Episode 66
Patrick Forge pt 1 -Talkin' All That Jazz
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In this conversation, Adam Gow and Patrick Forge explore the journey of music from overcoming self-doubt to the evolution of musical tastes. They discuss the impact of punk, the complexity of jazz, and the joy of DJing, emphasizing the emotional connections music creates. The dialogue highlights the eclectic nature of music and its ability to bridge cultural divides, as well as the personal growth that comes from exploring different genres and sounds. In this conversation, Patrick Forge shares his unexpected journey from studying the history of ideas to exploring jazz culture and its philosophical roots. He reflects on his experiences living in a squat, the vibrant music scene of the 80s, and the rise of warehouse parties. Patrick discusses his return to music through record shops and the birth of his radio show, highlighting the importance of community and creativity in shaping his musical journey.
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Transcript
Welcome back to Once A dj.
Speaker A:This week we're joined by a legend of the jazz dance scene, former Dingwall's resident, one of Kiss FM's longest serving DJs and master compiler, Mr. Patrick Forge.
Speaker A:Patrick, how are you doing today?
Speaker B:I'm good and I'm very grateful that you've asked me to do this.
Speaker B:I'm looking forward to it.
Speaker A:No, appreciate you coming on.
Speaker A:So I know you're somewhat familiar with the show and the format and stuff, so really it's just about getting into your story.
Speaker A:So whereabouts did you grow up and where did music come into your life?
Speaker B:Well, I grew up in Ipswich in Suffolk, a pretty classic provincial town in terms of its size and makeup and what have you.
Speaker B:And I mean music for me as a kid, I mean I always go back to kind of like Sunday mornings being left kind of.
Speaker B:I had a sister, but she was generally.
Speaker B:I think my grandmother used to drag her to church on a Sunday or whatever.
Speaker B:But anyway, I was always had these kind of Sunday memories of a Sunday morning when I was old enough to do it, of being able to work the record player and playing my parents very limited collection of records and just getting lost in music, just really loving and savoring those moments and you know, almost like feeling like I was entering another world.
Speaker B:You know, I get so lost in it and my mum.
Speaker B:The only pop records we had were the Beatles records.
Speaker B:Not all of them, but some of them.
Speaker B:I think me and my sister required the, the other ones filled in the gaps later and some classical and I think I'm right in saying.
Speaker B:Although I know, yeah, I'm pretty sure she also had Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook which I kind of got into latterly in my childhood.
Speaker B:But I was, this is, you know, I'm a kid here.
Speaker B:I'm, you know, this is under 10 years old or whatever.
Speaker B:From 7 to 7 years old or something like that, you know.
Speaker B: layer which was a amazing old: Speaker B:Into a corner.
Speaker B:So one of the speakers was just firing straight into a wall.
Speaker B:So I'm not sure how effective that was.
Speaker B:Yeah, but, but it sounded quite good and you know, and it filled the room with sound and that was all that I cared about.
Speaker B:And I, I just literally just pranced about in the room feeling very unselfconscious because I was left alone to do that and.
Speaker B:And discovering this.
Speaker B:That I could have this kind of secret world and secret release of music.
Speaker B:So that was really the starting point for me.
Speaker B:And then, you know, I fell in love with various forms of pop music.
Speaker B:And my.
Speaker B:I had a sister who was two years older.
Speaker B:So, you know, we bought, like.
Speaker B:I remember pooling our pocket money and buying a David Bowie album, Aladdin Sane as it came out.
Speaker B:And that was, you know, a very exciting moment in my life.
Speaker B:And.
Speaker B:And, yeah, and, you know, and then I had.
Speaker B:And then I nurtured dreams of.
Speaker B:Of becoming, you know, a pop star or whatever.
Speaker B:And, you know, I started learning to play the guitar when I was about 11 or 12.
Speaker B:And that was really my.
Speaker B:My.
Speaker B:My raison d' etre for.
Speaker B:For a long time.
Speaker B:That was what.
Speaker B:You know, that was where I was aiming.
Speaker B:And it was very amusing because I remember I had a school careers report when I was in my O level year or whatever.
Speaker B:And, you know, I wish I still had it.
Speaker B:But it said something like, patrick wishes to break into the music business or something like that, you know, and it was like it was kind of pitched in a way that this poor deluded fool thinks that he'll end up, you know, being able to work with in music.
Speaker B:Well, my dreams of pop stardom may not have come.
Speaker B:I did find a way of having a life in music, which I'm eternally grateful for.
Speaker B:So.
Speaker B:So there you go.
Speaker A:So what was the early stuff you were learning on guitar?
Speaker A:Because I learned at a similar age and I had other mates that became far better guitarist because I was just strumming Beatles chords.
Speaker B:Yeah, mainly Beatles chords.
Speaker B:We had the Beatles songbook, you know, and it was.
Speaker B:It was a lot of fun working those out.
Speaker B:But some, you know, but I also, I think, you know, it was like.
Speaker B:It was quite early on when I started experimenting with chords and started hit, you know, using, you know, like you.
Speaker B:Or seeing some of the jazzy accords that McCartney would insert into songs and go, oh, this is a ninth, you know, and all this kind of thing.
Speaker B:So I sort of started it started making, you know, firing my imagination and I started kind of hearing it in music, if you see what I mean.
Speaker B:I started realizing that there was this kind of world of harmony, if you like.
Speaker B:And then, you know, and then when you kind of get that revelation, I guess in a way that's when you start hearing that a lot of music is quite pedestrian in terms of that.
Speaker B:It doesn't not.
Speaker B:There's anything wrong with that because you can do amazing, brilliant things with, you know, three major chords or whatever, but, you know, that's.
Speaker B:That's a kind of fairly limited harmonic palette.
Speaker B:And, you know, and gradually I came to appreciate and understand a more advanced kind of harmony, you know, and harmony is a big thing for me, and it's still a huge part of my taste in music, you know, it's one of the reasons I love Brazilian music so much, for instance.
Speaker B:But, yeah, I mean, you know, learning the guitar, I mean, I've, you know, I'm not a musician.
Speaker B:I've.
Speaker B:I'm a failed musician.
Speaker B:I switched from guitar to bass.
Speaker B:I, you know, what have you.
Speaker B:But, you know, my fairly amateurish attempts at doing music were, you know, we're never really going to go anywhere.
Speaker B:But it was a good grounding for me to have, you know, and I'm really glad that I've had that because, you know, when I did actually eventually get into DJing, I had a kind of whole.
Speaker B:Another compass, if you like, a whole nother orientation of the way that I listened to and understood music.
Speaker B:Not that I was on the great level where I was going to kind of like write the chart of it straight away, but I could hear things from, you know, from a technical perspective in terms of where they were harmonically, and I could hear the level of playing and all of these kind of things.
Speaker B:So I had a kind of more of a ready reckoner of understanding it in that way, you know, which, you know, a lot of some people don't, because they come to music from a totally different thing.
Speaker B:And they come as Is purely as consumers and, you know, consumers of records, really, and of tunes, you know.
Speaker A:Yeah, I. I often find it interesting because I could go on about the Beatles again, but we've already done an hour and a half.
Speaker A:I know, Greg.
Speaker A:So.
Speaker B:It was so funny listening to the podcast you did with.
Speaker B:With Greg, which was.
Speaker B:Which is brilliant, by the way, and he's such a great natural raconteur.
Speaker B:But it was so funny, those touchstones that he had and I had, very much in terms of the Beatles, which he did his deep dive a bit later, but obviously, you know, it was the soundtrack of his childhood as well, you know, and him talking about that, the pivotal Bowie on top of the pop starman moment, which was like a huge thing for so many people.
Speaker B:It's like.
Speaker B:It's crazy when you read so many people's stories.
Speaker B:And that was a kind of, you know, that was a really pivotal moment in culture that you just don't get anymore because, you know, obviously the nation gathered around the TV set for the Top of the Pops.
Speaker B:And, you know, much as I didn't have many mates at school at that time who were really into music, those that were, you know, it was either, you know, Bowie's amazing or it was.
Speaker B:What's all that about?
Speaker B:You know.
Speaker B:So, yeah, it was a real Marmite moment as well.
Speaker B:It was a real division as well, if you like, you know.
Speaker A:Yeah, I suppose what you were saying as well, though, about the Beatles and the chords and things, it is a really good point because, you know, they were known as this sort of three chord wonder.
Speaker A:But there is some quite complex songwriting and stuff.
Speaker A:And even in like, Michelle, there's like the jazz bass solo.
Speaker A:Who's doing a bass guitar solo?
Speaker A:Yeah, it's jazz, you know.
Speaker B:Well, I think McCartney was an incredible sponge and I think, you know, like a lot of.
Speaker B:One of the great things about people of that generation, as much as they were inspired by rock and roll and rhythm and blues, you know, they've been exposed to the great, you know, the great American Songbook kind of sound, you know, songwriting that, you know, that kind of school of songwriting, like the Cole Porters and all of them.
Speaker B:And all of that was part of the musical fabric of everybody's lives because that's what was played on the radio a lot of the time, you know, those kind of standards and things.
Speaker B:So I think an appreciation of that kind of, that level because that there's such enormous craft in those songs, you know, you can go, but what.
Speaker B:The reason they're standards and the reason they're so great is they're so brilliantly crafted, you know.
Speaker B:You know that these guys were kind of like on a.
Speaker B:On a really sophisticated level, if you like.
Speaker A:Yeah, some of the harmony and some of that stuff, you know.
Speaker B:You know, these guys were, you know, they were.
Speaker B:They were, you know, if you like, proper musicians who'd done plenty of study before, whereas, you know, the generations that followed the, you know, the pop generations from the Beatles onwards who were writing their own songs, they were learning all this stuff, you know, and they started off with the basics and they learned how to play rock and roll, because that's fairly simple, you know.
Speaker B:But obviously McCartney was somebody who was, you know, very early on, you know, understood and was interested in other forms of music.
Speaker B:And, you know, they did things like Bessemy Mucho and things like covers of that in their.
Speaker B:In their early days.
Speaker B:So obviously there was that influence as well, you know.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:So I think with, with me from my guitarin and stuff, because I did.
Speaker A:I played brass when I was young, right.
Speaker A:So I like.
Speaker A:It is interesting, like I had a sort of.
Speaker A:Probably like a grade 5 or just below grade 5 sort of understanding of theory and chords and stuff like that, but I kind of never knew quite enough to be accomplished and I knew too much to be interesting.
Speaker A:I just sat in this really like, pedestrian.
Speaker B:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker B:I think it's.
Speaker B:It's hard to break on through to that, to that, to that higher level, isn't it?
Speaker B:It's funny you should say funny actually play guitar.
Speaker B:I really, you know, this was part of my early fascination or with.
Speaker B:With.
Speaker B:With kind of.
Speaker B:Kind of with jazz, but also with like, you know, that Roxy Music had a sax player, you know, I was really into.
Speaker B:I was into the.
Speaker B:And David Bowie played the sax, you know, so I was really into saxophone.
Speaker B:So when, you know, like my opportunity came to learn an instrument at school, I said, can I learn saxophone?
Speaker B:And they said, no, but you can learn clarinet and maybe you can progress to saxophone from that.
Speaker B:And.
Speaker B:And I did learn clarinet for a while.
Speaker B:And my first clarinet teacher was Brian Eno's uncle, right.
Speaker B:Because Brian Eno is from my part of the world, he's from Suffolk himself, you know.
Speaker B:And yeah, his uncle taught me and he was a beautiful old man and he was an incredible teacher.
Speaker B:Unfortunately, he retired about a year after I started learning and I acquired another teacher who rubbed me up the wrong way.
Speaker B:This is one of the.
Speaker B:Also part of my history was my endeavours to learn music kept on being thwarted by coming.
