back facing the cathedral. And somebody bought both of them, knocked them into one and created Pips. Nobody knew what Pips was going to be like, except the advert says Number 1 in Europe.

Pips – Fennel Street

GW: (Laughs)

MS: Small claim! People used to come in coach parties from all over the country to come to Pips. Now when it first started I wasn’t working there, so I went down with my brother, just as punters. It was fantastic! Four different clubs effectively. Four different rooms, all playing different music. Probably the most popular room was the Roxy Room.

GW: Roxie & Bowie

Pip’s flyer 1979

MS: Aaah, Roxie & Bowie all night long! It was incredible! Upstairs they played commercial soul. Downstairs they played a more funkier sound, and then there was a pop room as well. In the end they asked for DJs in the paper or whatever, I went down, saw the guy, got the job. We didn’t even discuss money. The first time I knew what I got paid for a night was when I got my first pay packet. I’d done two nights that week and there was £12 in the pay packet. Can I tell you this… I used to work for the Post Office in those days, and I got the equivalent of £6 a week!  From the Post Office. So you can imagine what it was like getting £12 for doing two nights of something that I absolutely loved doing!

Audience: Sorry, what year was this?

MS: I got no idea!

[Laughter]

MS: I got to tell you, this…

GW: This would be about ’75 I would imagine, wouldn’t you say?

MS: I really don’t know the dates. So I’ll have to apologise for that straight away. I don’t remember the dates. There are a couple of dates that I remember quite clearly, starting at Piccadilly, which you mentioned before was in ’78 through to ’86, but outside of that, it’s kind of all blurred into one. So apologies for that!

GW: So, you obviously established yourself at that point. There was a DJ that was presenting a show on Piccadilly Radio, Piccadilly radio started I think, was it 1974?

MS: 1974

GW: Andy Peebles, who some of you might have heard of, he went on to do Radio 1, Radio 2. Y’ know, big BBC kind of presenter, but he actually started out, I think he started on BBC Radio Manchester, the BBC station, but then went over to Piccadilly when it opened, and did a show called ‘Soul Train’, which was the first kind of main soul show which started in Manchester, in 1974. Hugely popular, and that run through until 1978 when he moved on… You can take up the story from there. Obviously you’d listened to his show and everything?

Andy Peebles

MS: I applied to Piccadilly when it first started, never even got an interview. Tuned in I think it was the first Friday night and Andy Peebles is doing the Soul Train, and I knew at that moment that I would never get a show at that station while he was there. Because the show he did was everything. You know, he didn’t play an awful lot of dance music, but he played great Soul music! Which is what I wanted to play. So I just got that in my mind, that it was never going to be Piccadilly. And I’m working at the Post Office at the West Didsbury Post Office, which is now a pizza place, right next to the tennis club. And I open up the Daily Mail one day and it says “Peebles goes to Radio 1”, and I thought right, this is my chance. I said to the boss “Can I take my lunch early?” He said “Yeah”. I went straight to the reception at Piccadilly and asked to see Colin Walters who was the manager at the time. In fact I must just mention… I just this week got an email from Colin Walters. I haven’t heard from him, or seen him for twenty plus years probably! And he sent me an email when Isaac Hayes died, and said “…sorry to hear about the guy who gave you your name passing on”. Anyway, they said Colin wasn’t in so I says “Can I see his assistant?” His secretary, his PA came out, a girl called Gail, who I had lunch with not so long ago, we were talking about this (Electrospective). And I just bent her ear for 45 minutes… “You’ve got to give me this job! I’m the only person that could replace Peebles, I’m the man! I don’t care what anyone else tells you!” In the end she just got so sick.. She said “Send a tape in” I says “Look, I’ve sent tapes in before, he doesn’t listen to them” She says “I’ll make you a deal…  Send the tape to me, and I guarantee you he will listen to it! That’s all I can promise”. I said “That’s all I want”. I went away, made a tape with an old mate of mine who’s passed on, a guy called Ronnie North, in the flats in Salford, about a minute from here. We made the tape; it needed editing, I we went to see Pete Smith, who’s another pal of mine, a DJ. He edited it for me, and I sent off 3 copies. I sent one to Radio 1, one to Piccadilly, and one to Radio Merseyside. Two days later I got a letter back from Piccadilly saying “Please phone my secretary for an appointment”. The day after that I got two letters back, one from Radio Merseyside saying “Thanks we are not interested”, and one from Radio 1 saying “Please phone my secretary for an appointment”. It was just awesome! One day I’d have a meeting at Piccadilly, the next day I’d have a meeting at Radio 1, the next day at Piccadilly, the next at Radio 1. Then they started getting me to make demos. Radio 1 demo, Piccadilly demo. In the end Piccadilly stopped calling me. With Radio 1 it continued and I got a job at Radio 1. Now I don’t know how many of us here are old enough to remember the days when Radios 1 and 2, in the evening, would simulcast? That’s what we call it now; they’d have the same programming in the evening. The reason Peebles was brought into Radio 1 was because they were going to split frequencies at night, and Peebles was gonna do a show. And I was gonna do the show following Peebles. It was called ‘Discovatin’. I’m now working at the post office in Wythenshawe [laughter]; my life is a series of Post Office jobs across the city. So, it’s the Thursday before the thing starts on the Saturday, OK, on the Thursday the phone rings, “Mike, it’s for you” It’s the producer, guy called Tony Hale, great guy! He says “Are you sitting down?” I said “It’s not gonna happen is it?” He says “No” I said “Is it anything to do with me?” He said “No” I says “Well that’s OK then”.  And it didn’t happen. The reason it didn’t happen was because the unions weren’t happy with the number of people that the BBC wanted to put… to split the two stations. Obviously the unions wanted two sets of staff, the BBC didn’t want that… Big argument, it stopped the whole thing. And on the Saturday night Peebles didn’t go on the air, the Saturday night they continued simulcasting.  Let me tell you just a little bit more on this… So that’s the Thursday, I put the phone down and I am absolutely devastated! You can imagine this. Phone rings, “Mike, it’s for you”, Colin Walters from Piccadilly, he says “Mike, we are still interested, you know, why don’t you come and see me tomorrow?” I said “OK, what time? “ We agreed. About 5 o’clock I go to reception at Piccadilly. And Colin comes out to meet me, says “Do you want a drink?” I said “yeah, I’ll have a hot chocolate”. We are walking into his office and he says “When do you want to start? This Sunday OK?” I said “Yeah!” On that Sunday I did my first show for Piccadilly. I’m being a little bitty modest, I’ll tell you this… It was brilliant! [Laughter], it was absolutely brilliant! On the Monday he gave me the call, said he was very happy, will I do the next week? Did my second show on Piccadilly and it was crap! Because I thought I’d arrived, I was the biggest thing since sliced bread. I was terrible! I listened back to it and I was embarrassed! After that I settled down and it was cool. Colin Walters called me in one day, said “We’re really happy with the way things are going we’d like to give you a six month contract.” Absolutely delighted! Got the contract, read it, signed it. Money was crap in those days I have to tell you. A day later, Tony Hale on the phone “…Problems at Radio 1 are resolved. Do you wanna do the show?” I said “I can’t do it; I’ve just signed with Piccadilly.” …It was obvious that Colin Walters knew that the Radio 1 situation had been resolved, and had tied me up at Piccadilly. But I was happy that I was on the air, it didn’t faze me at all, not going to Radio 1.

GW: It was a long tenure and basically, musically, you brought more of a Dance aspect to it?

MS: I had been, and again this is going to sound really immodest, but it’s just the way it was, a massive DJ in Manchester before I ever got on the radio. I used to fill nightclubs all over the place, because I played a specific type of music that really wasn’t available anywhere else. So when I went on the radio I just took that onto the radio.

GW: And what was the music you where playing? Just to fill people in.

MS: The first song I played on Piccadilly, which would be quite embarrassing to admit now, was Dan Hartman ‘Instant Replay’.

GW: Big Disco.

MS: Massive club tune in those days! And loads of things like that. Again I can’t go through all of them because I really don’t remember specifics to be honest. But we changed it very much to a Dance, more Dance thing. I’ll tell you how big I was in Manchester; this is an odd little story, talking to Colin Walters when he was giving me the job. He said “Yeah, we like what you are doing”, he said “We are not happy about the name Mike Shaft though” So I said “What do you want me to do?” He says “We want to change it”. I says “Colin, I’m not changing my name, I’m massive in Manchester, it’s taken me years to get this name, to be respected as somebody who plays this music. If you don’t want to give me the job that’s fine. I’m not changing my name.” And he just laughed it off “Aaahh, don’t worry about it, carry on with Mike Shaft.”

GW: Did you know what he had in mind?

MS: No, no we never discussed any alternative, maybe ‘Mike Superfly’ I suppose. But it just illustrated that because I knew that the people in Manchester knew me as Mike Shaft, it would be totally crazy to give all that up, to start a fresh, so I said no.

Mike Shaft at Tiffanys – Manchester

GW: A question I must ask you about that particular period in time. What was it like being a black DJ on the scene in the 70s? What did you encounter in that aspect?

MS: Oh god, it was difficult at times. In some clubs; “You’re playing too much black music” you know. And one of the saddest nights, man I remember  this , every time I think of it as if it was yesterday, my last night at Rafters. Rafters was rockin’! OK, chocca every Friday and Saturday night! And it was about, I would say 75% black, maybe 80% black, the rest white. Not many white guys, lots of black guys, lots of black girls and lots of white girls. I arrive one Saturday night, I drive down Oxford Road, and there’s all these black people on the opposite side, on the, what was then, I think it was, it became Rotters, I can’t remember what it was called at that point. So I drive down Oxford Road and all these black people are lined up on the opposite side of Rafters, and I’m thinking what’s going on? I get out of my car and somebody shouts “They’re not letting us in!” So I go down, talk to the manager; “We think it’s getting too black!” So I said “OK, what do you want me to do?” He says “Play less black music” I says “Well I’m not prepared to do that”. In the end I resigned on the spot and left. But that’s not the best bit of this story. The best bit of this story, I don’t know if, again you’ve got to be old to remember this stuff… It was two glass doors to get into Rafters in those days. Again, I don’t know if you know this, but with fully glass doors the handles are kind of fixed on to the glass. The bouncer is there holding onto the handle, to let people in. Somebody throws a brick from the opposite side of the road, smashes the door, and the bouncer’s left there holding just the handle! [Laughter] It was an incredible night! Very sad night for me, but I couldn’t continue working in there. You know, and left. It didn’t take me very long to get another gig, and people just came to where I was. Rafters went on, still played, you know, John Grant and Colin (Curtis) moved in there some time later, and continued playing a different type of black music. But in some night clubs, in Manchester, in those days, if you played too much black music it was brought to your attention.

Mike Shaft – Black Echoes 1983

GW: You really established yourself to a much wider audience via the radio; it went on until, as I say, 1986, so you saw some changes during that time. You moved from the Disco, Soul, Funk era, into a different era that kind of culminated into Hip Hop, House, Techno. How did you see those changes at the time? How did you view them?

MS: To be absolutely honest, I didn’t like the changes at all! I knew the music that I like, and it’s not changed in 40 years… If anything disappoints me about today, is that there is music that is around today that is as good as ever, but now it doesn’t get played. So that’s where we are. Back then I played exactly what I wanted on the radio. It was my choice. Because I was in the night clubs I would know what people were dancing to, I’d take that on the radio, we’d play it there, that would make it bigger, and it was just a sensational situation. I wasn’t allowed to mention my night clubs on the air… any night club in Manchester. I remember I was doing Angels in Burnley, and I had a massive argument with Colin Walters, about whether Burnley was part of the radio station area. It wasn’t, it was outside of our area. And in the end he says “OK then, you can mention Angels and Burnley, but you can’t mention any of your gigs in Manchester.” But it didn’t matter, because everybody came to the gigs anyway, listened to the radio programme, came to the gigs, taped the radio show and so on. The music changes came and went, but it never changed what I wanted to play. I wasn’t gonna start playing Hip Hop or Rave, or anything like that because I was not interested in it. I was quite happy to have guests on my show who played the music, who reflected the music. You (Greg) came on; you did a couple of years as a guest. Chad Jackson came on as a guest. Colin Curtis came on playing Jazz. Hewan, him playing Jazz. Now I quite liked some of the Jazz they were playing, other stuff I didn’t like. But the show was never about me, the show was about my listeners. And if my listeners where into a bit of Jazz, or ‘Planet Rock’, then that’s fine, I never had a problem with reflecting that, it was never gonna dominate my show. Once my 15 minutes of ‘Planet Rock’ and Afrika Bambaataa went through, then we where back to playing Bobby Womack and Lamont Dozier.

Mike Shaft with Kev Edwards and Greg Wilson

GW: I thought that was always a strong point that you had, that you could separate the show from yourself. Rather than that’s not my particular taste, I’m not gonna do it, that you brought in people, and that really added to, and enhanced the whole appeal of the show.

I was going to ask you about the early 80s, there was a night called the Main Event, which was at Placemate 7, which was a big deal at the time. It was promoted by Piccadilly Radio, and by Blues and Soul. What are your memories of that?

MS: That’s a funny one, I knew nothing of the discussions that had been going on between Blues and Soul and Piccadilly. Got called into, I think it might have been Tony Ingham or somebody who was in the promotions department as this is happening, “We want you to do it, it’s on a Tuesday night”, and that was it, turned up for the first one, absolutely brilliant! I loved it there! I loved the club; I loved the layout of the club. Layout is just so important sometimes. One of the things about Placemate was that it was lots of space, But kind of in small spaces.

Main Event ads ’81 & ’82

GW: It’s called ‘Legends’ now isn’t it?

MS: Is it?

GW: Weirdly enough yeah. Was it on the site of the old Twisted Wheel?

MS: Yeah that’s right, same place.

Twisted Wheel 1967 (Later Placemate 7, now Legends)

MS: So if it wasn’t a massive crowd it still looked good, because we were all in that area, in the central area, and then out on the wings it may have been empty. But first night; chocka! Absolutely brilliant! Great nights! Great PAs! PAs where big things in those days!

GW: PA being a personal appearance… the great thing was that we didn’t have to pay for them did we?

MS: No, record companies brought them up, they wanted to plug their songs. I remember we did a PA at Legends, did Loose Ends in there, not a word of a lie 300 people were locked out. Locked out! The whole of that Street – Princess Street… absolutely chocka! Roadblock!

Loose Ends – Live PA at Legend Night Club

Things I remember about Main Event… Two of the songs, right, and I’ll never forget this, Colin Curtis who is one of my heroes, I have to tell you, he’s here somewhere, he’ll be talking next, I put on ‘Never Too Much’ by Luther Vandross, and Colin Curtis came flying across the room wanting to know what this was. I’ll never forget that! Other songs that I played there first, or very early on, things like D-Train ‘You’re The One For Me’, absolutely massive! And again, it’s kind of interesting to explain this to people who live now and didn’t live then, or don’t remember then. Nowadays you can tune into MTV Base; black music 24 hours a day. You can tune into any number of stations playing this stuff. Radio 1 has their 1xtra channel, playing black music 24 hours a day. Back then those things did not exist. And you heard black music when I played it in Manchester, in a night club, or on the radio, when Les Spaine and Terry Lennaine played it in Liverpool, when the guys in London, Chris Hill in the clubs, Robbie Vincent on the radio. And dotted around the country, where these radio shows which played this, one 3 hour show a week and that was it! You then went to your night club, you heard the songs. Next week you hear some of the same songs and move it on. And that’s how we built up the scene. And it ended up where I remember, you know, people coming over from Bradford saying “We want you to come and do a gig here.” Huddersfield, Videotech in Huddersfield, one of the most incredible night clubs that has ever existed! It was an old cinema OK, and it was just a massive space. Absolutely massive! Upstairs there where bars up there, but the space downstairs was just huge! I can’t remember what night we used to do there but it was massive. I remember they asked me to do the New Year’s party because this thing we had there was so successful. We had a big screen tuned in to BBC television and at midnight it came from Trafalgar Square, or somewhere, and I remember standing on the stage and looking to a massive crowd from Trafalgar Square, OK, going back miles into the screen, and then just panning my eyes down and seeing the crowd in the venue just going on for miles. It was one of the most memorable things I’ve ever had in my life, it was just sensational! So we had some great club nights all over the place.

GW: Just saying about Piccadilly, just to fill you in, at the time it was the biggest commercial radio station outside of London, and Mike’s soul show was part of a trio of Soul shows in this country right at the top echelon of things, along with Robbie Vincent in London and Greg Edwards. So this wasn’t a small pirate radio type situation, this was hitting a wide area in Greater Manchester.

IBA map showing coverage of Piccadilly Radio

MS: I’ll go even further, and people won’t believe this when they know what’s happened to radio now, but back then Piccadilly Radio was the most successful of the radio stations, of the commercial radio stations. Capital, which one would think would be the biggest had access to a lot more audience, because you’ve got 10 million people nearly in London. They couldn’t make it work at all. They had serious financial troubles and it couldn’t get the audience because down there people listened to Radio 1 as their main station. Up here Piccadilly came along, really made a mark, and out-performed Radio 1 in this area. It was unheard of to put it mildly for a local radio station to do that.

Mike Shaft at Piccadilly Radio

GW: Yeah, it was a fantastic station! I mean, when I did my mixes on there, I just know from the exposure from that, the amount of people, all of a sudden, from outside Manchester that were tuning in. I think in many respects that it brought the people from The Haçienda; it brought my name to their attention in a big way, although The Tube had something to do with that as well. electrofunkroots.co.uk/articles/on_the_tube

MS: Oh The Tube!

(Asks audience) Have you seen The Tube thing online?

GW: With my curly hair! (Laughs).

MS: My goodness. We went up in my car to do The Tube. This was a fascinating story this! The Tube was based in Tyne-Tees Television, which is up in Newcastle. So we had Granada here, in Newcastle they had Tyne-Tees. And they said we are going to have no guests on The Tube unless they come to Newcastle. So whereas people in the past would say “Yeah, we’ll do it from London in a studio”, they wouldn’t do that.

So everybody, all the big names went up to Newcastle for this gig on a Friday night, it was fantastic! Greg was asked to come and do his mixing. I’d just launched this magazine called ‘Taking Care Of Business North Of Watford’ which lasted about three issues before it went bust.

GW: A good magazine though!

MS: Great magazine! You had a section in it.

GW: Yeah. That’s why it was good

[Laughter]

MS: Now Greg has his mixing unit to take up, and it was about the size of that, to there (points.. it’s big!). Could we fit it in this car? Could we ‘eck as like! So, what we had to do in the end was fold the front seat down, put it in through the boot, right across to the front seat, I’m driving, Greg is sitting on the seat behind me, and we’re going to Newcastle to do The Tube, the coolest programme in the universe. Unbelievable! It was great. It really was.

GW: Yeah, it was.

Mike, Jools Holland and Greg on The Tube

MS: As it says now, that was the first mixing on British television anyway.

GW: It’s funny looking at the footage now because Jools Holland’s asking what a turntable was, I mean it was like literally, we were in the dark ages!

MS: Well, he knew about the drugs.

GW: Yeah he did, the echo and the reverb.

So after Piccadilly, just to round things off, you launched a station in Manchester which should really have been the moment for you when everything came right, you had your ambition, your dream of putting this station together. It went a bit sour in the end, but you certainly managed to get it there, and that was Sunset.

MS: After Piccadilly I went to Radio Manchester, did three I think years at Radio Manchester which was great. I remember how I got the job at Radio Manchester, this won’t take long… They interviewed me on Radio Manchester; Phil Sayer, who’s a very good friend of mine, interviewed me because the government had cancelled this experiment into community radio. And Phil says to me on the air “What are you going to do now?” I says “Well actually I’m gonna talk to your manager, see if he wants me here”, just like that, on the air! I step out of the studio at the end of the interview, the manager’s there, “Come and talk to me”. I started my show on Radio Manchester that Saturday night. Did three years there. In the end, left there to go and do Sunset radio, because we’d won a license. There were I think, about 13 stations across the country, we were the only one in Manchester. But in Stockport there was KFM, and we worked closely with KFM, as closely as you could because we played totally different music styles to be honest. But it was great!

Mike at the Sunset Radio launch party at The Haçienda with Kym Mazelle (Photo by Peter Walsh)

MS: The launching of Sunset was truly the high spot of my life, outside family things. And irrespective of what happened to it, in the end, the memories that I took away from there, and that people took away from what Sunset was, and what it did on the air, is just unbelievable! I always say, I could sit here for two days talking about it, and I still wouldn’t get over what it was like being a part of that. We’ve got Hewan here, Hewan (Clarke) and Anif (Cousins), they both did a show; ‘The Brotherhood’; midnight, Saturday night, absolutely sensational!

Hewan Clarke and Mike at the Sunset Radio launch party at The Haçienda

MS: Dawn Payne, over there, who’s now a BBC producer, she err, I remember getting a letter from Dawn, she said she had opened The Guardian, she was at University at Kingston, had saw that we’d got the station, wrote to me straight away, she came up, she blew me away! Absolutely blew me away with her ideas and her whole attitude, and I gave her a job. We gave jobs to lots of people around Manchester who where, you know, in, at the lower echelon clubs…

GW: From the rave side, the Spinmasters?

MS: Yes! Oh my gosh!

It was just fantastic to be able to bring it all together in one place. And people like, you know, the 1xtras of this world, MTV Bases of this world, they could think they invented the thing, but, Sunset was there before all of them. Sunset lasted three years in the end; of those three years I’d say we had about 18 months when it was good. Then they tried to change it; make it into a Pop music station, because that was how it was going to make money. But there was terrible racism around in those days, you know, people wouldn’t advertise because it was a black radio station, same thing as before. We fought it as long as we could, but in the end it went bust.

GW: Yeah, and they just changed the policy around?

MS: Yep.

GW: And what happened to it in the end?

MS: Well, the radio authority, as it was then, took the license back, re-advertised it, Galaxy I think was the next, or was it Kiss first? Kiss first, and then Galaxy. It’s the 102 frequency, the one we were on, but it didn’t survive.

