Greg Wilson (2006)

GERD JANSON

Hello, welcome to another lecture. Today, we are talking about UK dance music culture and two things that are always mentioned are, on the one hand, Northern soul, and on the other hand, great peaceful Summer of Love in ‘88. But there’s also a time in between. Mr. Greg Wilson from the Merseyside of Liverpool is a representative of that time. Please give him a very warm welcome.

[applause]

Greg, you’ve been a DJ for, I don’t know, most part of your life in retrospective?

GREG WILSON

Not really in a sense. I was a DJ when I was 15, I started in clubs and that was 1975, and I stopped when I was 23, which was the end of 1983. Then took a twenty-year break and started again end of 2003, and so I’ve been back doing it for a couple of years now.

GERD JANSON

What was it like back in’75? It’s pretty different to what has become like this global phenomenon of DJs traveling the world ...

GREG WILSON

Yeah, I mean, for me UK perspective straight away the major difference of being a DJ back then was the fact that it was microphone-based. You announced records. There was no mixing at all. That was very much like a New York thing and not something that we were really aware of until around about kind of ‘77, ‘78. We started kind of getting more of awareness of New York culture.

We wouldn’t really get full awareness of it till the early ‘80s. The music at the time when I started DJing was … The dominant kind of dance music was soul and funk, that was being played in the club, and also was the start of the disco era. The kind of early disco music, I say early, I mean, obviously you had the kind of Philly sound from about ‘73, ‘74 but things like Donna Summer’s first hit, “Love to Love You Baby,” [which] was January ‘76, that kind of started back in ‘75. Kind of ties a little bit with that kind of period.

At that point in time, disco music wasn’t like a genre as we see it now. Disco music was the music played in clubs and discotheques, which was the soul and funk, generally. That’s how we saw it. Later down the line, it kind of evolved into its own genre, and that’s what a lot of people look back on as disco music.

That was the setting, that’s how it started. When I started out, I started in my home area, which was in a place called New Brighton, which is opposite of Liverpool on the River Mersey. iIt’s just a small town. I was a jobbing DJ, which meant I was playing five, six nights a week, playing kind of whites kind of music. I was always aspired to be a black music specialist. That’s where my heart lay with music.

GERD JANSON

How would you define it? Were you playing Northern soul back in the day?

GREG WILSON

No, no. There’s a kind of misconception that in the ‘70s in the UK in the North of England, it was all Northern soul. Northern soul was a big underground scene, but there was ... For example, in Liverpool, the Northern Soul never took off at all. Liverpool was a much more funk-based city. The kind of music that I was playing was contemporary stuff of the time. For example, on the funk side, you had people like Kool & the Gang, Ohio Players, then James Brown, of course, and then Parliament-Funkadelic. Those kind of bands were coming through. This was more the type of music that was being played in Liverpool at that particular point in time.

GERD JANSON

Could you still describe that Northern Soul phenomenon for people who might not know it?

GREG WILSON

It gets put in this context, Northern soul is the… It was, at the time - this is like in the mid-’70s - it was a retrospective form of black music. It was derivative of Motown. It was like almost all the people that were into Northern soul, they never let go of Motown. They loved that music so much that what they wanted to do is, they wanted to dig deeper and deeper and find rare records with that kind of Motown feel to them.

At the time, Motown was successful in the ‘60s, there were loads of artists in Detroit who were trying to make Motown-sounding records and often the original musicians from those records were moonlighting doing other people’s music and stuff.

I think the Northern soul scene started because… There’s a club in Manchester called the Twisted Wheel, at the back end of the 1960s that, at that point in time, was playing contemporary soul music. Then they started digging a little bit deeper and finding these rare records, and so by the time we got into the ‘70s, a scene had developed which was all about finding old records and rare records, and the main clubs in that scene were places like the Blackpool Mecca, obviously Wigan Casino later down the line, the Torch in Stoke, Catacombs in Wolverhampton. These kinds of places.

A huge underground scene developed around that, but what must be said about that scene, it was a predominantly white audience into retrospective black music, whereas at the same point in time, the black kids in the UK weren’t listening to old -- as they would have seen it -- old music. Why would they want to listen to ‘60s kind of, old ‘60s tracks when there was all this great contemporary black music?

Obviously, the ‘70s, like Curtis Mayfield, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder doing his greatest work, all the funk bands, the stars of disco. It wasn’t a scene that black people were involved in. They were more into the kind of funk that was going on at the time.

From where I actually lived, it didn’t affect things so much. Of course, certain tracks came through and were played, but it wasn’t certainly the dominant force. I mean, should I play something to give an idea of a Northern soul track?

GERD JANSON

Yes.

GREG WILSON

This is quite an obvious one to play for you, because later it was a big hit, that everyone should know by Soft Cell, called “Tainted Love.” This is the original version, by Gloria Jones.

(music: Gloria Jones – “Tainted Love”)

GREG WILSON

You wouldn't get stuff like that played on a Northern soul night. Although, at the time, I was by no means a specialist. I was playing a lot of what would be seen as more commercial music at the time.

GERD JANSON

You had to make it now?

GREG WILSON

I was just starting out, but this kind of stuff was played in. There was never chart hit. There was a club I went to when I was 16 called the Timepiece in Liverpool, and it was a real education for me. I've heard about the club beforehand and there was a legend about the DJ, a guy called Les Spaine, he was a guy from Liverpool, but he been born in Sierra Leone. He lived in an area called Toxteth.

Toxteth in Liverpool was the black area in Liverpool. It was a quite segregated city and a quite racist city in many respects as well, but this night was like ... This club was in the city center called the TimePiece, and it was a predominantly black audience, I was taken down there by some old DJs that I got to know. Well, I lived in New Brighton where there were a very few black people at all, so going into that environment on a personal level, I was walking in there thinking, "Am I all right in here? Am I'm going to be okay?" But the music instantly made me feel at home, and I was introduced Les, who was the DJ there. He was playing what we call upfront black American music, imported music, stuff that wasn't released in the UK that they were buying an import.

At the time, there weren't 12-inch single so most of the stuff was played in seven-inch or sometimes album tracks. What was happening in there, what I could see the first time, it was everything I wanted musically. The dancing as well, it was on a different level. People were there seriously into [it]. It was almost, at that second in time, I kind of saw the light. This is where I wanted to be headed. This is ... I mean, I spoke to every DJ. There was like all sorts of DJ's around the DJ box asking Les what he was playing and making notes and all sorts of things going on. Everyone was probably on that tip.

GERD JANSON

He didn't cover up his labels?

GREG WILSON

No, no. He was very open about it. His attitude was, "It doesn't matter if you know what I'm playing because next week I'll have something different again to play for you." He had that confidence in his ability. He was a wonderful DJ. He went on to work for Motown, I mean, when Motown opened up in the UK, he went on to work there. He still works in the music business today.

Identifying that, I was very fortunate that later down the line. It took me another five or six years. I ended up in Manchester with a similar audience and a similar vibe to what I saw that night at the TimePiece. I obviously have to go back into what I was doing at the time, which is trying to work towards a situation of building a crowd and working more of this type of music that I was into into what I was playing.

First and foremost, at that particular point in time, I saw myself as a professional DJ. I did it for living, and this was at a point where, if somebody said to me, like an adult said, "What you do for a job?" Like, they used to say in those days, and I said, "I'm a DJ." But what you do for a proper job?" That was the way it was. When I started off, I earned six pounds a night in the clubs. That's what you got paid.

GERD JANSON

That's not too much.

GREG WILSON

I know, and I was happy with it, I was earning good money for somebody of my age, by putting the hours in and doing five and six nights. Eventually, I took over a club called The Golden Guinea in New Brighton, and it was a very commercially-based club, but bit by bit, I worked with the people that were there and started playing some imports myself and the whole disco thing was evolving at the same time. Pretty soon, I managed to evolve what might be called a scene.

GERD JANSON

That was due to the fact that you played there almost every night, then? You could educate ...

GREG WILSON

Yeah. Well, I don't like the term "educate." I find that a very high term to use because music is such a subjective thing. What it is, I think you bring in your personality in terms of music into play. By saying you're educating people, it's somehow presuming that you're somehow better or at a higher level, whereas I always like to say that you're working at the level with the audience, you need them as much as they need your music. Without them, nothing is going to happen.

Often, soul DJs play it above the heads of an audience thinking that they're being really clever by playing all these new tunes, but missing the target completely with it. It's far better to… Even now, I mean, for example, I'm playing at the weekend in Revolver, and I've never been to Australia before, so I won't... I've got an idea of what I want to play and I'm covered from quite a few bases, but I can't let anything down until I'm actually in the venue, looking at the audience that's there and then getting a feel from that. That's almost the kind of, an old way that dates back.

I started off even before I came into the club. I did mobile discos. They were weddings and 21sts. They were working with kids to grandparents and trying to balance the audience. The rules that you learn within that were exactly the same as when, later down the line, I went to Legend in Manchester and I worked with a predominantly black audience who totally knew the music. Was a totally upfront audience.

The same rules apply. You look at your audience and you cut your cloth accordingly to who is there. You've got to kind of work with the people that you're with. Everyone you look on their own situation, you're going into that environment and you've got to weigh that up and play accordingly to that. From that level, when I went to the Golden Guinea club, I had a period of time where I could slowly, bit by bit, kind of impose my personality into the night, and eventually get into a situation where the nights I was doing there were regarded throughout the Merseyside area as some of the best nights to hear black music, which was the great thing for me.

The major thing was when... The main magazine that reported on black music throughout the UK was called Blues And Soul. It was like the DJs bible at the time. It was a great moment for me when they eventually came to my little small town club, and did a piece about it and recommended it as a club to go to. That was working on that local level. I loved working there. I knew all the people. It was my hometown. I was there 'til 1980.

In the meantime, I'd been to Europe. I tried ... There was a lot of English DJs at the time going out to Europe and working the ... I went to Scandinavia. I went to Denmark and Norway.

GERD JANSON

Why was this?

GREG WILSON

Again, it was like ... A lot ... [inaudible] were using the microphone as well. It was seeing that the English language was the language to use for DJing.

What was quite funny that I remember was that you couldn't get a work permit to work in Sweden. English DJs, apart from working illegally, couldn't go out to Sweden. Swedish DJs would announce the record in English on the microphone. If there was a kind of announcement to say there was a taxi outside, they'd do that in Swedish. The record announcements would always be in English. It was seen that way.

Again, that kind of mixing culture ... This is '78 ... was just starting to make inroads. Some places in Europe, it took off earlier. This microphone side of things wasn't as prominent in most places ... For example, Germany. There was a lot of English DJs working out there and working that scene.

