Norman Jay

Emma Warren

A little later than planned, I’m sorry, we’re very pleased to have Norman Jay with us. Hello, Norman Jay. [applause]

Norman Jay

Before we start I just want to apologize to you for my lateness. I was quite unprepared for this, I had to go and quickly organize some music for today’s interview. So, bear with us.

Emma Warren

Which was very kind of you, you had to go all the way back to your car to find some bits.

Norman Jay

The wonders of modern technology.

Emma Warren

Indeed. If you think about ten years ago, if you’d left your records at home, they would’ve been well and truly left at home.

Norman Jay

It’d be cassettes.

Emma Warren

Now we can have the wonders of your record collection here with us. You’ve done so much in your life. You started DJing when you were ten at some cousin’s birthday. There’s all the clubs you’ve been involved with over the past 30 years, Notting Hill Carnival, the Shake ’n’ Fingerpop warehouse parties, High on Hope, all that stuff you did at Talkin’ Loud with Gilles Peterson and loads more. We’re going to talk about as much of that as we can over the next hour or so, but I wondered if we could start back at the beginning, which I guess, is you putting records on at your cousin’s birthday party, just in double digits.

Norman Jay

Yes, I’m 53 years old, and my DJing career has been the best part of 40 years-plus. I started DJing records as I remember them when I was seven or eight years old. My mum and dad were both great collectors of music, both Caribbean, where my parents are from, and of the great black US jazz tradition, R&B, soul etc. My dad had a substantial collection of 1940s, 1950s crooner records. They weren’t records then, they were old 78s, made out of brittle vinyl. I don’t know if you’ve seen them. Anyway, the siblings in our family were exposed to music from a very early age, probably two or three up. My dad reckons I was responding to music at a very early age. I guess, that might be the same for you guys, otherwise you wouldn’t be here. In my formative years, I didn’t really aspire to play music, but my dad had a record player. And at a very young age I was drawn to that, the physical aspect of playing records, piling them up on a spindle and watching them drop, one by one. As a young kid I was fascinated by that.

Emma Warren

These were the old Dansette record players with the 7”s?

Norman Jay

Dansette style, but we didn’t have a Dansette. My dad bought a radiogram and in those days, the only people who made them were companies in Germany. So, it was a foreign import of the highest quality, either Blue Spot or Blaupunkt, or a Bush. I remember, it was made of mahogany and it had the first bass and treble controls, little rotary dials, which I was fascinated with and always played with. But, in our family, we always had access to musical instruments, we had a piano from very young, we had a guitar in our house from very young. But I never went anywhere near them, I was interested in the record player. I guess, all these years later it’s no coincidence I became a DJ instead of a budding Mozart.

Emma Warren

I guess, nothing’s really changed, has it? You’re still drawn to the record player, the music machine. So, when you were very young and first taking control of the music, not just listening to what was around you, was it something you wanted to share with your friends, or more with your mum and dad and family?

Norman Jay

When I was about ten, I was tasked with buying the family records every Christmas. Any time we had a family gathering, whether it was Easter or a wedding or a christening, my dad would give me £5 or £10, which was a lot of money then, and I’d go to the local record store and buy whatever I wanted to buy. In the beginning it was 90% ska, as it was then, blue beat and reggae, and about 10% soul. As I got older, I realized my true love was US soul, jazz, R&B and latterly all the other genres that came out of America. But my brother Joey, he was similar, he didn’t really aspire to playing any musical instrument, but he was fascinated with how the record player worked, which always frustrated me. I simply wanted to play records, but my brother would pull out the cartridges, pull the speakers out, pull out the amplifier, bits of the amp, to see how it worked. and put it all back together again. Invariably, when he put it back together it wouldn’t work, or sometimes it worked even better than before. So, he was a self-taught electronics expert.

Emma Warren

And, of course, your brother went on to run the Good Times soundsystem with you. While you would be in charge of the selection, he was the soundman part of the set-up, wasn’t he?

Norman Jay

From early in our careers our paths were defined. I was always the music man and my brother was the sound engineer, which I guess, was a marriage made in heaven.

Emma Warren

It’s a lovely image of you aged nine or ten with your head poking up over the counter listening to records. Were you the only child in the record shop?

Norman Jay

I was, in the beginning, but as I got older, into my early teens, it was a regular thing, all the kids would. Just as you go out and buy PlayStation games today, kids would go and buy records.

Emma Warren

Where did you go?

Norman Jay

I went to Webster’s in Shepherd’s Bush market, for those of you who know West London. A very famous record emporium, actually, which was the first outlet for Trojan Records in the UK. Then there was a plethora of record shops that would pop up for a few months. Then, I guess, if they had to pay rates and tax, they would shut down. But Pama Records, which was run by Mr. Palmer, was, maybe still is, the biggest importer or exporter of music from the Caribbean.

Emma Warren

It would be really lovely if you could play us something from this point in your life.

Norman Jay

I’d have to find something.

Emma Warren

You were talking when we were chatting earlier about your dad’s collection and some of the music it reminded you of somehow. We’ll be talking a lot about the way you, or we, connect with music emotionally.

Norman Jay

I guess music, for most of us, is the soundtrack of your lives, isn’t it? I don’t have very vivid memories of things I did, or things I was a part of, or things I saw. But, I guess, like you guys, there’s always a record that acts as a trigger mechanism, and there’s a soundtrack to your life. And whatever you go through, whether you’re happy or sad or melancholy, get married or divorced, a death in the family, there’s always a track that triggers that. My life has, thankfully, been blessed with thousands of tracks over the years. So I’m desperately trying to find something on this gadget.

Emma Warren

You say that slightly disparagingly. Are you not impressed?

Norman Jay

I mean it ironically, it’s only because I’m not on top of the whole gadget thing. I’ve never been a gadget freak. I actually owned an iPod two years before I opened the box. There’s all sorts of music on it, it’s probably the most valuable iPod in the world, and some day it might go for auction. You carry on asking me questions. I need to go through it, I’m trying to think. We’re notorious, us guys, we can’t multitask, you do things much quicker, we can only focus on one thing at a time.

