During the 1980’s Morgan Khan was viewed as a ‘dance music mogul’, a true instigator who enriched British culture via his unyielding efforts, driven by ‘an ego’, as Blues & Soul once put it, ‘bordering on the manic’ – Khan was (and remains) a force of nature. The fact that his absolutely pivotal contribution to the UK dance movement is constantly ignored remains a great travesty. If you know nothing about his Street Sounds label your knowledge of how dance culture developed in this country is terminally flawed – it’s as simple as that.

In true one nation under a groove style, Street Sounds was inclusive, bringing black, white and Asian, whether they be straight or gay, together under the banner of musical appreciation. In many respects he was a revolutionary, although his reputation was tarnished when the company went belly up in 1988 leaving many people out of pocket – maybe this is the reason he’s been relegated to a minor role, rather than his true position as a central figure in the evolution of the dance direction this country took. He’s fallen out with numerous people in the industry down the years, and I can vouch for the fact that he can be a tricky character, having had my own run-ins with him, but to deny his legacy is to deny our very culture. It’s not overstating things to say that Morgan Khan is one of the most important and influential figures in British dance history.

This year see’s the 30^th Anniversary of Street Sounds, and on November 17^th the occasion is being marked with a 9 hour event at The Coronet in London, with a line-up of old school heroes including Leroy Burgess, Fatback Band, Kurtis Mantronik (of Mantronix), Leee John (of Imagination) and Shannon, plus back in the day DJ legends like Davy DMX, Chad Jackson and Dave VJ (Mastermind Roadshow / Max & Dave). Full details here, via the Street Sounds website:
http://streetsounds.co/

I first got to know Morgan back in the late 70’s when he was working for PRT Records – I particularly remember him busy promoting the seminal Hip Hop 12” ‘Rapper’s Delight’ by The Sugarhill Gang, which would become a major UK hit, reaching #3 on the chart. However it was at R&B Records in 1981 that Morgan really hit his stride, playing a key role in breaking the British Soul / Funk band, Imagination (as part of the promotional push he brought them up to my Tuesday night at Wigan Pier, as he later did with another R&B act, Savanna). The runaway success of Imagination would give him the impetus to launch his own label, Streetwave, later that year.

Out of Streetwave came Street Sounds, and my path would cross with Morgan’s in a major way a few years down the line, in 1984, when I approached him with some demos I’d recorded with a couple of Manchester musicians, Martin Jackson (previously of Magazine) and Andy Connell (then the keyboardist with A Certain Ratio). This would result in the release of the ‘Street Sounds UK Electro’ compilation, with, despite an apparent handful of artists featured, all but one of the tracks having been recorded at our own sessions in Manchester and Oldham. This would turn out to be a pioneering album, which reached  #60 on the chart, and was a taste of what was to come a few years down the line, when ‘DJ records’ became the norm, and acts like Coldcut, M/A/R/R/S, Bomb The Bass and S Express finally brought homegrown dance music to the fore. Full lowdown here:
http://www.electrofunkroots.co.uk/misc/uk_electro.html

Street Sounds UK Electro 1984

Streetwave was the inspiration for a whole host of independent British dance labels that would emerge later in the decade, whilst Street Sounds laid the blueprint with regards to dance compilations. Morgan had started out with unbridled optimism, in Blues & Soul (April ’82) he’d outlined his intention to create a dance music dynasty in the unlikely location of London’s West Acton, where the label’s office was based. His battle cry was; “As long as I keep seeing UK dance / soul orientated artists on other labels, I ask myself why the fuck didn’t they come and see me first . It’s unrealistic to want and expect all the action in your own ball park, but hell, let me at least be at least the first to say no!…Britain has for far too long been an importer of ‘Dance’ music, turn the page man, ‘cos we’ve started a new chapter”.

Streetwave Blues & Soul April 82 (Click to enlarge)

This ‘new chapter’, however, wouldn’t quite work out the way Morgan had envisaged. Streetwave had initial success  with Zimbabwean singer Alton Edwards and ‘I Just Wanna (Spend Some Time With You)’, which reached #20 on the chart, as well as the imports he licensed to the label, but the big hit he needed to ignite things failed to materialise. Streetwave was anything but a failure though, it just never lived up to the ‘British Motown’ hype (‘Detroit comes to West Acton’, the slogan said). Instead of homegrown talent, it would become best-known for licensing imports, which were being played by the DJ’s on the specialist black scene – between 1982 and 1986 the label would have its finger firmly on the pulse, putting out a wealth of Electro, Street Soul, Hip Hop, Hi-NRG, Jazz-Funk, Rare Groove and Boogie classics, amongst well over 100 12” releases, many of which might never have been issued here otherwise.

Where Morgan Khan really made his mark though was via his seminal compilation album releases (more than 200 in all), the influence of which can’t be understated, despite the fact that they remain almost criminally absent in the available documentation of UK dance culture. The label would score a remarkable 57 chart entries in just over 5 years (1983-1988), its most successful releases being the ‘Street Sounds Editions’ series (or just simply ‘Street Sounds’), launched in December ‘82, and the ‘Street Sounds Electro’ series (which would eventually morph into ‘Street Sounds Hip Hop’), launched in October ’83.

Blues & Soul July 1984

As Blues & Soul writer Damon Rochefort explained in an article called ‘Khan’s Kingdom’ (April ’84), Street Sounds “totally revolutionised the entire dance music industry by making available , at a more-than reasonable price, a remarkable selection of the very latest dance hits within the financial reach of the country’s younger end of the dance music market”. He continued; “Before the series’ were introduced, kids were faced with the daunting prospect of shelling out upwards of £2.50 for a 12” and close on £5 for an import. The Street Sounds series, obviously, was met with considerable enthusiasm and relief”.

Street Sounds had made upfront dance music affordable – a whole LP for little more than the price of just one 12” import. This was a genius stroke of marketing and introduced a new generation of groove enthusiasts to the music of the established underground club scenes. It was the first successful series of British released dance compilations (unless you go back to a previous era to include the fabled ‘Motown Chartbusters’, which yielded 9 hit albums between 1967-1974), with the Electro LP’s also having the distinction of being the UK’s first series of mixed albums – more here in my blog post from August 2010:
http://www.gregwilson.co.uk/2010/08/street-sounds-electro/

Street Sounds Editions 1 & 2

The first ‘Street Sounds’ compilation failed to make any impression on the chart, but the follow-up, just a couple of months later, reached #35, and all 19 subsequent editions would enjoy chart runs. ‘Street Sounds Electro’, in its various guises, would run up a similar amount of successes.

When the company went into insolvency, in 1988, this was said to be a result of losses incurred by Khan’s club music magazine, the ill-fated Street Scene, which was launched as a weekly in October 1985, and lasted 6 months. A TV report from the time on the fall of Street Sounds, including an interview with Morgan (also a young Dave Pearce, as well as Tim Palmer, the owner of the legendary import specialists, Groove Records in Soho), can be viewed here on YouTube:
http://youtu.be/BF_SLRT3lSI

The House Of Hits Box Set 1988

Yet, just as people thought he was finished, Morgan re-emerged for his 80’s swansong, championing the coming wave of dance (a veritable tsunami as it turned out) by acquiring the UK license for Chicago’s most influential House music labels, DJ International and Trax. His ceaseless work, and ‘by all means necessary’ approach to it, had played a major part in clearing the pathway for the approaching juggernaut of the Rave era. His vision for UK dance music was about to become reality, but rather than receiving respect for his groundbreaking innovations, not to mention the quality of the music his labels put out, his place in history was marginalised.

But not by the generation who discovered dance music before the big bang of Acid-House, who, thanks to Morgan, had been enabled to grow up on a healthy diet of ‘Street Sounds’ and ‘Street Sounds Electro’, or maybe their boat was floated by ‘Jazz Juice’ or ‘The Anthems’ or ‘Love Ballads’ or ‘Slow Jams’ or ‘The Artists’ or ‘The Philadelphia Story’ etc. etc. Then there are all the people who revere him as the facilitator of what some would argue to be the greatest Hip Hop event ever staged in Britain, 1986’s ‘UK Fresh’. To each and every one of them, the role he played in helping shape their lives will never be forgotten.

UK Fresh 86

As his Wikipedia entry states; Morgan Khan’s sharp eye for trends, fast-paced release scheduling, talent for publicity and hype led to him not only promoting his own label, but also the dance music scene as a whole. He was well-known (and disliked in some quarters) for his high personal profile and as a self-publicist; and admired in others for his business acumen, and for representing an Asian success story in a less stereotypical field. Fans of Street Sounds releases admired his insistence on including only full-length versions of tracks, against the previous tradition in music [compilation albums]. Street Sounds albums represent the soundtrack for many UK soul boys and b-boys as they came of age in the mid-80s.

He continues to fly the Street Sounds flag, combining contemporary and classic Electro artists in his ‘Nu Electro’ series, which he launched in 2009, with the fourth volume issued earlier this year.

Street Sounds Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StreetSounds_(record_label)

© Greg Wilson, First published November 2012: http://www.gregwilson.co.uk/2012/11/kudos-to-morgan-khan/

Cleveland Anderson is someone I met in the early 80’s on the All-Dayer scene in the North. What made this unusual was that Cleveland was a London DJ, and, at this time, Southern DJ’s rarely played up North (and vice-versa), whereas Cleveland became a regular part of the line-up at events in cities including Manchester, Birmingham, Sheffield, Leeds, Nottingham etc – this gave him a unique perspective on the early 80’s period, with a foot in both camps, so to speak. He also talks extensively about the London scene of the 70’s, and legendary clubs like Crackers and Global Village, dropping some serious knowledge with regards to Britain’s dance heritage.

GW: Whilst Northern Soul and the Rave era is well documented, in between there’s a big chunk of British club history that remains largely obscured, but which an increasing amount of people are now intrigued by. What’s particularly interesting from your perspective is that you were regularly heading from London to DJ at the All-Dayers in the north and midlands during the early – mid 80’s, so you had a unique overview of what was happening back then, both on the scene up north, as well as in London – a foot in both camps. Where did you come from?

CA: I was from London.

GW: Whereabouts?

CA: West London, Acton.

GW: Oh yeah, I know Acton very well, are you still around there?

CA: Yeah, I’m still there, Ealing.

GW: I remember at one point coming down with you on the coach, I was in London over the weekend and I think I jumped on your coach and hitched a lift down there. So now I remember where you were. I lived around Wembley for ages myself.

CA: You kind of know where it is.

GW: Yeah, I’ve got a very good mate who lives there, and I stay with him from time to time. So, what were you doing at that particular point in time? How did you get your own start?

CA: I started DJing in 1976.

GW: Same time as me. I was late ’75.

CA: Well you will have done the same schooling as myself. Back then you’d be the guy who did the school Xmas party, and the community centre party, you know, the cubs and Scouts parties, because you had the records… “Let Cleveland do the party” you know what I mean.

GW: Did you have your own mobile?

CA: Yeah, I had my own mobile disco called, damn! Ohio Express.

