When did you start buying records?
It was probably about '71 and '72. Mostly just reggae stuff, the first lp I bought was ‘Double Barrel’ by Dave and Ansil Collins and then just after that I bought Ziggy Stardust. It was always backwards and forwards between rock, Bowie and Roxy and the funk thing and also reggae stuff.

So right from the beginning you were eclectic in what you were buying?

There just seemed to be so much good rock stuff and I liked the image as well! I always thought that music and imagery go together pretty well, the whole image of Bowie and the Roxy thing and around Guildford you had all these trendy kids that would be wearing what they (Bowie and Roxy Music) were wearing but at the same time they would go to funk and reggae clubs. I guess round th mid-’70s with the tail end of the mod thing, that dressing up mentality was still there, trying to be different from what all the hippies were wearing. I mean you didn’t want to go and shop in Jean Junction, so you’d go somewhere like Acme Attractions where they played dub reggae and all the funk kids would hang out and wear peg trousers and cap sleeve T-shirts and plastic sandals. All the kids had their hair done ’50s style and you had gangs like The Deans (named after James Dean) and people were driving ’50s cars but the soundtrack was always funk and Bowie.

So the soundtrack was the same but looks were much more tribal?

Yeah all the funk boys would hang out with the Bowie kids and a lot of them would all be into the same thing. It didn’t really start to change until punk started, then the kids that got into punk got more and more into that look and then the soul thing sort of branched off into the soul patrols, so by ’77 there was a definite split. I got into punk because I liked the rebellious nature of it, though I wasn't crazy about the music at first. After I saw the Pistols a few times, it was just that the energy was better than going to see the Fatback Band for the fifth time. They were still wearing huge flares and huge afros and I just thought they looked really out of date.

Did fashion form an important part of belonging?   

It was that tribal thing, I didn’t have older brothers that were into mod or anything but I was just aware of things. I remember getting this book out Folk Devils And Moral Panics, about mods and rockers, and just thinking it must have been so cool that the mods really lived it! In 1976 I met this guy called Don Hughes who has just brought a book out on mod culture called Friday On My Mind and he was a working class mod from Hounslow, he’d grown up into the scooter thing and buying imports. We met him at a car boot sale in Canvey where he had a record stall selling ’60s stuff and we got into buying the old Motown and the Small Faces which led us to getting into the punk thing. It was Don Hughes that said, “There’s this great band you’d probably like to go and see called the Sex Pistols, stupid name but they play Small Faces and The Who numbers.” So I was kind of disappointed when they only did two Who numbers and two Small Faces numbers (laughs) and the rest was a bit too intense for me, coming from a funk background, but the vibe was just so different from anything else that I got into it.

How punk did you go?

Oh god I was full on, I bleached my hair spiky white, bondage trousers. I was working in Boy (London) in the Kings Road and this kid came in whose dad worked at EMI and he had a bunch of the ‘God Save The Queen’ singles that were pulped and I actually sold one to McLaren for a bondage suit and five quid because he didn’t have a copy. The kid had like a box of ten of them that his dad had just taken out. I wished I bought all of them, if I’d have known but at the time I thought I was lucky to have two, kept one and sold one to McLaren.
 

Did you notice that what became punk fashions were really appropriated from that funk scene?

Yeah because once you’d been to Acme Attractions you’d meet people and you felt that you were part of a different community, you really felt like the in-crowd. People would tell you to go to Sex as they had some really weird clothes and good funk records on the jukebox. So you would go there for the jukebox and look at the clothes and think, “Oh that is a bit weird” but then a few weeks later you’d go to a club and you’d see someone else wearing it and think to yourself that he actually looks really good in that.

You’d got to a pub on the Kings Road and everyone would be dressed up. Some funk, some punk but really there wasn’t much difference between the two. You could go to football matches around ’75 and people started having little green bits dyed in their hair or little pink bits and you start seeing the fluffy jumpers and there was just this real crossover thing and you’d spot someone at the football match and it’d be like, “Oh where’d you get your hair done?” It was just that working class thing of being in the know. By about ’77 you could tell apart the punks and the soul kids but it was fun while it lasted, when no one could really put a label on it. I really liked that period.
 

Before it became a uniform?

Before you started getting kids with the mohicans. I mean the first time I saw the Pistols there were all these kids that were wearing black jeans and T-shirts that were handmade, that they had ripped themselves, you know ‘The Pistols shot a hole in my soul’ and that was kind of cool because I was getting into the fashion thing more and more then and that’s when I went to London College of Fashion.    
 

