Greg Wilson (2014)

Todd Burns

Hello and welcome to the final lecture of the Red Bull Music Academy Weekender, Belfast. I’m really honored to be joined by a DJ pioneer in the UK, Greg Wilson.

Greg Wilson

Hiya. Nice to meet you.

Todd Burns

I wanted to begin by connecting a little bit to Noel’s lecture. He talked and he did some mixing for the Street Sounds compilations back in mid ’80s, I guess?

Greg Wilson

Yeah, ’85, I think he would have done that.

Todd Burns

Yeah and you’ve written extensively about the impact of that compilation...

Greg Wilson

One of the series compilations, it first started, it was like the first kind of successful series of dance music compilations. It was the first series of dance compilations that were mixed as well. It was a guy called Morgan Khan who came up with the idea and I mean a lot of these tracks were only available on imports and they were expensive. Imports cost twice the amount of a British release. So if you were trying to buy these records, just as a normal person not as a DJ, it took a lot of money. So, he came up with the idea of let’s get these imports, put them on an album, maybe have eight tracks that would cost, you know, for the cost of two tracks and it was just a winner. He also did a series called Street Sounds which was dealing with the more kind of street soul based, and Hi-NRG. He made all sorts of spin offs but the electro series... (phone rings) my phone, let me turn that off. There we go.

The electro series, which was basically the one that Noel was involved in, really caught the imagination and that was almost like the soundtrack for the original breakdance era. It was like, there was kids up and down the country who were like put ghetto blasters on the streets, were just like getting some lino about and break dancing and that was the perfect format. I would imagine cassette sales were probably as strong in many respects as vinyl sales because this is what the usage was. Later down the line when people started to look at the history of dance culture, especially with regards to what happened in the late ’80s, it was a huge emission, a massive omission that Street Sounds and what that represented wasn’t there within the story. It was kind of sidelined for the whole of Ibiza narrative of how things turned out.

Todd Burns

Yeah, I was looking at the comments to a post you’d put on your website and it was amazing to see five or six people that were like, “Yes, that was the compilation for me.” And like no one talks about it anymore.

Greg Wilson

I mean, these were chart albums. These weren’t like kind of something that sold a few thousand copies. These were getting in the Top 20 of the British album charts. These were huge records so it’s not surprising that a lot of people from that era, when they saw that being written about, it was like, “Well, yeah of course that happened.” But it was still very much... dance culture was very much an underground thing at the time still. It wasn’t until later that with the advent of the whole acid, house, rave scene, that it went overground and just became something that was more of a commercial force at that point.

Todd Burns

What’s been the impulse for you to... I mean obviously, your love of music, to get back into the DJing game, I understand that. What is the impulse for you to write about it so much on your website and document these things?

Greg Wilson

I mean, maybe it’s important to me that if I’m interested in history of music and for example, I’m massively into what happened in the ’60s and just obsessive. I can read any amount of books on that period of time. When you see things that... it’s almost like, I say this a lot, but to know the future first you must know the past. If it’s a wrong past or if it’s a past that’s missing big chunks of it, you can never look ahead properly. So, from my point of view, when I came back into DJing, which was just over ten years ago, a lot of the reason behind that was because, I’d got ... I’ve got a computer, started to go online and see what’s happening on the internet, realize that dance culture now was being documented in a historic way and seeing these omissions, and at that point, you could either just sit and moan about it or, in my case, I knew that I had all my archive material from the early ’80s period and I could put together a website that basically was a starting point that showed you how it led to that period of time and explained how things came out of that and so that’s what I did basically.

I went back and that was what brought me back into DJing because when I had set the website up then people would say to me, “Would you like to DJ?” and then it became worthwhile to do that. There was a reason to do that and to kind of point a finger back to these times so people could see. Because as I say, up until that point, I think the narrative was very much the Ibiza one, which was really important, but it wasn’t about bringing the music back or like it was a Balearic edge to music, but a lot of people thought it was the house music that came back from Ibiza, whereas really what came back from Ibiza was ecstasy and the house music was already in place, but I mean that’s what it was. It was like on the underground scene, certainly in the north and Midlands. I mean there was a different lineage in London. Not many people were actually playing house, Noel and Morris were two of the people that were but, as he probably told you himself, there was a lot of resistance to that at the time in London whereas in the north of Midlands, there was already established networks between places like Sheffield, Nottingham, Birmingham, Leads, Bradford, Huddersfield, Manchester.

There was an all-dayer scene that was going on. This goes back to the jazz funk days and house music was just played on the back of the electro. We’re talking about the electro albums. House initially, before there was a term house, it was just another form of electro that people found out came from a different city which happened to be Chicago and techno being Detroit as well, but it was all under the same umbrella. One of the first techno records was Cybotron, “Clear,” which was, I played myself in 1983 as an electro track. I wasn’t even aware it wasn’t. I didn’t know it was from a different city at the time. It just fitted in exactly with that and that’s what happened in the north and Midlands.

The lineage in London was different. What broke it in London and made it different to what was happening, where we were was that the Rare Groove scene was so big, so that was almost like London’s northern soul, it was like going back and finding older records and creating a vibe and a scene around that and that was so huge during that kind of mid 80s period that took precedence on things and that caused a different narrative. I mean, house music predominantly from a London perspective, was originally played within the gay clubs whereas house music from the northern Midlands perspective was played in the black clubs so that’s probably the difference of the two.

Todd Burns

Yeah, I mean that was quite an interesting thing to me is that outside of London, black audiences in the UK at least in the north were cottoning on to house music first. Speaker: Greg Wilson

Yep.

Todd Burns

But it was the exact opposite. Why do you think house music in the north caught these audiences?