Speaker B:Coming against awful teachers who kind of.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker B:Who I felt kind of wanted to belittle me more than they actually wanted to impart anything useful.
Speaker B:So, you know.
Speaker B:So yeah, my second clarinet teacher was not very inspirational.
Speaker B:So I kind of quickly.
Speaker A:I quickly dropped that, I think woodwind instruments as well.
Speaker A:My daughter started learning the flute at school.
Speaker A:And it's like these things are so hard because they're not linear instruments, you know, Piano's linear, isn't it?
Speaker A:You know, you start at the left, it's low, you go to the right, it's high on a guitar.
Speaker B:It's.
Speaker A:Yeah, you know.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:Well, I mean, this is the whole thing, you know.
Speaker B:I've got.
Speaker B:One of my twin boys is quite adept on piano and I keep on showing to him, I said, look, this is quite simple because all the harmony stuff, you can work it out, you can just count up from the root note and you.
Speaker B:There you are, you know, it's all.
Speaker B:It's all fairly obvious and it's graphic and you can understand it.
Speaker B:Whereas the guitar is a matrix, you know.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:Is a weird matrix that takes a.
Speaker B:Forever to get your head around because of the way it's tuned.
Speaker B:So it's funny how it's like the principal instrument of kind of, you know, of popular music for so many people.
Speaker B:And it's the first thing that everybody picks up.
Speaker B:But it's the hardest one to learn and understand music on.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:You know, guitar doesn't make sense of music.
Speaker B:It complicates it, you know, doesn't.
Speaker B:It certainly doesn't simplify anything, you know.
Speaker B:And it's a ball ache to learn that involves a lot of pain in your wrist and fingers and what have you.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:Shredding the front of your fingers and stuff.
Speaker A:So what came next for you musically?
Speaker A:What was.
Speaker A:What was the next after, like the Bowie and the Beatles?
Speaker B:Well, you know, it's funny actually, because I look back on this.
Speaker B:On my.
Speaker B:My earlier tastes and I mean, I.
Speaker B:It's funny because I, I.
Speaker B:Quite early on I was really into, you know, buying records and.
Speaker B:And I really quickly realized that if you bought either secondhand records or.
Speaker B:Or records that nobody wanted in sales, for instance, that you could buy them really cheap, you know.
Speaker B:And that was great because you could be a bit more speculative about what you bought, you know.
Speaker B:And so, for instance, I remember very.
Speaker B:You know, I was probably.
Speaker B:I don't know how old I was, but whenever it came out, I guess I remember buying Brian Auger's Oblivion Express album in Nice in the.
Speaker B:In the.
Speaker B:In the sale in.
Speaker B:In the record department of the department store in Ipswich, you know.
Speaker B:And it was like 50p or 99p or something like that.
Speaker B:I thought, oh, that's worth a pun.
Speaker B:It's got a great cover, you know, and it was.
Speaker B:And it was a jazz fusion record, which I didn't really understand what it was at the time, but I liked it, you know, and what have you.
Speaker B:But when I went to.
Speaker B:I kind of changed schools at the age of 12 or 13.
Speaker B:But it was funny because so many of my peers were kind of into heavy and progressive rock, you know, that was the kind of.
Speaker B:And so.
Speaker B:And I didn't like a lot of that stuff, but I kind of tried to find things that I did like that they would relate to because.
Speaker B:But.
Speaker B:But I guess in a way, my tastes had already started to be quite eclectic.
Speaker B:My sister was a couple of years older.
Speaker B:She'd started buying, you know, more different things like, you know, some soul Records and what have you, you know.
Speaker B:So, yeah, I did have a kind of brief flirtation with kind of Prague, I suppose, but that I quickly grew out of that.
Speaker B:And then of course I was that age when punk happened that it had a fairly seismic effect, just not necessarily in terms of musically, but obviously you just felt it culturally and as a kind of natural rebel, if you like.
Speaker B:I was just drawn into its attitude and its spirit and, and what have you and, and you know, and there was that sense of.
Speaker B:There was something going on and I loved the whole thing about the.
Speaker B:The kind of DIY ethos of it.
Speaker B:It just made the musical world seem more possible, whereas it had always seemed incredibly, you know, like these far flung pop stars that you would never attain their level, you know.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:And then suddenly it was like, wow, these, these people are just going out there and making a record, you know, and, and they're doing it.
Speaker B:And so, so, so I was drawn into all of that.
Speaker B:So, yeah, that was, that was, that was a big thing for me.
Speaker B:It was funny because my.
Speaker B:A guy I was playing in bands with, who was a drummer, he.
Speaker B:He got a job as a Saturday boy at the local radio station, Radio Orwell, which was also a big insight for me because he was very friendly with a guy called Andy Archer, who was.
Speaker B:Who'd come over from Radio Caroline, which was the kind of pirate radio in a sh.
Speaker B:On a ship, you know.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:And he was, you know, he come from there more kind of hippie, progressive ethos and what have you.
Speaker B:And he did a Saturday afternoon show on the.
Speaker B:On Radio Orwell, which we often sat in on, which was great because it was one of my kind of insights into that whole thing of wow, you can play music you love on.
Speaker B:I mean, he played what he loved, but a lot of the listenership weren't necessarily that down with it, but he was like, I'm doing it anyway.
Speaker B:So he was like.
Speaker B:He was really into the whole kind of, you know, the.
Speaker B:More of the kind of, you know, the Doobie Brothers, Crosby, Stills and that all Van Morrison, all of that kind of.
Speaker B:That kind of the more soulful end of rock music, which I, you know, he was my kind of introduction to a lot, a lot of that stuff.
Speaker B:Stuff.
Speaker B:And I loved a lot of that music, you know, and I, I heard it first there.
Speaker B:But my mate Robin having a Saturday job there meant that he was, you know, he.
Speaker B:One of his jobs was working in the record library they had there and they were sent all the promos and of course they didn't play any punk records at that time.
Speaker B:So every punk single that came out, he.
Speaker B:He just took home with him, you know.
Speaker B:So he had this incredible collect.
Speaker B:I mean, God knows what it would be worth now because it was like, oh, you know, this incredible collection of all the punk 7 inches as.
Speaker B:As they came out, you know.
Speaker B:So, you know, we listened to those as A Bit of Love.
Speaker B:But funnily enough, you know, he was somebody who.
Speaker B:He was kind of pulling me and the other.
Speaker B:The other part of what he was listening to was kind of jazz rock and jazz fusion.
Speaker B:You know, he was kind of Weather Report and Coliseum and stuff like that, you know, so.
Speaker B:And I was playing.
Speaker B:And by that time I was playing bass and we were kind of, you know, a rhythm section and you know, that was where our tastes were going.
Speaker B:But at the same time.
Speaker B:And it's so funny, isn't it?
Speaker B: that period from kind of like: Speaker B:And I'd say 97 to 82 really.
Speaker B:Because 82 was when I start.
Speaker B:It was just so wide open.
Speaker B:And I didn't feel that there was any contradiction in liking all of these different kinds of music.
Speaker B:You know, I was just kind of like.
Speaker B:And I didn't want it to be tribal, you know, and it was quite tribal amongst.
Speaker B:Amongst, you know, culture, you know, socially out there in the world that I lived in.
Speaker B:But one of the things that.
Speaker B:And when it got to post punk and things started to kind of.
Speaker B:And those barriers started to break down, it was like, yes, this is what we want.
Speaker B:We want to live in a world where we can do anything.
Speaker B:Do you know what I mean?
Speaker B:And because it was so.
Speaker B:And I remember, you know, like being in ipswich as a 17 year old walking through the town center with my kind of David Bowie affected haircut and whatever I was wearing at the time.
Speaker B:And this girl stopped me in the street and said, oi, are you punk or soul?
Speaker B:You know, and.
Speaker B:And that for me was a cr.
Speaker B:Was almost like a crowning moment.
Speaker B:It's like, yeah, I really cracked it here because she.
Speaker B:Because she's confused as to what I am.
Speaker B:And I.
Speaker B:And that was where I was at by that time.
Speaker B:It was like, what was I?
Speaker B:Punk or soul?
Speaker B:I wasn't quite sure, you know.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker A:So what was Ipswich like then for integration and people accepting different tribes and things like that?
Speaker B:Well, it was interesting because it was, you know, I think microcosms are kind of often interesting.
Speaker B:In that, in that respect, because it is all quite contained and because it, you know, because there's only a certain amount of opportunities or outlets for anything, whether it be youth clubs or venues where you can perform or whatever.
Speaker B:There's always quite a lot of, you know, pollination, cross pollination between people and tribes, you know.
Speaker B:And, you know, it's funny when you think about the kind of Bob Marley punky reggae party thing.
Speaker B:Well, that definitely happened in Ipswich because certainly when I was growing up there, not so much the case now, but there was a much bigger Caribbean population.
Speaker B:They all moved away, probably because it was so racist.
Speaker B:I don't know, whatever, you know, But.
Speaker B:But there was in those days.
Speaker B:So we had some really good reggae bands came out of Ipswich, including Jar Warrior, who I think people think of as being a London band because I think they all moved to Brixton, you know.
Speaker B:But so I remember them and we had a.
Speaker B:We had a kind of like our semi successful punk band, the Addicts.
Speaker B:And I certainly remember going to gigs where Jar Warrior and the Addicts were on the same, you know.
Speaker B:And.
Speaker B:Yeah, and so that was.
Speaker B:That was a kind of common thing.
Speaker B:And then kind of later on, I remember when some of the people that I'd started playing with, like Robin and a cable player I'd work with John, they kind of got into the kind of local soul boy, jazz funk scene maybe, you know.
Speaker B:And so they were playing in one of their bands and I was playing in one of my slightly weird post punk bands and we would kind of.
Speaker B:We would share a bill, you know.
Speaker B:So it was like.
Speaker B:It was.
Speaker B:It was.
Speaker B:It was not seen as it was, you know, you wanted to kind of to merge those things because that's the only way you get enough people into your gig sometime or whatever, you know.
Speaker A:When you were just mentioning about bands, you talk about getting into Weather Report.
Speaker A:Yeah, Weather Report is quite technical, isn't it?
Speaker A:Because I think this is something I want to get into with you around jazz and how accessible some of it is and some of it isn't.
Speaker A:As you're someone who's learning bass and you're then starting listening to Weather Report and Jaco Pistorius.
Speaker A:How like soul destroying is it?
Speaker A:Just listening, being like, wow, he's good.
Speaker B:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker B:I mean, you know.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:I mean, you know, I remember all kinds of bass players who really, really excited me, but at the same time just made me feel like I was completely inadequate and I would.
Speaker B:I would never get there.
Speaker B:And funnily enough, you know, I mean, as Much as I did love Pastorius.
Speaker B:And.
Speaker B:And it's a complicated part of my story, actually, because Robin, who was the drummer who kind of introduced me to Weather Report, I eventually left Ipswich because he was at university in.
Speaker B:In, well, polytechnic, as it was in Kingston.
Speaker B:And my mission was that I would go to Kingston to study because I wanted to form a band with him, which never kind of happened.
Speaker B:But he was a huge Weather Report fan and we.
Speaker B:We shared a flat.
Speaker B:And his incessant playing of Weather Report actually really got to me after a while, you know, and.
Speaker B:And I had a whole period of a few years when I just could not hear Weather Report.
Speaker B:It would just kind of make me make my flesh crawl.
Speaker B:And then, you know, eventually I was able to kind reintroduced myself to them as being a completely new band because it was like I was hearing it all afresh by that time.
Speaker A:But.
Speaker B:Yeah, but certainly, you know, and there.
Speaker B:I can remember him just playing those records.
Speaker B:And I remember there's.
Speaker B:I think it's called A remark you made.
Speaker B:It's a Pastorius kind of solo and it goes and that.