Emma Warren

You look, I’ll ask questions. We won’t stay too long in your childhood because there’s so much to talk about. But which kinds of artists were the sound of you as a boy?

Norman Jay

Many, some long since forgotten, but thanks to the wonders of the internet a new generation are discovering them. I guess, Prince Buster, loads of Jamaican artists whose music escapes me, but my real true love of black music stems from Motown in the ’60s. I was a big fan of the whole Motown machine. When I was a kid in England, you just didn’t see black performers on television or in the magazines.

You guys don’t know how fortunate you are. I’m old enough to remember when no black artists were featured on television, no black artists appeared in music magazines. The only way you had access to those artists was via records, which you couldn’t even read about – you had to go to the record shop physically, and listen, and read dedicated fanzines that were around at the time, which gave you information and an insight into what music was coming out. Those are different times, different socio-political times.

It’s a little-known fact that in the late ’60s / early ’70s, when the race riots were raging in America, the anti-Vietnam War riots in places like Atlanta, Chicago, New York, LA, obviously there were social commentators who were making records about all this. The British government actually banned these records from coming into the UK under the pretext of protecting the home market. So, consequently, you had UK bands and artists covering records from America, sometimes rewriting them, adding lyrics or adding choruses. It wasn’t until some years later when I went to America myself and came across some of these original recordings.

We all know The Beatles, right? But tracks of theirs like “Twist And Shout” were originally written by the Isley Brothers in fact, the Isley’s version was itself a cover. A lot of famous British and European artists, when you check their repertoire and check the credits for the songwriters, it’s amazing to realize these were written by black acts in the middle of nowhere who never got the credit.

Emma Warren

So it’s your understanding there was a specific government policy around not allowing civil unrest to happen here?

Norman Jay

To spread to the UK, definitely.

Emma Warren

Where certain people’s music was stopped from entering the country.

Norman Jay

Definitely. And one of the chief people’s music they stopped was James Brown’s. Anti-war records, pro-black records, similar records that were coming out of Africa at the time from political artists like Fela Kuti. All the music we take for granted now, because of the internet, but back in the day, and even when the earliest rap records were coming out, the more politicized ones, initially those records were either blocked, or certainly wouldn’t get airplay. They might get written about in magazines, like the NME, but you wouldn’t hear them on Radio 1.

Emma Warren

I think we should listen to something now. I know we were talking earlier about playing something from before, but we don’t have to do that, it might be something you were just talking about, this idea of political music coming from America that was about identity and culture. Music that was allowing people in this country to construct their own identities in the absence, perhaps, of clear examples elsewhere.

Norman Jay

But what it did do, music from America, both black and white, was always having an impact on popular culture. In the late ’60s I was into the more accessible, rather than commercial tracks I heard on the radio, because I was a radio fiend. I got my first transistor when I was 11 and I just used to listen with one single earpiece to any station that played any black music or certain rock records, which formed the soundtrack to my life.

Emma Warren

So, which station would that have been?

Norman Jay

The fledgling Radio 1, I was a big fan of Radio Luxembourg. If it wasn’t for Luxembourg, I wouldn’t have heard about Jimi Hendrix.

Emma Warren

Luxembourg was the original pirate station that preceded the BBC setting up Radio 1, because before that the BBC just played very upper-class, cucumber sandwiches…

Norman Jay

It was a very safe music policy.

Emma Warren

They didn’t play pop music, did they?

Norman Jay

Well, they did, but it was music they deemed acceptable. Any music that was considered on the margins wasn’t put on the radio. But the good side of that was, all this music that was happening at the time – jazz, the original R&B, Motown, Stax music – what it did do was, the kids who were into the music in the late ’50s and early ’60s formed appreciation societies, which we now know as clubs. They went out and found a coffee bar, they’d find a jukebox, and load it with the specific type of music they liked, punch their money in, and so you’d get your soundtrack all night, and you’d be sharing that love with like-minded people. They were the fledgling clubs.

Emma Warren

Would they have been called appreciations societies?

Norman Jay

Yes, they were. Motown had a huge appreciation society, Stax had a huge appreciation society, British jazz had an appreciation society. You only needed to go to Ronnie Scott’s, and the coffee shops there and they had live performers, that was the live aspect.

Emma Warren

So you’re talking about the UK then?

Norman Jay

Yes, specifically about the UK.

Emma Warren

This is something I’ve never heard about. I’ve been interested in nightclubs for a long time, but it’s proof that you can think you know about something, read about things, listen to things, but unless you were there, there’s always gonna be huge gaps in your knowledge. That’s why it’s so great to have someone like you who was there to talk about it.

Norman Jay

I’m not that old [laughs].

Emma Warren

Of course not, that’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying you’re an authority, and you know about this stuff. So appreciation societies as a kind of precursor to nightclubs, as we know and love them. Did you go to any of these?

Norman Jay

No, I was too young, that was a ’60s thing, but I understood that. I was a child of the ’70s and the disco as we know it evolved in the early part of the ’70s. The appreciation societies had morphed into nightclubs, whereas back in the day the kids would sit there, tap their feet, listen and shuffle around to certain records. By the time the ’70s came, there were dedicated emporiums where people could go and physically dance to that music. First and foremost, these clubs were actually gay clubs, because gays and lesbians, people on the margins of society, but who had a passion for music and fashion, found spaces where they could go and hear music they loved all night long and meet people, it was a form of networking. I’m not sure if you know, but discothèque is a French word, which loosely means “dancing at night”, and Paris hosted the first discothèques, long before we had them in Britain. They morphed over from Europe and America, mainly through people who travelled around, young international jet-setting kids. It was the preserve of the rich and wealthy who had nightclubs and had music playing. Through the years, it filtered down so the common man could pay his money, go out and enjoy the music he or she loved.