GW: (Laughs) ‘Yummy Yummy Yummy’ (in reference to the one and only Ohio Express hit in 1968):

CA: Yeah, you know. So, the strobe lights and the all-in-one console, a couple of speakers and you was well on the way. As you know, back then it was majority 7 inches, and then you had the super 12s came out and you got excited when they came out! So that’s how I started out, doing a lot of school discos, Scout discos and various things like that, before I broke onto the club circuit. At first I was like, warm up DJ. I was warm up DJ for George Power.

GW: Where you?

CA: Yeah.

George Power

GW: Right, George Power is one of those names that, again, it’s a bit of a shrouded one but he pops up in a lot of areas and seems a very significant DJ from that period, obviously overshadowed by the whole Soul Mafia thing. I know Steve, or I knew Steve fairly well. He was one of the few people who had the muscle to stand against those guys really, on his own terms. I remember he had some big events going in London. Tim Westwood was warm up for Steve Walsh for some time.

CA: Yeah he was as well. For me the George Power thing, that was really the side I was brought up and groomed on. There were two sides to the Soul scene in London. There was the South; the black side. Then if you like there was the Chris Hill – Goldmine and Lacy Lady, the Caister side of Soul. There was a difference in the music, it was all Soul, but there was a difference.

Chris Hill and Robbie Vincent with Froggy on his DJ console @ Caisters

Chris Hill @ The Goldmine / Canvey Island

Then you would go down to, say, Crackers, and the clubs at the time like Crackers, Global Village, Beagles and Bungles, those were the real underground places which were happening at the time, and you would hear some real deep down funky jazz-funk stuff.

GW: Was this more the black side of things?

CA: The black side was more, say if you went to Global Village, Crackers, Bungles or Beagles, the crowd was definitely a mixture of black and gay.

GW: Right.

CA: It was very much black and gay at the time.

GW: I never knew that at all.

CA: We went to the clubs because we loved the music. To be perfectly honest it didn’t even occur to me that other people in there were gay; it wasn’t what I was going there for. I was going there for the music. The music was that great! Obviously at that time you had the Soul boy, Reggae boy thing, and they (Reggae boys) used to think the Soul boys were queers, but we were going there for the music. So generally on the black side that’s what it was.

GW: That’s bizarre because that’s another part of the history that I’ve never even heard, because now you are touching on what was happening in New York where you had a mix between all sorts of different audiences that were gay, straight, black and white, and there isn’t really a precedent in this country for that, but what you are talking about, this is the closest thing that I’ve heard to it.

CA: Yes, it was very much that because, I mean, occasionally, occasionally right, of course I knew people like Chris Hill and occasionally I’d get called to play x amount of gigs and I would go down to their clubs, and it was by and large a complete different vibe. Totally different vibe! The Soul music tended to be… it had definitely a more commercial edge to it. But it wasn’t the kind of Soul that you would hear in the overground clubs, it was still underground. But it was more commercial underground, whereby Crackers, Bungles, Beagles, Global was real deep underground! Where you had, say you went to places like Goldmine, y’ know, there were people who appreciated Soul music, but like I say, it was more at the commercial end of underground soul music. So therefore what you would have is that the majority of people that would go there, there was a lot of head nodding going on. Maybe a little bit of dancing going on, but the crowd tended to be predominantly white, and they were very much into themselves.. as in, well, you either had to be straight, or you had to be white.

Whereby if you went to crackers or Global, all those kind of clubs, it didn’t matter what you were because everybody was there for the music. If there was more colour in the blacker clubs there was a lot more colour going on, not just in colour – tone of skin, but whatever sexuality you were, whatever preference, it didn’t matter how you dressed, there was some outlandish dressing going on.

GW: Right!

CA: So freaky! Back in them days it was really freaky! So if you go back to the Caister, they were more, it was predominantly white and it was kind of laddish, it had a rowdyness about it. And that was really, if you like the London scene, what happened from that point onwards was that, yeah, your Caister, which was obviously a Mafia… They took off and really that was instrumental through Robbie Vincent because Robbie Vincent had a show every Saturday, and what he used to in those days was, we didn’t have pirates, the nearest thing we had in London was Invicta.

GW: Invicta was a pirate wasn’t it?

CA: Yes it was, yeah. So at the time London had only two commercial, let’s say black dance programmes. One was Greg Edwards on a Saturday night, which I used to listen to religiously, and then there was Robbie Vincent, which I still listened to it, but I was really a Greg boy, I listened to Greg Edwards. In those days Robbie Vincent used to invite Sean French, Chris Brown, Froggy and all that lot, and they started building this Mafia thing whereby if you like, the Crackers thing with George Power, it didn’t have the radio exposure, it was always underground, somebody had to tell you about Crackers.

Robbie Vincent & Greg Edwards

GW: What other big DJs were there from that side of it apart from George Power?

CA: There was a guy called Andy Hunter, Paul Anderson was a very big Crackers DJ.

GW: Of course.

CA: Nicky Price, Alex Alexander, these were your main Crackers DJs. George wasn’t the original Crackers DJ, because George took over from, I’m sure it was Alex Alexander (Mark Roman was the original Crackers DJ, between 73-76). Alex was this white guy who, damn! Did he know his music! He was awesome this guy! And then out of the blue he just packed up DJing. Obviously Crackers continued and then George came along, George took over and so forth, so basically Crackers already going at least a good couple of years before George actually… because it was Whiskey A Go Go…

GW: Right, is that what it was before? Ahaa!

George Power and Paul Anderson @ The Astoria – London

CA: George took over a period of time when I suppose the music was beginning to change to a large extent. When we were going to Crackers first, at the time we were hearing a cross between Funk and a certain kind of Disco being played, stuff like John Davis and that kind of thing.

GW: Yep, John Davis & The Monster Orchestra.

CA: So that kind of Disco in amongst your Funk stuff. But then when George came along, roughly around the George era, that’s when things began to open up a little bit more, you were still hearing that stuff, but more Jazz influences started to come into the music at that time, leading up to Jazz-Funk, not quite there yet but it had more of a Jazz identity of its own. Then as more Jazz tunes came out and were played amongst the Funk and the Soul it developed into Jazz-Funk. Talking late 70s, around ’78, ’79, that’s when Jazz-Funk came into itself.

So around that time George was running two very successful sessions at Crackers, one was Sunday night and the other Friday lunch time, which was very popular, we all used to bunk off school and go up to Crackers on a Friday afternoon. It was strange really because it was for people who were at work, and who’d probably take a couple of hours off…

GW: Well that’s mad because if you go right back into the 60s, the whole Beatles thing, a lot of the stuff that was going on there at The Cavern was lunchtime sessions, so there must have been this whole kind of scene. It’s interesting to hear that it still existed at that point in time. I can’t remember anything similar in our neck of the woods from that period of time.

CA: It was fantastic, and then the 100 Club they had their Saturday afternoon running simultaneously on a Saturday, so you would have Crackers on a Friday afternoon, this was how your weekend went. No, let’s start again; we would go out on a Monday night, Hammel Hampstead – Scamps, which was underground serious music on a Monday night. Tuesday was Sutton Scamps; serious grooves! This was where all the underground heads used to get down. These places didn’t hold more than three to four hundred people but it was wicked! Then on the Wednesday was a place called Bungles, and then the weekend was upon us. Back in those days we used to rave practically every night of the week! Thursday will come back to me. Friday afternoon we used to go to, like I said, Crackers, bunk off school, other people took leave off work, sometimes we didn’t go to school in the morning, we’d end up taking the whole day off. So you’d rave on a Friday afternoon, you’d then change back into your school uniform and go home. Then Friday night…

GW: Interesting, ‘cos I was talking to someone about this before… that term ‘rave’ did you actually use that term back then?

CA: No, no.

GW: I’ve always wondered where that developed from anyway. I didn’t know whether it was a black term, I remember hearing people like Kermit and some other black mates using that term. But I also know that it goes back to the 60s anyway, it was an old 60s word for… sorry to stop you there.

CA: Funny you should say that because that was a phrase, a word that was reborn from Acid House.

GW: That’s right. (I’ve since learned that it was being used in the context of a DJ party in Jamaica – the source of the modern variant)

CA: That came back early Acid House. For us things were so much about the music that really, we just spoke, in terms of going out, it was clubs; it was this club, that club. And then if there were any other labels that we would use, it was generally the music that was played, it was Funk, Jazz, Soul y’ know. Until Electro came about which was another label. By the time we go to the late 80s, as you know, a whole new can of worms was opened up. But going back to those periods in the 70s, late 70s, you had Crackers on a Friday afternoon, then on Friday night, depending on the time of the month you’d either have a 100 Club all-nighter going on. That would be awesome!

GW: That’s another big link back to the 60s as well.

CA: Yeah because the 100 Club was run by a guy called Ronnie L. Ronnie L stopped DJing in the end, he was roughly in his early 60s when he stopped.

GW: So all these clubs welcomed the black audience, obviously there were other clubs about that wouldn’t, because of the racism back then.

CA: There wasn’t loads of them but you kind of got into a circle where if you got into that circle you would know where the clubs were. Outside of that circle there were hardly any clubs for us to go to. We’re talking about half a dozen clubs really, which in the scheme of this is not a lot. The majority of clubs in London did not let black people in, they just didn’t. So you had to have your ear close to the ground to know what was going on, or you just didn’t go anywhere. So on a Friday night it would be a 100 Club all-nighter, or there was a place called Countdown, which since then has changed its name so many times. It used to be called the Old Hombres. But it used to be called Countdown. Then on a Saturday it used to be the 100 Club lunch time sessions with Ronnie L and Greg Edwards. The doors used to open at about 11 o’clock and we used to rave until 4pm. It was a real sweat box. Once again, you’d come home and Saturday night, you could go to places like Beagles; there was Beagles on in West Kensington. Global Village which is Heavens now, that used to be the biggest gay black gathering back then.

GW: Right, that’s interesting, I mean, the homophobia within the black scene is very much highlighted, especially even now. There’s always been that kind of stigma, it’s always been there generally, like with a lot of Reggae acts nowadays, there is still this kind of thing that is there. Just trying to get my head around that scene that you are talking about there, whereby black people felt comfortable enough to be in that environment?

CA: Well it was the only environment where you weren’t looked upon as if you shouldn’t be there. Amongst a more flamboyant or gay crowd, by and large they didn’t care whether you had two heads! It was a place where a lot of the dancers were born, a lot of the great club dancers from London. Because they were able to go there and just express themselves.

GW: Where there many black gays that you remember? What was the situation there within the community, how were they received within their own community?

CA: Firstly, from a club point of view, at the end of the day it was live and let live. You went out, you knew that certain guys who, if you like, batted for both sides. “That’s pretty cool, they are nice enough guys” But when it came out of that club culture, and if you are talking about the community – on the street, it was not received well at all!

GW: I would have imagined a lot of people would have been worried about seeing straight people from within their community in these clubs?

CA: I would say that it tended to bother black people more than it did white people. I can’t speak for Asian and Chinese, most Asian weren’t going to clubs back then. But as far as a black and white thing, I went to a school in Acton that was three quarters black. Same school as Norman Jay, so to be a Soul boy, it wasn’t just three quarters black, it was also three quarters plus Reggae influence. So to be a Soul boy at that school was murder! Believe me, it wasn’t an easy thing being a Soul boy.