Is that what made you go there?         

No. I just didn’t know what to do. I’d left school with no idea what I was going to do and I was working in this dead-end-job and my mum, bless her, said, “You've got to be doing more than this!” So she took a bunch of my drawings and sent them off and they accepted me. So basically my mum made my career choice for me and it was one of the best things she did.
 

Were you going out to clubs then?

Yeah, people would start getting coaches up to Lacy Lady and Goldmine and California Ballroom in Dunstable and if you didn’t get into a fight that was a really good place to go.
 

What was it like going to the Lacy Lady?
It was great and it was exciting because you’d think, “Fucking hell this is a hardcore area,” as coming from the suburbs anywhere in east London is considered a tough area. But then you’d go and everyone was really dressed up and you’d ask them where they got their shoes from. I think most of the times it was Chris Hill that was DJing there, but you didn’t really take too much notice of the DJ you just listened to the sounds. I remember the first time I heard ‘Movin’’ by Brass Construction I was like, “What the fuck is this?” All the funk stuff I’d heard didn’t prepare me for hearing that. That intro, “Pow!” and it was super exciting. You’d have your vodka and lime or your Babycham (laughs) whatever we were drinking in those days. I knew it was un-cool to drink beer and everyone seemed to be drinking cocktails or whatever. I thought it was probably the most sophisticated club I’d ever been to!   

It was just a really exciting period because fashions were changing, things like Smiths jeans would come in and you had to hunt them down. We used to go to Contempo Records in Hanway Street and go up the stairs and listen to imports and you’d buy a couple as that was all you could afford on your pocket money or your Saturday job but it just felt that you were connecting to something that was much bigger than just being in the suburbs. You felt you actually connected to urban America because you were buying these imports straight off the plane – supposedly.

Did you go back towards funk again?

It was kind of boredom. I remember this club I used to go to called the Hawley Hotel which was really near where my parents lived, it’s demolished now but it was a bit like Fawlty Towers, this big ’30s hotel and the manager was kind of weird who ran it but he had enough sense to put a club in the basement. You had to become a member and all the scooter boys went there and all the kids who dressed up went there. I think I went there at the end of ’76 wearing peg pants and ’50s gabardine top and ’50s haircuts were in and there was just all these really straight-looking kids in there going, “What the fuck are you supposed to be it’s 1976 not ’56”. It actually got so bad that me and my brother had to actually leave fairly sharpish. So we started going more and more to the gay clubs because the music was still pretty good and you didn’t get beaten up if you looked weird.

You would go in with your girlfriend but you had to pretend to be gay to get in but once you were in people left you alone and the music was still pretty cool. There was a lesbian club called Louise’s in Poland Street which was fucking amazing. It was so decadent, there were red leather seats upstairs, it reminded me of Weimar Germany. Upstairs there were all these lesbians in tweed suits with cigarette holders and everyone would be smoking like mad in there and downstairs there would be a DJ playing stuff like Donna Summer, some ’50s  stuff and the night always ended with ‘Louise’ the Maurice Chevalier song (sings), “Every little tree seems to whisper Louise”. It was just a place you could go and not get picked on for the way you dressed and the worst that would happen is that some lesbians would hassle your girlfriend. Again it felt as if you were part of something that no one else knew about. It wasn’t in Melody Maker and it wasn’t in NME and you just thought, “Wow this is really underground.”

When did you leave college?
I left college in 78. They threw me out because I’d booked Siouxsie & The Banshees and the Pistols, this is when the GLC had banned them from playing in London and I booked them and got told by college that I wasn't doing enough work and that they didn’t like my attitude. They never played, it was either the Dean of the college or the GLC that stepped in and put a stop to it. We showed the Pistols film there and a bunch of people turned up and there was some trouble. Had a school disco and there was some trouble and they just thought I was a bad influence. I was kind of glad about because I wanted to do this punk stuff and they were giving me a piece of orange material and asking me to make a dress for a woman that shops at Marks & Spencers and I was thinking, “How am I going to use this when I leave college?”

When I left college I worked for Johnson and Johnson in the Kings Road and Kensington market and while I was there I got more and more into rockabilly that was just taking off because I thought it was really interesting, again the whole rebellious thing. So again I liked stirring things up but also I liked the music they were playing and a lot of cool chicks were going there as well so that always helps.