Greg Wilson

Well, I mean, as I say, I think it was the electro lineage. I think, electro also had a different effect in the north than the south and the reason for that was, don’t get me wrong, there was a lot of people in the south that were really into electro, but if you go back to say, 1982, when the first electro records appeared, how the scene worked, the black music scene in the UK was, the south and the north were separate. DJs didn’t kind of very often go between the two. It wasn’t like nowadays.

Todd Burns

So you didn’t play very much in London?

Greg Wilson

No, I never played at all in London. I played one time in London just before I stopped DJing and that was part of the Hacienda tour when I did Camden Palace, but never apart from that. I can think of two or three London DJs who came up to the north during that period. It was very rare, it was a real rare occurrence. In London, there was a group of DJs called the Soul Mafia: Chris Hill, Froggy, people like Pete Tong. Pete Tong was the young guy from the Soul Mafia, Jeff Young, you know Tom Holland, all these people. They had like a lot of power on the scene. They’d sussed out how to promote as well as to DJ almost.

There was a company called Show Stopper Promotions, they were putting on weekenders, you know. I mean there was all-dayer events in the north and the south but they’d taken it to another level and I’d say that Chris Hill, the DJ Chris Hill, was probably the first superstar DJ in this country in this respect. He was way ahead of the curve with what he was doing. They were a powerful force and they had a lot of power within the media, so, Blues & Soul Magazine, the London stations that played black music, Radio London and Capital, Robby Vincent and Greg Edwards, these were all connected into the Soul Mafia and they were anti-electro. Their initial stance was that they didn’t like this, how they saw as kind of machine music. They thought it had no value with regards to soul.

Todd Burns

Just a little bit more robotic.

Greg Wilson

Yeah, I mean they just thought that, to their belief, soul was about songs and instrumentation and everything and this was something different. Whereas as a younger DJ, the way that I looked upon it was that, for me, I mean I was a big soul fan as a kid growing up and you know Stax Records and obviously Motown and stuff and you know the raw edge of something like Otis Redding and stuff like that, I could hear that in the electro, whereas the contemporary soul music of the time, you know, Luther Vandross, Alexander O’Neal, these people... incredible voices but it was over lush production and it was now aspirational black music. It was almost black yuppie music, in the sense that it was so smooth that it was almost bland in a sense, and this is what they were kind of hanging on to, whereas this new vibrant New York kind of cutting edge music being made from the streets, you know this is where...

Todd Burns

So it’s kind of the same attitude as well from the, this is the raw...

Greg Wilson

Yeah, that’s how I saw it and so we embraced it completely but it took longer. I mean for example, there was electro albums that you’re talking about, the first one was in October ‘83, whereas what’s seen as the track that really kicked off the whole electro thing, “Planet Rock” by Africa Bambaataa and the Soul Sonic Force, was that kind of an import in May ‘82. So we’re talking over a year. Morgan Khan saw the commercial possibility of this by then and he, by ‘84, like that old Soul Mafia thing had almost been swept aside and the new breed came through. That’s where DJs like Tim Westwood came from because they again, they embraced this new sound that was coming out and electro was the vehicle also that really brought hip-hop into its own. You know, things like Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, “The Message,” you know, its kind of electronic backing, and Run DMC, you know one of their first big singles was It’s Like That, which was played as an electro track so a lot of hip-hop kind of emerged out of electro as well.

And so, there was a massive change in London. I mean, the people that were playing this music were doing so, for example, on Pirate Radio and it was hidden in the shadows, whereas, for example, I did mixes for Piccadilly Radio playing this music and this was the second most popular commercial radio station in the country, outside of Capital Radio in London, so really we’d got it to a certain level already before London was like really embracing it and that was purely down, in my opinion, to the stranglehold on the scene that the Soul Mafia guys had.

Todd Burns

And you also mentioned, extended to the media in some sense, in the north obviously pirate radio was...

Greg Wilson

We didn’t have really Pirate Radio.

Todd Burns

No?

Greg Wilson

It was... that was more of a London phenomenon. I mean it was only later that a few pirates emerged, Manchester and places like that, but that wasn’t really what was happening from our side of things.

Todd Burns

So how was what you guys were doing up there spreading? How were these messages spreading?

Greg Wilson

Well, it was an underground scene which meant that if you didn’t read a magazine like Blues & Soul, if you didn’t listen, say if you were in Manchester, to Mike Shaft Show on Piccadilly Radio, or if you were in Liverpool, Terry Lennaine on Radio Merseyside, these different regions had DJs who were playing specialist black music. Or you hadn’t had the fortune of meeting somebody who hooked you into these kind of clubs that the... you probably missed them completely in a sense. You might not have even known that it was going on. But there was, as I say, there was this huge kind of subculture that developed over a period of time with whole series of... I mean at one point literary every weekend there was an all-dayer somewhere. So it was Sheffield this week, next week it was Nottingham, and the week after it was Manchester.

And how all-dayers worked was that the most popular DJs in the region would come together in one place, so, and draw their crowds with them, I mean, we used to organize coaches for the people from our clubs, so it was this coming together. I mean, it’s a shame almost that something similar hasn’t existed more recently. I mean, I remember when I came back into things about ten years ago and this emerging disco scene and stuff, you’d see people doing events maybe in Newcastle or in Glasgow, Edinburgh and these kind of places and I’d always think what if those guys took a venue kind of central to all those and brought all the... and that’s what it was like, brought all their people together, because then everything starts to cross-pollinate from there. So the guys from Newcastle might check out the club in Glasgow, and so it worked on the club side people would go...

Todd Burns

These festivals, I mean obviously people were willing to travel to festivals...

Greg Wilson

Well, I think...

Todd Burns

To see things but ...