With regards to mixing, it's quite funny how that all worked out. When we first heard about it, right, and realized this is what they're doing over in New York. They're mixing two records together. We knew how to do it, but we didn't have the equipment to do it. We didn't have various speed turntables. To get two records running at the same time was a trial and error, really. Very rare. Maybe get them running through a bar, then ... It didn't really take off initially.

A lot of DJs tried it. It was a flavor of the month. Then everybody just went back to talking on the mic as they'd always done. It was just seen as a fad. It wasn't going to catch on. This was an American thing.

GERD JANSON

Had you been to New York during that time? No.

GREG WILSON

No, I didn't go to New York. Last year was my first time.

GERD JANSON

That's pretty surprising for someone who ...

GREG WILSON

... with the influence, it's hard down [inaudible]. I was like everybody else. I tried mixing ... We used to always do things like play three in a row, for example -- just run three records one after the other. We'd do that with things like Motown spots. Most DJs in your mainstream clubs would do a Motown spot. They wouldn't talk between each of them. They'd play a few tracks together.

It wasn't really mixing as such. The first time I ever run two records over the top of each other was two Motown records. They were both Jackson 5, "ABC" and "I Want You Back." It was like, at the start of "ABC," there was this section that was similar to this section in "I Want You Back." I used to run them. I wasn't thinking of it as mixing it all.

I think later down the line as well, you’d have the Thelma Houston and Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes version of "Don't Leave Me this Way." I'd somehow switch between them. Probably, if I went back in a time machine and listened, it would sound awful. It seemed like it was flowing at the time.

GERD JANSON

Back then it was all right?

GREG WILSON

The mixing thing never caught on at that point in time. It wasn't until later down the line that I was at Wigan Pier and Legend had the right equipment to work with that it all started to make sense. From a personal level, that's when I placed the emphasis on that. Still, from a UK perspective, the majority of the DJs were not mixing until the backend of the '80s until the house era started.

GERD JANSON

Wow. What kind of stuff were you playing at Wigan Pier, then?

GREG WILSON

What happened was that I went to Europe for a couple of months, as I said, in 1978. I was 18 at the time. Got very homesick. Didn't work out the way that I thought it would. I came back. Went straight back to what I was doing before, the clubs that I was at and everything.

Then, a couple more years passed. I actually thought ... I was working at this club, The Golden Guinea. There was a DJ who worked upstairs. He played more pop stuff and everything, which was good from my point of view. If somebody came and asked me for a record that I didn't want to be playing, I could say, "Go upstairs. He'll play it for you."

I think he was at that point in his 30s. He'd been at this club for about ten years. It's like I almost saw myself and thought, "I don't want to be like that. I don't want to be in the same place in ten years time." I felt I needed to change something. I decided to try Europe again. I went to Denmark. Then, I went to Germany. The club I worked at in Germany was the first club I ever worked in that had SL 1200s. Then, there was another club in a nearby town called ... city called Essen, a club called Librium. It was a small, compact club with a really great lighting system.

The DJ there was just constantly mixing. It made a big impression on me. It's the first time that I'd seen ... It was the first DJ in England to really mix was a guy called Greg James, an American who knew some of the people from New York. He'd come over the UK. I'd seen him at a club called The Embassy in London. It hadn't made the same impression as this guy in Essen.

GERD JANSON

Do you remember his name?

GREG WILSON

I don't know. I've got a feeling it could be Peter Roma, but I don't know for certain. I did a bit of detective work on it. He was obviously one of the early German mixing DJs. He came to England as well at some point. I know that he was around... He actually worked in that club at certain points in time around that period. I'm not... I couldn't be 100% sure.

It just crystallized the idea in me that the right situation at the right point in time, this was a direction I could see myself taking. While I was... I'd originally gone to Denmark, and I crashed my car while I was over there. I come back to the UK to change my car, and while I was there, there was a guy that I'd met in Norway - the way karma goes - when I got homesick who is now working at a club called the Wigan Pier.

I went to see him at this club. This club was absolutely phenomenal first time. It was first club in the UK that had a laser system. The DJ box was in this 15-foot fiberglass frog. They had a light controller at the front of the mouth of the frog looking out of the DJ [inaudible] to the side. There was a monitor system inside. All this was totally new. We'd never seen the likes in the UK. Normally, the equipment the DJs was using was an afterthought of the club owners'. How the bar looked was more important than how the sound of it was in most clubs.

This club was absolutely geared towards the DJ. It was an American style. Disco actually advertised itself as an American-style disco. It was influenced by what was obviously going on in New York and everything at the time. I just thought this was a wonderful club.

They were opening a new club in Manchester called Legend. Nicky, who was the DJ there, was going to be opening Legend. There was going to be a vacancy at Wigan Pier. I ended up speaking to the club owner. He said, "Why don't you audition?" Everyone wanted the job at this place. I had to go out to Germany. I didn't want to take the risk of not going to Germany for this audition. I couldn't do it.

I said to him, "Could I send you a tape or something?" When I went out to Germany, I managed to make myself a tape and sent it over. Nicky probably pushed to hear it. While I was there, they got in touch with me. They offered me the job. I was absolutely blown away. I actually wept, I remember. I couldn't believe that this club... It was just a dream club. I was going back. I didn't really want to be away. I wanted to be in the UK, and now I had this fantastic club. I went back as the four nights a week resident.

One of those nights, the Tuesday night, was, at the time, it was like it was the special spot music night, which was the jazz-funk night. It was the jazz-funk scene at that particular point in time. The other three nights were more a mixture of the bigger tracks that were played on the jazz-funk night. Also a lot, a lot of the futuristic type stuff that was coming through at the time, for example, like Human League, Spandau Ballet, all that kind of early stuff.

GERD JANSON

New Romantics?

GREG WILSON

Yeah. The New Romantic thing was happening. Also, at the weekend, you'd play the more commercial side of black music that you wouldn't play on the Tuesday night. For example, things like Shalamar and Micheal Jackson. They wouldn't be played on the more specialist, upfront nights. They were seen as the more pop side of black music.

GERD JANSON

Do you have an example of the Tuesday night selection?

GREG WILSON

Yeah. The jazz-funk night was ... Although it was jazz-funk, it was also the big disco tracks at the time, the big funk tracks, the big soul tracks. There was two sides to it. A typical jazz-funk track, right. This would work. Donald Byrd.

(music: Donald Byrd – “Dominoes (Fallin’ Like)”)

Typical jazz-funk vibe, Donald Byrd coming from a jazz background but incorporating funk into the style of the music. On the other side of that, there was more of what later was called fusion stuff that was a lot like the American stuff and things. This was a huge track, Chick Corea, "Central Park."

(music: Chick Corea – “Central Park”)

GREG WILSON

The variance in the stuff that was played tonight, the type of stuff like Chick Corea track, I mean, what became a major part of the scene was called jazz fusion crew.

GERD JANSON

And dancing was very important?

GREG WILSON

They were mainly black kids. Well, they were all black kids pretty much, and incredible dancing. When I first kind of saw it, I couldn't understand properly why... someone like, say Wigan Pier… Just to give you an example, it became more of a black audience as time went on. When I first went there, I'd say it was predominantly white kids that were there, with a black presence, later down the line it was predominantly black kids with a white presence there, and there is no black people living in Wigan, and this was a Tuesday night. People would be traveling from Birmingham and Manchester, Sheffield, even as far as London, Holisfield, and there were crews of dancers within this as well who'd challenge each other.

GERD JANSON

So it preceded that whole breakdance culture?

GREG WILSON

Yes. Yeah. And in fact, a lot of the original break dancers in the UK came from jazz fusion crews, so once the breakdancing came through, the first kind of people off the mark in many cases were the guys who were dancing to jazz fusion.

GERD JANSON

And were you a dancer yourself or did you just sort of supply the music?

GREG WILSON

No, not a dancer at all. Just supplied the music. But watching it, eventually, you start to understand the intricacies of what was going on with the dancing, and it was a serious, serious business with these challenges that were going on and everything, and so it was a very vibrant, intense scene. Initially, as I said, it was at Wigan Pier, and in that early period that was jazz-funk dominated, knowing then, that it was mainly the kind of style of music that we're talking about there.

Then, because of the success of the Tuesday night that was doing really well with the Tuesday nights, the Legend in Manchester had their own jazz-funk night on a Wednesday, which had been going OK, but then the DJ that they had there had left to take over a rival night, and it basically kind of wiped it out. I think the first night I worked there was like 70 people, whereas the club held about 500. So it was looking a bit drab. When I went in there, there was a big difference to Wigan Pier, which was that [out of] those 70 people, probably 69 of them were black. Here was an audience that wasn't really interested in a DJ on the microphone...

GERD JANSON

…making announcements.

GREG WILSON

...the verbals of it. It's very much music-based. I just knew at that point in time. I made the decision, "This is where I put the emphasis on the mixing." Although I still used the microphone, I didn't completely put it aside.

GERD JANSON

What kind of announcement?

GREG WILSON

For example, one of the main things about the scene was the all-dayers, which happened on a Sunday or a bank holiday Monday where all the big DJs from different areas came together on one bill and played. Their crowds came in. You'd have all these people coming in from different areas. The all-dayers would run from maybe 2 o'clock in the afternoon 'til midnight and stuff like that.

You knew that you were making it as a DJ when you were booked to appear on the all-dayers. Once I'd been at Wigan Pier for about six months, a couple of the promoters asked me to go on the all-dayers. Originally, I was down the bill. Bit by bit, I came up the bill. It was one of those that... By the time that I was at Legend, that's where you'd use the microphone to tell people there's going to be old heir in Birmingham next month and there's going to be a coach leaving from such-and-such a place and what's going on. One of the things that I did do as well...I was a great believer. You kind of touched on it before with what I said about Les Bain, that he covered the records up. I was always a great believer in sharing the information about the record that you have, which I felt was important to move everything forward. If people knew...

GERD JANSON

What do you play?

GREG WILSON

Yep. Then you can push the whole thing forward. When I decided that the mixing was going to take center stage, it caused a bit of a dilemma. It's like, how are the people going to know what I'm playing? What I did was I did an information sheet. Every week, it was done. It was called “What's Going On?” It had a flow fillers chart, which were the biggest records. It had a new releases chart. It had an information section saying what all-dayers is, what things were happening.

GERD JANSON

Almost like a fanzine?

GREG WILSON

It was just one sheet of paper and everything was handwritten. I had a kind of template for it and just wrote out each week. Had it photocopied a thousand times or whatever. It was given out to Wigan Pier and Legend and any other kind of specialist black music nights that I did as well later down the line.

How it worked eventually would be, people would literally, all they’d need to do is, as it was playing they'd come up and they'd hand me the thing. I'd know what they wanted. They wanted to know what record was on. I'll take the record. They take that, they go into Spinning, which was the record shopping in Manchester. They go on that record and it was done and that was how it worked. I managed to kind of solve that dilemma. From the ...