By the way, let me just give a free plug here, if you don’t mind… If you are interested in this stuff I’ve got a brilliant website: mikeshaft.com, go there (Laughter). I don’t have much advertising it, so that’s not why I’m selling it. But a lot of these stories; I go into in real depth on there. And as I say to everybody when I tell them about this; what’s on there is my opinion, you know, different people have different memories of things, this is what I remember how it is. So if it aint the way other people remember it, then so be it.

GW: Mike it’s been it’s been fantastic having you with us. You are someone who looms large in my life, I mean you gave me a big break; by putting me on the radio with the mixes. So on a personal level I’d like to thank you very much for everything, and great to have you down here today.

MS: My pleasure!

Additional links:

http://www.mdmarchive.co.uk/archive

www.mikeshaft.com/08Piccadilly

www.mikeshaft.com/08Sunset

manchesterradiomusic.com/808-state-show-sunset-radio

wiki/rafters_club

Mike Shaft’s Electrospective photographs: http://www.mikeshaft.com/08ELECTROSPECTIVE2.html

Electrospective Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/group

© Greg Wilson, 2012

Image by www.anti-limited.com

Full transcript of interview:

GW: Right now I’d like to introduce you to somebody that, if you know the history of dance culture, you’ll have heard about this guy, mainly through the Northern Soul scene. He was one of the DJs at one of the pivotal Northern Soul nights, which was at Blackpool Mecca, and there are books and books written about this. But, not a lot of people realise that he was also somebody who was involved in a key way in two other scenes. I don’t think there is any DJ in this country that can say was a key player in three separate black music scenes, the first one being Northern Soul, the second one being Jazz-Funk, and the third one being the early House period. So I’d like to introduce up Colin Curtis.

I’m not going to go into the Northern Soul situation, because, as I say, that is so well documented, because we are obviously going over ground that people are probably aware about.

CC: Yeah, there’s nothing about Northern Soul, other than the fact that for me that period was just about new black music, it was about black music that I’d never heard at that time. Buying black music in the UK at that time was very difficult; you could only buy it on 7” single, or occasionally albums, and from specialist places. It was from nothing, to just a spark of light, that opened up a new world that just didn’t exist in the UK, there was no underground scene for that music at the time, it just grew as more and more people got exposed to it.

Colin Curtis at The Mecca (Photo Steve Naylor)

GW: Around the mid 70s there was a famous schism within the Northern Soul Scene where yourself an Ian Levine at Blackpool Mecca began to play contemporary records alongside the more retrospective stuff that was the normal fair of Northern Soul.

CC: We’d been existing on Levine’s trips to America, and the other main sources in the UK; Record Corner and F.L Moore , and individual mail-order guys – based in Manchester; Brian ‘45’ Phillips was a top supplier of records at that time. But the difference between Blackpool Mecca and Wigan Casino was that we were interested in playing great black music and all of a sudden black America had gone away from putting out just Ballads to putting out dance music again, and you know, you could buy records for a pound instead of £50 that where just as good, if not better. So we started going down that route and exploring that route, and Wigan Casino didn’t. Wigan Casino, for me, was always a retro venue, I was actually there the first night they opened the oldies sessions and I thought this was the first step backwards. I never really understood Wigan Casino, although I look like I’ve taken drugs for 50 years, but I actually haven’t. That particular side; the all-nighter scene was something that didn’t appeal to me.

Ian Levine & Colin Curtis at Blackpool Mecca

GW: The Mecca was basically run on a Saturday night, it closed at 2 o’clock, normal club hours and a lot of people would go to Blackpool Mecca first, and then they’d go onto Wigan Casino after that for the all-nighter.

CC: Yeah, I think one of the successes at Blackpool is that in those days the Mecca organisation actually laid on coaches from probably 20, 30 locations within a 40, 50 mile radius, and those people where actually brought to us, and as the soul thing developed upstairs obviously people who were interested in that started jumping on those coaches, so they could come, dance all night, get pissed and go home without driving.

GW: What you started doing at the Mecca, and what started changing things around, it was the time when the music scene was changing, moving away from northern soul and into the Jazz-Funk era. When you made that move, the transition, pretty smoothly, and went from being a top Northern Soul DJ to being one of the main Jazz-Funk DJs.

CC: That probably initially happened at The Manchester Ritz, the old venue which was the first place we brought the two cultures together, where we’ve got Northern Soul, and started playing, as you say, the dance music that was eventually titled Jazz-Funk. If you go back to some of the old posters that we used to do, we used to spell it in different ways (laughs) with a ‘G’ in there (as in Slide ‘Stella Fungk’), if anything it hadn’t been defined at that stage. I think, I left Blackpool, and as far as I’m concerned that could have been the end of my career, and then coming to Manchester… Mike (Shaft) has told me something tonight that I didn’t actually realise; that he’d DJd at Rafters before we went in there. I came to Rafters in about ’78, and the first I knew of Mike was rumours back in Blackpool that he played in Rufus, which you haven’t mentioned tonight, which was another dump in Manchester. Dumps are great for black music; the whole of Manchester was full of clubs that nobody wanted to know. It was a similar story for us when we came to Rafters, I came down and looked at it and the night I arrived it was 50, 60 motorbike rockers in there and the place looked an absolute dump! I just collared John Grant and I said “There’s no way we can do this!” We actually cut a deal in the end that they were going to stop the Rock nights completely, and then we’d try it. We moved in with carpenters, we put the sound system in there and the lights, and re-jigged the whole place from ’78 on.

Rafters ads 1979 & 1981

GW: I remember hearing about it before I’d ever come to Manchester to a club. I saw some of your lists with John Grant and knew Rafters was a legendary club.

CC: The lists were down to John Grant.

(Colin Curtis/John Grant – Rafters record lists 1979: djhistory/djhistory/displayClassicCharts)

Tony Bowd, Colin Curtis & John Grant

GW: Can we talk about John Grant? Explain who John Grant was?

CC: When I left Blackpool Mecca, I’d been working with Ian Levine who most people have probably heard of in some shape or form, a controversial but likeable character if you got on the inside of him. John Grant I was hooked up with through Kev Edwards who was one of the main guys in Spin Inn Records on Cross Street in Manchester, Kev kept coming to Angels in Burnley, I used to go there as a punter on a Wednesday night to listen to Richard and Mike and people like that, and he (Kev) kept on mythering me to meet up with John Grant and have a look at moving forward in Manchester. Mike always worked for the Post Office, and John for British Rail.

John Grant & Kev Edwards

CC: Yeah, he got a job as a harbour master on the South coast; he completely sold up all his records, everything, he just went, lock stock and barrel.

GW: We’ve said a lot about DJing in those days, but it wasn’t you know, a major career move like it is now.

CC: No, no absolutely not. John felt that the money he earned from work, even though at the time of Rafters, I mean the reason that eventually it was a big success is because we controlled the door take and therefore the expenditure on equipment and putting the money back in. We earnt a huge amount of money at that particular time but we ploughed most of it back into music, equipment and promotion.

GW: Yep. Just explain about a pivotal part of the scene at the time, that of the all-dayers, and how that all worked?

CC: The all-dayers started at the Manchester Ritz, and they were probably the beginning of, as I say, the friction between Northern Soul and the new music which was eventually titled jazz-funk. jazz-funk started to take over The Ritz as a venue. Also, that was the beginning of us starting to see more black guys and girls coming to Manchester Ritz to experience that. We where then able to use the Mecca organisation to promote similar events in Blackpool, Birmingham, Nottingham – Nottingham Palais, Birmingham Locarno and Blackpool Mecca, and we started bringing over these artists, so live artists would be Al Hudson, Roy Ayers, with still retro a bit with people like Jnr Walker. We were in a position to get what were top acts back then, we had Sylvester, Two Tons Of Fun.

Blackpool all-dayer adverts (Click image to enlage)

GW: The way that it worked with the DJs, that you would pick the main DJs from different areas and bring them all in together?

CC: That’s what we tried to do, we tried to utilise DJs from all over the country; Leeds, Manchester, Birmingham, all over.

All-dayer ads The Leadmill Sheffield ’83, Clouds Preston ’83

GW: I speak to people now about the underground scene and maybe how they can network this by bringing people in from different areas, because what it did was bring different crowds into the same environment and then maybe for the club night, for example the guys from Huddersfield would come to check out what was going on in Wigan, or the people from Leeds would come across to Manchester and Birmingham, and it would all start (to cross-pollinate)…

The Ritz All-Dayer Manchester 1982

It’s like when we talk about Manchester and the scene that existed in the late 70s and into the 80s, it wasn’t just about Manchester people, it was about people from Huddersfield, Leeds, Sheffield, Birmingham, Nottingham, Bradford.

CC: He’s playing to the Huddersfield posse here.

GW: (Laughs)

CC: Huddersfield was massive! …A massive input of travellers from Huddersfield!  I mean we still get travellers from Huddersfield at the nights at Blackburn. But back then they would come into Manchester, down to Birmingham. Leeds was another good area, at the Central club in Leeds with Paul Schofield, Ian Dewhirst back then. And they were playing off the back of Northern Soul. When I first heard Mike (Shaft) playing in Manchester he was playing more towards the James Brown, he was playing Banbarra ‘Shack Up’, he was using, as I said, Bobby Womack, a lot of the Funk side of the black scene, which never really developed in the North of England.

S.A.S Of G.B All Dayers May 1983

GW: Well it did in Liverpool , with Les Spaine.  electrofunkroots.co.uk/articles/when_funk_held_sway

CC: Yeah Liverpool, well that was a different country wasn’t it. I only went to Liverpool twice as a DJ and I lost my car both times. Ford Capris, don’t take them to Liverpool.

GW: Right, so Rafters, huge concern, that was round about the time that I met you, I think you where still at the back end of working at Rafters, and we spoke to Mike (Shaft) before about The Main Event in Manchester, and you followed John Grant there; when John went off to work, you took over from John there.

CC: That’s right when John packed up I moved in with Mike. I don’t ever remember running up and asking him who Luther Vandross was, I don’t run anywhere! (Laughs)

GW: (Laughs) Now, when the Electro scene, or when I say scene, it just started initially with a trickle of music initially that came through. From my perspective I took over at Legend in 1981, back end of ’81.. You said before about the clubs that most of the clubs on the black scene at the time where ramshackle hovels… You know the difference between the clubs that I was fortunate to be at, Wigan Pier…

CC: Apart from the major venues which were owned by Mecca Organisation, most of the independent nights were in poor venues yeah.

GW: Wigan Pier, Legend where state of the art discotheques, and I think that with the new music that came through, and with everything that happened around that period, it changed the scene around very quickly from being the old style of doing things, there became a new scene. That obviously affected you at the time in Manchester.

CC: Of course it did, the way the music develops, and the way the music always changes, is, you know.. Mike has already announced that he has made a decision to erm, you know, that he didn’t like that particular music, therefore he didn’t want to promote it. He actually then quite cleverly utilised his radio show to incorporate people who did know about the music, and that’s why Mike maintained the respect that he does in Manchester. For me it was probably a little bit wider than that because I wasn’t just about Manchester, I’d become about Birmingham, about Nottingham, where the scenes were just as huge, and the black population in those areas was also just as huge. So we’d got major clubs like Rock City and Birmingham Locarno, where prior to the break dancing and prior to the Hip Hop, we’d already started to develop the Jazz rooms as a separate entity. The Jazz rooms were very much about dance! In the main room it was about black people, black dance, which had not been seen in the clubs for about 40 years! And this was redeveloped, and then Hip Hop came on the back of that, and the Electro sound. We had Bambaataa, Run DMC, Mantronix – all these guys live in Rock City and this was an integral part. What you were doing in Legend I was able to take to Nottingham and Birmigham, and utilize that with the local DJs. All those, you know, ‘The Voice of Q’, Warp 9, Bambaataa, all those records where huge. For me it was a triangle; Manchester, Birmingham and Nottingham.

Johnathon Woodliffe, Colin Curtis & Jean Carn

GW: Only recently, Colin and I sat and talked on the phone for a long time. There was a lot of stuff that it (the conversation) clarified for me, because there was a lot of political stuff going on at the time when Electro music came through, and I found myself backed into a corner at first with people that where very anti (electro), they didn’t see it as black music, they saw it as machine based music that was going to kill the scene, destroy it. I think that, in a sense, that your name was used in vain on a number of occasions to kind of tell me that people weren’t happy with the scene. So speaking to you more recently, a lot of things fell into place, especially with what you were doing at Rock City; that you took that kind of music side there and you ran with that. It basically links into what happened later very clearly. The manager at Rock City was a guy called Paul Mason, who in this city went on to become the manager of the Haçienda a bit later down the line. A guy who worked in one of the record shops in Nottingham, Selectadisc, was  a guy called Graeme Park, who wasn’t DJing at the time, but I believe you where instrumental in him starting up?

CC: Yeah, we used to pay Graeme £30 to finish off some of the nights we did. He was the first DJ that I actually saw turn up with 2 record boxes that had identical records in, 30 or 40 records in each box – just 2 copies of each record. He was one of the first guys who started to put that erm, well it was more blending than mixing if you will, he was actually using the attributes, and I mean records were coming out with 4, 5 mixes on; instrumentals, dubs, and he was using that in those early days.

GW: Yeah, cos I mean the lineage, you know, like the start of the rave period, it had kind of been lost… Something you touched on before, that I’d like you to talk a little bit more about, that was massively important, and I think people now couldn’t take on board just how major it was, was the dancing on the black scene.

CC: Even today, talking outside the venue tonight before we came in, one of the most undocumented areas for me of club culture in the UK from around ’78 to ’88, where for some reason nobody has gone out there and written a book that actually documents what happened with the emerging black dance scene in the UK, whether it was Jazz, whether it was Hip Hop, no matter what it was it seems to have been written off, that whole period seems to have disappeared. Nobody has actually written a definitive book, people have touched on areas of it. The importance of dancing, to most of the black crowd I knew, it was an integral part of life, yes it was about the music, the going out, yes, but the dancing, everybody had moves, everybody had styles. I remember bringing up some guys from Birmingham to a club next to Spin Inn Records; Smarties, on a Sunday night, and these guys where free-form, probably more towards the Jazz, but they could dance to anything. They came onto the dance floor this particular night and they’d pulled black tights over their heads and danced that night, and that changed the dance attitude in Manchester, just from that one night people started to pick up and come back with their own ideas and would then use them at Blackpool Mecca at an all-dayer. You know, you’ve got Broken Glass in Manchester. We had The Rock City Crew – the break dancers down there, IDJ from London, you’ve got all the guys, Salts, and all the guys from my city – the Jazz Defektors. The outlets and the importance of the development of dance music in the clubs that has not been documented is disappointing.

Jazz Defektors & Colin Curtis at Tropicana / Jazz Defektors at The Haçienda 1985

GW: I think that’s one of the things where looking back at the start of the rave scene, people not realising that before it exploded in ’88 at the Haçienda, that previous to that, the main crowd for House music in the Haçienda was a black crowd. Now this crowd was a dancing crowd, and when you look at the classic footage of the Haçienda, with everyone squashed in like sardines, and its all arm and hand movements, there’s nothing happening with their feet because everyone’s close together.  Whereas with the black dancers it was all, you know, the footwork was all important, it was important to have a bit of floor space. It’s clear that that space was invaded, and no longer was their space, and I think that they moved on at that point in time.

Jazz Defektors & Broken Glass at The Haçienda 1984

GW: Wanting to talk about House music, and the early House music, the stuff that you were playing, again, I explain to people that House music wasn’t a separate entity when it started; it was played alongside the Electro, alongside the music from Detroit that was starting.

CC: Whenever change comes out of America, whenever change happens to music, more often than not, it’s paying homage to something from the past. With Electro, with Hip Hop, that was paying homage to a lot of the 7” Funk singles that had been around and underplayed. They were called crate diggers back then in the States. Over here people used to search out for a different sound, for Northern Soul. Eventually, of course, ‘Sliced Tomatoes’ was used by Norman Cook, a huge record! But Electro was the same; it was paying homage to a mixture of James Brown, a mixture of those crate diggers, and with House music that was identical. They were looking back at where everything had come from and taken… they were putting vocals back into… with a 4/4 beat which hadn’t happened since the 60s. To get that dance beat back, some of the early records, there was a mixture, we had the Hip House period for instance, you know with Master C & J ‘Face It’, and records like that where there was a mixture of two things. Again, at that period we were still bringing those acts over. Because these were guys, like with the House movement, at the beginning, and even to this day, where there’s no major music companies behind these people. This is driven from here (points to heart), from people who actually care about what’s going on. I remember doing a weekender for the London crew; the Chris Hill crew down in Bognor Regis, and I was in the chalet with Jonathan (Woodliffe), one of the Nottingham guys, and this guy came in, I was introduced to this guy and he says “This is Paul Oakenfold”, I’d never heard of Paul Oakenfold, but he knew some things about me. He spent two and a half hours writing down all the early Precision tracks and Strictly Records that we were using back at that time, he had no clue about House music. But he’s a lot bloody cleverer than I am, he’s a fucking millionaire! Those are opportunities; it was the same weekend where the London guys were talking about taking people to Ibiza. We tried to take people from Manchester to Skegness. That failed, we sold 18 tickets for this weekender in Skegness! Eventually we put Mass Production over there and lost a fortune as well! But the whole House thing, as with Electro, as with Hip Hop, was born from the streets. It fed what was happening very nicely into what were doing. We were playing house music before The Haçienda was even thought of. They called it ‘The Haçienda, we built it’, well we built it way before The Haçienda, and it was black guys who were reacting to House music at that time. You know, DJ International, labels like that, I mean, huge response to the early House music!

Click here to view the embedded video.

http://youtu.be/46jB4yohiKA

Foot Patrol at the 8411 Centre, Moss Side Precinct, Manchester 1986

GW: And what were the clubs that you were playing these early tracks?

CC: Pretty much the same; for House music in Manchester would be The Playpen. In Nottingham, y’ know Rock City. We continued to move forward with that sound. The Electro thing which you pioneered in Manchester, and what’s that other country? Liverpool, erm…

GW: I wasn’t, I didn’t do much there.

CC: No, no, nobody did, apart from Les Spaine. It was pretty much Birmingham, Nottingham and Manchester, that was the Colin Curtis triangle if you will. That was where most of my support was. We were able to take 3, 4, 5 coaches of people to Scotland, Peterborough, Cambridge. Wherever we went there were fantastic followings, it was very much about dancing.

GW: The music back then was like; again for someone who’s much younger (today), it was the width of black music. Even for someone who was known for playing Electro, I was playing soul, I was playing Funk, I was playing Jazz, you know, it was the best music available. It didn’t matter about tempo, it was downtempo, it was upbeat. It was a full spectrum of music.

CC: Well there was a massive similarity between the way that, certainly began at the major nights, it happened a Legend, it happened a few times at Rafters; people would form into a circle and you’d get the battling off, whether that would be the Jazz dancing, or Hip Hop, break dancing, that became part of some of the all-dayers, we’d have a period of half an hour, 45 minutes where that was the only thing that happened, that was the aspect. It was important to the event; it became an integral part of everything.

GW: Again, going back to that kind of thing, I sometimes get asked now about… “What was it like?” “What were the clubs like?” They’ll ask me about Legend, and say “What was the party like?” and they’ll use that term ‘party’, and I kind of think about it and I’m like it wasn’t really a party, it was much more intense than that.

CC: No jelly, no trifle, it was no fuckin party!

GW: It was incredible; it was like there was a necessity, the people that came, they needed that to let off steam and everything.

CC: Yep, the initial buzz, when I first came into Manchester at Rafters, I think I ended up at Rufus before I eventually left, I mean the buzz about Legend back then, and what was being created by yourself and Chad (Jackson), and the other guys, and Terry Lennon, who put the whole thing together, at Wigan Pier as well, that excitement excites me! Whether people decide, as we’ve said, there were people who didn’t like that; the traditionalists didn’t like what was going on. But what tends to happen with all these changes is that because they are often borne of things that have happened in the past, they then evolve forward. So for me it’s a positive thing, it’s not a negative thing.

GW: Well it’s the same thing that happened when you where at Blackpool Mecca, things had to change.

CC: That’s right.

GW: You went with the change.

CC: People on the Northern Soul scene will tell you that (Northern Soul) is still going, and that Electro is dead. Which is shit! Sorry.

GW: Talk about Berlin, because I know that is close to your heart as a club.

Berlin 1986

CC: Berlin was a unique time, because Manchester, the best of what I’d been involved with in Manchester kind of passed on. This would be about 84, 85. Although at the time I didn’t know it but at the time I was having some sort of breakdown. So it was an important period for me, finding myself, as well as finding music. It was the one place, along with Hewan Clarke who assisted me greatly there, where we were able to combine every aspect of black music, whether it be Jazz, Hip Hop Soul. We were playing Bossa, Hip Hop, House, everything under one roof, and this was just a midweek night.

Berlin Flyers 1984

CC: It attracted the likes of Mick Hucknall, you know, he did ‘Money’s Too Tight To Mention’, we used to play the Valentine Brothers version down in there, and you know he picked up the album because we were, actually not playing that track, that track was shit! And he did a shitter version of it. But, that’s not a pop at Mick, you know the guy’s worked very hard! I think that particular period for me was unique because Hewan would play, and then I would play for maybe 3 or 4 hours, and that’s the first time I’d done that in a club, and actually played for that long, and to be able to go through all the different phases of music, and all the different styles, with the same people reacting. We attracted a lot of people who took a lot of ideas from nights like that.

Colin Curtis – Article in Mancunian – January 1985 (Click image to enlarge)

CC: You’ve mentioned Mr Scruff and people like that.

GW: Yeah Scruff. Oh, Gilles Peterson?

CC: Well Peterson used to have a spy in Berlin (Laughs), and when I used to go to London he used to meet up with me off the train station, and then he would follow me around the Jazz shops. You know he was only young back then and it was obvious that he’d got a pretty face and he got a chance, and for music he’s done a phenomenal job!

GW: And he does pay his respects to you as like an influence.

