Episode 56
Diggin' Deeper - Keb Darge's journey from taekwondo to the turntables
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Keb Darge, a preeminent figure in the realm of Northern Soul and deep funk music, shares the intriguing narrative of his eclectic journey, traversing from the disciplined world of taekwondo to the vibrant dance floors of London. This dialogue illuminates Darge’s metamorphosis from a budding music enthusiast to a revered DJ and digger, celebrated for his extensive and rare collection of records. He recounts his formative experiences with music, detailing the pivotal moments that ignited his passion for Northern Soul and deep funk, ultimately leading to his esteemed reputation within the international music community. Darge’s reflections on the evolution of the music scene, coupled with his candid anecdotes, encapsulate the essence of a life devoted to the pursuit of rhythm and the art of dance. Join us as we explore the profound impact of Darge's contributions to this vibrant cultural tapestry.
Keb Darge, a renowned figure in the realms of Northern Soul and deep funk, recounts his remarkable journey from a small Highland village in Scotland to the vibrant DJ scene in London. The episode delves into Darge's formative years, detailing his initial experiences with music, which began in his youth as he watched teenagers flock to local halls, dancing to the likes of The Kinks and The Beatles. This ignited a lifelong passion for rhythm and dance, leading him to discover Northern Soul through a friend at a taekwondo Christmas party. The discussion unfolds as Darge shares his transition from a novice dancer to an acclaimed DJ, highlighting the integral role of record digging in his career. He illustrates how he cultivated an extensive collection of rare records, becoming a notable digger in the UK, and eventually establishing a prominent reputation that led him to international stages. Darge's anecdotes vividly depict the colorful tapestry of the Northern Soul scene, emphasizing the communal spirit of dance and music that defined his experiences. The conversation further explores the evolution of the music landscape, including the emergence of deep funk and its intersection with his work at Ace Records, painting a picture of a dedicated artist who has continuously sought to share the magic of rare grooves with audiences around the globe.
Mentioned in this episode:
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Transcript
Welcome back to once a DJ.
Speaker A:I'm delighted to have with us Keb Darge, a DJs DJ, high level digger and someone hugely sort of influential in the world of deep funk and that sort of thing.
Speaker A:And I'm sure there's probably way more that we could say at this point, but I think it's best if we just kick off and first of all, see how you're doing today.
Speaker B:I'm doing fine, Luna.
Speaker B:I just got out of bed to speak to this nice man in front of me just now on the screen.
Speaker A:Oh, you do flatter me.
Speaker A:So what we'll do really is if we can just kind of go through your story and just see where it takes us.
Speaker B:Ah, okay.
Speaker A:So first of all, as I mentioned, I've got my research and my AI and my AI says that you grew up in a small mining village, is that right?
Speaker B:Absolute shite.
Speaker B:Mining village.
Speaker B:I grew up in a wee village.
Speaker B:It was just distillery.
Speaker B:There was two distilleries at the the village and that was it.
Speaker B:And the river, spay, beautiful part of the world.
Speaker B:You know, I appreciate a lot more now that I'm an adult.
Speaker B:But yeah, wee highland village up near Elgin, which was the major city, and then moved into Elgin when I was about 11.
Speaker B:And so, yeah, mine.
Speaker B:And there's no mines up there, it's all solid granite.
Speaker B:They're not gonna mine anything there.
Speaker A:All right, that's me done with AI.
Speaker B:Then I load a straight.
Speaker A:So what were your first sort of memories and experiences with music?
Speaker B:Well, a very weird one, which is quite an interesting story, possibly for your listeners.
Speaker B:So I was in Kigelhe and in Elgin there was a London type gangster, Bernice, who had played London and he run a club called the Two Red Shoes in Elgin.
Speaker B: years old, so: Speaker B:The problem was he couldn't sell alcohol.
Speaker B:As for some local law, he couldn't sell alcohol as Two Red Shoes, but he could sell it at Crgellhay Town Hall.
Speaker B:Crgellachy's got a population of 70 people, so he was friends with Epstein.
Speaker B:And I was hanging out my bedroom window as a seven year old looking at the Kergellahy Town hall, which was a Nissen hut really, and motorbikes and cars and tractors arriving from all over the Highlands and all that.
Speaker B:And then there's music blaring out and I'd hear some of the stuff hearing on the radio through the daytime and singing.
Speaker B:Wow, why are all these hundreds of teenagers coming to The Kingarhi Town Hall.
Speaker B:And I'd hear things which I later found out that, oh, that's a song by the Kinks or that's a song by the Beatles.
Speaker B:I did some research a few years ago.
Speaker B:It wasn't a song, but it was the fucking Kinks and it was the Beatles.
Speaker B:It was.
Speaker B:They did their first British date on the first British tour was in Elgin Wabanese, and he got them to play at the Cagillary Town.
Speaker B:It wasn't a town hall, but town hall so he could sell alcohol and make a fucking profit and all that.
Speaker B:And all these, the Stones, all that lot were playing in this tiny wee hall across from my house when I was a wee boy.
Speaker B:I'm like, bloody hell.
Speaker B:I didn't realize it was them until 50 years later, but that was the story.
Speaker B:Benny See had lived in London, Palswe Epstein and all that, and was hiding out up in Elgin for some reason and getting the big bands up.
Speaker A:Because when you said Epstein, I wasn't sure if you meant Brian Epstein.
Speaker B:I know, for that area, fair enough.
Speaker B:But, yeah, that was my first experience.
Speaker B:But I didn't really pay much attention to the music then.
Speaker B:I remember playing in the school playground, singing she loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah and all that when it was a hit.
Speaker B:But I didn't pay much attention to music right the way through.
Speaker B:I wasn't interested in music, you know.
Speaker B:Eventually moved into Elgin, the big city with a population of 20,000 and all that, and got into taekwondo.
Speaker B:I got in a fight at school with like 30 blokes.
Speaker B:Got the shit kicked out of me, wound up in hospital.
Speaker B:Came out of hospital, thought I'd better reassert myself.
Speaker B:Picked on David Benton, who I hadn't fucked with for a few years, and the fucker just cracked me on the ribs with a sidekick.
Speaker B:Then as I'm falling down, he hit me on the back with an axe kit.
Speaker B:I'm like, what the fuck was that?
Speaker B:So it's taekwondo.
Speaker B:I go to the RAF base and learn taekwondo.
Speaker B:This was before the Bruce Lee films had got to Britain.
Speaker B:So I was like, how the fuck did he do that?
Speaker B:I'm lying there like, bleeding.
Speaker B:Can I come?
Speaker B:I would run a Tuesday and Thursday and a Saturday morning, like, right, I'm joining the taekwondo.
Speaker B:So I joined the taekwondo class at the RAF base, which is a Royal Air Force base, RAF Lottie mouth.
Speaker B:Just about two miles from my house and I was doing taekwondo.
Speaker B:Happy, happy, happy.
Speaker B:And then they had a taekwondo Christmas party on the base in 73.
Speaker B:I think it Was.
Speaker B:And I went to the Christmas party and it was all the sort of pop hits of the day.
Speaker B:And then I saw these three guys walk up to the DJ with a handful of seven inches and start yapping to the DJ and hand them these seven inches.
Speaker B:What's going on?
Speaker B:I was looking at the women.
Speaker B:Then this music came out and it was like really exciting Motown stuff that wasn't Motown, it just sounded a bit more wild.
Speaker B: , blah, like break dancing in: Speaker B:I'm like, what the fuck is this?
Speaker B:And then my mate, who was from Newcastle, he was an RAF boy, okay, but it's Northern Soul.
Speaker B:I was like, what the fuck's Northern Soul?
Speaker B:Oh, there's an all nighter in Dundee or a club in Dundee next weekend.
Speaker B:You fancy coming?
Speaker B:I thought, okay then.
Speaker B:So from Taekwondo, my mate Mick Thompson, he's now Grandmaster 9.
Speaker B:Stan Michael Thompson took me.
Speaker B:We didn't actually go.
Speaker B:I remember that.
Speaker B:No.
Speaker B:He told me about the Dundee thing.
Speaker B:I went off on my own through to Dundee to this Northern Soul club and just sat there watching the dancers, listening to the music and thinking, hell, this is brilliant.
Speaker B:This is so exciting.
Speaker B:You know, that's where I bought my first record was at that club at the nightclubs.
Speaker B:Northern Soul nightclubs.
Speaker B:Then they all had record bars and I was sitting there listening and, oh, fucking hell.
Speaker B:And eventually, after about four hours, I picked up the balls to go to the dj saying, what was that one?
Speaker B:Well, that was the human beings.
Speaker B:Nobody but me.
Speaker B:Oh, and into the record.
Speaker B:But if you've got human beings.
Speaker B:Got human beings.
Speaker B:Got human beings.
Speaker B:And then one guy says, yeah, there you go, two quid, thank you very much.
Speaker B:And that was the start of it.
Speaker B:And then from then on it went to.
Speaker B:Down to Wigan Casino.
Speaker B:First lively weekend.
Speaker B: I moved down to Wigan in: Speaker B:And that was me hooked on Northern Soul.
Speaker A:So with Northern Soul, I kind of.
Speaker A:I know a little bit about it.
Speaker A:It's, it's.
Speaker A:I'm not particularly into it myself, but what was the kind of ecosystem with it?
Speaker A:So was there like certain people that were importing everything?
Speaker A:Was it coming through like a couple of people or was there people sort of around?
Speaker B:No, there was a guy, Christ, I can't remember his name.
Speaker B: From Birmingham in: Speaker B:Maybe I'll remember his name later.
Speaker B:But a guy for the sort of mod scene had been fed by British Released American soul and other stuff and British bands, you know, like the Pretty Things and all that doing RNB type stuff.
Speaker B:And this guy worked out that the.
Speaker B:The pop charts, solid Motown started fittering away in the early 70s and it started getting a more funky beat.
Speaker B:And that wasn't good enough for the folk that wanted that Motown four to the floor beat.
Speaker B:So this guy, Tony Worrell, or Tony anyway, he thought it, I'm going to go to America and look for records.
Speaker B:So he flew over to America.
Speaker B:He came back with a pile of records.
Speaker B:He went to the Twisted Wheel in Manchester and handed the DJ a couple of records.
Speaker B:One of them was I Wasn't There but, you know, spoke to folk that well was Baby Re considered Leon Haymouth, which nobody heard before, then Richtix.
Speaker B:So these records came on and the crowd like, what the is this?
Speaker B:Within a year, approximately 200 people from the north of England and a couple from Scotland had gone to America looking for records.
Speaker B:Two of them settled in America, which is named Martin Capel.
Speaker B:Settled in Detroit first, then moved to Canada and then.
Speaker B:Oh God, what was the fiddly diddler's name that did all the bootlegs?
Speaker B:You're talking to an old man here, memories ago.
Speaker B:Anyway, this other guy of French Lebanese descent, settled down in San Francisco and was.
Speaker B:They were soaking up records and you could get them.
Speaker B:I went over later on, you could get them for nothing.
Speaker B:Nobody wanted them in America at all.
Speaker B:So they get them at a penny a time and shipping over loads of records and all that and supplying their mates to sell to the DJs.
Speaker B:And the DJs would play them covered up most of the time.
Speaker B:They'd put a fake name on the record, play them for six or seven months.
Speaker B:By doing that, the record got more interest because nobody knew what it was.
Speaker B:Then when it was announced, the bootleg would come out and, you know, a few thousand folk could buy a bootleg of the record and then the collectors and other DJs would be hunting for another original.
Speaker B:And yeah, there was folk going back and forth in the States.
Speaker B:So I'd go to Wigan Casino every week, near enough.
Speaker B:And you'd go into the Record Bar and there'd be Mick Smith there just back from the States.
Speaker B:There'd be Tim Ashebender just back from the States, where Boxer Records to flick through and all that.
Speaker B:So, yeah, records were readily available because the only other people when I was going to the States that wanted them at the time, and this was early 80s, I went.
Speaker B:I'd go and I'd find like an old closed down radio station or a distribution warehouse that had shut down in 69 or so and you'd track it down and get in there up to your knees in water sometimes, or rats sprintering about and go through the records and the guy that owned it was there and you'd like, I've got this much money in my pocket, I'm going to buy these and I'm going to hide these somewhere and come back in two or three months and get them.
Speaker B:So I do that, then two or three months later I go back and where's the fucking records?
Speaker B:A load of Japanese bought them all.
Speaker B:Them all are a load of Belgiums, which shocked me.
Speaker B:A load of Belgians bought them all.
Speaker B:And the only three people, British, Japanese and Belgians, were the ones looking for old 45s of soul music, weird instrumentals, etc.
Speaker B:So there's a big fallacy about the Northern soul scene at Wigan, that it was all about soul and celebrating American black music and all that.
Speaker B:No, it wasn't.
Speaker B:It was celebrating dancing.
Speaker B:We fucking loved dancing.
Speaker B:And 30, 40% of the records were by white artists, you know, Frankie Valle, all those boys, loads of them.
Speaker B:So it was exciting dance music.
Speaker B:And for me at first, this is leading on to how I became a DJ.
Speaker B:I wasn't interested in DJing, I wasn't that interested in what the records were.
Speaker B:I was just fucking off my tits, dancing, having a great time dancing to these records.
Speaker B:But then I'm living in Aberdeen.
Speaker B:This is before I moved to Wigan.
Speaker B:I got a university at Aberdeen, at Aberdeen and nobody in Aberdeen knows what Northern soul is.
Speaker B:There's not a person there knew where it was.
Speaker B:I thought, holy shit, right, I'd better start buying some of these records and giving them to the local DJs on a Thursday night or something so I can have a dance.
Speaker B:You know, you go to university, you, you go out at night through the week as well.
Speaker B:Back then there was clubs on every night of the week and there's one club called Fusion on Union, not Union street, can remember the name of the state, you know.
Speaker B:But they had a guy called Jonathan Scott teaching at it who liked black music and was playing the hits.
Speaker B:But you know, Teddy Pentagras for the day off her sound and all that.
Speaker B:And I'd hand him a few records and could you play these so I can have a dance?
Speaker B:And I'd have a dance and because I'd done the trike one day I could do the fancy dancing quite well.
Speaker B:And I was going to ask you that.
Speaker B:Yeah, I was pretty good at that, spinning about, doing that.
Speaker B:And I'd always get a table.
Speaker B:I was hoping for a tap on the shoulder from young ladies saying, oh, how did you learn to dance like that?
Speaker B:Perhaps you'd like to come home with me.
Speaker B:But no, it was always blokes.
Speaker B:How the do you learn to dance like that?
Speaker B:I'm going to Wigan next Saturday.
Speaker B:Do you want to come with me?
Speaker B:And I started taking folk and eventually we got hundreds if not thousands of Aberdeen Northern Soul.
Speaker B:Which point, See, you don't need to ask many questions.
Speaker B:At which point this guy Jonathan Scott says, ke, I'm going to open a Soul Night on a Sunday at the Royal Hotel and all that.
Speaker B:Do you fancy DJing?
Speaker B:I'm like, if I'm back for Wigan in time, because I was hitching then it took about 12 hours to get to Wigan and Burkett etc.
Speaker B:So I'd say, all right then, if I'm back in time and as long as you play some for me to dance to.
Speaker B:He says, keb, I don't know your records, you're going to have to play them.
Speaker B:You're handing me too many records now.
Speaker B:You're going to have to play the records.
Speaker A:Can I just stop you and just ask you what it's like hitching for 12 hours repeatedly?
Speaker B:I was young.
Speaker B:Well eventually I moved to Wigan so I was know I was.
Speaker B:Obviously I'd rather be there and have a five minute walk.
Speaker B:So yeah, it was, it was great fun.
Speaker B:I like the hitching with some adventures.
Speaker B:Hitching some weird ones and all that.
Speaker B:There's.
Speaker A:And any that stick.
Speaker A:Stick in mind?
Speaker B:Oh, tremendously, yes.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:Do you want this one?
Speaker B:It's quite a weird one and people will think I'm a weirdo.
Speaker B:So I'm on a roundabout, itching for a lift.
Speaker B:So you're coming back then?
Speaker B:It wasn't all motorway and Joel carriageway, you know.
Speaker B:So I'm on this roundabout and there's this car going round and round.
Speaker B:This was actually going to Clifton Hall.
Speaker B:Rotherham.
Speaker B:This car going round and round and round about as I'm hitching then the guy pulls up and that.
Speaker B:Where are you going, son?
Speaker B:I'm going to Rotherham.
Speaker B:Clifton hall or Rotherham?
Speaker B:Oh, I'm going to whatever.
Speaker B:I can't remember the name of the town.
Speaker B:It's about 20 miles short, just hop in.
Speaker B:So I gets in with the guy and it starts yapping to me.
Speaker B:Oh yeah, I've just been in trouble.
Speaker B:I've been trying to find my brother.
Speaker B:I can't find him.
Speaker B:This is a fascinating story.
Speaker B:I was caught in besling at work and boss is old fashioned.