GERD JANSON

Do you still do that?

GREG WILSON

Pardon?

GERD JANSON

Do you still do that?

GREG WILSON

No. I should do it actually. Later down the line, I was asked to design a DJ booth and one of the things that I had in... I always thought this happened clubs and it never happened was … You know one of that kind of LED readout screens where information goes along? That was part of it. I thought that you type in what you were playing and then people would see what was being played. That never came about.

It was important, I felt, that this information was shared. That was how I felt. I know some people like to keep everything to themselves and keep things exclusive. Not my way. I can't really see the point of that because the music doesn't belong to you. You share it. You're a channel. You're kind of giving this music out.

GERD JANSON

It was always pretty big part of DJ culture, right? To be very secretive about what you play to distinguish yourself from the average?

GREG WILSON

Nope. The Northern soul scene was very much like that.

GERD JANSON

It's still like that?

GREG WILSON

Yeah. Northern soul, what they were doing there was they were actually getting records, finding a rare record, covering up the label and calling it something else. Giving it a completely different title and artist to what it was. Other DJs were getting called out because they were putting them in their charts, and it didn't exist. That happened quite a lot.

GERD JANSON

That's mean.

GREG WILSON

It wasn't so much the same on the scene that we were involved in at all. It was always... It was a real love of the music and it was a real love of moving this music forward and sharing this music. There was a kind of connection with it in that sense. We wanted more people to get into it. We wanted it to be successful.

Making this decision to place the emphasis on mixing, being at this club, bit by bit over the next six months, we picked up. More and more people came, more and more people. Then, fate kind of takes over and a kind of music starts to come through that is suited towards this mix. It's towards mixing. This was the more kind of electro-based stuff that was coming through.

GERD JANSON

How would you define electro-funk?

GREG WILSON

A lot of the stuff that was being played, say, in 1981, people have now referred to as boogie. We didn't call it that. We called it disco-funk. It was still a disco vibe but it was the funk edge of it. Boogie was a term that derived later down the line in London. They had a bit like the Northern soul scene. Their red roofs in boogie scene was like they were playing retrospective music. That's where that kind of turned, but it's the same music. We were playing the same music. It's just that we weren't calling it that at the time.

What was defined as electro-funk was that these new tracks started to kind of emerge that were utilizing the technology. It was like underground black music predominantly from New York utilizing the technology, be it drum machines and sends later samples and stuff like that.

GERD JANSON

They were also designed towards DJing, right? Like having intros, outros you could mix and more than like Donald Byrd samples?

GREG WILSON

Not in a similar way to what house would be later where it would be straight kick drum to let the DJ mix in. It wasn't designed in that way but because it was drum machine based, a lot of the stuff, it was more suited for mixing as opposed to what was before that which was like, obviously, life musicians. You were mixing to a live drummer and that's got more scope of kind of moving out of time, obviously.

One of the early tracks and funnily, now, people would kind of describe this as a disco track -- as a disco classic, in fact. When this first came out, it sounded different. It was a new sound and it's D Train, "You're The One For Me." Again, with a lot of the stuff that we played, certainly a lot of the stuff I played, I generally went for the instrumental or dub mix. That was another thing of this time was that with regards to the remix and there was much more of an experimentation going on. There was a drawing from this kind of Jamaican influence from the '70s that was now coming into New York dance music.

"You're The One For Me,” straight away with this it's the kind of sound at the beginning, which was different.

(music: D Train – “You’re The One for Me”)

That was on West End. The labels that were emerging is like the big labels with this new sound, with things like Prelude, which D Train was on. West End. "Emergency," this Italian record. We didn't know it was Italian at the time, but another one.

(music: Electra – “Feels Good”)

GREG WILSON

Of course. It was a revelation. Born of pure open-mindedness. Afrika Bambaataa from the Bronx had the vision to be open minded enough to listen to other sides of music.

GERD JANSON

Kraftwerk.

GREG WILSON

Got into Kraftwerk. Started playing it so that kids who wouldn't previously have seen that as their style of music were listening to it and listening to other things like that kind of derivative of that kind of whole electro sound. A lot of the British New Romantic stuff was being played within the Bronx as well. Came with a new sound completely that revolutionized everything using TR-808 and completely electro sound Arthur Baker production. Revolution re-tracked straight out of space. Dance music would change completely as a result of that track. It was a total hybrid for what was to come later.

GERD JANSON

A lot of your peers weren't into that when it came on?

GREG WILSON

It was like, they thought, "What are you playing that shit for? You know that is not black music. Why are you playing it? You're ruining the scene, you're polluting the scene by playing this music." For me at the time, I would have been 22, I just kind of arrived on the scene. I was doing really well. I had these two great clubs, Wigan Pier and Legend. It was going well for me. The crowds were coming in. My ego wanted a pat on the back and “aren't you doing well?”

All of a sudden, the people that I respected and my peers on the scene were totally critical of this direction I was taking. They thought it was a one-minute wonder. It would be here and gone and I'd look stupid for having played this. I know that when I... The record shop I bought it from. One of the biggest critics was the guy who sold me the record in Spinning, the manager of the shop.

I know that they would have looked at me and probably laughed at me walking out the shop with that. Like, "Look we got rid of it." At first, I was really on the defensive about this. It was like, I was into it. What's most important was that the kids who came to the club were into it. That was the main thing. These people were saying, as I say, that it's not black music. Then, it kind of occurred to me properly what was going on here. The people that were saying it wasn't black music were generally white people who were in their 30s who seemed middle-aged to me at the time.

It was like, “Who are you to say what black is? Ask the black kids what black music is. That's what black music is, what they're into.” Not only is this black music, it's the cutting edge. This is where it's at. They thought this was the music that was going to kill the scene. Whereas, really it was the music that was going to revive the scene because a lot of the stuff that they were kind of into at the time, they were kind of hanging on to the whole soul thing. I remember, they're into an artist like Luther Vandross and Alexander O'Neil. They held the pie on the pedestal. Great singers, great production, but everything was too perfect. There was blandness about it that... I love soul music. It's my first love, but it wasn't Otis Redding tearing it up. Everything was beautifully put together and it was too perfect whereas this was raw. This, to me, had more in common with those great early soul records than what was the contemporary soul at the time.

It changed things in me. It almost put me on the offensive about it. I've become proactive about ... I went for this. It was a rocky road for a period of time. I took a lot of criticism. I was seen as like the heretic for doing this. Eventually...

GERD JANSON

You were proved right?

GREG WILSON

Proved right by the virtue of the fact that this is the direction that people go on the scene. I found myself in a position whereby my clubs, which were Wigan Pier on Tuesday and Legend on Wednesday, got voted first and second by Blues & Soul readers in the North's best club category. I got the top DJ award, so it was a clean sweep. All of a sudden, I was in a position of power on the saying, you know, what was happening in my clubs was dictating the whole scene within the north and midlands, you know, within that sector ...

GERD JANSON

And you like that, to be in that position?

GREG WILSON

Well, of course you do, but I mean... It was like... You find yourself in these positions. You don't particularly set off to... You couldn't. It was like a combination of factors worked out in my favor. I was very fortunate. I was in the right clubs. I'd made the right decision to move toward mixing. I was doing something none of the other DJs were doing. I mean they didn't have the equipment even to do that. So, even if they had the music that I had, they couldn't compete against the whole idea of mixing.

At the same time as this, I'd been asked to go on the radio. I was doing Piccadilly Radio in Manchester, which was the biggest commercial station outside of London at the time, so it was like a big station. I was putting these mixes together for them. It was a new idea. This was bringing what I was doing to like a wider audience again and bringing more people into it.

GERD JANSON

Radio was still very powerful, right, in these days?

GREG WILSON

Very powerful. I mean, that was the ambition of a DJ back then. There was no superstar DJs and traveling the world. The ambition for most DJs, if you'd made it, you'd got on the radio, and that's how it was seen, you know. So these mixes that I would do were the first of the type in the UK and so it was all new, you know, and then I was asked to demonstrate mixing on a TV program called The Tube in 1983 and that was the first time that I had been shown like on the TV.

GERD JANSON

Do you remember...

GREG WILSON

At the same time as all this as well, this music's coming through. So it was a combination of factors that conspired to allow me to be in this position. But I was... Don't get me wrong, I was always completely respectful to the position that I was in and I always knew that it was like by the grace of the audience that I worked with that I was in, and I felt amazing being this young white guy from New Brighton that had grown up with a love of black music that all of a sudden was in this club with a really on-the-ball hardcore black audience who knew their stuff and, you know, they accepted what I was playing, and...

GERD JANSON

Skin color was never a topic for them with you?

GREG WILSON

Skin color wasn't a topic with regards from black people to white, it was the other way around, and we were still in very racist times, and... You know, to put things into historical perspective, the year before all this happened was like 1981 when there were race riots right throughout the UK in places like Brixton, Toxteth, and Liverpool, Moss Side in Manchester, Handsworth in Birmingham, St. Pauls in Bristol, you know.

The generation of kids that were coming to these nights, their parents' generation had tried to tow the line, fit into what was going on, and they'd just been abused for that. But this generation of kids were different. They were like, "We're here, we're staying here. You better get used to it." Their attitude was different and it was more confrontational. They weren't going to take that shit anymore and quite rightly so. That was like that whole generation.

They were really given a bad time. There were police laws at the time that allowed them to just stop people on the street for no reason and search them and these laws were being used against young blacks and the thing with black culture at the time, a lot of young black people smoked marijuana. They didn't drink so much, there wasn't a drinks culture there, and so it was very easy to pick them up. They were getting drugs records, you know, for just having a little tiny bit on them and there was a lot of things that were wrong during that period of time and a lot of things that people had to put up with. And that made it ... These nights, for some people, that was the crux of everything for them. That was the time where they could forget what was happening in the whole day-to-day and they were there and the dancing and the music was important.

GERD JANSON

They lived for nightclubbing?

GREG WILSON

Yes, I mean, in a sense. In a sense, it was a hugely important thing, and the atmosphere in a club like Legend, it was intense, it was serious, it was amazing. I'll never experience that again because the social conditions were different and everything. The time is different.

GERD JANSON

So you would argue that dance music also has a political edge?

GREG WILSON

Of course. I mean, all types of music. It rises above that as well, but of course, any kind of era of music is definitely involved with ...

GERD JANSON

Because usually it's always described as a bit of a blunt thing, you know, just dance music being a bit stupid in general.