GW: This is another thing that was an important factor. When you are getting towards the Electro, Electro-Funk period, is that it’s the changing of cultures… a lot of people don’t appreciate, or realise that with black culture at the back end of the 70s, there was so much West Indian culture, and the pride within what was happening from the Reggae side, especially with Bob Marley and what he was saying. It’s like you are saying there, it was very Reggae influenced, and that the Hip Hop culture fusing with the West Indian culture, I think is what’s caused the great musical advances from black musicians in this country like Jungle, Drum & Bass through UK Garage…

CA: That would be a fair reflection. I would also say that from the point of view of say the Reggae side of the fence, going up through Hip Hop and possibly a certain kind of R&B feel today, however then there is the other side of black music which is very rarely acknowledged by most black people as being black music is a certain side of Soul which is more your Teddy Pedergrass. I mean there was a period when black people in London embraced Teddy Pendergrass and people like that. But by and large, even if you went to a Barry White concert not too long ago in London it would have been a predominantly white crowd. There was a list of black artists who made a certain kind of R&B that was never embraced as black music. But then there was a slight change in the mid 80s when the likes of Alexandra O’Neil hit the scene, and then people like Luther (Vandross) came to the forefront. You also had bands like Change, S.O.S Band and Kleeer, so black people began to embrace the likes of Teddy Pendergrass at the same time, because, if you like, R&B was more in line with what he (Teddy) was doing; it wasn’t an R&B sound that was on the Hip Hop side of the fence, it was more on the smooth side of Soul. It was more about the passion, the type of Soul that you and I would probably appreciate, probably the type of Soul that would be in line to the D’Angelos of today.

GW: I think that was it, that the American side of the culture was becoming more and more prominent right through, but initially that whole West Indian identity was so strong, and with Bob Marley especially, also Haile Selassie, the embracing of the Rastafarian religion. I always remember that time in Liverpool, around the late 70s early 80s, that in Toxteth, the black area of Liverpool, where all the street signs were painted in the Rasta red, green and gold, there was that kind of whole pride and feeling of connectedness. I don’t think people felt that they where British, it was much more West Indian, and pride in that culture. Whereas the US black culture came through strongly alongside that and I think it was properly embraced within the early 80s and the Hip Hop culture. And like what you are saying there with the more soulful artists as well. Whereas, before that, if you look at something like Northern Soul, this was a scene of white enthusiasts of black music, just like the whole Caister thing was initially as well, I know a lot of black kids came into that scene eventually.

Caister Soul Weekender Number 2 October 1979

CA: Yes, yes eventually that became more mixed as the years progressed. I’ve got friends now who went to Caister who probably wouldn’t have gone, or didn’t go to the first maybe 3, 4, 5, 6 Caisters, right when they first started. I suppose when you look at it from that point of view it shows how much a generation has come together, however it’s strange, you see people or generations come and go, and you hit your 40s and you’ve got a bit to look back on, and one thing I have noticed that I do see is when I look at today’s club scene and maybe apart from the odd event like the Soutport Weekender and probably Carnival and maybe one or two others, by and large the club scene is very segregated.

GW: Which is wild isn’t it, because through that early period that we’re talking about, it was about the coming together you know. I think the rave scene drove it all apart in a sense.

CA: I think yes, the thing is, when we go through the 80s and we talk about the Soul scene, and what was happening through the Jazz-Funk era, and after the Jazz-Funk era, that early 80s period, when Soul was always there, Soul had never gone out of vogue, no matter how people like to tell you from time to time that Soul is dead, but Soul was always there. But it has its moments when it comes to the forefront and then it takes a step back, but then it came back to the forefront again in the early 80s when you started getting things like Arnie’s Love http://youtu.be/Jzp1jf3S2b8 and all kinds of things coming back out but Soul had returned on a slightly mellower tip. That was when the Reggae Soul scene came together, because all of a sudden now, Soul music was of a tempo and of a whatever that most black people who weren’t considered as Soul people before then, I can only speak for London, someome has to tell me what it was like in other parts of the UK, but as far as London was concerned, all of a sudden now… before that if you tried to get a Reggae person to listen to a Soul record it was murder. If you went to a dance they’d probably put one on, but they wouldn’t play that Soul record all the way through! Y’ know, they couldn’t get it off quick enough.

GW: In a way, when you think about it, it makes sense; that coming together at that point, because the predominant Reggae music at that period of time was Lover’s Rock. So it was soulful Reggae.

CA: It was very soulful! Funnily enough at that time I was kind of influential as well within the Reggae scene even though I was a Soul boy, because at the time I was also Personal Promotions Manager for Carroll Thompson and various other Reggae artists, I used to do Eddie Grant and various other people. So I had a very good overview of what was going on, though I wasn’t known for playing Reggae and I didn’t play Reggae in the clubs. However, from a behind the scenes point of view I was involved in Reggae, but as far as the public was concerned I was a Soul DJ and that was what I played. So I could see the whole thing coming together. So that was when you started getting things like getting things like ‘Magic Touch’ (Rose Royce http://youtu.be/XL8VehptfIA), all those nice Soul Grooves that I think was the coming together where London is concerned of both black and white cultures dancing to one Soul. That now lasted for three of four years. Then what started to kick in down here, probably not up your way, at practically the same time was the JBs, and Hip Hop started coming in. Although before Hip Hop we had Electro.

GW: Well this was obviously the period that I was heavily involved in. What I was going to say was, just to back track you a little bit, because I wanted to ask you how you actually came to be doing the all-dayers in the North? How did that happen?

CA: How did that happen, wow! That’s a good question! How did that happen?

GW: It was through Richard Searling wasn’t it?

Richard Searling in 1982

CA: Yeah, definitely through Richard. I’m just trying to think how the whole thing connected. I can’t think how. In those days, going North, or travelling up to Manchester was a big deal! It’s not like now, now DJs are international. But in those days going North, or coming South was a big deal.

GW: Yeah definitely.

CA: So yeah, it was definitely Richard, and I’m sure it was through Black Echoes actually.

GW: So Lindsay might have had something to do with it?

CA: Yeah, that’s right, Lindsay Wesker. At that time Black Echoes magazine played a very major role in black music in this country. The publication of black music, alongside Blues and Soul, at that time you got one or two of the magazines. He (Lindsay) was in touch with a lot of the promoters.

Black Echoes October 1982

GW: Also, Lindsay was the more progressive aspect of it. Blues and Soul had got a bit, kind of, they were in with the (Soul) Mafia, so they weren’t gonna rock the boat too much.

CA: Yeah, they only covered certain events and the rest just went amiss. Lindsay always knew I was an adventurous soul…

Click here to view the embedded video.

MTV Music Editor Lindsay Wesker:

‘The Era of Black Music & DJ’s In The Early 80s’

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QimrwL5BrPc

GW: So Lindsay would have gone to clubs that you did?

CA: Well Lindsay used to come on the coach; he used to come with us all the time. We started going up North. The very first time I think was Lindsay had put myself and Richard in touch, and we got talking, Richard told me about The Ritz all-dayers he was having in Manchester. He invited me to come down and play, he said bring some people if you want. So I thought why not, so I got a coach together and we went up.

The Ritz All-Dayer  Manchester – 1982

GW: Lindsay had already been up to my gigs in Wigan Pier and Legend. I’ve got the report he did on it, so I’m just trying to piece it together myself… Maybe there was a contact made around about this time between Lindsay and Richard and then it came about that you got the contact through Lindsay with Richard, then you started coming up and doing The Ritz. So Lindsay is definitely the key to this I would imagine.

The Ritz All-Dayer Manchester – 1982

CA: Linday was pretty much involved in a lot of things that I was doing, especially when it came to me going up north. Obviously he was in a very key position through the magazine. He was speaking to all the key promoters and DJs etc, he was kind of like match maker. So yeah, I would say that was far from how it happened.

GW: What did you make of it coming up North?

CA: I loved it! I came up North and I fell in love with the North. Funnily enough for a few years I think a lot of people weren’t actually sure where I came from (laughs)

GW: (laughs)

CA: People had forgotten where my roots were, because when I came up North I just found the whole thing fresh! It was open, relaxed and the music was great! It was real music, people were passionately into music. Even though we had some of that in London, the problem with London was every now and then it would be subjected to fashion, whereby being up North the trends never got in the way. The music was always about the music, that’s what really did it for me. When we came up North I was amazed how many people were into Soul! When I came back down South and told my mates they were like “Na na na” So I told them to come and see it for themselves, so more of us went up there. Because before that… Most people from London… London can be a very arrogant place!  They think nothing happens outside of London.

GW: This was it, that’s what Lindsay was getting when he first came up; he was taken aback by the North. For a lot of people that I knew from London who would come up, there was that preconception. I remember they used to say they thought people would be doing crab walks across the dance floor because it was a throwback to the Northern Soul thing. People were generally surprised at that point in time, that it was such a strong scene we had going there. A lot of the Northern People were very anti South because they felt that the South put them down. I was always a bridge builder, I always wanted to… I actually brought Froggy up for an all-dayer in Wigan Pier and took a lot of stick from the northern correspondents in Blues and Soul about that because “what have they ever done for us in the South, and we shouldn’t be getting them up here…” and so there was that political thing, and that’s why it was very interesting with you because you just cut right through that. There was never that kind of… you were just one of us, there was never that feeling of you being an outsider or something.

Cleveland Anderson, Greg Wilson & Mike Shaft @ Rotters / Manchester – Black Echoes 1982

CA: Well put it this way, I got really into the Northern lifestyle that much that I ended up in deep North for two and a half years. I actually ended up living in Scotland.

GW: Did you?

CA: Yeah, that was on the back of my times going up there. Really for me London was, there was a sense of reality, even back then, that London had lost. There was a sense of realness about everything in the North. It was like a magnet to me.

GW: I agree with you, I can remember those times with London, there was an arrogance with… it wasn’t necessarily with London people, it was more people living in London. Often it was Northern people who lived in London. But it was that London attitude of “We’re here, we’ve got it all here, we don’t need anything outside this, and so I could see that and I always thought people were at an advantage who understood what was going on elsewhere.

CA: Most definitely. The thing was what made it worse was the times I did come back down to London, for me London just seemed flat, it was just going through the motions, scratching at things. The more I came back down to London the more I wanted to go back up North, it just wasn’t saying anything to me anymore down here, I’d actually lost the vibe for London, so that was why I spent most of my time playing in and around the North for a hell of a long time. Also even down to the music, I was coming down to London where they like to pride themselves in being advanced, being this and being that, when there was music I was hearing way in advance up North. People telling me “you’re trying to tell me” “Na na na, I heard this at bla bla bla up North about three of four months ago!” At the time London had record shops like Groove Records, Record Shack and all these various record shops that were considered as cutting edge, and they were, don’t get me wrong. But it was all very hard for Londoners to accept.

GW: It’s like now, re-documenting this whole period, even though I date back with you to that earlier period I’m mostly seen with regard to the Electro-Funk thing because it happened in the North and specifically the clubs that I worked in, that’s where it came from.

(Tape Cut out whilst Greg asking Cleveland about Electro in the London clubs)

CA: I think when Tim Westwood started Electro was just phasing out and Hip Hop was coming in.