CC: Only respects, he never pays cash! (Laughter)

GW: (Laughs) Why is it that people now go over to Japan to play, and they go all over the world, surely…

CC: I remember sitting at my parent’s house many years ago, and I got a phone call, and my dad who not the best, you know he uses about 3 hearing aids for each ear! And he said “Sony incorporated are on the phone from Japan”. I said “No, it will be the council”. “No” he says “It’s Sony Incorporated from Japan”. I said “No, no, that can’t be right”. I picked the phone up, and it was one of the executives from Sony Japan who wanted me to go over and play jazz in Japan.  Y’know, I’ve been on one aeroplane in my life, and that’s it! No, I don’t do aeroplanes, so I passed them on to Baz Fe Jazz, who’s one of the Birmingham DJs, who was one of the original Birmingham dancers.  And he went over there, and since then Snowboy, people like that have been able to go out there. And on the Northern (Soul) side people like Butch, Mark Dobson, which is fantastic! I would have loved to do it, but something up here says that I don’t do aeroplanes, so you know, I didn’t go at the time, and probably could have done the Gilles Peterson thing. It was difficult to be as influential as Peterson if you weren’t in London. Very few DJs have been able to be, you know, Oakenfold again, who was clever and used the internet, whereas Gilles, again, he built up the rapport in London. But Gilles is a real nice guy, he’s not like me, he hasn’t got an edge, he hasn’t got an attitude, he’s accepted around the place. He did a fantastic job! I did some great radio shows with Gilles back in the day, and the weekenders as well, we had some good times together. We came at it from different angles, but yeah a lot of respect for the guy!

Baz Fe Jazz / Gilles Peterson, Norman Jay & Omar

GW: Talk to me again about The Playpen, because this was a club that doesn’t get mentioned an awful lot. It was the old Slack Alice’s which was George Best’s club in the 60s (42nd Street nightclub today).

CC: Yeah, I used to see Best in a couple of the clubs in Manchester, mainly for drinking sessions; he wasn’t interested in the music:  Women and drinking mainly for George. We got tied into The Playpen through the connections with Terry Lennon, because I used to work at a club called Cassonellis, just outside Manchester, which he owned.

GW: It was his cousin?

CC: Yeah his cousin, or brother I think, they owned the supermarkets and hotel. It (The Playpen) was a silver and glass, chrome and glass club. Horrible! but supposedly very trendy. I used to play a lot of music in there on DJ International Records, a lot of very early House stuff.  We had a troupe of girls I can’t remember their name…

Audience: Freestyle Freakers.

CC: Yes, they were the first as I remember, first female… I wanted to take them everywhere with me, to prove that this thing was huge. And again we’d have people from Huddersfield, people from Sheffield, which was another great city that I had a fantastic black music following. The Playpen was probably the first place where we really got to grips with House music and later people who used to come along who’ve later become influential in Manchester, like Mike Stephens, he was one of the early punters towards the end of The Playpen.

GW: And there was a crew of guys who kind of evolved a specific dance style to House wasn’t there? Like Samson, and those guys?

CC: Yes there were.

Audience: Foot Patrol

Foot Patrol at The Haçienda (Photo by Ian Tilton)

GW: Yep, yeah, which was very different to what people, you know, looking at the old footage, the kind of rave footage, it was a completely different kind of thing from that.

CC: I think because so much of what had gone on before, the culture of what had gone on before, in underground type venues that were not like this. The fact that a black crowd was moving into this type of venue was also reasonably unique, as it was at Legend. To have a black crowd that was so influential in a very up-market trendy club that had a lot of money, and Legend was one of the first clubs that had the money spent on it; lighting and sound. I mean lighting and sound, if you go back to Northern Soul, lighting and sound was a candle and a fucking handle! Nobody gave a shit about the sound system.  And I still bang on about sound systems today. That was hugely important. I think that helped with the way you presented music, it helped that you were working on the best equipment. Even Chad Jackson learnt how to use it (laughter). Well, he used to have a switch didn’t he? He used to turn it on and off, and he said he was the light engineer! I never got that (laughter).

GW: I think I was fortunate that I went to that club with the equipment and at the moment the music was changing, and I’d made a decision that I was going to mix. I think it just fell kind of lucky for me, in a sense.

CC: I have a mixing style that’s unique to me; it’s called ‘falling down the stairs with a drum kit’… “bumpppttthhhh… these beats are not matching!” Yeah, I know, (laughs) I’ve been DJing for 41 years, I know they don’t fuckin’ match! (laughter).

GW: You mentioned Sheffield, just wanted to jump back to that for a second because I know that linking into The Playpen that there were very legendary names in Sheffield, DJs like Winston and Parrot.

CC: Winston used to come to The Playpen, he very rarely missed The Playpen. In fact, I owe him a big thanks because I used to make such a big mess with records, with covers and things everywhere, he used to put them all back for me, so I mean he was a top guy!

GW: It was funny because when I first found out about the Electric Chair, when it was at its height, I looked at what was going on there and it had a real grounding in black music, and it understood that kind of culture. It seemed to me that it linked in, it kind of almost jumped over the rave period and it linked back to where we were at before it became all house in a sense. And I was trying to work out why and what was the linkage, then I realised that Luke Unabomber was from Sheffield, and realised that Luke used to go to Jive Turkey that was Winston and Parrots club.

CC: Well Jive Turkey was probably just before I eventually ended up in hospital. I used to play for Winston in both rooms, because again, they’d set up a different room for the Jazz, that still continued. The sort of positive attitude towards dancing was as important as the gig itself.

GW: Exactly, when you think about it, what happened later, you know, we had this huge explosion in House music, and all of a sudden, from my perspective, when I wasn’t DJing at this time, I just saw that a lot of people have come onto the scene, that previously six months ago would have told you that dance music was shit. And now they’d taken a little pill and they were like there and they were centre stage, and all of a sudden everybody was into dance, but that kind of background that we had with the dance scene was lost. All of a sudden nobody was talking about that. It was like talking about something completely new. Why do you think that happened?

CC: I think you already… just said why it happened, its called ecstasy. To be fair I don’t think many black people were duped by ecstasy, for many white kids it was a return to the northern soul scene. Although the drugs problems that came with northern soul, the all-nighters were probably 20 – 25% of the issue, although back in those days, for instance when The Golden Torch was closed down, in the local paper it was front page news, it was major! But the drug taking at the height of the dance scene in the 90s was probably 80 – 85%, it was totally different. Most of the black guys, that I knew anyway, didn’t take that particular drug; I’m not saying they took any drugs, but it wasn’t that particular one. They didn’t need to, they came to dance, it was about the dance, the chilling afterwards was a different party. Massive respect to Persian and the Reno scene because that was where people had already established a culture for class black music in Manchester which was the underscore of the success of the dance clubs.

GW: Yes because I mean again that’s a question that I’m often asked is “What drugs were people taking?” and I’m like, somebody might have a little smoke in the corner, but they were even reluctant about that because if they got caught they were out of the club and they couldn’t get back in and they didn’t want to risk that. So that was it.

CC: So where did the black people go? I think that was part of where they went. The Ibiza thing kicked in , and I did the first Acid Jazz thing in Stoke On Trent, which is another dance town, city, whatever you want to call it, it was involved in the Northern Soul culture, it was evolved in the Jazz-Funk scene, and here it was again, so I used two local guys and we put that on, and within three weeks we got lock outs, we got the police, we got everything. Everything was a problem. We were able to bring something out that me and John Grant had close to our hearts, that was the old dry ice machines were back, and stretchers for the hospital… ecstasy is not a good drug to be taking!

GW: So why do you feel that it has been obscured so much? You know, from your own personal perspective, obviously you where involved in such a wide spectrum of music and scenes, and yet what people know you for is Northern Soul.

Colin Curtis photographed for Black Echoes magazine 1982 & 1983

CC: You keep saying that, and I don’t think people on the Northern Soul scene (laughs) would agree with that anymore. My opinions on Northern Soul, you know I always find it very strange that a music scene would want to listen to the same records for 40 years! I’m not saying there isn’t a wealth of 60s music, there is, but when you actually go to the gigs and hear the repetition of music that’s been around for a long time, I don’t fully understand that one, on a personal level. Erm… I’ve no idea.

Northern Soul was predominantly white people. Jazz-Funk eventually became predominantly a black scene. I still play out most weekends, and I play mostly to white people. I would love to know where the, the black scene’s kind of gone back to itself if you will.

GW: Which is a shame…

CC: It did become one.

GW: It’s like saying, for example with House, that a lot of people would assume that someone like A Guy Called Gerald; that he walked into The Haçienda one day, discovered house music and made a track called Voodoo Ray. Whereas in reality Gerald was a kid who was on the Jazz-Funk scene, then he went through the Electro period, then he was the DJ while MC Tunes was the rapper, and when you listen to Voodoo Ray as a track, you can hear those Jazz influences, you can hear the electro, it’s not an orthodox House record.

CC: No it’s a great track, it appealed to a lot more than as you say that one particular genre. It appealed to everybody. I mean that crossed-over to most of the venues I was playing at the time I could play that record, and that didn’t apply to all the records.

GW: Yeah, but I think the people kind of assume that he discovered it because he went to The Haçienda, whereas really it was Gerald and the people like him that built that kind of scene in The Haçienda by going across on the Friday, and obviously they had been going to clubs like The Playpen, Legends, The Gallery, Berlin, these kind of clubs beforehand, and you know I think that that’s like, the one main thing that I’m always trying to put across, is to draw back to that period of time, and the culture that existed beforehand, and how strong it was. It was an underground culture but it was a big culture.

CC: If you look at the 90s dance scene as it was, and the amount of people that were drawn into it through the raves, through Acid House, through everything, through Ibiza, the whole thing, it became so huge! And yet now, you show me an event, apart from Southport Weekender, that actually encompasses 2 or 3 thousand people dancing to that music? Where? It doesn’t exist. So when you think something that huge could disappear, I suppose it isn’t that surprising that what happened between ‘78 and ‘88 has also disappeared, and changed in a way.

GW: What’s happening, a lot of that music is being rediscovered, but interestingly it’s by generally by a younger white audience who never had it first time around, that have come across these records, that maybe have gone through the house scene and heard things sampled, and discovered that maybe these came from a Disco record, or a Boogie record from the early 80s.

CC: I think that’s just repetition of what we said about the American black culture, you know, they come up on the crate digging, just buying cheap records, learning from that. Well Keb Darge was another. Keb Darge was originally into Northern Soul. He single headedly invented ‘Rare Funk’. He applied a Northern Soul mentality to 7” Funk singles. We’d had the Rare Groove thing with Norman Jay in London, which something else that didn’t really come up to the North.

GW: That was almost like their Northern Soul.

CC: Yeah that’s right, that’s been said in the past. Keb Darge did that with Funk, but Keb had the power of the internet and again very cleverly. His Funk nights are still going in London, been going for years.

GW: So tell me what are you doing now?

CC: Talking to you.

GW: (Laughs)

CC: Erm, see, even recall at 55, that’s pretty impressive! Erm, I’m DJing, I’m DJing all the time. I work within the Blackpool Hilton Weekenders, I still work in the midlands, I work in Birmingham, Wolverhampton, nights like Soul Underground, Soul Intent. But I have to say, most of the crowds are predominantly white, the weekenders can level up a bit.

GW: I would say that with the black crowd in general, apart from the Rare Groove scene in London, you know the black crowd have never been retrospective towards music, they’ve never gone backwards looking for stuff, they are always looking forwards, looking ahead for things.

CC: I think some of them look backwards, I mean the whole white thing in London, you know, the Chris Hill era is completely stuck!  I mean it’s become almost an 18 to 30s scene, where if you’re not playing any records from sort of ’81 to ’83 or ’85, then they don’t want to know, they just stay in that. If you listen to Solar Radio which is one of today’s internet radio stations which plays 24/7 black music, erm, you’d wonder what year it was sometimes because it’s predominantly about the 80s. And when you talk to them about it, approach them thay say “well nobody’s making any good new music” Bollocks!

GW: Well I mean that’s it, I think there’s always stuff.

CC: It’s changed, record companies, don’t rule the same way that they did; independent music is now fed through the internet, either you download it illegally, or there’s places like CD Baby. If you want vinyl still there’s Juno online. There radio stations, you can listen to… I used to covet my 70s American New York WBLS cassettes, you know these where guys who influenced me greatly back then… Frankie ‘Loveman’ Crocker, Billy Carrington Kirkland – these were DJs on WBLS back in the 70s. Now you can press buttons on the old laptop and you can listen to any radio station in the world. That’s not been there before. People have got the options. I think Gilles Peterson more than any other DJ has opened that sort of world music aspect, and Louie Vega is there at the moment, he’s in that World music, looking at the African side, looking at the Latin side which is again cultures that he comes from whereas Kenny Dope goes more towards the Hip Hop thing, that’s where he grew, another crate digger. Kenny is still a collector, he still comes over to see Keb Darge and they chase after records.

GW: I also heard that Louie Vega saw a list of the music being played in the UK in late 70s, early 80s and couldn’t believe it! …There’s a lot of documentation now about US dance culture, there’s been some fantastic stuff written about it and it’s great to have that information there. But at the same time I don’t think people realise how rich and how far dance culture in this country goes back, you know, way back into the 60s!

CC: They (Americans) have gone about it… If you look at it you can go to more depth, the main influential clubs in the States were Paradise Garage, Body and Soul, Shelter, these are consistently good year in, year out. Originally of course the Paradise Garage was heavily connected to the gay side, but these clubs are about dancing, and it’s a marathon, it’s a 12 hour session each time, they are marathons!  For most of the major world DJs we’ve come to know in the UK, gigs in the states don’t exist. They become huge in Europe, they become huge in Australia, but they’ve never had this adulation, this respect in their own country.

GW: Yeah. I wanted to kind of round things off, just talk about why this country, for example if you go back to the 60s I’ve heard the stories of the people who came over on the Stax Volt Tour and on the Motown Review, they came to this country and they couldn’t believe the amount of knowledge that people here had about their music!

CC: That was back then, I mean I went to watch Stax Volt when they first came over, and I would have been 12 – 13. If you look back at the crowd that was watching they were very beatnicky, very university and very white! But no, I think that happens every time Americans… I’ve spoken in some depth with Jnr Walker, Roy Ayers and people like that about black music, they can’t believe how much people know about black music over here. For them the world exists just in their world. You know I think I gave Roy Ayers about 31, 32 albums to sign, and he said “You know what Colin? If you didn’t spend so much money on records, you could buy a yacht!”

GW: And it’s true.

CC: What for? I don’t like planes; I don’t like water, no, no. It’s a different culture, If you get sucked into the music scene in this country, for me, what I’ve seen, and the passion that people in this room and DJs that have upheld and contributed to black music in this country, it’s a completely different mindset… Because you are unique to the UK.

GW: Yeah, in the States, even looking back at that early 80s period, and now I can do it with hindsight and say look at the music I was playing at somewhere like Legend, that it wasn’t being played in the same way anywhere in New York, for example, you’d have the block parties in the Bronx where playing one side of it, the people in the Paradise Garage where playing another side. Maybe the closest thing to it was something like the Funhouse or The Roxy, where they were kind of combining these things. But it was completely different the way people consume music in this country.

CC: Yeah we had that situation at Blackpool Mecca where you were getting the Disco end it; even as extreme as Alec Constandinos and Parliament and Funkadelic being played in the same gig, along with anything from Northern Soul, right through to what became Jazz-Funk. So I don’t think that’s ever been embraced outside of the UK in the same way.

GW: I think if there’s a positive thing that’s being embraced now is that people seem to be kind of becoming broader minded towards music that for a long time, especially during the 90s, everyone sort of went into their own narrow bag, so it was one little side of House music or Techno or whatever it was. Whereas now I think people for the first time in a long time… Somebody said to me the other day, and you know, I hadn’t thought of it that way; it’s almost like now we are going back to before the house thing hit, and taking on from there in a sense.

CC: I think possibly, I think the people who treated the House scene, you know, at the front end, the [people who’d done it from the heart and from the dancing, and then what it eventually became, inevitably, it was only ever going to leave a residue, most people would move on with their lives and just retain that as a memory, as opposed to looking for what goes next. I think, like you say, I think a lot of people now go back, there’s 40, 45 years of black music history in this country that you can go back and respect. I’ve always felt that my goal is about playing new music. Whether that’s also incorporating some music from the past that other people may not have heard, but yeah. A guy once said to me “I like what you do, you play to an empty dance floor for about an hour and a half, and then about five years later we get it!” (Laughter) And that’s been my job, which doesn’t make you the most popular DJ at times. But erm yeah, I’m excited by the next parcel that arrives, the next CD that comes down off the internet whatever, I’m still excited as much now as I was 40 years ago!

GW: And that’s a fantastic way to be! And really, many thanks for coming down today Colin, it’s been an absolute pleasure to have you here!

CC: No problem. Thank you.

Additional links:

www.mdmarchive.co.uk/archive/showartefact

colincurtisconnection.blogspot.com

Electrospective Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/group

© Greg Wilson, 2012

Image by www.anti-limited.com

Full transcript of interview:

GW: Anyway, as I say, we’re onto the second part of the interviews, and this guy who’s gonna come on now, he’s seen them all come and go, he’s been in Manchester since the 70s, he continues to DJ in Manchester, he is the quintessential Manchester DJ, and his name is Hewan Clarke.

[applause]

Make yourself comfortable.

HC: I am yes.

GW: Right, firstly, let’s talk about… I think you’re the best person to talk to us about a really influential venue in Manchester that you ended up working at yourself, but it has a history that goes back well before that, particularly with a DJ called Persian, a place called the New Reno, in Moss Side. When did you first go there?

HC: I got into the Reno round about ’85 when I was doing the Gallery. The Gallery would finish about 2 o’clock in the morning, and then the whole club would just get up and move across Manchester to the Reno and carry on til about 6, 7 in the morning.

GW: That’s when you were DJing there?

HC: Yeah.

GW: But did you go there before that?

HC: No, in the days when Persian was DJing there in the 70s therenoclub.com/dj, I was going through my Reggae phase, so I used to go upstairs in the Nile.

GW: The Nile was the more Reggae side?

HC: Yeah, the Nile was sort of more Reggae-ish and downstairs was all the Soul and everything else that Persian was playing, and I wasn’t into Soul at that time. I remember one time going downstairs into the Reno and it was packed and I had no idea what he was playing and I just walked out and went back upstairs and listened to the Reggae. And then it was only after Persian had left and the club  had gone through a sort of really quiet period for about 5 years, that I came in about 85 and kicked it off again and took it back up.

GW: Yeah, cos that underpins that whole era from a black perspective, that was there before maybe the black kids were coming into the city centre of Manchester, and it still was until the time it was all knocked down. When did it get knocked down?

HC: I have no idea.

GW: Back end of the 80s?

HC: I have no idea, and like Mike says to you, everything just gel into one for me, if you ask me for dates, I can’t pull dates out, I have no idea!

Hewan Clarke photographed for Black Echoes Magazine May 1983

GW: OK, well from a DJing perspective, can you tell us how and where you started out yourself?

HC: I started out listening to Reggae.

GW: Right.

HC: I used to go up to Birmingham with friends and there was a shop in Lozells where we used to buy Reggae 7 inches like Louisa Marks ‘Caught You In A Lie’, and all that sort of stuff. I wasn’t actually DJing then, I was just a collector of music, I just bought what I liked really.

GW: This would be the 70s, obviously

HC: Yes this was the 70s. And then I heard an album from Wilton Felder, a friend played me an album and I was just totally captivated by it. And that was the end of my Reggae phase and the beginning of my Jazz phase, and I’ve been into Jazz ever since then… I mean there’s so much really.

GW: You did Pips as well didn’t you?

HC: Yes, I got into Pips, I went out to all the clubs in Manchester, I was the dancer, I was the club dancer, always on the floor, in the middle of the floor, dancing away there, sweating away. I started off going to the Hard Rock in Stretford listening to Andy Peebles play things like ‘Golden Years’, David Bowie.

GW: So he was actually DJing in that club?

HC: Yeah he was DJing in that club but at the time I didn’t know, my mate told me years later that it was actually Andy Peebles. And from there I moved into town for the first time and started going places like Placemate and Smarties and I also went to Pips. Now when I was in Pips Mike (Shaft) had left, and the guy that was doing the Soul room was a guy called Ian Connor and his DJing name was Johnny Washington, and I became really friendly with him. Basically what happened is whenever he wanted a break, he’d give me a pile of records and say “play these for me”, and that was really how it went on. And then I got to know the manager of the club and he said “OK, you can be our sort of stand-in DJ”, because I think Pips had about 7 different rooms, and they played about 7 different types of music really, and so whenever a DJ phoned in late or couldn’t come in, I would actually do their set. The way Pips operated is that they had a room at the back with little boxes, with all the different music for the rooms.

GW: So they bought their own music in then?

HC: Yeah, so it was just a case of going in that room, picking up the box and playing what was in the box. And I did a lot of work in the Bowie room. There was a DJ there called Ian Bracewell, who I know really well, Steve Bracewell, sorry, and he had a problem, he was epileptic, so every now and then when he was DJing he would have a seizure, so someone would come running going ‘quick, Hewan, get downstairs and start playing’. So I’d be playing Bowie, Roxy, Birthday Party, Kraftwerk, that’s how I got into all that stuff!

GW: So I mean, it’s interesting for a black guy at that point in time, because then it was seen that people should be into this type of music or that type of music and if you were black you were either into Reggae or you were into Soul and Funk.

HC: It wasn’t that I was actually into it, it was just music, and I just played it, and for me the reaction between the audience and the music was more interesting, because at the time there was this kind of robotic dance and all these people that were painted all over the place and hair up here and I’d been used to seeing just black people dance in clubs and then to go to this place and see a whole club full of white people, it was really fantastic, it really was. And so there I was playing to them.

GW: These nights were called Roxy Bowie nights, and within the nights anything alternative, like Kraftwerk, would have been played at Roxy Bowie nights, it was the alternative music, like a lot of the alternative stuff that was being played in the late 70s. It was a huge, massive scene that was going on, separate of course to the Funk side. So how did you move into becoming a Jazz DJ as such?

