How did you get into music?
The first record I heard that I liked was ‘Walking To New Orleans’ by Fats Domino when I was about seven. The school I went to in High Wycombe had lots of Pakistani, Indian and West Indian kids and I used to hang around my friend Gilbert Barker’s house. He was Vincentian and his sister Jean used to play all the 7-inches, reggae and calypso; but mainly reggae. I got into it instantly. But I was into funk and we used to go over to Dunstable, to the California Ballrooms and underneath the Ballroom there was the Devil’s Den which is where they used to have all the funk. We used to stay at my mate’s family, the Redison family, in Luton and there it was pure reggae. We were waking up to John Holt’s A Thousand Volts Of Holt playing!
So you must have been into those crossover records like ‘Monkey Spanner’ and ‘Double Barrel’.
Well what happened, I was DJing at school for fun at lunchtimes in the science lab to raise money for the old people’s Christmas fund. It was really crap but good fun. Eventually we went down to the Newlands Club and the DJs were Judge Kilroy and Chalky White. My friend, Joe Farquharson, ran the Newlands. He was Jamaican and he was like a father figure to me. Judge Kilroy and Chalky White were playing slamming dance music of the time, stuff from the States, interspersed with ska, rocksteady, bluebeat and modern reggae (but not much). The main emphasis was on the black American stuff. They’d play Adriano Celentano’s ‘International Language Of Love’, and then it would be into ‘Lottery Spin’ by Zap Pow, then loads of funk; two or three ska tunes you could shuffle to, maybe a few tunes for a smooch and then back on to the funk. That’s how it used to run in them days. They were good DJs and eventually we got to DJ there in the afternoons and then in the evenings and that’s how I started with my love for the music.
Were you collecting then, too?
I used to go from High Wycombe very early on a Saturday and get to Record Corner in Bedford Hill in Balham for 9.30am. This is from 15 or 16 years old. They used to import soul and they were more of a soul shop than reggae but I bought reggae there too. I remember buying ‘Rastaman Chant’ by the Wailers on a black Tuff Gong import. After Record Corner I’d go to Shepherd’s Bush market to Caesar’s and I’d end up in Harlesden, where I got free copies off the Palmers – the guys that ran Pama – because Joe had previously worked for them at Soundville. Then I’d go from there back to High Wycombe and drop a few of the new tunes that afternoon at Newlands. I’d be back there by 1.30pm.
How did you get involved in the industry?
Through the Newlands. That club was brilliant. In the afternoons we used to have Emperor Rosko, Johnnie Walker, Dave Lee Travis, Noel Edmonds, Judge Dread, all doing PAs in the afternoon at our thing for the kids. I started doing that in 1971 when I was 13 or 14. The opening thing Joe put on there was his mate Johnny Nash. There was a roadblock, about 2000 people. The club could only hold about 600 legally but they managed to get a 1000 in. It was only a little place. I had some mad nights down there. In 1975 or ’76 we had a really hot summer. It was so hot no one wanted to go in the club. So that was the end of the Newlands...
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