Speaker B:Yeah, you know, that one, it just kind of like every time it's that one, that particular tune, I still can't kind of hear it, you know, because I just remember him just playing them, you know, like somebody can really bore you with a record, you know, if they just play it too much and it's not what you want to listen to at the time.
Speaker B:So.
Speaker B:So.
Speaker B:Yeah, but.
Speaker B:Yes, you know, but that whole kind of.
Speaker B:I did.
Speaker B:It took me a long time to kind of assimilate.
Speaker B:I was, you know, like, going back to buying my Brian Auger album when I was a kid.
Speaker B:It took me a long time to start really having the ears to be able to digest a lot of jazz fusion and.
Speaker B:And stuff, you know, it was quite complex music and.
Speaker B:And, you know, I totally appreciate that.
Speaker B:It's some.
Speaker B:You know, sometimes it's music that can turn a lot of people off because of that.
Speaker B:Because of that thing.
Speaker B:But eventually I got my head around it, that's for sure, you know.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:Like, I find it was Frank Zappa as well.
Speaker A:Some of his stuff I think is really cool, but some stuff, it's just too clever for me.
Speaker B:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker B:Well, I hear that as well, you know.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:So was it Kingston that you moved to then?
Speaker B:Well, yeah, so basically I'm.
Speaker B:You know, I was playing in bands as a bass player.
Speaker B:I think the last band I had was called Lux Function.
Speaker B:It was basically me, a synth Player and a drum machine with me kind of playing slap bass and.
Speaker B:And.
Speaker B:And Robin, who was the drummer I'd work with, he came and played congas on some of our gigs as well.
Speaker B:And it was the summer of 82, which was a great year.
Speaker B:And it was.
Speaker B:And it was actually when I did some of my first DJing as well.
Speaker B:But.
Speaker B:And I just suddenly thought.
Speaker B:And I've been kind of quite dedicated to Ipswich, to staying there and trying to make things happen culturally there because, you know, when it was always a fit sense that there was a bit of a scene and that, you know, that it was quite exciting in its own way.
Speaker B:But I just kind of got to a point where I was just like, no, I can't do this anymore.
Speaker B:I need to go somewhere else.
Speaker B:And I was.
Speaker B:I've always been very.
Speaker B:I was very.
Speaker B:I feel very drawn to London anyway.
Speaker B:My dad's a prop was a proper Cockney, if you like, you know, So I felt ancestrally it was my.
Speaker B:My homeland.
Speaker B:And I know Kingston isn't quite London, but we'll get to that.
Speaker B:But I, I. Yeah, I suddenly, literally at the last moment, applied to Kingston Poly to do a degree because I thought I can't do.
Speaker B:I'd taken two years off after my A levels and doing.
Speaker B:Messing around, doing music.
Speaker B:And I thought, no, I need to go and do a qualification.
Speaker B:And at the time it was very much about forming a band with Robin.
Speaker B:But as I said at that time, I'd also done some of.
Speaker B:My first.
Speaker B:Summer of 82 was the year when I did my first ever proper DJing, which was funny and I don't quite know how it came about, but there was a venue in Ipswich called the Albion Mills.
Speaker B:It was a pub and they had a classic kind of pub basement, you know, with little alcoves and what have you, you know, and it was a jazz club.
Speaker B:The guy that ran it, Derek, was a proper jazz head and little known to me.
Speaker B:I really was not appreciative of how immersed he was in the British jazz scene at the time, because various artists who I totally admire played there on a regular basis.
Speaker B:And I was kind of associating them with being a kind of jazz world that I didn't.
Speaker B:Even though I was kind of getting into jazz, I was thinking of British jazz as being these kind of blokes in cardigans with pipes and kind of.
Speaker B:It just.
Speaker B:It just somehow I just, you know, I'd built up this antipathy towards it and.
Speaker B:And we had a really funny relationship with Derek because he really took the piss out of us as being these young kids who would kind of do our weird bands and.
Speaker B:And what have you.
Speaker B:But there was a couple of guys who were in the year above me at school and I think they were at uni already.
Speaker B:But in the summer they decided that we'd do a DJ night in the Albion Mills within the nearly.
Speaker B:We're always doing live on a Thursday night.
Speaker B:And they.
Speaker B:They knew I had records by that, you know, by that time and so they said, come and DJ with us.
Speaker B:And it was.
Speaker B:It was a funny thing because we were just.
Speaker B:It was just a thing, you know, But I love doing it.
Speaker B:And it was completely eclectic.
Speaker B:It was in terms of the kind of stuff.
Speaker B:Well, eclectic in a kind of.
Speaker B:In quite a cool way, I suppose now.
Speaker B:But we were.
Speaker B:It wasn't.
Speaker B:We didn't know that at the time.
Speaker B:The fact that we were playing this kind of weird mixture of kind of post punk dance like A Certain Ratio and all of that kind of related type of things alongside things like, you know, Gwen Guthrie and then things like Planet Rock, when that came out, and all of this kind of mad and, you know, and things like Nina Simone as well and kind of some more retro stuff, even Louis Jordan, you know, we just mashed it all together because it just felt natural to do that, you know, and.
Speaker B:And it was a lot of fun.
Speaker B:So.
Speaker B:So that was one of my first ever DJ experiences.
Speaker B:But at that time it was absolutely not even remotely in my head that it was an avenue that I would later pursue, you know, and it was.
Speaker B:It was really.
Speaker B:I think Greg might have said something along these lines as well about the experience of DJing.
Speaker B:When you start when you're kind of playing.
Speaker B:And especially for me, because Ipswich is a very kind of small scene.
Speaker B:So, like, everyone I knew was out there having fun and I was kind of trapped behind the decks trying to provide the entertainment and it was like, yeah, you know, they were having a lot.
Speaker B:They seemed like they were having a lot more fun than I was.
Speaker B:And I was still very sketchy about how I approached the technical aspect of.
Speaker B:Well, I kind of blended.
Speaker B:Blended records together and it was, you know, a citronic console with garage turntables.
Speaker B:So it wasn't, you know, yeah, the kind of level that we got used to later.
Speaker B:So.
Speaker B:But it was.
Speaker B:It was.
Speaker B:It was a good initiation and.
Speaker B:And like I said, I think we were playing what now in retrospect might be considered a very hip playlist.
Speaker B:But I think it was just.
Speaker B:It was just kind of cone.
Speaker B:Completely Accidental, coincidental that we were, you know, was.
Speaker A:Was part of that, do you think?
Speaker A:Because I think about this sometimes because I overthink probably because I don't DJ as much.
Speaker A:I really overthink what I'm going to DJ at places and stuff like that.
Speaker A:Whereas those first few sort of gigs I was doing, I remember I closed out a.
Speaker A:Like a festival up at a uni campus up near where I'm from and I was playing all sorts of things, but it was because I only probably had about 50 records.
Speaker A:Like, I. I didn't have an option, but what I played.
Speaker A:I'd love to go back and hear the sex.
Speaker A:I'm pretty confident it would have been pretty decent and just a lot more varied than if I went and played somewhere tomorrow, you know, and you're not overthinking it and stuff.
Speaker A:It's quite nice in a way, but it's.
Speaker B:I mean, you know, but that whole thing, because, you know, eclectic became a word which then eventually got used a lot in terms of, you know, to describe sometimes my style or a style of DJing that, you know, ranged across genres or whatever.
Speaker B:But it was something that, you know, for me, like, in that kind of, very much in that kind of post punk ethos was that.
Speaker B:Was that, you know, anything could go and there was no reason why you shouldn't be able to blend this with that or what have you, you know.
Speaker A:Yeah, definitely.
Speaker A:Did you enjoy that because you were saying, you know, you were mindful that people were having more fun.
Speaker A:Did you still enjoy the DJ and all?
Speaker A:Was it a chore?
Speaker B:No, not sure, but it was, but it was, it was, it was, well, I suppose a little bit challenging, you know, just because that thing of like, oh, the records are only out, I haven't got, you know, is that.
Speaker B:It's kind of like you haven't quite got down with the kind of, the basics of like, of how you have to.
Speaker B:What the mindset you have to have.
Speaker B:Whereas that's kind of second nature to me now because of the 10,000 hours rule or whatever and what have you.
Speaker B:But then, you know, and.
Speaker B:But it was interesting because I think, you know, there's something very beautiful in the unselfconscious selection process, you know, and because I had no real reference points in terms of comparing much to it.
Speaker B:I mean, I was, you know, I heard other DJs, I had been exposed to some DJs at that point, but not that much, you know, so it was no way that I was thinking about, I need to try and copy that or whatever, it was just like, no, I'm just, yeah, I'm gonna play this now or whatever, you know.
Speaker B:And it was probably a much more, you know, it wasn't so much about tempo or style, it was more about mood, you know, I think that was the thing, you know, it's like, I want to play this record next because it, emotionally it makes sense rather than.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:And for any other reason, you know.
Speaker A:Nice.
Speaker A:Yeah, because sometimes, yeah, BPM can get in the way, can't it?
Speaker B:Oh, totally.
Speaker B:And I never, you know, and it took me a long, you know, I, you know, it's not, it's not where I come from as a dj, you know, even though I'm kind of completely down with doing that now.
Speaker B:And I, you know, and I'm, you know, I've got to that point where I can hear what BPM record is almost straight away within, you know, roughly.
Speaker B:Yeah, it's.
Speaker B:It wasn't the way, it certainly wasn't the way I thought back then.
Speaker A:So in those two years after your A levels, were you doing any, Were you doing any jobs or part time jobs or anything?
Speaker B:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker A:What sort of stuff?
Speaker B:Well, I did.
Speaker B:Well, I did.
Speaker B:I worked in a. I actually worked in a.
Speaker B:In a warehouse at an engineering company for, for quite a while actually, until they kind of made me redundant.
Speaker B:So it was for me that was really quite liberating as well, you know, I just want, you know, the idea of having a weekly wage packet and being able to spend it on records.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:Which I did.
Speaker B:Which I did pretty regularly on a Saturday.
Speaker B:I remember there was a guy called Charlie Davey who was the older brother of one of my sister's friends.
Speaker B:And he was kind of like an old hippie type and he opened a secondhand shop just in, literally on the same road as Ipswich is kind of main record shop, Parrot Records, as it was at the time.
Speaker B:So, you know, like on a Saturday in a kind of like a.
Speaker B:In a rehearsal of what would come later in Soho, you know, you do the kind of record shop run which might only be two shops, but I go to Parrot Records and then I go to Charlie's shop and buy records, you know.
Speaker B:And that certainly, that was instilled at that point of that kind of the pleasure and the joy of just doing some record shopping and going home with a bag of records and the anticipation of being able to play them, get them on the turntable, that, that whole thing which still kind of excites me to this day, you know, to an extent that, that was very much instilled in me at that point.
Speaker B:And, you know, I was, you know, I'd.
Speaker B:I'd already started a quite.
Speaker B:You know, like.
Speaker B:Whereas most friends of mine had a few records, you know, I had a big shelf of record records already, you know.
Speaker B:So.
Speaker B:Yeah, and.
Speaker B:And I was buying all kind.
Speaker B:And I was buying all kinds of things at that point as well, you know, like, you know, whatever, sometimes random, sometimes whatever.
Speaker B:But I got into quite early on, I.
Speaker B:By that time I was probably kind of involved.
Speaker B:I got to the point where I was doing things like.
Speaker B:Well, I was looking.
Speaker B:And even if I wasn't buying them, I was reading, you know, like James Hamilton's column in.
Speaker B:In Record Mirror.
Speaker B:And I was looking in the.
Speaker B:And look very, very much looking at a lot of the charts in the back of blues and soul and trying to thinking, what the hell are these records these guys are playing?
Speaker B:Especially when I started realizing some of it was more kind of jazz related.