GREG WILSON

Well, I mean, even back then, with the success that I had at Legend and Wigan Pier, a new club had opened in Manchester in May of 1982 called the Haçienda, and it had opened and it wasn't doing very well. Its audience was mainly white students who were into indie and alternative music. They had a decent Saturday night, but the rest of the time, they were really struggling, and the club wouldn't have survived but for the fact that New Order, the band New Order, were directors of the club and they were plowing money into it.

They had a vision, though. The people from the Hacienda had been over to New York and they'd seen places like Paradise Garage, but even more importantly a club called Danceteria, which was kind of mixing the black side of ...

GERD JANSON

Which was Arthur Baker's club, right?

GREG WILSON

No, no, no. Danceteria was, I don't know whose club it was.

GERD JANSON

Ah, John "Jellybean." Maybe? Benitez.

GREG WILSON

No, you're thinking of the Fun House.

GERD JANSON

Oh, OK.

GREG WILSON

The DJ at Danceteria was a guy called Mark Kamins, who worked with Madonna early on. I think Madonna did her first ever gig there, supporting a Manchester band called A Certain Ratio. So, this Manchester connection with New York was there like, with the Haçienda mates seeing this, and I think they wanted to bring a bit of New York to Manchester, and they liked the idea of that kind of thing and they realized what was happening down the road with the black scene and they asked me to go across and work on the dance night there, which was... We launched on a Friday night.

It was a struggle, to be honest, because the crowd that came to Legend, the black kids... I think, for a start, it was a membership club. You had to pay a membership to get in in the first place, which was a lot of money, and the kids that came to Legend didn't have money. A lot of the time people say, "What drugs were used on the scene?" People have a smoke, but you couldn't really do that within a club environment because it could be smelled, so, you know, people didn't want to get like thrown out of there because then they couldn't get back in, so they did have to do it kind of either craftily in a corner somewhere or... So there wasn't like a major kind of drugs thing to it. Certainly not alcohol. People weren't drinking alcohol at all. A lot of the time, kids only have enough money to kind of pay their admission in and then they'd drink tap water. They'd get a glass and they'd fill it with tap water. The drug was like the music and the dancing. That was... So, something like the Haçienda was like set up in a totally different way. To even, before you got in the club, you had to pay a 10-pound membership or whatever it was...

GERD JANSON

Like the New York thing, or...

GREG WILSON

Yeah, well, it was just Manchester licensing laws at the time. Legend had found a way of getting around it, but they, for some reason, hadn't, and also, their regular audience just didn't like dance music, and that's what we were saying about dance. They looked at dance music as an inferior style. They thought bands and you know, this was proper music and this dance stuff was somehow lower in some respect and so it was a real struggle to get anything going at the Haçienda.

We had some good nights, but they were kind of one-off nights and then they'd ... I'd be doing the Fridays and they'd have a band booked in for the next Friday, so we'd have to miss a week and then kind of start again, so it never really took off in the way that we wanted it to, but a lot of seeds were planted during that period of time, and one of the main things that happened was that in the summer of '83, the whole kind of breakdance culture burst out of the black scene. It had first come through with Malcolm McLaren's “Buffalo Gals” video, which was like first shown on British TV.

It's the back end of, sorry at the beginning of 1983, although, actually, I had a promo copy of the video that I played like back end of '82 and by this point, I'd now stopped doing the four-nights-a-week residency at Wigan Pier and I was completely a black music specialist, and I was now working… Also, I did a night in Huddersfield, because we used to have a strong contingent come down from Huddersfield to the night, so I went and did a night there. It was in this kind of run-down, ramshackle place called the Stars Bar, which was completely different to Wigan Pier and Legend, which were real state-of-the-art kind of clubs, but they had a video screen there, and I took the video to “Buffalo Gals,” and I remember getting it through. I got sent it by the record company and I looked at this video and the first thing that struck me, I mean, we now know those four elements to hip-hop, but at that time, rap was the only one that we'd heard, you know, from our side. The other three were in there, which were graffiti, scratching, and of course, breakdancing.

The funny thing was that the scratching, it was like World's Famous Supreme Team on the video, and they were scratching. It was a 7-inch single! And we'd heard the sound on records. I remember thinking at the time, “Does it have to be a 7-inch?” because he was using one of these 7-inch singles. But the breakdancing did it. This guy spun on his head and it was bizarre. It was like, it wouldn't have been more bizarre if a Martian would have walked in and announced himself.

The first time ever seeing that, I took this to the club and this was like, you know, clubs in the UK that stayed open until 2 o’clock, and at 1 o'clock, I thought, “I'm going to play this video to the crowd in Huddersfield.” Again, it was like a predominately black audience, very hardcore crowd, you know, very raucous, rowdy crowd and everything. And I put this video on at 1 o’clock and I understood at that point in time the meaning of the term 'culture shock' because it was an absolute culture shock with the crowd. What they were watching, they couldn't properly take it in, and straight after I played it, they wanted it on again. And it was almost like, I kind of became, you know, I picked up actually the microphone and I kind of became like a… "Well, could you sit down on the dance floor and let the people at the back watch as well?" And everyone like sat down and watched this video. For the last hour of the night, I just played this video.

There was no point in going back to a normal night, because what people had seen had just like changed everything, you know? They left at the end of the night and, I mean, it was shown on TV the following month and then there were bits and bobs showing throughout. It wasn't like the next week everyone was breakdancing. It was a much slower process. People were at home practicing. They were in the kitchens, on the lino. Bit by bit, they were getting the moves together. It didn't come out until the following summer and the first people...

GERD JANSON

It takes some time to spin on your head.

GREG WILSON

Speaking to some of the guys who did it, they were saying, one of the guys was telling me, their elbows were just bleeding with trying to get this move and banging themselves and banging themselves but kept going, kept going until they eventually got these moves together. It got to the kind of early summer, and first it was a crew from Huddersfield. It was at Wigan Pier, and they were the first ones to kind of show it in the club and at the very moment they showed it, this Manchester crew came in as well and they'd been doing it and it started and then there was a crew called Broken Glass in Manchester that took to the streets. I got kind of heavily involved with then and ended up in a managerial kind of role for them. They eventually did a lot of TV. They were like, one of the guys was the first guys who was photographed for a national publication spinning on his head in the streets in Manchester happens to be a guy called Kermit, who became one of, still is, one of my great friends. Kermit was a jazz fusion dancer. He'd started off in the jazz fusion crews. He was one of the early breakdancers. Later down the line, he would move on to become a rapper with a group called Roofless Rap Assassins that I managed and further down the line again, he took up with Shaun Ryder from the Happy Mondays, and he'd be in a band called Black Grape who had like a No. 1 album, so Kermit comes from back in that time. Other people that come from the scene like A Guy Called Gerald. He was one of the kids that used to come along to Legend when he was 15. He used to put this big trench coat on and manage to look older than he was and get in there.

He started off as a hip-hop DJ, dancing and everything. It was this kind of... A lot of people came through from this whole scene that's this early kind of hip-hop thing that came out like the breakdance and the Buffalo Girls. It was fantastic. I just fell in love with the whole thing. It was just so visual to watch and especially when it was out on the street.

One of the first things I did with Broken Glass was I arranged this tour. I call it Street Tour, and all it was was going to local shopping centers throughout the north of England, often where there were no black people. There's a crew of 15 black lads because there were two white guys in Broken Glass and there were about 16 black kids. It was very much a black thing, and it was the same in London at Covent Garden where it all started down there. The original kind of b-boys, like in Britain, were obviously predominately black kids that came from the scene.

Going into an area where there was no black people at all, I was very worthy and white myself of the kind of dynamics of what was going on, very aware that, like the local lads, they saw a group of black kids, it looked like a gang coming into their area, that it was a recipe for trouble. And it would have been if it would've been twelve months earlier, but all of sudden these kids rolled out this line-o and they got out this ghetto blaster. They put on this music and it was amazing! It must've done so much for race relations because all of a sudden, these young white kids you probably have never even spoken to a black person before were coming over and saying, "What is this and what's this music and this dancing?" There was this dialogue that was going on and by the next summer, which was the summer of '84, there were breakdancers all over the country everywhere. There was ... Obviously, it had come into white culture, even into areas where there was no black culture and it really permeated that and you could see how the influence of it was going to spread out from there.

Now, in the UK, hip-hop culture is everywhere you look. Black culture is everywhere. We don't notice it anymore. The way people dress, the way people talk. It's just right across the board, but at this particular point in time, it was like seeing it happening at its very root, and it was a great time to actually be out there on the street and see them dance. The joy that it brought, seeing the old people watching this and just being blown away by the whole thing. So, this is what happened with the Haçienda. On a Saturday night, which was their only half decent night at the time...

GERD JANSON

The indie night?

GREG WILSON

Pardon?

GERD JANSON

The indie night?

GREG WILSON

Well, it was, yeah. It was a mishmash mash of these. The DJ was there played everything from rockabilly to dance music to pop to ... It was everything was kind of in there. To try to get people into the idea of what I was doing on the Friday, they got me in to do an hour on the Saturday, so I was playing mainly electro-funk type stuff, the type of stuff that I would play at Legend. As I say, the normal audience wasn't too into this kind of stuff.

Broken Glass had come and danced on the stage as I was playing, and so even though the people weren't into the music so much, the visual aspect of this, and everyone looked great dancing when it first kind of started because it just looked so fantastic, and it was the freshest thing about. So they became kind of celebrities at the Haçienda. They almost became the Haçienda's resident dance crew. I think their presence there gave the club for the first time a credibility, a street credibility, with the black audience that it had never had before.

As time would move down the line the next few years, it would move towards what we all know now as that summer of love '88, so we still got a five-year gap. More and more black kids started to come into the Haçienda. The original house crowd - and again this isn't really well documented at all - in Manchester was a black crowd that would go into the same clubs that would play electro. This is after I stopped DJing at the end of '83, but...

GERD JANSON

Why?

GREG WILSON

Why? Right. Breakdancing had something to do with it. Right? The clubs that I played in … All of a sudden, the whole break dancing thing had exploded, which at first was fantastic, but pretty soon, some of the people were fed up that whenever anything remotely electro was played, there was a rock of people around the dance floor watching a challenge going on between... Especially the girls. All of a sudden, there's no dancing space. It'd become quite a macho situation and so I could see that there was a split going to happen there. It was the start of the hip-hop, the kind of hip scene emerging on one side. And I think that from the other side, there was almost initially a retrospective step where a lot of people got into a more... A lot of the soul stuff that was like street soul that was out at the time, and eventually the house thing came through and moved onto that.

Although, there was never, and that's an important thing about that time, there was never a separation within music. All the best black music was played on the same nights. It was like everything, when I was playing electro, when I was still playing jazz, doing jazz breaks here and there, still playing the disco, boogie-type tracks and the funk tracks and some of the more soulful things, that was all played within the context of one night. The tempos ranged from downbeat to uptempo and every mood in between, and that was how things worked.