HC: I’m the reluctant DJ. If anybody would have told me I’d become  a DJ, I’d have said, nah. That was the last thing I would have walked into. I wear 2 hearing aids, I’ve got very bad hearing, ever since I was a child I’ve had bad hearing. I’ve got 2 hearing aids and the reason I don’t wear them is because they’re pink. The thing with me and music is that because of my hearing I lose the high end of my hearing, so it means that I can’t hear maybe 90% of the lyrics that I’m playing on the record. So I don’t actually buy music for lyrics, I’m a beat DJ. I buy for the beat, and the bassline, and whatever it is that comes out, irrespective of that is being shouted over the top of it basically. I love Jazz because there was no vocals on most of them, it was mainly instrumentals and stuff like that. I like the fast stuff, the Latin, the Samba, you know the Brazilian type of stuff, that sort of thing. How did I get into being a Jazz DJ? I think that was Colin’s fault really, because meeting up with Colin (Curtis) was a major turning point in my life actually. I remember the first time I was in Placemate and these people came over and they were dancing in the middle of the floor, and we were like, ‘what the hell, what kind of dancing is that?’ It was absolutely brilliant, we’d never seen dancing like that. People were actually down on the floor, we danced upright.

GW: This was where by the way?

HC: This was in Placemate. And then I went over to them and said “where are you guys from, where did you learn to dance like that?” And they said at a club downtown at a place called Rafters. And the following week I walked into Rafters and it was like walking into heaven, it was beautiful, absolutely beautiful. And I remember Colin and John (Grant) was on there, and the music they were playing was right down my street – up-tempo Jazz, mid-tempo Soul, all stuff that was really nice. Out of that, Colin and myself became really good friends actually, and we found out that we had very similar taste in the type of Jazz that we were buying. So I would nick stuff out of his collection and he would nick stuff out of mine, and I want them back! [laughter]. So that’s how it happened really.

GW: When was your first move into DJing with the Jazz?

HC: There was a club that Mike and Colin used to do called Rufus. This was at the other end of the block from where Pips was, downstairs in the basement. Rufus had its heyday, it was brilliant when it was running, and then it kinda like died off. I knew the manager really well, and the Jazz Defektors had formed, we wanted somewhere where we could go and practice dancing, and I think I was in there a Monday or Tuesday nights, they opened the club just for us and anybody else who wanted to come in. What I’d do is I’d play tracks, and then run on the dance floor, dance to it, and then start the next one. That was just what we did. That was basically how I started DJing Jazz really.

GW: And that led on to the whole course of what happened afterwards for you?

HC: Yes, Colin and Mike took me onto the all-dayer scene, and I used to warm up for them. I’d be the first DJ on as people were coming in. It was nerve-wracking, I hate being up there and people looking at you and being the centre of attention and that sort of thing. I think I really hated all of that but I got through it.

Sean Brett & Hewan Clarke at The Ritz All-Dayer September 1982

GW: So wasn’t it the Jazz you were playing when the guys from A Certain Ratio came down?

HC: Yeah, the crowd that usually come in there was mainly a black crowd with maybe 3 or 4 white guys who came in who were into the Jazz dancing. But in the corner of the club there was this group of people. They’d come in every week and just sit there, and every now and again one of them would come over and say ‘excuse me what’s this you’re playing?’ and write it down. Later on at the end of the night after a couple of months coming they came over and introduced themselves to me. This was Martin Moscrop and the rest of them from ACR and said “we’re with a band called A Certain Ratio and we’d really like you to support us on our gig”. They were going to do their British gigs, which was campuses and all that sort of stuff, and I was like, OK, that’d be cool, I’ll have some of that. And so I went off with them on their tour. The person who was driving them around between venues at the time was Anthony Wilson and that was how I got to know him basically.

GW: And you had a shared passion for an American DJ, which one?

HC: Well, we were talking at one point and we got down to the question of who our favourite DJs where, and I said my favourite DJ was Frankie Crocker. Frankie Crocker was the DJ that used to DJ in WBLS in New York in the 70s and 80s. I used to have a cousin that used to send tapes over to me. I thought this guy was the best DJ ever. Tony Wilson listened to him as well, and Tony liked him. He quite simply said to me “Look, in two years time I ‘m gonna open a night club in Manchester and I want you to be the DJ”. And that was how The Haçienda came about, it was that simple, really simple.

GW: So May 82, that was the opening of The Haçienda. Obviously, when it opened, people remember it now because of the rave scene, but at that particular point in time the club wasn’t very well designed for the DJ?

HC: No, it was weird, it was really strange, we, I was stuck in this room by the side of the stage with the lighting guy, I can’t remember his name…

GW: Claude? No he was the video guy.

HC: Yeah Claude was the video guy. Claude was a French guy, he was a really decadent person, he used to fart in the DJ box all the time! [Laughter] You’d be trying to DJ and he’d be like [Paaarrrrrp!] “Eat that one will ya!” in that French accent. Oh, the madness that went on in that room. Claude was a character, I mean I loved him to death, you know, he was a very special person really, you know in his own special way. The things that he did, and the images that he threw out on the screen. He was the first person that introduced me to Divine, and the film Pink Flamingo, and I remember him putting the scene out onto the screen where Devine picked that dog do up off the floor and ate it, and I remember people in the club going “Eeeuuuk! What’s this thing on the screen?” An amazing guy! y’know, but in terms of for the DJ it was horrible.

The Haçienda DJ Booth 1983 (Photo by Hewan Clarke)

GW: Yeah it was, it was detached from the audience.

HC: Very much so! What I used to do when I was playing the records… I always had to go out, run onto the stage, stand in the middle of the stage and listen to how it sounded in the club, went back in and readjust it on the mixer and I was constantly doing that because there was no feedback from what was going on outside, you just had to look through that gap.

GW: That was the other main problem with the club as well…. Was the acoustics, the sound.

HC: The acoustics was terrible! I remember two minutes to opening time they were still painting The Haçienda. They opened the door and let the first punter in and I remember the painter pulled the ladder down and ran into the back with the ladder. They tested the sound system for the first time and they used a classical music track and it sounded tremendous because that sound just sort of like filled the whole of the The Haçienda, it was absolutely brilliant! A really brilliant sound. And I was playing stuff that was current at the time, erm ‘You’re The One For Me’ D Train, cos Tony, Anthony Wilson said to me “I want you to play black music, I want you to play the music that you are playing now in the clubs and the all-dayer scene”. So I came over with the Jonzun Crew and Sharon Redd ‘Can You Handle It’, all that sort of stuff, that was what he wanted. He said “Stick to it”. I’m like “Why do you want me to play that?” and he said “because black music is going to become an essential part in white musical culture in the future” He actually said that to me, he knew that. And I was like I can’t see this happening, but it did, you know. Of course the thing with The Haçienda is that once you start playing music that had that… it just bounced all over the place and it really did my head in!

GW: You ended up becoming like, it was all things to all people, there was so many different kind of types of people within that crowd.

HC: Well yeah because the club that they had before that was The Factory, which was the PSV, which was like an alternative club again because they played Punk there and that sort of stuff, and when they moved from The Factory and came over to The Haçienda, obviously that crowd came across with them thinking they were gonna get the same type of music. And there was I playing music that… I remember somebody wrote a letter saying why did the DJ keep playing music that they play in hair dressers. I was there playing that type of music. I think that was why they hid me in the DJ box, because you could see people walking around… “Where’s the fuckin DJ? Get him to take this music off!” We were hidden behind this screen you know what I mean, and nobody knew where we were so…

GW: So you ended up playing a wide selection of stuff. What kind of stuff would you play on a normal night?

HC: I had this sort of like blending the Sharon Redd, the D Train and that sort of thing with like current Pop, Funk Pop like Thompson Twins, ‘Fascist Groove Thing’.

GW: Heaven 17, Blancmange?

HC: ABC, Blancmange, all that sort of stuff. I’m very much a crowd pleasing DJ. There’s no way I could DJ and have an empty floor. I would try to the end of my life to get people on that dancefloor. Definitely, I can’t DJ to an empty floor. And if I have to go out and buy a Punk record to get them on the floor and then hit them with something else, I actually did that. Howard who was the manager, I was saying “Look Howard, I need to be able to blend some more, some different types of music in here” and Tony was like “No, don’t do that, just keep playing black music, keep playing” you know, but it did my head in!

Haçienda Newsletters 1982 (Click image to enlarge)

GW: It was like a kind of naive thing that they were… I mean a very brave thing I think they were trying to do. They’d been to New York, they’d seen Danceteria, Paradise Garage, and they thought that they could transplant that in Manchester.

Click here to view the embedded video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1hQcFXSWkQ

The Tube – New York clubbing 1983

GW: But obviously the black crowd didn’t want to go into a venue unless it was the latest black music so…

HC: No, the black crowd were in there, there was a large quantity of them that came in, because I was doing The Gallery and The Reno…

GW: But that was later, that was ’85, rather than the ’82 period?

HC: Yeah, a lot of them were in there, the problem with The Haçienda was the delivery of the music, it wasn’t clear enough for them. These sort of people liked their music big, so that they can hear the bass, the treble, the mid, everything. You couldn’t do that in The Haçienda unless you stood directly in the middle of the dancefloor in The Haçienda you couldn’t really decipher what was going on.

GW: Also it was very much a live venue as well. There was a lot of big acts…

HC: Yeah, we had a lot of live gigs there, I remember seeing people like The Birthday Party, Robert Palmer, Boy George – I chatted to him for ages. Met Madonna, met ‘em all, met William Burroughs…

GW: William Burroughs? Didn’t know that!

HC: Yeah, William Burroughs came. Brought a table in the middle of the stage, and he sat down there and read from a book and the club was packed. People just sat around on the floor with their legs crossed just listening to William Burroughs. www.dangerousminds.net/william_burroughsat_the_hacienda_1982

I had no idea who this man was, you know what I mean, but it was a really good night. They used to have plays in The Haçienda. I remember at one stage they turned the dance floor into a ship, were they brought in props and masts and stuff like that and what they did was they took the audience through the ship and told a story. Oh a lot of wonderful things happened there that wasn’t documented. It wasn’t just a music venue, a lot of things went on in there.

Hacienda All-Dayer July 83

GW: It’s probably well documented now but The Haçienda probably wouldn’t have lasted the first 12 months but for the success of New Order , because they were losing money hand over fist trying to fill that venue.

HC: I didn’t know any of that, I wasn’t told any of that at the time.

GW: Yeah, it was the success of Blue Monday that kind of kept things afloat. They were struggling to keep the venue open.

Hewan Clarke photographed in The Haçienda DJ booth for Mancunian in 1985

GW: In the end you left The Haçienda in ’83 but came back again I think it was in ‘84 for a second period.

HC: Did I?

GW: You did yes.

[Laughter]

HC: Alright yeah, yeah I left… I mean the Saturday night in The Haçienda, no problem with the Saturday night. They were packed, I was playing everything; Soul, Funk, Jazz, Indie, Pop, everything, anything I could get my hands on. The Saturday night was OK. It was just sort of like the rest of the nights. Cos I was there Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, I was there 7 nights in the week at the beginning. Tony had me in the beginning, playing all that stuff. I left when the Saturday night went down, and then they asked me to come back. I’ve got a leaflet called ‘Big H returns to the Big H’ and I remember keeping one for my archives.

Big H Returns To The Big H

GW: Mike Pickering at that point, he wasn’t a DJ he was the promotions manager.

HC: He was the booker, he was the one that booked the bands and everything.

GW: How was your relationship with Mike at that point?

HC: My relationship with Mike was fine. I’ve got photographs in my album of Mike in the DJ box with his arms round my girlfriend at the time [Laughter], erm he took a picture of me with my arms around her in the DJ box with the Akwil mixer and everything else. I’ve got loads of pictures from inside The Haçienda.

GW: He (Mike Pickering) made the decision that he wanted to split the nights up a little bit and change things.

HC: Yeah, I was asking for that, I was saying “Look I need help here!” because you know I’m being told one thing by Tony Wilson just play black music, just play the music you are playing out in the clubs and stuff like that. Mike Pickering obviously wasn’t happy with that because it wasn’t working as well as Tony thought it was going to work really. And that was simply because the sound system wasn’t there, you know, when you see what happened when The Haçienda, at the beginning of the rave period, they went out and bought a 6K sound system. If I’d had that it would have been a totally different story altogether.

GW: Well, I worked there myself, so I can completely appreciate everything you are saying, because it was a nightmare. Especially after working a club like Legend where it was designed for the DJ. To go into that environment. It’s like people now will say to me “You used to work at The Haçienda!” because everyone knows about The Haçienda, “What was it like?” It was almost like me saying “Legend was my club. That was the place” I mean The Haçienda at that point in time was still finding its feet. It was very badly designed in terms of DJing. So for me to go across from a Wednesday at Legend, which was just everything set perfect, into that.

There was something funny with the mixer as well, it was high up and everything.

HC: Yeah, it was an Akwil Digitheque mixer, I need to show you the picture… You’ve got the decks here, on two blocks of bricks, then you have this slip window that you looked out of.

GW: And you saw people’s feet.

HC: And the mixer was up here, like this [Laughter], it was weird. They bought the mixer because there was one other club in Paris that had it, and they had it as well. But the thing about the mixer was that it had a crossfade where, if you get the beats lined up just marginally, then you press a button and it shot across.

Akwil Digitheque – original Hacienda mixer 1982-84

GW: Cos I remember then, I was kind of known for mixing, and I was saying to them “Can you bring in another mixer?” and they were like “what? there’s only two of these in the world!” it was just totally impractical for that purpose.

Mancunian 1985 (Click image to enlarge)

GW: So from the Haçienda, obviously you went back there in ’84 and you continued there for a period of time. But then you became known for another club that, again, is a place that has a huge part in the history of Manchester, that we should read more about, that we should know more about, which is The Gallery. Tell me about it there.

HC: How did The Gallery come about? I don’t know how I ended up in The Gallery but I did, it happened at the right time because there was a new sound coming out; the British sort of Street Soul sound.

GW: Like Loose Ends, Cool Notes and stuff?

HC: All that sort of stuff that had just started coming out of London. It was a really big sound and I was playing that in The Gallery and it just really worked. It just caught that generation then, absolutely perfectly. It was a brilliant club, a very, very good club. I mean I had total leeway in that club in terms of what I could play.

GW: Just to clarify, this was very much a black audience, totally different from The Hacienda?

HC: Oh yes, it was very much a black audience. The club was very, very dark. I mean it wasn’t 100% black, it was very mixed.

GW: It was seen, regarded as…

HC: Oh yes it was seen as a black club.

HC: The police used to come in quite often…

GW: That was why it was seen as a black club.

HC: Like ten of them at a time, they’d just walk in and walk right through the middle of the club, walk right across the dance floor, have a look and then just disappear out again, you know. It only ever happens in black clubs, wierd!

I had total control of The Gallery. What I was able to do with The Gallery was sort of like take the audience on a journey you know. Because we developed a happy medium, myself and the audience, over the years of playing to them I knew exactly what they liked and they knew what I was gonna play. One of the things we used to do was a black out; there was always a big tune that was the big tune of the moment, and what I would do was I would build up to that tune, and they were waiting for it, you know just on edge waiting for that tune. And as soon as that tune would hit, everybody would be like “Yeeaahhh!!” a big cheer would go up. And I’d send a little signal over to Omar the manager behind the bar and he would switch all the lights off in the club. The club would go pitch black for about a minute, and we called it the blackout. I used to give a shout out to the Jamaica posse and the whole club would just go wild! Absolutely wicked! Then we’d switch the light back on again, bring it down and then take it back up again. Magical time! It was really good!

GW: The Gallery used to have all-nighters?

HC: Oh yeah, we had all-nighters. We had loads…

GW: What other DJs would play on those nights?

HC: People like Tomlin (McKinley) therenoclub.com/dj , Dr D (aka) Dennis Ward.

Mike, did you ever play at The Gallery? You didn’t you. Did Colin ever play at The Gallery, no. OK.

Erm, Soul Control…

GW: Stu Allan played there as well didn’t he?

HC: Yeah.

GW: The one person missing from that period is Stu Allan, who did Key103, and he followed Mike (Shaft), well Lee Brown came between, and he (Stu Allan) took over in 1986 on Piccadilly Radio. He would have been here tonight but he’s on holiday.

HC: It’s interesting really because the thing about Berlin, remember when I was talking about Pip’s and talking about Steve Bracewell, well when he left Pip’s he ended up in Berlin because Berlin was an alternative club originally, and when I started working at The Haçienda I was still good friends with him, there was a tune I used to play in the Haçienda called ‘Holland Tunnel Dive’.

Click here to view the embedded video.

http://youtu.be/RHlfuv422Bw

Implog ‘Holland Tunnel Dive’

GW: Yes, it was on the Haçienda compilation recently.

HC: What I used to do with that was that was always the first tune I used to play. I used to really jack… What I tried to do was I tried to blow the system in The Haçienda, cos I wanted them to buy a new system, I really did. [Laughter] If you’ve ever heard it it’s got the sound of an aeroplane taking off, and I used to jack that up! Really, really loud and it was amazing. Really, the sound that came out of that! And he (Steve Bracewell) liked that and he borrowed it off me one time to play it down at the club (Berlin), and then he said to me “Look, we’ve got a couple of free nights over at Berlin, would you be interested in coming over and doing a night there?” and I was like “Yes!” because me and Colin (Curtis) had discussed beforehand that we wanted somewhere in Manchester to do this thing, and I said to Colin “Look, I’ve got this club Berlin, I want you to come and DJ, I just want to dance” That was how Berlin came through from that. So I’d warm up for him, and there would be people from Anif (Cousins, of Chaper And The Verse), and Kamau (club regular), and the Jazz Defectors and a few others who would get there for dead on 9 o’clock and we’d have an hour of Jazz dancing to ourselves before Colin came down and the main crowd came in.

GW: A real communal kind of thing going on?

HC: Very much so.

GW: Cos I remember that people, specific crowds would come early, because it was a different kind of vibe early on.

HC: Yeah.

GW: So with Berlin, you were there for, it lasted a good few years. Do you remember what Colin (Curtis) was saying about people like Mick Hucknall and those…

HC: Oh yeah I remember them all, I remember Mick Hucknall, he used to live not far from me in Chorlton. Always used to see him walking with his flat cap and his walking stick, and riding his bike.

GW: A lot of people assumed that ‘Money’s Too Tight To Mention’ was an original track and didn’t realise that it was (originally) by The Valentine Brothers. http://youtu.be/LfkJ04tfYs4

HC: No, I mean ‘Money’s Too Tight To Mention’ was something that I think I heard Mike (Shaft) play the first time, we certainly used to play it down at Berlins, and he (Mick Hucknall) used to come to Berlin as well, as well as Gilles Peterson and a lot of others. Gilles Peterson was an interesting character because every time we’d play something he liked he’d run over to the DJ box “who’s this?” and then he’d write it down and then disappear. The Street Soul albums that he actually compiled and released were based on all the tracks that Colin had been playing in Berlin. It wasn’t the London sound; it was very much the Manchester sound actually.

GW: So, you’ve got The Gallery, you’ve got Berlin, you are doing the Reno as well, so that mid 80s period… where you still doing The Haçienda? When did that finish?

HC: I have no idea! [Laughter] Honest to god! I have no idea.

GW: It’s all a blur.

HC: Well the Haçienda was such a special place for me that I never actually left it really.

GW: Did you continue to go there after you’d stopped DJing there?

HC: Yeah I continued to go there, I was always downstairs in the Kim Philby bar. I never went upstairs because the sound just didn’t agree with me basically so I’d stay downstairs in the Kim Philby bar which was more like this size. The sound was more compact, it was a lot clearer.

GW: When did you see at The Haçienda, you know like, that things were starting to become more to the vision of people like Tony Wilson, Rob Gretton of course, and Mike Pickering; of wanting this to be a dance venue. When did you see them start to realise this?

HC: There was a time when they brought a DJ over, a guy called Mark Kamins…

GW: Yep, he was the Danceteria DJ in New York.

Haçienda advert 1984

HC: I never knew that, I have no idea who he was.

GW: He was also Madonna’s boyfriend around that period as well.

HC: Was he?

GW: Yeah.

HC: I had no idea.

GW: Before she moved on to Jellybean (Benitez).

HC: Mike Pickering just said to me “I’m getting a DJ over from New York to do a spot” and I was concerned because the Saturday night was pretty well stitched up. People that were coming in knew what I was gonna play, and I had an idea of what they wanted. And he came on and he played, I don’t know how to describe the music, I think somebody described it as ‘iconic sounding music’ Oh god, it was horrible! It was awful, it was just like so bland, there was no feeling in it whatsoever. I don’t know how to describe the music.

GW: Black music? Dance music?

HC: It was very similar to Peech Boys ‘Don’t Make Me Wait’, that type of hard, industrial type sound, just no feeling to it. It was as if the person that made it had earplugs in, they made it, did it with his eyes closed “That’s my new record, go and play it” you know? There was just nothing on it. And the dance floor stayed empty for the whole of his set, nobody danced, because there was nobody in Manchester playing that type of music. I don’t think any of the DJs that were around in Manchester at that time would have touched that type of music. It just wasn’t spiritual, there was no feeling in it whatsoever. There was nothing in it that you could say oh that was interesting. Just bland beat sound. Good luck to the Americans basically. But it didn’t work and I was pretty annoyed that, the thing was, everybody thought it was me that was playing it because we were upstairs, and they had moved the DJ box onto the balcony at the time. We had darkened smoked glass that we could close at the time, and while he was on the glass would close all the time, and people actually thought it was me. That was playing that type of music. It was horrible.

GW: So they started experimenting then with bringing other DJs in?

HC: Yeah, they brought in a guy who was working over in Leeds called John Tracey. John was a brilliant guy, he was playing Thompson Twins, Simple Minds, that sort of stuff. He was a Soul man, in his heart, every chance he’d get he’d slip a little Soul record in and stuff like that. Me and John actually became good friends, and he actually took part in many of the Soul gigs that I did after The Haçienda. He was a bona fide soul DJ.  They (Haçienda management) brought him in, that kind of worked. We started off the Friday night ‘Nude’ night and then I think that was when I got booted out by Mike. And then Mike took over the Nude night and brought Dean (Johnson) in and people like that and started playing like Latin music all night long which didn’t work. And then they started playing House music. It’s interesting because everybody says that the Haçienda started playing House music before everybody else. I was going through my collection last night trying to bring stuff for down here later on, and I actually found a record that I used to play in The Haçienda, it’s called ‘It’s OK’ by The Force and I definitely remember playing it, and I remember it packing the floor and everybody loving this tune.  And I put my glasses on and looked at the date and it was 1986! You know, this is like 2 full years before The Haçienda started doing their thing, we were playing House music in The Gallery that early. It’s interesting.