Greg Wilson

Festivals is the modern phenomenon I think.

Todd Burns

Yeah.

Greg Wilson

Festivals is where youth culture is now, it’s so big and it’s like a rite of passage for younger people and everything. I think this is where we are now, so in a sense, but this was more kind of bespoke because it was a certain type of music, it was, the DJs that worked on this, it was a specialist scene. I mean, for example, you had to buy these records. They didn’t come cheap. You know, I mean I’d spend 100 pounds worth records a week and that doesn’t seem a lot now, but back then most DJs were lucky if they got 20 pound a night. So I was fortunate. I could make a little bit more, I had a residency at Wigan Pier and I had Legend as well, but a lot of that money went into... you had to have the music.

You literally... there was a famous occasion where I came up against... there was one shop in the north of England where you had to go for your records, if you were serious about being respected as a specialist black music DJ, and this place called Spin Inn in Manchester and that, you know I clashed a little bit with the manager. I was a young guy and maybe different ideas and you know as it goes, people see things in a different way and I remember one night I had gone into, I was at the club one night. It was a track by Arthur Adams called “You Got the Floor” and it was, somebody came in and said, “Have you got this Arthur Adams track, ‘You’ve Got the Floor?’” and I’m like, “No, but we’ll start.” And he’s like, “Oh yeah it’s great blah, blah, blah we heard it last night,” because there was another big club in town at the time called The Main Event. I’m thinking, “Why don’t I have this track?” So you know, the next day I ring the record shop, “Arthur Adams,‘You’ve Got the Floor’” “Oh yeah, yeah, yeah! We must have run out when you got in. We’ll put one aside for you.” “Okay.”

So I go to pick my records up the next week and he said, “Oh, it hasn’t come in the shop yet.” So I’m thinking, “Oh God, I haven’t got this record and everyone’s raving about it.” and the night that I was working someone else comes up, “Have you got Arthur Adams, ‘You’ve Got the Floor?’” “I’m afraid I haven’t got it.” And this was like see a normal punter, not a DJ or anything and he said, “I’ve just got one in the car, I got it from Spin Inn yesterday.” I was livid. I actually played his copy that night, but I was like in there and saying, “What? Are you holding this record back?” And that made a decision in me. I went to the manager of the shop and I said, “Look...” and at that point he made sure that everything that came in I had it first. I was spending a lot of money, and it was important that I had these but it also made me think well, to kind of cover my back I used to shop in London as well and make sure I go to London every few weeks just to check off of that the things there and so you know it made me like look at things in a bit of a different way, but again the guy, later we clashed further along the line with the electro thing because he was completely anti-electro, and even put [a sign] in the shop window — although they were selling this music and there was massive demand for it — “electro shit chart,” it was like just grinding it down as though it was worthless and nothing.

Todd Burns

So he is selling it, he’s stocking it.

Greg Wilson

Yeah.

Todd Burns

But he’s saying you shouldn’t buy it or anything.

Greg Wilson

Exactly. I mean I remember going in and buying “Planet Rock” and I know that as I walked out he was just looking at me and thinking, a fool parted with his money, because to them “Planet Rock” was coming from a Kraftwerk basis and it wasn’t black music to them, they didn’t see this as anything. It was just this novelty gimmicky thing. But really, now we know historically, this is, for me it’s one of the most important records of the 20th century because it is right at the start of that kind of electronic dance. It defined a new era, it defined a new way of making music, a new approach and everything and things changed after that forever. You can go back and look at pre-“Planet Rock” and the music that was being... I mean, I did a series online called “Early ’80s Floorfillers,” where again I went through all my record lists and I compiled a top ten for each month through ’82 and ’83 and if you started in the beginning of ’82, there’s still a lot of jazz records being played on the black music scene but you go to the end of that year and you’ve just seen a completely different, so many electronic tracks are coming into play and everything, and so there was a massive changeover at that point.

Todd Burns

Tell me about Wigan Pier, you mentioned that.

Greg Wilson

Yeah, Wigan Pier was a club...

Todd Burns

Very briefly.

Greg Wilson

It was a club in Wigan. A lot of people make the mistake of thinking it was Wigan Casino. Wigan Pier and Wigan Casino were chalk and cheese, they were two different things. Casino was an old dilapidated rundown ballroom playing ’60s rarities over a bit of a tinny old sound system. Wigan Pier was the state of the art American-style disco that they based around what was going on in New York, you know, your venues like your Paradise Garages and Studio 54s and these clubs had emerged in the ’70s, putting the sound equipment in, putting the emphasis on sound and lights and stuff like that.

Todd Burns

How did that happen in Wigan like what, who was going to New York and saying we need to have this here?

Greg Wilson

It was a complete accident apparently. The guy who owned the club, there was a stockist of disco equipment called Roger Squires in Manchester, and like every other club, he was going to Roger Squires and I don’t know how it happened but he bumped into somebody who worked for a company called Bacchus and Bacchus used to fit Hilton hotels and venues all around the world with the latest kind of equipment, and this guy persuaded him into, for example, getting the first laser system in a British club.

I mean, it was way ahead of the curve. I’d gone to work in Europe by this point and when I say go to, it’s not like now where they fly you over there, put you in a nice hotel and look after you. I mean, you drove to Europe and you worked like six, seven nights a week in a club between 9 and 5 in the morning, and you slept in some grotty little backroom somewhere. There were loads of British DJs out there doing that at the time all over Scandinavia. You know I think, I often think that whole of kind of Scandinavian disco thing that came out, that’s part of the reason, because of these DJs that came before.