There was never a direct separation, although there was more of an emphasis on one thing between certain clubs. One club would have more of an emphasis on a jazz theme. One would have more of an emphasis on electro-type side, but they'd still overlap in some of the stuff that they played.

GERD JANSON

And the opposite happened with the emergence of house music then?

GREG WILSON

When the first house tracks came through, the tracks and DJs and actual things, they were played in the same clubs that were playing electro and then the freestyle thing that started, the Miami bass thing that started. There was all of these little strands of things and this was just another aspect of it when it started. It was just another new kind of electronic-based music that fit into this vibe.

Before the Haçienda took off as a house venue, there were places like the Playpen, Balin, the Gallery. These were all Manchester clubs. Legend, obviously, how we continued on after I had gone. All these clubs were playing the early house tunes and the crowd that were first into it... This is documents from the Haçienda side, Mike Pickering and also Laurent Garnier, who was a DJ at the Haçienda before the rave scene.

It's quite interesting from his perspective because he worked at the Haçienda before it all exploded and the kind of rave era started. He was in Manchester. I think he'd come to Manchester as a chef or something, and he'd ended up DJing there, and he'd had to go back to France to do national service, and when he came back, all the rave thing had happened, so he saw it before and then he came afterwards, and what he said was before he went, the house crowd was mainly a black crowd, and when he came back, it was mainly white crowd, which is obvious really because the black kids were always into dance music anyway. They were always serious about it. They were always serious about their dancing.

Then, all of the sudden, this little pill came along. Loads of people, who six months previously would've told you that dance music is the biggest load of shit there was, took a little pill, and then they were like that [puts his arms up] and they were doing all ... So from the perspective of black kids, it was like their scene had been invaded, and they moved on from that and they settled new scenes and a new kind of evolution from that side came that originally would have been kind of coming from hardcore into jungle into drum & bass into UK garage into broken beat, and taking on that kind of level, whereas the house scene kind of evolved in a different way, which we know about because obviously the documentation of that has been done. But this period that we're talking about, this in-between period… For a long time, it was left out of the equation.

From my own perspective, the reason I stopped DJing, as I said, the breakdancing was a part of it. Another thing that was a reason I stopped DJing was that I wanted to get into remixing because, by doing the mixes for radio… Initially, I was doing them like normal mixes. They'd come down from the radio station with a reel-to-reel machine and tape me doing a mix as I would do in a club, but then they'd back and top and tailor it and put lieder tape on it, the finishing tape, and if you wanted to, "Oh I just want to do that again," they'd run an edit. And then one day we went back and there was no one to do the edit because they didn't have a tape-up, and I'd been shown, years before I'd made a demo tape for radio and somebody had shown me editing. Back then, if you made a demonstration tape for radio it was all about your voice, so you didn't want to give them a half hour tape with loads of music on because they didn't want to hear that. They just wanted to hear your presentation style, so you edited out the track, so you just had the intro of the track. You edited it to the end of the track, and then it carried on from there. It also had to be on reel-to-reel, you couldn't give a radio station a cassette because that would have been seen as amateurish, and they wouldn't even listen to it, so we had to be presented in a certain way with green tape at the beginning and red tape at the end.

So he'd shown me this back then, and I kind of remembered, and then this day, there was no one at the radio station to edit this for me, and I was on my own in the station, I went into one of the editing booths, and the next thing I'm turning tape around and I'm like running little effects and just really getting into it.

GERD JANSON

So you had to use a razor blade?

GREG WILSON

Oh, yeah. My love affair with editing just started there. I just loved it. The idea of cutting tape and, as it evolved down the line, I'd just get more and more intricate, so a mix was eventually taking me the best part of a day to do because I was doing all these little things, editing bits out, putting bits in. Further down the line, I got even more into it. I'd even do things like… I'd measure a beat, literally measure it with a ruler, and then I'd half a beat and I'd quarter a beat and I'd eighth a beat, and I'd cut loads up and I'd end up about 30 bits of tape there, and I'd put little marks on it and I knew what was what and then I'd put them back together, and it was just like no one showed me how to do that, it just kind of evolved like this madcap scheme of putting my kind of things together.

I just really got into it, and that slowed the process down to me. From it being a live medium of mixing, it was all of a sudden … It was working much more slowly with music and that kind of led towards wanting to get involved in remixing, and I knew all the people from the record companies anyway because I'd known them for years, I always got sent records, British records. Even though by this point I was rarely playing British records, everything was like American import stuff that I was playing, and I was saying to them I want to do some remixing, and they were saying "Yeah, but American DJs remix. English DJs don't remix."

It's bizarre now thinking about it, and I was really, really eager to do something and just give me a chance, and they couldn't get their bosses to let me loose on the multi-track tape and do a mix. They just didn't trust, they were sending their stuff off to the States, and so eventually I hooked up with these two musicians from Manchester, one who was in a band, a kind of post-punk band called Magazine, one who was in A Certain Ratio, and we started doing tracks together, and that became UK electro that was like a series of albums in the UK, very influential, called Street Sounds Electro, that a guy called Morgan Khan put together, which was really what brought electro to the more mainstream.

It kind of happened, if you take into account “Planet Rock” was May, '82, and the first Street Sounds Electro album was October of '83, there was quite a gap in between, but these albums, they were entering the charts, and also they were, I think they were like the first series of albums that were mixed. They were mixed by some guys in London called Mastermind, Mastermind Roadshow, and for most young break crews that were starting then, they probably saw more on cassette than they did on vinyl because they were ghetto-blaster kind of for the break dancers because again that's another point that, from a British perspective, the original break dancers didn't dance to breaks in '70s funk and the stuff Kool Herc played. They danced to electro because that was the first music when they started getting into it, so these electro albums were really kind of important.

I went to see Morgan Khan because I knew him with a couple of these tracks and he'd come up with this idea of doing a compilation, even though it was the same people who'd done all these tracks, he named four or five different acts, like there was this thriving electro scene, but apart from one of the tracks on the album, they were all mainly just two guys putting it together, and so...

GERD JANSON

So what was your project name then for that?

GREG WILSON

Well, there wasn't really. The names he gave it, we had Broken Glass, the break dancers, we did a track with them with Kermit rapping, it was the first track he rapped on, and that was called "Style Of The Street." There were sync beats with music, which was probably the track out that was like the best received track, two of the tracks were by Forever Reaction, and two of the tracks were by Zero, but as I say, they were all the same people. It was just us experimenting making it up as we went along, doing our own slant on electro. It wasn't so much like the New York stuff that I was playing. It was this hodgepodge.

Now it's become kind of a cult album, but back then, we did well. We got to No. 60 on the British chart, and it all looked good for a time, and I'd stopped DJing now to concentrate on doing all this, and then it all went wrong.

GERD JANSON

But why?

GREG WILSON

I don't know. It just imploded, and I found myself in a situation where I was no longer a DJ, I had no money, there was no money coming in, my car went, the next thing my house went, and I didn't want to go back. I couldn't go back at that point. I didn't have the heart to go back, although I would have identified it as a reason at the time. Now with hindsight I can see I'd been DJing since I was 15, I'd done it solidly for eight years, and as I say it wasn't like, say, now where maybe DJs sometimes work three or four nights a month or something. I was averaging five or six nights a week. Throughout that period of time, I hadn't had a normal teenage life. I was doing this when I was still in school. I was falling asleep in class because I was out in the clubs the night before. I messed my exams up because I wasn't turning up because I was DJing and I lived the whole thing. It was everything to me, and I suppose I needed to find myself to get away from it, and when I did come away from it, it really freed me up. I started listening to all sorts of different music in a new way.

I didn't have to listen to it just thinking about the dance floor. It was pure, you know. I started reading and looking at... I mean, I've got to admit that another reason with regards to the decision that I made was hanging around with a lot of black kids. I started smoking dope a lot. That changed my way of looking at life in a big way. That really... I mean, it's very much an opener, you know. My perspective changed. I saw things in a completely different way, and that made a big impression and impact on me in both a positive and ultimately negative ways. It's two-sided to everything. Coming away from it, I was looking at things in a completely different way. What's really strange is that, after being into this cutting edge American music, black music went through America.

The next big thing I got into after I stopped DJing, and when I say got into, I mean obsessively got into, like to a ridiculous level, was The Beatles. That was in the mid-'80s at a time when Oasis kind of bringing... You know, people used to think he's a real quirk. I mean, later down the line, I managed the Ruthless Rap Assassins who were like three black guys from Manchester. People come to the office and they saw Ruthless Rap Assassins. It would be like Beatles 1965 poster in there. They thought it was a quite quirky thing at the time. It was a great thing as well because what it did... I got into it because I'd always liked the music since I was a kid, and it was a time to sit down and listen. I listened to everything that they ever done and then started reading the books. I must have read in a period of three or four years over 100 books that was about or related to...

GERD JANSON

To the Beatles.

GREG WILSON

About the Beatles, yes. I lived in Liverpool as well so I had the perspective on them as people because I knew where they came from and knew the places they were talking about. I knew what cultural thing it was, how much it affected everything. The thing with the Beatles is, as a starting point, it takes you everywhere. They were obviously majorly influenced by R&B, so you learn about that. There was the whole psychedelic era that they went through. You go into that. You get into the whole kind of history of popular culture. It gave me an overview and a grounding to see the bigger picture and to understand an awful lot more about the things I was into anyway.

I can remember at the time saying, "You should teach this in school." And they are now. They're actually starting to teach these things in school to kids. It's all history. It's like the whole postwar kind of history that we're a part of, that we grew up in. They're such a symbol of that. They tell you before, and they tell you after it. If you want to learn about the history of popular music, you've got to go through the Beatles. There's no option. So many first things happened. The industry... A lot of the inventions within the music industry was because people tried to catch up with what was happening with this phenomenal thing of these four lads. It just happened. Even down to a level... I never realized until I got into all this that something like the word “teenager” didn't exist before the early '50s. There was no such thing as a teenager. It was like a marketing invention. It was to...

GERD JANSON

For rock & roll?

GREG WILSON

It was to do with the idea that - say before the Second World War, there was young people and adults. If you were a boy, for example, you were like a young man and then you were a man. There was nothing in between. The idea of the teenage arose after the war in America. There was money being spent within a certain sector, which was that kind of age group between 13 to 18. I think the first time it was used was, there was an advertisement which said this is the teenager and the word caught on from there.

GERD JANSON

These days you can be a teenager until you are way past 40.

GREG WILSON

Is that right? [laughs] Just getting a kind of bearing on that, that came later and probably a lot had to with the copious amounts of hashish and marijuana that I was smoking at the time, which ultimately had a negative effect because...