GW: Tim Westwood was always at Spats I believe. Do you know anything about the Language Lab? ‘cos this is seen as an early London Electro thing with Tim Westwood. I’ve heard so many different accounts how things developed in London. I did radio interviews, one with Radio 1, one with Kiss. And from the Radio 1 side, probably because Westwood’s a Radio 1 DJ, they were putting forward him as the pioneer at the Language Lab. But in the Kiss one Gordon Mac was talking about Paul Anderson and the Electric Ballroom.

CA: I would say that that’s correct.

GW: Now the other person that comes into the equation is a friend of mine who I haven’t seen for years, but during this period of time I didn’t see him that much, I saw him a few years later, but I knew he worked for Radio Invicta, and I know that he did an Electro-Funk show on there and that was Steve Devonne.

CA: No, I’ve not seen Steve for a good while, I dunno where he is.

GW: I used to DJ in Europe, and he did as well. So I know him through a mutual friend that we met out there. Apparently he was seen in Brixton a few months ago, but he’s got nothing to do with music now. But Steve did Invicta Radio around this period. I’ve even seen Gilles Peterson interviews where he’s listed Steve as a huge influence on him. He kind of sits in a period of time more to do with this pirate radio thing, and I know that he did an Electro-Funk chart on there as well.

CA: I would say from a radio point of view definitely Steve, from a club point of view…

GW: Paul Anderson.

Paul ‘Trouble’ Anderson in 1982

CA: Paul Anderson, without a shadow of a doubt! I mean, I actually remember when Tim Westwood started DJing… I’m not saying Tim wasn’t collecting records, but he wasn’t one of the players from a DJing point of view. Tim really did begin to come into his own once Hip Hop began to open up. The Electro, no that was really, you’re talking about going back to, really Tim Westwood wasn’t on the scene at that time. We’re really going back to Man Parish and all those kind of Grooves, that was Electric Ballroom and at that time Paul Anderson was playing there, and a guy called Tosca.

GW: Oh I know Tosca, I didn’t know that!

CA: So yeah, mainly Paul Anderson, Tosca, and once again George Power. Paul Murphy was doing the Jazz room with Baz Fe Jazz.

GW: Well that makes sense because you know, that’s the two kind of aspects of it that’s been put forward, the Westwood side, which I knew myself had to be later, in terms of I knew that something was going on at the Electric Ballroom because I knew that some of the break crews from London that used to go down there. I’d imagine, going back to what you were saying there about the whole Electro period only lasting, from a London perspective, for about one and a half years… It’s probably the same in the North, I think what killed it, although killed it is probably the wrong word, so I think what stumped it so to speak was that the breakdancing thing, for a period of time, was so huge, and then it went into overkill. It was on all the… the Weetabix advert on TV http://youtu.be/QD1igYSJJl8 I remember from some of my mates, Kermit is the perfect example because when it started he was the first UK breakdancer photographed in this country for a national publication, breakdancing was the coolest thing on the planet at that moment in time. I remember he was one of the first people to get out of breakdancing because he could see that all the little kids were getting involved in it, that now it was like any TV show was showing a bit of breakdancing, it all of a sudden became uncool. From being ultimately cool it was kind of the raping of a culture in a sense. Have you seen the documentary ‘The Freshest Kids’ that’s been done recently? http://youtu.be/2Yv3d8KTwSQ

CA: No, I haven’t

GW: Oh it’s incredible!  It’s absolutely amazing! And it’s that, it’s from the bigger picture, from New York’s side and it is about that. Rock Steady saying how for that moment in time they were celebrities, they were travelling all over the world, and then all of a sudden they couldn’t even get into the Roxy, a club whose legend they played a key role in creating.

CA: This is where the problem is… Probably, like yourself, I had Hip Hop in my collection, Electro, Funk, I’ve got everything. Generally by and large I’m a lover of music.

GW: Exactly!

CA: But then you of course have your preferences right, and Soul has always been, and then followed by Jazz. However, getting back to the point, I think one of the things that Soul music has never done, where I think a lot of other types of music do eventually; it isolates itself from the female side of the club scene, eventually it becomes too male. Like the Hip Hop thing, it starts great, girls start going, everyone is loving it, the music is fun at the time, women do not feel threatened, everything is cool. Then as time goes along the guys begin to take over, then it becomes… everyone wants to challenge each other. This isolated the women.

GW: You are so right!

CA: Breakdancing did this.

GW: Exactly! I’ve already documented this as being the moment that the scene split. Initially when breakdancing started it was so visually exciting that everyone just loved it, but then after a few months, after people got used to it, then especially in a club like Legend, where the dance floor wasn’t massive, that if kids were breakdancing there was obviously a circle of people around them, as this carried on, the more that this happened, the more the girls were saying we can’t dance, we can’t get on the dance floor because they are taking the space. This is what I saw as the schism within the scene at that point.

CA: Which is what’s happened to Drum & Bass, it’s happened to UK Garage, and it’s going to happen to the current mould of R&B as we see it. Because what happens is like I said, it starts off first as a scene for everybody, but slowly it begins to shrink, then what happens is you end up with a group of guys who are all battling it out for supremacy of what they are doing, but what they end up doing without realising is isolating all the women, then what happens is once the women go, then you lose x amount of guys, so then the scene goes. You can see history repeating itself, even with the current R&B. I’m already seeing a lot of people who was going to clubs, who were going to 2 Step clubs who are going to Soulful House clubs now, and they are beginning to like the music now. My son goes to me ‘it’s kind of cool here Dad’ I mean OK, some of the music, I’ve got to be honest, I’m still not quite into. What I like about it it’s chilled, there’s no competition, there’s loads of women here and the women are approachable. That’s the problem with when a scene becomes too popular, including what you were talking about; let’s say TV wants a piece of it, the media wants a piece of it, everybody wants a bit. A few years back it was 2 Step, a few years before that it was Drum & Bass, a few years before that it was House, a few years before that it was this, and we can remember when it was Soul. So what you are saying is correct.

GW: It’s like the black kids are always the first to move on because they are the trend setters. It’s like now there’s a huge Electro community on the internet, but the demographic of the people is really interesting ‘cos they are all white kids, or I say kids; they are white people who are now in their early 30s to mid 30s and they were the Morgan Khan Street Sounds Electro generation. This is where the white kids started to get, in a big way, into dance music, that were brought into that side of it. It was through Morgan doing those albums and also with Street Sounds albums and it’s funny because you don’t see the black kids from that period in time using forums on the internet, they’ve moved on to wherever they have gone to. They love that period of time but they’ve moved on, and that’s always been the case. I remember seeing that so clearly with someone like Kermit who was the first to embrace this whole thing, but the first to get off the boat when they saw that it wasn’t cool anymore. And so yeah, I can see that’s why it was a little glorious period, it was very short-lived in a sense. But it was kept going by white kids which is really strange.

CA: You see the thing is that one of the major problems I think, with the UK then, and even still now, is how influenced Britain has been by American music, there’s no getting away from that, especially black music. However, I think one of the major problems I find now is that, for the first time in a very long time, there are now some great UK soul singers around, there is a history here now, OK we haven’t got the history that the States has got, but there are some really great vocalists here now, and musicians and so forth. But what the saddest thing is… it’s not moving off the point now, because it’s the same thing that happened back in the 80s, but it’s still happening now, it’s probably worse now than it was then, but at least in the 80s you had a chance of your Loose Ends breaking through, maybe your Hi Tensions breaking through, your Jackie Graham, David Grant. OK some were underground, some were overground whatever. But then I look on the UK side here, by and large right, and I don’t take much notice of MTV but I tune in every now and then, by and large it’s wall to wall US. You might get the odd, OK they say Craig David, but I’m struggling to name five on one hand. And this is the problem, we have roots here, it’s not as deep as the American roots, but there is a root being built here and this is what we are talking about here; talking about club culture, black music culture in Britain.

GW: Yeah

CA: That’s all a part of the roots here, we have our own roots. But the problem is, when you do look at these documentaries, whenever it’s covered on TV, it’s never been told in way were you can say OK they’ve missed a bit out there but what he’s saying is fair. So at least you can say the things he was saying were fair. But to my mind, with most of the documentaries that have been made, there’s been a lot of stuff missed out and they aren’t fair.

GW: That’s it, and that can be more damaging because that can throw people right off the scent. You’re talking about the roots of it, and this is the whole point of this phone conversation in the first place. My project is called Electro-Funk Roots, in terms of documenting that period in particular, but it’s not just about that, which is why I want to interview Les Spaine, I want to go before that, I want to find out how these things developed, and how these things came to a point where it allowed the scene in this country to develop in the way that it did. Which for a British side, it’s an amazing country for developing musical scenes, both black and white.

CA: I think it has the ability to go further than that, But not until we look under our noses to also embrace the talent that we have here, as well as over the pond. The seeds are being planted but a lot of people don’t know they are there, so they ain’t being nourished, and the story is not being told.

GW: I think that’s it.

CA: It needs to be passed on from generation to generation.

GW: If people understood that then what you’d get is the next generation of musicians and singers, they won’t be relying so heavily on the American experience and they’ll be looking to the experience in this country which obviously links into America, and always will, but like we were saying before, that the whole West Indian identity in this country is just major, it’s just a huge thing, the way that the whole club scene has been run for a start. The Blues dances, the illegal dances, the rave scene. What you are talking about there with Norman Jay is you putting on illegal events because you can’t find clubs to go to. This is very similar to what was happening three or four years down the line with raves, and it’s coming from a tradition within the black community, which comes out of the West Indian community of the Blues dances http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blues_dance It’s the mother of necessity, you couldn’t get in certain clubs, so you put your own clubs on. This isn’t something that people have taken from America, this is something that has evolved in this country, and so it’s like this history, I feel it’s so important that the whole history of our culture in this country, our club culture and our music culture is properly documented because that is the roots of it, and that is where we are coming from with it. It’s too simple to say the north was Northern Soul and the south was Caister, because just by saying that in the first instance you are negating so much of the whole black influence.

CA: Of course, I think we have a big problem here still, I mean I think we are getting over it, but how long it will take us to actually get to a point whereby we have eradicated ourselves of it is unfortunately… rather than people who have been instrumental within the scene, and some of whom are still instrumental, coming together and putting together something for the cause of the scene, everyone stands back and they have this tendency of when they are approached, to document things, through their own eyes, which is fair enough, but often it’s done with tinted glasses.

GW: Well of course, that’s why it’s important, like were you said before, that if somebody is talking about Manchester, it should be somebody who was involved in Manchester, if somebody is talking about Birmingham there should be somebody from Birmingham because you get the right perspective.

CA: I’m never gonna be able to give what it really meant… OK I played in Birmingham, I played in Manchester a few times, but you need to go and speak to a promoter or some DJs, they can tell you what it was like from the bottom upwards. The way Manchester or Liverpool people felt, or what the Soul scene meant to these people, how they were living it, how they were dressing.