Speaker B:And as I kind of became aware of the idea of this notion of jazz, dance and Latin music, which really fascinated me.
Speaker B:So I would go into Parrot Records or later Andy's Records, which were opened up in Ipswich, as well as another.
Speaker B:The second main record shop.
Speaker B:And Andy's had actually had a quite a decent jazz department.
Speaker B:So, like, I remember really early on buying, you know, just because I knew it was a significant album.
Speaker B:I think I was probably only about 16.
Speaker B:I bought Coltrane Love supreme in.
Speaker B:In there.
Speaker B:And.
Speaker B:And then I got.
Speaker B:Because I was into playing bass and I was really completely drawn and fascinated by the sound of the upright bass, you know.
Speaker B:And I knew that Charlie Mingus was the, you know, the number one kind of jazz bass player.
Speaker B:So I went to the kind of Mingus section and I found an album called Tuana Moods.
Speaker B:And on the back it had a quote from him saying, this is the best record I ever made.
Speaker B:So I thought, well, I'm gonna buy that one then, you know.
Speaker B:And that was a record that I completely.
Speaker B:Because it was kind of really quite different as a jazz record.
Speaker B:I mean, they were quite heavy records for me, you know, and I wasn't really assimilating this music.
Speaker B:But at the same time I was like.
Speaker B:I understood that there was something there and I began to hear it.
Speaker B:Gradually it made more and more sense to me.
Speaker B:But even to my young, young is.
Speaker B:There was enough to make me think, I need to know this.
Speaker B:I need to kind of explore it more.
Speaker A:Because, yeah, Coltrane's not kind of simple jazz, is it?
Speaker B:No, certainly.
Speaker B:And Love supreme is a pretty heavy one.
Speaker B:You know, if that's your first Coltrane album, that could put you off for life.
Speaker A:Is that like hard bop stuff then?
Speaker B:Well, yeah, but, I mean, you know, I suppose Love supreme veers towards a slightly freer approach as well.
Speaker B:You know, Even though I'd say it's very much within that kind of era of post or hard bop or whatever you want to call it.
Speaker B:Because it's, you know, that's his.
Speaker B:His getting off heroin and having a kind of spiritual revelation type of record, you know, so.
Speaker B:But yeah, I mean, you know, it was funny because it wasn't until quite a lot later that I suddenly, you know, that I kind of became like a Coltrane devotee, if you like.
Speaker B:And if you look behind me, you can just probably see on the wall a picture where you can't see his face, but you can see his feet and his sacks.
Speaker B:So, yeah, it took a while to really start to appreciate Train in the Fullest.
Speaker B:But, yeah, Even as a 16 year old, there was.
Speaker B:I could hear.
Speaker B:There was something there and I could hear there was something there very much in the voice of his saxophone.
Speaker B:Yeah, I could hear like this human.
Speaker B:I could hear the anguish and the.
Speaker B:And the kind of.
Speaker B:And that kind of, you know.
Speaker B:And I suppose, you know, quite early on I was kind of into that notion that there was.
Speaker B:That there was.
Speaker B:That in music there could be anguish and joy at the same.
Speaker B:That it could have these simultaneous emotions, you know, that there could be pain and pleasure at the same time all wrapped up in the same thing.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:So, you know, so Coltrane was.
Speaker B:That was definitely the part of that thing.
Speaker B:But the Mingus record that I bought to one of Moods was because it was very much influenced by his trips to Tijuana and by kind of Latin.
Speaker B:Well, by kind of, you know, a kind of Latin music.
Speaker B:But I was read already as well at that stage, fascinated by Latin music.
Speaker B:So one of the things I would do when I went to Andy's records, I'd go to the jazz record section and look for anything that seemed Latin.
Speaker B:You know, I mean, these records that I was seeing that people were playing in the charts in the Back of Blue, I couldn't.
Speaker B:I know I couldn't find those records, but I thought, well, let me see what I can find.
Speaker B:That's going to be a bit like.
Speaker B:I was aware of this sound, even though I didn't really know what it was at the time, you know, whether.
Speaker B:Which was eventually I would understand as Latin jazz and Brazilian jazz and fusion and all of these things.
Speaker B:But so, you know, there were some records that I bought at that time, like, for instance, Ray Barretto, Lacuna, which came out in, I don't know, whenever it was, but that was a new release at the time and had this amazing version of Stevie Wonder's Pastime paradise, which I knew anyway because my sister had songs in the key of life.
Speaker B:And that was the Stevie album that I'd completely fallen in love with.
Speaker A:Is that the version with a really nice heavy percussion?
Speaker B:Yes.
Speaker B:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker B:Which, you know, it's like.
Speaker B:It's funny because that's a tune I still play to this day.
Speaker B:So that record's been with me a very long time.
Speaker B:Another one was.
Speaker B:There was a McCoy Tyner album called Leyenda de la Hora, the Legend of the Hour, which was very much a.
Speaker B:Kind of Latin influenced with a lot of orchestration on it as well, which, again, is something which, you know, I got into big time later on.
Speaker B:But these were kind of very much like introductory records to me as I.
Speaker B:As I started to feel my way into.
Speaker B:Into the.
Speaker B:Into the music, I would love it.
Speaker B:But like I said at that time, my awareness of whatever was going on in London in terms of, you know, DJs playing jazz, whether it was Paul Murphy or whether it was in Manchester, and Colin Wilson and.
Speaker B:Yeah, Colin Curtis.
Speaker B:Sorry.
Speaker B:And.
Speaker B:And yeah, I was.
Speaker B:It was very, you know, it was very sketchy.
Speaker B:I didn't really know what was going on.
Speaker B:Although also around that time when I was still at school, like, my.
Speaker B:I had a girlfriend called Sylvia and she was like properly into the whole jazz, funk, soul scene.
Speaker B:So we would sometimes get another mate of us to drive us down to clubs in Essex, like the Barn at Braintree.
Speaker B:So I was, you know, I was.
Speaker B:And I went out and I'd go to clubs.
Speaker B:So certain.
Speaker B:Certain records that I already knew and heard, you know, and I was.
Speaker B:It was weird because I was kind of into disco as well, you know.
Speaker B:You know, that generation we grew up with chic and all of those things.
Speaker B:You know, those records were just like second nature records to us because you heard them all the time, you know.
Speaker B:You know, I remember going to.
Speaker B:There was a little pub that we used to go to on a Friday night where the landlord used to play some records and he would play all of those things and, you know, grew up dancing to all of that stuff.
Speaker B:And I love dancing, I always loved dancing.
Speaker B:But, yeah, so I started going out, you know, and I remember going to these clubs and thinking, wow, that's it's interesting they're playing, but my taste in jazz, if you like, was already a bit heavier, you know.
Speaker B:And like, certainly I remember Sylvia lending me her copy of the Crusaders Free as the Wind.
Speaker B:And I just, I just thought this is too lightweight for me.
Speaker B:At the time, you know, I wasn't kind of into it.
Speaker B:You know, it took me a while to kind of get my head round and all of that.
Speaker B:You know, maybe when I understood the history of the Crusaders and where they come from and they'd previously been the jazz crusaders, I kind of understood the whole lineage of it as I do these days.
Speaker B:It would have, you know, I appreciated it in a different way.
Speaker B:But at that time, you know, and I, and I suppose there was also this kind of like, as I was doing that kind of post punk hang up over and there was something that I identified in soul boy culture which I really wasn't into, which was kind of like this, kind of.
Speaker B:For me, you know, there was a lot of this kind of like, you know, nouveau riche, driving XR3s, going to wine bars, you know, this kind of whole kind of cultural ethos of that thing.
Speaker B:And you know, one of the things I realized from looking at blues and soul was that there was a kind of pretty naff element to the soul scene, you know, like, you know, on the weekenders and wet T shirt competitions and all kinds of shenanigans like that.
Speaker B:You know, these were the days when, you know, DJs were talking on the mic a locked and all that kind of stuff and I was just not into any of that stuff, you know, I just like.
Speaker B:Nah, that, that just didn't appeal to me.
Speaker B:I probably didn't really understand it and I probably wasn't really being exposed to the better end of it.
Speaker B:So, you know, I didn't get really where it was all coming from.
Speaker B:You know, I've studied that history in kind of in retrospect since and realized that I missed out on an awful lot, you know.
Speaker B:Yeah, but at the time that was, that was what my head was saying.
Speaker B:So that's, that's kind of where I went.
Speaker B:So.
Speaker B:So yeah, so I was, you know, so funnily enough, that whole thing about jazz funk, it took me a while to kind of reappraise that, you know, because my, my idea of jazz funk was a band like defunct or something like that were out of Chicago and were playing really quite heavyweight, grimy, grinding, but with a lot of jazz and not, not something that was kind of like light under these kind of fluffy little lines and stuff like that, which is how I heard a lot of that music then.
Speaker B:But having said that, there were certain aspects of it that I loved immediately.
Speaker B:I mean, you know, there was things.
Speaker B:There were records, you know, like Freeze.
Speaker B:When Freeze came out, I thought they were brilliant, you know.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:I just thought there was.
Speaker B:It was an energy to it, you know, that I just immediately got.
Speaker B:And Southern Freeze was just a record that just like.
Speaker B:I just love this record straight away, you know.
Speaker A:I suppose with Southern Frieze as well, it comes into what you said before about being able to have the sort of anguish and the joy.
Speaker A:Yeah, it's almost a bit kind of.
Speaker A:Is melancholy the right words?
Speaker B:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker A:Well, there's nothing like.
Speaker B:Well, of course, you know, this is the whole thing about music is when you get into that harmonic thing, you realize that when you're dealing with.
Speaker B:You can deal with a minor tonality, but it can be very joyous, you know.
Speaker B:You know, and that's a massive part of what Brazilian music as well, is about, as well, you know, what the Brazilians call saudaji, you know, this sense of longing in the music.
Speaker B:So there's kind of melancholia and joy at the same time, which I think is really a massive thing, you know, that's a huge thing for me.
Speaker B:It's a big key to my taste in music, is that thing.
Speaker A:So what was it you went to study at the Polytechnic then?
Speaker B:Ah, yeah.
Speaker B:Well, that's a funny one, because I was always an English scholar.
Speaker B:Words has always fascinated me.
Speaker B:I love poetry, I wrote poetry.
Speaker B:And I always assumed that if I, you know, even though I'd left school, I thought, well, if I'm going to do a degree, I'll do a degree in English.
Speaker B:But because I applied really late, I applied to do English and they said, sorry, the English course is full, but you can do History of Ideas if you like.
Speaker B:And I was like, what?
Speaker B:What's History of Ideas?
Speaker B:One of those serendipitous things that I'm incredibly grateful for, because it was a fantastic course and it was a perfect degree for me to do at the time.
Speaker B:And I gained so much from it.
Speaker B:It helped me so much in terms of.
Speaker B:Of understanding the world, the history of the world, where I was at, where understanding politics, giving me tools of political philosophy to understand politics on a kind of more fundamental level.
Speaker B:You know, when you've studied the history of, you know, you know, where liberalism comes from, you know, all of the.
Speaker B:You know, it just help, you know, everybody should have that Stuff should be in everybody's education, you know.
Speaker B:Well, after all, if you're voting for something, you know, that you don't really understand in that way, I'm not saying, of course it's, you know, it's kind of conceptual or whatever, but some kind of grounding in those ideas would be really useful for most people because I think a lot of part time, it passes people by.
Speaker B:But.
Speaker B:But yeah, it was an incredibly great degree for me to do and, and I'm eternally grateful that the English course was full and it was a pretty rubbish English course, to be honest with you, when I spoke to some of the other people who did that course.
Speaker B:So, yeah, it was, it was a really great thing and, and yeah, and it really suited me.