GERD JANSON

It was too much?

GREG WILSON

It just slows you down if you're doing it every day, which is what I did for 20 years. I used to smoke cigarettes, and I decided about the early '90s I'm going to pack in smoking cigarettes, but what I meant was I'm just going to smoke joints. All of a sudden then, I was just smoking joints from the first thing I got up in the morning. I didn't smoke a cigarette. Still smoking tobacco is just like a false door. I stopped eventually.

GERD JANSON

You got rid of the habit?

GREG WILSON

I got rid of the tobacco. Let's put it that way. [applause]

GERD JANSON

What prompted you to get back into DJing, then, eventually?

GREG WILSON

During the '90s, I just felt lost. I felt older then than I do now because a lot of things were changing. I think what occurred to me was that, once the house thing started, which was... The original house explosion was amazing. If you go back to somewhere like the Haçienda and you know, the '88 period, it wasn't just house music being played. They were still playing hip-hop and stuff. It was still derivative of the way the black scene had been before that where all these different types of music went into the melting pot.

GERD JANSON

And making downtempo breaks?

GREG WILSON

Exactly. It was all within that. Then it all started to narrow in and it was one style that was just these four beats that just took over completely. Me watching from the outside, I couldn't quite understand.

I remember speaking to somebody, a DJ at that time. It was about a certain downtempo track and I asked him if they played, and they said, "No, the count is too slow." I just remember thinking, "God, it's wiping out a whole area." Also, remember for impacts, used to always be great. You're playing something quite uptempo and then drop it right down to something slower and it went into a groove. That was like always a real impact moment.

All that had kind of gone, it just got into... First, it just got into the straight 4/4 beat. Then, it closed in even more. It was all of a sudden that there were all sorts of different types of house now. Everything was sub-divided and so somebody played it happy and somebody played it dark. All that was there before and all those moods were played together, but now everything was separating up. Obviously, the reason being was with the influence of the drug. I think, really, in many respects, is the music was no longer leading. The drug was leading music as opposed to the opposite way around as it had been in the first place.

From my point of view, the '90s, I couldn't quite understand. I couldn't grasp what was happening. It was alien to me to see the way that everything was going. I was also, at the time… There were times when I was really struggling financially on a personal level and my friends could see this and were saying to me, "Get back into DJing. You could make money. People are making big money out DJing. Trade on your reputation, your past, you'll do all right." It sounded great to the point where they went, "All you’ve got to do is work out what style of house you're going to play," and I'd be like, "I don't want... There's some stuff I like, but I like that and I like this." “You can't do that. You've got to…” And I couldn't do it. I'm so glad I didn't do it because it would have been soul-destroying for me. It would've felt, on a personal level, that it was against everything that I believed in. I just carried on.

I was always involved in music and projects and Rap Assassins was a great time, did two albums for EMI, but it was an up and down line, and sometimes things were going well, sometimes things were really hard. That was the world that I was involved in, smoking too much dope in the meantime. It was this living by my wits in many respects, but I still walk into studios with my reel-to-reel, and everyone else was using computers and I look like this DJ fossil, come back in and put my reel-to-reel out. Even though I was using it on a reproductive level, I've made all these tapes of sounds and as I work with the track, I'd be spinning sounds over the top of the track and adding textures to it, and I still do that now. From a DJing perspective, I've brought the reel-to-reel back into that.

GERD JANSON

But are you using it for edits still these days?

GREG WILSON

No, because there's no point with the computers. I was a real technophobe at the time. I was just scared of the technology. I just thought, "I don't know how to do this," and everything. I felt I was slipping back more and more and these younger people were coming along who it was second nature for them to ... I was just feeling out of touch. There's certain points where I just thought to myself, "What happened? I was doing all right at one point, and I've completely lost the plot somewhere. I've lost my way." It was like, where did it all go wrong and this kind of thing?

Then, I eventually made a decision that I've got to get involved in the modern age. A friend of mine was working radio production at the time. He had an editing system called Sadie, which is a professional radio editing system, and I learned how to use that. Somebody had said something to me at the time when I was saying, "Yeah, but all these... You look at all these younger people coming along and the skills that they've got," and they say, "Yeah, but they haven't got your experience." I thought, "Mm-hmm, yeah, there's something to that."

When I started getting involved, of course I knew all about editing. It's second nature, the mathematics of editing. It's in my brain. I think in bars. I see it. Somebody might be able to learn a program of editing, but then they've got to learn how to edit.

GERD JANSON

What makes a good edit?

GREG WILSON

Pardon?

GERD JANSON

What makes a good edit?

GREG WILSON

I think it's different for everything to know when to stop is possibly one thing. To certain things, it only needs a couple of twitches. Other things, you can go much deeper into everything at its own. I don't know. I only edit for what I feel I like, so I think it's a subjective thing as well. Do what you... If someone wants to edit, great. Do what you want to do. If there's a track and you feel there's part of it you want to take out, take it out. It's what you get off on.

GERD JANSON

So maybe you can...

GREG WILSON

Or, or to extend something to the dance floor or something. Want me to play an edit?

GERD JANSON

Yeah, one of yours.

GREG WILSON

Right, yeah.

GERD JANSON

That you would say is...

GREG WILSON

To get myself used to it, I made these sketches. I saw them as sketches. Everything was loop-based in what I did. The main program... The program, in fact, this friend who had the Sadie editing system, he said to me, he said, "I've seen this program." He didn't say, "I've seen this program you'll like." He said, "I've seen this program that is you." I was like "Right." It was a program called Acid. Don't know if anyone's used it. It is me. It's a loop-based system. Perfect, exactly where I'm coming from. I'm not a musician. I'm very much editing-based. I can work with musicians and stuff, but this allowed me to sit on my own for the first time and make my own tracks, whereas before, I needed a singer or I needed to work with a musician or an engineer to help me. Now, I could do it.

This is one of the things I came up with and it's called ... Well, I called it "I Was A Teenage DJ."

(music: Greg Wilson – “I Was a Teenage DJ” / applause)

I could see that there was this huge missing chunk from the UK perspective and the missing chunk basically was the black scene. It was missing. People were even trying to connect Northern Soul to house directly, and here's to seeing the great club of Northern Soul with Wigan Casino, which had burned down in 1981 when I was working down the road at Wigan Pier, the same night as that, which was a completely different thing. It's almost the old and the new. The Haçienda kind of explosion, we're talking about '88. That’s seven years. That's a very big period of time. Yet, people... I was hearing documentaries on BBC radio and people saying, "Yeah, you know, like the house scene in Manchester it came because people were used to dancing to the uptempo rhythms of Northern Soul." It's all bollocks. It's totally untrue. The house scene evolved in Manchester because the black kids got on the music and were into it from the off. Eventually, that crossed over so that the more mainstream audience came into it. It was like this kind of early ’80s period, the electro-funk period was completely missing from a lot of people's knowledge about... I kind of realized what had happened was that a lot of the people who were writing about house culture and rave culture had got into it… They might have thought they got into it earlier, they might have thought I got into it in ’86/’87 and thought that was early, but in the real sense of the term, that's still very late in the day. We're talking about a culture of dance music in the UK that dates back to the ’60s with R&B and goes right through the ’70s with the whole funk and disco thing and goes into the early ‘80s with the jazz-funk and the electro-funk era into the early house, into the early techno, into the start of the hip-hop scene before we get to this rave explosion.

So, I thought, “Well, you know, you can kind of moan about this, ‘They've got it wrong and everything,’ or you can contribute to it.” I have upstairs in my loft all my archive of materials from back in the early ’80s, so I thought, “Well, yeah, I can put together a website that's based specifically around the early ’80s period but can also take you back to a previous period.” I came up with the idea of doing a website, Electro Funk Roots, and put that website up. Once I'd done that, then people started getting in touch with me and saying, "Would you DJ?" It became viable for me to do because what I didn't want to be doing, I didn't want to be Mr. Retro coming back, playing the music I used to play then in exactly the same way as I used to play it. That's fine now and again. That's a nostalgic thing. I've got no problem on one offs but to come back to DJing purely based on that was not what I wanted to do. Although at the same time, obviously, I want to draw from that period. Also, the period before that, the ‘70s period...

GERD JANSON

What are the new things you're into?

GREG WILSON

What allowed it to have a contemporary thing, which is what I needed before I felt I’d go back into it and be doing it in the way that I wanted to… The edits make a big difference. I didn't know about re-editing. I was so out of touch with the scene in the ’90s. I just stopped going to clubs and everything. I didn't know people were doing re-edits. I had been doing them back in ’84/’83 and stuff with these radio mixes, I started doing things like that. We didn't even call them re-edits at the time. They were actually called turntable edits because I recorded the tracks off turntables and then edited them up and made something different. Editing, yeah, of course, that's what I do. It allowed me [to] edit certain tracks to play when I was out [and bring] them into a more contemporary side. What I hadn't realized was that there was already a movement in thought back to this period of time anyway. The way I see it is the cycle had come to a certain point whereby this house era, it was an incredible period of time for one style of music to have such a dominance from that kind of the late-'80s into the new millennium. The mainstream of clubs were still kind of on this four-on-the-floor beat. I just think that a generation of people began to start to look for something else and couldn't necessarily find a new thing to move onto necessarily, unless they moved on to a certain scene, like broken beat scene from the drum & bass side and everything. There wasn't really a kind of step off towards a new scene from house so much.

I think quite a few people started looking back toward disco at that point in time, and started to make those connections and started to get into that music. What they'd heard about disco had been all the negative side of it. It had been John Travolta in the white suit with his hand in the air and the Bee Gees, and everything that was later, everything that changed disco from being originally what I said it was. It was music that was played in disco times, generally soul or funk to being this image of platform shoes, and the very tacky aspect of, but now people were realizing, "God, the musicians that played a lot of this stuff are just amazing" and realizing what actually happened.

I think some people of some kind have found their way into the early '80s, and the fusion that kind of hybrid, the idea that disco was supposedly at that point from an American perspective, it died. They were done with it. It was the old thing. All it had done is gone back underground, redefining itself with new ideas [and] all the remixes like T. Scott, Larry Levan, Kevorkian, Shep Pettibone, Tony Humphries, the hip-hop flavor coming into it. Grandmaster Flash and people like Steinski and Double Dee doing their thing. All these experimental things that forged what was going to happen after that. The music changed, the instrumentation that was being used, the technology coming into it, the new aspects of house and techno, and the fact that hip-hop had been brought through via this period of time.

People don't think generally - and still a lot of people today don't realize this, and they still think from a UK perspective - that a group of DJs went to Ibiza in 1987 and brought back dance music, and that's when it started. But now, people are starting to realize the true roots of what went on which I think is really important because if you don't know the roots of something, I don't think you can move forward properly.