GW: It’s the influence, the whole thing in the North with The Haçienda is that here’s a club that became world famous as a dance venue and yet within all the documentation of it you cannot find anything, or you’ve got to dig very deep to find out how this club that was an alternative club become a dance venue. I know directly because I was involved in it, I went across and did the first dance night at The Haçienda and this was where the black crowd came across from Legend the breakdancers from Broken Glass came to The Haçienda at this period where we were saying it was the real cool thing that gave this club a focal point with the black audience in Manchester and then so you get some years down the line, you’ve got some of the DJs that have been quoted saying the original house crowd in The Haçienda was a black crowd, yet nobody who’s documented that has gone well where did these black kids come from? How did they get into this club in the first place, ‘cos people don’t just arrive there, it evolves, something evolved. So what you’ve got is a whole evolving scene within Manchester that’s resulted in the conditions that allow that club at that particular moment in time to become what it became, and the weird thing about it was that many of the black crowd moved out at the moment when it became the big rave club. Because it was all these white kids who weren’t really that up front or knew their stuff. But they discovered it.

CA: They heard it was trendy.

GW: They’d taken a pill, they discovered it… “Right, we are into dance now!” So the black kids moved on from there. So it’s like with what’s on the surface, sometimes you are just touching on the story and from my point of view it’s really important from a Manchester perspective to document the fact of just how influential the black audience was. That could never, ever have happened, and yet so many times I read accounts of it where it just negates that. It’s not there, it’s touched on maybe. And the people who are writing it, I don’t think they are trying to rewrite history, I just think they are the people who didn’t get into the scene until 1987 themselves. They were so blown away by it, but they don’t know what happened before. And it’s not knowing before as in speaking to someone and getting a bit of a kind of oh, there was this club and there was that club, but they didn’t live it.

CA: It’s like say Trevor Nelson, when he did Soul Nation, say for arguments sake, and like you say living it, and I’ve known Trevor for Donkey’s! Trevor used to come on my coaches to Manchester.

GW: Did he?

CA: Yes. So before Trevor was a Soul boy he was a Reggae boy, that’s Trevor’s roots. He’s a Reggae boy, yes he loves his Soul, and some may argue that one day Trevor may go back to his roots. But the point I’m making is that there were times I heard, I aint seen the whole of the Soul Nation, but there were times I’d heard that Trevor was making comments or suggestions, even quotations towards certain areas that he weren’t even there. And he was getting it completely wrong… Totally wrong!

GW: He put so much in store about The Wag Club in London that was a kind of a trendy, The Face audience, and yet he said within that that he couldn’t get in The Wag Club. So what we had was Sade, Simply Red and all this, whereas at the same time you had this cross culture.

CA: Yeah, But he was wrong because I could get in there. The thing is if you was an original black soul boy of course you could get into The Wag. ‘Cos Wag was the only clubs where… Let me explain, if you looked like a black guy who’d just got into Soul you wouldn’t get in. But if you was a black guy that looked like a Soul boy you’d get in. But in them days trying to tell the Reggae Soul boys there was a big difference in the way we dressed. We could tell from a mile off who was Soul boy, or who had just become a Soul boy, it was painfully obvious in their dressing that they weren’t real Soul boys, and in them days, if you liked places like Whisky A Go Go and Wag, they wanted to stay trendy. Don’t forget Soul people were seen… We kind of dressed freaky.

Cleveland in 1982

So these clubs, all they wanted was freaky dressers, so it wasn’t good enough just saying make up your mind one morning and suddenly saying “well I really like Soul music” there was a whole lot of other things to go with it, and if you weren’t like that then you would have problems getting into a lot of Soul clubs. But then having said that, someone like Trevor would have found it very difficult, not just getting into Soul clubs, because he probably wouldn’t have been seen by security as being trendy-soulful enough, but then on the other hand if he went to the white clubs they wouldn’t let him in ‘cos he was black. So I can see what he’s saying, but I don’t think Whisky A Go Go didn’t let him in because he was black, I think it was because…

GW: No, the doorman that he was talking about was black, because he actually interviewed the doorman there and he was saying “why didn’t you let me in?” and it seemed like he was making this big case for The Wag, but then saying I couldn’t get in there, and it was seen that because he couldn’t get in there it added more to the whole kind of thing for him. So it was all about his experience of trying to get in The Wag rather than somebody else’s experience of what actually was going on, which would have been interesting to hear. I went to The Wag around that time myself, I knew what was going on there, but it was one side of the picture, I know there was a coming together at a certain point with what became the Rare Groove scene, but at the same point in time you’re talking about people like the Mastermind Roadshow and Paul Anderson, these people were out there doing stuff, and none of that was even mentioned. One of the things that struck me about the whole thing was that when he got to Soul II Soul he was saying that Soul II Soul was the first Soul Hip Hop band, and what the people who made the program hadn’t realised was that they hadn’t even said what Hip Hop was. They’d done this whole program without even saying what it was, where it came from, how it fitted into the picture in England, but all of a sudden we were late 80s and here was the first Soul Hip Hop band. So all that period of time… They talked about the sound systems saying that the sound systems either played Rare Groove or Reggae, but Mastermind Roadshow mixed all the Electro albums. In Bristol, Bristol wasn’t even mentioned in the whole series, you had The Wild Bunch who fused Electro, Reggae and building a sound that became known as the Trip Hop sound. So it was a very blinkered viewpoint. I would imagine that within himself he feels, “Oh shit! I made a big mistake with that”.

CA: Well maybe these programs should be titled ‘The Soul Scene Seen Through…’

GW: Yeah I said ‘Soul Odyssey’ Trevor Nelson’s Soul Odyssey, My Life in Soul Music’ fair enough, but to call it Soul Nation was a real big mistake because straight away you are putting forward that this is some kind of definitive statement of the whole British Soul scene. Whereas it had 12 minutes of Northern Soul at the beginning and the rest was in and around London, the whole thing, there was not even a mention of, not just the north, but Bristol didn’t even get a look in.

CA: We had over here in London there was DJs like Trevor Shakes, who was very well respected on the underground black music scene. Once again he was gay and black. You asked me a question about was there many gay black guys on the Soul scene? Yes there was. Most of the best dancers, there was Mohammed, Franklin, Horace, Peter Franklin, Trevor Shakes, Clive Clarke, Tommy McDonald, some of these guys were gay. I mean they saw girls as well but they were gay. They were amazing dancers! The best black soul dancers were born out of the gay black soul clubs. Because that was where they could really express themselves.

GW: What’s really strange on that level is that with the Northern Soul scene, the more you look into that scene it’s hugely gay, and when you listen to some of the music you can hear it now. It’s so camp. But it’s obvious because there is a scene, and it’s the same as what you are talking about, here is a scene where at a point in time where in a normal club atmosphere if a guy was seen dancing on his own people would be calling him for being queer or whatever, you can go onto the dancefloor and you can dance on your own and nobody cares. So it was a loophole that allowed people to go out and be themselves. It’s very interesting, it’s just something that I’ve always thought it had to be there, but where was it or how was it. And so what you’ve told me tonight, it’s intriguing talking on these levels because it’s like when I spoke to Les Spaine I got all the American air base side of it and that whole thing, and the fact that he was saying that there was loads of people going to his clubs that were then going to Vietnam where people died, and so you think god! That happened, and your telling me this. And I’m sure there is an equivalent if I look into the black scene in Manchester, the kind of 70s side of it, you’ll find that there, it’s just that people didn’t talk about it.

CA: Probably the same thing you’ll find, probably a mirror of what was going on in London.

GW: Of course it’s got to be there. People, regardless of the colour of their skin, are gay and are straight, and they’ve got to find a way of expressing themselves, so it’s very interesting – the whole London scene that you are talking about, and again a scene that’s not well documented.

CA: The thing is, it makes me laugh this right, bring it up to today and you are talking about R&B and Hip Hop and how macho and how badboy it is. But would you believe, I know you would not be surprised, but the same thing goes on in that scene, but the difference is that it’s not acceptable for it to be seen or flaunted. But it does go on, that’s the reality.

GW: It’s got to (Laughs)

CA: Who are they trying to kid?

Larry Levan, Frankie Knuckles, Tony Humphries, Tee Scott

GW: Exactly! I’ve just read an amazing book which is called Love Saves The Day which is a history of the whole of New York Club scene from 1970 through to 1979, again it was an eye opener because I knew there was a huge gay influence, but I didn’t realise how gay. I didn’t realise that all those DJs were gay – Larry Levan, Frankie Knuckles, Tony Humphries, Tee Scott; all black guys, all gay. It was a different kind of equation than it was in this country, but it was huge, there was a coming together. It was like that kind of scene where it wasn’t just gay clubs, the clubs where mixed. In the progressive underground clubs there was always a mix of races as well, and that’s what made it what it was, what made it special. There was also a lot of racism; there were gay clubs that were just for white gays, and gay clubs just for black gays. You start to realise and unpick this whole thing that at one time in your own isolation of whatever you were doing that it bore much more relevance to you, but I find out that some of these DJs from the early 70s, there is one guy in particular – David Mancuso, he was the guy that found ‘Soul Makosa’ by Manu Dibango http://youtu.be/w2jYjUiulMQ he found that on a French album, and that was why I was playing it when I started out as a club DJ in 1975. So you start to link your own history back through these things and realise that this went on.

This has been fantastic talking to you Cleveland! We must get together, as I say I’m up in your neck of the woods now and again.

CA: When you are you’ve got to give us a shout, touch base and have a coffee.

GW: Definitely, and now that you know where I am, if there is anything that you need that I can do for you. So if you are looking to do this documentary, I’ll give you all the support that I can on that.

CA: Well you are definitely on my list of people to… What I’m doing is I’m slowly… I’ve got Richard’s number, I’ve got Colin’s number, your number, you know so when the time comes. And if there’s any names missing one of you guys must know…

GW: Exactly, people like Ian Dewhirst.

CA: God! Ian Dewhirst, another guy I aint seen for ages!

GW: Well I see Ian quite regular, he is a wealth of knowledge.

Ca: Give him a shout for me.

GW: I will do yeah, definitely.

CA: Do you know what earlier on you mentioned two clubs that… one in particular that I would have loved to have done and I just never got around to doing it, the opportunity never came around, and that was Legends.

GW: Legends yeah, well that was my club. That was my baby.

CA: I would have so loved to have done that.

GW: You came to Legend did you?

CA: I did yeah, on various occasions, maybe two or three times. But from a playing point of view, that was one club, everything else I’d done in the North, no, there was another – Wigan Pier.

GW: That was my other club. They were my venues (Laughs)

CA: There you go. I know, they were basically residential clubs with residents. I look back and when people talk about the North they always mention those two clubs. By and large I played at all the big Northern all-dayers, but they were the two clubs, especially Legends, which for me was legendary!

GW: It was an incredible space. Again, a lot of the documentation I’m doing is… I mean, I know I was blessed to have worked there. I was there for nearly three years and it was an incredible scene, and so influential. As you will remember it was predominantly black, it was seen as a black club. Wigan Pier was much more of a neutral venue. Legend was in Manchester so even though people travelled from all over, the Manchester crowd was predominant there. Whereas Wigan Pier, it was as much Birmingham’s club as it was Liverpool’s or Manchester’s there was people coming in from all over the place, so there were two different kinds of dynamics with each. But at the end of the day Legend was just a very special club to have been involved with. I’m made up that you actually came there and you saw it and everything.