I opened this shop in Ken Market called Rock-A-Cha and found some tailors in the east end, old Jewish guys that were still making peg pants because they had been making them for the GIs that were over here in the ’40s and still had the patterns. Malcolm McLaren used them at Sex, so I had some contacts through the shop there and they said you’ve got to go to this guy Tony Daniels or Sid Green, all these people that had made stuff for McLaren. Of course they weren’t doing that stuff anymore; I think they were just about to do that whole pirate look that they did.
 

How did you finance opening a store on Ken Market?

I saved money, you know I still lived my parents or crashed with friends in London. My dad lent me some money and then the guy I did it with had some money as well but it wasn't much. I think we opened it with two hundred quid. The first few months we had twelve pairs of pegs and any day you went in there that’s all we had and when they sold out we would go and replace them and then gradually it kind of built up. We would buy white, red tag Levi jackets that were selling for two quid each and then we would sell them in the shop for a fiver and felt guilty, “Shit we've become little capitalists!” It gradually got big enough that we would have people like Bowie and Paul McCartney and Adam Ant in there and word just spread. Then The Face did an article about us and a bunch of other people in Ken Market.
 

Did you go to the first Dirtbox and where was it?

It was on Earls Court road. Rob and Phil started it. They used to go to the Beat Route and everyone would get drunk down the Beat Route and slag off Camden Palace because that was the big club then and was two quid to get in. We were saying they were ripping people off and the drinks were expensive and the bouncers would give everyone a hard time, all chrome, mirrors and laser lights. We were all like, “wouldn’t it be great to get back to the basics?” and so one night Phil told us to come down and have a look at this old West Indian club above a chemist on Earls Court Road that this Greek guy was running. It had silhouettes of jazz players on the walls, armchairs in a little bar and a DJ booth inside a sort of cage. They were going to charge a quid to get in, bring your own booze and they were going to do the door. So I went down there as I was living in South Ken, so it was only a ten minute walk. You went up the stairs and there were all these prostitutes that had their doorways on the way up, so you’d go up past two flights of prostitutes and at the very top was this club.

Only about twenty of us turned up, which was a shame as it had this great vibe. But then the next week we went back there and about one hundred people turned up. Rob was a DJ but he was doing the door so the DJ that was playing, something happened. He passed out, I don’t know if it was drugs or booze or what but there was this horrible scratching noise and this guy slumped over the decks so Rob went for his records and he had bought a little too much Killing Joke but not enough funk and other stuff they were playing at the Beat Route so I said to him that I lived round the corner and I can bring my stuff. So I went home, got my records and people seemed to enjoy it. Rob gave me twenty quid and asked me to come and do it again next week and it just took off from there. Then a few months after that the Wag had opened and they asked if I could do the Thursday night there. A few months after that, Philip Sallon who I’d known from college, mentioned that he’d heard I was doing good at The Dirtbox and could I come and do the same thing at The Mud Club? So then I ended up doing Thursday, Friday and Saturday at what The Face called the three hippest clubs in town. It was just pure luck and just all happened in the space of about six months.

I think the first Dirtbox was July ’82 and the Mud opened January ’83 or something with McLaren doing the whole square dancing thing for ‘Buffalo Girls’. Then a few weeks after that Bambaataa came down and he was just doing this amazing mixing. He signed my copy of ‘Planet Rock’ and ‘Looking For The Perfect Beat’. I just got more and more into DJing and was making more money from DJing than I did in the shop so it go to the point where my friend at Rock–A–Cha was getting kind of pissed off, I was coming in late everyday because I was out clubbing every night until three or four in the morning, so he offered to buy me out, so I think maybe ’84 or ’85 I left the shop and went full-time as a DJ.
 

So being a DJ was never a plan?

No... it’s the story of my life. I just kind of drift into things and I just wish I did plan things because I would probably be able to retire right now. It was really just good fortune I guess that got me to where I am.
 

What kind of money were you earning?
Dirtbox was probably between twenty and thirty quid a night. The Mud was another fifty. I remember one of the guys that did the sound system there and Busby’s and also worked I think it was at Epping Forest Country Club told me that I should be getting more and that the DJs there were on something like one hundred and fifty quid despite us getting more people than they did. So me and Mark Moore had this big argument with Philip Sallon about getting more money and Philip got so upset that he was crying that we were ripping him off (laughs). He’s a lovely guy, he is very loyal but the thing about Philip is that he runs a tight ship with the money but he’s very loyal.