Speaker B:And I ended up writing my thesis on jazz culture.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker B:Which was.
Speaker B:I think my.
Speaker B:The title of my thesis was Trying to remember the Culture and Philosophy of Jazz and the Roots of Disaffiliation.
Speaker A:So what does that mean?
Speaker B:So, okay, so what it was about was a bay.
Speaker B:There was the way in which, if you like most of the.
Speaker B:So many things that became part of counterculture and subculture came initially out of jazz culture and black culture or society, you know, it was about.
Speaker B:And, you know, there were various texts that I used that were quite seminal in terms of my.
Speaker B:In terms of being able to write that.
Speaker B:You know, Norman Mailer's the White Negro, which was all about that idea of, you know, white people falling in love with this notion of a black.
Speaker B:I'm not.
Speaker B:You know, it's a.
Speaker B:It's a.
Speaker B:It's a.
Speaker B:It's a really interesting and very sensitive subject in a way.
Speaker B:But I was approaching it fairly naively at the time.
Speaker B:But at the same time I was kind of getting quite clued up.
Speaker B:By that time, I was living in a squat in Vauxhall and I was surrounded by people who were very politically motivated.
Speaker B:So, you know, concepts like cultural imperialism and the whole notion of, you know, as a white person being involved in black music, that was something that I. I understood it on those levels from the get go, if you like.
Speaker B:So.
Speaker B:So it was kind of it.
Speaker B:But it was obviously, you know, what I was trying to do was write a thesis that would work for my degree, you know.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:So it had to be, you know, to kind of wrap it up in.
Speaker B:In, in a kind of academic understanding.
Speaker B:But it was just being able to kind of go headlong into all of these subjects that really fascinated me and, you know, be able to reading books about, you know, the history of counterculture.
Speaker B:You know, like, you know, looking at the, you know, the 50s and the folk and jazz movements in the.
Speaker B:In.
Speaker B:In Britain, the beatniks, of course, all of these things that kind of fed into the, you know, the.
Speaker B:The kind of forerunners of what eventually happened in the 60s and what have you.
Speaker B:So I was.
Speaker B:It was something that I was totally.
Speaker B:I was, you know, I got really passionate when I was writing my thesis.
Speaker B:I got really, really into it and I was really searching around for a really good, pretentious enough, academic enough, if you like, text about jazz.
Speaker B:And then I was saved by the great Joachim Ernst Brent, who went on to.
Speaker B:Was actually a kind of one very involved in the German label mps, who released a lot of great jazz fusion and jazz records in the.
Speaker B:In the 70s.
Speaker B:But he'd.
Speaker B:He wrote quite a lot as well.
Speaker B:And he wrote.
Speaker B:And I had this book and it was just like a coffee table jazz, one of those kind of coffee tables jazz books.
Speaker B:But in the back of it there was this essay he'd written called Glosses on a Philosophy of Jazz.
Speaker B:And that was kind of.
Speaker B:That was.
Speaker B:This was like, oh, this is.
Speaker B:This is where I need to go.
Speaker B:I need to have some of this to kind of.
Speaker B:To make it all make sense, you know.
Speaker B:And it did.
Speaker B:And it was very.
Speaker B:And it was very interesting because he was really talking about a lot of the whole ideas in which jazz breaks down.
Speaker B:Linear time, if you like, you know, the fact that swing and the notion of the fact that, you know, that there are.
Speaker B:That you're moving or, you know, like, if you like.
Speaker B:If the most linear music would be kind of marching music.
Speaker B:Yeah, because the rhythm would just be so kind of pedestrian, you know, and jazz was all.
Speaker B:All about the offbeats, the nuance, the push and the pull of the swing, all of those things.
Speaker B:And how, in a sense, that plays with.
Speaker B:Obviously time still goes on, but you're playing within time.
Speaker B:You're moving time back and forth.
Speaker B:You're creating things within linear time that aren't quite so linear.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:Emphasize different things and what have you.
Speaker B:So it's more, it's more.
Speaker B:It's just, you know, there's more ambivalence, if you like, in.
Speaker B:In.
Speaker B:In the notion of time when you.
Speaker B:And that's something that, you know, that, That I understood anyway.
Speaker B:And it kind of fed into my notion of groove, I suppose, you know, in the idea that when you have a rhythm, a rhythm, it can be, you know, that you can play it in a variety of ways, you know, that there could be a way of playing it where it would be very ungroovy because the beats would be really like that, nailed down to where they should be.
Speaker B:But you could also sit back on it and it could become.
Speaker B:Or you could push it, but whatever.
Speaker B:But this would.
Speaker B:This notion that there was something.
Speaker B:There was some play within the.
Speaker B:Within.
Speaker B:Within this kind of rigid structure of time.
Speaker B:And that was.
Speaker B:And that helped create the magic, if you like, you know.
Speaker B:And this.
Speaker B:This slight sense of dislocation.
Speaker B:And that sense of dislocation is part of the way, when you hear it, that you kind of able to enter into a less linear world, you know, that it.
Speaker B:The.
Speaker B:That.
Speaker B:The fact that time and rhythm is working in with you and obviously with polyrhythm, when you're getting a lot of rhythmic information at once, that whole thing of your being, you know, and it's.
Speaker B:I mean, you know, the most reductive version of that might be something like psi trance.
Speaker B:The most advanced version of it might be something like, you know, well, like African percussion and kind of like some of the kind of records that Art Blakey made with a whole host of African percussionists, where it was like this real dense rhythmic intensity and there'd be this kind of thing within it that was moving.
Speaker B:You know, it was kind of an emotional thing moving.
Speaker B:And I could.
Speaker B:And that was why, you know, And I heard.
Speaker B:And I kind of really identified with that thing.
Speaker B:And that's something that.
Speaker B:It's, you know, that's really fundamental to my understanding of music as well.
Speaker B:That rhythm, that aspect of rhythm, you know.
Speaker B:Yes, I hear that.
Speaker B:I mean, you can hear that within, you know.
Speaker B:Don't get me wrong, you know, you can still create a lot of those feelings with programmed.
Speaker B:You know, with house music, for instance, you know, a lot of that thinking comes in.
Speaker B:It doesn't have to be vastly complex or played for it to have elements of those syncopations which do those.
Speaker B:Do.
Speaker B:Does that thing, you know.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:Well, you get it with scratching as well because it's, you know, the phrasing and stuff like that.
Speaker B:Yes, absolutely.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker A:You know.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker A:It's interesting hearing your sort of abstract, sort of conceptual understanding of jazz beyond, you know, modal structures and scales.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker A:Chromatic.
Speaker B:You know, there's.
Speaker B:There's so many aspects to.
Speaker B:To jazz, but the understanding of jazz.
Speaker B:I mean, I.
Speaker B:You know, listen, I'm not a musician on that level.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:The whole idea of running chord changes and the level of technical proficiency that's needed to be able to do that.
Speaker B:You know, the old School, if you like.
Speaker B:Essence of what, you know, jazz improvisation is about is well beyond my, you know, my level in terms of musicianship, but I understand it conceptually.
Speaker B:But the thing is that, you know, within, you know, obviously, you know, with jazz, you've got this whole, you know, the jazz quartet is this incredible, you know, at its highest form, or the.
Speaker B:Or even the trio, but once you've got those elements working together of rhythm, improvisation, harmony, yet those things are all constantly being played with and shifted or what have you, you know, it's this amazing organic thing that does dissolve a lot of that kind of linear nature of maybe not of time, but of the way that a lot of other music works.
Speaker B:You know, that's the.
Speaker B:The thing that draws me into that music.
Speaker B:And, you know, and as I've grown and developed my ears, hopefully I've had.
Speaker B:I've got an understanding or a feeling for what I love.
Speaker B:I can't pretend, you know, it's taste.
Speaker B:At the end of the day, it's, you know, I can.
Speaker B:I know what I love within that thing, and I know when it happens and I hear it when it happens, you know.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:So how was squat life and did you have your records there and were you ever worried you'd get kind of turfed out and stuff?
Speaker B:Constantly worried about theft and being turfed out and all those things.
Speaker B:And yes, I did have my records there, and I was on the ground floor.
Speaker B:And so when I was playing music, it was pretty obvious that I had a fairly decent hi fi with an integral.
Speaker B:But it was interesting.
Speaker B:It was a.
Speaker B:It was a.
Speaker B:What is now kind of quite a historic squat area.
Speaker B:It was kind of famous.
Speaker B:It was called Vauxhall Grove and Bonnington Square in Vauxhall.
Speaker B:Part of my raison of wanting to be there was that I've been.
Speaker B:I was at college in.
Speaker B:In Kingston and I at that.
Speaker B:By that time I was getting really into going clubbing and I wanted to be closer into central London.
Speaker B:And, you know, Vauxhall just seemed like the absolute perfect location because I could almost.
Speaker B:I could like, walk into the West End, virtually, yeah, from Vauxhall, and I could get on the train to go to college.
Speaker B:So bingo.
Speaker B:Brilliant.
Speaker B:And then through a friend of a friend of a friend, I heard about that there was this big squat area and this friend knew somebody who lived there.
Speaker B:And one day we went around to their squat and went chatted to them and said, you know, I said kind of casually, slightly, you know, inappropriate.
Speaker B:Well, not inappropriately, but it's like, was there any Space here, you know, can I move?
Speaker B:And they said, no, listen, we're full up.
Speaker B:Which, of course, they weren't, because the whole thing about these greedy squatters is they'd all want more space.
Speaker B:You know, you'd have, like, three people in the house and you'd have a floor each or whatever, you know.
Speaker B:But they said, there's two girls down the road, and they're just the two of them there.
Speaker B:And, you know, you never know, you might be able to move in there.
Speaker B:And literally it was like, you know, I thought, I'm just gonna grab this opportunity, you know, Tempus fugit.
Speaker B:Not tempest.
Speaker B:Fugit.
Speaker B:What's the word for seize the day?
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:Anyway, I thought I seized the day, and I went around there with a big bottle of wine and knocked on the door and said, hello, you know, I'm looking for somewhere to live.
Speaker B:And they very.
Speaker B:And they very kindly let me in.
Speaker B:And we chatted and we got on and.
Speaker B:And, yeah, and I.
Speaker B:And I moved into a school, which was just perfect because, like, you know, firstly, it meant that my grant would go a lot further.
Speaker B:Secondly, it meant I could go clubbing, you know, so it was.
Speaker B:It was.
Speaker B:It was just perfect.
Speaker B:But, yeah, I mean, it was slightly precarious.
Speaker B:Squat life, you know, and.
Speaker B:And it did worry me.
Speaker B:And it was funny because when I actually moved in there, I don't think they were actually paying for any services at all.
Speaker B:I don't think I had any.
Speaker B:You know, I think they were.
Speaker B:They were hooked up to gas and electricity, but they somehow managed to do that without being.
Speaker B:Having registered accounts.
Speaker B:And I did actually, you know, usher in a transformation to actually.
Speaker B:Actually paying some bills as well, you know, just made me feel like I was a little bit more legit.
Speaker B:But it was very much part of the.
Speaker B:Of the.
Speaker B:Of the spirit of those times.
Speaker B:I mean, you know, I knew that, you know, that, like, some of the bands that I was really into were kind of squatters, you know, like Scritty Polity.
Speaker B:They come out of that London squat scene.
Speaker B:23 Skidoo.
Speaker B:They came out of the London squat scene, you know.
Speaker B:Simon Booth, who went on to do Weekend and Working Week, was a musician that would be quite pivotal for me as well.
Speaker B:In a way, he was escorted, too.
Speaker B:So that was very much.
Speaker B:And it was that whole really interesting thing in the early 80s of A.
Speaker B:It was a.