Emma Warren

My understanding of the discothèque in Paris was that it was also linked to the repression during World War Two, because it was run by a chap whose daughter Regine went onto run [the Whisky à Go Go and Régine’s] in [Paris and] New York later on. And on this particular road, Rue de la Huchette, there’s a jazz club there still called Caveau de la Huchette, so you can still go there to the birthplace of the disco in Paris, but people don’t know about that. It’s such an amazing story to think about this place and it was so secret, people used to have to be able to flip it, Bugsy Malone-style.

Norman Jay

You can trace the lineage back even further to black speakeasies in Harlem in the ’20s, which were exactly that, the only difference was it was live music. Live players would go there to preen, to dance, because normal society wouldn’t accept them. You can trace the history of that to the Sugar Shack [in Harlem] the fish fry [dances in the Caribbean], they all had really cool names, people would dress up, because it was always all about sex, just like discos. The essence of it was people who were on the margins looking for excitement. If they were fortunate enough to have jobs, they had boring humdrum jobs. Life was tough, so come Friday night or Saturday night it was a couple of hours of escapism – music, drink, drugs. Sixty years later, things haven’t changed [laughs].

Emma Warren

The phrase is plus ça change. You just mentioned people getting dressed up and fashion and the relationship between fashion and music has been a really central part of your journey through music.

Norman Jay

Brother and sister. People love music, but music cults and scenes don’t happen unless there is a fashion and lifestyle element. It just simply doesn’t happen, that’s the way youth culture works. When I was growing up I always wanted to be a mod. I would’ve been first-generation mod in the ’60s, my older mates were. They had a certain look, loved a certain style of music, which separated them from the mainstream. They rode scooters, they liked black R&B and jazz, there was a coolness about them. Flip the coin, and you had kids who were into rock, the bikers. So there’s always been youth cults, no different to today to the tribes who like drum & bass, hip-hop, techno. There may not be a certain look that goes with it, but there’s an attitude, a way of thinking that certain people who are into it are on the same wavelength.

Emma Warren

But you weren’t a mod, were you?

Norman Jay

No, I was too young, but I still have a basic interest and an understanding of it to this day, the evolution of youth culture in the UK. They’ve always had their soundtrack, whether it’s Northern soul in the ’60s, Philly and Motown in the ’70s, disco, jazz-funk, hip-hop, house, R&B, acid house, punk rock. We’re blessed in this country, we’ve always had those youth cultures. In America it’s slightly different. Partly, because it’s so big, and partly because it’s divided on racial grounds. Black music, because it’s been marginalized in America, has developed its own way. So it was always going to give us jazz, it was always going to give us hip-hop, soul or disco, but what it was never going to give us was jungle or punk rock. The great thing about the way the English approach music and lifestyle is that we’re not scared to experiment and f--- things up. Ninety-nine per cent of the time, it will end up crap, but the 1% we get right will basically move the game on, a quantum leap, and thanks to the powers of the internet we’re able to sell that around the world.

Emma Warren

Do you think that’s also because, in the UK it’s easier for people to mix? I’m not just talking about ethnicity, I’m talking about class as well. There are spaces in every town where people, who were maybe marginalized by society can come together, maybe that wasn’t the States.

Norman Jay

It’s so small and miserable and cold, so we’ve got to get along. Most of us, we come from the same council estates, we eat the same Indian food, the same West Indian food. The one thing that seems to unite most people I meet is a love of music. That seems to break down more barriers than politics or anything. I see people here from all over the world and the one thing that brings you here is a love of music. You’re not here for a Labour Party conference. I’ve just come back from a tour of Australia, and the biggest emerging music out there is the sound of dubstep. Personally, I don’t really understand it, I’ve never heard the track that unlocks it for me. But the one thing experience has taught me is that I’m never dismissive of any genre I don’t understand. I just wait until I hear the track that unlocks the door for me, and then I have a Homer Simpson moment, “Now I get it.” I’m sure we all have that epiphany about music. I don’t like all music all the time but I like most music most of the time. The one thing I’ve learned is to give things a chance. I’ve got a curious mind, so I will always investigate certain types of music. Every music is valid, every music has its place, and clever people know to take the music they like. If it doesn’t work in the environment it’s in, don’t be scared to put it in another environment, to offer another perspective.

Emma Warren

It’s interesting you talk about that, but when Steve Reich) was here, I remember a story about Philip Glass with – maybe it was Mark Moore of S’Express – taking him to Rage, Land of Oz or Shoom, one of the famous acid house nights, and while everybody is jacking madly around him, apparently Philip Glass just sat there with his head in his hands for about an hour and then sat up and said: “I get it.” Sometimes you have to put yourself in there to be able to understand it.

Norman Jay

The best way to discover something is to go there and experience it in its natural environment. I’ve got two sons who are grown up now, my younger one is around the age of you guys. In the early ’90s, he’s loving jungle. I said: “What is this music? I need to go and find out.” So I bought myself one of the box sets.

Emma Warren

You mean the tape packs?

Norman Jay

Yes, the tape packs. I’m a house guy primarily, I make my living from that type of music, but whenever I get the chance to, I’m not shy of going into other realms of music. I play hip-hop, I play drum ‘n’ bass, I’ve been known to play trance, and people go, “Wow!” But people who know me are not surprised by that.

Emma Warren

So if we’re going to be able to be open-minded here, what’s our door-unlocking record in trance?

Norman Jay

I can’t name them. It’s like I was explaining to you earlier, this is just a personal opinion, but the way we hear, feel and appreciate music today has become so devalued, I have less and less emotional attachment to music. So when I hear a trance record, I don’t really care who’s made it or where it comes from, whereas 20 years ago I might have been interested to find out more. Right now, I don’t care who made it or where it’s come from. If it’s right for me and I like it, that’s all that matters. Some of the tracks I might get on a download or on a white label have little or no information, some of the white labels don’t even mark an A- or a B-side. Given that lack of interest from the person who made it, I don’t see why I should invest my time. If I play it on the radio, if that information is not supplied to me, I’m not gonna go out of my way to find it. It’s incumbent on the person who made that record to give as much information as possible. Records made last month, last year, I really can’t remember who, what, why, when. Yet, music of 10, 15, 20, 30 years ago, I’ve got an encyclopedic memory. I don’t know why that is, it’s just the way it is.