The Force ‘It’s OK’

GW: Yeah… Mike was picking up on a lot of the House stuff. Stu Allen was playing it on the radio. Yourself an Colin obviously were playing stuff at The Playpen, & within Berlin.

HC: What we did was we integrated the House with all the other different styles of music. It wasn’t just House music all night long. You know, you’d play four House records, they you’d play your Soul, then your Funk and your Disco, and whatever.

GW: I suppose that’s what The Haçienda did, they kind of brought it to a point where…

HC: That was the point that really killed it for the black audience in Manchester because the black audience definitely took House music off me in The Gallery. Definitely, they were into it, they were moving with it. Because of the tempo of the music, and the energy of the dance that goes with house music, it couldn’t last all night long, and so you’d play like a couple of house records and then you’d break it down. The thing that The Hacienda did was that they played house ALL night long, from 9 o’clock ‘til 2 in the morning. That was when, for me, I felt that the black audience in Manchester just kind of like “well, we’ve had enough of House now, we don’t want to listen to House anymore” and I think that was that period that sort of like killed House music for the black audience in Manchester, so we just went back onto the Jazz and the Funk and the soul and everything, and left The Haçienda to do whatever they wanted to do with the House music.

Click here to view the embedded video.

http://youtu.be/46jB4yohiKA

Foot Patrol at the 8411 Centre, Moss Side Precinct, Manchester 1986

GW: Interestingly, Mike Pickering himself has said that that period before the explosion, when before it had become totally House… I mean, on the Nude night he was playing very much like a black night he was playing different areas.

HC: Very much so.

GW: …and I think it was part of that lineage.

HC: There was a lot of black kids in The Haçienda.

GW: And he says that was his favourite time, and he says that “I think we made a mistake by just going completely House” even though…

HC: Oh, I didn’t know that.

GW: It could have even been in the sleeve notes, but certainly in a recent thing that I’ve read. I’ve heard him say that anyway, you know that in his heart that was the period from just before the gold rush, when the black kids were in there, when the real top dancers were there and everything, and you know that was a special time that was kind of lost when it all, you know it was a different special time afterwards, obviously it’s a historical time, and what happened was it was exported all around the world, and the Haçienda became world renowned. But, like you said, I think that that’s what changed. It changed dance culture in general, everywhere became one style of music, whereas before it had always been a whole remit of music played within the context of one night, and that’s what made it special. And like you said there, an interesting thing about the dancers, because there was so much being put in from a dancing side that you couldn’t maintain that all night. I mean you can maintain it, if you stand there and you know, keep close in, but if its foot moves and you are going down (drops) and all sorts of things going on, it’s impossible, so the music does need to vary round, so yeah, that’s an interesting observation there from the dancing side.

HC: Well I’m a dancer myself, I come from the dance floor, so I instinctively knew what to play to sort of like, when I DJ in a club, I know who the dancers are in a club and I will play for them.  And they were the ones who would get on the floor and they would encourage everyone else to start dancing as well.

I mean Colin (Curtis) knows, in Rafters there was a guy called Danny (Henry). Did you used to pay him Colin? I heard you used to pay him.

 Danny Henry

Colin Curtis: Yeah I used to pay him.

HC: They used to pay Danny to go on the dance floor cos…

Colin Curtis: He’s just making this shit up now! [laughter] He used to get there before I did and start dancing before the music even started.

HC: He was always the first person on the dance floor. There’s a kind of stigma, people would sort of like “OK we’re ready to dance”, they’d all walk towards the dance floor and then stop at that boundary, like “I’m not going to be the first person to step on the dance floor… no you go… no, no you go”. But once they saw somebody on the dance floor already they’d always jump on and just boogie away.  And I knew who the dancers were, and I knew what they were dancing to, and I would sort of like programme my music to them. They would get on the floor, pull everybody else on and just take it along there basically.

GW: What did you feel, you know afterwards, the way that dancing went, that it seemed to move increasingly out of the scene or certainly in a visible sense maybe it existed in the kind of parties that you were doing later down the line, or did it? Do you still see people that are involved in dancing to the same kind of level of intensity that was happening back then?

HC: Yes a lot of the music that I played, I played for the women, I tried to get women onto the floor. Basically all I play for, I play for the females.

GW: And that brings the guys anyway.

HC: Yeah that brings the guys in. When I go out and play now, my audience is sort of like 80% black girls, and I’m happy with that. [Laughter] No, because, you have a club full of girls, you have a club full of men.

GW: Course.

HC: Men will come in, it just works like that.

GW: But do people put the same type of intensity into the dancing as you were putting in when you…

HC: No because the music has changed over the years, it’s gotten more mellow, it’s more like a kind of head nod, and the audience have gotten older now as well.  They can’t do those heavy funky moves that they used to do in their younger days, so they just kind of like one step to the left, one step to the right and that sort of thing.  That was Manchester, I mean places like Birmingham, and Rock City in Nottingham, all these other places, I don’t know what was going on there, I suppose they were still dancing pretty hard on the floor there. But Manchester kind of quietened down, mellowed out.

Spinn Inn Records – Kenny passing a record to Hewan Clarke

GW: So you’ve always been involved in the clubs… what you doing now? What’s a general kind of month for you? How often are you out DJing?

HC: I do quite a lot of DJing, I do a lot of parties. People hire clubs and hire me to come and DJ, and erm, kind of boring because I found that people who grew up listening to music in the 80s, because that was the time they were young, and that was the time they had fun, they won’t let go of the 80s. So I get called to DJ and play a lot of the old 80s stuff all the time, you know the Loose Ends and everything else, and I do that with my eyes closed now, I just take a record out, put it on and play it, and they are all dancing next to each other, it’s so easy!

I buy a lot of R&B, but not the kind of R&B that the younger generation listen to, sort of like retro R&B that has a similar sound to the kind of R&B that we used to listen to in the 80s.

GW: So is it an older crowd that you work for generally?

HC: Oh yeah, very much so! My crowd now that comes out is over 25, over 30, I don’t get anybody younger than that. That’s why I can still DJ, because I don’t get any troubles in my club, I don’t get any kids coming in because they do not like the music that I play.

We’ve been doing a lot of Reno revivals as well.

GW: Where are they taking place?

HC: They’ve been taking place in a place called Relish, which is a club actually behind where The Gallery used to be. They are amazing because the people that come out to them went out to night clubs in the 70s. They are in their 50s and 60s. I remember the first Reno Revival that we did I remember walking into the club and there was this grey haired old lady on the middle of the floor and she was doing some moves on the dance floor and everybody was just stood there looking at this old grey haired woman like “where did this woman learn to dance like that?!”. It was unbelievable! These were people who, in their younger teens where going to the Reno from the 50s and 60s and grew up listening to the music that Persian played. It was amazing! That first night was just unbelievable!

GW: And Persian is still doing it?

HC: Yeah.

GW: I’ve seen the website therenoclub.com and it links you into the music of the time, again it’s a great document for people who want to learn a little bit more about what was happening in Manchester , basically going back to a time before many black people came into the city centre.

HC: Well that’s true. I mean we are getting calls now to take the Reno thing… we’re getting calls from Germany, Switzerland, Holland, people that used to go to The Reno in the 60s that are living in foreign countries now, and they want us to come over there and DJ for them.  You know, playing to an old set of geriatrics and it’s brilliant! I’m looking forward to it.

GW: And you are on the radio tonight?

HC: Yeah, I’m on at 9 o’clock, 9 ‘til midnight, so…

GW: What station are you doing?

HC: I do a lot of community radio, in Moss Side , we get about maybe 3 or 4 community radios a year , RSLs and they last for about 28 days, and there’s one running at the moment called Peace FM 106.6, www.peacefm.co.uk I think it finishes next week. And they always give me a show on it always complimentary, and I always get the 9 ‘til midnight slot on a Saturday and it’s just brilliant, it’s like my perfect nightclub, I can just play whatever I want.

GW: Brilliant! So are you coming back afterwards between 2 and 3?

HC: Yeah I’m coming back afterwards.

GW: Well, Hewan, always a pleasure! Great to have you with us! Thank you very much!

[Applause]

HC: Thank you.

Hewan Clarke at Band on the Wall 2011 (Photo by Mancky)

Additional Links:

The Reno:
therenoclub.com

MDMA – Moss Side Stories – The hidden history of Moss Side and Hulme club culture 1950 – 1990:
www.mdmarchive.co.uk/mosssidestories

Electrospective Facebook group:
www.facebook.com/group

Further Reading:

www.gregwilson.co.uk/2012/02/the-hacienda-dj-booth

www.electrofunkroots.co.uk/interviews/hewan_clarke

© Greg Wilson, 2012

Image by www.anti-limited.com

Full transcript of interview:

GW: I want to introduce you to… when I was still DJing, a young DJ that was coming through, he was part of a new generation, probably the first guy that really mastered turntablism as we know it now. I mean I had a go and I got to a certain level, but this guy took it to a different level, he eventually ended up winning the world mixing championship in 1987.  He also had a top 3 single in 1990, I think it was with a track called ‘Hear The Drummer Get Wicked’ http://youtu.be/1PubbeR1cwQ and he’s with us tonight, but I can’t see him anywhere, I hope he’s in the room, is he there? Oh, here he is…. Chad Jackson.

CJ: [Sits down] Ooh my old bones are aching!

GW: What did you do to your arm? I didn’t notice.

CJ: Erm, I’ve kind of got a bit of tendonitis in my old age, so I’ve got these straps on, just to try and keep it warm for, you know the proceedings tonight.

GW: Ah right.

Audience: Too much workin’ the cross fader mate!

[Laughter]

GW: That’s what they say (Laughs)

CJ: The joints don’t work quite as this well at this age. You know.

GW: Well, really good to have you here! I know that you live in… is it Slough you are living in now?

CJ: No, Denom, down south, to the West of London.

GW: You are lecturing aren’t you?  At a university?

CJ: Yeah I’m lecturing in Guilford at the Academy of Contemporary Music, I lecture in music production, DJ skills, website design, music culture and history, and I specialise in dance music history as well.

GW: Fantastic! And that all kind of stems back to a time where, you are originally from St Helens, and in the late 70s you would have come onto the club scene, and been influenced by the whole jazz-funk movement? And northern soul?

CJ: Yeah, absolutely! I basically… It’s interesting listening to the other guys… I mean already it’s been a fantastic day! I really don’t know what I can add to what’s been said already, but I’ll try. What Hewan said about how he kind of came about, very similar actually, I started off basically as a music fan and a dancer, as you (Greg) know, because I used to actually go to a lot of these guys’ clubs before I actually started DJing. So I started off collecting music and going to Northern Soul all nighters and stuff, and the Casino etc, etc. So I kind of got into the Northern Soul thing. Started collecting records because I had this passion for music, it was just an absolute passion probably from when I was about, as far as I can remember, about nine or ten years old. I basically just nicked my Dad’s old record collection, hid it in my bedroom, and started collecting records from then on. So I just amassed loads and loads of records, I was totally into the music. As I said, I started off in the Northern Soul scene, but I must admit, thinking back then, for us it wasn’t northern soul it was just the music that was around at that time, which was dance music; music that was just great for dancing to. It was all about… a lot of things have been said today about the passion for the dancer and stuff. That’s exactly where I was coming from, you know, an absolute passion. I found it hard to believe how I went to so many venues, to be quite honest, so young, because I did start very young. I used to go to places like The Timepiece in Liverpool, and then onwards to place in Manchester, places like Rafters etc. Obviously The Casino from before. Thinking back I kind of remember how I did it; I used to go to, for instance, to The Timepiece in Liverpool, I used to travel there, get inside the club somehow, and then I wouldn’t buy a drink all night, I go in the toilets, drink water out of the tap, and that would be my drink for the night, you know. And I’d be on the dance floor from the minute I got there to the minute I left. That was what my life was all about… Just this passion for music! The amassing of such a huge record collection after that, as I said, was just buying music. Collecting records, buying music, collecting records… That’s all that mattered to me. It almost still is that way. So I amassed this huge record collection and it was a case of, you know, I had to start thinking, it had started taking over my bedroom at home, and I was driving the family crazy! I don’t think they’ll ever forgive me for keeping them up half the night with banging music coming out of my bedroom. I must admit, if I’d have been my dad I’d have been dead, you know, that would have been it. I amassed all these records and I obviously moved on to the DJing thing because I suddenly had this huge collection and it was like, well I’m gonna start putting it to some use, rather than just sitting in my bedroom on my own, playing records and dancing in front of the mirror, it was like let’s just move into the DJing thing because I just naturally kind of swayed that way.

Chad Jackson 1983

GW: I remember the first time I heard of you it was in Record Mirror, one of the main things for DJs,  I mean, Blues and Soul was the main thing you had to read…

CJ: James Hamilton

GW: James Hamilton had a column in Record Mirror, it was a DJ column, he had all sorts of odds and ends, and in it, you know, I’d started mixing by this point and I was at Wigan Pier and Legend probably, and it said that; I (James Hamilton) had got a letter from somebody called Chad, who said that there’s another mixing DJ in the North of England apart from me (Greg), and I can rember saying who’s this guy Chad? And they said “there he is”, and it was like Chad, I’d seen you coming in the club, you were a regular on the dance floor, they just pointed to you and there you were on the dance floor. And I said to you I never knew that you DJ’d, and that’s how I got to know you on that level.

CJ: Yeah…

GW: … I think you were at Cagney’s at the time (corner of London Road / Liverpool).

CJ: Yeah I was DJing at Cagney’s in Liverpool at the time.  That was my problem, I’ve always been a little bit of a loner, so I’ve never really talked a lot about what I do, especially in the early days. It was just, it was almost like it was my thing. Because I went to a school where everybody else had leather jackets, biker leather jackets, and they were all into Rock music, and I used to walk around with this big huge ghetto blaster, you know. At the time they all thought I was a bit mad, I probably was, but I just lived for my music.

GW: And I suppose that you where brought up… the area that you lived in as well, you know, that you were kind of isolated and so you gravitated towards the black scene.

CJ: Absolutely! There wasn’t really any thought about it, it was just a natural thing. The same things apply; the music means so much, the passion is there, and like you say about the dancing thing, I must admit, in these later years I tend not to cut a rug quite as much as I used to, but the passion for that is still there. It’s like eating food man! You’ve got to have it! I couldn’t live without it personally. I’d die very quickly without music.

Chad Jackson in his studio

GW: So, from a DJing stand point, you built up a reputation for yourself, and eventually you took over the main residency at the Wigan Pier, I was still doing the Tuesday, and Wednesday at Legend, but you took the Thursday, Friday and Saturday. So what was Wigan Pier like?

CJ: I must admit  I’d been working towards trying to get into what I classed (as) more of the top echelon of clubs, like Wigan Pier, Legend etc. Because obviously I wanted to start making a career of this, because I’ve come to a situation where  when I was at Cagney’s in Liverpool, at the same time I was going to Elliot Clarke’s Dance and Drama school in Liverpool, and I was going to be an actor or a dancer, or something like that. And I was paying for my course by doing the DJing at Cagney’s, and basically the problem was that with the drama-dance course you had to get in there at about 7 in the morning, and you’d do three hours of limbering up, which was basically the most hideous, torturous limbering up exercises you could ever dream of! And then spend the whole day there, and then go out at night DJing. For a few months I was burning the candle at both ends and in the middle! So it was one of those situations where I had to make a choice, I couldn’t carry on with the drama school thing because I couldn’t pay for it without the DJing, so the DJing kind of won. So from then on it was like right, I have to make this a career. So I started getting hungry and wanted to move to better clubs, trying to move up the echelon etc. Luckily I got into, as you say, going to Wigan Pier, those were just amazing times! Seeing yourself on Tuesday nights, going as a punter. Obviously people like Hewan and Colin as well. I’ve always been a massive Jazz fan, and I used to go to all these clubs that we’ve mentioned today, it’s just taken me back so much! I used to go to places like Blackpool Mecca for the all-dayers. Being in the Jazz room, just dancing all day with a towel and not much else you know. Those were special times, it just mattered so much! Some of the things that have been said today about there being possibly not as much passion nowadays, I think part of that is the culture we live in, with the internet etc, everything is so readily and so easily accessible, that there isn’t as much worth put on things. It’s almost like for instance, if you’re offered all the best sex in the world that you have ever had in your life, with the most amazing people bla bla blaa, and you could have that any time you want… you would soon get really, you know, oh sex, oh great, not again. You’d really get kind of bored of that.

GW: So you think it’s like an overdose of stuff?

CJ: Kind of, yeah, I mean it was always a special thing, those feeling all those years ago, it was always that thing of like… it’s our thing!

GW: Yeah.

CJ: Other people don’t understand, because they just don’t understand, it’s our thing.

GW: It’s kind of interesting as well because there’s a difference with black and white… with black kids it was the norm, that was their Pop in a sense. I was talking to somebody from New York about all the music of the late 70′s, early 80′s, who listened to it on the radio. For them radio was segregated there, you know, that was their Pop music, they had their own chart and everything. Whereas for white kids who were into this black scene, we were very much involved in a specialist, underground movement. Like you are saying, there was specialness about it, you were part of something that was outside the mainstream.

CJ: Yeah, I must admit, personally I think it had a greater influence even than that. With a lot of the lectures I do about music history and culture, the kind of feelings that started there, like you say, about the mix of black and white, I think even today a lot of people in the world can lean a lot from that. Especially with all the stuff that’s going on these days with Muslims etc, and with the kind of general media frenzy and craziness, which is almost creating a kind of segregated society again. Whereas through the things that we experienced, that’s always been a thing that’s very close to my heart personally, because apart from the fact of being into the music and having a lot of black friends and partners etc, I’ve never understood that; why people see colour and stuff, it’s just never been an issue, why are people like that? I really find it hard to understand, but with all this stuff recently that’s going on, it almost makes you think… are we going… (Backwards), all that good work that’s been done… is it being undone? Have we got to try and do it up again? You know, (sighs) I’ll shut up.

GW: No, it seems to be, on a cultural level I think it always seems to go in cycles, even if there wasn’t colour, people would find ways of discriminating against other people for whatever reason.

CJ: Yeah absolutely!

GW:  Unfortunately that’s life… sadly. But I mean, yeah, you are right, one of the main things I’ve remembered, it kind of goes onto what’s going to be happening a little bit later with Street Machine and Broken Glass in attendance, was that when I was working with Broken Glass and they did a street tour, that was one of the first things they did; they went round all the, basically shopping (centres), like St Helens, like Blackpool, place like that, all around the North West. As a white guy with a group of predominantly black kids, I was very aware that we were walking into an area where there was no black population at all, and if that had been 12 months previous, and a group of people coming from outside the area were walking into somebody else’s patch there would have been trouble. But what I saw was that they rolled out the lino and they got out the ghetto (blaster) and they put this music on and they danced, and all of a sudden these young white kids came over and talked to them “What is the music you are listening to?” “What’s going on?” I was watching a cultural exchange, and I think that things like that did more for race relations in this country than anything. It was a very powerful period of time! The coming together of people.

CJ: Absolutely, I mean I think music… the good old thing that people say “music is the universal language” that is absolutely true!  It’s one of the only things that really truly gets people of different cultures, races, creeds etc together on a kind of level playing field. Everybody understands music. Everybody can tap their fingers and stuff. So I think it’s such an incredibly powerful thing!

GW: So you were working in Wigan Pier, you established yourself on a different level at this point, and your name became…

CJ: Yeah, I was young and hungry, and I got into the mixing thing even before I started at Wigan Pier, before I met yourself. I’d started a BPM book. I think this was about ’78, ’79.

GW: Yeah that was when James Hamilton was…

CJ:  Yeah, and I had this BPM book, and used to buy loads of records and immediately BPM them, write it in my book. This book ended up that (approx 3 inches) thick with BPMd records. The reason I did that was because I was working at these clubs, I mean some of the early clubs, I started off at some early clubs in St Helens which just had normal belt drive turntables, and I was mixing at that time. Basically because all the DJs at that time, a lot of people probably remember, a lot of DJs actually talked on the mic, and I just couldn’t be bothered with that. I knew as a dancer in a club myself, you just wanted to go there to listen to the music, you don’t want to listen to some DJ prattling on. So I started this BPM book to enable me to put records together on belt drive turntables of vaguely the same speed. So I could vaguely mix them into each other without having to have any vari-speed or anything like that. So it was a means to an end for me to actually sequence music without having to talk over the mic, just let the music do the talking kind of thing. So I ended up with this huge BPM book, in the early days it really helped me because I only got some Technics 1200′s when I had the chance to… Well I had the chance play and practice on yours (Greg) I remember when you used to live in Wigan, and that was just brilliant! For me that was just, I remember the set up you had, which Mike (Shaft) mentioned earlier, I was just like in awe, I was like wow! I would give my right arm to have that amazing mixer, with a cross fader!

GW: Supernova (Laughs)

Matamp Supernova Mixer

CJ: That was it. You just didn’t see cross faders in those days! It was just like a completely alien thing. I just absolutely adored it. When you went out to the shops and let me have half an hour I was like I’m in heaven!

GW: You’d sometimes stay while I went to work.

CJ: It was like being at the altar for me. It was a religious experience really. And so as I said, this BPM book enabled me to mix, and then I only got some Technics 1200′s when I actually won the UK final in ‘86.

GW: Oh wow!

CJ: I actually got some 1200′s from it, so I could kind of put my BPM book down so to speak. And there’s one.. I must admit.. I must make a shout out to anybody… I know there’s loads of old faces in here today, and it’s just an amazing day for me, I dunno about you guys… but I lost my BPM book about 6 or 7 years ago, maybe more, and I’m just putting a general shout out… If anybody got it hiding in a box somewhere in the loft, y’know, maybe I left it at somebody’s house or something, I would pay anything to get that book back!

[Laughter]

CJ: But I lost it a few years ago and it really… I was depressed for about 6 months, cos it was y’know.

GW: I know, I’ve lost stuff, had records stolen. Depressing, really!