Speaker B:You know, I see it as being, in a way, kind of like the last throes of counterculture, in a way, you know, before the whole world just got completely Nailed down by the.
Speaker B:By neoliberal economics, you know, and what have you.
Speaker B:Like Thatcher had come in and we knew the world was changing, but there was still enough room in the margins and things were still, you know, and people were still, you know, people were signing on and doing stuff.
Speaker B:Do, you know, I mean, you know, they were, you know, having enough money to live and finding little ways, ducking and diving, you know, earning a few quid on the sly here and there, or doing creative projects.
Speaker B:But that was.
Speaker B:There was, you know, and I think that's the.
Speaker B:Just a really healthy thing for society to have those margins where people can do those kind of things.
Speaker B:You know, it's really sad that that doesn't really exist anymore, but it was a great time and I'm incredibly grateful to kind of live through that, that period.
Speaker B:So it was kind of a weird mixture squat life of kind of, you know, so much drugs around.
Speaker B:It was insane.
Speaker B:A lot of heroin, which was kind of pretty depressing, and a lot of very politically motivated people, like I said earlier, and a lot of music and a lot of creativity.
Speaker B:I mean, there was in this.
Speaker B:Because there was these two squares that were both squatted, Bonington Square and Vauxhall Grove.
Speaker B:There was this place in the corner of one of this kind of.
Speaker B:They were all terraced houses, but there was this one squat in the corner that was called.
Speaker B:I can't remember called the Club or whatever.
Speaker B:But it was basically.
Speaker B:They kind of hollowed it out so that, like, all the floors were just like.
Speaker B:It was almost like an Elizabethan theater or something like that.
Speaker B:It was just like floors on the periphery of the.
Speaker B:And then the staircase.
Speaker B:And so you could kind of.
Speaker B:And there was a kind of central area and there would just basically be anarchic happenings there of a kind of completely, you know, spontaneous nature, you know, which I loved.
Speaker B:I just loved all that whole.
Speaker B:That whole kind of thing about it.
Speaker B:And, you know, one of the bands I was really into at that in that kind of period, you know, as much as I was listening to Loose Ends and Change and what have you, like that.
Speaker B:I loved Rip Rig and Panic, you know, who were ultimate kind of jazzy Bristol post punk.
Speaker B:You know, it was when Nenna Cherry and Andy Oliver, who's of course on the telly now and does food programs, who I'm friends with on social media, who I've always slightly starstruck when I'm engaged with them because I just remember following Rip Rig and Panic round to various gigs, you know, and just kind of like they're thinking, because they just do these really, really mad improvised shows, you know, where you just knew there was.
Speaker B:You never knew quite what was gonna happen.
Speaker B:And, you know, occasionally it would kind of.
Speaker B:It would merge into a tune and you knew they'd rehearsed that bit.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:Other bits just weren't, you know.
Speaker B:And, you know, at that time in my life, I was.
Speaker B:That very obvious kind of freedom of expression was something that was still very much part of where, I think, where I thought things should be at, if you like, you know.
Speaker B:And it was what drew me to the next kind of phase, I suppose, which was warehouse parties, you know, as a kind of adjunct to squatting, you know.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:Is.
Speaker B:Is the kind of.
Speaker B:The one night squatting a venue and moving in a sound system and buying and bringing in beer and having a party, you know.
Speaker B:And that really, really excited me when I suddenly realized there was this scene of warehouse parties.
Speaker A:Was it quite a different feel to.
Speaker A:Because we've not sort of talked about the clubbing that you mentioned before.
Speaker A:Was it quite a different feel?
Speaker B:Oh, absolutely.
Speaker B:I mean, you know, the.
Speaker B:The notion of rocking up at a kind of warehouse and it was all.
Speaker B:Be a bit grimy and the music that was played and everything, it was just like it.
Speaker B:You know, it always felt like.
Speaker B:Like, you know, going to.
Speaker B:You know, there was certainly the first clubs that I went to still had the hangover of being discos, if you like.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker B:Do you know what I mean?
Speaker B:And then this was kind of.
Speaker B:This was the antithesis of the disco.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:Is this mid-80s?
Speaker B:Yeah, I suppose.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:Early to mid-80s.
Speaker B:I started, you know, round about the time when I was finishing my degree and what have you.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:And that just that whole.
Speaker B:That.
Speaker B:That period, just really.
Speaker B:That was my.
Speaker B:That was all part of my just getting an incredible enthusiasm for what was going on culturally in terms.
Speaker B:I felt like in London there was something that was really buzzing, you know, it was a real buzz, you know, and you just felt that there was something was going to come of it.
Speaker B:And I suppose in the late 80s that all came true in a kind of huge explosion of dance music.
Speaker B:But that period of kind of 82 through to kind of 80, 87, 88, and the first summer of Love and the kind of explosion of dance music culture on a wider level was just a really, really exciting time.
Speaker B:And I think it was a really exciting time musically as well, I think, particularly in the uk, because there was, you know, one of the things I think about a lot is this.
Speaker B:This notion that in America.
Speaker B:America was always a very forward facing culture.
Speaker B:Okay?
Speaker B:So by the time you get to 80 80s, it's amazing.
Speaker B:It's like America got consumed by the technological changes that were happening in music.
Speaker B:So even people like somebody like Robbie Robertson from the Band would make.
Speaker B:Would make a solo album where there would be a sinclavia basically dominating the sound, you know, because that was the, that was the flavor, you know, this is somebody who come from really kind of rooted roots music.
Speaker B:And suddenly this sinclavia was running the show.
Speaker B:So, you know, it's amazing how dominant that whole.
Speaker B:The technology really changed the music then.
Speaker B:And what was interesting and, and obviously by the time you get to the early 80s, you've got the possibilities of so much more in terms of electronic music, you know, in terms of synthesizers, the advent of polyphonic synthesizers using sequences, you know, the whole kind of.
Speaker B:That whole kind of early electronic music, you know, whether it's kind of Eno and the ambient stuff and some of the, you know, Tangerine Dream and craft work, of course, and all of those kind of things which were all incredibly important and influential on the evolution of dance music later.
Speaker B:But I think before we get to the kind of, you know, the explosion of house and all of that kind of thing, there was a kind of like this amazing period when anything went, you know, and it was just much more.
Speaker B:And it was more interesting because it was more about possibilities and.
Speaker B:But what made the UK different from.
Speaker B:From the States by and large, in broad brushstroke terms, if you like, was that there was a very much a retro element to what?
Speaker B:To what.
Speaker B:So our kind of taste spanned this.
Speaker B:A huge thing, you know, like, on one level it was okay, there's these electronic dance records coming out of America, you know, and on the other level you've got people like Sade Working Week who came out of Weeknd and a lot of stuff that was produced by that guy Robin Miller, where they were kind of like going, hang on, we don't want to abandon the sound palette of the 60s and 70s quite yet.
Speaker B:You know, we're going to keep the Fender Rhodes on the album.
Speaker B:So we're going to, you know, we're not, you know, because the advent of certain keyboards, it was amazing how technology changes music.
Speaker B:You know, when the Yamaha DX7 came in, keyboard players worldwide would say, hey, I don't need to take an electric piano.
Speaker B:I can just have a DX7.
Speaker B:A DX7 will do the Rhodes parts.
Speaker B:No, it can't.
Speaker B:It doesn't sound anything like a Rhodes.
Speaker B:It sounds ghastly.
Speaker B:I mean, DX7's got its own brilliant qualities, but as a substitute for Offender Rhodes, it's not.
Speaker B:Just not possible.
Speaker B:So, yeah, so I think there was that kind of that retro element to the, to the UK and I think, you know, that was something that was reflected in fashion and, and it was reflected in taste for music as well.
Speaker B:There was this kind of thirst for digging into the past and for looking for, for things that still were relevant and sounded good, you know, whether it was coming from jazz or wherever, really, you know.
Speaker B:So I think that, yeah, that was just, just a really, really exciting time.
Speaker B:And I think you've got the.
Speaker B:In that period as well, you've got that kind of convergence, so many convergences going on as well.
Speaker B:You know, you've got the convergence of.
Speaker B:Of different kind of strands of club culture that started to come together.
Speaker B:You know, like they've been this kind of.
Speaker B:That, that whole kind of, you know, new romantic kind of element and the kind of west.
Speaker B:The kind of early 80s West End club ethos, all very fashiony and what have you, you know, but that started kind of merging with more of a.
Speaker B:More of the soul, you know, gradually the kind of influence of the soul boy culture and the, and the.
Speaker B:That started.
Speaker B:These things started to gel and kind of cross pollinate around that time and you started to have certainly more, some more specialist black music nights happening in the West End in a limited way because I think, you know, when we can get deep into the politics of this.
Speaker B:But I think there was a lot of kind of racist door policy going on back in those days and what have you, you know, people talk about quotas and what have you.
Speaker B:But there was.
Speaker B:It was interesting, but it was definitely interesting in terms of.
Speaker B:So that cross pollination of different aspects of club culture was going on.
Speaker B:So I think there was.
Speaker B:And then, you know, then you get to the, to the.
Speaker B:To suppose with the advent of what people called rare groove as well.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:Which was another kind of important thing that, you know, massively took over my life as well at that time because I left.
Speaker B:I left.
Speaker B:I'd finished my degree in 85.
Speaker B:I went out and did a very dull job for a while.
Speaker B:What was that in sales?
Speaker B:I worked first in telesales.
Speaker B:This was the dawn of.
Speaker B:The dawn of digital communication.
Speaker B:So I was selling pages to companies so that they could keep a track on their workforce and the kind of like the first kind of suitcase brick, like mobile phones and what have you, you know, and I worked them in tele sales for A while.
Speaker B:And then I did a little bit of time in, in sales with a, you know, out with a company, Metro, trying to do the deals and what have you.
Speaker B:And I became quite alienated from my musical soul, if you like, at that period, you know, I was so like, you know, drinking a lot of vodka with my peers of a weekend and, you know, it was all kind of, it was just, it seemed all wrong.
Speaker B:And I just literally woke up, up one day and thought, hell, I need to get back into music.
Speaker B:Music, you know, whatever it is, whatever way I can do it, I need to find a road back into music because this is, this is not where I want it.
Speaker B:I could see a trajectory of my life which it just, I just didn't want.
Speaker B:I didn't recognize that.
Speaker B:So I thought.
Speaker B:So I quit that job and.
Speaker B:And, you know, bummed around a while, still living in a squat, so my overheads were pretty low and.
Speaker B:And I got jobs working in record shops initially in Record and Tape Exchange, which was this, you know, a group of shops in London, yeah, that had this.
Speaker B:That was notorious because they notoriously employed a lot of graduates like myself, who had enough knowledge to pass the test because you had to do this written music exam to show that you knew you shit and.
Speaker B:But they would exploit us, you know, use us as casual labor in a few shops and then you get dumped, you know, and that's exactly what happened to me.
Speaker B:But it was fascinating because as soon as I worked in a record shop, I thought, well, this is really interesting because firstly, I've got access to so much music and I, you know, and I can buy loads of records really cheaply, you know, and I start.
Speaker B:And secondly, I started to meet lots of people who were, you know, and it's like when you're working, when you work behind the counter, you can clock and check what people are buying, you know, so if you think, if you think this looks like an interesting dude who might have good taste, you know, and then you see what they're buying and you think, ah, okay, so you'd learn so much just like over the counter, you know, that's that, that thing.
Speaker B:So it was like, it was, it was the beginning of my serious education into music.
Speaker B:Because suddenly I thought, I've got a means by which I can put the pieces together.
Speaker B:Because you've got to remember that, you know, like I, you know, we always talk about this, like for old people like myself back in those days, there was no resource, you know, you couldn't go on the Internet to find out Stuff your music.
Speaker B:Your music knowledge was gained from the back of record sleeves, from whatever relevant books you could find, and from some, you know, music publications or have you.
