When you started getting more interested in using your brother’s soundsystem and running that together, did you change the technical set-up a bit?
Yeah, I did a little bit. We changed the name to Good Times, because before that the sound was originally called Great Tribulation, because of the great tribulation Joey went through building it. I think the slight changes in sound came about because of the party I did, like a club, at my mum’s house. I was adamant it was going to be a soul party, not a reggae one. My brother was a bit concerned.
What can you remember about that first party?
About 200 people turned up, mainly West End kids. It was like having a West End club in your mum’s house! In essence that was the very first “soul blues,” because traditionally blues were always reggae. I’d quite openly claim it was the first soul blues. All the local guys turned up and they were like, “What’s all this? Where’s the reggae?” I said, “There ain’t no reggae here tonight. I’m playing the records, and there ain’t no reggae.” I used to get a lot of grief in the early days.
It was amazing to see all these West End kids coming ’round to my house and all the local people were saying, “Who the fukk are these guys?” We jammed untold people into my mum’s house in Acton. The West End kids loved it, but the reggae boys weren’t impressed by the funk and soul I was playing.
I can’t remember the first track I played, but I know that I played Loose Joints’ “Is It All Over My Face?” fairly early on. I also played a lot of underground disco club tracks from the period and my old funk records. I was playing the kind of tracks that I’d always loved – funky stuff that I’d never heard in clubs because I’d always thought that they wouldn’t play. I subsequently learned that they never knew. That’s how the whole rare groove thing blew up: I took it for granted that people knew these records and it turned out they didn’t.
Did you get a good reaction?
Not really. I started off and the reggae boys were dissing us for playing soul and funk. We were getting a pretty hostile reaction, so a couple of hours after me digging my heels in Joey had to come on and play reggae. He wanted to play anyway – this was his chance to shine. I had to get him into the idea and it was my perseverance that drove us. I desperately wanted this to work.
When I played later there was a few more people, maybe 50, but that was about as good as it got. That night we had to take the system down and take it all back, which meant another three trips in the Cortina. Come six in the morning I was onto Joey saying, “Let’s take it back and do it again.”
When I got there about eight in the morning, there was some yardie setting up. I went fukking mad. I must have been out of my tree fronting them out, because they’d just taken the spot and wanted to fight me. They were getting physical, but when my brother turned up with his locks, one dread to another dread, they kind of chilling out.
After a lot of arguing this ragga posse decided to just pack up their gear and move on. I stayed there all night long and slept on the wall with the sound, with music on low. A couple of my die-hard mates came down and the punks came out with blankets. We got chatting and I told them it was our first year. They said, “Come back next year bigger, stronger and more organised.” So we did, and that was in 1981.
It was around that time that I became quite politicised. I knew what was going on with the whole white scene, I became quite angry and disillusioned and I was determined to challenge it. So I organised a black DJ union. No one had ever undertaken to do anything like that before.
Me and my brother organised a meeting at my mum’s house of all the big black soundsystems. I’d heard about Funkadelic and Good Groove Company in East London doing stuff. We didn’t know who they were, but we got in contact with them with the idea of forming our own black pirate station. This would have been 1982 or ’83, and even on pirates there were no black presenters.
What motivated me to do this was this night going on in Canning Town, Bentley’s at the Bridge House. The crowd was exclusively black. Froggy was the DJ. Greg James may have taught him to mix, but where he had the edge was he had a soundsystem. Most black kids could relate to that and that was why, out of all the Mafia DJs, he had the biggest black following. He played the music that the black guys in the East End loved.
Anyway, when I went to Bentley’s for the first time I was really impressed by the warm-up guy, Derek Boland. The kid was playing all the records I’d bought over the years and never heard out. And he was only the warm-up! The crowd was firing and then Froggy came on and played the same old soul boy classics. Yawn. At the end of the night I went over to Derek and said I thought his set was wicked. He said. “You’re the first person that’s ever said anything like that to me. It’s really great.” We talked about
Leroy Burgess, because he’d played Convertion’s “Let’s Do It.” No white DJ ever played that – it was so black and underground.
Convertion feat. Leroy Burgess – Let’s Do It
I went down for the next few weeks and he kept getting thrown off early by Froggy. I said, “Why does he throw you off?” I didn’t understand about the politics and all that bollocks. On one Friday Froggy couldn’t do it, so Derek did it all night and it fukking rocked. A black DJ playing black music to a black crowd: it was a fukking revelation. Froggy got wind of what happened that night and they sacked Derek. So we boycotted the club.
That’s when we organised the meeting. About 20 people came, including Paul “Trouble” Anderson,
Jazzie B, Mastermind and Derek Boland. East meets West for the first time. The meeting in our house lasted all day. It realised my worst fears. You couldn’t put a group of black guys together with different aspirations. It would never work. We couldn’t agree on anything amongst ourselves.
There was one guy sitting in that room called Tosca. He was a bit of a player in the ’80s. He whispered to me: “I’m hooked up with someone you know who’s going to start a station. I’ll come back and tell you about another plot.” Anyway, as good as his word, he rang me a couple of days later and said, “One of my mates, Gordon Mac, and someone else you know are starting a pirate station.” He wouldn’t tell me who the other person was but he did ask me if I’d be interested in getting involved.
Gordon called me about a week later and said he’d heard about the meeting. He also said that he’d been told that Froggy and the Soul Mafia were really pissed off. I think they were scared of what we were doing. He said, “We’re going to do a black music policy, over the weekends, with American-style mixes. Have you got any samples of this?” At this time I was getting KISS tapes from New York.
. I'm not accusing you personally of saying that, but it should be obvious that doing a black american accent is just the hustle needed for actors from here to get successful in America. People on here really think someone like Idris Elba is doing his stringer accent in his spare time lol. With music, you best believe that Americans were always getting way more play here, always have and likely always will. Lovers Rock, reggae, dancehall and then garage were all seeing more british blacks on tv screens, but still a minority. Channel U was our first channel we had which is when things started to even out, roughly after the pirate radio days.
but....