Speaker B:He wants me to be chastised, but I don't know who to turn to.
Speaker B:I'm thinking, what, you want me to scalp your ass?
Speaker B:Work cane or something?
Speaker B:Yeah, I'll do that.
Speaker B:Oh, we'll have to find somewhere private off the road.
Speaker B:So he turns up a serious.
Speaker B:He turns up this dog truck and I, I'm not worried because I'm at the time I was Scottish taekwondo champion, so I'm now worried.
Speaker B:Paul says, oh, I need someone to cane me.
Speaker B:So we goes into the woods, he find he gets his cane out of the back of his fucking car.
Speaker B:And a lovely case, all beautifully oiled cane.
Speaker B:And we can find a tree, gets on this tree and clings onto the sea.
Speaker B:Okay, no, you need to leave marks.
Speaker B:He, the boss wants to see Marx.
Speaker B:I'm like, all right, pal.
Speaker B:Whoosh, whoosh.
Speaker B:Fucking that was it.
Speaker B:We gets back in the car.
Speaker B:The minute we get back into the car before that, he's all heaving and breathing.
Speaker B:We get back in the car.
Speaker B:Did you see the football on Saturday?
Speaker B:A marvelous score like Hellboy.
Speaker B:I said, right, you're taking me straight to Clifton hall in Rotherham now.
Speaker B:And he did.
Speaker B:He drove me to the doorstep with the all nighter and I ran in ready to tell everyone.
Speaker B:I thought, holy shit, what are they going to think of me?
Speaker B:Well, I better keep this quiet.
Speaker B:So I've kept that one quiet for about 40 years.
Speaker B:That's a hitchhiking story anyway.
Speaker A:The hitchhiking, is that an exclusive?
Speaker B:Yeah, I don't think I told it before.
Speaker B:Right, so the hitchhiking stories I've told mates, it was fun.
Speaker B:I was a young.
Speaker B:I enjoyed adventure and all that, that was adventurous for me but I got fed up with it and sometimes you were.
Speaker B:I set off one time to go to Wigan for the fucking.
Speaker B:No, I was going to Barnsley, was it for an all nighter on the Friday, then Wigan on the Saturday.
Speaker B:And this was from Elgin.
Speaker B:I arrived in fucking Aberdeen at 11 o'clock at night.
Speaker B:I was getting lifts on the back of tractors.
Speaker B:Right, where are you going, son?
Speaker B:Wigan.
Speaker B:Where's that?
Speaker B:Down by Manchester.
Speaker B:I'm going to Ochtermuchty Farm at the end of this road.
Speaker B:Get in the back.
Speaker B:And it was like a one mile lift and then another two mile lift.
Speaker B:So I never made it to Aberdeen.
Speaker B:So I thought this.
Speaker B:So I was in.
Speaker B:We arrived one Friday, me and Speedy Faye.
Speaker B:Aberdeen got in on a Friday.
Speaker B:Once in the weekend before the all nighter got to sleep in the police station.
Speaker B:That was very nice of them.
Speaker B:And they were, what are you doing?
Speaker B:And all that.
Speaker B:So we're looking for somewhere to sleep.
Speaker B:We're outside trying to sleep.
Speaker B:He's come and sleep in the police station.
Speaker B:So they put us in the cells for the night, which was nice.
Speaker B:They were like, it's a cold night, you get in the cells.
Speaker B:When was it?
Speaker B:The next morning.
Speaker B:Russ Winstanley, who was one of the DJs at the casino, had a stall in Wigan market selling records.
Speaker B:So I went to have a look at the records and I just thought, might as well ask the fucker.
Speaker B:Russ, do you know any jobs down here?
Speaker B:Going, yes, my mate round the corners looking for a barman living at the Grand Hotel on Dornan street there.
Speaker B:I said, oh really?
Speaker B:Oh, what's his name?
Speaker B:I'll phone him for you, Keb, hold on, I'll be back in 20 minutes.
Speaker B:There was no mobile phones then.
Speaker B:And then, okay, can you go around and see him now?
Speaker B:And that was at start Monday.
Speaker B:I'm like, yes, I'm in Wigan.
Speaker B:Three minute walk to the casino.
Speaker B:Done.
Speaker B:I was very happy.
Speaker A:So with the taekwondo then.
Speaker A:So you were Scottish champion.
Speaker A:That must have been seriously sort of time consuming.
Speaker B:How was your training before Wigan took over?
Speaker B:I was training like, oh God, I don't know.
Speaker B:I mean there was three official classes a week, two hour classes, but then me and Gordon Wallace and Greg Chesser would get together and train in a garden or like that.
Speaker B:We were keen as.
Speaker B:So elan, there's day much to do, you know.
Speaker B:Then it was, well, there's nothing to do now, I suppose small, small town and all that in taekwondo was, woohoo.
Speaker B:This is our future.
Speaker B:So I'd be, you know, doing the splits at home while watching television, stretching myself and stuff like that.
Speaker B:So you're getting yourself in a condition takes a long time.
Speaker B:So I was doing all that, you know, I was working at a distillery for a year.
Speaker B:I did that to get some money in my pocket and I used to get the.
Speaker B:I used to sit on the workbench, put my legs apart and get Big Willie to drive nails in and then push my leg behind the nail, then stick bungs, cork bungs in to push my leg further back, further back.
Speaker B:And I'd sit there like this, getting stretched by the workmen at the distillery.
Speaker B:So I was keen as.
Speaker B:So I was training all the time.
Speaker B:I loved it.
Speaker A:Have you.
Speaker A:So once you went to Wigan, did you.
Speaker A:Were you able to keep doing it or was that the end?
Speaker B:I packed in the tyke when I was.
Speaker B:All the time I was at Aberdeen, I was doing the taekwondo.
Speaker B:Then when I moved to Wigan, I wasn't doing any training.
Speaker B:It was picked up again when I moved down to London.
Speaker B: I moved to London in: Speaker B:So that period I wasn't training 76 to 79, didn't it?
Speaker B:And then I started again.
Speaker A:So just before I interrupted you, before, we were talking about your first experience DJing.
Speaker B:All right, first experience was my ego was boosted, like, oo.
Speaker B:You know, by that time, you see, I'd taken loads of folk down to Wigan Fair, but then there was nowhere for them to dance to Northern.
Speaker B:Then suddenly Jonathan Scott puts on this night with me giving them Northern.
Speaker B:And he was playing the hits of the day and most of them were shite pop nonsense.
Speaker B:Then I'd come on Northern and I was like, yeah, this is good.
Speaker B:I like this Woohoo thing.
Speaker B:The biggest one.
Speaker B:The biggest thing a buzzer got in those early days of DJing and Aberdeen.
Speaker B:I was at the Blackpool Mecca one night.
Speaker B:No, I was at the casino on this one week and they played a record.
Speaker B:Ron holding off for Give and forget for the first time.
Speaker B:First time out in the UK for this record.
Speaker B:Comes on the deck.
Speaker B:Oh, you fucker.
Speaker B:That's good.
Speaker B:Oh, I must find out what that is.
Speaker B:The next week I'm at the Blackpool Mecca and there's a guy at the record bar with their own holding in there for seven pound, which was a week's wages back then.
Speaker B:I'm like, oh, hell, seven pound, that's a lot of my money.
Speaker B:You know, my mum will kill me if I spend that on a record.
Speaker B:Then I got other guy's hand reaches for it.
Speaker B:I'm buying the wrong holding.
Speaker B:So then I'm back up in Aberdeen on the Sunday I and I put the Ron holding on and, oh, Kev's got that record from Wigan.
Speaker B:Oh, they're all peering at the decks.
Speaker B:Then a fucking week later, a few folk, Fenber and Dundee turn up at overnight because Keb Dorge has got that record.
Speaker B:And I thought, yeah, get the special records and all that.
Speaker B:So from then on I was looking for, you know, things that hadn't been bootlegged before that.
Speaker B:I was just buying the fucking bootlegs and, you know, cheaper records that had been played a few years before.
Speaker B:And then I thought, no, I'm getting the special records.
Speaker B:I'm getting the ones that no other got.
Speaker B:Or Richard Ceiling or One of the big DJs has got, but nobody else.
Speaker B:And I'm going to hunt out the dealers that get those big records.
Speaker B:And that was the start of me buying those big records.
Speaker B:There you go.
Speaker A:With Northern, then was.
Speaker A:Did people tend to be quite open about what the tunes were and the artists and stuff?
Speaker A:Because it was quite a flex to have those records.
Speaker B:Not sure what your question means.
Speaker B:The thing about Wigan and the thing about Northern Soul was the dancing people went there to dance to records with the beat they wanted.
Speaker B:They didn't care who the fucking artist was, they just wanted that sound.
Speaker B:The Northern scene's changed nowadays.
Speaker B:It's nothing like the scene I knew, you know, it's all very political and boring and dull as folk clutching their hearts to show how soulful they are.
Speaker B:It's like, bleh.
Speaker B:Yeah, Sickening.
Speaker B:No, that was awfully.
Speaker B:Virtually everyone there, apart from me, I did gear for six months, but everyone there was off their heads on speed and all they wanted to do was dance, dance, dance, dance, dance, dance, dance, dance, dance.
Speaker B:So you got all kinds of weird instrumentals which had nothing to do with soul music.
Speaker B:You got lots of great soul music.
Speaker B:A lot of garage music was played there.
Speaker B:It was just a mixture of anything with the correct beat.
Speaker B:Is that what your question meant or what?
Speaker A:Not really.
Speaker A:I was.
Speaker A:It was more like just on the side, I think sometimes you'll get so say with.
Speaker A:With the sort of funk scene and stuff, there was a lot of, you know, people would in certain say, like in the battles in the sort of early hip hop days, they'd be like, covering the labels and stuff so that you couldn't see what the record was.
Speaker A:Yeah, it sounds like with Northern there was a lot more openness about what the record was.
Speaker B:Oh, no, no, no.
Speaker B:All the records were covered, right?
Speaker B:No, the records were all covered.
Speaker B:It was after they'd been made popular.
Speaker B:Mainly it was after another DJ got a copy.
Speaker B:Someone find out what it was, got a copy.
Speaker B:That's when it was uncovered.
Speaker B:But Sailing had records covered.
Speaker B:Butch today.
Speaker B:There's a guy called Butch Today who's got cover ups that he's been playing for 25, 30 years and still nobody knows what they are.
Speaker B:He's still the only one with those copies.
Speaker B:And so, yeah, records were hidden.
Speaker B:It was a ego, complete ego thing.
Speaker B:I got into it once I started to get records that hadn't been played that were good.
Speaker B:I started covering up myself and all that and realized it was complete ego.
Speaker B:It was like, yeah, fuck you, I can play this set and none of you fuckers can because these records are all mine and nobody knows what they are.
Speaker B:And that was it.
Speaker B:A lot of the DJs from the scene, I'll say we did it to protect the artists from bootleggers.
Speaker B:Did you fuck.
Speaker B:You did it to, you know, show off.
Speaker B:You've got fancy records and they don't.
Speaker A:Yeah, but I get, you know, I guess you've kind of.
Speaker A:If you want to stand out from the others.
Speaker A:Yeah, it's a powerful way to stand out as a DJ, isn't it?
Speaker A:And you want to get more DJing and you want to kind of be well thought of in a scene.
Speaker A:So it makes sense, really.
Speaker B:As long as they're killer records.
Speaker B:You're not covering up pish, you know.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:Today some of them cover up push.
Speaker B:What the.
Speaker B:The point in covering up, that is.
Speaker B:So, yeah, you had to pay good money to the dealers to get.
Speaker B:Eventually I was going out and finding them myself, but for the first 10 years at least, I was paying good money to the dealers to get someone nobody knew.
Speaker B:And I'd play it on the phone to folk and see if anyone knew it.
Speaker B:No, don't know that, don't know that.
Speaker B:Cover it up.
Speaker B:Nobody knows it.
Speaker B:And it was great.
Speaker A:So as you got those records then, were you sort of.
Speaker A:The more of those records you got, did you get more bookings?
Speaker A:Which then meant you could kind of justify spending the extra to get the rarer stuff?
Speaker B:I never worried about justifying spending the extra.
Speaker B:So another additive to this story was I didn't take gear, but I used to break into chemists and pinch gear and sell it, you know, sneakily to get money for records and all that.
Speaker B:But where were we now?
Speaker B:Ask that again.
Speaker A:So I was just.
Speaker A:I was just asking if you.
Speaker A:If you were kind of getting more bookings which then justified.
Speaker A:Provided the.
Speaker A:Or provided the funds to be able to get.
Speaker B:No, not for a few years.
Speaker B:No.
Speaker B:I was just doing the odd Scottish thing.
Speaker B:I moved into London in 79.
Speaker B:This is when I sort of took off as a DJ, moved down to London in 79.
Speaker B:I sort of conveniently hooked up with a few of the really big, like, days.
Speaker A:Let's just.
Speaker A:Let's just rewind a bit then, because we'll come on to this.
Speaker A:Because I've not properly asked you about Wigan.
Speaker A:Okay, so what was it, about seven years?
Speaker A:Did you say that you were in Wigan?
Speaker B:Yeah, no, no, I was only there for a year.
Speaker B:I was going from Aberdeen, then Edinburgh, then from London.
Speaker B:When I moved to London, I Was going to Wigan virtually every week.
Speaker B:But I only lived in Wigan for a year.
Speaker B:Then the hotel got put out and they.
Speaker B:They got rid of the living staff so they could use the bedrooms for guests.
Speaker B:So I lost my.
Speaker B:My place to stay in Wigan and went up to Edinburgh then.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:Sorry.
Speaker A:Oh, so you went to Edinburgh before London?
Speaker B:Yeah, Edinburgh before London.
Speaker A:So how was Edinburgh then?
Speaker B:Ah, great.
Speaker B:They had a tremendous Northern scene already before me.
Speaker B:They had a big scene.
Speaker B:Jolly.
Speaker B:One of my heroes, a guy called Jolly from Edinburgh was the one that.
Speaker B:I copied his dancing really, and he taught me about records, what was rare, what wasn't there, what was worth buying and all that.
Speaker B:My mentor was a guy called Jolly from Edinburgh and they had tremendous all nighters.
Speaker B:Clouds in Edinburgh, which Richard Seerling, the Wigan dj, said it was the best all nighters he'd ever been.
Speaker B:Who was Clouds much better than Wigan.
Speaker B:I didn't think so, but they were good and that's.
Speaker B:So Edinburgh had a great scene then?
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker A:Do the scenes vary a lot in the Northern from city to city?
Speaker B:Yeah, it depends on the venue they get, you know.
Speaker B:So Casino was a beautiful venue and they haven't found one as nice since, I don't think.
Speaker B:And the.
Speaker B:What was the whole Clouds in Edinburgh was a great venue.
Speaker B:The Marriott hall in Dundee wasn't as nice, you know.
Speaker B:And Aberdeen, we had the Music hall, which was okay, but not as nice as.
Speaker B:So it depended on the.
Speaker B:Which the venues were and the city you were in.
Speaker B:You know, you needed a wooden dance floor and that dance floor had to have a bit of give in it, otherwise they couldn't do your fancy spins and tricks and all that properly.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:Did you compete in Northern Dancing?
Speaker A:I swear I've seen a clip of it, yeah.
Speaker B:You would have done.
Speaker B:No, I didn't compete on Northern Dancing.
Speaker B:They, After Disco arrived and fucking Saturday Night Fever, they had the EMI World Disco Dancing Championships and they had heats in Aberdeen.
Speaker B:And me and all the Northern Soul troops thought, come on, let's go and take the piss out of the cunts.
Speaker B:So we all go down to this.
Speaker B: e beach ballroom in Aberdeen,: Speaker B:Yeah, 79.
Speaker B:And they announced the prize money.
Speaker B:I'm like, holy.
Speaker B:And I look at this mate of mine, Willie F.
Speaker B:I'm like, fucking hell, I'm going in.
Speaker B:I don't care if I get the piss taker out of me, 500 quid, I'm in and all that.
Speaker B:So I entered the competition there, won that, then did the next sheet, but it was won that and then down to London to.
Speaker B:That's the one you've seen is the finals in Leicester Square.
Speaker B:I can't remember the name of the venue they did it at, but you've seen that.
Speaker B:That was me dancing and that.
Speaker B:But it wasn't a Northern Soul thing.
Speaker B:It was a glitter and wiggle your tits about ballet dancers.
Speaker B:And I came on.
Speaker B:If you actually look at the video closely, you'll see my face.
Speaker B:So I'm coming out to just dance north style.
Speaker B:And there's this wanker with shiny church sing.
Speaker B:Use the whole floor.
Speaker B:Smile, smile.
Speaker B:Use your hands more.
Speaker B:What do you mean, use my hands more?
Speaker B:I'm.
Speaker B:I'm dancing.
Speaker B:They wanted me to do the sort of show dance.
Speaker B:I'm like.
Speaker B:I didn't do show dance.
Speaker B:I just dance in a wee corner.