Speaker B:That was it, you know, so it wasn't.
Speaker B:It was.
Speaker B:And there was, you know, and vast swathes of music were undocumented and unresearched.
Speaker B:So, you know, it was just like, what's that?
Speaker B:So, you know, being behind the counter of a record shop suddenly thought, yeah, this is a really good place to be because this is where I can really start, you know, accruing some serious knowledge, putting things together and meeting people, you know, and meeting people who are into music and having conversations about music, which is great, you know, because my taste had always been really eclectic.
Speaker B:So, you know, I just was always fascinated to talk about.
Speaker B:To other people who knew a lot about different kinds of music or, you know, explain their passions for different things.
Speaker B:So meeting people and, you know, and other folk who worked in record shops, of course, or another, they were all equally passionate about music themselves.
Speaker B:So it was like suddenly being involved in a culture and having a sense of belonging, which I.
Speaker B:Which had been seriously missing, you know, I think.
Speaker B:Well, it was what I was looking for, yes, in my life.
Speaker B:It was.
Speaker B:That was.
Speaker B:That was the thing.
Speaker B:And enough, nothing, you know, at that point, because I was so kind of, you know, alienated from what I thought I was going to become.
Speaker B:I was.
Speaker B:It was just like, anything will do.
Speaker B:This is all great.
Speaker B:You know, just being involved in music was enough, you know, I wasn't nurturing any dreams of, you know, of becoming a great songwriter, a great player or.
Speaker B:Or let alone a dj.
Speaker B:I was just thought, this is enough.
Speaker B:I'm back into music and music is there and it's.
Speaker B:And it's feeding me and it's feeding my soul.
Speaker B:And that was.
Speaker B:And it was great.
Speaker A:Been doing bands then in that time?
Speaker B:No, because I think.
Speaker B:Well, there was a. I had a. Yeah, not really when I left college, you know, like my, My.
Speaker B:My relationship with Robin, the drummer has really kind of gone.
Speaker B:Gone.
Speaker B:Gone to pieces.
Speaker B:I was still playing a little bit.
Speaker B:And I remember actually, funnily enough, there was a brief time when I got involved with a band with a guy called Rob Milton, who was a DJ who ran a really famous warehouse pie called the Dirt Box, which was.
Speaker B:Which was like a roving party.
Speaker B:That was really good.
Speaker B:It was.
Speaker B:I think it was where Sade played.
Speaker B:Their first ever gig was at the Dirt Box.
Speaker B:Oh, wow.
Speaker B:And, yeah, Rob was one of the DJs there and he tried to put A funk band together.
Speaker B:And I got involved in that for a while.
Speaker B:Unfortunately, his vocal chops weren't quite up to it.
Speaker B:And some of the.
Speaker B:Some of the rest of the band.
Speaker B:But we had a few rehearsals and it was a lot of fun.
Speaker B:And I remember covering things like Joe Courtman, so Much Trouble on My Mind and all of these, you know, it was good getting into it was just nice to.
Speaker B:And the drummer who was in that band way was pretty good.
Speaker B:And I did a few jams with him at that time.
Speaker B:He kind of brought his kit around to the Scot and Because we had a little music room in the Scott with kind of vague soundproofing and what have you.
Speaker B:So for music, for those kind of musical activities.
Speaker B:So we did it and John, who was a keyboard player, who I'd been with, you know who I was involved in my first ever band.
Speaker B:We occasionally got together and I had a port studio.
Speaker B:So occasionally we do a few little rough ideas.
Speaker B:But I was kind of like.
Speaker B:I was kind of beginning to realize that this wasn't really going to happen for me, you know.
Speaker B:So the record shop thing was.
Speaker B:Was.
Speaker B:Was great until I got spat out by recorder and tape exchange and I was back to bumming around.
Speaker B:And then I went one day I had a friend, one of my closest friends somehow had ended up renting a flat quite cheaply on Wardle Street.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:And Soho was like the know.
Speaker B:It felt like the epicenter to me of the world at the time.
Speaker B:So that was brilliant.
Speaker B:So you spent a lot of time hanging around with him and his girlfriend.
Speaker B:And I was actually with his girlfriend one day because he was at work and we were walking down Berwick street and I went, oh, there's Reckless Records.
Speaker B:This is another secondhand record shop.
Speaker B:A bit like record and tape exchange.
Speaker B:And I just literally thought, I'm just gonna go in there and ask for a job.
Speaker B:So I walked in and asked for a job and bluffed.
Speaker B:It is a way.
Speaker B:But I had worked for record and tape exchange.
Speaker B:But I said I was a jazz specialist, which was not really true at all because it was like me completely winging it.
Speaker B:But Andy, who was the manager, seemed to take to me and, you know, and I got my opportunity and.
Speaker B:And that was the beginning of my career at Reckless Records, which again was just like.
Speaker B:It's what that is an absolute.
Speaker B:That was the absolute kind of token serendipitous moment.
Speaker B:That was like the lucky coincidence that just suddenly.
Speaker B:That was like the dominoes beginning to fall, you know, things clicking into place.
Speaker B:Because at that Time as well.
Speaker B:I mean, like, the one thing about Reckless was I walked in there and I realized that this guy Jonathan Moore, who was.
Speaker B:Went on to perform Cold Cut and what have you and Ninja Tune, Jonathan Moore worked there.
Speaker B:And I was squatting in South London.
Speaker B:And one of the clock parties that I went to regularly was his party that he did called the Meltdown in.
Speaker B:In New Cross and places like that.
Speaker B:So.
Speaker B:So.
Speaker B:And he was a good DJ that I'd heard who just blown my mind because he was playing, like, fellow Cootie and kind of music that I couldn't have even.
Speaker B:I couldn't even tell you what it was.
Speaker B:Some of.
Speaker B:Some of the stuff he was playing, like Mad African records, whatever, you know.
Speaker B:And so, yeah, so he was working there.
Speaker B:So he was like a kind of hit, you know, like.
Speaker B:Like one of my early DJ heroes, if you like.
Speaker B:So I thought, brilliant, I'm gonna get a job.
Speaker B:I'm gonna meet John Moore as well.
Speaker B:So, yeah, so I started working at Reckless.
Speaker B:And, you know, and at that time, that was.
Speaker B:And, you know, if you like, that was just like the moment when kind of rare groove, the notion of rare groove was exploding in London.
Speaker B:So, you know, and.
Speaker B:And also record shops were beginning to.
Speaker B:You know, there were already quite a lot of record shops in Soho, but they were kind of like.
Speaker B:This was just before Black Market opened in Darblay street, which is literally just around the corner.
Speaker B:But it was like.
Speaker B:It was the.
Speaker B:It was that kind of pivotal moment when the kind of, if you like, vinyl culture was really beginning to embed itself.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:In that area.
Speaker A:You know, so because, yeah, there's loads of.
Speaker A:There's, you know, Sister Ray Sounds the Universe, and there was groove.
Speaker A:There's all these kind of legendary shops around there.
Speaker A:What was.
Speaker A:What characteristics were unique to Reckless at that time?
Speaker A:Was it.
Speaker A:Did it have a certain means?
Speaker A:Like, what differentiated it from the others?
Speaker B:Well, okay, so between.
Speaker B:There was a guy with John Mulworth there.
Speaker B:So he was kind of really.
Speaker B:And he was really into the whole.
Speaker B:I mean, they were kind of currently, at that time, I suppose a lot of people were really like, searching out old funk records, right?
Speaker B:So that was a lot of the rare grooves that people wanted with these kind of like obscure funk records.
Speaker B:And of course, a lot of DJs had realized that there was this list called Soul Bowl Records, which was made predominantly Northern Soul distributor, you know, or selling to Northern Soul DJs, but who had bought up, you know, swathes vast amounts of, you know, records from American warehouses of just black Music, you know, but the funk records weren't a particular, you know, they weren't great currency for that for Soul bowl.
Speaker B:Nobody really wanted to them.
Speaker B:And so certain DJs were going up to Soul bowl and digging and finding funk records and things, what have you.
Speaker B:So there was, so there was that thing.
Speaker B:So John Moore worked there and there was another guy called Trevor, Trevor St. Francis, who was incredibly influential to me as a DJ.
Speaker B:He was a, he had a, he had a radio show on, I think it was called LWR was one of the other, one of the other big pirates at the time.
Speaker B:And that's another element to my story as well.
Speaker B:So I suppose in a way was that pirate radio had kind of really fired my imagination as well.
Speaker B:You know, the notion that you.
Speaker B:There was all these stations in London and occasionally you'd hear some extraordinary music on them was, was, was something that I was kind of getting very excited by.
Speaker B:But at that time I was still really just very grateful to be involved and I felt like.
Speaker B:And I was, you know, and I knew I was winging it a bit.
Speaker B:So I was just very grateful to have the opportunity, opportunity to kind of, to work in the, in the record shop.
Speaker B:And I just kept my head down and, and did my thing, to be honest with you.
Speaker B:But Reckless was a second hand shop.
Speaker B:So it didn't have a particular ethos.
Speaker B:It was basically what people sold to us and then what we could sell to them, you know.
Speaker B:But within that, you know, that, because we had people like John and Trevor and whatever work in there, they could identify the records that were going, you know, that were slightly higher value for the kind of, you know, for the various factions and heads of the, of the.
Speaker B:In the kind of black music circles.
Speaker B:And so those records would go on the wall behind the counter or what have you.
Speaker B:And, and so, you know, people.
Speaker B:And it became, you know, a place where a lot of people, you know, if they were coming into gradually, you know, as the record shops culture exploded and black market opened and there was all these other shops, you know, people would come in on into London to go record shop shopping.
Speaker B:But they'd always check Reckless as well because, you know, it was just on the, on the circuit and it became like a very much like a meeting place as well, you know.
Speaker B:Yeah, yeah, it was probably one of the shops where there was more as much, you know, groupings of conversations and you know, little, little clutches and gaggles of people just talking, talking music, you know.
Speaker B:I mean, certainly a little bit later on I, you know, because I Met so many people there.
Speaker B:I met all these guys I met, you know, I suddenly started meeting the boogie collectors.
Speaker B:You know, this was like when people never really spoke about, you know, it was like before people even started talking about this music.
Speaker B:I realized there was all these people who were fanatically deep into these kind of American dance records from, you know, from a certain kind of period.
Speaker B:A lot of them weren't that old, but a lot of them had never been.
Speaker B:You know, there's a lot of independent stuff that hadn't been released in the uk, you know, and what have you.
Speaker B:So a lot of it was quite difficult to find.
Speaker B:But I love them because these guys were really fanatical about it and they spoke about.
Speaker B:And they talked about producers which nobody else seemed to do.
Speaker A:Like the early 80s boogie stuff like Yashif and that sort of thing.
Speaker B:Yeah, but yeah, you know, like, particularly producers like, you know, the Patrick Adams, Leroy Burgess, all of these kind of guys, you know, that was kind of like the more obvious end.
Speaker B:But they were into all of the really obscure stuff and all of the really obscure New York labels and what have you.
Speaker B:But they were into that kind of level of detail, which was something I really picked up from.
Speaker B:From them and really thought, well, you know, and I was kind of naturally drawn to that level of scrutiny of record covers as well.
Speaker B:Checking all the credits.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:You know, because that was the way you could join the dots and make links to other things and suddenly you started to recognize names and stuff like that.
Speaker B:But it was an interesting period.
Speaker B:Like I said, the whole rare groove thing was massive.
Speaker B:The rare groove thing.
Speaker B:A lot of that was based on something that kind of already had happened, which was like cutout records coming into the uk, you know, cutouts being stuff that was deleted.
Speaker A:But basically in America that when the corners chopped off.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:And then when they took corners.