CA: I did, the thing was for me, even if I wasn’t playing out, it got to the point if I was going to go out for a night out or just for a social whatever, I would much rather go up the motorway. It really got to that point. So I’ve been up there a few times, and you know it’s one of those clubs, a few people talk about legendary clubs, yes Crackers, Bentleys which Froggy used to do with Derek Boland, I dunno if you’ve heard of a club called Bridge?

GW: No.

CA: That was something myself and Norman Jay used to do, around the same time as Bentleys.

GW: Was this like about 84, 85?

CA: Yeah.

GW: Well I was a bit out of the scene; I’d stopped DJing by then. Again Derek B used to come up to Wigan Pier.

CA: Yes.

GW: Derek Boland, I didn’t know him then, it’s only later that I found that out. When you start talking about legendary northern clubs and so forth from the south, to be perfectly honest there are people down here who know about Legends, but they tend to be people who’ve been around a long time and they know a bit of history about Legends and Wigan Pier and various other clubs, but as far as outside of that, the knowledge, this is what you touched on earlier on, these documentaries, or various people documenting these things, so if a generation can embrace that and say “Oh yeah, there was this club called Legends that used to go on in Manchester right, around the same time that the Electric Ballroom was doing it’s thing. And that’s the side that’s been held down. Because it was a black club. It’s hard to put it in those terms but that’s it. Had Legend been the same club packed with a white audience everybody would know about it. The funny thing was with Legend, just to sum it up really, years later The Happy Mondays had a track called ‘WFL’ and it’s a brilliant video, they made a great video for it, and it was right at the height of the ecstasy period. It was a video that if anybody said what was it like back them with that whole kind of E – ravey kind of thing? I’d say watch that video, that’s the closest you are gonna get to it. And the weirdest thing of it is that the video is not recorded in The Haçienda, the Happy Mondays were a Factory band, so you’d you would have thought… Well it was recorded in Legend. Shoom, you know Shoom?

CA: Yes

GW: They did a Manchester night.

CA: I heard about that yeah.

GW: Paul Oakenfold used to ring me up back in the early 80’s, before he ever had a name, he used to ring me up for my list of records and stuff. He was aware of Legend and Shoom picked that as their club and they did it for a period of time. But they filmed it there, and it’s a great video. You’ve got a dancefloor and it’s full of energy, packed with people dancing and buzzing… But the weird thing was that it was all white kids dancing, and I remember thinking wow! That’s mad! It symbolizes the whole Rave culture because this dance floor was once packed full of black kids, and now it’s the same energy but it’s white kids. I was so happy that they filmed it there because it does exist. http://youtu.be/QrVH8tEIjEk

CA: Have you got any footage of any of your nights?

GW: No we haven’t got footage that’s the problem.

CA: You’ve got flyers though?

GW: Bits and bobs of stuff, I’ve got loads of archive stuff. I’ve got all my record lists and stuff like that. But nobody ever thought of filming in those days did they?

CA: No, not really, well down here you might get a bit more footage.

GW: Yeah, the Goldmine, there’s lots of stuff on there, but it’s very rare that you find much else.

CA: Before you go, what’s the scene like over at your end currently?

GW: There’s a lot of bars nowadays, bar culture has taken over.

CA: It’s the same down here as well.

GW: Because people don’t want to go and spend money in a club when they can stay ‘til 2 o’clock in a bar, which you never used to be able to. You used to get kicked out of a bar at half ten didn’t you?

CA: Yeah.

GW: I think it’s going through an interesting period of redefining itself. It’s probably very similar to what it’s like now in London. But what I’m noticing now is that a lot of the younger people are very interested in what used to go on. I’m getting people getting in touch with me of ages early twenties to twenty five, saying educate me, tell me about this music, what was going on? You know, I’m playing them stuff like ‘Spread Love’ by Al Hudson http://youtu.be/-uAM5OKGQTc and they are just blown away! They are like Wow! I wanna buy this and play it! So I think that there is a good openness at this second, and it’s at one of those periods where it’s just waiting to happen.

Useful links referencing some of the above:

About Crackers, George Power & Paul Anderson:
http://www.red5599.com/pages%202009/crackers%202009.htm
http://history-is-made-at-night.blogspot.com/2008/06/crackers-1976.html

About Chris Hill:
http://www.soulpranos.co.uk/DJs/soulpranos-djs-c.html

About Caisters Soul Weekenders:
Caister No3 Finale,with Chris Hill,Robbie Vincent,the Funk Mafia DJs:
Part 1 http://youtu.be/B-sFijIyx7w
Part 2 http://youtu.be/NBNUJBEUr1s
Part 3 http://youtu.be/7_-k7PXKldM
Part 4 http://youtu.be/obkI3zjThdI

Chris Hill / The Goldmine interviewed by Paula Yates on The Tube:
Part 1 http://youtu.be/qFM1PY9ksps
Part 2 http://youtu.be/RiprWQenvMg
Part 3 http://youtu.be/UiuHJaxXIJQ

About Froggy:
http://www.djhistory.com/interviews/froggy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DJ_Froggy
http://forum.speakerplans.com/froggy-and-the-soulweekenders_topic17026_page1.html
Froggy Mix: http://youtu.be/gILQtGtpPUs

About Robbie Vincent:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robbie_Vincent
http://www.radiorewind.co.uk/radio1/robbie_vincent_page.htm
http://www.radiocafe.co.uk/talk/archives/35

About the 100 Club
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100_Club

Steve Devonne on Radio Invicta June 1981:
http://dixmix.podomatic.com/player/web/2009-09-12T01_55_28-07_00

About Trevor Nelson:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trevor_Nelson

Gay community on the Northern Soul Scene and in Manchester:
http://www.mdmarchive.co.uk/queernoise/help.htm
http://www.soul-source.co.uk/soulforum/topic/219294-gay-connection/

About Derek B:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/nov/17/derek-b-obituary

Also, check out this incredible footage of the 4^th Prestatyn Soul Weekender. It clearly illustrates a turning point in 1988, where many soulful scenes converged; where the established weekender Soul Mafia mic based DJs worked a crowd, where Jazz-Funk was being reinvented by DJs like Gilles Peterson and labels like Acid Jazz. Where Stetasonic T Shirt wearing white kids signal the arrival of Hip Hop, and where Acid House music had begun to take over…

Prestatyn 4 Soul weekender 1988 Part 1
http://youtu.be/geIah0omm3s
Prestatyn 4 Soul weekender 1988 Part 2
http://youtu.be/1_P5dNyRDNU
Prestatyn 4 Soul weekender 1988 Part 3
http://youtu.be/AWQhCIq6CcY
Prestatyn 4 Soul weekender 1988 Part 4
http://youtu.be/FKeMFnF8vSk
Parts 5 – 8 available on facebook via Graham Ibiza-music

Thanks to Dan Smith for the transcribe & further research.

© Greg Wilson, 2004 (First published July 2012)

© Greg Wilson, 2004

The Haçienda DJ Booth 1983

Not the iconic one up on the balcony, but the initial side of stage location.

This bit of history comes courtesy of Hewan Clarke, the original Haçienda DJ, who had to put up with what was one of the worst thought out DJ booths I’d ever come across, located in a separate room down some stairs to the side of the stage, with a narrow slit window enabling you to view little more than the feet of those outside in the club. With the eccentric French VJ, Claude, for company, Hewan, and the other DJs that would work in there during the venue’s first few faltering years, myself included, had never experienced the like – it was more akin to being in a radio control room than a nightclub. This was all topped off by the infamous Akwil Digitheque mixer, a state of the art piece of kit, but far too clever for its own good – I’d built a reputation for mixing by this point, and people, who’d seen me at Wigan Pier and Legend, now had expectations of me, but this mixer was the bane of my life. For starters, it was positioned at an unnatural height, as you’ll see in the photo – 5 years on the dancers there became legendary for their hands in the air vibe, but back then the only hands in the air were those of the DJ in that bizarre booth. Another thing I recall was the automatic crossfade on the mixer, where you pressed a button when you’d lined up the beats, so it, in effect, took control and mixed the track for you. It’s one of those things that might sound like a good idea, but was far more hindrance than help. I just wanted something more hands-on functional – this was just a load of confusing knobs and buttons when it was faders I was used to. So I’d say to the manager, Howard ‘Ginger’ Jones, “Can’t you get another mixer? I can’t work with this one”, and he’d look at me as though I was some sort of heathen, telling me there were only 2 of these mixers in the world, as though this was validation for what I had to put up with. Needless to say, when the DJ booth moved to the balcony, it came complete with a new Formula Sound mixer (too late for me though). Akwil would go on to install equipment into other clubs, including Stringfellows and The Hippodrome in London, and later Sankey’s and Bowlers in Manchester, and is nowadays a successful audio visual company of 40 years standing.

Akwil Digitheque – original Hacienda mixer 1982-84

So, as the Friday night resident there during the final third of ’83, I can totally empathise with Hewan’s predicament. Seeing this photograph (actually 2 photos expertly spliced together by Trojan Dan) was a real trip down memory lane, and not necessarily an altogether pleasant one – as I’ve said elsewhere, working in there was like deejaying with a hand tied behind my back. Thankfully, after constant badgering, the management ended up taking our advice and re-located the DJs to somewhere suitable, where they had direct contact with the audience they were playing to, rather than having to run up the stairs onto the stage to try to gauge the atmosphere. Madness!

Blues & Soul’s Frank Elson reported at the time that:

Factory records (The owners of The Haçienda) is, of course, owned at least partially, by Granada TV personality Tony Wilson whose much used quote about being totally against recorded music and totally for live music may well be the reasoning behind tucking the deejay console away in a room behind the stage. Instant paranoia for a jock who cannot see much, except through a spyhole, of the club itself”

Tony Wilson

Hewan dug out these significant snapshots when we asked if he had any images we could include in his Electrospective interview, which has just been uploaded at Electrofunkroots:
http://www.electrofunkroots.co.uk/electrospective-event-hewan-clarke-interview/

It’s a fascinating interview, with some wonderful insights into The Haçienda during those early days, when the venue was still struggling to find its direction. It shines a light on what it was like to DJ at this World famous venue, but before it became famous – when it was far more likely that it’d turn out to be a heroic failure, forever regarded as Factory’s folly, than a cathedral of dance.

Back to the photograph, and if you look to the right hand side of the window you should be just about able to make out a proto-photoshopped postcard of the then Lady Di with hubby to be, Prince Charles. It was the official engagement shot that was everywhere at the time, with his hand on her shoulder, but this altered version, thanks to a bit of jiggery-pokery, had her topless, rather than in the conservative blue suit she was really wearing. I laughed when I spotted it there, it took me right back into that booth – Hewan was buzzing about me remembering the pic, as it was something he put there himself – it had the title ‘Subject or Object’. Not only that, he still has the very postcard, reclaimed when the booth was moved.