Emma Warren

Maybe there’s only so much space in the old cranium.

Norman Jay

No, it’s about emotional relationship to the music. No disrespect to anyone in the house, but no one remembers an instrumental, they remember a vocal, whether it’s a snatch, a song, a hook, which is why those records will continue to sell, continue to dominate, while instrumental genres will always be marginalized, for the heads. Instrumentals serve a purpose, but you’re never gonna sell a million records or downloads on an instrumental.

Emma Warren

I would say I 98% agree with you, but I’ve got the sound of Richie Rich, “SalsaHouse” in my head.

Norman Jay

The good thing for Richie Rich is he’s still getting the royalty checks for that. How many people here could sing or hum “Salsa House”? There’s no reference point, but a click or a download and you can hear it.

Emma Warren

What would be good is to hear one of the things you’re talking about. By the late ‘70s you’d amassed a pretty serious record collection. And that music you picked up along the way provided the bedrock of your very famous and really influential shows on Kiss FM, the Original Musiquarium.

Norman Jay

People always asked me, even to this day, the number one question from journalists is always: “How many records have you got?” I don’t care and I don’t know, that’s not relevant to me. The only way to have old records is to buy them new, I’ve always bought new tunes, been interested in new music, which eventually becomes yesterday’s history, rare groove.

Emma Warren

Absolutely, but the music you bought as new, and the music you bought as you were investigating backwards, forwards, sideways, as you always do when you’re really into music, did have a major role in your radio shows and the Shake ’n’ Fingerpop warehouse parties. Maybe this would be the time to listen to something.

Norman Jay

The radio shows were great because, for those of you who don’t know, I was one of the founder members of Kiss FM in London. It’s a commercial station now, a parody of Radio 1. But, in 1985, we founded the first dance music station in London. We only came on at weekends, it was illegal, I borrowed the name from Kiss in New York because I knew they couldn’t come to England and sue me.

Emma Warren

It was three good days a week, then.

Norman Jay

It was three days a week, it operated as a pirate station for three or four years. The government offered us an amnesty, if we came off air for that first year, which we did. Then they reneged on that promise, so we came back on for another year, and this time they came good – they offered us a proper amnesty and said they’d consider us for a legal license. Eventually, that did happen: on September 1st, 1990, Kiss FM was born legally. I presented the first program on that station.

Emma Warren

And I believe the first song you played was the “Windy City Theme”.

Norman Jay

Before that it was Cocoa Tea, Shabba Ranks & Home T with “Pirate’s Anthem”, a reggae tune we felt was appropriate, and then I came in with “Windy City.” The radio offered me a platform to play stuff I really loved. My raison d’être for being on the radio was to explore the history of black music, as I understood it, and as I lived and interpreted it in the UK. That had never been done before, not on Radio 1, not on any program. We had no way of quantifying how many people were listening, how long they were listening. But it soon became apparent, after 12 months of doing it, as I was doing the Original Rare Groove Show… luckily I had the foresight to call it the Original Rare Groove Show because I knew it would spawn loads of imitators.

Emma Warren

You coined the phrase rare groove, didn’t you?

Norman Jay

Yes, I was the one who coined the phrase rare groove. I had no idea the show was becoming as influential as it became, because the first generation of UK hip-hop makers, a large number of them were listening to my shows. And they were actually educating me as well, because I was playing a lot of these funky, jazzy, rare-groove-style records, which in essence were proto-hip-hop records. These guys would contact me and say: “What’s that break you were playing?” “Break, what’s a break?” I realized I had a shed full of those records that they could sample breaks from.

Emma Warren

Why don’t you play one of those? I’ll ask you something else, but you have to press play before you answer.

Norman Jay

Yeah, sorry, I’m becoming talking head here. It’s playing now, Eddie Harris, “It’s All Right Now.”

(music: Eddie Harris – “It’s All Right Now”)

Emma Warren

Can we have another original Rare Groove Show?

Norman Jay

That has all the ingredients: there’s church, there’s unity, there’s jazz, there’s call and response, there’s message.

Emma Warren

Talking of church, was that something that was alive for you?

Norman Jay

No, I was never a church head. I don’t come from an overtly religious family, but I’ve always been into music that’s expressive of suffering. For me, the best emotional music is music that’s made out of hard times. Whether that’s from this era or some kid in a tower block in Tottenham who’s got no job, no future, and he’s there at his computer making his beats. When you hear that music, you can feel all of that. That to me is emotional music, whether it’s electronic or old-school, funky jazz.

Emma Warren

There were lots of record you played, things like New York Community Choir “I’ll Keep My Light in My Window”, or Asha Puthli, loads of songs you played that were soundtracking my growing up.

Norman Jay

They were talking to you.

Emma Warren

They were – Dizzy Gillespie’s “Unicorn”, this wasn’t something I heard at the time, but after someone had taped it. After Dizzy died, you did a tribute show to him and opened it with that. There was always the sense with you on the radio that there was a massive emotional connection to everything you played, and you conveyed that really strongly. I remember someone saying the whole thing about your show was about sharing and wanting to communicate things you felt strongly about.

Norman Jay

I was never into that whole… it’s a uniquely British thing… One of the reasons I’m glad the whole internet download thing has evolved, it means everyone’s on the same playing field. I work from the simplistic thing that music is for sharing. Britain is a unique place – they’re like the self-appointed guardians of black American music and black UK music as well, which is a good thing, because the mindset in America is completely different. They don’t deal with old stuff, only what’s gonna be big tomorrow. If you ever meet any American music moguls, you’ll be left in no doubt. If your music sells, they’re your best buddies.

Emma Warren

Any specifics you’d like to interject there?

Norman Jay

Back in the day, when I was a senior A&R man at Talkin’ Loud with Gilles, one day my head of A&R came in the office and said: “Norman Jay, you’re going to New York next week to meet Rick Rubin. You’ll get on alright with the brothers.” It wasn’t said in a patronizing way, but just that sentence, they weren’t ever gonna send anyone else in the record company to go into the heart of the ghetto, the South Bronx, a dangerous place as it was then, and meet with the head of Def Jam Records, one of the big emerging hip-hop record labels of that time.