Then by pure luck again, I started doing stuff for The Face. I think we sold The Face in the shop and someone came in who worked there and recognised me from DJing at the Dirtbox. Then this guy David Thomas interviewed me for The Face, a three page interview and called me the ‘hippest DJ in town’ which was a bit embarrassing and then after that they asked me to write an article about what it’s like to DJ at a warehouse party, and then on from that they asked me the next month to write another article, so I got into writing for The Face and then i–D asked me to do stuff and Blues and Soul.
 

What about Soul Underground?

Darren Reynolds said that he had done this magazine and he wanted me to do something about go-go or about fashion and he showed me issue one and again I thought that it was like punk, like the old punk fanzines, so I wrote for issue two and then did issue three and I think David had joined by then and Darren just left it and I kept doing stuff for them. I just liked that sort of thing I mean it wasn’t Blues and Soul, it wasn’t Black Echoes it was really underground and just tied into everything else, tied in with Kiss being a pirate station, it tied in with the warehouse vibe, so it just felt rebellious. We were doing stuff that Radio One wasn’t doing and that none of the magazines were really covering.
 

Were there any DJs that influenced or inspired you?

I guess my biggest influence was Steve Lewis who did the Le Beat Route. He’d play Benny Goodman and then he’d play ‘Loopzilla’ by George Clinton and some of the early hip hop stuff and he had this really left thing at the time where he’d play ‘The Red Flag’ as the last song of the night until some guy got offended and scratched it (laughs). There was this whole thing, the Tony Benn Funk Force and it was all kind of tied into left-wing politics, in those days it made sense as there was the whole Thatcher thing, the riots in ’81. It wasn’t just underground music, you were making a political statement by running a sort of do it yourself club and it was kind of anarchic and tied into punk, so a lot of people from the punk scene resurfaced in ’82 and ’83 and were doing clubs or doing clothes for people that were going to clubs.
 

Do you think the political climate influenced it?

Looking back on it now I don’t how it did but it was just there. You were just aware of it. Thatcher’s in power and all the kids on that circuit kind of tended towards the left, all hated Thatcher and it seemed rebellious and it was against the establishment. So you’d go to these clubs and play stuff that was really tough and underground. Like the Dirtbox soundtrack would be old Cajun records, old rockabilly and northern soul records, it was the opposite of what was going on, it was underground, it wasn’t Duran Duran, it wasn’t New Romantics. We wanted to be tougher, it was all linked to how the clubs were like, one red light and the decks. It just made sense then to be playing records like ‘How you Going To Make The Black Nation Rise’. Again it was always going back to the mods, the way they felt about black America, dancing in the street was this kind of call to arms if you read it that way. The working class mod kids identified with the black music from America and I think it was the same thing then. Kids in Thatcher’s Britain – I know it is a cliché but that’s how it felt – were rebelling against the establishment using records from black America the same way kids there were rebelling against Reagan. 
 

When did you first hear hip hop?

The first time I heard it was on a bus (laughs) some kid was playing ‘Rappers Delight’ and just thought, “What the fuck is that?” I just couldn't believe it; it just went on and on. I got on at Piccadilly and got off at Brixton and it was just playing the whole time, for the whole journey. Obviously I recognised the disco beat in the background but it was like what the hell are they doing, they were just chatting but it worked. I went into Groove Records and asked if they had that record that was just talking and talking and so I think I bought Spoonie Gee’s ‘Spoonie Rap’ and obviously ‘Rappers Delight’ and then I went back there every week and bought stuff.

I remember the first time I heard ‘Adventures On The Wheels of Steel’. I had read William Burroughs and just thought, “this is the musical version of cut ups!” At that time I wasn’t aware of the whole block party thing in New York, where they were cutting up loads of records. Later on people would come around selling sets of Africa Islam stuff off WBLS in the States, so hearing that was mind blowing. You know they were mixing all sorts of stuff and that probably contributed to the stuff we were playing at the Dirtbox where we would play Siouxsie and the Banshees and then we would play Hank Williams and then go into ‘Rock The Joint’ or ‘Pressure Drop’ and people were really going for it because at the end of the ’70s you had all those youth cultures but they were kind of coming to an end, the nouveau-mod thing had come to the end, the casuals had reached its peak as had the old soul boys, the punk, rockabilly, the new romantics thing it all kind of collided and what came out of that was the whole west end warehouse scene of ’83 to ’85.
 

Do you think the Dirtbox was the start of that?