Wigan Pier all-dayer advert May 83

GW: Right, you were doing the normal residency, when I say normal residency at Wigan Pier at the weekend was like a mixture of what was played on the Jazz-Funk night, a mixture of what was played on the Futurist theme? Which was like kind of the New Romantic area, and the Pop stuff, or the Pop dance, like the stuff that you wouldn’t play on a specialist night like Shalamar, Imagination, Michael Jackson, things like that. So you were playing a wide berth of music, but then you became… you started getting a few bookings for the all-dayers, we put you on at the all-dayer at Wigan Pier, I think that was one of your first all-dayers. Then when I stopped DJing which was the end of 83 you were the natural successor.  Because the thing about Chad was that, for me, the time that I stopped which was the end of ’83, by this point we knew what was going on in the States, there were kids cutting it up and doing all this stuff. Before that we just heard it on the records. But now we could see it, there was enough video stuff to understand that, and from a personal point of view I tried scratching, I did a little bit of primitive stuff, but I understood that to really get involved with that you needed to dedicate a lot of time to put yourself into that, and by that point I was doing my radio mixes and I was using reel to reel and editing, my process was slowing down as opposed to the live thing. What I could see within you was you had that time, you had that dedication and you picked up on it. You’d see somebody doing something, or you might even see me doing something and you could pick that up really quickly, run with it and take it to another level. So what you did was you were the natural progression on, you were taking this, as I say, turntablist approach. We didn’t use that term then, but that’s where it was going to.

Clouds All-Dayer Preston – April 1984

GW: So you took over at Legend, and I think that the scene at that point, there was a bit of a split because the breakdancing, that breakdancing changed the dynamic of the club scene, because before that, when I played electro, everyone was into it, but come the summer of ‘83 when breakdancing kind of hit with a vengeance, it was like every time I played anything remotely electro there was a ruck of guys, there was challenging going on the dance floor, which initially was fantastic, the visual aspect of it, everybody loved it. But then as the weeks go by, especially the girls, they were getting pissed off, their dancing space is being invaded, they can’t get on the floor, there’s this going on, and you could see the dynamic changing. That was one of the things that I was aware of when I came away from the situation. You stepped into that, you became very much, you know, the start of that Hip Hop culture, and what you were doing, and the way that you were playing. So if you could talk to me more about that period of time for you?

Smiley Culture, Chad Jackson, Street at PSV – 1984

CJ: Yeah, it was an interesting period as you say, I mean I must admit I was really pleased to be offered the Legend thing and all that, but I must admit it also was, I was kind of, you were like a hell of a hard act to follow! At the same time I was thinking, well how am I going to take over from Greg, who at the time, you had a huge name on the scene and I was like the new guy, and obviously people, as I said, people were very passionate in those days, so there was a lot of people who kind of, were shall we say Greg boys, you know, and it was like ‘Who’s this guy coming in?’ So I had to try and win those guys over. The thing I remember about Legends was things like, like you were saying before, the equipment and everything was just state of the art. I remember some little thing, some little switch on the mixer board where it was almost like surround sound…

GW: The sound sweep…

CJ: Yeah, the sound sweep thing where the sound just started spinning around the speakers around the dance floor. That just freaked me out!

GW: There was stuff at Legend that now you just don’t see it. It’s hard to describe somewhere like Legend. If you opened that same club now it would blow people’s heads off! You don’t see the likes of it, they don’t make clubs like that anymore.

Legend’s light show (Click image to enlarge)

CJ: Absolutely, I mean I felt very honoured, you know, to take over the mantle from you, but also with that I think that it was as I said, a hard act to follow, so I decided to try and eek my own path by following the kind of turntablism thing.

GW: Which you excelled in completely! I mean you had that kind of style, and that showmanship to what you did. And you took that on. You later played at The Haçienda for a period of time?

The Haçienda 03.12.85 (Click image to enlarge)

CJ: Yeah I played at The Haç, I was playing the Saturday nights and I remember being up in the booth and playing stuff like JM Silk ‘Music Is The Key’ http://youtu.be/rLEMQJdlYoY some of the really early House records. I remember someone coming and knocking on the DJ booth door, opening the hatch and going “Why are you playing this gay music for?” You know people were really against it, it really was a kind of changeover period around that time.  I did feel that with The Haçienda it was… if I’d have stayed on there… maybe I would have taken it a bit further, but the mixing thing had started to happen at about that time, kind of ‘85, ’86, ’85, when actually there was the first mixing championship, it was at The Hippodrome, London, and I remember going to that, seeing it and thinking to myself man I’ve got to enter this! I’ve just gotta enter this! So the next year I entered it and that’s when I left The Haçienda because I started to get a lot of gigs abroad and stuff, so I had to free up my weekends.

Chad Jackson

GW: That was when you won the UK Mixing Championship?

CJ: Yeah that was when I won the UK.

GW: And then the following year which was ’87, I was there at the Albert Hall, and you won the world Mixing Championship http://youtu.be/lLlV2VUgnn0 which really kind of, you know, cemented your place.

CJ: Yeah basically in ’86 I got pipped at the post by DJ Cheese the USA competitor, and basically from the next day ‘til the mixing championships the next year I was just practicing every single day. Because I was like, you know, people say second is nowhere, I felt absolutely like that, it was so close, but so far, second is nothing. I had that real hunger going on, you know it was like I have to do that, I have to do that! So I basically spent a whole year practicing stuff in between doing gigs. Luckily I didn’t have to enter it again from scratch, because they enter the champion from the precious year automatically into the competition, and DJ Cheese declined, so what actually happens is the runner up gets the chance to stand in for him, so I got the ticket that way. So I was yes! I’ve gotto take this! It really has to be mine! And it was really like… I find it… I think it’s the strength of youth maybe? or the stupidity of youth? whatever you want to call it. I was absolutely one track, it was like I was so focused, it was like I’m gonna do that, or I’m gonna die! I don’t care! It’s that or nothing you know. And so I was just absolutely eye on the bull’s-eye thinking I’m gonna get that, I’m gonna get that, that’s gonna be mine!  There was just like a, what’s the word? Erm, obsessed… a complete obsessed maniac really. But sometimes you have to do that to get to places you want to get to.

GW: Tunnel vision.

CJ: It obviously worked.

Chad Jackson collecting his DMC World title in 1987

GW: And it did, you won it. And tonight what we’ve asked you to do, as a special thing, is to play from 10 until 11 because we’ve got all the people in from Street Machine, people here from Broken Glass, the B Boy fraternity that are in attendance tonight. So, you know, play some stuff from that kind of period of time that links into that. So it will be good to see you back on the… I mean I don’t know what kind of stuff you are playing these days but it will be good to see you playing again.

CJ: Oh well I mean nowadays, I mean I do the laptop thing I use Ableton Live on the laptop, I use Tractor, I use CDs, I use vinyl, I use the whole lot now. I thought I’d leave it oldschool for tonight though.

GW: Yeah! Definitely

Audience: Wheeey!

GW: Keep it oldschool! It’s been a pleasure Chad! And we’ll see you DJing later on.

CJ: Thank you.

Additional Links:

http://www.chadjackson.co.uk/

Electrospective Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/group

http://soundcloud.com/chad-jackson/chad-jackson-best-of-84-mix

INTRO…
ROCKMASTER SCOTT & THE DYNAMIC 3 – REQUEST LINE
KLEEER – INTIMATE CONNECTION
EUGENE WILDE – GOTTA GET YOU HOME TONIGHT
DENNIS EDWARDS – DON’T LOOK ANY FURTHER
THE CHI-LITES – RUNNING AROUND
THE COOL NOTES – YOU’RE NEVER TOO YOUNG
ARNIE’S LOVE – I’M OUT OF YOUR LIFE
SWITCH – KEEPING SECRETS
KLEEER – INTIMATE CONNECTION
KLEER – TONIGHT
LIONEL RICHIE – ALL NIGHT LONG
CHAKA KHAN – AIN’T NOBODY
THE BREEKOUT KREW – MATTS MOOD ‘ROCK BEATS’
THE SOURCE – GHETTO LIFE
I’M SO GLAD I MET YOU – DECO
JOCELYN BROWN – SOMEBODY ELSE’S GUY
FREDERICK ‘MC COUNT’ LINTON – I’M SOMEBODY ELSE’S GUY
CHERRELLE – WHEN I LOOK IN YOUR EYES
ROSE ROYCE – MAGIC TOUCH
SOS BAND – JUST THE WAY YOU LIKE IT
DR JECKYL & MR HYDE – FAST LIFE
MARCUS MILLER – JUICE
JAKI GRAHAM – WHATS THE NAME OF YOUR GAME
THE EMOTIONS – YOU’RE THE BEST
PATRICE RUSHEN – FEEL SO REAL
REAL TO REEL – LOVE ME LIKE THIS
STEVE ARRINGTON – MELLOW AS A CELLO
BARBARA FOWLER – COME AND GET MY LOVIN’
FATBACK BAND – I FOUND LOVIN’
NEWCLEUS – NO MORE RUNNIN
T-SKI VALLEY – CATCH THE BEAT
DR JECKYL & MR HYDE – GETTING’ MONEY
DAVY DMX – ONE FOR THE TREBLE
YVONNE GAGE – LOVER OF YOUR DREAMS
THE STAPLE SINGERS – SLIPPERY PEOPLE
GAYLE ADAMS – IM WARNING YOU
WORLD PREMIERE – SHARE THE NIGHT
CHANGE – CHANGE OF HEART
SKOOL BOYZ – SLIP AWAY
UNKNOWN
ELBOW BONES & THE RACKETEERS – A NIGHT IN NEW YORK
CAMEO – SHE’S STRANGE
UNKNOWN
WINDJAMMER – TOSSING & TURNING
INNER LIFE – NO WAY
THE CIRCLE CITY BAND – MAGIC
BARBARA MASON – ANOTHER MAN
TOUT SWEET – ANOTHER MAN IS TWICE AS NICE
MAN PARRISH – BOOGIE DOWN BRONX
KEY MATIC – BREAKERS IN SPACE
AFRIKA BAMBAATA & JAMES BROWN – UNITY
JEFFREY OSBOURNE – PLANE LOVE
RICH CARSON & GALACTIC ORCHESTRA – STREET SYMPHONY
TWO SISTERS – B-BOYS BEWARE
THE TEMPTATIONS – TREAT HER LIKE A LADY
STEPHANIE MILLS – THE MEDICINE SONG
LEFTURNO – OUT OF SIGHT
DAYTON – THE SOUND OF MUSIC
THE FRESH BAND – COME BACK LOVER
FUNK DELUXE – THIS TIME
WEST PHILLIPS – SUCKER FOR A PRETTY FACE
AFRIKA BAMBAATA – RENEGADES OF FUNK
NV – ITS ALRIGHT
GRANDMASTER MELLE MEL – WHITE LINES
KENNY G – HI HOW YA DOING
NV – LET ME DO YOU ‘REMIX’
STARPOINT – ITS ALL YOURS
GREG HENDERSON & ROME JEFFRIES – NEVER TOO LATE
SISTER SLEDGE – LOST IN MUSIC ’84
HAROLD MELVIN – TODAY’S YOUR LUCKY DAY
THE SYSTEM – I WANNA MAKE YOU FEEL GOOD
FONDA RAE – TUCH ME
NEWCLEUS – JAM ON IT
DYNAMIC BREAKERS – DYNAMIC
DAZZ BAND – LET IT ALL BLOW
KLINTE JONES – IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT
SINNAMON – THIN LINE
B-BOYS – ROCK THE HOUSE
BOOGIE BOYS – ZODIAC
MIAMI SOUND MACHINE – DR BEAT
BOBBY BROOM – BEAT FREAK
SHANNON – GIVE ME TONIGHT
PAUL HARDCASTLE – RAIN FOREST
XENA – ON THE UPSIDE
CAPTAIN RAPP – BAD TIMES
ROY AYERS – IN THE DARK
ROY AYERS – GOREE ISLAND
COLONEL ABRAMS – MUSIC IS THE ANSWER
CHAKA KHAN – I FEEL FOR YOU
ARROW – HOT HOT HOT
HASHIM – AL-NAAFIYSH
HASHIM – WE’RE ROCKING THE PLANET
LJ REYNOLDS – WEIGHT ALL THE FACTS
TIA MONAE – DON’T KEEP ME WAITING
THE INTRUDERS – WHO DO YOU LOVE
PAUL HARDCASTLE – GUILTY
PAUL HARDCASTLE – YOU’RE THE ONE FOR ME
TERRI WELLS – I’LL BE AROUND
DAVID JOSEPH – BABY WONT YOU TAKE MY LOVE
KREAMCICLE feat PAULA ANDERSON – NO NEWS IS NEWS
THELMA HOUSTON – YOU USED TO HOLD ME SO TIGHT
BONZO GOES TO WASHINGTON – 5 MINUTES
CHERYL LYNN – ENCORE
MICHAEL JACKSON – THRILLER

CHAD JACKSON BEST OF 85 MIX:

http://soundcloud.com/chad-jackson/chad-jackson-best-of-85-mix

INTRO…
DOUG E FRESH & SLICK RICK – LA DI DA DI
GRACE JONES – SLAVE TO THE RHYTHM
FULL FORCE – ALICE I WANT YOU JUST FOR ME
FAB FIVE FREDDY – CHANGE THE BEAT
TROUBLE FUNK – PUMP ME UP
DOUG E FRESH & GET FRESH CREW – THE SHOW
FULL FORCE – ALICE I WANT YOU JUST FOR ME
CARL ANDERSON – BUTTERCUP
HI-TENSION – YOU MAKE ME HAPPY
MICHAEL LOVESMITH – BREAK THE ICE
PRECIOUS WILSON – I’LL BE YOUR FRIEND
PRINCESS – AFTER THE LOVE HAS GONE REMIX
WALLY BADAROU – CHIEF INSPECTOR
KRYSTOL – NOBODY’S GONNA GET THIS LOVIN’ BUT YOU
CHANGE – LETS GO TOGETHER
DOUG E FRESH & GET FRESH CREW – THE SHOW
FULL FORCE – ALICE I WANT YOU JUST FOR ME
TWILIGHT 22 – MYSTERIOUS
B.B & Q BAND – GENIE
PRINCESS – SAY IM YOUR NUMBER ONE
DOCTOR ROCX & Co – GIRL FRIENDS / BOY FRIENDS
ROXANNE SHANTE – BITE THIS
JENNY BURTON – BAD HABIT
KID FROST – TERMINATOR
UTFO – ROXANNE ROXANNE
LOOSE ENDS – HANGING ON A STRING
52ND STREET – TELL ME HOW IT FEELS
ASHFORD & SIMPSON – SOLID
ATLANTIC STARR – SILVER SHADOW
BAD BOYS feat K LOVE – BAD BOYS
THE COOL NOTES – NATURAL ENERGY
THE COOL NOTES – SPEND THE NIGHT
AURRA – LIKE I LIKE IT
DIRECT DRIVE – ANYTHING
KRYSTOL – AFTER THE DANCE IS THROUGH
SKIPWORTH & TURNER – THINKING ABOUT YOUR LOVE
CHANGE – MUTUAL ATTRACTION
TROUBLE FUNK – PUMP ME UP
KLEEER – NEVER CRY AGAIN
CHERYL LYNN – FIDELITY
RENE & ANGELA – I’LL BE GOOD
ROCK HILL – ROCK THE BEAT
MC SHY D – RAP WILL NEVER DIE PART 1
BASE – BIG NOISE
ROYALLE DELITE – I’LL BE A FREAK FOR YOU
MAZE – TWILIGHT
LILLO THOMAS – SETTLE DOWN
EDDIE SKI WHITE & DAVY DMX – BABY BE MINE
GLORIA D BROWN – THE MORE THEY KNOCK
CAMEO – SINGLE LIFE
RENE & ANGELA – SAVE YOUR LOVE FOR No 1
DSM – WARRIOR GROOVE
LITTLE BENNY – WHO COMES TO BOOGIE
TOTAL CONTRAST – TAKES A LITTLE TIME
HARLEQUIN FOURS – SET IT OFF
GLENN JONES – FINESSE REMIX
CLAIR HICKS – PUSH PUSH (IN THE BUSH)
THE TEAM – WICKI WACKY HOUSE PARTY
PENNY FORD – DANGEROUS
B.B & Q BAND – MAIN ATTRACTION
ROCHELLE – MY MAGIC MAN
URBANIAX – LOVE DON’T GROW ON TREES
COLONEL ABRAMS – TRAPPED
CHERRELLE & ALEXANDER ONEAL – SATURDAY LOVE
STEVE ARRINGTON – DANCING IN THE KEY OF LIFE
STEVE ARRINGTON – FEEL SO REAL
PRITTI BOYZ feat FELIX – MAKE LUV TONIGHT
SUBJECT – THE MAGIC THE MOMENT
PAUL SIMPSON – TREAT HER SWEETER
SERIOUS INTENTION – YOU DON’T KNOW
JM SILK – MUSIC IS THE KEY
JELLYBEAN – SIDEWALK TALK ‘FUNHOUSE MIX’
LISA LISA – I WONDER IF I TAKE YOU HOME
CONWAY BROTHERS – TURN IT UP
HAROLD FALTIMEYER – AXEL F
PAUL HARDCASTLE – 19

© Greg Wilson, 2012

Electrospecive by Richard Stewart

Acid House commemorated its 20th anniversary this year, with no shortage of articles, books, club nights and talking heads on hand to guide you through the seismic shift that shook youth culture in the summer of ’88. This UK driven phenomena had blown in from the winds of Chicago, an accidental derivative from the Roland drum machine which had for many years powered the black gay clubs of America.

Saturday 30th August 2008,  a short cab ride from Manchester city centre in a small enclave of Salford not much troubled by the cranes and bulldozers- the creeping regeneration so evident elsewhere in the borough, tribute of a more clandestine nature was being paid. It celebrated those who blazed their trail to a different beat, in a time long before House Music. Electro–Funk, much like the tower blocks of Salford stands isolated and largely forgotten; simultaneously ignored and misunderstood. ‘Electrospective- Manchester Pre Rave’, the brainchild of DJ Greg Wilson and the MDMArchive, set out to tell the full story, coaxing Electro out from the shadows with nearly 12 hours of discussion, film and dancing. Wilson was a pioneer in programming the electronic boogie emanating from New York towards the end of ’81, a move not popular with purists who were outraged that drummers had been substituted for drum machines. Undeterred, his nights flourished before the fuse paper was well and truly lit, late in1982 and from the unlikeliest of sources.

Malcolm McLaren, like a pre You Tube voyeur went to the heart of the Bronx and his video for ‘Buffalo Girls’ gave the UK it’s first glimpse of Breakdancing, a style which had developed in the streets and clubs of New York since the mid-seventies and featured scratching, graffiti and rapping for good measure. The burgeoning electro scene in this country now had an explosive visual to match the beats and the following summer, swept through the inner cities of Britain laying much of the foundation that Acid House would build upon half a decade later.

Islington Mill dates back to the Industrial Revolution and is now a thriving cultural hub for Manchester’s artists, writers and musicians, where pop sensation the Ting Ting’s early manifesto and debut album came together. A wonderful red brick building, infused with a palpable sense of history and the perfect setting for Electrospective, the doors opened at 4 pm. The daytime session began with an informal Q&A with various movers and shakers of the era, DJ’s Hewan Clarke, Colin Curtis, Chad Jackson & Mike Shaft. The afternoon turnout was testament to the high regard which these names are held locally and to the radical impact Electro left in its wake. During the lengthy and lively debates that ran throughout the early evening Greg proved a good interviewer, taking a background role and subtly cajoling stories and amusing anecdotes from his assorted guests.

There then followed a short session with Tim’Bones’ Forde, a dancer with Manchester’s best known dance crew, ‘Broken Glass’. He is also behind the documentary that showcased on the night called ‘The Birth of the British B-Boy’, which charts the rise of Broken Glass and shines a light on a clutch of unheralded early pioneers of the scene. Whilst the Rainy Cities miserabalists donned grey overcoats to pen a Manchester musical heritage we hear so much about, black kids and soul boys slipped into something more comfortable and hunkered down to the serious business of partying. The 40 minute short perfectly captures that essence, tapping into the raw energy and talent hidden in the high rises and estates of ‘80’s Manchester. The same D.I.Y. spirit that propelled this movement forward is dusted off and put to good use in the film making process and the low budget approach lends the film a certain authenticity. It also gives voice to those responsible for starting the dance, detailing their struggle to find not only an outlet for their passion, but also their place in society.

Certainly the landscape was different back then, with the black voice and presence marginalised. It was nonetheless an intensely inspired and productive period that gave rise to a number of influential underground movements. The film touches upon the lack of opportunities for those lower down the economic order, but its message is refreshingly upbeat. It demonstrates that with hard work, talent and self belief, young people can and do transcend their monotonous grind as proven by this group of street smart kids suddenly realising a golden opportunity in the summer of ‘83. Armed with a determination not to be written off and managed by the soon to retire DJ Greg Wilson, ‘Broken Glass Street Crew’ took their show on the road and made things happen.

With communication as sophisticated as it is today, things travel so much further, so much faster. In a myspace, facebook dominated world, it is hard to imagine anything given the space to develop as organically as the many strands of black music that collided to eventually form the original electro explosion. The internet can flash messages across the globe in minutes, but offers such a wealth of choice that it’s causing attention deficit disorder amongst its users. A generation of fidgets never have time to get bored; one click and they are already onto something new.

And that’s part of the problem. There runs a train of thought that a little bit of boredom is exactly what our children lack. Cutting them off from that experience can leave them with practically no use for their own initiative and less practiced in the art of free thinking. Allow them a little ennui and let’s see what they can create once their minds have a chance to idle. It is no accident that our most defined club moments were the result of decay; oppression, lack of opportunity and disenchantment forced people to find something constructive and meaningful in life and in the case of Broken Glass and Manchester’s other crew of note, ‘Street Machine’, it led to the dancefloor (or makeshift lino) in a contest for supremacy.

There was a fierce rivalry in the early DJ battles and competition between the different crews was furious, yet rarely violent. With the co-modification of hip hop and its subsequent glamorisation of violence this intensified divisions, and seeing the brutal consequences of ghetto styling over substance and the rising toll that the drug wars have taken, this documentary takes us back to a time when a beef was settled by consensus; the one throwing the best or hitherto unseen moves walked away with the spoils. Crime and poverty were as entrenched then as they are now, but B Boy culture for a brief time offered respite from the harsh realities of life, an escape route that hadn’t previously  existed.