A week later I go there, cool little black boy from Notting Hill in London, all the way there to Brooklyn to meet with this guy, a record label at this time is ruling the world of hip-hop… Def Jam was the hip-hop label in the world, and their office is this ramshackle place in the back end of the Bronx somewhere. And I go down to meet this guy and within ten minutes I’m left in no doubt that they’re not interested in Talkin’ Loud unless our records, a) get on the radio, and b) sell millions, otherwise this meeting is effectively over.

So, I was never going to be able to sell our Galliano records or whatever. But I learned a valuable lesson. I realized there was a cultural difference in the way they perceived and sold music in America, which is the reason America does not have, and is not likely to have a defined dance music culture. The flip side of that coin is they produce artists like Beyoncé and big artists like Jay-Z, who sell millions and billions of records because there are a million different radio stations, and records in America are hits because they’re playlisted on these radio stations. The internet has impacted a little on that, but if your record isn’t being played on college campus radio in Arkansas, it’s not gonna happen for you.

Emma Warren

And, in your opinion, that’s why there’s no mainstream dance culture there?

Norman Jay

The mainstream is the hip-hop, is the R&B, is the country, is the rock. But America still sells artists. If you’re an aspiring artist, it’s the world’s biggest marketplace for western music. So, if you’re going to make it as a performer, you need to make it in America. But they don’t have a dance culture. In the UK, we have a massive dance culture, which goes back 50 or 60 years, so even if your records are never likely to sell millions, they will be filling clubs up and down the country on a Saturday night.

Emma Warren

Now, you just talked about this trip to the Bronx. But you had a connection to the Bronx anyway, didn’t you, because you had an uncle who had a soundsystem.

Norman Jay

Yeah, the Dr Wax Roadshow. In the ’70s, we were very young, my brother and I, and unknown to us, my uncle, who’d moved to New York some years before, was operating the largest Caribbean soundsystem in New York at that time, called Dr Wax Roadshow – the largest calypso soundsystem. He used to do all the big Afro-Caribbean events in the five boroughs. So when I first went there I was, “Wow!” That enabled me to DJ at a block party in 1979, two or three years before the whole hip-hop thing had started. And looking back, I realize I was very fortunate to be in the right place at the right time.

Emma Warren

Could I just pause you there and ask you to explain what a block party is and how it would work?

Norman Jay

The way the block parties worked – especially in the black and Hispanic communities, the working-class people in the boroughs – they couldn’t afford to or were never encouraged to go partying across the bridge in Manhattan, which housed Studio 54 in midtown, CBGB down in the Bowery, which was basically the birthplace of punk. The kids were excluded, they were never encouraged to come into Manhattan itself, but what they did do was provide their own entertainment. Thank goodness they did, otherwise we wouldn’t have hip-hop today, we wouldn’t have electro today. These kids stopped the violence and they’d have dance competitions and they’d have DJ competitions on rudimentary soundsystems. It was pretty much the same as what we were trying to do in the UK, but we didn’t have an audience for it. As it turned out, they created a new music that went on to sweep the world.

Emma Warren

But the set-up of the block party is the main thing, taking hydrants at either end of the street and turning them on so the streets were blocked off.

Norman Jay

That’s exactly what they’d do. All the communities were quite tribal and territorial because of the gang bullshit in those days, so you didn’t go into areas you didn’t know. So, on Labour Day, or any public holiday, the New York councils would grant you a license to hold a street party. You’d block off both ends of the street, all the people on that street would put out picnics, barbecue, contribute the food, and whoever had a couple of turntables and an amp and a mixer would provide the soundsystem. My uncle used to put out a massive soundsystem outside my aunt’s house and plug the soundsystem into the street lamp for free power, something I copied later on, but would never do again. And they’d run the whole soundsystem during the day when it was safe. It was the first time I saw twin-deck and three-deck mixing and segueing. They never used turntables as we know them now.

They used these huge platters called Thorens, they were huge, heavy, and it was a real skill to be able to cut and scratch. It was the first time I saw it. Actually, my cousin introduced me to cutting and scratching. This was in 1979 and they would take two 45s and physically glue them onto old LPs so they could get the traction to cut and scratch records. That was the first time I’d ever seen a crossfader, too, where they would play the best part of a tune and then four bars behind [moves fader across], back again, so you had this extension of the best part of the record and the crowd would really rock to this. Then some guy, who was normally the street clown or poet, would be on the mic, improvise, freestyle and I’d watch kids make sounds I’d never seen or heard before. I’m watching the birth of hip-hop here. Absolutely amazing. When I got back I couldn’t describe to people what was going on because they couldn’t get a handle until certain records came out. I was trying to explain to people that these records weren’t made in the traditional way, they were made up of four or five records – what we know as sampling. Take the best bits of this, splicing it onto tape – now you’ve got computers and drum machines that can do that for you, but to watch people actually do that physically live, it’s an art form in itself.

Emma Warren

Sorry to interrupt you, but I’m intrigued to know what were the 45s that were being glued onto the albums?

Norman Jay

The 45s were James Brown records and at the time, Chic. You all know Chic, “Good Times”, when I was there that was all over the radio. But adventurous kids got bored of hearing “Good Times”, because it’s a great hook, so what they did, they chopped up “Good Times” and kids would come and freestyle their own lyrics and have DJ battles. That’s when it dawned on me, I was never a poet, never into poetry, but these kids were basically self-taught street poets. Absolutely amazing. Another art form, another avenue for expression.

Emma Warren

So what did you take back with you from that trip? I know while you were in America, maybe another time, you went down to the Paradise Garage and heard Larry Levan playing records, and that had a big impact on you, and more specifically the soundsystems you decided to play on… how that could have a big impact on how the record sounded. So, what did you take back to the UK and what did you do next?