To me it seemed to be the start of it but there was probably other things going on outside London but I never got outside London so I don’t know but I am sure there were clubs in Leeds, Sheffield and Nottingham that were doing a very similar thing. But for me it was the Le Beat Route and the Dirtbox. Then people started doing warehouse parties, more and more after the Dirtbox and again I’m sure there was other stuff going on, I know Norman Jay started doing stuff around then.

When did you notice it being a trend?
By the sixth night of the Dirtbox there were so many people that there was a queue all the way down the stairs out onto Earls Court Road and it was one in one out. Sade played, though they were still called Pride then and it was just this sweatbox, there were so many people in there. The prostitutes were giving the owner a hard time as people were queuing there for seven hours a night drinking Red Stripe, so none of the punters would dare come up because of all these kids on the stairs. Then the old bill started giving him a hard time because of the queues out on the street and I think the next week he told them at three o’clock that this was their last night. It was probably stupid that he told them then, he should have waited until it was closed because everyone rioted. There was this huge fire hose on the wall and people set it off so there was water going everywhere. People were setting off fire extinguishers; someone rolled one into the DJ box so there was spray going everywhere. I just grabbed my records and ran down the stairs with everyone else and the Special Patrol Group were still around then. They turned up and just started laying into people with truncheons and there was screaming and fighting. So that was the end of the Dirtbox in that venue (laughs).

Also we went down to Bournemouth one bank holiday and did a Dirtbox down there and then again unfortunately, it was probably pretty stupid but everyone was going crazy and I played ‘Anarchy In The UK’ as the last song and everyone trashed the pool tables. If the person that owns that club is reading this, I'm really sorry! (laughs). There were just all these kids that you hadn’t met before wearing the ‘hard times’ look, you realised that that it spread everywhere.
 

Were the warehouse parties a natural evolution from Dirtbox

It seemed that way, Dirtbox got bigger and bigger so they started doing stuff in the east end, in places that held five or six hundred. I did something for The Warehouse at the Electric Ballroom for like twelve hundred people and there was just this huge dancefloor and with this DJ box on a stage, when most DJ boxes were tucked away in the corner. I was so nervous even though I’d done a few hundred gigs by then but to be up on a stage in front of all those people, I remember I was shaking so much I couldn’t put the fucking needle on, it was just this sea of people and then me on a stage. From there they just kept getting bigger and bigger. More and more people started doing them and they were better organised and the police were paid off
 

Was paying the police off just an informal back-hander?

I mean I’ve got no proof of that but it just seems that the parties that were better organised didn’t get raided. I could be wrong but it just seemed that way. We did this one called The Bunker just after Chernobyl happened and we basically bought these iodine tablets and sellotaped them to this weather map of Europe that was covered with isobars. Unfortunately by then a dodgy element were getting into it, drug dealers and that started happening a lot where more and more dodgy elements became involved. Obviously it gets so big you can’t just do it yourself anymore and people started having bars in the clubs and just went away from that whole thing of bring your own booze and all that.
 

Was there a guest DJ circuit when you first started playing?

No not at all, the first DJ trip I ever did was to Vienna, the girl that booked me had read this article in The Face and of course it was a bible in those days and for people abroad it was often the only way they could find out about English culture. I started playing in Europe and I did the States because of that. I played at Dancetaria in New York and I did a few warehouse things over there when I was out there and I met the Beastie Boys, though I didn’t know they were the Beastie Boys at the time. I met Rick Rubin when he was still living in his dorm at New York University and he told me he was doing this label Def Jam and I thought, “Yeah good luck mate” (laughs). I didn’t realise that in a few years he would be a multi-millionaire.

But most of it came through The Face rather than from people seeing me at clubs. Every week someone would call me to ask if I would go to Stockholm or to Amsterdam. When people asked me to do stuff in London I would always be like, “Yeah just give me fifty quid” because of this stupid fucking punk thing I had in my head, I just wanted to be one of the people. Obviously I got a kick out of it but at the same time I was embarrassed when all this stuff was appearing in The Face. I had one girl who did some PR for me; she got me into the Evening Standard and Vogue and I thought, “I don't want to be doing this” and again I was so dumb I should have kept paying her and I would probably have ended up DJing at really nice Hollywood parties for the jet-set and instead I was just doing the warehouse parties! People even suggested getting DJ Strongman T-shirts and I was just like, “I can’t do that”. 