The legacy of those early days has permeated the upper echelons of high brow culture, with graffiti ‘installations’ now exhibiting in the distinctly asbo-free environment of the art gallery. Turntablism is still thriving and Breakdancing is the standard backdrop for MTV chart hits as well as the burning obsession for Jonah Takalua, the foul mouthed Tongan in Chris Lilley’s brilliantly observed cult comedy, Summer Heights High. The no sell-out ethos that was integral to keeping it ‘street’ may have excluded many of the original crew members from hip hop’s new wealth, but they do at least have a celluloid record that accurately represents their place in history, one that will survive beyond their own memories. ‘The Birth of British B-Boys’ also provides a fitting tribute to Royston Swanston, AKA Swanny, a key member of Broken Glass who sadly died in 2006.

At around the same time that the roots of hip hop began forming in the Bronx, during the 70’s on the other side of the world, a pair of Australians Bill Mollison & David Holmgren first coined the term permaculture. Used to describe an environmentally friendly farming method most in tune with nature, this attitude has been adopted by a huge global movement uniting to fight for equality and sustainability. Their guiding principle follows a simple logic; if you want something to survive, to thrive, then you have to put back in. Watching the grainy footage of Greg Wilson’s very eighties barnet we are reminded of an altogether different kind of permaculture, but you would be hard pressed to find anyone who has done more to raise the awareness of what this short lived era spawned. Since coming out of retirement back in 2003, through his mixes, edits, DJ sets, written memoirs and his own exhaustive fact packed website www.electrofunkroots.com Greg has been on a crusade to exhume the facts from the skeletons of this nascent club scene.

It would be inaccurate to think that the music in clubs at that time was purely electro; that simply wasn’t the case. There was a wide spectrum ranging from jazz, funk, disco, soul and boogie that fused with the synthesizer to construct a new sound labelled ‘electro-funk.’ All these components were the melting pot that provided forward thinking dancefloors with a fairly diverse dynamic.

An interesting point raised by Hewan Clarke was how Hacienda’s later policy of ‘House Music All Night Long’ resulted in a much whiter clientele. There is no suggestion this was a conscious decision from the club, but the move towards solely one style of music alienated much of Hacienda’s black crowd, who preferred Moss-side clubs like Reno’s or the all-nighters at the Gallery where a wider choice and variable tempo was on offer. The same charges of over-kill were levelled at Electro when it stalled down a cul de sac of its own making; looking for the perfect beat soon became the only beat and this rapid rise in popularity actually helped bring about its early demise. As far as the mainstream could tell, electro went to ground almost as quickly as it had come.  It barely raised a pulse for the remainder of the ‘80’s before returning in various guises bearing the same name but little resemblance and certainly, none of the innovation of its fore bearer.

Back to the present, and after the screening of the film, the sofas were pushed aside to make way for the club session, which kicked off at 10pm. Early exhibition dancing from the Breakers set the tone and it was pretty much big party tracks all the way after that. A multicultural mixed crowd in terms of age, gender and background responded to generate a great atmosphere. When it comes to throwing a memorable party the devil is in the detail and from the format of the day’s event, running order, venue, right down to reasonable door price and the cheap bar, everything was meticulously planned to make this a night to remember (Note- the £2 bottled beer conspired to erase whole chunks of those memories, so excuse any recollections that may be a tad hazy).

Everyone involved deserves credit for pulling this ambitious project off, in particular the Manchester District Music Archive who had a large hand in making the event possible. It was a runaway success and that speaks volumes for Greg Wilson’s organisational skills and the degree of work he is prepared to ‘put in’ away from the decks and his trusty Revox. Were he still alive, ‘60’s counter culture hero Emmett Grogan might class Greg’s thirty years plus behind the turntables (albeit with a 20 year hiatus) as ‘rubbing it till it’s sore’ but seeing the reaction from contemporary dance-floors to his unique reel to reel and laptop cuts and edits, its clear that the message is getting through.

And that’s really the point- what made Greg’s return to DJ’ing such a triumph was that he never traded on the nostalgia ticket. This was so much more than a mere misty eyed trip down memory lane and ‘Electrospective’ sent out an impressive and important declaration. Respect the past dear reader for we can learn much from the tracks of time, but never forget the future; that is history waiting to be written.

First published by Swine:  http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/swine/swine_oct08_2.htm

Electrospective Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/group

© Greg Wilson, 2012

Huddersfield Crew, Stars Bar 1982 (Photo by Greg Wilson – taken from the DJ booth)

Electro-Funk is undoubtedly the most misunderstood of all UK Dance genres, yet probably the most vital with regards to its overall influence. Central to the confusion is the term itself, which during 82/83 (before it was shortened to Electro) was specific to the UK. From a US perspective this music would come under a variety of headings (including Hip-Hop, Dance, Disco, Electric Boogie and Freestyle), arriving on import here in the UK mainly on New York labels like West End, Prelude, Sugarhill, Emergency, Profile, Tommy Boy, Streetwise, plus numerous others. Just as Northern Soul was a British term for a style (or group of styles) of American black music, so was Electro-Funk, and, like Northern, the roots of the scene are planted firmly in the North-West of England.

Although this has been documented in a number of books and publications down the years, often with a fair degree of insight, the subject is rarely approached with any true depth and attention to detail, the information all in fragments. Perhaps the main reason that Electro-Funk remains a mystery to so many people is because its audience was predominantly black at a time when cutting-edge black music (and black culture in general) was very much marginalized in the UK, and as a result essentially underground. To keep up to date with what was happening on the British black music scene in 82/83 you’d have had to have been a reader of a specialist publication like Blues & Soul or Black Echoes.

In the UK scheme of things Electro-Funk eventually took over from Jazz-Funk as the dominant force on the club scene, but not without major controversy and upheaval. The purists regardedelectronic or electric (as they called it) with total contempt, rejecting its validity on the grounds that it was, in their opinion, not real music due to its technological nature (although Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing” would put paid to that theory). However, as time went on and audience tastes began to change, even the most hostile DJs were forced to play at least some Electro-Funk. Despite all the resistance, the movement slowly but surely began to gain momentum, sweeping down from the North, through the Midlands and eventually into London and the South. The reason the Electro scene took so long to fully establish itself in the capital was down to the stranglehold the all-powerful Soul Mafia DJs held on the Southern scene. The Soul Mafia, with big names like Chris Hill, Robbie Vincent, Froggy, Jeff Young and Pete Tong, continued to concentrate on Jazz-Funk and Soul grooves (later referred to as “80s Groove”). It wouldn’t be until ‘84 that their virtual monopoly of the clubs, radio, and the black music press began to erode as a new order of music replaced the old, laying the foundations not only for Hip-Hop, but also the subsequent UK Techno and House scenes.

Kraftwerk

As has often been said, Electro is the missing link of Dance music. All roads lead back to New York where the level of musical innovation and experimentation throughout the early 80s period was quite staggering. It wasn’t one narrow style that never strayed from within the confides of an even narrower BPM range, Electro-Funk was anything goes! The diversity of records released during this period was what made it so magical, you never knew what was coming next. The tempo of these tracks ranged from under 100bpm to over 130, covering an entire rhythmic spectrum along the way. There was no set template for this new Dance direction, it just went wherever it went and took you grooving along with it. It was all about stretching the boundaries that had begun to stifle black music, and its influences lay not only with German Technopop wizards Kraftwerk, the acknowledged forefathers of pure Electro, plus British Futurist acts like the Human League and Gary Numan, but also with a number of pioneering black musicians. Major artists like Miles Davis, Sly Stone, Herbie Hancock, Stevie Wonder, legendary producer Norman Whitfield and, of course, George Clinton and his P Funk brigade, would all play their part in shaping this new sound via their innovative use of electronic instruments during the 70s (and as early as the late 60s in Miles Davis’ case). Once the next generation of black musicians finally got their hands on the available technology it was bound to lead to a musical revolution as they ripped up the rule book with their twisted Funk.

Before Afrika Bambaataa & The Soul Sonic Force’s seminal Electro classic, “Planet Rock” (Tommy Boy) exploded on the scene in May 82, there had already been a handful of releases in the previous months that would help define this new genre. D Train’s “You’re The One For Me” (Prelude), which was massive during late 81, would set the tone, paving the way for “Time” by Stone (West End), “Feels Good” by Electra (Emergency) and two significant Eric Matthew / Darryl Payne productions, Sinnamon’s “Thanks To You” (Becket) and, once again courtesy of Prelude, “On A Journey (I Sing The Funk Electric)” by Electrik Funk (the term Electro-Funk originally deriving from this track, “electric-funk” being amended to Electro-Funk following the arrival of Shock’s “Electrophonic Phunk” on the Californian Fantasy label in June). However, the most significant of all the early releases was “Don’t Make Me Wait” by the Peech Boys (West End), for this was no longer hinting at a new direction, it was unmistakably the real deal. An extreme chunk of vinyl moulded by Paradise Garage DJ Larry Levan, “Don’t Make Me Wait” would quickly become a cult-classic, and eventually even manage to scrape into the top 50 of the British Pop chart, purely on the back of underground support (as would a number of subsequent Electro-Funk releases).

As the first British DJ to fully embrace this new wave of black music, I came in for a lot of personal criticism. Having already become an established name on the Jazz-Funk scene I was seen as a heretic for playing thesesoulless records, especially those that were regarded as the more blatant ones (for example, the dreaded “Planet Rock” and the rest of the Tommy Boys stuff, Warp 9 “Nunk” (Prism), Extra T’s “ET Boogie” (Sunnyview), Man Parrish “Hip Hop, Be Bop (Don’t Stop)” (Importe/12), and Italian Zanza 12″, “Dirty Talk” by Klien & MBO). I generally opted for the Dub or instrumental versions, mixing them in alongside the more orthodox Funk, Soul and Jazz-Funk releases of the time at my weekly residencies, Legend in Manchester and Wigan Pier, where the scene first took root. These venues, both state-of-the-art US styled clubs, would become central to the movement throughout the 82-84 period, attracting people from all over the country. The music would also gain further exposure via my regular mixes for Manchester’s Piccadilly Radio (beginning in May 82), and in August 83 I’d introduce Electro to a new audience, when I became the first Dance resident at the Haçienda club.

Haçienda Flyer

Electro-Funk’s legacy is huge. It announced the computer age and seduced a generation with its drum machines, synthesizers and its sequencers, its rap, cut and scratch, its breaking and popping, its Dub mixes, its bonus beats and its innovative use of samples. Made to be mixed it inspired a new breed of British DJs to cut the chat and match the beats. Now legendary names like Grandmaster Flash, Tee Scott, Tony Humphries, Larry Levan, François Kevorkian, Shep Pettibone, John ‘Jellybean’ Benitez and Double Dee & Steinski became role-models for tuned-in DJs and would-be remixers, whilst pioneers of the new digital sampling technology, including New York producer Arthur Baker and his collaborator John Robie, British producer Trevor Horn (via “Buffalo Gals”) and, of course, the Herbie Hancock / Bill Laswell combination, with their Grammy winning “Rockit” (Columbia), not only revolutionized black music but instigated a whole new approach to popular music in general.

DJ Kool Herc

Electro-Funk was the channel that finally brought the Hip-Hop movement, and all its various creative components, firmly into the UK mainstream, helping to spread its message throughout Europe and beyond. To all intents and purposes Electro-Funk pre-dates Hip-Hop in a British context, the term not coming into common use here until much later. We were more or less clueless when it came to Hip-Hop until late 82, when Charisma Records in the UK unleashed Malcolm McLaren & The World’s Famous Supreme Team’s “Buffalo Gals” video, which came as something of a culture-shock to say least, bringing the full force of NYC street-style out of The Bronx and into our living rooms, and inspiring a carnival of breakdancing in cities and towns throughout Britain during the summer of 83. Eventually we’d learn of its origins with Kool DJ Herc, spinning his famous merry-go-round of breaks for the b boys. Before this, most people had presumed that the break in breakdancing referred to the damage you might do to your bones if you got the move wrong!

Although the media gradually latched onto this new dance craze, the scene that surrounded it wouldn’t receive any serious attention here in the UK until 1984. This followed the runaway success of the Street Sounds “Electro” compilations (Volume 1 released in October 83), which would take the music to a much wider audience, and result in The Face announcing “Electro – The Beat That Won’t Be Beaten” across its entire front page in May 84, a full two years on from the US release of “Planet Rock”. This substantial delay in recognition went a long way towards obscuring Electro-Funk’s essential role in kick-starting the 80s dance boom, with many UK club historians bypassing the pivotal early 80s period and mistakenly citing Detroit Techno as the trigger. Even the track that gave birth to Techno, the Juan Atkins / Rick Davies 12″ “Clear” by Cybotron (Fantasy), was regarded as an Electro classic here in 83, way before the Techno scene began to take shape, and would feature on the first Street Sounds “Crucial Electro” compilation the following year. Little mention is ever made of the fact that its remixer, Jose ‘Animal’ Diaz, was immersed in NY Electro, with previous mix credits including “We Are The Jonzun Crew” for Tommy Boy, and “Hip Hop Be Bop (Don’t Stop)”, which gained a new lease of life following his much sought-after limited edition mix for Disconet (the DJ Only format affiliated to Sugarscoop).

Electro’s star burnt very brightly, initially on the underground and eventually with the club masses. In 1984 the London scene took off in a big way, both in the clubs and on the radio, with the emergence of DJs like Herbie from Mastermind (who mixed the Street Sounds albums), Paul Anderson, Tim Westwood and Mike Allen confirming a radical shift in power on the capital’s black music scene. With the substantial weight of London behind it, the Electro movement quickly went overground enticing an ever-increasing number of switched-on white kids in its on-going search for the perfect beat. With a significant proportion of the British youth, regardless of colour, now grounded in Hip-Hop culture, the new UK Dance era was well and truly under way and it wouldn’t be long before musicians and DJs here began to create their own hybrid styles, most notably in Bristol where Electro was fused with the Reggae vibes of Dub and Lovers Rock, to bring about a unique flavour that would later be known as Trip-Hop. By the end of the decade cities like Manchester and London had become major players on the now global Dance scene, with the UK a veritable hotbed of creativity both in the clubs and the recording studios.

Electro-Funk was the prototype, and Hip-Hop, Techno, House, Jungle, Trip-Hop, Drum & Bass, UK Garage, plus countless other Dance derivatives, all owe their debts to its undoubted influence. Without it’s inspiration, it’s unlikely that British acts such as Coldcut, 808 State, A Guy Called Gerald, Soul To Soul, Massive Attack, The Prodigy, William Orbit, Goldie, the Chemical Brothers, Underworld and Fatboy Slim, to name but a few, would have emerged. When all’s said and done, Electro-Funk (or Electro or whatever people choose to call it) was the catalyst, the mutant strain that bridged the British Jazz-Funk underground to the Acid-House mainstream, Until this fact is fully recognized the UK Dance jigsaw will remain incomplete and confused, with countless clubbers, twenty years on, having no idea of the true roots of the music they’re dancing to.

ESSENTIAL BEATS 82 – 83

ONE HUNDRED OF THE BIGGEST TUNES PLAYED AT LEGEND AND WIGAN PIER

The tracks are listed in chronological order – the first three entries arriving on import in late ’81.

• D TRAIN — You’re The One For Me (US Prelude)
• DR JECKYLL & MR HYDE — Genius Of Love (US Profile)
• STONE — Time (US West End)
• P–FUNK ALL STARS — Hydraulic Pump pt III (US Hump)
• ELECTRIK FUNK — On A Journey (I sing the funk electric) (US Prelude)
• PEECH BOYS — Don’t Make Me Wait (US West End)
• SINNAMON — Thanks To You (US Becket)
• AL McCALL — Hard Times (US West End)
• ELECTRA — Feels Good (US Emergency)
• ATLANTIS — Keep On Movin’ And Groovin’ (US Chaz Ro)
• AFRIKA BAMBAATAA & THE SOUL SONIC FORCE — Planet Rock (US Tommy Boy)
• SHOCK — Electrophonic Phunk (US Fantasy)
• SECRET WEAPON — Must Be The Music – remix (US Prelude – from the LP Kiss FM Mastermixes vol 1)
• GUNCHBACK BOOGIE BAND — Funn (US Prelude)
• THE SYSTEM — It’s Passion (US Mirage)
• ROCKERS REVENGE — Walking On Sunshine (US Streetwise)
• GRANDMASTER FLASH & THE FURIOUS FIVE — The Message (US Sugarhill)
• RAW SILK — Do It To The Music (US West End)
• THE JONZUN CREW — Pack Jam (Look Out For The OVC) (US Tommy Boy)
• SHARON REDD — Beat The Street – remix (US Prelude)
• KLIEN & MBO — Dirty Talk (Italian Zanza)
• Q — The Voice Of Q (US Philly World)
• EXTRA T’s — E.T Boogie (US Sunnyview)
• GEORGE CLINTON — Loopzilla (US Capitol)
• WARP 9 — Nunk (US Prism)
• TYRONE BRUNSON — The Smurf (US Believe In A Dream)
• PLANET PATROL — Rock At Your Own Risk (US Tommy Boy)
• WHODINI — Magic’s Wand (US Jive/Zomba)
• STONE — Girl I Like The Way That You Move (US West End)
• ORBIT — The Beat Goes On (Canadian Quality)
• DR JECKYLL & MR HYDE — The Challenge (US Profile)
• TONEY LEE — Reach Up (US Radar)
• GRANDMASTER FLASH & THE FURIOUS FIVE — Scorpio (US Sugarhill)
• MALCOLM McLAREN / WORLD’S FAMOUS SUPREME TEAM — Buffalo Gals (UK Charisma)
• NAIROBI & THE AWESOME FOURSOME — Funky Soul Makossa (US Streetwise)
• MAN PARRISH — Hip Hop Be Bop (Don’t Stop) (US Importe/12 – later on Disconet 12″)
• INDEEP — Last Night A DJ Saved My Life (US Sound Of New York)
• REGGIE GRIFFIN & TECHNOFUNK — Mirda Rock (US Sweet Mountain)
• MELLE MEL & DUKE BOOTEE — Message II (survival) (US Sugarhill)
• PRINCE CHARLES & THE CITY BEAT BAND — The Jungle Stomp (US MJS)
• THE WEBBOES — Under The Wear (US Sam)
• THE JONZUN CREW — Space Is The Place (US Tommy Boy)
• SANDY KERR — Thug Rock (US Catawba)
• KLIEN & MBO — Wonderful (US Atlantic)
• EX TRAS — Haven’t Been Funked Enough (UK Excellent)
• VANITY 6 — Nasty Nasty Girls (US Hot Tracks – originally on Warner Brothers LP)
• AFRIKA BAMBAATAA & THE SOUL SONIC FORCE — Looking For The Perfect Beat (US Tommy Boy)
• JOHNNY CHINGAS — Phone Home (US Columbia)
• PURE ENERGY — Spaced Out (US Prism)
• VISUAL — The Music Got Me (US Prelude)
• C.O.D — In The Bottle (US Emergency – later on Disconet 12″)
• THE JONZUN CREW — We Are The Jonzun Crew (US Disconet – later on Tommy Boy 12″)
• RUN DMC — It’s Like That / Sucker MC’s (Krush-Groove 1) (US Profile)
• WARP 9 — Light Years Away (US Prism)
• D TRAIN — Music (US Prelude)
• SHIRLEY LITES — Heat You Up – Meltdown mix (US West End)
• WEEKS & CO — If You’re Looking For Fun (US Salsoul)
• FEARLESS FOUR — Just Rock (US Elektra)
• MIDNIGHT STAR — Freak-A-Zoid (US Solar)
• FREEEZE — I-Dub-U (US Streetwise)
• SINNAMON — I Need You Now (US Jive/Zomba)
• ROCK MASTER SCOTT & THE DYNAMIC THREE — It’s Life (You Gotta Think Twice) (US Reality)
• ELECTRIC POWER BAND — Papa Smurf (US Bee Pee)
• NEWTRAMENT — London Bridge Is Falling Down (UK Jive/Zomba)
• S.O.S BAND — Just Be Good To Me (US Tabu)
• TONEY LEE — Love So Deep (US Radar)
• NEWCLEUS — Jam On Revenge (The Wikki Wikki Song) (US Sunnyview – originally on US May Hew)
• HERBIE HANCOCK — Rockit (US Columbia)
• PROJECT FUTURE — Ray-gun-omics (US Capitol)
• TWO SISTERS — High Noon (US Sugarscoop)
• THE RAKE — Street Justice (US Profile)
• WUF TICKET — The Key (US Prelude)
• TIME ZONE — The Wildstyle (US Celluloid)
• CANDIDO — Jingo Breakdown (US Salsoul)
• UNIQUE — What I Got Is What You Need (US Prelude)
• THE PACKMAN — I’m The Packman (Eat Everything I Can) (US Enjoy)
• CYBOTRON — Clear (US Fantasy)
• PLANET PATROL — Cheap Thrills (US Tommy Boy)
• NEW ORDER — Confused Beats (UK Factory)
• HOT STREAK — Body Work (US Easy Street)
• WEST STREET MOB — Break Dancin’ – Electric Boogie (US Sugarhill)
• GARY’S GANG — Makin’ Music (US Radar)
• CAPTAIN ROCK — The Return Of Captain Rock (US NIA)
• B BOYS — Two, Three, Break (US Vintertainment)
• ARCADE FUNK — Search And Destroy (US D.E.T.T)
• DIMPLES D — Sucker DJs (I Will Survive) (US Partytime)
• G.L.O.B.E & WHIZ KID — Play That Beat MR DJ (US Tommy Boy)
• TOM BROWNE — Rockin’ Radio (US Arista)
• GRANDMASTER & MELLE MEL — White Lines (Don’t Don’t Do It) (US Sugarhill)
• CAPTAIN RAPP — Bad Times (I Can’t Stand It) (US Saturn)
• TWILIGHT 22 — Electric Kingdom (US Vanguard)
• RUSSELL BROTHERS — The Party Scene (US Portrait)
• SHANNON — Let The Music Play (US Emergency)
• DJ DIVINE — Get Into The Mix (US West End)
• THE ART OF NOISE — Beat Box (UK ZTT)
• HASHIM — Al-naafiysh (The Soul) (US Cutting)
• B BOYS — Cuttin’ Herbie / Rock The House (US Vintertainment)
• MALCOLM X / KEITH LeBLANC — No Sell Out (US Tommy Boy)
• XENA — On The Upside (US Emergency)
• PUMPKIN — King Of The Beat (US Profile)

© Greg Wilson, November 2003

Malcolm McLaren masterminded the explosion of the Punk Rock scene and brought anarchy to the UK in the form of the notorious Sex Pistols who he managed and mentored. As a result, McLaren’s place in British music history is ensured. Countless words have been written (and will continue to be written) on the subject.