Norman Jay

When I came back, I was suffering from information overload… it took me ages to make sense of what I’ve been experiencing. I was very fortunate… in those times I used to spend summers in New York because I had family there, so I’d spend about four months every summer in New York and have a first-hand view of all the new and evolving styles of what was happening.

Emma Warren

So, you’re going there every year from the late ’70s onwards?

Norman Jay

Yeah, and during the mid-’80s I was going to every club, purely because I was a serial clubber in the UK, I went everywhere. I was a clubbing geek, and I fanatically bought music there because music was really cheap. The one thing I quickly learned in America is that music was so cheap in relation to what it was in the UK because of the exchange rate. When I first went there, you know what it was? It was $2.66 to the pound. Now it’s almost $1.20. It was amazing, so I’m like a dollar millionaire, so I’m a kid in a sweetshop, every shop I’m loading up trolleys, buying everything. I noticed all the kids there bought two copies of everything, which contributed to the record sales, because in the UK kids didn’t buy two copies, they just bought one. But in the States, all the kids bought two copies of everything. Because my uncle ran Dr Wax, he was in the record pool, so you got sent all the promos of everything that was sent out, so he was sent two copies of everything. But I already had single versions of the records, because I was a 45 collector, that’s all I could afford. So, when I went there I could get albums and it was really then that I became a serious 12” collector.

The 12” was first created in 1976, became commercially available as a format, just like the cassette was to follow a few years later and the CD later. But the 12” was a revolution for DJs, the sound quality for playing out. Before that they played a three-minute 45, which was designed for radio. The way it worked, no single was more than three minutes long, because three minutes was your allotted airplay, which you’d get for free. Anything over that and you had to pay. So that’s why the 45 was three minutes long, the edited version. But a three-minute song was no good in a nightclub, because it meant you had to come with a million records. Sometimes the 12” was so good it allowed the producer reinterpret or expand with seven or eight minutes of unbelievable music. It wasn’t necessarily designed to be listened to at home, it was designed to be danced to at night. I’m sure you guys know, there’s no better feeling than when a piece of music is touching you, it’s an ecstatic feeling. During the course of a night, when you’re hearing records that you may have been familiar with in the radio edit, then you go out that night and hear a completely full-blown version of how the music was intended to be made. It’s another experience altogether.

Emma Warren

Now, this record pool that your uncle was in must have been the same pool that all the disco DJs were in.

Norman Jay

Yeah, all the top US DJs were in, same as Larry Levan, same as everyone.

Emma Warren

So, can you tell us some of the records you picked up through this connection?

Norman Jay

In one fell swoop I got the entire back catalogue of Salsoul Records. All the major labels were putting out 12”s, which were loss-leaders; a lot weren’t commercially available. All the major record companies were all putting them out. But it was mainly the independent labels who were putting out forward-thinking and progressive music on the 12” format. It began to take over, because you’d hear selected tracks on an album that you’d like, then the DJ feedback would be: “You need to pick up side three of this Chic album, we’re all on it, we love it, but we can’t play it because it’s an album cut.” So the producer would go back in, reproduce the record and give it to the DJ on the day. But in those days it was quite political, because the DJs would be paid. The record companies would go in and hype records, play them on the radio for money.

Emma Warren

This is the payola scandal.

Norman Jay

Payola, yes. This meant nothing to us in the UK because we played it purely out of love. When we started a pirate station we never did it for money, we ran serious risks of losing all our records, all our equipment, but we still did it.

Emma Warren

Can you select something that came back to the UK through you in this period? Then it would be really nice to ask about those early days of Kiss.

Norman Jay

Think I can. This is a tune that came out and did nothing in the beginning, but it was us in the UK who got onto this and made it big, sold it back to America. It’s Eighties Ladies “Turned on to You”, a Roy Ayers production. These are all random selections. Good sample material there.

(music: Eighties Ladies – “Turned On To You”)

Emma Warren

You just mentioned briefly about Kiss and about taking serious risks to do it. It’s the opposite of being paid to play something, this could’ve cost you dearly, not just in terms of equipment, but also your own liberty.

Norman Jay

All the DJs used to spend their own money, go out and buy their own records, just to play on the radio and share the love.

Emma Warren

The modern idea, the classic idea of the pirate radio is that it’s people in the tower block, having to find a place, a little kitchen or wherever they can set up their stuff. What was the set-up in the early days at Kiss?

Norman Jay

We had to get an aerial at the highest point in London we could that would beam out across London. I don’t know if you guys are familiar with London and how it works, but all roads lead to Crystal Place and the mast in South London. You couldn’t get to put your aerial up there, but within a two- or three-mile radius, because this is the highest part of London, but on a good day I’m sure you can see the mast flashing. It’s the main mast in the country for everyone from Radio 1 down to the World Service, it beams it across different masts around the country, it all comes from Crystal Palace. So we’d be on the roofs of those big Victorian houses in Charlton, Sydenham, Crystal Palace in the snow putting our little transmitter on the roof, which would just about get us on the low frequency around London. It was amazing, exciting times, highly risky – every couple of weeks we’d have to move to new studios, kick open the door in an old council flat. I remember, once we set up the studio, third floor in a condemned building in Charlton High Street. There were no floorboards, just the rafters, and in those days we were pursued by the agent from the DTI, it became a cat and mouse with them, because they had the technology to trace where our signal was coming from. We had quite advanced technology, compared to all the other pirates. True story: one of the DTI’s chief engineers got paid by the day to shut down pirate stations and at night time he was helping us.

Emma Warren

I think we should all salute that man.