Speaker B:Normally we don't have enough room to use the whole floor and I.
Speaker B:I wasn't enjoying that.
Speaker B:But that's what you saw was that.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker B:I got plenty of money from winning the first couple of heats and that and bought loads of writers with the money.
Speaker B:So I was very happy with.
Speaker B:With it.
Speaker B:But I didn't fit in that world.
Speaker B:There was agents came around the hotel.
Speaker B:We stayed at the Royal Horse Guards Hotel, which for me back then I was Scottish scum.
Speaker B:Was really posh.
Speaker B:The Royal Horse Guards mom and all that.
Speaker B:And all these agents.
Speaker B:Oh, would you like to sign for my dance troupe?
Speaker B:We have a contract with Granada Television.
Speaker B:I get the.
Speaker B:I dance at clubs.
Speaker B:I'm not interested.
Speaker B:Wes was silly because I could have made money.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:So you mentioned Jolly just before now.
Speaker A:I think something I wanted to ask you about was because for a lot of people, York, you know, you're a certain level of DJ experience.
Speaker B:Bring your hands up higher.
Speaker A:So then it's like there's always someone who knows more or, you know, feeds, you know, we all learn from people.
Speaker A:So it's.
Speaker A:It'd be interesting to hear more about how that relationship came about.
Speaker B:And so Julie wouldn't be the wonderful that Jolly was the early days that taught me stuff.
Speaker B:And then I studied Richard Serling.
Speaker B:So the DJ at Wigan Casino, which if you ask any real Northern soul punter, not these pretend wankers that went once or twice, but the regulars.
Speaker B:Who was the best DJ in Britain in the 70s?
Speaker B:Richard Cernan.
Speaker B:He was getting supplied by John Anderson, who was the biggest record supplier in the world of soul music etc.
Speaker B:Warehouses in America and here with millions of records.
Speaker B:Scottish guy.
Speaker B:And he supplied sailing with unknowns, covered up and all that.
Speaker B:And there you go, Richard, I got a new tune for you.
Speaker B:And the records were fucking tremendous and nobody knew what they were and they were always very rare.
Speaker B:John Anderson made sure that even if people did find out what they were, they're not going to find this record because it's, you know, it was a 200 price only, blah blah blah and there's probably 10 copies left existing.
Speaker B:So sailing I studied sailing to the later and it was just the basics of make sure your records are top notch.
Speaker B:Don't play half baked records that have got the beat but are not quite there.
Speaker B:Play just perfect records, make sure the records are things that other people aren't going to get easily and all that.
Speaker B:So covering up will protect you for a while but unless the record's there as soon as it's uncovered, if it's on ABC or RCA or something like that, they're going to fucking find it.
Speaker B:So go for the obscure labels and he didn't tell me.
Speaker B:I just watched the.
Speaker B:Yeah, so I based myself, still do today, on what Richard Cerner was doing at the casino.
Speaker B:It was exciting for me as a customer I thought, well if it's exciting for me it's going to be exciting for us and if I do it, maybe I can bring that excitement to some other people as well.
Speaker B:So I copied Seerlink to the letter.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:So what was it that took you then from Edinburgh to London?
Speaker B:A bit of rough one I was trying to disappear with.
Speaker B:There was a guy selling bum gear.
Speaker B:So there was people died, there was an all nighter at Wakefield and they found six dead bodies in the morning and then there was a couple other deaths.
Speaker B:Etc.
Speaker B:Our mate Bruce died from bum gear at bum speed.
Speaker B:He died in Edinburgh and then me and a few others sort of pieced together this gray Jaguar had been seen outside selling gear to the troops, to the northern soulpunters at every scene when someone died.
Speaker B:So we tracked down the gray Jaguar and chastised them and then I thought I better get away before the police find us.
Speaker B:We went quite wild, you know, I was actually sick after it.
Speaker B:I thought fucking hell.
Speaker B:So I thought I better go this because, you know, I didn't know but I assumed half of me were singing Fuck me, you know we're going to get done for supreme violence.
Speaker B:So I disappeared to London and my sister was living in London at the time.
Speaker B:She's seven years older than me so it was an easy place to go and I can stay there in London.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:Are you happy to keep that in?
Speaker B:That doesn't matter.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker A:Okay, let's check in.
Speaker B:I'll get arrested next week.
Speaker B:The place, right.
Speaker B: Grey Jaguar,: Speaker B:One of those guys died.
Speaker B:Or did he?
Speaker A:Oh, yeah, yeah.
Speaker A:So I'm thinking of getting you on my podcast now.
Speaker A:I've heard people come on your podcast and get sent down.
Speaker A:That'll be the end of it.
Speaker B:That'll be the end, yeah.
Speaker A:So what was it like landing in London?
Speaker A:What area were you in?
Speaker B:When I first came down?
Speaker B:I remember the Grenfell Tower that burned down.
Speaker B:I was at the tower next to it.
Speaker B:Tower.
Speaker B:So that's where we were.
Speaker B:I thought, I'm going to go in Northern Seoul.
Speaker B:That's me finished with Northern.
Speaker B:After that event, you know that I'm not going to bother with Northern.
Speaker B:So on I started going to Wally clubs or normal clubs.
Speaker B:I'd go to the Camden palace and Steve Strange and Rusty Egan and Steve Strange was.
Speaker B:Hey, I remember you from Wigan.
Speaker B:You're the dancer, aren't you?
Speaker B:You're.
Speaker B:They used to call me Hercules or something.
Speaker B:Not Hercules, Tarzan or something like that.
Speaker B:They're a nickname for me.
Speaker B:I got the dance.
Speaker B:Oh, would you come and dance for us?
Speaker B:Here, for sakes.
Speaker B:I don't like this.
Speaker B:I don't like this.
Speaker A:What.
Speaker A:What year was this?
Speaker B:79.
Speaker B:Right, 79.
Speaker B:I moved away again.
Speaker B:I.
Speaker B:Then I got a girlfriend in London, Michelle and all that, and took her to clubs, etc.
Speaker B:And then I thought this.
Speaker B:I'm fed up.
Speaker B:I'm moving back to Aberdeen.
Speaker B:I can't handle London.
Speaker B:It's really boring.
Speaker B:Boring.
Speaker B:And everyone's a wally.
Speaker B:So me and Michelle moved to Aberdeen, went to Northern.
Speaker B:Night there, bought Echoes.
Speaker B:Do you know Black Echoes used to be called Black Echoes?
Speaker B:Then it became Echoes.
Speaker B:It was a newspaper every week for black music fans in the 70s and all that.
Speaker B:So I got it.
Speaker B:It goes the back page looking at what clubs are on, and it says, six Days Soul Nights London.
Speaker B:I thought, oh, they're starting a Northern night in London after I've gone.
Speaker B:So I moved back down to London.
Speaker B:I went to the 60s club, which was run by AD Crossdale, who I now work with at Ace Records and that.
Speaker B:And I was like, oh.
Speaker B:But they wouldn't play Northern.
Speaker B:They were just playing 60s soul, which is a huge difference.
Speaker B:A lot of people can't judge that.
Speaker B:I've seen some compilations come out and it's just 60s.
Speaker B:So that's not northern.
Speaker B:That's 60 soul.
Speaker B:There's a big difference.
Speaker A:How do you delineate?
Speaker A:Because the main Thing for me with Northern is the four to the floor.
Speaker A:Like I use the word stompers.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:So stompers were stompers.
Speaker B:You also had hand clappers, which were records where the crowd were being.
Speaker B:And it'd be a slower record with a bit.
Speaker B:You had shufflers, which was the first footwork ones.
Speaker B:And yeah, the slow records were douch, douch.
Speaker B:But it had to have that slight thing for you to waddle to.
Speaker B:It couldn't be a funky, jittery beat.
Speaker B:It had to have a certain beat to it.
Speaker B:So there's 60s soul records that would never have got into the Northern scene at all.
Speaker B:They're being played today on the Northern scene.
Speaker B:It's disgusting.
Speaker B:And where did we come to?
Speaker B:Why did we come there?
Speaker B:Yes, they were playing 60s soul and hits.
Speaker B:And so in Northern that had been the early days of Northern, but was really dull compared to the stuff that Sailing was playing.
Speaker B:Like walking up a One way Street Will at to me is a really boring record.
Speaker B:But it was big at the Wheel and the Torch, but nothing like the stuff Sailor was playing at Wigan.
Speaker B:And they were playing all this stuff, I thought, yeah.
Speaker B:But I went and had a wee dance and all that.
Speaker B:And then I took Michelle to Wigan and that was my first trip to Wigan for six months or something.
Speaker B:And then that was me off again.
Speaker B:And there's a new all nighter in Clifton Hall, Rotherham.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:I'm going there as well.
Speaker B:But I just started going from London up to Wigan, Rotherham, Manchester, whatever was on.
Speaker B:I'd go from London to.
Speaker B:Because there was nothing for me in London.
Speaker B:There was no clubs.
Speaker B:That 60s thing was all right.
Speaker B:I could meet folk who had been on the Northern scene.
Speaker B:A lot of them were older than me, they'd been to the Wheel and stuff like that.
Speaker B:But they weren't interested in Northern at that time.
Speaker B:They were two years later, though.
Speaker B:There you go.
Speaker B:Shall I do that?
Speaker B:They were two years later though.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker B:So there was a mod scene.
Speaker B:The Quadraphena had come out and the mod scene was becoming huge in London and they were putting on mod nights and the mod kids were dancing the 60s.
Speaker B:So I was in a shop in Leyton.
Speaker B:Jim Wilson, who used to buy bulk off John Anderson, was selling his stock and he had a sale, 50p or whatever, a record.
Speaker B:And I was in there picking out bags and bags of records and all that and yapping to the guy.
Speaker B:So there was a chap behind me listening to me and he worked out.
Speaker B:This guy's a Northern Soul bloke.
Speaker B:This guy's a Northern Soul bloke.
Speaker B:So I get a tap on the shoulder.
Speaker B:Excuse me, could you pick out some Northern Soul records for me?
Speaker B:All right, son, you want one of them, you'll want one of them and all that.
Speaker B:I run a club at the Albany in Great Portland Street.
Speaker B:Would you come in and DJ with us sometime?
Speaker B:All right, okay, I'll come.
Speaker B:So I came down to this Albany thing, mod night and all that.
Speaker B:I'm sitting there, I mean, a sales box, like 50 count, sales box.
Speaker B:This is a funny one.
Speaker B:And then it was a copy of Tina Britt, the Real Thing and that.
Speaker B:And this mod guy comes up and sees it and like, oh, and I've got 50 written on it, meaning 50p.
Speaker B:And this guy comes up, oh, oh, could you keep that for me?
Speaker B:I'll go and borrow the money.
Speaker B:I'll be back.
Speaker B:I'm going to borrow the money.
Speaker B:I'm going to borrow the money.
Speaker B:I said, what, 50p?
Speaker B:You're gonna put a 50p?
Speaker B:You know.
Speaker B:So off he goes.
Speaker B:He comes back and starts counting out 50 quid.
Speaker B:I'm like, what the are you doing?
Speaker B:It's 50 pence.
Speaker B:But.
Speaker B:But Dick says he's got the only copy in Britain.
Speaker B:You mean he's got the only copy.
Speaker B:I've got 40 copies at home.
Speaker B:I'll bring you another one next week.
Speaker B:I found out they're lying.
Speaker B:They were cheating their crowd and pretending they had all these super discoveries, but they didn't know all and all that.
Speaker B:So I sort of made my way with the mods and got in with a sort of cool mod types then because I was the one that was in amongst them that actually knew the records.
Speaker B:None of them had a clue about the records, but I knew the records.
Speaker B:However, the one guy did teach me some and there was Simon Sento who was into it.
Speaker B:He was part of that club and he took me to my first rockabilly club and I was like, whoa, I like this too.
Speaker B:This is exactly like us.
Speaker B:You know, the dancing is very important and they've got rare records.
Speaker B:And I thought, oh, I like this rockabilly thing.
Speaker B:So that introduced me to rockabilly and he was a mod and a rockabilly, which is very weird for the time, but yeah.
Speaker B:So then Eddie Crowsdale, who was running the 60s night.
Speaker B:Where are we now?
Speaker B: ,: Speaker B:Eventually Eddie Crosdale was putting on clubs.
Speaker B:And eventually he went to the Hundred Club in Oxford street and says, can I put on an all nighter of 60s music on a Saturday night?
Speaker B:Starting at midnight or whatever it was, finishing 8 in the morning.
Speaker B:And they said yes.
Speaker B:So me, Alec Murray for Aberdeen, who had moved down to stalemate to get a job.
Speaker B:Well, I got my job in a butcher's factory and all that.
Speaker B:And three guys for Dundee Kanga.
Speaker B:Who else was it?
Speaker B:Joe Hairfall.
Speaker B:Three Dundee boys that were fucking off to the Isle of Wight to pick potatoes because they couldn't get jobs in Dundee because of Margaret Thatcher or some shite, were at the Hundred Club.
Speaker B:And it was all these mods that turned up.
Speaker B:And there's me, Joe Heffolk, Anger, five real Northern punters, Scottish ones and all that.
Speaker B:And they're playing this 60s stuff like fucking hell.
Speaker B:And we're all going up to the dj, please, please sub Northern.
Speaker B:Will you please, please have Northern, please, please, Of Northern.
Speaker B:And eventually One of the DJs, Mick Smith says, what the fuck's wrong with Northern anyway?
Speaker B:And he put on Lennox guess.
Speaker B:And we were like, yes.
Speaker B:And then the five of us started dancing and spinning, flipping over into the box.
Speaker B:Splits.
Speaker B:Whoosh.
Speaker B:Flipping back.
Speaker B:You could see these mods going, oh, what the fuck?
Speaker B:They're cooler than us.
Speaker B:We want to do with that.
Speaker B:I thought, yeah, we're cool, you fuckers.
Speaker B:And all these mods were coming like, how'd you do that?
Speaker B:Would you do that?
Speaker B:Would you do that?
Speaker B:So I organized a coach to go to Wigan and take all these London mods up to Wigan Casino to show them what they were missing and all that.
Speaker B:And from then on, eddie and his 60s club had all these mods.
Speaker B:Now, not just me and a few others, pasted them.
Speaker B:Play Northern.
Speaker B:Play Northern.
Speaker B:Play Northern.
Speaker B:So I says, ke, you're dean now.
Speaker B:Play Northern.
Speaker B:You can do a Northern set.
Speaker B:Exactly.
Speaker B:He'll deny it and say he was playing Northern all along.
Speaker B:But you weren't A.D.
Speaker B:you were playing 60s solo, which wasn't Northern.
Speaker B:It had been Twisted Wheel music, but it wasn't up to date Northern, which was much more violent.
Speaker B:And that's how Northern took off at the Hundred Club in London, which is still going.
Speaker B:The All Nighters there are still going.
Speaker B:I was there two weeks ago, still going strong.
Speaker A:So was that the point when you started going to America then, about that?
Speaker B:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker B:So I hooked up with Dave Withers.
Speaker B:Dave Raistick was getting lots of records off them and then I was dealing with a guy.
Speaker B:I was dealing.
Speaker B:There was two newspapers in America you could get.
Speaker B:One was called Discoveries, another one was called Gold Mine and it was American record collectors, newspapers, but they were all collecting doo Wop was huge.
Speaker B:And rock, they collected rock and doo wop.
Speaker B:And all the dealers, addresses and adverts were on the back.
Speaker B:So I was dealing with this guy.
Speaker B:Oh, God, what's his name?
Speaker B:Edna Minor.
Speaker B:Richard Miner.
Speaker B:Richard Miner in Florida, big dealer in Florida, big warehouse.
Speaker B:It was also a bootlegger who got done for bootlegging Elvis Presley stuff.
Speaker B:He died and all that.
Speaker B:And I thought, oh, what a shame.
Speaker B:Brilliant.
Speaker B:The wife won't have a fucking clue.
Speaker B:I'm going to Florida.
Speaker B:And so books this flight to Florida and then fucking phones up his wife and.
Speaker B:Hello, I've flown over to get the records.
Speaker B:I have to have a look at your husband.
Speaker B:I'm really sorry about your husband.
Speaker B:Can I come and see the records?
Speaker B:We're not ready for you yet, sir.
Speaker B:I'm sorry.
Speaker B:We're a period of mourning.
Speaker B:I understand, I understand.
Speaker B:So I sat on fucking Miami beach for a few days.
Speaker B:Phones up again, sorry, we are not ready yet.
Speaker B:It.
Speaker B:So I goes up to Orlando.
Speaker B:There was a shop there, King Arthur's, an Orlando record shop, which was worth skifting through.
Speaker B:So I skipped through that, but kept most of my money for this minor collection.
Speaker B:Eventually, okay, you come round now.
Speaker B:So I goes round, gets a taxi.
Speaker B:I was outskirts of Miami, on the other side from the beach, and all that in a walk.
Speaker B:I've stolen this story loads of times because it's my favorite collecting story.