With everything that I'm kind of involved in now, what I'm doing, the way I look on it, it doesn't mean much if it becomes purely going back and looking at how it started. That's great to its own thing, but what's really important is where it goes from here. The younger generation takes this and runs with it and does their thing with it and reinterprets it, and brings that and uses that as an ideas pad and for their influences on what happens from here. That's happening now. There's a lot of people making a new style of underground dance music that's derivative.

GERD JANSON

For instance?

GREG WILSON

For example, on the credits of the edit album that put together like Chicken Lips is a perfect example of that. I use one of their tracks on there. That was really strange because before I'd kind of got back into the DJing and there was a record shop in Liverpool called 3 Beat. I was to have a bit of business there with the guy who owned the shop and I went into the office and the manager of the shop was a guy called Pezz. I was introduced to him and he said, "Are you the same Greg Wilson who used to be a DJ?" I was like, “Yeah,” and he said I've got this tape. He said, "Can I bring the tape in?" He was going on about this tape, like “Could you identify some of the tracks? This is one of your mixes.” I was like "Yeah, yeah, yeah." Every time I'd see him, he'd say to me, "I'm trying to get this tape back off my mates." Then all of a sudden, he sent through the post two CDs, and it was either side of the tape on the CDs plus a couple of albums by a band called Chicken Lips. First time I've come across them.

Then, it materialized what had happened. When he was a kid, he'd been influenced by the break dancing thing, along with his mates. It was Dean Meredith who now turns out to be in this Chicken Lips. They'd come across this tape. The tape had come from a friend of theirs, and the friend had a sister, and the sister had a boyfriend, and the boyfriend went to the club. The club was Legend. He got this tape, and they managed to make a copy of the tape. They've had the tape all these years, and they didn't know what the tracks were. They knew it was on the radio, and they knew that this name Greg Wilson was involved with it, but they didn't know what the tracks were. They found some of the tracks along the way, and they've made it a personal mission to try and find as many of these tracks as possible. The weird thing was it turned out that this tape was the first two mixes I'd ever done on the radio. So, I was able to tell him what these tracks were.

It turned out that, in the meantime, Dean Meredith, he'd gone on to form the band Bizarre Inc., and they'd been a huge band in the rave period.

GERD JANSON

"Playing With Knives."

GREG WILSON

"Playing With Knives," yes, and everything. He'd gone through that. Then he'd had a band called Psychedelia Smith that was signed to Norman Cook's label, and then he got to a loose end: “Ahere am I going from here?” Then he dug out this tape again. The kind of stuff that was on this tape was things like Emergency, [inaudible] tracks, and West End tracks, and those things, those earlier electro-funk tracks. He basically decided to take that direction - to take the influence of that tape and make a new thing from it. It had come around full circle. It was obvious to me that when I was doing the approach of the early album to bring it full circle from my own side to use the Chicken Lips track.

GERD JANSON

Do you have it with you?

GREG WILSON

I should do somewhere. Where did I put it? This is a track called "He Not in."

(music: Chicken Lips – “He Not In”)

It was like the kind of main tempo run about 120 BPM. A few years later, people thought that was slow. They were just getting faster and faster. That was the progression that they saw was just to make it faster. Even earlier than that, some of those early house tracks, for example, the track "This Brutal House," Nitro Deluxe is only about 114 BPM and very derivative of electro. You can see the linkage perfectly within something like that. I have to say, that kind of tempo of music was almost wiped out. They have to be faster. It got to a point where if it wasn't faster than 130 BPM, it couldn't be played in a club for some reason. I think some people have found a way back to that just by accident in sense, whereas other people like Chicken Lips have listened back to that period and rediscovered it and listened to the music of that and let that influence what they're doing now and taking it forward from that.

So, the theory that I have on it as well is that it was such a melting pot period of ideas. It was so open and experimental in what people were doing. Literally, I was going to the record shop every week and being blown away by hearing just really new stuff that I've never heard before, two or three tracks. It was coming thick and fast for about an eighteen month period. It was intense - the creativity and the music that was happening. They'd be saying that things like house and techno evolved from that. It could have been other things that came from that. There could have been other directions that were taken. It just happened those were the directions they went in.

I think now people are kind of going back and saying, "Oh right, it can go here as well, or it can go in this place too." It's a crossroads. It's the moment in time in dance music where it changed from the old style of dance music, which was basically music made by live musicians, to the new style of dance music, which was music made by live musicians to the new style of music, which was music made by technology. It was the crossroads period. What was an interesting discovery for me, and I think that links in with if somebody was saying, “Where can it go to from here?” The one thing that I've got it down to was when I started listening back to a lot of these records, the same records I used to play back then. When I first heard them, I was listening to the technological aspect of these records because it was the new thing about them, but when I went back to them, I go, "I didn't realize that I blend live percussion" or, "I didn't know that I added a bass on it or a guitar." Then you start realizing there's a fusion going on here. There's a fusion of live instrumentation and technology. You were just hearing it from, in certain cases, from the technological side because, at the time, as I say, that was that was the newness of it. Going back to it, you hear it a different way.

Almost now, I feel like it can go full circle again insomuch that what might have been lost from dance music in a certain respect is, it’s great that people were able to start putting dance music together themselves at home, or on computers and stuff. I'm all for that kind of aspect. You can't beat a live musician. You can't beat a true musician. That's a special thing. That's a skill.

So, the idea of now bringing a more musical aspect back into the technology, I see that definitely as a way forward. I hear that in certain things. Even the people that were programming the music back then were generally musicians. The people who were programming the drum machines were, in many cases, drummers who were forward-minded enough to think, "Let's try this out, work on this lever." The realization that there was a very high standard of musicianship going on within these tracks even though they seemed, at the time, computer music. Even then, going back to the people, the purists at the time who were against this, I think they literally believed that the music made itself in some sort of way.

How that changed actually was [that] a few key tracks came out during that period that made them change their mind. One of them was Marvin Gaye did “Sexual Healing.” Marvin Gaye was the greatest solo artist ever. One of the Titans was using a drum machine. I think that made a lot of people think of it in a different way. Herbie Hancock doing "Rockit." Herbie Hancock was like a jazz musician, now he was totally embracing the technology. I think he said in an interview one time, "Somebody's got to put the plug in. Somebody's got to go deep." People were naïve enough then to think that it somehow made itself. It's like in any form of music and any way you make it: you've got to give a bit of yourself and nothing comes easy. Even the most simplistic music, the beauty in it is its simplicity.

But, I think we've got to the stage of dance music as we know it whereby the music aspect became less and less important. I think that it needs a renaissance in that in a sense that I can see more of a fusion. I can see people working with musicians, bringing live musicians in, working alongside the technology and creating from that which, as I say, is kind of going back to... it's not one of those directions that we were talking about before that could've gone in that way that hasn't been discovered.

I'm really excited about music now. I think that we are back at a similar point in time. It is a crossroads period again. That's always an exciting point. A lot of people, for example, in the UK the new music played by the NME, a couple of years ago, said dance music was dead. What it was saying was that it was going to revert to type. It was never into dance music in the first place. Then, dance music got big, so it covered it. Now, it’s not as popular because dance music is no good. Dance music can't die because people always want to dance. It's obvious. It's a stupid statement to say... Dance music evolves and it's going to always be there. It always has been there. I think this next step for it... I'm here, I'm sat in Australia... I was speaking on the radio last night to somebody. They're similar minded. They've got an outlook that's the same as people I was talking to New York last year or Italy last week when I was there... There's a global underground now. There's a linkage in all countries. At one time, a scene used to be a regional thing. When I talk about the scene I was involved in, it was in the north of England and involved the Midlands. The south of England was a different scene. Now, we connect worldwide... We've got the technology that we can link up worldwide.

GERD JANSON

The merits of the Internet?

GREG WILSON

Exactly. I mean, it's a wonderful, wonderful time. If people can draw from this and put their own aspect into it, go with their own beliefs on this... I mean, it's like music's a magical thing and an ever-evolving thing... A lot of this music that maybe I play draws from the past. It's 20, 30 years old in certain cases. If that connects with someone now, it means it's still alive and of course it does. I mean, music stays that way. That's why classical music is still played now because it transcends time. It's got a special quality.

So, it's still developing now and people can take from that. People can add their own side to that and fuse their own ideas and take it in new directions. This is why I feel particularly excited about where we're at at this point in time because on one level, things have been forced to go back underground to a certain degree. That whole super-club era... That superstar DJ period, that whole thing of the DJ becoming ...

GERD JANSON

A pop star.

GREG WILSON

Pardon?

GERD JANSON

The DJ becoming a pop star.

GREG WILSON

Yeah. I mean, I was never comfortable with what I saw, the idea that the DJ felt that they were somehow above the audience. I mean, I remember the early rave days. I remember somebody saying to me, and I was living in London at the time. It was to do with one of the London clubs. It could have even been Shoom or Spectrum. They said, "There's this thing going on... They worship the DJ," was the word they used.

"They all stand there and they raise their..." I remember feeling uneasy about that from a personal level. It was always about respect, for me. If the audience respected you... Then you saw it the way that a DJ would wait for a break of a record and they'll take the hands and take the acclaim. Okay, that's showmanship, and I understand that, but it's not the way that I was brought up on it in a sense. It didn't sit right with me.

Another thing that was a big one when I realized what was happening was when people started talking about sets. "He did this set." This word "set" always, in the past, used to be connected with bands. A band wrote a set. When they did a performance, the band did a set. A DJ didn't do a set, a DJ played a spot or played a night. When I used to DJ, we did from 9 o’clock 'til 2 o’clock. The one DJ did the whole night. There wasn't all the guests and everything that there are now.

Now, a DJ was doing a set. I was like, "What's this set? What does this mean?" When I realized that for a lot of people that meant all through the week, they were practicing at home exactly what they were going to play in the order they were going to play it, mix for mix, perfecting it, getting that absolutely perfect. That blew me away. I thought, "Okay, really clever, fantastic, but where's the room for any spontaneity within this?" You're walking into a club knowing exactly... You may as well in a sense be playing a tape.

It's taken away the whole premise... When I started out, what it was about, every individual situation, you walked into the club, you weighed up the audience that was in front of you, you played your music according to what was the... Now all of a sudden, you were deciding beforehand exactly what was going to be played, and "If you don't like what's going to be played, you're stupid because I know best. I'm the DJ. My taste is better than yours." which is wrong because it's subjective.

Why is my taste better than yours? You like music, I like music. You might like different things than I do. We all work off certain vibrations and we all like certain things. What one person likes, the other person might not like so much... To assume that you know best and to assume that you're greater in your knowledge and your taste. It's a wrong assumption. Don't get me wrong. There's some great DJs and they know what they're doing and they work in a certain way. I understand that, but for a lot of people, I think they got on the wrong track.