Norman Jay

Yeah, Piers was great, because he loved what we were doing, but obviously he couldn’t officially say so. So, in the daytime he was working for the DTI, and he was the one who invented the remote radio link – it gave us about one hour’s warning that they were coming. It enabled us to check that the DTI had sussed us and were on their way to close us down. So, it gave us enough time to shut down the link at our end and have about an hour’s getaway time before they got near the building. That’s why Kiss very seldom got busted in the early days. But on occasion it came close. One time I was doing a show on a Tuesday night, looking down three floors, because there were no floorboards, because we took the last bit of staircase away. We had to escape through a parting wall into someone else’s flats. It was a mad time, but really exciting. They didn’t really want to bust us, because there was a plethora of stations like Horizon and a couple of others. Kiss was definitely the most forward, the most organized and the most listened to. We had a huge [following]. Remember, we were still underground, London had never had a station like that. Anyone who was under 21 was locked into Kiss. My peer group DJs would’ve included Jazzie B from Soul II Soul, Judge Jules from Radio 1, Coldcut, Matt Black and Jonathan More. And they were just like me, all young and had something to say, all driven by a common love of music. Obviously, it created a cycle for Radio 1 to come in and poach all those DJs, who went onto to have careers on Radio 1.

Emma Warren

On the music archiving site Test Pressing, they’ve just put out the letters that Kiss sent out to their mailing list of about three-and-a-half thousand people. It’s got some editorial chat, things like: “We keep getting busted, we think it’s DTI but there may be outside forces at work.” Very mysterious.

Norman Jay

There was a lot of rivalry in those days. Rival stations would get on to the police and say: “Kiss are operating from that street, that house in that part of London,” just to get you off the air. There was quite a lot of that going on. The “pirate wars,” as they called it.

Emma Warren

That’s just the soundsystem thing again, getting someone’s gear nicked, it’s not so different from what was going on in the decades before you.

Norman Jay

I think I can honestly say one of the reasons why Kiss stood apart from the rest – I know because I took it on myself to recruit the DJs – we were truly multi-cultural. We had black DJs, we had white DJs, we had Asian DJs. At that time no one else dared do anything like that. We gave a platform to young black kids, young Asian kids, young disadvantaged kids. Normally, the radio stations that went before were the privilege of rich kids, middle-class college kids, who had the money and the wherewithal to set it up. We were urban, we were real. We had rich kids from Hampstead doing shows next to kids from estates in Peckham. The one thing we had in common was the music.

Emma Warren

Were you influenced by Dread Lepke and the Dread Broadcasting Corporation?

Norman Jay

DBC? Sort of. DBC was a Ladbroke Grove Carnival station that came on air around about the time Carnival was on. They were given a temporary license for two or three days around then, and they had a huge cult following. Then after a while, they used to come on stream without the license, which a lot of us did because the license was too restrictive. But breaking the law and the license requirements meant it would prejudice you down the line, if you wanted to make an application to become legal, which is what everyone still wants. That is another major plus of making music or being part of the clubbing fraternity in the UK. For some reason the UK is still the only place in the world where you can come on and start a radio station illegally and broadcast music.

Still, the only free country in the world where you can do that. In China there’s a mandatory death sentence if you’re caught broadcasting illegally. In Australia it’s a mandatory life sentence. In America… boy, you don’t want to play with the people there when it comes to illegal broadcasting. Most countries in the world have a zero tolerance when it comes to broadcasting. I don’t know if you watch any old films, what’s the first thing they always take when there’s a coup in a country? The radio or television station because its access to millions of people. So, governments around the world are really stringent on that. I’m just glad in the UK they’re pretty lax.

You can turn on your radio now, playing whatever you want, the A to Z of music. There’s some proper yardie nonsense, there’s Asian things going on. Providing you don’t get overtly political, the British authorities kind of let it go. But in most countries around the world, under no circumstances do they tolerate that. And the plus of that is that we’re still able to have illegal stations on the FM band, which means there’s still a platform for guys like you, young aspiring music makers.

In the first instance, that’s the first place your music gets heard. Now we’ve got internet radio, but for me the jury’s still out on internet radio because you need to have a computer to listen to it. AM/FM is in 12 million cars, it’s in every factory workplace. Until the internet radio is on something you can put in your car, then it’s a pointless exercise. But you drive around in your car in London, go the margins of the dial, you’ll hear reggae, you’ll hear dubstep, you’ll hear someone who can’t even speak English properly telling you about his tune or for his mate to email in, text in, some nonsense. But there are some people doing some really good things on that. Fundamentally, we retain the platform for guys like you to get your music heard.

Emma Warren

There’s another station now that is in a very similar position to Kiss before it went legal. Rinse FM is not quite as broad in its music as Kiss, but certainly as important in terms of representing, curating and presenting street music, dance music, electronic music. They’re applying for a license, going through that whole process. Given what you know about that transition, what would your advice be to those people, in terms of maintaining what’s good about a pirate in a legal format?

Norman Jay

It’s nothing to do with music. It’s about access to people is a commercial medium – it’s nothing to do with music. I learned that the day after Kiss got its media license, it’s got nothing to do with music. Radio stations in this country, all you are is an unpaid servant of the government. All you are doing is building a radio station, which will eventually get sucked up by the big players, that’s how it runs. Instead of some huge publishing company spending their money at the grassroots for some kids in their bedrooms to come and run radio stations, all you’re doing is building another part of their portfolio, which five or ten years down the line, once you’re successful, they come in with a hostile bid, which you’re never going to be able to refuse. I know from personal experience, it’s about controlling access to people. If it’s not government doing it, it’s private enterprise who works with the government. As much as things are free, they are not free, there’s always a cost somewhere that someone pays. No such thing as free when it comes to access to the media. If there were, we’d all be building our own television station. Once the station is perceived as being a threat to the national interest, it either comes off, or it gets bought and controlled. Straight away. So, it’s something those guys need to bear in mind. You’re young, idealistic, let’s start a radio station. All you’re doing is the legwork for companies who come in and take it over.

Emma Warren

You just mentioned national security… what do you mean?

Norman Jay

It’s a perceived threat. It’s uncontrolled.

Emma Warren

What is threatening about a music station?

Norman Jay

There’s nothing intrinsically threatening in the music itself, but if someone comes on there, spouting a political view or a religious view, it’s very easy to turn the mic down and say: “Hey, talk some language.” Someone only has to hear that and report it to set the train in motion.

Emma Warren

So, do you believe it’s not possible on mainstream radio to hold a strong opinion about anything?