Speaker B:So I walks into the house and this old wifey over, wig on, comes here, come here.
Speaker B:How you doing?
Speaker B:Okay?
Speaker B:And don't ignore Davey there her son was lying on the sofa with two bottles of Jack Daniels next to him in his own piss.
Speaker B:And.
Speaker B:Oh, hell.
Speaker B:All right.
Speaker B:So I sits down and she goes, would you like a soda?
Speaker B:Yes, please.
Speaker B:Could I get a Coke, please?
Speaker B:Okay, son.
Speaker B:So out she goes to the kitchen, comes back in, pumps shotgun, sticks it in my bars.
Speaker B:You try and steal them fucking records, I'll blow your fucking balls off, boy.
Speaker B:I know what you people do.
Speaker B:You throw them out the window and come back at night and get them.
Speaker B:Well, you won't be stealing from me.
Speaker B:I'm like, no, no, I'm just here to buy records.
Speaker B:It's okay.
Speaker B:All right, then.
Speaker B:I'll be watching you.
Speaker B:And we've got dogs.
Speaker B:We got dogs.
Speaker B:You won't come back at night.
Speaker B:I'm like, okay, fair enough.
Speaker B:So I get to the record warehouse and sure enough, there's fucking seven dogs.
Speaker B:Wild dog running around outside it like, oh, she's really worried.
Speaker B:And I goes, downstairs was all the sun records and the Rockabilly, which they were into themselves.
Speaker B:It's not for you.
Speaker B:Your stuff's upstairs.
Speaker B:I said, okay, then.
Speaker B:So it goes upstairs and it's 100 count cardboard boxes with all kinds of creatures living inside them.
Speaker B:And I'm pulling them out and looking through and I'm finding labels like Arctic and not Shrine, but, you know, no.
Speaker B:1 Northern labels.
Speaker B:But the good records aren't there.
Speaker B:It's like the numbering sequences, you know, 1, 2, 3, 7, 11, 13, 15, 19.
Speaker B:Where's the good records?
Speaker B:Oh, we had a couple of boys over from England just before you came.
Speaker B:I thought with that mark, Butch Dobbs, I'm like, oh, me?
Speaker B:He's, you know, one of my best pals, you know.
Speaker B:And with that Tim, I should bend there.
Speaker B:This is a good one for listeners that enjoy Tim Ash Ebendi.
Speaker B:I like this story.
Speaker B:You know that Tim Ashe Bendi.
Speaker B:We've been dealing with him in the Mailing Owl for years.
Speaker B:We invited him over here out of the goodness of our heart.
Speaker B:And not once, not once did he have the decency to tell us he was a nigger.
Speaker B:We don't have niggers round these parts.
Speaker B:I'm like, oh, yeah, fuck.
Speaker B:As soon as I got back, I phoned up, tim, Tim, do you know you're a nigger?
Speaker B:He knew.
Speaker B:Exactly.
Speaker B:He says, oh, you've been to say Edna Miner, have you, Keb?
Speaker B:I was like, she must have said it to him.
Speaker B:He knew who I was talking about, so she must have said it directly to him.
Speaker B:I'm like, hell.
Speaker B:All right then, Tim.
Speaker B:Good boy.
Speaker B:So anyway, I get through the place.
Speaker B:I spend three days going through the warehouse, just the upstairs bit.
Speaker B:Went for a shit downstairs where the toilet was.
Speaker B:She follows me with her shotgun.
Speaker B:I'm on the pan here.
Speaker B:She sits in a seat in the toilet beside me with a shotgun.
Speaker B:So I don't go near the Elvis Reyes.
Speaker B:So I stood up and wiped my ass right in her face.
Speaker B:And she didn't flinch, she didn't move.
Speaker B:Anyway, gets back to the house after three days.
Speaker B:I've just got a small basket with about 50 or 60 records, nothing special and all that.
Speaker B:Wake up Davey Price, that man's records for him.
Speaker B:Obviously the son knew more about the prices than she did and all that.
Speaker B:Okay, so she's fitting about.
Speaker B:And how much would you like to pay for these records, Sir?
Speaker B:I said $2 apiece.
Speaker B:Off comes her wig, throws it on the ground into the kitchen, grabs her pump, shotgun again.
Speaker B:I ain't working my fanny off for no fucking $2 of records.
Speaker B:The son gets up, stands up, smack, knocks his mother out.
Speaker B:She passes out.
Speaker B:I hope my mother hasn't given you a bad impression of our fair state, sir.
Speaker B:No, that's fine with $2 for these, but I want $8 for this one.
Speaker B:I know it's worth money in your country.
Speaker B:I said, okay, fine.
Speaker B:There you go.
Speaker B:Thanks very much.
Speaker B:I have to rush off.
Speaker B:I went, that was Richard, Ray Namina.
Speaker B:And then fucking years later, I'm at Camden Market and a young boy comes along, American, looking through the records they were selling, and I thought, oh, this guy's very knowledgeable.
Speaker B:What's your name?
Speaker B:Josh.
Speaker B:All right, blah, blah, blah.
Speaker B:How the do you know these records?
Speaker B:Oh, I'm a collector.
Speaker B:All right.
Speaker B:Eventually I found out it was DJ Shadow Y Images.
Speaker B:Well, I got a big hit in Florida.
Speaker B:This old lady, she was mad.
Speaker B:I said, was her name in the minor?
Speaker A:Yes.
Speaker B:So Josh went in there and got all the funk, because when I was there, I wasn't interested in funk.
Speaker B:So Josh had been in and cleaned out of the funk from there after me.
Speaker B:He was in there a couple of years after me and got the funk out of it.
Speaker B:I thought, shit, if only I'd been into the funk then.
Speaker A:Did they have a similar experience to you or with him being a man?
Speaker B:She was a bad bastard.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:It might have been just a fucking off day, I don't know.
Speaker B:He was in two years later.
Speaker B:She may have mellowed, but Tim definitely got told what she thought he was.
Speaker B:You know, if I phone him up and say, tim, you know your nigger.
Speaker B:And her name came straight out of his mouth.
Speaker B:Edna Minor.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:Okay.
Speaker A:After that trip, were you starting to make more regular trips then?
Speaker B:Yeah, I did.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:So I hooked up eventually with John Manship.
Speaker B:Do you know John Manship?
Speaker B:He's like the biggest, biggest dealer of soul music in Britain, if not Europe, probably Europe.
Speaker B:And the biggest auctions of northern soul in the world is John Manship's.
Speaker B:So me and him hooked up.
Speaker B:He, me and him were pals from the all nighters and all that.
Speaker B:But he became this very businessman type record dealer, you know, made millions out of it.
Speaker B:And it's just kebja.
Speaker B:Fancy coming with me?
Speaker B:I'm doing a trip to New York and all that.
Speaker B:I thought I knew bothered.
Speaker B:Can you introduce me to the pals with the Dap Tone people then who weren't Daptone?
Speaker B:They were disco.
Speaker B:Then there was a French guy started it who had a big collection that John had heard about.
Speaker B:You know him, Gabe can you introduce me?
Speaker B:I know bother.
Speaker B:Come on.
Speaker B:So we went and then John, he said it himself on a video.
Speaker B:He says, I just had such a laugh with Kev that we went every time together because we had a good laugh and found lots of records.
Speaker B:You know, we're both hard workers.
Speaker B:So I've gone with some people and you see a warehouse in front, you whoosh.
Speaker B:And they'll flick through for eight hours and then, oh, my back.
Speaker B:Oh, well, that's enough.
Speaker B:I've got some.
Speaker B:Whereas me and John.
Speaker B:No, you go to the last fucking record in the very last box because you don't know what you're going to miss.
Speaker B:Your daft bastard.
Speaker B:But most people won't do that.
Speaker B:So I think John liked me because I'd fucking.
Speaker B:No, you're looking at every record in this warehouse.
Speaker B:It doesn't matter if you find nothing for 10 hours or two days.
Speaker B:There may be something on day three.
Speaker A:Yeah, I think.
Speaker A:I think your sort of level of digger, you built differently.
Speaker A:I've probably got about two hours of stamina.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:Yes, Softy.
Speaker B:Yeah, but then I today, back then, there was a much bigger reward back then, you know, you go in there and you find a fucking 25 count box of Shrine records.
Speaker B:That's a year's wages in your hand there, you know, and you're probably going to pay fucking an hour's wages to get them.
Speaker B:So the reward was much bigger, you know, so they said after hip hop kicked off, every American town had a digger in it.
Speaker B:Before that, nobody.
Speaker B:You never hear of Americans buying these records.
Speaker B:Just didn't seem to happen, you know, they bought doop was what the American big collectors collected was doop was their thing and rock.
Speaker B: tuff, which I did until about: Speaker B:When was the last time I went?
Speaker B: About: Speaker B:I went out, spent two weeks with John Manship.
Speaker B:He got thousands of records because he was selling them.
Speaker B:I was just buying records from a DJ box and I got two records.
Speaker B:And that was with the cost of the flight, cost of the hotel, cost of the higher car.
Speaker B:Oh, I thought, nah, it, you know, waste of time.
Speaker A:Would it have been sort of say about 88 when all the diggers and the hip hop?
Speaker A:Because, like, sort of when the sampling.
Speaker B:Yeah, I don't know when they did it because only, you know, I met Josh in about 93, 94 and that was my first American digger that I knew, other than the old man that collected do.
Speaker B:Whoops.
Speaker B:So I don't know the Americans would know that.
Speaker B:But I noticed that from about 88 or before, the chance of finding someone was going zoom.
Speaker B:And come 92, 93, it just went zoom.
Speaker B:The chance of finding great finds, it disappeared because the Americans had souped it all up themselves.
Speaker A:So till that point, were you still really focused on Northern?
Speaker B:Yeah, at that point I was focused on northern and modern Seoul, which is not modern at all.
Speaker B: to: Speaker B:Yeah, disco sound, but a bit more soulful and professional sounding music was the.
Speaker B:What they called the modern soul scene, which is a spin off with the northern scene.
Speaker B:So I was after that sort of late 70s soulful, good disco sound.
Speaker B:I was buying that stuff.
Speaker A:Would you separate that from the term rare groove?
Speaker B:Yeah, definitely.
Speaker B:Totally separate things.
Speaker B:So the rare groove scene was in London.
Speaker B:So here's another story for you then.
Speaker B:The mate called Garlic George from Derby and that is called Garlic is that.
Speaker B:Oh yeah, in Derby just now.
Speaker B:You probably know Garlic George is dead now though.
Speaker B:George Raymonds.
Speaker B:And he was.
Speaker B:He's an old guy.
Speaker B:I think he was a Polish evacuee during the war as a kid.
Speaker B:Because I went to his house a few times to look through the records and there was paintings of him and his fancy gear, like black and white, 40s paint.
Speaker B:Hell, that's George.
Speaker B:He's from a rich family in Poland and he was going to the States and buying everything, taking it back and he was supplying DJs and all that.
Speaker B:He was in the head.
Speaker B:And I tend to get on with people who are in the head.
Speaker B:So he.
Speaker B:He phoned me up once when I was at.
Speaker B:Well, I worked in a butcher's factory back then, early 80s.
Speaker B:And phoned me up to say, oh, ke just round for your advice.
Speaker B:Because you.
Speaker B:You seem to be honest with me.
Speaker B:I've realized that the neighbors are possessed with demons.
Speaker B:So I've cut their brake cables this morning.
Speaker B:Do you think it's.
Speaker B:Do you think it'll be okay?
Speaker B:I'm like, ah, George.
Speaker B:To deal with demons.
Speaker B:The best people that know about demons are psychiatrists.
Speaker B:They don't only deal with psychiatry, they deal with the occult and the devils as well.
Speaker B:You best go and see one and you know they'll tell you how to deal with your neighbors who are obviously demons and all that.
Speaker B:Another one, I went to his house.
Speaker B:He's got two houses full of records.
Speaker B:One in Nottingham which is just for storing records in.
Speaker B:And we goes into the house, it's about tea time, it's getting dark.
Speaker B:Outside and okay, this room's the blah, blah, blah, blah.
Speaker B:This is the British stuff.
Speaker B:And upstairs, this is our Philadelphia here, Detroit there.
Speaker B:And I goes to open the curtains to let the light in.
Speaker B:No, no, don't open the curtains.
Speaker B:They're always watching.
Speaker B:They're always watching.
Speaker B:Looks out and it's a empty field.
Speaker B:I'm like, holy shit.
Speaker B:Okay, this boy's off the heat.
Speaker B:Anyway, George used to come down to my flat in London in the early 80s with two or three boxes of 45s and all that.
Speaker B:Always three or four for me.
Speaker B:I got these for you.
Speaker B:Nobody knows that.
Speaker B:This one's Jesse Davis.
Speaker B:I think it'll go big on the scene.
Speaker B:Thank you, George, on that.
Speaker B:And then off he'd go on a Saturday afternoon to Camden and sell them to the shop in Camden, etc.
Speaker B:Then he'd come back and right, George, you fancy going for a drink?
Speaker B:I've got an appointment.
Speaker B:I've got an appointment.
Speaker B:He was an ugly, the ugliest on the planet, who no woman would ever sleep with.
Speaker B:So off he goes to his appointment and then he comes back with a big smile on his face.
Speaker B:It's been to a prostitute, obviously, you know that.
Speaker B:And then back to Derby a few years later, when I did get into funk, I was seeing that the Rare Groove Boys had been playing some records that were actually there.
Speaker B:Like two or three things that were rare.
Speaker B:Most of the Rare Groove stuff was just children's records that you, you know, you'll find fucking thousand counts of them in any American warehouse back then.
Speaker B:But there was two or three that were rare.
Speaker B:I says, george, have you got a copy of the Leroy and the Driver's side Chicken on Julia?
Speaker B:Oh, yes, it was quite funny, Kep.
Speaker B:I sold about 20 or 30 of those to that shop in Camden back in the years.
Speaker B:I used to bring these records for these rare groove people.
Speaker B:It was all just funk.
Speaker B:Etc.
Speaker B:They weren't interested in rarity, they'd just buy anything.
Speaker B:But yes, I have still got a couple and I'll bring it up.
Speaker B:What about the Apostles?
Speaker B:Oh, yes, that was another one that was popular with the Camden people as well.
Speaker B:So George Raymond's was by his desire for a prostitute was what really kicked off the rare groove scene and supplied the rare groove scene.
Speaker B:I believe that to this day because I made pals with what was the big Rare Groove dj.
Speaker B:Not Norman.
Speaker B:Norman wouldn't he buy.
Speaker B:Now, I used to try and sell rare records to Norman J, but he wouldn't pay money for them.
Speaker B:You know, he'd Buy the cheaper ones.
Speaker B:And he was a nice boy.
Speaker B:There was another one, another guy who was into it.
Speaker B:What was his name?
Speaker B:He had a record shop called Quaff Records and Finsbury park.
Speaker B:And I went to meet Roy the Roach.
Speaker B:Roy the Roach, Roy, he still promotes now he does house nights as a promoter.
Speaker B:But Roy the Roach was a black guy who was deadly serious into the records.
Speaker B:I went into his shop once, started talking to him and all that.
Speaker B:He was like, holy, how do you know all these things?
Speaker B:He said, okay.
Speaker B:So he started hanging about with me and he'd go to Northern Soldiers with me to look through the records.
Speaker B:So he was one of them that actually did dig.
Speaker B:But he's the only one, you know, the rest of them played about at it.
Speaker B:Yeah, really.
Speaker B:I'm going to upset a few people and they'll, oh, how could he say that?
Speaker B:But no, they did.
Speaker B:They were only turning up big records.
Speaker B:They weren't turning up rare records.
Speaker B:They should have called it Groove, not Rare Groove.
Speaker B:It was like easy to get in any American cutout shop.
Speaker B:Groove should have been the correct name.
Speaker B:James Brown's and you know, Curtis Mayfields and have you heard of Eddie Bow?
Speaker B:I'm like, are you fucking joking?
Speaker B:I was at his house a few months ago.
Speaker B:What are you talking about?
Speaker B:Grip.
Speaker B:So it wasn't.
Speaker B:So, yes, the rare groove scene, it didn't interest me because it wasn't digging deep.
Speaker B: So in: Speaker B:So I got married.
Speaker B:And then about a year later, not even that, six months later.
Speaker B:When are you going to stop buying records?
Speaker B:Sell the records, buy a new house?
Speaker B:Right, this is me.
Speaker B:That's who you married, that's what I do.
Speaker B:What are you going to buy?
Speaker B:Records?
Speaker B:Divorced.
Speaker B:Unfortunately though, it was, you're going to lose your house or flat.
Speaker B:It was, I got the place by then and this bugger's going to get it.
Speaker B:So I thought, I can get rid of her.
Speaker B:So I put up all my rare Northerns for sale.
Speaker B:I think I got 70,000 quid for it.
Speaker B:Butch and Rob Marriott brought the big pieces.
Speaker B:Hand selected pieces at big silly prices.