Yet, strangely, little is ever mentioned about McLaren’s later role, which was also hugely significant, for it was he who was ultimately responsible for bringing Hip Hop out of New York’s South Bronx and placing it squarely into the collective psyche of the British youth. The portal for this unlikely introduction to what would become the most influential cultural movement of the late 20th Century was a highly infectious and truly inspirational single called “Buffalo Gals”, which entered the UK Pop chart in December 1982 (exactly 6 years on from the Sex Pistols’ chart debut), climbing all the way into the top 10.

This was more than six months before Herbie Hancock’s Grammy winning “Rockit” was issued, giving the UK a head start when it came to our Hip Hop education, for it wasn’t until “Rockit” came along that the majority of people (even in most of the US) began to latch onto this vibrant and colourful New York subculture. Herbie Hancock, via Grandmixer D.ST, might have scratched the surface when introducing Hip Hop to a global audience, but “Buffalo Gals” had already brought the total package (inclusive of all four elements, not just scratching) to the British mainstream.

As often happens at these pivotal points in popular culture, it all came about by complete accident. McLaren, in New York looking for a support act for his current charges, Bow Wow Wow, was taken to see “something that couldn’t possibly have ever existed in England”. This “something” turned out to be an open-air party, where he was exposed to the full-force of the Hip Hop movement in the presence of none-other-than Afrika Bambaataa, the figurehead of the Bronx’ Zulu Nation (who laid the blueprint for the Electro genre via his hugely influential Kraftwerk-inspired monster cut, “Planet Rock”).

In the illuminating 1984 BBC documentary “Beat This! – A Hip Hop History”, McLaren (thankfully) gave a rare TV interview on his Hip Hop initiation, recounting his impressions of this first awe-inspiring encounter with what must have seemed like another world (especially when you consider he’d have been one of the few white people and possibly the only Englishman in attendance). Watching the DJs at work on the turntables he observed:

“…it was extraordinary cos the sound coming out was totally inarticulate, it was a load of rough noises, noises that sounded a little like guitar, but had a sort of concrete chisel sound and the sound I realised was actually coming from the way they were messing around with their hands on the decks, moving records backwards and forwards…at one point or another people would move to the sides and a group of kids would start freaking out in the middle of doing all this incredible gymnastic dancing!”

McLaren, profoundly affected by what he’d seen and heard that night in the Bronx, incorporated the Hip Hop style into his debut album project, “Duck Rock”. With top British producer Trevor Horn at the controls, the LP broke new ground, taking the recording studio on the road and around the world, absorbing many different musical styles and putting them together in a totally unique way (a number of years before Paul Simon was universally acclaimed for doing a similar thing).

The “Buffalo Gals” track itself has a fascinating legacy. It was based on a famous minstrel song of the same name, which was first published in 1844 by the ironically-named Cool White (although the song is older still and it’s writer unknown). A hundred and two years later, it found its way into the storyline of the classic Frank Capra movie “It’s A Wonderful Life” (which, remarkably, was a box office flop that only gained full recognition in the 1970s, following annual Christmas TV repeats). “It’s A Wonderful Life” is nowadays, of course, regarded as a masterpiece, one of the most beloved of all American films.

If its origins weren’t bizarre enough, to twist things even further, McLaren’s “Buffalo Gals” saw him hark back to an earlier type of MC, taking the role of a square dance prompter (or figure caller), instructing the buffalo gals (and boys) to ‘go around the outside’ and ‘do-si-do your partners’! The sleevenotes on the album describe the track as follows:

“…recorded with the World’s Famous Supreme Team and Zulu singers backing them up with the words “she’s looking like a hobo”. The performance by the Supreme Team may require some explaining but suffice to say they are DJs from New York City who have developed a technique using record players like instruments, replacing the power chord of the guitar by the needle of a gramophone, moving it manually backwards and forwards across the surface of a record. We call it scratching.”

The sleeve for the album would be a customised boom box (complete with buffalo horns!), whilst many people saw their first pair of the soon to be essential Technics SL1200 turntables on the front cover of the single.

Before “Buffalo Gals” we were more or less completely unaware of Hip Hop (at least with regards to three of its four elements). We already knew about Rap of course, which had first made its mark in 1979 when The Sugarhill Gang scored a worldwide success with “Rappers Delight”, but the style had been dismissed by the British media as a novelty (although perceptions had begun to change following the August ’82 release of Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five’s street epic “The Message”, another UK Top 10 hit). Scratching was still an abstract concept as far as British DJs were concerned (Flash & The Five’s “Wheels Of Steel” made little impression on it’s UK release in ’81, it’s genius only fully appreciated when it was revived later, during the Electro-Funk era), graffiti, as we then understood it, was hardly considered art, and we knew nothing whatsoever of breakdancing, although Shalamar’s Jeffrey Daniel, an ex-dancer on US music show Soul Train, had already introduced us to the LA-originated style of body popping via the bands appearances on British TV.

Despite our ignorance of events in the Bronx, we weren’t totally green. In the more adventurous specialist black music clubs a new type of sound, which became known as Electro-Funk, was being played on import (mainly arriving on New York labels like Tommy Boy, Streetwise, Sugarhill, West End, Prelude, Sunnyview, Emergency and Becket). During 1982 the landmark early Electro-Funk tunes (which pre-dated “The Message”) were the mighty Peech Boys, led by the legendary DJ Larry Levan, with “Don’t Make Me Wait”, as weighty a slice of Dub/Funk as we’d ever heard, and, of course, “Planet Rock”, by Bambaataa and his Soul Sonic Force, which would cause major controversy within black music circles due to its no-holds-barred technological assault.

As more and more of these innovative ‘electronic’ releases began to make their way across the Atlantic, the Electro-Funk scene (which attracted a predominantly black audience) took root at two clubs in the North-West of England where I then deejayed, Wigan Pier and Legend in Manchester. Ignoring the mounting flak I was taking for playing what my critics regarded as ‘soulless’ records, I became increasingly associated with this music, not only as a result of featuring it in the clubs (which drew people from all over the North and the Midlands, and even as far as London), but also because I’d incorporated it into my regular mixes for Mike Shaft’s show on Manchester’s Piccadilly Radio (which was known for a more orthodox selection of Soul, Funk and Jazz).

“Buffalo Gals” was despised by the purists, the very idea of playing a record by Malcolm McLaren on a black music night was absolutely abhorrent to them, but it fitted perfectly into my playlist as the backing track was pure Electro-Funk, giving the whole crazy concept a solid foundation that would truly rock the dancefloor. Following on from “Duck Rock”, Trevor Horn would continue the Electro experiment, via his own ZTT label, as a member of The Art Of Noise, most notably on the influential singles “Beat Box” and “Close (To The Edit)”, whilst cleaning up in ’84 with his groundbreaking work with Frankie Goes To Hollywood. Horn set new standards in Pop music production, his studio wizardry a major inspiration for the next generation of music makers.

However, it wasn’t until the promotional video for “Buffalo Gals” was unleashed onto a totally unsuspecting British public that the full impact of this truly revolutionary release hit home. It would be no exaggeration to say that from this moment onwards British youth culture was never the same again. The contents of this video quite literally changed people’s lives!

Click here to view the embedded video.

Malcolm McLaren ‘Buffalo Gals’ video

It wasn’t an overnight change, how could it be when the full implications of what had appeared, as if by magic before our eyes, would take months to fully sink in, but change gradually came. The video opened up the Pandoras box of Bronx street science; it was a full-frontal introduction to what we would later learn was Hip Hop. It was all there, rapping and scratching, colourful graffiti pieces and, of course, the most amazing of dance styles (courtesy of the soon to be internationally famous Rock Steady Crew), which we’d come to know as breaking (although the original term was b-boying). This included the execution of a move that none of us could have imagined was possible at the time, somebody spinning around upside down on the top of their head! Had we been watching a news report with footage of the Martians landing, we’d have been no more awestruck than the moment we saw that first headspin!

The effect of all this on young blacks cut particularly deep. It hadn’t been long since the inner-city riots, which resulted from the black community becoming increasingly isolated and marginalised within British society, and now, having made a stand against the system, young blacks were asserting their identity in a way that had never been possible for the older generation (most of whom had immigrated from the West Indies in the 50s and 60s). This Hip Hop spoke directly to the youth, and needless to say, once they’d seen what it entailed, things would never be the same. Society might have closed the doors, but Hip Hop burst them wide open and it would be difficult to calculate just how many black kids in this country became breakdancers, body poppers, DJs, rappers or graffiti artists as a direct result of watching that video.

By the summer of ’83 breakdancing exploded onto the streets of the UK. After painstakingly practicing their moves (ideally on the kitchen lino) during the intervening months, the British b-boys finally emerged, ghetto-blasters at the ready, giving impromptu performances to bemused shoppers. This first wave of breakers were mainly black and their all-action entertainment worked wonders for race relations! Their white contemporaries, who may previously have felt threatened by what appeared to be a gang (rather than a crew) of black lads, no longer thought about fighting, but wanted to find out more about the dancing and the distinctive music that was booming out of the speakers. For many people, this was their first conversation with someone of a different skin colour, and major barriers began to break down during those initial exchanges in the streets and shopping centres. Apart from anything else, Hip Hop (or Electro-Funk, as we still called it) was a unifying force as far as the youth of this country were concerned, with black and white kids now communicating to the rhythm of the perfect beat. Nowadays Hip Hop culture is so much a part of British youth culture that we barely notice anymore, but back then this was a remarkable development. We were right on the cusp of social change.

By the end of 1983 Morgan Khan’s era defining “Street Sounds Electro” compilations had hooked in the mainstream audience and now white kids in the suburbs, many of whom had never even come into contact with black people, were tuning into the b-boy vibe. The “Electro” series provided the soundtrack for this new British breakdance generation and the UK dance scene would never look back as the seeds were well and truly sown for the clubbing boom that followed later in the decade.

Malcolm McLaren (Photo by Bob Gruen)

As with Punk, Malcolm McLaren could clearly understand Hip Hop’s role as a force for social change, for when all’s said and done, these two major youth movements represent opposite sides of the same coin. Both Punk and Hip Hop made a lasting impact on popular culture in the UK and McLaren’s role was absolutely crucial in each case. To view him only in context with the Punk years is to miss the full scale of his role in music history (not to mention the related areas of dance, art and fashion).

It’s difficult to bring to mind another 80s release that had a greater impact, or longer-lasting effect, on the youth of this country than “Buffalo Gals”, and as such, McLaren can lay claim to another title to place alongside his Punk Rock plaudits, that of British ambassador for the Boogie Down Bronx. It’s about time that this fact was finally (and fully) recognised; the tributes are long overdue, for this was undoubtedly a monumental contribution to British popular culture and black British culture in particular.

© Greg Wilson, 2003

Everyone has heard of The Haçienda, but not many people know about Legend, which could well be described as Manchester’s other club of the 80’s – I was fortunate enough to be associated with both.

No matter where I am in the world, people will ask me about The Haçienda – it’s a magical name for so many. They’ll say ‘wow! The Haçienda must have been really something’, and always seem surprised when I tell them that it wasn’t so great, for a variety of reasons, back in ’83 when I was there. The best Manchester club by a long shot at that point in time was Legend, and what a club!

It’s thirty years this month since I took over the Wednesday night there – this would prove to be the defining moment in my DJ career.

My debut night was August 12^th 1981, and I’d play every Wednesday up until the end of 1983, when I retired as a DJ. This was with the exception of one night in May ’83 when I was in London for the Blues & Soul awards, where I was named North’s Top DJ, and, to complete a clean sweep, Wigan Pier & Legend, my weekly residencies, placed 1^st and 2^nd in the club category – I brought in a young DJ called Chad Jackson to cover for me that night. Chad would later go on to be crowned DMC World Mixing Champion in 1987, and score a big hit single with ‘Hear The Drummer Get Wicked’ in 1990.

There were only about 80 people there that first night, almost all of whom were black kids seriously into their music and dancing. The night, originally launched when the club opened almost a year earlier, had previously been successful with Nicky Flavell and then John Grant at the helm. John Grant was one of the big names on the Jazz-Funk scene up North back then, right up there with Colin Curtis and Mike Shaft, who hosted the Piccadilly Radio Soul Show, ‘TCOB’ (Taking Care Of Business). When John Grant defected to a joint Blues & Soul / Piccadilly Radio promotion called The Main Event, that was also held midweek in Manchester, at Placemate 7 (previously seminal Soul venue The Twisted Wheel), the bulk of the audience, which had averaged around the 300 mark, left with him. So, given the success of my Tuesday sessions at Wigan Pier (owned by the same company), I was given a crack at halting the slide before it was too late and all was lost – it was very much last chance saloon for the Wednesday at Legend.

During those first few weeks I would have played a selection of mainly US imports, with some choice UK Jazz-Funk releases thrown in for good measure – for the spotters out there, these would have included: Al Jarreau ‘Roof Garden’ / ‘Easy’ (US LP), Archie Bell ‘Any Time Is Right’ (US 12”), Bob James ‘Sign Of The Times’ (US LP), Central Line ‘Walking Into Sunshine’ (UK 12”), Denroy Morgan ‘I’ll Do Anything For You’ (US 12”), Donald Byrd ‘Love Has Come Around’ (US 12”), Inversions ‘Loco-Moto’ (UK 12”), Keith Diamond Band ‘The Dip’ (US 12”), Level 42 ‘Turn It On’ (UK 12”), Morrissey Mullen ‘Slipstream (UK LP), Rahmlee ‘Think’ (US LP), Richie Cole ‘New York Afternoon’ (US LP), Roy Ayers ‘Land Of Milk And Honey’ (US LP), Shock ‘Let’s Get Crackin’’ (US 12”), Unlimited Touch ‘Searching To Find The One’ (US 12” remix), Vaughan Mason ‘Rockin’ Big Guitar’ (US 12”), War ‘Cinco De Mayo’ (US LP) and Wish ‘Nice And Soft’ (US 12”).

As the above list illustrates, a wide selection of black music was played on the Jazz-Funk scene back then – Soul, Funk, Disco (or what would later be termed Boogie), Jazz-Funk and Jazz Fusion. It was basically the best of the various black music genres (with the exception of Reggae), covering a wide tempo spectrum. These specialist Jazz-Funk nights were as upfront as you could get; meaning that this was where you’d hear stuff that other DJ’s wouldn’t pick up on for weeks, sometimes months, often never – many of these tracks weren’t ever played outside of these nights (and the All-Dayers that were such an important element of the scene), some were never released in the UK. If you had serious aspirations of being a black music specialist in the North there was only one shop to buy your records from – the legendary Spin Inn on Cross Street in Manchester, who imported direct from the US.

Legend (or ‘Legends’ as the black crowd always called it) was a phenomenal club – there’s nothing comparable nowadays, they just don’t make them like that anymore. A quite spectacular environment with its space age metallic décor (15,000 steel cans were spot welded together at different levels to form its unique silver ceiling), especially when the laser was bouncing about off all the reflective surfaces. The sound system was the best I’d ever heard in a club anywhere at that time, the sub-bass (another unique feature back then) would practically punch you in the chest! The lighting was even more impressive than Wigan Pier, which was an achievement in itself. Legend’s own brochure boasted; “A circular dance area raised above the general floor level peppered with 2000 Tivoli lights forms the focal point of this new futuristic disco club, enhanced by the most up-to-date light show tailor-made to the overall design, it includes numerous par 36 lamps, scanner spots, jumbo and scatter strobes, mirror balls, half a mile of neon and a five colour computer controlled laser…The catalogue of lighting effects and laser technology with a full array of 12 channel American control boards gives the light jock plenty of scope to practice his art, The various effects include ‘tumbling’ neon rings on the shiny steel pillars which dominate the standing area, a pin spot light curtain, diversity arms spreading from the centre of the dance area ceiling and principally the 4 watt argon iron laser with an additional dye laser”. Talk about blinded with science!

Like the Pier, it was one of the precious few clubs in the UK to place the emphasis firmly on its sound and lighting, and as such the DJ and light jock were regarded as the companies most valued employees. This was at a time when most clubs’ idea of a lightshow was a few coloured bulbs hooked up to a single sound-to-light unit, so they flashed along in time with the beats. If you were lucky there’d maybe be a handful of pin-spots, some ropelights, a splash of neon, a solitary strobe or a UV strip. It was then an accepted part of the DJ’s job to also control the lighting, and the Pier was the first club I’d worked at which employed a separate light jock. Don’t even get me started on how poor the sound systems generally were back then.

Lengend Floor Plan (Click image to enlarge)

It’s highly likely that Legend would have turned to Mike Shaft in an attempt to revitalize the Wednesday night, but he was also tied into The Main Event so that was a non-starter. Instead they asked me, and I knew I had my work cut out if this wasn’t to be a short lived experience. Although there were so few people in the club, I was instantly aware that those who had turned out were serious music heads. They weren’t really interested in the microphone patter, which was the DJ norm back then in the UK, it was all about the music, and with this in mind I made what would turn out to be a pivotal decision. I resolved to change my approach more towards mixing the records that I played, taking advantage of the fact that Legend had three Technics SL1200’s (the first I’d ever seen in this country). This was a bold move, but one I felt would completely suit the type of audience I hoped to attract. A state-of-the-art venue like Legend demanded a radical new approach to musical presentation and, if we were to turn the tide, it was vital that we not only promoted the club as the superior venue that it undoubtedly was, but that I also set myself apart from all the other DJ’s on the Jazz-Funk scene. It was following this that I became known as ‘a mixing DJ’ – this was at a time when no other DJ’s on the scene in the North were placing the emphasis on mixing, and only Froggy, who’d invested in a pair of 1200’s for his Roadshow, was doing so down South

The first few months at Legend were mainly about damage limitation, and we managed to stabilize the numbers around the 100 mark. I worked alongside resident DJ’s Paul Rae and Ralph Randell during this period, taking the night over completely when they moved across to the Pier on a Wednesday to launch a new Alternative / Futurist night (their Thursday Futurist session at Legend was a major success, and a whole story within itself – many of the original Haçienda crowd would have regularly attended this night). With Paul and Ralph gone I now worked alongside Pier light controller, Paul Vallance, playing every week from 9pm – 2am, and loving every single minute of every week.

Paul Vallance & Greg Wilson 1980

The night would eventually take off in a major way, and by May ’82 right up to the time I stopped at the end of ’83 it remained packed to its 500 capacity. There were queue’s right up Princess Street every week, with people travelling in from all over the North and Midlands, and even as far as London – if you didn’t get there early you might not get in at all.

My status as a DJ was elevated from up-and-coming to central, and my controversial championing of the evolving Electro-Funk movement would turn the black music scene on its head, helping create a crossroads from which the old (Soul, Funk, Jazz-Funk) would branch off into the new (Hip Hop, House, Techno). My mixes for Mike Shaft’s Piccadilly Radio show would spread my name, and the music I played, to a much wider audience – things quickly snowballed for me. It was undoubtedly a hybrid era, and Legend was its key venue – Gerald Simpson (aka A Guy Called Gerald) would state that having now played around the globe he’d not experienced a club to rival it, adding that “the atmosphere was something I’ve never ever seen repeated”.

The Haçienda, as we all know, would put Manchester on the map with a worldwide dance audience, but its success owes much to Legend, and other city centre venues associated with the black scene during the 80’s, including The Gallery, The Playpen and Berlin. Haçienda director and New Order bassist, Peter Hook, would say “Wednesday nights (at Legend) were presided over by DJ Greg Wilson, who later would also play a major part in shaping the Haçienda’s musical direction, educating audiences in a new streetwise sound”, whilst Mike Pickering, the club’s booker during the early 80’s, and later half of the Pickering & Park DJ partnership from the clubs golden era, remembered “At the time Legend was the closest thing to New York”. It was Mike and New Order manager, Rob Gretton, who would approach me to DJ at The Haçienda’s first regular weekly specialist dance sessions, starting on Friday August 19^th 1983, almost exactly two years since my Legend debut.

Loose Ends – Live PA at Legend 1985

The tradition of black / dance music at Legend would continue throughout the 80’s, with DJ’s like Stu Allan, Colin Curtis, Mike Shaft and Chad Jackson having residencies at one point or another. The famous London Acid-House party Spectrum also held their Manchester events at Legend at the height of the Rave era, whilst the Happy Mondays recorded their videos to both ‘Wrote For Luck’ (1988) and ‘WFL’ (1989) in the club (and not The Haçienda, as many people assume).

Click here to view the embedded video.

Happy Mondays ‘Wrote For Luck’

Click here to view the embedded video.

Happy Mondays ‘WFL’

The video for ‘Wrote For Luck’ had the theme of a children’s party, with a multi-racial audience, which seemed to sum up the cultural melting pot that had been stirring in the city for a number of years, whilst I’ll never forget the first time I saw the video to ‘WFL’ – this time the children had been replaced by a club full of what were now termed ‘ravers’. A brilliant visual representation of those early ‘E’ days, perfectly capturing the time and the vibe, this video obviously made a deep impression on me. Seeing the same dancefloor that had been packed with black kids on my nights earlier in the decade, now full of white kids, was hugely symbolic of the way youth culture in this country was changing.

Legend became 5^th Avenue in the 90’s, and is still there on Princess Street, although the interior is very different these days: http://5thavenuemanchester.com/theclub/explore

Undoubtedly the greatest club I’ve ever worked in, Legend, as I’ve previously said, was the place where I experienced my ultimate DJ highs. It doesn’t get any better for someone like myself who started out with aspirations of being a black music specialist, and went on to live the dream.

Legend All-Nighter 1982

Groove Weekly – Legend All-Nighter 82

© Greg Wilson, August 2011