Speaker B:So those cutouts would be, you know, they could be.
Speaker B:They could be bought really cheaply.
Speaker B:So, you know, they were cut out shops and there was a lot of titles that were never released in the uk, you know, that became kind of rare groove classics straight away because they were great records, you know, things like James Mason's Rhythm of Life or Don Blackman's LP on grp, you know, these kind of.
Speaker B:These kind of records hoods.
Speaker B:And they've been cutouts to begin with.
Speaker B:But then as soon as those cutouts had disappeared, they were rare crews and the price started to.
Speaker B:Started to shoot up, you know, because they weren't that many.
Speaker B:There weren't that many around so you could sell.
Speaker B:You could sell them for serious money.
Speaker B:So that was.
Speaker B:Yeah, so, I mean, I was.
Speaker B:I was into the cut.
Speaker B:I mean, when I was still squatting in Vauxhall, I remember going to.
Speaker B:There was a cutout shop in.
Speaker B:In Elephant Castle.
Speaker B:And I remember going, you know, like, thinking, yeah, these records are all 5.99.
Speaker B:I'm gonna buy lots, you know, And I did.
Speaker B:And some on spec, some that I knew of, some from, you know, just like having an instinct about it or what have you, you know.
Speaker A:When you say on spec, do you mean that based on the players and the producers?
Speaker B:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker B:Just having a instinct about it or whatever.
Speaker B:Or just getting something.
Speaker B:Getting something that I could latch onto, whether it was player or producer or whatever that.
Speaker B:That appealed or something more.
Speaker B:Sometimes something that I take making.
Speaker B:Made a note of because I've heard it on a pirate station or whatever, you know.
Speaker B:Yeah, but I was.
Speaker B:But I was still finding my way in.
Speaker B:But when I worked, when I started to work at Reckless, I started feeling like I was in.
Speaker B:I was on.
Speaker B:Suddenly I was on the inside because I was meeting so many people, so many other DJs, so many collectors, so many music heads and what have you.
Speaker B:And, you know, like I said, I was inspired by pirate radio.
Speaker B:And then I suppose that was when I just started to get this idea that I would love to do radio.
Speaker B:I wasn't thinking about Club DJing at all, but I just thought, wow, I started.
Speaker B:I did, you know, I would start.
Speaker B:By that time, my collection was kind of growing and building, and I was hopefully had some kind of fairly fresh perspectives on some of the stuff that I was going to play.
Speaker B:And I thought maybe I could do a radio show.
Speaker B:So without really even thinking about it in an obvious way, I was just like.
Speaker B:But I was also going into the shop every day and we'd all take our own mixtapes or our own compilations into play in the shop, you know, so, like, obviously, and Jonathan Moore has just become one of the founding DJs of Kiss FM as a pirate.
Speaker B:So I didn't think, you know, I never said to John, oy gets a show.
Speaker B:And Kiss, you know, it was.
Speaker B:It never got to that level, but it was like he heard my compilations and what's this?
Speaker B:You know, and what have you.
Speaker B:And then gradually.
Speaker B:And it was.
Speaker B:It was something, you know, and then I remember I met Norman J.
Speaker B:And he was on Kiss too.
Speaker B:And, you know, and it suddenly.
Speaker B:It almost seemed to.
Speaker B:I don't remember ever asking for it organically.
Speaker B:It seemed to Happen that I was kind of like, well, you know, you can have a little chat with Gordon Mack, who runs the station, and maybe you can do.
Speaker B:Because they didn't, as much as they'd already kind of thrust their way into the.
Speaker B:Into this kind of plethora of pirate stations as being the kind of hip one and the one that everybody was starting to take notice of.
Speaker B:They didn't have a.
Speaker B:They didn't have a jazz specialist at that time.
Speaker B:You know, a lot of DJs would play a couple.
Speaker B:Do you know what I mean?
Speaker B:They might be into other things.
Speaker B:They might be playing more boogie and soul, but they might play a couple of jazz tunes as well.
Speaker B:You know, everybody wanted to keep a little toe in the jazz world as well, but they didn't have a kind of jazz special, didn't have anybody who was kind of specializing in that.
Speaker B:So that was kind of what.
Speaker B:I think it was sold to Gordon that I could come in and do a more specialist jazz show.
Speaker B:And I remember this is a story I always tell because I think it's quite funny, was that on the day of my interview with Gordon Mac, it was, funnily enough, KISS FM were based in Camden because they had a kind of legitimate promotions company called Goodfoot Promotions, where they put on their club nights and what have you.
Speaker B:And it was.
Speaker B:What was hilarious about it was that their studio, where they broadcast from, was literally on the other side of the corridor.
Speaker B:And those days, the dti, you know, were chasing down pirate stations and trying to take them off air big time.
Speaker B:But I think it was almost like it was a double bluff.
Speaker B:They just thought, well, actually, we're just gonna put the studio there because you wouldn't actually think it would.
Speaker B:You'd imagine that it would be further away.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:So the studio was there.
Speaker B:But anyway, I.
Speaker B:So I went.
Speaker B:So I had my interview with.
Speaker B:With Gordon on a Saturday, and I got to Camden a bit early.
Speaker B:I thought, I'll go to.
Speaker B:Because there's a branch of Record and Tape Exchange in Camden.
Speaker B:I'll go and have a little shifty in record type exchange, see if there's anything I can find.
Speaker B:And I went in there and I found a couple of records which were great.
Speaker B:One was Gil Scott Heron's live album it's yous World, which is like, seminal record for me.
Speaker B:And I was kind of looking for it because I knew there was this live version of the Bottle, which I didn't have.
Speaker B:And the Bottle had been a tune which I'd been dancing to since whatever, you know, and and the other one was Johnny Hammond Gears, which at the time was, you know, which Meisel Brothers production that was a huge kind of jazz, funk, rare groove tune at the time.
Speaker B:And I already had it, but it was eight quid, so I thought, well, I'm gonna have that as well.
Speaker B:And so I went to my interview with Gordon and like, one of the first things, things that he said to me, and luckily I'd removed the price tickets from the records, but one of the first things said, what's he worn when you got in your back, you know, And I went and pulled out the Gilscott Heron, which I don't think he was particularly interested in.
Speaker B:And I pulled out keys and he went.
Speaker B:And his eyes lit up, he says, can I have that?
Speaker B:What do you.
Speaker B:How much you want for that?
Speaker B:And I said, well, it was.
Speaker B:I said, 15 quid to you.
Speaker B:He was like, yes, straight away.
Speaker B:So, you know, he interviewed me.
Speaker B:I got myself a radio show on KISS FM and I sold him a copy of Gears at a profit, all in one, all in one fell swoop.
Speaker B:And it was great because Kiss was very clever because they only broadcast on weekends, which was one of the reasons they were able to survive a little bit more easily than some of the other pirates.
Speaker B:And they gave me a show on Sunday night at Close down, right?
Speaker B:So I did.
Speaker B:My show was nominally, I think 11 o' clock until 1, but basically because I was the last man on, I could finish when I wanted to.
Speaker B:So sometimes I would just go on till half three or something like that, you know, if I have more, if I had enough records and I was feeling inspired enough, I just.
Speaker B:I just carry on.
Speaker B:And it was just literally like, you know, I'd just say my goodbyes and then turn all the power off and lock the studio and go home and what have you.
Speaker B:So I had this kind of initiation into doing radio, which was crazy because I just didn't know what I was doing, you know, but how else are you going to learn to do a radio show?
Speaker B:You know, throw you in the deep end and off you go, you know, And.
Speaker B:And I'd always.
Speaker B:I always think that John Peel was a bit of an inspiration as well, because I appreciated.
Speaker B:I'd listen to a fair amount of John Peel in my.
Speaker B:In my youth and what have you.
Speaker B:And I'd always rather enjoyed the more amateur elements of John Peel and when he put a record on, on the wrong speed or make a mistake or whatever, you know.
Speaker B:So I always thought that, you know, that you could probably get away with A wart snort type of approach to doing radio.
Speaker B:And there'd be a way of styling it out and you know, and you know, when you're doing live radio, you've just got to make it work one way or the other.
Speaker B:You have to kind of get through those things.
Speaker A:So how did you find getting used to working on the mic?
Speaker B:Yeah, I mean, you know, I got, you know, obviously I learned, you know, the obvious, dip the music, put the microphone up, speak, you know, but it was very much.
Speaker B:I was versed in that pirate radio thing where.
Speaker B:And I like the idea, you know, kind of like one of the things that we did differently from the BBC and what have you, from conventional radio is conventional radio would play a record, it would end and the DJ would speak over dead air.
Speaker B:You know, pirate radio didn't do that.
Speaker B:Yeah, you know, you came in at the right, you know, that was the art of it, in a way was coming in in a way where you could talk over a record without kind of upsetting anybody, you know, in the right places or whatever.
Speaker B:You know, that was, that was what I, that's what I.
Speaker B:Anyway, that's how I understood it was that I was like, you can talk over a record and you want to keep this flow of music going.
Speaker B:You don't want to, you don't want it to get to that dead air thing because that's what they do.
Speaker B:We do it differently, you know, and you can be a bit more, and you can be a bit rowdier and what have you, but, but just find the right place to speak, you know, whether it's just on the outro or there might be a breakdown or, or a moment where you could interject and it would make sense.
Speaker B:But yeah, I did that.
Speaker B:But I also, you know, I also relished the opportunity right from the get go that I would say, right, okay, I've also got to do a lot of back to back music where I'm not going to talk.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker B:Because I did.
Speaker A:Because I know that up to you then.
Speaker B:Yeah, totally.
Speaker B:And then, and that was, you know, because it was something that I'd enjoyed.
Speaker B:I went back to literally to my youth and like when I was first playing in bands and I was a young teenager and meeting this guy called the Major, who had a portable studio and he, he had a Reevox and he would put compilations together on a Reevox that were great, you know, and I remember, you know, like, you know, sitting in his dark and flat on his big speakers listening to this mix and just thinking, oh, so great, this idea that you can segue different bits of music together and make this kind of, you know, tell this story.
Speaker B:So I, you know, I always did that from the beginning.
Speaker B:You know, my show was called the Cosmic Jam.
Speaker B:It was very much inspired by Lonnie Liston Smith and Cosmic Echoes, which is the name of his band.
Speaker B:And, you know, that was my orientation, that I wanted it to be a bit more cosmic or whatever.
Speaker B:And I was always kind of veering towards that more spacious, more spiritual, if you like, side of the music.
Speaker B:And I would always say that in the second hour I would just let it run for however long, sometimes for half an hour, but for at least 15 minutes, I would just do back to back music or whatever to start to, you know, so you could have that moment of just a sequence of tunes for whatever reasons you.
Speaker B:And that would be also the most ambient and the most laid back element of my.
Speaker B:Of my show as well would be that beginning of the second hour.
Speaker A:Amazing.
Speaker A:So, yes, I think that brings us quite nicely to a point where we should pause because I know we've got a lot more to get into and we've not got that much time because of school pickups and things like that.
Speaker A:So.
Speaker A:Yeah, so let's pick up again in a couple of days, Patrick, and thanks ever so much for your time.
Speaker B:I'm enjoying it.
Speaker B:I mean, it's crazy to go back over the story and kind of pick my way through it.
Speaker B:I know it's not exactly linear in the way that I've told the story, but I think we cover most of the paces.
Speaker A:Oh, it never is.
Speaker B:Why should it be linear?
Speaker A:Yeah, that's it.
Speaker A:Cool.
Speaker A:Well, yeah, let's get wrapped up then.
Speaker A:Nice.
Speaker B:Thank you so much.
Speaker A:We'll catch up again in a couple of days.
Speaker B:Indeed we will.
Speaker B:Thanks so much.
Speaker A:Cheers.
Speaker B:Bye.