Speaker B:And then John Manship came and bought the list.
Speaker B:And I dumped 70,000 pound on the table for this woman and said, sign this please.
Speaker B:And off she fought and I never saw her again.
Speaker B:And then I'd up in the loft, all the junk and all the rubbish.
Speaker B:So you would buy blinds?
Speaker B:Back when I was going to the States, you could buy blind because it was so cheap.
Speaker B:You'd look at the label, I think, well, I Don't know that.
Speaker B:Don't know that.
Speaker B:This may be good.
Speaker B:So you'd buy it.
Speaker B:I'll listen to it when I get home.
Speaker B:That we hadn't the sound burgers then, they hadn't been invented.
Speaker B:So it was just.
Speaker B:You had to use your eyes and guess if it was going to be good.
Speaker B:And then listen, when you got back, they were up in the loft and that had a neighbor called Jimbo, who I met him when he was like 14 and he was getting into hip hop and all that.
Speaker B:Had to taste hip hop, but he was getting into hip hop.
Speaker B:And anyway, he gave me a cassette and plays it at home and it's this rare funk stuff.
Speaker B:I'm like, oh, this is quite good music and all that.
Speaker B:These are quite rare looking records.
Speaker B:I says, jim, where are these records?
Speaker B:He brought them around.
Speaker B:Nobody's Leon Gardner.
Speaker B:Oh, that's quite rare.
Speaker B:I've never seen that before.
Speaker B:Yes, you have.
Speaker B:How?
Speaker B:You gave me them all.
Speaker B:When I said I was into hip hop, you gave me all these records.
Speaker B:I'm taking them back now, okay?
Speaker B:So I got these records back and I went up into the loft.
Speaker B:I thought this Rear Groove, at that point Rear Groove was dying because house was arriving.
Speaker B:Yeah, and all these DJs that we rear Groove, we love Rare Groove were switching instantly to, oh, this is the new thing.
Speaker B:This is the new thing.
Speaker B:And Rare Groove was dumped by them.
Speaker B:So I thought, well, these idiots have scratched the surface of what they call rare groove.
Speaker B:Okay, I've got the next level of it in my loft and now I'm going to go around all my old Northern soul mates and get funk records out of them.
Speaker B:And I was getting things like Arthur Mundy handed to me for nothing from Northern Soulmates, Latin, whatever.
Speaker B:It's that blue label and CNL and real heavy function.
Speaker B:I was getting all these super rare functions from my old Northern soul mates for free.
Speaker B:Would you want that shite for?
Speaker B:Take it, take it, take it.
Speaker B:So I built this up.
Speaker B:I was DJing at a club called the Brain Club and just down from the Wag Club on Wardle street, which was a really cool trendy club.
Speaker B:And I was the sort of regular DJ there with folks started there, Harvey, DJ Harvey and folk like that were starting there.
Speaker B:And that Boyzone thing before Boy Zone, Harvey was doing the Brain.
Speaker B:Anyway, I was actually doing the warm up set really, because I'd fucking sold on my big Nolan.
Speaker B:I was just playing a bit of Gnoll and a bit of this funky stuff, a bit of that.
Speaker B:Then The Brain Club got a booking to take the Brain Club to Iceland.
Speaker B:And at the same weekend, some people in Japan wanted the Brain Club to go to Japan.
Speaker B:Now, at that time, Japan was completely uncool and nobody wanted to go to Japan.
Speaker B:The Breton Club.
Speaker B:So Mark wiggin and Sean McClusket was that run it.
Speaker B:They said, keb, we're all going to Iceland.
Speaker B:Sorry, but you are going to Japan.
Speaker B:I thought, oh, yeah, you're going to represent the Brain Club in a club called Gold in Bayside in Tokyo.
Speaker B:I said, okay.
Speaker B:And then you've got another night in the Cave Club in Shibuya.
Speaker B:I thought, okay, okay, I'll go.
Speaker B:I'm getting paid for it.
Speaker B:I might as well go.
Speaker B:So I goes out there for two nights and I'm at this club called Gold, which was like three floors, great big floor, playing this new house nonsense downstairs.
Speaker B:Then the middle floor was me wore this, playing funk and soul.
Speaker B:And then the top floor, I was voguing with some.
Speaker B:Whatever voguing music was at the time.
Speaker B:You're probably too young to remember that electro beat, pop rock, right?
Speaker B:Go Go or whatever they called it was on the.
Speaker B:The top floor.
Speaker B:So I'm playing, I got a Q.
Speaker B:One side of my otakus, which are like obsessive collectory types.
Speaker B:Japanese attack was one side like, oh, oh, nanny, sorry, nanny, sorry.
Speaker B:Oh.
Speaker B:Looking at the records, I've got a queue of young ladies this side asking if I'd teach them English.
Speaker B:I'm like, hell, this is nice and all that.
Speaker B:Blah, blah, blah, blah.
Speaker B:Anyway, the end of the night, I'm like, fuck me.
Speaker B:That was brilliant.
Speaker B:You know, they were all going wild to the ring as I was playing.
Speaker B:Oh, fucking, that's much better than playing at the Brain Club.
Speaker B:The guy comes to pay me.
Speaker B:And I learned later in Japanese culture, they apologize for everything, no matter how good it is.
Speaker B:So this guy comes up, oh, gomen ASAI kibza no, kani was koshi daki.
Speaker B:I did not speak Japanese then.
Speaker B:So I asked this girl, what did he say?
Speaker B:Oh, he said, it's not much money.
Speaker B:He's very sorry.
Speaker B:Okay, how much is it?
Speaker B:I have no idea.
Speaker B:I've never seen yen before.
Speaker B:750 quid.
Speaker B:No, you daft Mitch.
Speaker B:You mean 75 quid.
Speaker B:No, 750 quid.
Speaker B: This was: Speaker B:I'm like, what?
Speaker B:Are you serious?
Speaker B:They pay me 20 quid at the Brain Club and I've just got 750 quid for playing records.
Speaker B:I'm staying here.
Speaker B:So I phoned my mate Speedy and said, speedy, you can have my flat.
Speaker B:I'm never coming back to Britain.
Speaker B:I'm going to live in Japan for the rest of of my life.
Speaker B:And I stayed there for six months until immigration caught up with me and all that.
Speaker B:And my mates in Japan told me I could go to Korea and then come back and go to Korea.
Speaker B:But I thought, no, I'm going back to Britain, I'm going to find a Japanese woman, marry her and get a visa so I can live in Japan for the rest of my life.
Speaker B:But in that six months, I was tittering about all clubs and sort of created the first deep funk scene.
Speaker B:Deep funk started in Japan.
Speaker B:It didn't start in Britain, it was Japan.
Speaker B:It took off then first, I know that.
Speaker B:And I said, oh, hell.
Speaker B:So I was really sad to leave.
Speaker B:I remember getting off the plane here, the Heathrow, and driving a taxi in London because I had 750 quid wages and loads of wages and looking at it, saying, God, it's so gray and miserable.
Speaker B:Oh, take me back to Japan, please.
Speaker B:Anyway, married two Japanese girls.
Speaker B:They didn't want to go back to Japan and divorce them as well.
Speaker B:But, yes, but then I came here and wasn't getting much work.
Speaker B:The Brain Club shut down.
Speaker B:And then a guy, Spencer, a mate of mine from the Northern Scene, had been speaking to this guy called Spencer, who was going to put on a night at the Wag Club in Wardour street, which was a big super cool club back in the early 90s and in the 80s.
Speaker B:And this guy Spencer phones up and said, here you've got a big collection of funks.
Speaker B:All right, I'm starting a new night called Leave My Wife Alone.
Speaker B:It's every Thursday at the Word Club.
Speaker B:Do you fancy doing?
Speaker B:I say, all right, then, I'll do it.
Speaker B:So I did it and I was doing it every week and the Guardian made it the best club in London of that year and all that shit.
Speaker B:And I was fucking rammed.
Speaker B:You know, hundreds of folk come around.
Speaker B:So me, this is brilliant.
Speaker B:But being Britain, Spencer was paying me a fucking bag of sweeties and sticking the rice in his pocket.
Speaker B:And I said, oh, fuck that, you know, I'm going to start my own club.
Speaker B:Because they're.
Speaker B:Yeah, let's be a cunt about it.
Speaker B:They were coming there for me on mainly, you know, the other DJs were playing pish and I'm playing all this stuff that nobody knew, but they're all going, wow, this is great.
Speaker B:And all the dancers, the jazz dancers, you know, Jerry IDJ rock Me and them boys, they were sort of coming because of the stuff I was playing.
Speaker B:I thought, I'm going to start mowing night.
Speaker B:So I bounced about a few clubs, failed miserably and then came across a mate of mine says, oh, there's this strip club in Soho called Madame Jojo's.
Speaker B:You know, you should go in there and see they give you a Sunday night.
Speaker B:They do nothing on a Sunday night.
Speaker B:So I went in there and I said, all right, start Sunday.
Speaker B:And that was the start of deep funk at Madame Jojo's.
Speaker A:Were they having strippers on at the same time then?
Speaker B:No, no, before us.
Speaker B:Yeah, we became a transfresh.
Speaker B:So it was a transvestite weird strip club.
Speaker B:And then when Paris bought it, which was just about a year after I took over, there was a German guy used to run it, but he left after a year and she just put on a transvestite show on the Friday and Saturday night and that finished at 10.
Speaker B:And then I took over and they cleared out.
Speaker B:The people for the show were cleared out unless they paid extra to stay for the deep fun.
Speaker B:Yeah, and then all the dancers would arrive and it was great.
Speaker B:18 years, it was great, you know, when a tremendous crowd that just came to dance, you know.
Speaker A:Was that with Snowboy?
Speaker A:Is that right?
Speaker B:No Snowboard ever did it.
Speaker B:No, Snowboy.
Speaker A:This AI is terrible.
Speaker B:Oh, I know, me and Snowboys did.
Speaker B:I started at a club called Ormonds and I was.
Speaker B:Was it Greg Belson?
Speaker B:And it was advising me who I should book or what was it one of the rare groove DJs who.
Speaker B:I sacked her the first night.
Speaker B:I can't remember remember his name.
Speaker B:Something funky or whatever he called himself.
Speaker B:It was big.
Speaker B:He was on Kiss FM and all that.
Speaker B:Can't remember his name.
Speaker B:So I was booking all these DJs and he told me to book this guy, Snowboy.
Speaker B:I thought, Snowboy, what a stupid name.
Speaker B:All right, I'll book this guy, Snowboy.
Speaker B:If you say so, Greg.
Speaker B:Cuz I wanted to get people in, you know, I thought, I've got the records, but if people don't know me, they're not going to come to hear the records.
Speaker B:So I booked all these folk.
Speaker B:Jasper the final junkie, that was it.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:So Jasper the vinyl junkie does say upstairs he's on for about 15 minutes.
Speaker B:Sorry pal, can you get off?
Speaker B:Okay.
Speaker B:And this is deep funk, it's not children's James Brown medley, 12 inches and you're fired type thing.
Speaker B:So I sacked him.
Speaker B:I was.
Speaker B:Yeah, you get out.
Speaker B:And then I look and Soul Ball John Anderson had sent his mate Andy to have a record bar because he thought, oh, maybe Kev's gonna get something going here.
Speaker B:Let's sell some Soul Ball records there.
Speaker B:They want soul and funk records.
Speaker B:So there was a record bar from Soul bowl in the club and I look over and there's this great big rockabilly standing at the record bar.
Speaker B:Now I'd been in the rockabilly scene for my own pleasure and bought a few records but never played rockabilly at clubs.
Speaker B:So I woke up to this great big rockabilly says, hell, you're rockabilly.
Speaker B:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker B:Where you're from?
Speaker B:South End.
Speaker B:All right.
Speaker B:What you doing here?
Speaker B:I'm DJing.
Speaker B:What are you DJing?
Speaker B:What's your name?
Speaker B:Snowboy.
Speaker B:Well, my name's Mark, but.
Speaker B:Snowboy, You're Snowboy?
Speaker B:Oh, I thought you were a wanker.
Speaker B:Oh, you're a rockabilly?
Speaker B:Oh, fucking help me.
Speaker B:And we became the best of pals.
Speaker B:And so from that I thought, right, he's a good dj, Ian Wright's a good dj, I'm a good dj.
Speaker B:The rest are wank.
Speaker B:And then we moved from Ormonds because they started putting the price up and charging people 20 pound for a warm kind of coat with 20 pence written on it.
Speaker B:And I thought it, they'll just rip off merchants, let's go to different clubs.
Speaker B:And then by the time I got to Jojo's, Snowboy had given up.
Speaker B:We thought, nah, it's not going to work, C.
Speaker B:I'm going to focus on my jazz dance thing.
Speaker B:So when I started at Jojo's, it was me and Jimbo Raw Deal, the young boy from next door that had given me my records back in the first place.
Speaker B:So I got him on as the warm up DJ because he thought, shit, I'm going to start buying these things now that Kev's taking them back from me.
Speaker B:And so he bought them and he had a quite a good say and I'd give him records to fucking play.
Speaker B:Here you go, there's play them, you know.
Speaker B:So that was it and 18 years of glory and promoted it for maybe two or three months.
Speaker B:Then after that I didn't need to bother with flyers, I didn't need to bother with anyone.
Speaker B:It was just packed every night and I'd get folk like Kenny, Dope, Jazzy Jeff phoning up, kev, can we play at your club?
Speaker B:Oh, I can't afford you.
Speaker B:No, no, we don't want money.
Speaker B:We'll just do it.
Speaker B:All right, Come and to it.
Speaker B:And all your big Yankee DJs were turning up playing at JoJo's for nothing.
Speaker B:Because it was fun.
Speaker B:Oh, it was great.
Speaker B:I loved it.
Speaker A:Yeah, I guess there was a lot going on in London, wasn't there?
Speaker A:Like, I'd rob the bank on the other week and.
Speaker A:And he was talking, you know, we've talked a bit about the money in DJing and stuff.
Speaker A:And, you know, he was.
Speaker A:He was saying that you were getting people like Andy Weatherall coming and playing for sort of 20 quid in a roast dinner in the good old days.
Speaker B:Andy Weatherall.
Speaker B:So I was living in Japan, 89.
Speaker B:Came back to Britain in 90.
Speaker B:I was just after the first Gulf War, okay.
Speaker B:But I missed the Gulf War, came back and all that.
Speaker B:And I picked up a box of Japanese stuff.
Speaker B:I just, you know, I buy records and I bought loads of house records and.
Speaker B:Oh, no.
Speaker B:Well, before I went to Japan, they told me, kib, you can take your funk.
Speaker B:And so, but you better buy some house because house is going big everywhere now.
Speaker B:It's the new thing.
Speaker B:The new thing and all is this house music.
Speaker B:So the mate was a dealer.
Speaker B:I got a load of fancy house records.
Speaker B:Anyway, I came back from Japan, the funk and the solid work, they didn't need to play any house records.
Speaker B:So I knew that Andy Weatherall had a copy of a rockabilly record.
Speaker B:I want Frank Andy Star.
Speaker B:Dig them squeaky shoes.
Speaker B:Andy was a big Rocky Bailey collector.
Speaker B:So phones up says, look, I'll give you a swap.
Speaker B:I want your Frank Andy Star.
Speaker B:I've got about 100 rare 12 inch house things and all that, blah, blah, blah, that tracks and like that.
Speaker B:Fancy labels that are big with a house crowd and all that.
Speaker B:Do you want to show up?
Speaker B:Right, so meet someone.
Speaker B:So who had this 100 count album box and he came out with this one wee seven inch from it.
Speaker B:Yes, you.
Speaker B:So, yeah, Andy was great.
Speaker B:He was great into the rockabilly.
Speaker B:He was a rockabilly first when he.
Speaker B:I used to do rockabilly nights, didn't.
Speaker B:He did rockabilly nights after.
Speaker B:He was a big famous house dj, he started putting on rockabilly nights for his own pleasure and all that.
Speaker B:Good boy.
Speaker B:I miss him.
Speaker B:He was a good boy.
Speaker A:Yeah, he's.
Speaker A:I don't know as much about him as I probably should.
Speaker A:I know I'm more in the name, but.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah, all right.
Speaker B:It was a lovely man and he liked his rockabilly.
Speaker B:Anyone that likes rockabilly is Honest with me.
Speaker B:It's a funny thing for me to say, but, you know, there was an attitude that you can't like that.
Speaker B:It's like hillbillies and hicks and all that.
Speaker B:No, no, no, no, no.
Speaker B:It's not cool.
Speaker B:But then you think, well, you haven't fucking listened, have you?
Speaker B:It's as soulful as you're gonna get.
Speaker B:You know, these hicks and hillbillies are just as soulful as your Detroit car worker and all that, so.
Speaker B:And Andy obviously was honest and had listened with honest ears.
Speaker B:Instead of creating an image, he was actually, no, I'm just gonna listen to what's in the grooves as opposed to the image of these records.