And so, I was over there at the time, I decided I’m going to try and see how it works out there and, but I still wanted to be in the UK, but you know at the time, as I say, being a DJ it wasn’t a lucrative business. It wasn’t like it is now, and so I had a... as I said, ?I had my car out there and I had a bump in the car and had to bring the car back to get it repaired and changed. And while I was back, a guy that I’d met during my first trip to Norway, I tried to get in touch with him and found out he was at this club Wigan Pier and it was not far from where I was in Liverpool. So, I went to see him and I just saw this club and I was like, “Oh my god, this is it.” The just incredible kind of lighting and sound, and the DJ was on this balcony in this 15 foot high fiberglass frog, it was like this bizarre kind of... and they have monitors there and you never saw monitors in clubs at the time.

It had vari-speed turntables that you didn’t see in clubs, or by and large in clubs, and everything was just set right and he told me that he was going to take a new club by the same company in Manchester called Legend and that there was going to be a vacancy for the job and he said, “Why don’t you audition for it, they’re doing auditions next week.” And I’m like, “But I’m going back out to Germany next week.” And I’m thinking, and I actually considered not going to Ger-, just to try to do the audition because I was so into it, but I couldn’t do that. I said to the owner, I said, “Look, can I, if I can give a cassette or something and send you a cassette as a demo.” And he said, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.”

So that’s what I did and fortunately, I got the job on the back of that. I came to this working four nights a week residency straightaway, financially, as I said, most DJs they got I think, you got 20 quid for a night. That was a really good crack but, you know I was getting about like 42 pound, 50 a night and you know over the residency and I was doing the four nights there so I was like sorted on that level, and one of the nights was the jazz funk night, the Tuesday night, and that was my favorite night because it was the type of music that I was into. And then, a little later down the line, the same company that owned Legend, they had a Wednesday jazz funk night, and that was struggling. I’d done well and now the DJ there, a very famous DJ at the time called John Granz had left and gone to another club, taken the crowd with them, and I was given a failing club but managed to turn that and that became my great night, the Wednesday at Legend.

Todd Burns

How did you get into jazz funk originally?

Greg Wilson

Well, I mean, I was always like, from being very young, you know, black music found my brother and my sister. The records that they bought when they were in their teens, they were older than me, was like Stax Atlantic, Motown, Trojan Reggae stuff, and this is, I was kind of inheriting these great 7" singles and so that was, musically that was really my first love and I just followed that through and looked, when I started buying records myself, I was about 11 when I started buying records. I’d go and look round, I’d go in the bargain bins and find these soul records and then I’d start listening to the radio shows, reading Blues and Soul Magazine. And so that was the direction, by the time I started DJing myself, which was in ’75 and coming to the end of the ’70s, I think what happened was that disco, obviously I just started as disco was coming in, I think the month I started was the month Donna Summer released “I Love to Love You Baby,” so it’s kind of the start of that real era coming through.

But when Saturday night fever came out, although at first it was great that here was a film that was depicting this kind of culture that we were a part of, very quickly it brought in what we saw was like a wrong... people latching onto the film, people dressing in you know like sometimes... like Medallion Man and stuff and it was getting a bit crassy, you know. I always see it that way, that in the end the symbolism of what disco originally was, which was like an afro hair, black kit you know like kind of dancing to, you know it became like this white suited, white guy with his hand in the air, you know, and it changed with that and it made it very uncool all of a sudden. There was those connotations with it and I think a lot the kind of cooler kids at that point started moving towards jazz funk and listening to that music so that, I kind of went with that lineage and although I wasn’t in a venue of the level of a Wigan here or a Legend at the time, I was still in my home town, that I was able to start to introduce these records and play them within that and one of my proudest moments was that Blues & Soul actually come to my little backwater club and recommended it, just before I went abroad and everything.

So yeah, I aspired to that. I mean, I always tell this story, I mean when I did the Academy in Melbourne back about what, must have been about eight years ago, I told the story about when in Liverpool there was a club called the Timepiece in the ’70s and it was a funk club, and the DJ was a guy called Les Spaine and it was predominantly a black club, and I went there when I was sixteen. I was taken in by some older DJs and it was one of those occasions where you go into an environment and all of a sudden you’re thinking, “Oh am I out of my depth here?” Because there were very few white people and I hadn’t been in an environment as a white guy where I was in the minority. It helped me understand how a lot of black people must have felt being put in a situation where they were in the minority in most circumstances.

But amidst that was the music that was playing was exactly what I was into, exactly what I was about and that this DJ, Les Spaine, he was like a larger than life character and he did all-nighters and so all the like Liverpool DJs from different clubs would come at the end of their night and they all stood round the booth and looking up to him and asking, “What’s that record?” and writing it down. He was quite happy to give them this information, but he was like the don, but he was so welcoming to everyone. So, and like me as a sixteen year old, introduced to him, treated me with respect, you know not like I was some little nothing... I always felt that with him. I mean, he’s still a friend to this day. He went on to work for Motown and he managed the Reggae band Aswad, and he’s still involved in the music business today. And when I saw what was going on there, that was it, that’s what I wanted, that’s what I aspired to. I wanted something like I saw there, and that’s what I eventually managed to get at Legend, I managed get my Timepiece when I, a little bit later down the line.

Todd Burns

You mentioned, you keep mentioning Blues & Soul Magazine. How important was that at the time?