What impact did house have on you?
When I went to New York I went to the New Music Seminar in ‘86. And when I had first gone over there the year before Mark Kamins played me some stuff on DJ International. I played that at the Mud and it didn't go down that well. But as it got better and better I just started playing more and more of it. When I went over to the next New Music Seminar there were loads of people giving out stuff from Chicago and we realised what a big scene it was then. 
 

Do you think house had an adverse affect on eclecticism? 

By ’88 if I started playing hip hop in the middle of a house set I would get some serious grief off the punters. It was the complete opposite of how it had been in ’86. If you played any hip hop in a house set you would get people shouting, “What are you fucking doing mate, you’re killing the mood, we’re on one!” It was also to do with the whole ecstasy thing coming around. Even people that had always been into the hip hop or the rare groove stuff and Philip Sallon were telling me that I just had to play house all night and that I couldn’t play hip hop anymore. By ’89 it was pretty much impossible to play anything outside the house thing in the Mud Club. By this time that everyone was shouting, “ecstasy, ecstasy” (laughs) that to me was when I thought that this was one of the whole reasons I got into clubs, was to get away from that terrace mentality and I know it had all changed and it was different music and different people coming onto the scene but I am always wary of mobs and crowds. So when people started chanting... it just didn’t feel right in a club to me.

It started to move away from fashion. There was a time when English kids were three or four years ahead of the continent. You’d go over there and no one had flat tops and no one was wearing MA1 jackets and then you’d go to the continent and you’d think, “actually they’re dressed exactly the same as all the kids in England.” It was like in the fashion sense we were going backwards, we weren’t leading anymore.

Tell us about the tiki parties you did?

(Laughs)... That goes back to about ’95, I was playing the Electric Ballroom and, to be honest, just doing it because it was a job and it was good money. My heart wasn’t really into it. I was going out with this American girl who was from California and we went over there for four or five weeks at a time staying with her family.

I went out to San Francisco and there was this thing for Brian Setzer and his swing band, so there were all these kids dressed up again in ’50s and ’40s suits, it was like being back in England in 1976. One of the things that came out of that was that tiki thing. People drinking rum cocktails and wearing Hawaiian shirts which was something that people had done back in England in ’75. It got huge and every few months I’d go over there and when I came back to England there just never seemed the same buzz. I did the first tiki weekender at this place called the Madonna Inn which is just this great, really kitsch, place. Every room is different, you can book the caveman room that’s done out like the Flintstones or you can have the Heidi room that’s like a Swiss chalet. There were all these kids that were into the swing thing, the tiki thing and the retro thing. I discovered all this music that I didn’t know about, all this exotica and I realised the guy from Throbbing Gristle was into before me, his album cover for '20 Jazz Funk Greats' is a piss-take of this album by Martin Denny who is this big guy on the exotica scene. I just liked the fact that there was this music that had been forgotten and re-discovered by these kids in America and it just got me into my record collecting thing again. So I just stayed in touch with the tiki scene, go back every now and then for weekenders because everyone dresses up and gets drunk and it’s fun.
 

What was the high point of your DJ career?
I guess it was that Dirtbox when Sade played as it was just packed out and it was just packed, people queuing outside and we were walking down the queue giving out Red Stripe to the people that hadn’t brought their own drink and just seeing all those people and think, “This is it.” It felt like punk again. I mean when I was a punk I was trying to recapture what they had in mod but this actually felt like it felt when we were punks, you were doing it for yourself and it was slightly outlawed and had its own fashion statement.

Also the warehouse party in Russia was really good! I could only take twelve records and bunch of cassettes because CDs were just this thing that was being talked about; no one actually had any. The venue was literally just off Red Square in this old Russian theatre and we had this East German turntable and a boom box. I think I maybe brought six LPs with me that were greatest hits things. Not K-Tel, probably Streetsounds stuff so we’d play them and then switch to cassette and then switch back again. It was so funny but everyone was drunk that they were all just dancing like crazy to everything. I could literally have played pretty much anything and they would have danced to it. But it all just seemed like a buzz in those days, then I was on WBLS pirate radio and then when that got busted I went on Kiss and again it just felt like it was us against the world and the world was getting bigger and bigger, more and more people were getting into it.  You’d go out and all the kids would have the VW badges that they’d nicked and they would all be wearing Doc Martins with the metal bits showing and it all just seemed so huge. It just felt like we really were taking over.

Interview conducted by Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton, October 2010.

© DJhistory.com, 2012

Buy Catch The Beat, featuring Jay’s writing, here >