I remember meeting a guy right... Just before I started DJing, I went on some of the websites and I met some people that way around. One was a young DJ and he happened to be from Liverpool and we met up and had a coffee. He was interested... He'd discovered this period of time. We were talking and he said, "What advice would you give me on a DJing level?" I said, "Don't plan exactly what you're going to play. Walk in with your records. Of course, you've got to plan it to a level, you got to take what you've got and you can only work within that, but don't..." He was really shocked. He'd said, "Well, I was brought up to think that you had to ..."

GERD JANSON

Have a set?

GREG WILSON

Have to do that. I think that stifles you rather than helps you. By all means, practice. By all means, try and perfect your skills and everything, but have options. It's like now I'm still of that mind that - and it happened to me, but I didn't like doing... I tried to avoid mixing the same record... People used to talk back then even about, "Oh, I've got this mix and this record goes into that record." I'd almost wouldn't want to do that every time because it was...

GERD JANSON

Force you?

GREG WILSON

It was nailing me down to that. I'd try to do it differently with another record. I even find that now when I record a night that I do, I don't like the idea that... Mix the same record. I try to vary it around... You used to hear certain DJs and you'd know what record they were going to play next because they always used to mix the same record out of that. It takes away the element of surprise and the interest of where you're going to go from here.

Everything starts to become... It becomes regimented to a level. I mean, that's my feeling. I mean, some people might disagree and think, "No, we've got to..." I mean, that's great for a mixtape. Brilliant. But in a live setting working with actual live people who can respond in different ways?

The other thing... Here's some DJ who will say, "Somebody come up and asked me for a record." Really as though it’s in distaste. "They come and ask me for something. Yeah, how dare they? I'm the DJ. I know... They ask me." Again, I come from a time when we used to use the microphone. One of the things we used to say, "If you've got any requests or dedications you want, come and talk to me." People come and ask you for records. That was part of the deal. Sometimes, someone can come and ask you for something that you haven't thought of yourself on the spot and it just turns out to be the perfect record. You've got to be open. You're working with people. You're not separate. That's how I see it.

GERD JANSON

But sometimes they ask for Christina Aguilera, too.

GREG WILSON

You can't play that if you don't play it. If you don't play it, you can't play it. That's fine. "Sorry, I can't play that. I don't play that." They might ask you for something that you just haven't considered. I mean, somebody... I was in Manchester recently and somebody came up, asked me to... It was a young guy as well... It was a real strange request. He said, "Could you play Gladys Knight and the Pips “Midnight Train to Georgia'?"

It really made my night. I thought, "That's a really strange record to ask. It's a great record, but an odd record. It's a slow record." Yeah, I said, "I'll see what I can do." I knew I had it with me. I played it at the end of the night, and it was just... I couldn't believe the response. Everyone... I thought most people wouldn't even know the record. It was too old. It just became the perfect record for that moment.

GERD JANSON

You have it with you?

GREG WILSON

It wasn't my decision.

GERD JANSON

You have it with you right now?

GREG WILSON

I have, but I mean, I don't think it'd work in this context. It's a different time and a different place.

GERD JANSON

But I just made a request for it.

GREG WILSON

I haven't got it with me.

GERD JANSON

Okay, then you can't play it. Maybe we should open it up for questions.

GREG WILSON

Definitely, yeah.

GERD JANSON

Anyone? Wait for the microphone, please. Thanks.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

Firstly, thank you ... I've got a couple of questions. What's your favorite Beatles song?

GREG WILSON

My favorite Beatles song... Well, it's hard to say what your favorite is.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

Sorry.

GREG WILSON

It's just so many, but what I would say is that I think people at funerals, they have a track played. I think... for me, it'd be "Tomorrow Never Knows.” That would be my track.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

Thanks. The second one is, are there any secret Greg Wilson samples?

GREG WILSON

Right. Well, kind of. Ruthless Rap Assassins, the band I worked with, their first album was like sample city. It was just... Everything is on that album from Hendrix, The Beatles, The Stones, every ... It was at that time when you weren't clearing it. We were with EMI at the time ... Other people at EMI were listening to the album. They heard ... What I'd done was I'd looped up the drum bass to Sgt. Pepper's. I would dub into that.

Somebody who had heard it said, "They're not The Beatles." Somebody at EMI had said, "There can't be any Beatles on this." He sent a memo down saying, "You got to take off any Beatles." I went to see the guy at the head of the company, and we'd completed the album at this point. To his credit, he said, "Go in the studio, book a day in the studio, but say you've changed it and we won't know any different."

I didn't touch anything. It stayed on there, all the beats and stuff. There's all sorts of little sprinklings all over that album. There's loads of stuff. I mean, it's everywhere. The funny thing was that this day that we did, I used it as a press day, invited everyone down to listen to the album... What did we have? All these little kaleidoscope things.

It was right at the height of the E period and I think everything was a bit... Everyone had loads of spliffs, brought them in and listened to the album in the studio, in the system. Didn't do any work, just paid for a day, had a great day of listening... It was fantastic. It was a really wonderful day, but all the stuff stayed in there. Yeah, just loads.

I mean, one of the tracks is called "To the Other MC's." In a hip-hop tradition, it's a kind of bragging track... Within that context... Apart from the manager, I was the producer. They allowed me to add my side into it. I thought, "Well, what can I use within that ... What would I say?" What I used into it was "Revolution 9" from The White Album. There's loads of that in there as well. I shouldn't be saying this.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

Thanks.

GREG WILSON

Thank you.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

In 2006, what musically excites you?

GREG WILSON

I mean, like I said before, just the idea that there's a new generation of musicians, programmers who are looking at a wide arena for music and taking it from different directions, what people now call eclectic. I mean, I saw something the other night on the TV and it was Outkast. They were talking about Kate Bush, who I really like. I mean, I really like Kate Bush's stuff. I just thought it was fantastic that they were really into what she did, and they were talking about the idea of working with her.

That's what it says to me now is that a lot of barriers are broken down that people aren't necessarily pigeonholed into the areas that they should be into. It's open and use that... I mean, that's what hip-hop was originally. The original vibe of hip-hop was [to] take from wherever you can. Eventually, it became formularized like anything else. Yeah, the fact that it's open and people... It can go anywhere. Let it go where it wants to go. Go with your feelings on it.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

Maybe in the last year, what sort of records... Just this year of releases in 2006 that really caught your ear? Has there been anything?

GREG WILSON

Well, yeah. I mean, there's a Spirit Catcher track at the minute that I really like. I'm doing some work at the minute with Groove Armada and also Tom Findlay from Groove Armada's got another project called Sugar Daddy... I very much like the vibe of the stuff that's on there. Again, it's coming from different directions that he's taken within that. It's not a specific... It's not staying in one area.

I mean, I like things like Kanye West and just good music. I mean, obviously... Again, it's a subjective thing what good music is, but I mean, I'm open to whatever from whatever direction it's coming from. In terms of a DJing sense, as I say... Obviously, I'm coming from a certain direction, so it's stuff that's derivative of where I'm heading from, although I can appreciate... I mean, I hear a lot of good drum & bass stuff or broken beat now that I really like... It's not stuff that I play and with the type of stuff that I do. Just, as I say, from whatever direction that people come from as long as they're coming from their heart with music, I suppose. I mean, I'm not so much into formularized... When people are going from that way. You can hear the difference, I suppose.

GERD JANSON

Anyone else?

AUDIENCE MEMBER

[inaudible]

GREG WILSON

Yeah, if you want.

AUDIENCE MEMBER

[inaudible] It took me five years to find it.

GREG WILSON

Right... I was talking before about this UK electro album, this one that had... It's supposed to be this thriving electro scene with all these acts and all the same people. It's funny with this track myself. The first time I heard it played in a club was only a few years ago. I'd never heard it. They did it in 1984, and here it is...

(music: Greg Wilson – unknown)

I got a lot of my influence from with regards to the whole sampling thing was British musician Brian Eno... He did an album with David Byrne called My Life In The Bush of Ghosts, which I thought was... It used different... Sampled tapes of that he brought into it. I thought that was a revelation, that album. That had a big influence on where I was coming from with regards to sampling, whereas I think a lot of people were influenced a bit later down the line by the Paul Hardcastle track "19,” which I was never that keen on myself. I always found it a little bit... I mean... very good concept of the track and everything, but just a bit...

GERD JANSON

Corny?

GREG WILSON

A little bit, yeah. A little bit, I suppose.

GERD JANSON

Okay... Ben has another question...

AUDIENCE MEMBER

Just hearing that track that you played for us now, I'm just wondering whether there's any kind of cross-pollination between this electro group soul sound that you guys were doing in [inaudible] and things with Ian Levine or [inaudible]?

GREG WILSON

No, I mean, that was a different thing. I mean, we were talking about Ian Levine yesterday and Ian Levine was the DJ at the Blackpool Mecca, which was one of the Northern soul clubs. He was probably the most influential of all Northern soul DJs. Basically, he was a rich kid. His dad had businesses in the States. He used to go over there and I think Miami. He went into a warehouse and went through all these records.

A lot of the Northern soul discoveries came from Ian Levine... I mean, he hadn't come out at the time, but Levine's gay. I think by going to the States... He started going to New York, and he saw what was going on there. He split the Northern Soul scene in the mid-'70s by introducing disco alongside northern tracks, whereas Wigan Casino kept it retro. There was a big schism in that scene from that.

Levine later down the line became the DJ at Heaven, which was the main gay club in London and was largely responsible for the Hi-NRG genre that came about in his productions. At the time when I made that sync beat track, there was a lot of press at the time. It was a big novelty because I was saying before about English DJ remixing and all this, that an English DJ was involved in making music. I mean, a lot of the press things that came out... One of the things that actually split up the people I was working with was that there was a lot of onus put on this fact of the DJ making music. One of the guys in particular, I think there was a bit of an ego clash and he didn't so much like this kind of onus was being put on my side of it as opposed to... He was from a band who'd had hit singles and stuff like that. That was just the novelty aspect which they came from.

Having said that, I mean... From Ian Levine's side, he was making records in the mid-‘70s. He is the original English DJ making music. He was working with soul acts from the States and doing tracks with them. Originally, his style was derivative of Northern Soul but eventually moved more towards a disco and Hi-NRG sound. He had Barbara Pennington "24 Hours a Day," which took off in the States as well. Ian Levine pre-dates any of the English DJs as a guy who got into actually producing and mixing his own stuff. Very much a pioneer.

GERD JANSON

Anyone else? No-one? Then I would like to thank you very, very much for being here.

[applause]