Greg Wilson

Blues & Soul was the DJ’s bible. There was no Mixmag, DJ magazine, all those things then. So, Blues & Soul... and one of the big things in Blues & Soul was the DJ, this is where I heard about DJs like Chris Hill and these guys in London, was that they, there was charts, a DJ could submit a chart, a top ten. I put mine in all the time, and so there’d be these two pages of DJ charts that you could read for a start. So that alongside with Record Mirror, there was a disco page in Record Mirror by a guy called James Hamilton. He’s probably one of the most important people ever in British dance culture, but not many people would know. He dates back to the early ’60s and the R&B scene, at a place called the Scene in London. And so this was where your sources of information came from. Like Blues & Soul, for example, would print a UK soul chart, which were all the records released in the UK but also the US. So you’d see what was released there, and you know, latest record reviews, all sorts of kind of interviews and stuff like that. A lot of adverts for clubs, clubs advertising... it was at that point in time, it was the DJ bible. You had to, again, if you were a specialist in black music, you had to read that. There was no way around it.

Todd Burns

Why was James Hamilton so important?

Greg Wilson

For a start, he was with a guy called Guy Stevens. When I say the foundation of UK club culture, I think you can take it to the scene in London which was the Mod Club of the early 60s. You can also take it to the Twisted Wheel in Manchester with a guy called Roger Eagles. These were the first people that were importing American records and it wasn’t enough to just buy what’s coming out in Britain, they had to get to source and get these records, so Twisted Wheel for example, that’s where northern soul comes from. It’s from that venue where eventually, they got so obsessive about this music that they wanted to dig back and back and find these rarer records and it came through from there.

James Hamilton was one of the DJs at the scene but later turns up at the start of the disco era writing for Record Mirrors. Before that, he was doing US import reviews for Record Mirrors. Record Mirrors is a really important magazine in terms of dance music. They were always pro-dance. Magazines like say NME or Melody Maker, they ignored it probably until really the ’80s and hip-hop came through and then the rave scene eventually, but Record Mirror was always supportive of disco and dance music as it evolved. James Hamilton was central, he was the guy who... BPMs, he started listing beats per minute obsessively. You’d see him, he’s this big, tall, he was about 6 foot 6, larger than life, mad character and a very far back voice and he’d stand there in Groove Records in London with a stopwatch just BPMing records, counting the BPMs and he went on an obsessive mission and he was the one who I think pushed mixing in the UK because initially it was just seen as a fad from America, and British DJs used the microphone and nobody saw the reason to change, and we didn’t have the equipment, the vari-speed turntables.

So the idea of mixing came out and people gave it a go on these belt-driven turns and tried to touch... the needle would jump and so everyone stuck to that, but he pushed that through and pushed that through until it eventually it really started to kind of come in. He was a real champion of New York dance culture as well and so many different things with him. He has become obscured in the history but he’s massive, he’s one of the key figures. Without him, it would be a different culture.

Todd Burns

One of the things that I think is regarded as one of your massive contributions to dance music history is that you were the first DJ on television to mix. Obviously people can go and look up that story. I just wonder if you remember that day specifically.

Greg Wilson

Yeah, I remember that day, it was the scariest day of my life. I see people now, like Boiler Room and all that and they do that. It was like that, but before it was hard for me to get my head round to that Boiler Room at first, the idea that somebody wants to watch a DJ play because when I started out, DJs weren’t on a kind of central stage and everyone looking at them, they were in a dark corner. I actually prefer that, just the music speaking for itself, DJ out of the way. So all of a sudden, there’s this massive scrutiny.

I remember how it all came about. I did the Wednesdays at Legend which was like the specialist black music night and there was a new British release by an artist called David Joseph, who’d had success previously with a band called High Tension, but this was his first solo single. I’d been sent copies of it by the record company, I got records from all the British companies, but it was only tracks like this that I play on British releases, all this stuff was imported. It was a British artist like this and it was a really good track, “You Can’t Hide Your Love.”

What I used to do at the time, I’d started mixing by this point, I used to play around with two copies of a record. I’d run one behind the other, either four beats, two beats or a beat and switch it around, maybe kind of extend it, it was almost kind of like a live remix in a sense. This night, David Joseph had come to Manchester to do a personal appearance. We used to get artists who’d just come in, we didn’t even pay them. We had people like Gwen Guthrie, Oliver Cheatham, even Kool and the Gang came in at one point. The record company would get them in there to help promote any number of British artists, of which David Joseph was one. Now, The Tube was in Newcastle, the TV program. It was the biggest music program at the time on the TV and they were going to have him on. They were going to do an outside broadcast from Camden Palace. I was actually in the studio in Newcastle. They were going to have him on for this, they wanted to come check him out and see what he did. They came to Legend and they heard me playing these two copies of the record and they went, “That might be an idea to have him on in Newcastle playing the record and then go to David Joseph in Camden Palace.” So they approached me and they said, “How do you fancy doing it?” And of course you go, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” And then you go home, you go, “Oh, my God. I’m going to be doing this in front of all of my contemporaries, what if it goes wrong? Oh no.” It’s like the fear of the situation at the time, what if I look a right melon if something happens?

And I remember going there and I took my equipment, I had this console, I took my Revox up there and we set it all up, and Jools Holland was the guy who did the interview, and all through the conversation and everything before we even were interviewing, I’m just looking at my decks and I’ve got everything cued up and what was scaring me more than anything was there was a guy with a hand held camera and he was going incredibly close to things. And I’m thinking, “Please don’t bang that.” So, it got to the point where he said 10 seconds before on air and I think that’s the most fearful moment of my life, just “Oh God, I’ve got to go for this.” And so, did it, and the cameraman did bang it and the record held and that SL 1200... just the steadiness of it, it saved my life because if that would have jumped, I would have had to kind of be on the hop trying to... I wasn’t no turntablist who could just drop the needle on the right beat or anything. I was still kind of infancy of mixing and stuff. And everything went fine in the end and it worked out great.