Speaker B:But they're all Klu Klux Klan members.
Speaker B:No, they're not actually.
Speaker B:They were actually fusing black music and were mates for other blacks.
Speaker B:No, no, you got this wrong, boys.
Speaker B:And, yeah, anyone that likes rockabilly, I tend to like instantly because it's a hard one to like.
Speaker B:Or it was a hard one.
Speaker B:I like 20 years ago.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:Oh, amazing.
Speaker A:So when you were going over, you said, like, you could take punts on records because they were so cheap in America.
Speaker A:What was your sort of hit rate like?
Speaker A:Because I think you've still got to think about how much you're taking, haven't you?
Speaker B:I know you could ship.
Speaker B:No, you could ship stuff.
Speaker B:You didn't have to take it back with you.
Speaker B:You know, we.
Speaker B:We use shipping services.
Speaker B:If you found a big hit, you know that.
Speaker B:So, yeah, hit rate would be.
Speaker B:So I was.
Speaker B:By the time I was going to the States regularly, I was pretty well trained, you know, I could.
Speaker B:Yeah, tell quite well.
Speaker B:So my hit rate, it's still not great.
Speaker B:It's like 20 to 1.
Speaker B:You know, one really good record you can play, 25 of which you can sell and 15, which go in the bin.
Speaker B:Yeah, that was the kind of hit rate I was getting.
Speaker B:But my eyes were trained to things that gave you a clue as to that would be good.
Speaker B:Unfortunately, I'm guaranteeing some of the stuff I threw away or sold at Cabinet Market was tremendous.
Speaker B:Garage.
Speaker B:I'm into the garage bunk thing just now.
Speaker B:That's my big love just now.
Speaker B:It's all exciting for me, but the amount of them that I must have sold for nothing back in the day, and I should have clung on to them.
Speaker B:So, yeah, I'd say 21.
Speaker B:Then you got the Sound Burger arriving.
Speaker B:And once the Sound Burger arrived, it was.
Speaker B:Everything was a hitch, you know, you could listen to everything.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:So when Kenny and Jeff and people were getting in touch to come and play.
Speaker A:Were they already sort of into the deep funk as well then?
Speaker B:No, Kenny was the first one.
Speaker B:So I got a phone call out of the blue.
Speaker B:So I put out compilations on bbe.
Speaker B:Legendary Deep Funk Volume, whatever.
Speaker B:Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Speaker B:And the same time they had this house thing, they were doing bb, same label with Kenny and Jeff and all them boys.
Speaker A:Is this late 90s?
Speaker A:Early 90s then?
Speaker B:Yeah, maybe.
Speaker B:All right, 90s, but I can't remember when.
Speaker B:Yeah, it'd be late 90s, right?
Speaker B:So I get a phone call one day out of the blue.
Speaker B:Yo, yo, yo, Ziggy Dodge.
Speaker B:I'm like, all right, who's this skinny dope?
Speaker B:Who?
Speaker B:Sorry, mate, masters at work.
Speaker B:What?
Speaker B:Sorry, who is it?
Speaker B:Oh, never mind that, never mind that.
Speaker B:Are you in the uk?
Speaker B:Are you in London?
Speaker B:Are you in London next Saturday?
Speaker B:I say, oh, no, sorry, Paul, I'm in fucking.
Speaker B:I'm playing in Germany.
Speaker B:I'm really sorry.
Speaker B:What about the week after?
Speaker B:Yeah, yeah, I'm here.
Speaker B:Do you fancy being our guest at the Cannes Film Festival?
Speaker B:Who is this?
Speaker B:It was like, oh, Pete from BBE gave me your number.
Speaker B:I'm alive, dj.
Speaker B:I got your compilation.
Speaker B:I just want to talk to you.
Speaker B:I've got to talk to you.
Speaker B:The records, I've never seen those records.
Speaker B:So I.
Speaker B:You got to teach me.
Speaker B:I'm like, okay, all right, I'll come to Cannes and be your guest.
Speaker B:Film festival.
Speaker B:So I met Kenny.
Speaker B:I know that the.
Speaker B:The Cannes film was a weird place.
Speaker A:What was Kenny doing at Cannes?
Speaker B:DJing.
Speaker B:So they had a sort of after party thing.
Speaker B:Him And Louis were DJing and all that.
Speaker B:And there was a big, big pier fenced off with a DJ box and all the superstars and a helicopter platform at the end of it and all that.
Speaker B:And I'm in here with this look, you know, the scummer on the beach, which are your TV actors.
Speaker B:So it was good fun.
Speaker B:It was fascinating watching them all arse licking and creeping and all that.
Speaker B:But, yeah, Kenny was.
Speaker B:First time I met him, I thought, this guy's genuine, you know, he's genuine.
Speaker B:He loves this stuff.
Speaker B:He's into it and all that.
Speaker B:And he was, yo, who the.
Speaker B:Did you get those records?
Speaker B:So I told him about the northern scene.
Speaker B:Eventually I took him up to Tim.
Speaker B:I should not.
Speaker B:Tim Brown's warehouse up in the north toward Modern.
Speaker B:There was.
Speaker B:Used to be two big warehouses.
Speaker B:And the guy that moved to Detroit, then Canada, in the late 60s, was shipping records over to These warehouses for the northern scene.
Speaker B:But in there, I went up there before Kenny and I was coming out with fucking crates of funk for next dinner.
Speaker B:And because Tim was it shite.
Speaker B:Kid, what do you want that for?
Speaker B:You know, it's not Northern, it's shite.
Speaker B:I was the same before.
Speaker B:Anything that's not Northern was shite.
Speaker B:So I'm getting all this funk stuff for next to nothing from Tim and it takes Kenny up there and he's.
Speaker B:And then Kenny twigged.
Speaker B:He was pretty quick to twig me.
Speaker B:This Northern soul scene has souped all the great records.
Speaker B:And they're all sitting with these middle aged older gentlemen around Britain and all that.
Speaker B:Jesus, we've got so much to find out here.
Speaker B:So he flew me over to DJ in New York with him and Louie introduced me to Jeff and it just made Terry Hunter, all those folk.
Speaker B:When I became parts and that, they were all nice guys.
Speaker B:I couldn't stand the music they were playing.
Speaker B:I never liked house, I never liked hip hop.
Speaker B:But I thought they were all really nice guys.
Speaker B:And Kenny was, yes, I'm getting into this.
Speaker B:And a few others got into it and he started buying wildly, you know, records.
Speaker B:He's got a great connection now, you know, I just speaking to Boy a while ago and he's got a tremendous collection of rare funk and 70s.
Speaker B:So I know that now.
Speaker B:Good on him.
Speaker B:But yeah, and that introduced me to that.
Speaker B:And the west coast crowd was because of Camden Market.
Speaker B:I tell you, I was selling cassettes and records and this young boy, Josh comes along.
Speaker B:He was actually looking at a cassette I had and I used to cover my artist.
Speaker B:Cover up.
Speaker B:Still covering up.
Speaker B:But the funk ones I covered.
Speaker B:All the artists names were American Civil War generals because I did history at university.
Speaker B:So I'd make up the.
Speaker B:Well, not make them up, but use American Civil War generals.
Speaker B:And he'd fucking look at this thing.
Speaker B:And you, you've got this down as James Longstreet.
Speaker B:I've got it as Arthur Mundy.
Speaker B:What, what's your name, son?
Speaker B:Josh.
Speaker B:Do you want to come back to the house after?
Speaker B:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker B:So me and Josh made pearls.
Speaker B:He'd come over when he was over.
Speaker B:I didn't actually realize he was DJing or famous or anything like that.
Speaker B:He'd come to the house where Boxer Records would do some swapping around and all that.
Speaker B:And then one night he says, oh, would you fancy coming to the bar Rumba on a Monday night?
Speaker B:It's a Giles Peterson thing.
Speaker B:I said, oh, really?
Speaker B:Oh, come on, kid.
Speaker B:Come with me.
Speaker B:I.
Speaker B:I need a mate.
Speaker B:There I was, okay, so it goes to the bar rumba.
Speaker B:And he's like, he's got loads of friends.
Speaker B:Hell, and I just keep hearing folk.
Speaker B:Oh, DJ Shadows here, DJ Shadows here.
Speaker B:DJ Shadows here.
Speaker B:DJ Shadows here.
Speaker B:My Josh.
Speaker B:Do you know who this DJ Shadow is?
Speaker B:It's me like, oh, I'm sorry for your son.
Speaker B:But he introduced me, actually.
Speaker B:He introduced me, he booked me.
Speaker B:He was doing his product placement tour or something.
Speaker B:He says, kev, do you Fancy coming and DJing with us on the tour?
Speaker B:Lucas, Kirk, Chemist and all the other.
Speaker B:So I got into all the west coast boys through Josh.
Speaker B:So Kenny introduced me to all the east coast boys.
Speaker B:Josh introduced me to all the west coast boys.
Speaker B:I used to go and stay at fucking Mad Libs House and all that up in the hills and it was wonderful, you know, floating about LA with these fuckers and posh food and all that sunshine.
Speaker B:Great.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:So, like, you get people like.
Speaker A:So you'll get your favorite rapper's favorite rapper.
Speaker A:You get your favorite DJs favorite DJ.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:Did you kind of twig onto the fact that that was kind of what you were.
Speaker A:Because you're like, these guys in a different scene are really doing things, but you're the guy they're sort of looking up to as well.
Speaker B:Oh, I got that from Kenny, clear as day.
Speaker B:Yeah, from.
Speaker B:Yeah, from most of them, madly not.
Speaker B:Yeah, a lot of them like, you know.
Speaker B:Yeah, I was like this old fucking school teacher or whatever, you know.
Speaker B:Yeah, so I got that from them.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:I used to know if Kenny did it.
Speaker B:Why tell this?
Speaker B:Once I was booked to play in Toronto and he was booked to do a house night in Toronto just up the road.
Speaker B:I don't know that.
Speaker B:And I says to.
Speaker B:He was doing like, these boys seem to do one hour, two hours sets, then off.
Speaker B:I was doing like a six hour set, you know that I was on our night.
Speaker B:So can he come to the.
Speaker B:Coming to my thing after you're finished?
Speaker B:Well, yeah.
Speaker B:Have a drink and a shower.
Speaker B:Yeah, yeah, but be there, man.
Speaker B:I want to hear those tunes.
Speaker B:Want to hear those tunes.
Speaker B:So he comes in this night and this is when he said it to me and I got.
Speaker B:Got the picture sort of.
Speaker B:Man, you're so lucky.
Speaker B:You're so lucky.
Speaker B:You get to play great tunes to people that love great tunes.
Speaker B:I have to play to me.
Speaker B:Don't tell him.
Speaker B:He said, Kenny, I got $300 tonight.
Speaker B:How much did you get paid?
Speaker B:That's not the point.
Speaker B:He probably got whatever, $15,000.
Speaker B:Kenny, you want the money to buy the records, you do your thing, I'll do this.
Speaker B:Yeah, but I'm so jealous.
Speaker B:I was.
Speaker B:Okay, so.
Speaker B:Yeah, so they were.
Speaker B:Yeah, I could see.
Speaker B:That's annoying me as well.
Speaker B:Francois Gavortian and did a festival in Belgium with him, and he said exactly the same thing.
Speaker B:He was playing with things on his.
Speaker B:I think it was his phone at the time, or it was a booking recorder thing on the Air Force kept, you know, this.
Speaker B:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker B:Can you get me a copy of that?
Speaker B:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker B:Oh, I love those records you play.
Speaker B:I love those records you play.
Speaker B:And then he's playing.
Speaker B:Oh, I wish I could play the stuff you play, Cape.
Speaker B:Well, you can.
Speaker B:You know, what's stopping you?
Speaker B:And, well, they don't want it.
Speaker B:They want.
Speaker B:I said, fair enough.
Speaker B:I thought, you know, if you want to play it, if you think you'd love to play it, just play the stuff.
Speaker B:But they were frightened.
Speaker B:The majority of them were frightened to play that stuff, which frustrates me a bit.
Speaker B:Kenny would do it when he was playing with me and Josh.
Speaker B:Me and Josh used to do every Christmas in Japan with Deep Funk Japan Tour, and Josh would play all his rare funk and soul stuff then with Dante from Chicago.
Speaker B:The three of us did it loads of times and great fun.
Speaker B:And that was their escape.
Speaker B:That was their fun.
Speaker B:Frustrated me.
Speaker B:I'm thinking, why don't you do it all the time?
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:I think with Josh, you kind of.
Speaker A:When he did his second album, and it's sonically and stylistically quite different to the first one, I can remember reading something where that gets questioned.
Speaker A:It's like, well, either I do something different or I do something that's exactly the same.
Speaker A:Yeah, you're kind of like, it's the curse of the success.
Speaker B:Yes, I understand that, but.
Speaker B:Yeah, well, that's why I parked in deep funk after 18 years.
Speaker B:I was bored shitless.
Speaker A:I was going to ask you that because, like, when it.
Speaker A:When something becomes.
Speaker A:Because I was thinking, like, I like it when I feel like.
Speaker A:And it's, you know, I don't know anything like, you know, 1% of the sort of things you do.
Speaker A:But if I find something that, like, I don't really know anyone that knows, I can be quite excited about it.
Speaker B:All right.
Speaker A:But then if you start hearing about it everywhere, it just loses a bit of this special thing.
Speaker A:Did you get that at all?
Speaker A:Sort of.
Speaker A:With the Deep Funk?
Speaker B:No, Deep Funk was always special for the customers.
Speaker B:It was just me.
Speaker B:So.
Speaker B:No, because There was new, so you'd have the regulars that were going for the whole 18 years, the Jazz dancers and the B boys and all that.
Speaker B:But there was a turnover.
Speaker B:You'd see the same faces for three or four years.
Speaker B:Then the faces would change.
Speaker B:And it was.
Speaker B:And you could see all the time, they're like, wow, look what we found.
Speaker B:This is because it was special, you know, There was nothing.
Speaker B:You go to a house club or hip hop club everywhere, but then you've got this lovely venue.
Speaker B:Did you ever go to Jojo's?
Speaker A:No.
Speaker B:Beautiful venue.
Speaker B: ne out in red and gold like a: Speaker B:It looked great at two dance floors.
Speaker B:And the Dinosaurs were packed with really good dancers and folk would come in for their first time and you could see them.
Speaker B:It was like me when I first arrived at Wigan, going, whoa, you.
Speaker B:What's this?
Speaker B:This is very different.
Speaker B:So it was special, but at one point I was DHing four or five times a week.
Speaker B:And the new discoveries were slowing down because on my own fault, I went at such a pace, you know, I mean, when I started, it was like, I play a record for three weeks, then drop it, and so I can make room for a new discovery.
Speaker B:And I went through them far too quick.
Speaker B:So I'm like, I've heard all these records God knows how many hundred times each, and the new ones that are turning up, that one's okay, but it's not as good as these.
Speaker B:And I thought, I'm bored.
Speaker B:And the sound began to gray.
Speaker B:To me, it sounds terrible.
Speaker B:The king of deep funk.
Speaker B:But the sound of funk began to.
Speaker B:Oh, annoys me now.
Speaker B:And.
Speaker A:No, I get it, though, because.
Speaker A:Because is this around?
Speaker A:Because then you had like the sort of the Dap Tones and everyone that were doing that sound again, but there's so many people kind of revisiting it.
Speaker B:That John was the one that got it right.
Speaker B:They were perfect, you know, all of the Sharon.
Speaker B:So the first time the Dap Jones, Adrian.
Speaker B:I hope Adrian watches this.
Speaker B:The first time the Duck Kings and Sharon played at the Jazz Cafe.
Speaker B:They didn't fucking get a hotel booked for them.
Speaker B:You know, they'd flown over from New York.
Speaker B:They were paid a small wage.
Speaker B:I found out later.
Speaker B:And the promoter, whose name I won't mention, hadn't booked hotels for the fucking lot.
Speaker B:So I'm like, oh, fuck.
Speaker B:Well, you can all stay at my house.
Speaker B:So the whole fucking lot stayed at my house and all that.
Speaker B:And we became great pals.
Speaker B:And then Sean, he's like, we're Going to play your club on Sunday.
Speaker B:They say we're not allowed to play anywhere else.
Speaker B:Them we're going to play your club on Sunday.
Speaker B:So we got Sharon Jones, the Duck Kings on stage every time they're over free of charge.
Speaker B:And eventually the Jazz Cafe and those folks are paying thousands to get Sherlock on and I'm getting them on for nothing.
Speaker B:I was like, and treat people nicely and they'll be nice to you.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:But yeah, I loved the Sharon thing with the whole dark tone thing and I think it's followed the right path now.
Speaker B:So the funk things fiddled away and they're into this sort of sweet soul, low rider soul and all that and producing some great stuff.
Speaker B:I've heard some of the stuff that Gabe's behind.
Speaker B:Gabe's the genius behind it all.
Speaker B:I thought, wow, that's great.