Everyone is aware of The Haçienda’s legacy, but usually only from ’88 onwards, when it became nationally, then internationally known, following the Rave explosion. Tim Lawrence’s ‘Discotheque Haçienda’ liner notes, unlike most of the writings about the club (including the Wikipedia entry), doesn’t skip over the early years, but makes the less known pre-Rave era its main focus, asking not only ‘what happened?’, but, more pertinently, ‘why did it happen in the first place?’:
http://www.timlawrence.info/linernotes/2006/Hacienda.php

Peter Hook’s book also helps put the record straight. Here’s my blog post about it from just over 12 months ago:
http://www.gregwilson.co.uk/2011/01/hookys-book/

To whet your appetite for his interview, which also includes a wealth of information about the black scene, I’ll leave you with Hewan’s thoughts about how House music lost its original audience in Manchester (and the initial Jazz Fusion inspired dance style), when the music policy at The Haçienda became House, House and more House:

What we did (on the black scene) 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, then you’d play your Soul, then your Funk and your Disco, and whatever… 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 Haçienda 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”

Check out this remarkable footage from Manchester’s Moss Side in 1986, at a time when House music was very much the domain of the black clubs in cities like Manchester, Birmingham, Sheffield and Nottingham, and Ibiza was but a faraway isle. As you’ll see, the style of dance is vastly different to the ‘big box little box’ movements that most people associate with House circa 88/89, when it’s audience became predominantly white, with, as Hewan mentions above, the black kids moving on:
http://youtu.be/46jB4yohiKA

By way of contrast, here’s some footage from The Haçienda in 1990:
http://youtu.be/4ZxDAKJfELI

Big thanks to Hewan, Dan Smith, and Andy & Eddie Akka at Akwil AV for pulling these fantastic images together.

Hewan Clarke – The Haçienda 1985

There’s a further in-depth interview with Hewan here:
http://www.electrofunkroots.co.uk/interviews/hewan_clarke.html

The Disco V Fiasco!

Sometimes you don’t know whether to laugh or cry!

Following on from February’s post about the extraordinarily ill-conceived Haçienda DJ Booth (original side of stage location), I’ve since found out something that takes the entire bungling tale, as slapstick as it already was, into a whole new realm of ineptitude!

Before I go any further I should link the original piece for those who haven’t read it – to get the full weight of what I’m about to disclose you’ll need to check out the photo of the booth from hell, paying particular attention to what I described as ‘the infamous Akwil Digitheque mixer…the bane of my life’:
http://www.gregwilson.co.uk/2012/02/the-hacienda-dj-booth/

For close on 3 decades, whenever I’ve discussed the predicament I found myself in during my time as Friday night resident at The Haçienda in the latter part of 1983, I’ve cursed the designers of that damned mixer for making it impossible for me to measure up to the reputation I’d acquired, via my mixes on Piccadilly Radio, as well as at Legend and Wigan Pier, as one of the UK’s leading ‘mixing DJ’s’ – I know a bad workman always blames his tools, but, come on,  you only need look at the photo to understand exactly what I’m talking about. It was an absolute nightmare to use.

People here in the UK generally had no idea of what was necessary for a DJ to properly mix records back then. Earlier in 1983, when I’d appeared on ‘The Tube’, to demonstrate mixing for the first time on British TV, the show’s presenter, Jools Holland, had asked me to point out what a turntable was, for the benefit of ‘people who don’t know what a turntable is’ (a record player then being the commonly used  name) – and this was a much revered cutting-edge music programme. You can view the clip here:
http://www.electrofunkroots.co.uk/articles/on_the_tube.html

In 2009 I wrote an in-depth article about the evolution of mixing in the UK, which, whilst obviously inspired by, was distinct to what had happened in New York. In the early 80’s, only a small minority of British DJ’s had placed the emphasis on mixing, the overwhelming majority still microphone based in their presentation – hence the title of the piece, ‘How The Talking Stopped – The UK ‘s Microphone To Mix Metamorphosis’:
http://www.electrofunkroots.co.uk/articles/how_the_talking_stopped.html

Garrard / Technics SL-1210

One of those British mixing pioneers, Froggy, had helped design the Matamp Supanova, which was what I’d bought at the end of 1982, when setting up my home DJ studio, where I recorded my radio mixes for Piccadilly in Manchester from this point onwards. It was the Matamp that I’d used on ‘The Tube’, and this is what I was suggesting The Haçienda invested in to help make my job more bearable, but my pleas, of course, fell on deaf ears.

Matamp Supernova Mixer

Not long after I started my nights at The Haçienda, a recently launched magazine called Disco Mix Mag (later to become the major DJ publication, Mixmag) ran a piece I’d written titled ‘The DJ Of A New Breed’, in which I outlined my belief that a shift towards a more New York based approach to deejaying, with mixing coming increasingly to the fore, was now inevitable. Yet, despite championing this new direction, I was unable to practice what I was preaching at The Haçienda, where anybody wanting to hear this new-fangled mixing in full effect would no doubt have wondered what all the fuss was about as I awkwardly attempted to make the unworkable work, whilst wishing pestilence and plague on the creator of this Digitheque anti-mixer.

I’d have gone on forever harbouring this ill feeling for some faceless electrical boffin who’d strayed into the world of the DJ without having a clue about the practicalities of deejaying, as was evident from this totally unfacile piece of kit I was cursed with having to use. However, due to some new information that’s now come to light, delivered straight from the horse’s mouth, a big apology to the manufacturers is in order. Having seen the previous blog post, and had a good laugh in the process, they’ve been able to set finally the record straight, adding an unexpected twist that takes the whole tale to new calamitous depths.

I’ve now found out that the Digitheque, which also doubled up as a sound to light controller, was never intended as a hands-on DJ mixer, but part of a dual unit in combination with the Disco V (pronounced Disco Five), which was exactly the piece of kit I needed, crossfader and all (the 2 units linked via an Aux In on the Digitheque). The problem being that The Haçienda’s management had completely missed the relevance of the Disco V and, incredibly, didn’t bother installing it, leaving the DJ’s to work with what amounted to half a mixer – unfortunately for me the half that wasn’t suitable for mixing with.

As I mentioned in the previous piece, the Haçienda’s manager at the time, Howard ‘Ginger’ Jones, would site the fact that there were only 2 of these mixers in existence as some kind of endorsement of their quality, whenever I complained about its impracticality. The Digiteque didn’t come cheap at around £1000 – so learning that it would only have cost an additional measly £40 for the Disco V only adds insult to injury, especially now I’ve learnt that 3 of these units were installed across town, at another Manchester club of the era, Placemate 7. Akwil mainman, Eddie Akka, told us that Hacienda owner, Tony Wilson, was really into the aesthetic of an all-digital mixer, so the Disco V with its faders was, as a consequence, deemed antiquated and unnecessary – only problem being that Tony Wilson, as visionary as he sometimes was, obviously didn’t have a clue about the rudiments of mixing one record into the next. Akka explained that the Haçienda management listened to the architects more than the sound and lighting advisors, resulting in big mistakes that were never fully rectified in all the years the club was running. Bands, not DJ’s were very much the club’s priority when they opened – either that or somebody had a particularly masochistic streak towards DJ’s. Apart from the mixer debacle, as Akka agreed, ‘the whole idea of the DJ being in a separate room was ridiculous!’

The owners of The Haçienda may have been over to New York, and clubs like Danceteria, the Funhouse and the Paradise Garage, and had the high idea of transferring the NY vibe they’d witnessed to Manchester, but they completely flunked out when it came to enabling their DJ’s to set about this task – they actually hindered, rather than helped them. Had Mark Kamins, ‘Jellybean’ Benitez or Larry Levan, the DJ’s associated with these key NYC clubs, and my transatlantic contemporaries back then, walked into the Haçienda DJ booth at this point in time they’d have thought they’d  landed on another planet, let alone in another country.

Legend, where I played every Wednesday would have been much more to their liking, set up, as it was, with the DJ centre stage, and with sound and lighting that wouldn’t have been out of place in the Big Apple itself. The sheer frustration of working in this ideal DJ environment on a Wednesday night, then having to endure the madness of a Friday at The Haçienda, hid away inside that room, is something I’ve never fully shaken off. Nowadays, no matter where I go in the world, people will want to talk to me about The Haçienda, expecting me to wax lyrical about the greatest DJ experiences of my life, but the reality is that my overwhelming impression from my time there is of one big struggle – it certainly took its toll on me. Manchester’s City Life Magazine would write in their review of 1983; ‘Greg Wilson’s faith in New York’s mind hammering electro-beat was confirmed with both growing crowds and colour supplement coverage. Though interestingly, the sound flopped in the vast chasms of The Haçienda. Is this why he is retiring from DJ’ing to concentrate on record production?’

Maybe this did play a larger part in my retirement than I’ve previously considered, although ultimately there were far greater forces at play, not least the emergence of Hip Hop culture in the UK, and how this brought a new dynamic that would change the existing scene (I go into my main reasons here: http://www.electrofunkroots.co.uk/misc/why_did_i_quit.html). However, hypothetically speaking, had I been given a level playing field at The Haçienda (i.e., with the booth up on the balcony and a mixer I could work with – both improvements later implemented in 1984), it might have provided me with the fresh challenge that was necessary for my love affair with deejaying to continue (whereas it probably facilitated my falling out of love just that bit quicker). There were certainly possibilities, including the proposed DJ exchange that was put to me, where I’d go to New York for a month and work at Danceteria, whilst Mark Kamins came to The Haçienda. That was a scenario that definitely appealed to me, but as fate would have it, it’d be another 22 years before I made my New York debut, and a few years more before I finally got to meet Mark Kamins, who came along to see me DJ at a night I was doing in Vienna, where he lived at the time. Although the exchange idea never transpired, he was invited over for a guest appearance at the club in 1984, and, in doing so, became The Haçienda’s first US guest DJ – something which would become a common occurrence later down the line.

Mark Kamins / Haçienda Poster

Hewan Clarke, The Haçienda’s original resident, wasn’t a mixing DJ, so the absence of faders was never as big a deal to him as it was for me (although we were in total accord about the need for the DJ booth to be moved to another part of the club). Working at the Haçienda night after night, Hewan soon got used to the quirky digital ‘mixer’ he had to use. It had a certain simplicity – there were 2 buttons to press, one to make a gradual fade from one track to the next, the other providing an instant switch. He was as surprised as me when told about the Disco V, and thought it was hilarious to learn, after all these years, that there was a missing part. He concluded that “the Disco V looks like a modern conventional mixer. It would have certainly made life a lot easier – if only for not having to mix with one hand on the record and the other hand above your head!”

Had The Haçienda not been so slapdash in its earlier days, and instead instantly become a slick well-run ultra-fashionable club, it would never have gone on to acquire the almost mythical status it’s now bestowed with. It’s a victory from the jaws of defeat type tale, which only adds to its overall resonance.  So, when all’s said and done, I’m happy to have my played part in the story, despite the personal frustrations I experienced at the time. Given what we now know about The Haçienda, it was pretty much par for the course. Peter Hook’s book title, ‘The Haçienda – How Not To Run A Club’, said it all, and the Disco V fiasco is yet a further illustration of how this world-renowned clubbing institution was born of a mixture high ideals and gross incompetence. You just couldn’t make this stuff up.

I must thank Dan Smith, Hewan Clarke, Andy Akka and Eddie Akka, without whose help I’d have never uncovered this hidden nugget of Haçienda history, which would otherwise have surely been forever lost to the past.