I remember I did a club in Manchester that night called The Exit. And I remember as I walked in a lot of people kind of patting me on the back and saying, “Well done.” And it had been a success and everything. It’s funny looking at the footage now because the people in the studio, there’s no interest, they are just not even bothered. They’re going, “What was this kind of DJ thing going on?” Because they were kind of New Romantic-y kids and stuff like that. Obviously from a DJ... anyone who was DJ who saw it, it kind of had an effect on them and people like Norman Cook talked about seeing it. Even people thinking about, “Oh, I could do that and give it a go.” It opened up the idea of mixing to more people.

Todd Burns

You mentioned Revox. Can you tell us what that is?

Greg Wilson

Right. Sorry. Revox is Revox B77, reel-to-reel tape recorder. It’s what I use now. I kind of record samples...

Todd Burns

So you’re still using this thing?

Greg Wilson

Yes, the same unit from back in the early ’80s. I started doing mixes for radio, once I became known as somebody who mixed and you got to remember, at the time, there was only probably a handful of people in the country who were seen as taking this direction seriously. People like Froggy in London, James Hamilton for sure, one or two other people Ian Levine at the Heaven gay club in London, but it wasn’t something that was being done. I don’t think mixing really took over with the majority of DJs until the rave period. It wasn’t until the late ’80s, there was still a lot of DJs using the microphone to that point.

The original mixes I did the for the radio were literally as live, but they recorded them in the day so I go into Legend in the day, they come and they bring one of these Revox B77 units. What they were used for, these were portable editing units that were used by news departments who on the hop, they kind of edit as they were going along. They were built for that purpose. They’d record the mix, take it back to the studio and did what they called top-and-tailor which was put blank tape at the beginning and the end so it was all broadcast ready to be played, and that was it. It was like a live mix at first. And then there was one occasion where they didn’t have anyone back at the studio to edit it. I managed to get myself into an editing booth and I’d been shown the rudiments of tape editing. I just really got into it, started reversing bits of tape, playing around and messing with beats, stuff like that, just loved it. That took me down that kind of path which was almost like a producer’s man. Which is where I wanted to work more slowly with the music and the mixes got to become more intricate, they’d take me longer to do. No longer was it as live, it was taking a whole night to kind of put something together and becoming more and more experimental all the time.

I’d bought my own and I bought my SL-1200s. This is at a time where only a couple of clubs in the country has SL-1200s and nobody had them, nobody bought them. I think Froggy in London would have had a pair, then I had a pair and so I had my own kind of little DJ studio that I was working on, making my mixes and the Revox was integral to that, because apart from... we would record into it then, that was the format you recorded to, and then I could edit things up and do little kind of tricks and fancy things. Also, if you put it into record, and I still do this now, if you put it into record, and turn the channel up so you’re recording what’s playing out and then you pull that channel up, it’s creating an infinity loop, so that’s the dub effect. That’s what the Jamaicans discovered in the 70s with dub and everything. They were doing so, I use it in that way as well, it has those two purposes for me.

Todd Burns

Why do you still use it? We have the technology today to do those things on the computer, obviously. What’s the appeal for you still to be bringing this out?

Greg Wilson

I suppose it’s like an instrument. It’s like a guitarist, well, why are you taking the guitar when you could use a keyboard sampler to sample things through. That’s their kind of instrument, that’s what they are comfortable with. I spin these sounds and it’s the way I do it. I have an affinity and a feeling for it. I suppose that if I wanted to, I could use bits of equipment that would do something similar to what I do but it wouldn’t be the same thing, it’d be similar. I also like the idea... when I started DJing, I mean I never used to use a Revox like that back then. I used it more for mixes, for radio mixes then. I didn’t use it in a live sense so much. I did on The Tube and stuff.

When I come back and started again, it was like, “How am I going to do this? Am I going to go off CD? Am I going to go off vinyl?” A lot of my records were stolen in the mid-’80s after I’d stopped DJing, so there was gaps to be filled. Maybe I have them on CD. So I have some stuff on CD, some on vinyl. The third option that appeared was laptop. And in the end I plumbed for that because I wanted to do edits and stuff like that so I thought, “Right. I can put everything together, I can rip my vinyl into there, rip my CDs into there, so everything’s in one place, I can do my edits.” But that was kind of like modern technology, that was like... And at the time, people were still a bit kind of weird about it. They didn’t like DJ playing off laptops and stuff. And I liked the idea of having this antiquated technology against the kind of current stuff. It was that balance. That’s the same in the way I present the music. So, although I’m taking music from the past, via the re-edits and everything, it’s being presented in a contemporary way, so it’s not just...

I didn’t want to fall into a nostalgia trap of had I come back into it and played the music in the same way as I used to play it, I think there would have been an interest to a certain level where people would have maybe checked me out, ticked me off, “I’ve seen him, let’s then move on to the next guy.” But there wouldn’t have been any longevity for me, there wouldn’t have been any shelf-life. Embracing the edits culture, which was second nature, because that’s what I was doing back then, and I was very fortunate that I wasn’t even aware because I was so out of the loop with things in the years before I came back into DJing. I hadn’t even realized that this re-edits thing was starting to emerge. So, walking back into it, it was just like hand in glove for me. That enabled me, as I say, to draw from the past but do it in a way with an eye on the future.

Todd Burns

You’ve took a long break from DJing but now you’ve been back for a while, a little bit. I’m wondering, now that you’ve got a handle on things and you’re back and you’re into it, what are you looking forward to now? Now that you’ve gotten over the shock of whatever the dance music scene looks like and all these things. Now what?