Speaker B:And that's a good progression from the funk stuff to the really good proper 60s, early 70s sounding soul done perfectly great.
Speaker B:Most other people it up, you know, they don't seem to get something right with the recording equipment or whatever.
Speaker A:Well, that.
Speaker A:That's the big thing with Daptone, isn't it?
Speaker A:That attention to detail.
Speaker B:Ah, yeah.
Speaker B:The sounds right, you know, I get loads of other stuff and it's.
Speaker B:Yeah, it's a nice song, but it's not right.
Speaker B:It doesn't sound right, you know.
Speaker B:And I was getting them at the time that everyone was sending me all their funk releases.
Speaker B:You know, I've made a funk record.
Speaker B:Have you really?
Speaker B:All right, let's have a listen.
Speaker B:Oh, that's very nice.
Speaker B:So many just junk.
Speaker A:Did you.
Speaker A:Did you ever get into the Chicano stuff?
Speaker A:Because that's something I'm really interested in, but I know very, very, extremely little about.
Speaker A:But I just love the textures, so.
Speaker B:Boy texture.
Speaker B:Stop using your fancy language.
Speaker B:Boy textures.
Speaker B:So you're talking about the soul harmony stuff.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:So Stafford after waken shot, the next main venue on the northern scene was Stafford.
Speaker B:Top of the World in Stafford and the main djs.
Speaker B:It was run by a guy called Dave Thorley and he booked me after a year.
Speaker B:He came down to see me playing in the south and thought, oh, fuck me, this guy's got nice records and a really beautiful girlfriend.
Speaker B:And I just wanted my girlfriend to be at his venue all the time.
Speaker B:So I got the booking at Stafford and then I got my mate Guy Hennigan on it.
Speaker B:Stafford.
Speaker B:And we were like the kings of 60s.
Speaker B:So it gets.
Speaker B:Okay, let's go into this at the same time.
Speaker B:When Wiggins shut there was a guy Called Sol Sam, who was a very influential DJ on the scene who thought that there was too many white pop stompers getting played.
Speaker B:The disco, jazz, funk, disco scene had been slagging off the Northern scene in magazines for not actually playing soul but playing too much pop and just a bit of soul.
Speaker B:And Sam was slate in the Northern seeing himself for playing too much pop and he started the modern soul scene.
Speaker B:That's when he started playing the late 70s, early 80s new release Soul, which was more soulful.
Speaker B:So that's what's happening.
Speaker B:So me and Guy thought, right, that we'll start playing more soulful records to shut these up.
Speaker B:Actually there was one night slam was Sam was slagging me off in Black Echoes.
Speaker B:The newspaper I talked about firstly of the week, Kev Darl doesn't know what so lazy's playing pop, pop, pop, pop, pop.
Speaker B:Nonsense.
Speaker B:I thought, Sam, you wanker, you've never been.
Speaker B:You know, I wasn't.
Speaker B:I was playing a couple of garage things and mostly soulful stuff.
Speaker B:So one night I looked behind me and the Preston Cybermen have tied Sam to a chair behind me.
Speaker B:They went and kidnapped him from some venue.
Speaker B:He was playing it and tied him to a chair behind me, was listening.
Speaker B:So I saw some.
Speaker B:I thought, right, I'm gonna play a really soulful set.
Speaker B:I'll play the.
Speaker B:Whatever you call it, Low Riders with a bit of beat.
Speaker B:So I was playing what lowriders would buy now, plus some faster stuff, but all really soulful, just a short summer.
Speaker B:So I did this set which was unusual for me because I love stompers.
Speaker B:Bang, bang, bang, bang.
Speaker B:So I did this set to shut Sam up, which worked.
Speaker B:He apologized and all that.
Speaker B:Unfortunately for me though, it took off with a crowd.
Speaker B:So the next week.
Speaker B:Keb, can you play that one you played last week?
Speaker B:Keb, can you play that again?
Speaker B:Can you play that again?
Speaker B:Fucking hell.
Speaker B:They were too slow.
Speaker B:So Stafford got a name as the beat ballad capital of the northern soul scene where we would play a lot of slower soul records and beat ballads became very popular.
Speaker B:And that was pretty well my fault with Sam behind me type thing and that because I prefer the Stompers.
Speaker B:But it's a really nice soul records.
Speaker B:To me they were like the Lowriders have them.
Speaker B:You have them at home or you sit in a bar, drink and listening to them.
Speaker B:But they're not for a big dance floor, you know, dance floor with 500 people, you can't play that many store records.
Speaker B:So yeah, so yeah, I was buying that sort of thing and listening to Things that had that really nice sulfur harmony thing and thinking, oh yeah, that would make a good ender.
Speaker B:Yeah, that's a great record.
Speaker B:I like that.
Speaker B:So I was buying it, but I wasn't.
Speaker B:I was into proper northern 100 mile an hour stompers, really.
Speaker B:And I thought this was just a nice little sideline type thing.
Speaker B:I wasn't into it.
Speaker B:Like those boys, the Mexican boys and all that are into it.
Speaker B:They're right into it.
Speaker A:Yeah, yeah, I love some of that stuff.
Speaker A:So with the garage rock, then how did that come in?
Speaker A:And cuz from what I saw in terms of my exposure and awareness about that sort of thing, it's probably mainly you and like maybe Cook, Chemist.
Speaker A:All right, the.
Speaker A:The people that I'm kind of aware of.
Speaker B:Okay.
Speaker A:In and around that.
Speaker B:The first guy to tell me that you would love garage rock was Josh.
Speaker B:He was like, Kev, you, you love garage.
Speaker B:It's like you're northern and all that.
Speaker B:But in my head for years I thought off, it's slate, you know, hippie, fantastic purple bubble, exploding machine, hippie nonsense.
Speaker B:I'm not interested.
Speaker B:Josh.
Speaker B:Right off.
Speaker B:But I'd never listened.
Speaker B:I never listened to him and Kirk Chemist as well.
Speaker B:K, you'd like garage?
Speaker B:Nah, didn't like the idea that it's hippie stuff.
Speaker B:Not interested.
Speaker B:The garage came about again.
Speaker B:It was a fluke.
Speaker B:I was living in the Philippines.
Speaker B:I was DJing in Japan once every sort of two months.
Speaker B:And before that, when I was over with Josh, you know that play in the Deep Funk, I was always getting bookings in a city called Kobe.
Speaker B:I know that.
Speaker B:And it's like, you know my.
Speaker B:Anyway, I speaks to Kaz, my agent out there, or the guy that manages me out there and sorts it all on me tours out.
Speaker B:And I said, okay, but you're not getting Kobe because it's like Northern Soul capital.
Speaker B:Now it's Japan's capital and you don't play Northern Soul anymore.
Speaker B:This was 12 years ago about that.
Speaker B:And I'm saying, oh shit, maybe I'll get some Northern.
Speaker B:But I'm gonna get that nasty, violent white Northern that they used to play at Wigan that nobody plays anymore because everyone's chasing the same soulful tunes.
Speaker B:Nobody's bothering with that nasty white stuff.
Speaker B:So I phoned up an old American dealer mate and all that.
Speaker B:I said, barry, you know that nasty white stuff they used to play at Wigan, like the Seven Dwarfs, so the Deadbeats and all that.
Speaker B:Have you got any of that?
Speaker B:He says, yeah, it's called Garage Cape.
Speaker B:No no, the nasty white stuff at Wagon.
Speaker B:No, no, it's called Garage Cape.
Speaker B:Play me a garage record, then.
Speaker B:Or have you heard of the Savoys?
Speaker B:No.
Speaker B:Can it be.
Speaker B:No, I never heard of that.
Speaker B:All right, I'll play that to you.
Speaker B:I was on the phone.
Speaker B:I.
Speaker B:Hell, how much is that?
Speaker B:Well, that's like $2,000.
Speaker B:I'm taking it.
Speaker B:What else is there?
Speaker B:Have you heard the Omens?
Speaker B:No.
Speaker B:I'll play it to you.
Speaker B:Hell, how much is that?
Speaker B:Well, that's like $400.
Speaker B:I'm taking that.
Speaker B:Okay.
Speaker B:And then he'd done a price guide.
Speaker B:Barry Wickham, Price Guide to Garage.
Speaker B:So I saw that and I bought this garage record price guide, flicked through it, went on YouTube.
Speaker B:This is only 12 years ago.
Speaker B:So YouTube existed then.
Speaker B:Started listening to these records, saying, holy shit, this is better than I thought it was.
Speaker B:And it really did blow my mind.
Speaker B:So from this collector that thought he knew it all, suddenly I'm listening to all these records that I'd never heard before that had the.
Speaker B:The feel of the white wig and stompers like the Seven Dwarfs, which was actually a garage record.
Speaker B:The feel.
Speaker B:But there was something different.
Speaker B:There was a lot more ideas, a lot of weird stuff that was like, whoa, really interesting tunes and all that.
Speaker B:And every record goes somewhere.
Speaker B:You know, there's a few flat ones, but everything goes somewhere, which was my thing with funk.
Speaker B:It was sort of flat, flat, flat, flat, flat.
Speaker B:But this stuff goes somewhere.
Speaker B:But, yeah, I just got right into the garage and started buying like a lunatic.
Speaker B:I sold everything.
Speaker B:I'd been collecting rockabilly.
Speaker B:And I was playing rockabilly on a Saturday night at Jojo's because I loved rockabilly.
Speaker B:And when the Johnny Cash film came out and Amy Winehouse was doing a sort of 50s type sound, I thought, now's the time I can play the rockabilly.
Speaker B:I'd collected it for my own personal pleasure, but I thought, there's no way it'll work in clubs.
Speaker B:No one's ever going to dance to rockabilly in normal clubs.
Speaker B:Only in rockabilly clubs.
Speaker B:But then I started playing it to the general public, and it worked.
Speaker B:But I sold all that, sold all my soul, sold whatever drabs of funk I had left and that, and started buying garage and still am now.
Speaker B:It just.
Speaker B:There's so many, you know, it's.
Speaker B:I have a theory.
Speaker B:So if you.
Speaker B:Northern Soul, there's a few thousand really great records, and the rest are okay on average, and loads of shit ones.
Speaker B:Funk, there's a few hundred really great records and the rest are average shit garage.
Speaker B:There's fucking thousands of great ones and every company on the world made a garage record.
Speaker B:But unfortunately because they were garage, they never made it to big labels in the shops.
Speaker B:So they're all rare, but there's so many of them all over the planet.
Speaker B:I was amazed the amount of great records from Australia and New Zealand that are like, wow, this is as good as the Kinks everywhere or the pretty things tremendous.
Speaker B:But they never made it, you know.
Speaker B:And yeah, that's my thing because that'll last me till I die because there's just so many.
Speaker B:And unfortunately because the majority of them are so fucking rare, it'll take me a long time to get them, you know, and I can't find them anymore.
Speaker B: ,: Speaker B:You can't go out and find them for $2.
Speaker B:So that's my thing now and I love it and it works so well with young people especially.
Speaker B:I do a thing called the Cave Club where my mate way about the others and it's just young kids going wild to this 60s, you know, psychedelic, garagey, thumpy beat stuff.
Speaker B:I think it's the most powerful stuff I've ever played in my whole career as a dj.
Speaker B:This garage is the most powerful stuff for clubs.
Speaker A:Whereabouts are you doing that?
Speaker A:Is that in London?
Speaker B:In London?
Speaker B:I do it in London.
Speaker B:I do it everywhere, you know, Beirut, Japan, you know, France, Germany, Spain, everywhere but the Cave clubs.
Speaker B:London.
Speaker A:Right, so you mentioned that you were living in Philippines.
Speaker A:Was, did you move there so that you had access to go and do the well paid gigs and Japan?
Speaker B:Not really.
Speaker B:My wife's from the island so I met my wife.
Speaker B:I was out in the Philippines, DJ and I met Edith and all that.
Speaker B:Couple of years later we're married, she comes here and then she invites me to go to her home island, which is a wee island and all that.
Speaker B:Actually she was still living there when I first visited.
Speaker B:I was on a a tour in Australia, New Zealand and A buy is a lonely fucking planet guide for the Philippines, you know that she said, oh, come and I'll take you to eastern summer.
Speaker B:So whatever you do when visiting the Philippines, do not go to Eastern summer.
Speaker B:The rebels will kidnap you and sell your kidneys to buy weapons.
Speaker B:I'm like, holy shit, that's where I'm going.
Speaker B:So I goes out there and I mate with me who's a martial artist as well.
Speaker B:And we're going there and no, this was later, after I'd finished the house.
Speaker B:So I goes out there.
Speaker B:Anyway, first time out there, and you can tell I talk a lot.
Speaker B:So I sat for two days and didn't say a thing.
Speaker B:And Edith was like, are you all right, honey?
Speaker B:You're awful quiet.
Speaker B:You're normally fucking yappy, yappy.
Speaker B:I fucking love it.
Speaker B:I want to live here, okay?
Speaker B:And it was just that place with a coral reef and white sandy beach.
Speaker B:It was right in the jungle.
Speaker B:There was no shops.
Speaker B:The nearest shops, like, four hours away and all that.
Speaker B:And it was real jungle.
Speaker B:Old women coming out of the jungle with machetes, dripping with blood and like that, and Kalashnikovs over their shoulder and all that.
Speaker B:Anyway, the rebels, a few years later, I built a house there.
Speaker B:And I'm sitting there one day with my mate Marcello, who was into the sword.
Speaker B:Eventually I got into Japanese sword.
Speaker B:So he came out because he thought, brilliant.
Speaker B:We can cut bamboo for the rest of our days and have fun.
Speaker B:Anyway, there's a knock on the door, and my wife goes to the door and says, oh, can you leave your guns outside, please?
Speaker B:So in walk all these fucking rebels with teeth missing and big scars and all that.
Speaker B:Oh, fucking hell.
Speaker B:Would you like a cup of tea, boys?
Speaker B:What the fuck's tea?
Speaker B:They all speak English, you see, because it was an American colony, which was very lucky.
Speaker B:Yeah, what the fuck's tea?
Speaker B:You'll find out in a wee minute.
Speaker B:A cup of tea each and all that.
Speaker B:And I find out that 2 of the NPA New People's army rebels are relatives of mine now.
Speaker B:All right, then, fair enough, then.
Speaker B:Sitting there for half an hour, laughing and joking away these cunts.
Speaker B:Out comes the whiskey.
Speaker B:I've actually got pictures on my Facebook of three of the rebels before the whiskey and then after the whiskey, slouched on the table with vomit over them.
Speaker B:And so they weren't that strong with the whiskey.
Speaker B:Anyway, about after a hour or whatever, there's another knock on the door, and it's the chief of police and one of his policemen, who's also a relative, and he walks in, and I look at Marcello and I said, right, I'll stop them drawing their guns, just with the eyes.
Speaker B:We didn't speak.
Speaker B:And you stop them getting to their guns.
Speaker B:There's going to be a fucking bloodbath here.
Speaker B:And the chief of police walks up to fucking Manu Norban, who's a relative of mine, said, man in Orban, how you doing?
Speaker B:I've not seen you for a while.
Speaker B:Blah, blah, blah, Blah.
Speaker B:What's that you're drinking?
Speaker B:Oh, it's kebs tea.
Speaker B:Don't know what it is.
Speaker B:Do you want to try some?
Speaker B:I'm like, aren't you cunts meant to be shooting each other?
Speaker B:I raided my Lonely Panics guide.
Speaker B:Oh, that's a load of Keb.
Speaker B:I'm the chief of police here.
Speaker B:The thing is, you see, I get paid three times as much as police chief in Manila.
Speaker B:They never come and investigate.
Speaker B:You know, I said in a report once a year that we got a hand grenade flown it, a hand grenade thrown into the police station.
Speaker B:And two of my men were shot at.
Speaker B:And they never bother.
Speaker B:And I get my big wages.
Speaker B:We haven't had a hand grenade for 20 years.
Speaker B:All right, then, fair enough.
Speaker B:So that was the guerrillas.
Speaker B:They all became good pals, as did the chief of police, etc.
Speaker B:So, yeah, I enjoyed the Philippines.
Speaker B:It was a fucking wild place, but great fun.
Speaker A:So this might be my really bad memory, but I swear I remember reading some stuff online.
Speaker A:It might have even just been one post where someone's like, has anyone seen Keb Darge?
Speaker B:No.
Speaker B:That went fucking everywhere.
Speaker B:Kenny Dope was speaking to my brother and my sister.
Speaker B:They were all panicking.
Speaker B:The typhoon.
Speaker B:There was a great big typhoon and all that.
Speaker B:I was fucking lucky, I suppose.
Speaker B:I was very lucky.
Speaker B:I'd been on a tour of Europe and I got back to Manila the week before.
Speaker B:I had a few mates in Manila and I was out drinking with them and they said, when you're going back to her nanny cape?
Speaker B:Or probably Saturday.
Speaker B:Well, you won't get back on Saturday.
Speaker B:What do you mean?
Speaker B:There's a big typhoon coming?
Speaker B:Have you not heard?