The Haçienda

Akwil Products From The 80’s:
http://www.akwilav.com/akwil-80s-product-set.html

Originally published as 2 separate blog posts at:
http://www.gregwilson.co.uk

© Greg Wilson, May 2012

http://soundcloud.com/gregwilson/it-was-back-in-82-by-greg

One of the defining moments of my DJ career took place on Monday May 10th 1982, when my first radio mix was broadcast on Mike Shaft’s show, ‘T.C.O.B’ (Taking Care Of Business), on Manchester’s hugely influential Piccadilly Radio, which played a major part in bringing black / dance music to wider attention during the 70’s and ‘80’s – from Soul, Funk and Disco, through Jazz-Funk and Electro, and on into Hip Hop, House and Techno. I go into its rich legacy in greater depth here:
http://www.electrofunkroots.co.uk/articles/dont_touch_that_dial.html

The mix had been recorded a few days earlier, as live, one afternoon at Legend in Manchester (the club closed at the time). Mike Shaft had brought along a Revox B77 reel-to-reel to record onto, the machine being the portable unit of choice throughout the radio industry in this country back then. This was the first time the Revox, which has since played a constant role in my work, entered my life. At the time I had no means to record at home, but by the end of the year, following the runaway success of the mixes, which would subsequently become a regular feature on Piccadilly, I’d purchase a couple of Technics SL1200’s and a Matamp Super Nova mixer (this was at a time when, with the exception of London DJ, Froggy, who used them for his Roadshow, no UK DJ’s had such equipment at home). To top things off I bought my first B77, so I could put together my mixes at home, which would serve to lead me ever-deeper into my obsession with editing. So glory be to Mike Shaft and to Piccadilly Radio for facilitating this life-defining arc of continued discovery.

The reel of ¼ tape onto which that first mix was recorded onto was, as with most of my radio mixes (the final one, ‘The Best Of ‘83’, being aired in December 1983), lost – probably copied over at some point or other, having been stored at the station. I managed to salvage a few of these mastertapes, most importantly ‘The Best Of ’82, but the original mix wasn’t amongst these, and I only had it on an extremely lo-fi cassette recorded from the radio at the time.

As the author / DJ Dave Haslam once said, the mixes “were probably some of the most taped programmes in Manchester radio history”. These tapes would also spread further afield than the Greater Manchester region that Piccadilly broadcasted to, with copies, and copies of copies, finding their way into cassette players and ghetto blasters in all corners of the country, often without people having a clue about their source – this was the ‘mixtape’ in its earliest form from a British perspective. One such recipient of my mixes was Stafford based Pezz, then a 14 year old lad discovering his musical influences, and later of the fabled Nottingham-based soundsystem and DJ collective, DiY, who were amongst the pioneers of the UK free party scene, having formed in 1989.

I’d meet Pezz at the Liverpool offices of 3Beat, the record shop / label he worked for – this was in 2002, 20 years on from when my radio mixes first aired. My DJ comeback was still in the future, and I was very much an obscure name from the past at best, most people of Pezz’s age brought up on a later generation of DJ’s. So his excitement at meeting me was unexpected – he was talking about this tape from back in my Piccadilly days that had made a big impact on him and his friends at the time, as they set off on their own personal dance music odysseys, and asked me if I could identify a couple of the tracks featured (these id’s having eluded them for 2 decades). It turned out that one of his big mates back then was Dean Meredith, later of Bizarre Inc, who enjoyed chart success in the early 90’s, and more recently Chicken Lips (whose ‘He Not In’ I edited on my first ‘Credit To The Edit’ compilation in 2005), and that this tape had been a major influence on the sound of his latter project, which, along with Bizarre Inc, was produced in collaboration with partner Andy Meecham.

Pezz takes up the story in the sleevenotes of a limited run CD (300 copies only), from 2007, which he called ‘It Was Back In ‘82’:

We all have stories to tell – this one is mine. It’s the story of a tape that has been with me for more than 20 years, which has finally come to light as a major inspiration behind the music of Chicken Lips, who based their style on the type of tracks included.

It was back in 1982 when I was hitting my teens and, as were many others, looking for some direction, something to come along and grab me by the balls, something to show me the way, inspire me…

I lived in Stafford and had a gang of mates as most 14 year olds do. We were heavily influenced by our older brothers and sisters and, in turn, by their mates, the older, cooler crew. They’d stopped looking for that thing cos they had already found it, and were living it up in Manchester at a club called Legends. The thing was Electro-Funk and the guy feeding the crowd was Greg Wilson. Regulars at Legends from Stafford were Dennis Grey, Patrick and Winston Dennis amongst others. Patrick at the time was seeing the sister of one of my friend’s friends. She had boxes of tapes that had been copied, borrowed or even stolen from her boyfriend. These were constantly heard pumping out from her bedroom by her younger brother Steve, who one brave day had sneaked in and taken one, her favourite, from the tape machine and hastily copied it before carefully replacing it before she caught him. The tape was simply labelled Greg Wilson Piccadilly Radio.

Within a week the word was out that Steve Harrison had a tape that contained new music, music that this older, cooler generation was dancing to in their regular mysterious jaunts to Manny. Everyone wanted a copy. Steve was worried his sister and in turn her fearsome boyfriend would find out he had copied the favourite tape. It was kept close to his chest. He did however copy it for Robert Bairstow, who was fortunately a very very good mate of mine! Within hours of Rob getting it the tape was in my hands …..

By 1983 the hip hop movement was beginning to evolve. Electro had become slightly more prominent and with the video to Malcom McLaren’s ‘Buffalo Gals’ the UK had suddenly been shown how to ‘break’. In Stafford there were little pockets of b boys. Two of whom were Dean Meredith and John Parkes. (Dean later moved on to produce his own tracks as a member of Bizarre Inc, Psychedelia Smith, Senseteria and, more recently, as Chicken Lips – John on the other hand, after a spell in the early 90’s dancing for Altern 8, moved back to breaking and recently danced for UK Rock Steady). It was inevitable our paths would at some time cross, Stafford being the small town it is. When we did meet, thanks to this common music bond, we all hit it off big time. Moves were exchanged, stories told and, above all, music, especially tapes, were passed between us. Before long ‘The Tape’ was in Dean’s hands, and here it stayed, until years later (following the rave days, during which time Dean had a run of hit singles and I became manager of 3 Beat, the record shop in Liverpool) it was pulled out by Dean and presented to his co-producer Andy Meecham.

The tape was, I believed, all of Greg Djing and talking on the radio, but later, upon meeting him, it became apparent that only certain sections of the tape were actually him. The presenter, Mike Shaft (whose voice had been mostly pause button edited out), was the person whose show it really was. However, it was Greg who was stealing the glory with his New York influenced ‘mixes’ – the highlights of this legendary tape.

Following a chance meeting with Greg, when I told him this very story, I said I’d send him a copy so he could identify some of the tracks for me, tracks I’d known and loved for almost two decades, but which I’d never known the titles of. However, it wasn’t going to be that straightforward, for my tape, most inconveniently, had gone missing. So then began 10 months of hell trying to retrieve a copy, for both myself and for Greg…

As soon as I’d met Greg, an excited call was made to Dean. ‘…. Hey kid, guess what! I just met Greg Wilson – No way – I need you to send me a copy of the tape up as soon as possible….’ Then came the months of waiting more phone call’s hassling to get a copy before eventually with the bribe of digitally remastering it onto CD it finally arrived!

In the meantime I’d had many conversations with Greg and e-mail’s were exchanged, one of which contained a list of essential Electro-Funk releases. This list was full of records I, and anyone I showed it to, had never heard of, apart from some obvious classic’s such as the Peech Boy’s ‘Don’t Make Me Wait’, and Afrika Bambaataa’s ‘Planet Rock’. When I finally sent him a copy of the tape I’d got from Dean he identified mysterious artists and titles like The Gunchback Boogie Band’s ‘Funn’ and Jimmy Spicer’s ‘The Bubble Bunch’. I began hunting down these tracks on the internet, the first to arrive was Larry Graham’s ‘Sooner Or Later’, and the excitement of finally getting my hands on these tunes was unreal, mindblowing! I hadn’t had such a buzz from buying records in years. A goal was then set to collect every track on the tape. Gradually over the coming weeks all but a handful were found. In the meantime, Greg found the old tracklistings for his first ever mixes for Mike Shaft, which just happened to be the two mixes contained on the legendary tape. I was then able to find all but two tracks, or rather two small drum sections he used in the first of the mixes. Not even Greg can recall where these came from!

Before long it seemed obvious that listening to this 20-year-old tape was not enough. After collecting these, and a host of other early 80’s Electro-Funk releases, I decided that the only thing left to do was to re-create the mixes myself! Rather than just re-do them as Greg did back in ‘82 on the decks at Legends. I decided to use the computer to ensure the tightest of mixes and present them in today’s highly polished manner (I also lifted and cleaned the missing drum parts direct from the tape). The whole concept of taking someone else’s work and re-creating it is quite strange, and actually completing it and then re-presenting it to Greg felt even more bizarre. Thankfully he was really into what I’d done, especially as the original ¼” masters have been lost and, like myself, the only copy of these mixes that Greg had was recorded onto cassette from the radio.

The actual mixes themselves were re-constructed using Sound Forge and the audio arranging software Vegas Pro. Whilst the theory of mixing using these tools is quite simple, to mimic exactly what Greg did was at times fairly complex. Until I came to do the mixes I was totally unaware that Greg had used more than one copy of the same record to create his own ‘turntable edits’, by switching between the various versions. The task was not only to work out the mix in a track-to-track sense, but to re-create these live edits too! There are obviously a few of my own subtle touches in there, but I tried to keep the whole thing as authentic as possible.

I’ve also included my own ‘Emergency Mix’, concentrating solely on tracks issued on this influential label that Greg would have played at Legends and his other major venue of the 82/83 period, Wigan Pier.

I hope you enjoy these seminal mixes, just as I have for more than two decades now.

Pezz

Tracklisting for Mix #1 was:

Michelle Wallace – Tee’s Right
Linda Taylor – You And Me Just Started
Kasso – Walkman
Al McCall – Hard Times
Electra – Feels Good
Touchdown – Ease Your Mind (US mix)
Sinnamon – Thanks To You
Peech Boys – Don’t Make Me Wait

The mix would be the first of its type on British radio, and following the fantastic response to this initial offering, Mike Shaft decided to make it a regular feature, with new mixes every 3-4 weeks. It would have an instant impact in the clubs, with Legend’s attendance, which was already on the up, going through the roof in a matter of weeks. It was a momentous month, which also saw the release of the seminal Electro track, ‘Planet Rock’ (see: http://www.electrofunkroots.co.uk/articles/when_the_planet_rocked.html) and the opening of a new Manchester club, which I’d DJ at later down the line, called The Haçienda.

My career was about to go into overdrive, and ‘The Greg Wilson Mix’, as Mike, in his distinctive mid-Atlantic drawl, would introduce it, was a major part of this process.

© Greg Wilson, May 2012

Electrospective Poster (Design by Dan Smith / 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 with.

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)
Mat 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

https://vimeo.com/35611342

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

https://vimeo.com/36071613

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 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 four or five 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 breakdancers 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 Currington, 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

https://vimeo.com/36535864

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 (Shaft) 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