Greg Wilson

A few years ago, I was still thinking of myself as new back into this, and then you come to the realization that you’ve been doing it longer than you did the first time around. It was between ‘75 and ‘83 so it was 8 years. Now I’m 10 years into this. So, the type of nature that I’ve got, it’s got to be for a reason. I can’t just do it to make money or go through the motions. I’d hate it, I’d rebel against it within myself. That’s why one of the reasons why I probably stopped the first time because it was like falling out of love with it. There’s got to be something that underpins that. Now it’s 10 years, it’s a decade. I could quite happily in many respects go and do my DJing where I get very well paid for what I do. In the week, I could put my slippers on and chill out in front of the telly, but that wouldn’t work for me. I’d fall into those bad ways, so I needed another challenge.

When I wasn’t a DJ, I was working in production and management, record labels, those kind of things. I decided that I wanted to make moves back into that direction and as it worked out, somebody that I worked with in the past, a guy called Kermit, who I worked with with a band called The Ruthless Rap Assassins at the back end of the ’80s, early ’90s, and he later went on to have big success with Black Grape with Shaun Ryder from The Happy Mondays, that he had some stuff that he’d done that I was really into and that was the fuse point and I’ve set up a label now called Super Weird Substance, and two dates into a five date mini-tour which is to open the label up. We did Glasgow last night, Manchester last week, and we’re off to Liverpool, Bristol and London before I think, November the 1st, the last gig. In a sense, it’s kind of, it’s a whole mad, chaotic situation of dealing with loads of people. Because not only the band, but you’ve got to deal with the people working around the band, to put all this on. The last few weeks have been, “Why have I done this? Why do I want to kind of take all this on?” But really...

Todd Burns

Why do you want to take it on again?

Greg Wilson

Because I think, to keep fresh in what you’re doing, you have to challenge yourself and there’s unfinished business in that area because when I came to the end of my line with the music business, so to speak, the music business is a hard, cruel business because music’s about emotion. You know, you put your heart and soul into something, and then you go into this machine of the music business, and really they’re interested in pounds, shillings, and pence. They’ll go with the artistic side if it sells, but they don’t mind, they’re selling cans of beans, and if it’s a nice flavor, that’s great, but they don’t care if it’s a bit grotty as long as they can get their money in. So they’re coming from a different perspective than we are.

And the end of it for me, it ended hard. I had a project, we were signed to Polydor, for one reason or another it didn’t work out, and I found myself left with like a load of tracks that I’d worked on, you know, put everything into it for a period of about two or three years, that never saw the light of day. That only my friends, the people around us, ever got to hear. And that hurt more than anything. And so later down the line, that’s why when the digital age kicked in and the internet, and there was the possibility of sharing music and stuff, that I embraced that. I’d rather give it away than be put in that position that you put all that work in and that energy and effort and nobody ever gets to hear it.

At this point in time I think that, as I say, financially for my DJ work, it enables me the opportunity to take a risk with this. Without it being... in the past I’d take risks with everything. I’d risk it all. I’d risk any money I had on on trying... because back then you had to get a studio. It wasn’t a case of open your computer and making a track. If you made a track, you’d have to book a studio, and they weren’t cheap. So it might cost you a thousand pounds to go in and do a couple of tracks. To a certain level, you weren’t even... finished mastering level with it. You were either looking to find finance to do that or you were pretty much doing it yourself. You were just finding money from somewhere. Whereas now it’s different. As I say, I could afford to put a little bit of money aside and say, “Let’s have a go at this.” And that’s where I’m at with it at the minute.

Todd Burns

We were talking earlier backstage about the event, and it seems like obviously you’re DJing at them, but there’s a live band, and then there’s all these other elements. Is that something that’s important to you to have this?

Greg Wilson

Yeah, I like the idea of bringing in different aspects and kind of shaking things up a little bit. And the fact that what we’re doing is we’re starting off with talks, we’re having a guest in and I’m kind of talking and Kermit who’s in Blind Arcade, then it moves into a more kind of an art space thing where we invite different artists to contribute, like drawing influence from what we’re doing. With DJ playing, but not so much in terms of wanting to fill a dancefloor, but just playing good music. Then the band plays. Then it goes into a normal club thing at the end, and I’ll finish it off.

So, it’s a multimedia thing. We call them Super Weird Happenings. The label’s called Super Weird Substance. And the term “happening” is a ’60s term that was basically artistic events with this spontaneity to them. And these things were happening back then, and that’s what I’m trying to kind of touch into. Each one will be different. It finds its own direction. It’s not set in stone. It’s not perfectly rehearsed. It’s something that allows that kind of spontaneity. And they’ve been like mad, this kind of glorious chaos which everyone’s like really enjoyed.

Todd Burns

You said you had a barber last night?

Greg Wilson

Yeah. Last night one of the artists was a barber, that came in and just did these mad kind of extreme haircuts with people, if they kind of wanted to kind of put themselves in his chair, and so, yeah. It’s one of those where you’re looking around and you see things that you wouldn’t normally see in a club environment. Really what I want to do with this is take it into festivals. I think its natural state is within a festival. I want to take an area of a festival, curate the day, program it, so as I say, in the day would start off, say you’d be in the festival, you’d get out of your bed after a late night the night before, but you could come in and listen to some interesting talk, what was going on with people, and then as I say, different artistic things happening like bands playing. And eventually into a full on kind of club vibe. That’s where I see it going and hopefully that’s what I’m going to be doing next year with it. Plus, one stand-alone, one-off events here and there at interesting places.

Todd Burns

Cool. I’d like to open up to questions.

Greg Wilson

Mmhmm.

Todd Burns

See if anyone has anything they’d like to know about Greg or his career. Anyone... have anything?