Speaker B:No, I've been in Europe.
Speaker B:You better go back tomorrow.
Speaker B:I said, okay, we'll go back tomorrow then.
Speaker B:So I got a flight from Manila to Tacloban and I get on the flight and there's three foreigners on the airplane.
Speaker B:I'm like, fucking hell, that's unusual.
Speaker B:So I start yapping to them and they're Americans.
Speaker B:Hi, I work for the New York Times.
Speaker B:I'm a storm chaser.
Speaker B:Yeah, I work for the so and so Herald.
Speaker B:Yeah, I'm a storm chaser.
Speaker B:Who do you work for?
Speaker B:Well, no, I'm a dj.
Speaker B:What you going here for?
Speaker B:I live there.
Speaker B:You live there?
Speaker B:Sir, there's going to be a lot of death tomorrow.
Speaker B:A lot of death.
Speaker B:Now, I tell you what you need to do.
Speaker B:You need to board up your windows, get everyone into the room with least amount of windows and all that, and just Keep your head down.
Speaker B:Pull tables over.
Speaker B:This is going to be horrific.
Speaker B:I thought, all right, fair enough.
Speaker B:So I gets back and nobody and her nanny knew, you know, nobody had warned them what was coming.
Speaker B:So I gets back and I fucking gets Edith and Tata and all that.
Speaker B:Go and get all your fucking pals, all the neighbors, get all your uncles and he's get them into my house because my house was the only real house.
Speaker B:They were in sort of nipah huts, you know, just huts were corrugated.
Speaker B:Get every content of the house and I'm boarding up the windows and that and that.
Speaker B:I heard the guy had said to me, get all your people into the room with the least windows.
Speaker B:So I looked at other children and I thought, children can move.
Speaker B:If some glass flies towards them, Records can't.
Speaker B:Children, would you help Tito, help your uncle move all the records into that room with the one small window, please?
Speaker B:So I did.
Speaker B:I moved all the fucking records into the safe room and left the kids out hiding behind tables.
Speaker B:When the thing kicked off, it wasn't a glass that came in.
Speaker B:The whole window frame came in.
Speaker B:The roof came off.
Speaker B:The place was minced.
Speaker B:I'm like, holy.
Speaker B:Then the next I went out looking for man in Auburn because nobody had seen him.
Speaker B:And there was pigs flying over my head and motorbikes flying in there.
Speaker B:And them holy.
Speaker B:This is mental.
Speaker B:Couldn't he find Manoa?
Speaker B:But I found him a few days later.
Speaker B:He was a mile back in the jungle, picking up other people's corrugated iron roofs and building him his own dream house out of the rubble from other people's houses.
Speaker B:It was, you know, a rebel.
Speaker B:So he didn't have a house, but he was building one in the jungle anyway.
Speaker B:Well done.
Speaker B:Clever boy.
Speaker B:Anyway, goes down the hill to her nanny.
Speaker B:I was like, where the fox Hernani gone?
Speaker B:Her nanny was a town with a population of like 3,000.
Speaker B:And in front of him is this giant puddle.
Speaker B:Nothing, not a trace of the buildings.
Speaker B:I'm like, holy.
Speaker B:I found out later there was 10,000 dead, including 15 are his family and like that.
Speaker B:So that was that sort of my house was pretty well.
Speaker B:And that's why I came back to London, cuz, you know, we stayed there for about a month and I was.
Speaker B:Eventually I got in with the marines and the Red Cross because the mayor was a twisted and all that and there was no Internet.
Speaker B:That's why everyone thought I was dead.
Speaker B:They.
Speaker B:They're looking at the.
Speaker B:The red spot of the thing where.
Speaker B:That's where cable, you know.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:10,000 dead in this area, it's like, that's where Kev lives.
Speaker B:He must be dead.
Speaker B:So that's where you held your panic and all that.
Speaker B:Anyway, had a fight with the mayor.
Speaker B:He.
Speaker B:He was stealing the relief goods and hiding it so he could ship it on lorries to Manila once the roads were rebuilt.
Speaker B:You know that I was getting locals to tell me where he was hiding the stuff so I could go and photograph it for when the Internet did come back on so I could expose him.
Speaker B:And the cunt shot three of my fucking mates that were helping me.
Speaker B:And the last one, my mother in law came and says, kev, you got to fuck off.
Speaker B:Why is that?
Speaker B:The last one who was a mate who had been helping me, they'd fucking put.
Speaker B:I had a beach that I went to which everyone called Kebs beach eventually because they couldn't understand why foreigners want white sandy beaches and all that.
Speaker B:Anyway, they'd got this guy, they cut his head, arms and legs off, poked him up in a fucking bamboo spike, poured petal on him, set fire to him and left him on my beach.
Speaker B:And it was like, ah, that's a warning.
Speaker B:You'd better fuck off.
Speaker B:So eventually picked up a couple of boxes of records and we off.
Speaker B:I was like, oh, well, this is getting a bit rough now.
Speaker B:But I did manage to get my report out.
Speaker B:It was in the Daily Mail.
Speaker B:They came over and interviewed me.
Speaker B:That was some Japanese newspaper came in and interviewed me and the mayor got done.
Speaker B:After that, Duterte sacked him, hunked him in prison.
Speaker B:Et.
Speaker B:I said, we got it right.
Speaker B:But, yeah, that was it.
Speaker B:Then I was in Manila, I was staying at my mate's house and I was slagging off the government because I'd found out that the government were involved in selling the relief goods.
Speaker B:You know, I took the Daily Mail guy to a local mall and here was USA Food packages on sale for two pound each.
Speaker B:And then some cunt stolen that.
Speaker B:And I was slagging off the government.
Speaker B:And it came on national television, the Home Secretary saying, this Keb d'arge is a liar, a racist, da, da da, da da.
Speaker B:Then the guy I was staying with in Manila, who was a British teacher, says, keb, they won't just do that, you know, they'll come here and shoot all of us.
Speaker B:They don't bother, the government will send someone, they'll let them out of prison, give them guns, give them your photo, they kill the lot of us.
Speaker B:Can you please go back to London?
Speaker B:I thought, all right, I'll go back to London.
Speaker B:Then we're not going to win this war.
Speaker B:Said.
Speaker B:But then the country elected Duterte.
Speaker B:Whoever wants slags off Duterte is a monster.
Speaker B:No, he wasn't.
Speaker B:He was a hero.
Speaker B:That cleaned the country up beautifully.
Speaker B:There you go.
Speaker B:So that was me back to London with my garage collection and starting doing garage nights.
Speaker A:So the records survived, of course.
Speaker B:Yeah, and the children survived.
Speaker B:So my house was up on a hill and the houses were badly built, you know.
Speaker B:Yeah, I'd.
Speaker B:My whole family were architects, my uncle, my dad, my brother, my ex wife, or architects.
Speaker B:So I designed the house and it was good enough to withstand a typhoon.
Speaker B:Their houses were new, you know, so they got minced and it was the wave that killed everyone.
Speaker B:So we were up on the hill and it was just the big wave that just washed everything away.
Speaker B:I was looking for bodies for three weeks.
Speaker B:And you found them either about half a mile into the jungle or piled up or there was a helicopter where the Philippine Air sea rescue boys came and I'm yapping to them one day and made pals for them.
Speaker B:Okay, you're lucky.
Speaker B:You want to see the ones we got to pull out of the sea.
Speaker B:I'm like, oh, all right then, oh, here's a good one.
Speaker B:So I thought, I'll go down to the sea.
Speaker B:And they were all fucking puffed up and you know, weird looking creatures nibbled at by crabs and like that.
Speaker B:But also I'm walking along the beach getting so I wanted them to burn the bodies.
Speaker B:I wasn't just finding bodies for the phone.
Speaker B:Oh, look, I found a body.
Speaker B:I knew about typhoid, cholera, that kind of.
Speaker B:The locals didn't.
Speaker B:And I'm trying to convince them to burn all these bodies, you daft bastards.
Speaker B:Which they weren't going to do until this helicopter arrived from the Philippine air whatever convinced them to burn them and mass bury them.
Speaker B:Anyway, I'm on the beach and the beach is truing with 45s, like manna from heaven.
Speaker B:I thought, is God rewarding me for what I've just gone through?
Speaker B:And there's all these 7 inches on the base.
Speaker B:I'm like, holy.
Speaker B:And I found some really good surf instrumentals by Filipino bands.
Speaker B:And most of them were broken, but there was, you know, about that many that weren't broken that were good reg or something.
Speaker B:What the this.
Speaker B:And then I speak to Edith and oh yes, that'll be old whatever his name was.
Speaker B:He was a DJ in Manila in the 60s on the radio and all that.
Speaker B:And then when he retired he moved up here and Must have taken all his records with him.
Speaker B:So his house had disappeared, he disappeared and all his records were scattered around over the beach.
Speaker B:I'm like, oh, well, that's a bit of luck then.
Speaker B:There's a silver lining and everything.
Speaker B:But yeah, and then they went back to London then after that.
Speaker A:So was it easy to kick on with the garage rock stuff kind of building?
Speaker B:Oh, it took a while.
Speaker B:No.
Speaker B:So there's a.
Speaker B:There's been a garage scene in Britain, in London and in Germany and places like that since the 80s.
Speaker B:There was a scene kicked off.
Speaker B:Rob Bailey, who used to come to the Honda Club, he was one of them young Mauds at the Albany club was Rob Bailey, he was in the Northern.
Speaker B:Then he got into this garage thing and he pretty well started a garage scene here.
Speaker B:But they kept it underground and they were promoting it to themselves and it was a sort of older crowd and all that.
Speaker B:And I thought, I don't want to do that.
Speaker B:It's, you know, like the Northern scene became too sceney for me.
Speaker B:I want to play this music to every come, you know.
Speaker B:And I love seeing people's expressions or feeling what they're feeling when they hear records that they think, oh, what's this and that.
Speaker B:And you get that when you play to people who aren't in the scenes.
Speaker B:When you play to scenes nowadays, you get chin scratching and.
Speaker B:Oh yes, well, yes, off.
Speaker B:Let me play it to normal people.
Speaker B:So no, it's taken off now with sort of younger people.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:And I got in with Reese, Reese Webb, great bloke, great dj, tremendous collection, all that, and started doing the Cave club with him.
Speaker B:And yeah, it's got a good following now.
Speaker B:Well, it has had for a while, but there's a lot of really young people and I'm doing things, skitting around and seeing younger people, you know, hanging about with 22 year olds and stuff like that, which is very nice.
Speaker B:They call me Uncle Keb.
Speaker B:It's very nice.
Speaker A:So.
Speaker A:And you're working with the label now.
Speaker A:When we spoke before you, you kind of mentioned that it was.
Speaker A:It was post lockdown.
Speaker A:You were struggling to get any details.
Speaker B:No work.
Speaker B:Yeah, well, no work in lockdown.
Speaker B:And then so other kind of jobs opened up and they wouldn't open up clubs for a year or whatever it was.
Speaker B:Clubs weren't allowed to open up.
Speaker B:And then when they did open up, half of them had gone and there was a million promoters trying to book 17 clubs.
Speaker B:I was like, oh, this is really hard.
Speaker B:So my mate Eddie Crowsdale, who run the Honda Club.
Speaker B: Who was the guy that I met in: Speaker B:So he was the label.
Speaker B:He run the label, Kent, which is a subsidiary of Ace.
Speaker B:This is a big.
Speaker B:It's like the biggest stem reissue label and longest running on the planet or something, I think.
Speaker A:So were they doing the.
Speaker A:Because Kent did a lot in the sort of late 80s, didn't they?
Speaker B:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker B:They introduced Northern soul to the world.
Speaker B:So, yeah, CDs and Wreck and sent the juice to all your Europeans and Japanese to Northern.
Speaker B:Because they could buy it then.
Speaker B:They couldn't buy it before Kent started putting it all out.
Speaker B:Except that.
Speaker B:That was Kent.
Speaker B:That's part of Ace.
Speaker B:So AD And Kent sit next to me and I sit here in the office.
Speaker B:Yeah, Eddie came.
Speaker B:He actually came a night I was DJing out to listen to the garage stuff.
Speaker B:Because he said when he came to Deep funk and stuff like that, he said, oh, well, Kev's got good ears.
Speaker B:I'll probably hear some good records if I go listen to the.
Speaker B:So he came to listen to the.
Speaker B:That is.
Speaker B:Okay.
Speaker B:We'll buy you a drink and all that.
Speaker B:I said, no idea.
Speaker B:Can I get you one back?
Speaker B:I'm skin.
Speaker B:Are you skin?
Speaker B:I'll buy a drink anyway.
Speaker B:Anyway, then a few minutes later, it comes out.
Speaker B:Are you skin?
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:No work.
Speaker B:Do you want a job?
Speaker B:Do you want to work at Ace Records?
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:Start Monday.
Speaker B:Yeah, that was.
Speaker B:It started Monday and I'm still there.
Speaker B:It's great.
Speaker B:I love it.
Speaker B:I get to go through master tapes of unreleased stuff and like that.
Speaker B:So Ace is huge.
Speaker B:You know, they got all your Funkadelic stuff.
Speaker B:Gil's got Heron, blah, blah, blah.
Speaker B:For that rare groovy scene.
Speaker B:We got the Cramps, we got.
Speaker B:We got Motorhead, we got.
Speaker B:You know, it's a big label, but we also got small things, you know, which is interesting for me.
Speaker A:So do you focus more on the smaller, rarer stuff then?
Speaker B:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker B:Same from the teachings from Richard Saling.
Speaker B:Make sure the records are obscure and rare and nobody else can play them and make sure they're good.
Speaker B:So I'm still on that thing and I've got access to unreleased stuff.
Speaker B:So I've got a.
Speaker B:My bag.
Speaker B:DJ bag at the moment.
Speaker B:It's got about 10 unreleased things that I've cut on to.
Speaker B:Carvers that eventually we'll put out.
Speaker B:But give me a year playing them myself, then we'll put them out type thing.
Speaker B:So, yeah, I did that.
Speaker A:That's.
Speaker A:That's still the Ethos from the Northern.
Speaker B:Scene still, the ethos from wigging, you know, from Copy and Richard Seal and.
Speaker B:Yeah, all right, that's.
Speaker A:That's brilliant.
Speaker A:And so where else can people tend to see you regularly, then?
Speaker A:Is it mainly the Cavern?
Speaker B:Yeah, Cave Club.
Speaker B:Cave Club in Hackney.
Speaker B:That's the only thing regular.
Speaker B:I get the odd book in here and there, but most of our works abroad, you know, it's.
Speaker B:You know, it's taken off here, the garage thing.
Speaker B:There's quite a few garage nights, but young folk doing it, but I don't think they're thinking, if we book Kept to us, we've got to pay him a thousand pounds.
Speaker B:I'm like, no, you don't.
Speaker B:But I think that's gone through the edge.
Speaker B:So I'm seeing, why don't you book me?
Speaker B:You.
Speaker B:You know, I'll do it better than that.
Speaker B:So I think they're frightened of the Kev D's name somehow.
Speaker B:But there's young kids doing garage nights now.
Speaker B:Young kids doing Northern Soul nights now, all over, which is nice.
Speaker B:And doing it for young kids, not for the old.
Speaker B:Go.
Speaker A:Yeah, awesome.
Speaker A:And where can people find you online?
Speaker B:Well, I'm on Instagram.
Speaker B:I do a weekly show on Rover.
Speaker B:Have you heard of them?
Speaker B:R O V R.
Speaker B:It's a new platform like MixCloud.
Speaker B:SoundCloud, they just started this year and they're planning to take over SoundCloud and MixCloud and dominate them.
Speaker B:So I'm doing a show with them every week and they're actually flying me out to Japan in June and they're doing a Rover Japan tour with Kick Dodge and whoever else they're having.
Speaker B:So I do that every week.
Speaker B:But there's no token, it's just I select music as a platform and you listen to two hours of music I've selected, you get the titles and all that.
Speaker B:But as you can tell, I like talking.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:Yeah, Right.
Speaker A:So, yeah, that's been amazing.
Speaker A:Thanks so much for sharing all that.
Speaker A:I've.
Speaker A:I've had a really fun time.
Speaker B:I'm glad you have.
Speaker A:And I hope it's been good for you as well, because I've learned a lot there.
Speaker B:I know I do.
Speaker B:Yeah, a lot.
Speaker B:And then, like I say, if you go through it and you think, oh, I should ask him about that, just give us a phone and I'll get online again now that I know my wife's computer works.
Speaker A:I appreciate that, mate.
Speaker B:All right, no worries.
Speaker A:Excellent.
Speaker A:Well, yeah, I'll sign off with you, then.
Speaker A:And I just want to say yeah.
Speaker A:Thanks very much for your time.
Speaker B:No day bother.
Speaker B:Nice to speak to you.
Speaker B:Thanks for being interested in me.
Speaker A:Oh, definitely, mate.
Speaker A:Definitely.
Speaker A:It's been a pleasure.