Greg Wilson

Don’t be shy. (laughs)

Audience Member

(inaudible)

Greg Wilson

I think Balearic really initially was basically in Ibiza, DJs playing pop music, and rock music, rather than black dance music. That was happening in the UK. There were plenty of places that were doing that. But obviously it went under the term Balearic. I think that what was recognized in Ibiza, the island and the setting and everything, was a certain spirit to music that was brought back and that’s where the term derives from, of course. I think Balearic was important because we were quite snobby about pop music as DJs. You know, black music was the real stuff. That was the proper dance music. All this kind of boop-boop, there are obviously great dance records that come from that direction, so I think it had an importance in that respect, in maybe telling us that it didn’t have to be one way or whatever.

Todd Burns

But you certainly wouldn’t identify yourself as one?

Greg Wilson

Well, I mean, interestingly, I think it was Terry Farley, he described me as a Balearic DJ these days. I think I could see what he means, that I’m picking from a wide spectrum of music and a wide history of music, and it can come from anywhere. Whereas I’d say in the past I was a different kind of DJ. That it had to be generally imported out of somewhere like New York, it was by black or Latino artists. You know, you had all these stipulations. I mean, one of the things about when I was a DJ at Legend, you know I always look back and I’m always a bit sad that I never played a track by Yazoo, it was the François Kevorkian mix of “Situation.” And that felt like one step too far at the time.

I mean, because I took so much stick for playing things like Buffalo Gals by Malcolm McLaren, because on the black music side they were like, “Wasn’t he the manager of the Sex Pistols? You’re playing this punk guy.” They just saw you moving kind of away from it. So the idea of playing British pop like Yazoo, but I should have done it, really. And people like Yello, the Swiss band and stuff. I think I actually did play a couple of Yello tracks towards the end of that time. There was a degree of snobbishness, and I think that in Ibiza, with ecstasy, in that environment, it opened it up. And those guys that witnessed that and brought it back, that’s what they experienced and I think it was an important addition and again, it was reminding us that music’s music. And don’t get too kind of tied up in what you think’s like credible and not credible in a sense. Just listen and you hear it.

Todd Burns

Is there any other questions?

Audience Member

(inaudible)

Greg Wilson

Well, I mean, straight away really what it does is it enables it to be brought into a current context. I mean, say for example it might be a ’70s track, ’70s disco track, but it’s got like a real drummer, it’s not in strict time, so from a mixing point of view, it’s not easy to mix for a starter. God knows how those guys in the ’70s mixed a lot of the... it must have been like a couple of beats and the next record played, you know, if you listened back, if you managed to get a window back in on that time. So what this does, it enables you to contemporize a classic track. I think, say for example in the ’90s, you know a lot of older records were... people were using them, but they were just putting straight 4/4 house beat and housing them up.

That’s not what’s happening now. It’s almost like they appreciate that these are great records in their own sense, and there’s nothing wrong with them as such, apart from the fact that they need to mix into them, need to kind of make... maybe they need to add some bottom end that wasn’t about at that time to make them sound right in that environment. And that’s what it does. What I’ve noticed down the years is how the audience has got younger year on year and people come in that connect with this type of music that now we’re getting into like people who are teenagers, who are getting into hearing mixes online and hearing these edits and really getting into them and stuff. You can’t go to somebody who’s young and say, “Listen, you’ve got to kind of... in my day it was all better and this music then...“ You’ll lose them straightaway. You’ve got to meet them and be respectful to where they’re coming from. So if you can present that music to them in a way that fits in with now, i.e. you can mix it in with what you’re doing, and again, it’s contemporary tracks as well, they’ll warm to it. Because really, it’s just great music.

When it boils down to it, it’s just... I also think, I’ve had a few conversations this year about... especially in Ibiza, because there was a feeling in Ibiza when people drive in between gigs and people at the club that are working and stuff, there’s real dissatisfaction with the music there. And I think it’s come from the whole EDM thing, that now, even though I think that Ibiza was part of the problem, it’s gone too far for them, and promoters and stuff are all of a sudden saying, “I don’t even like the music that we’re playing in the clubs anymore.” It’s got to that stage. I was just doing what I did and playing my thing, and they were like as though I was doing something new, although I’ve been doing it ever since I’ve come back.

But it’s the emotion within it. And I think like the vocals, the musicianship, these emotional aspects of the music that ... and I was talking to a DJ from Berlin who put it into terms that music has been technical for too long. Too technical for too long. And we are coming to a more emotional period. Maybe because of the austerity of the times, we’re living in strange times, and I think people need a kind of uplift, and all of a sudden these tracks take on a different context. They allow people to go out, let go of everything that’s going on in the world. Whereas a lot of dance music is very intricate in terms of its own little niche. So people who are into that side of it, appreciate it. They appreciate it on technicalities. On beat structures and stuff. That’s good in its own context, but when it’s all the time, when there’s nothing else happening apart from that, I think it does need something more human introducing.

I blogged about the Daft Punk album when it came out. Because I thought that was a real moment. What they were doing. They were at the point with this EDM thing, hitting a height. They could take their place on the throne and be the kings of EDM, and it was there for them. And instead they rejected it, and they said that music’s lost its direction and what they were looking at doing was bringing back into it musicianship now Rogers, obviously things like that, Pharell Williams, and I think from that, that will influence younger people, younger musicians, to look at music in a slightly different way than maybe people did, certainly dance music, than they did 5 or 10 years ago. I believe that we’re moving more into an emotional aspect at this point in time.

Todd Burns

We’re out of time. But I’m sure Greg will be happy to answer any questions you might have along the way, either after this or tonight at the club. There will be tickets on the door available if you haven’t already got them. Greg will be playing along with Terri Hooley and Noel Watson.

Greg Wilson

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And Ashley Beadle.

Todd Burns

Ashley Beadle as well. So, pretty stellar lineup. Thank you very much for coming today, and enjoy the rest of the weekender.

Greg Wilson

Thank you.