Norman Jay

It’s not, for the same reason 6 Music is going and the Asian Network is going. It’s about control and, I guess, that goes for most things in this country. If you are small and non-threatening, you are tolerated. If you grow too big, time to be pulled down. You guys know what I’m saying, the whole western world works like that.

Emma Warren

I suppose, that’s why lots of things you’ve done have been niche, big enough to affect hundreds of thousands of people…

Norman Jay

I flirt with the mainstream but I’m not mainstream.

Emma Warren

But not big enough to affect things directly.

Norman Jay

That’s why they’re trying to control the internet. Because for the first time, what we’re doing here, someone could put this up in an hour and potentially millions of people could tune in, right here, right now, with no government control, breaking down all barriers.

Emma Warren

But in terms of the things you’ve done, like the warehouse parties, the club High on Hope, the regular spot at Carnival, do you think part of the reason it’s been powerful is because it was aimed at the hundreds of thousands rather than the millions?

Norman Jay

It was before the information age. That’s why I’m so grateful, I got away with murder before the information age, before the internet, before CCTV. I used to break into warehouses before putting on parties, around here, all over London. That’s what made my reputation. I didn’t have a Facebook, but I had a fat phone book, I’d make 500 phone calls on a Friday telling people I’m having a party on Saturday. I had a pirate radio station, I had a show, where I wouldn’t give out the address, I’d give out the postcode in code. Those who knew, got it. Those who didn’t wondered what they’d missed Monday morning.

Emma Warren

What was the code?

Norman Jay

If I’m doing a party in Hampstead, everyone knows the postcode is NW6. I’m not gonna do a party in SE27. There are certain desirable postcodes around London, just like the postcode lottery. If I do a party in NW3, I know I’m going to have loads of posh middle-class kids there. If I’m doing a party in W12, it’s Shepherd’s Bush. If I’m doing a party in E6, it’s Hackney. You give little codes, things that kids who are switched on would know.

Emma Warren

So you’d give a postcode out.

Norman Jay

Yeah, not the address because the parties I was doing were illegal.

Emma Warren

Now, we know how people found raves in the late ’80s, they had to go to a phone box and ring this number. Were the Shake ’n’ Fingerpop parties the same, because in my mind that was before?

Norman Jay

That was just before.

Emma Warren

I know it was just before, but I don’t know how it worked.

Norman Jay

Like I said, I had a fat phonebook, I’d ring people and tell them to ring people. These are the coordinates, this is where it’s happening.

Emma Warren

So when you phoned them you’d give them the details.

Norman Jay

Yes.

Emma Warren

And these Shake ’n’ Fingerpop parties were, again, massively influential with Soul II Soul, all these people who came of age at a similar time to you.

Norman Jay

I didn’t know at the time, but the parties I was doing, the first generation of UK hip-hop producers and DJs used to attend, the first generation of jungle producers and DJs used to attend. I know this now because when I meet people like Fabioand Grooverider they say: “I used to come to your raves when I was a kid.” Which is really flattering. “The stuff you did back then inspired us to go on and do what I did.”

Emma Warren

I asked you about High On Hope as well, but do you have a Shake ’n’ Fingerpop classic?

Norman Jay

These are all names, alter egos. I’m no marketing man, but I know how to market what I do and how to get it out there. I always held the view that the perception is the reality – it’s how you’re perceived.

Emma Warren

So do you have a Shake ’n’ Fingerpop classic?

Norman Jay

I could get Benji to shout one out. Benji, you’re a child of Shake ’n’ Fingerpop. And while it’s playing, I can run to the toilet because I’m bursting to go.

Emma Warren

As you’re scrolling, if you pass through a High on Hope classic, we could just jump straight to Dingwalls.

Norman Jay

I think you need to explain to them what High on Hope was.

Emma Warren

We will, if you find the tune. If you don’t we’re Shake ’n’ Fingerpopping.

Norman Jay

I’m still looking, I’m useless at this.

Emma Warren

Well, you keep looking and while you’re doing that, tell them about the connection between Shake ’n’ Fingerpop and Young Disciples).

Norman Jay

In 1989, I hadn’t worked. Well, I’d never held down a day job for about seven years. Then I got a call while I was in New York at my aunt’s house, from my mate Gilles Peterson. I’m sure you all know who Gilles is, esteemed jazz DJ. Gilles had somehow got my aunt’s number, rang me while I was in America and said PolyGram Records were interested in hiring him to head up a new label, as senior A&R man. He suggested they get me to come in and run a sister label at the same time. I was very skeptical about that. I’m enjoying my freedom, I don’t know if I want to do a nine-to-five job working for a record company. But I got loads of calls from Gilles and the record company people, until they made me an offer I couldn’t resist. When I got back, I went on to form Talkin’ Loud records with Gilles, and I had my own sister label, High On Hope. So, Gilles was to sign and put out the acts and music he wanted to make, which was slightly left-of-center, and I guess mine was a little bit more accessible. I won’t say mainstream, because it was more accessible, but black music. I quickly realized in my first week that there was gonna be no future doing that together. I realized the way record companies worked, Gilles and I would’ve been at each other’s throats a year down the line, fighting each other for the same resources. So we thought it would be better if we joined forces, form one label and make that label kick out, and that was Talkin’ Loud. So that’s what we did. Trying to find the tune for you here. Here’s a classic Shake ’n’ Fingerpop tune, actually. I’m gonna go to the toilet while you listen to this. That was already an old tune when I heard it.

(music: unknown)

Emma Warren

It seems like that’s been a thread as well, playing old music and fresh stuff. We should talk about Talkin’ Loud and some of the stuff you signed and feel responsible for in a good way. Then we should hand it over to you guys, and you can ask what you want. Which of the artists you brought into Talkin’ Loud do you feel particularly proud of having brought in?

Norman Jay

Gilles and I were fortunate enough to sign and nurture a number of UK acts. It’s difficult for me to recall them all now, but if you Google Talkin’ Loud records and the roster, you’ll find them. Essentially, Gilles and I talked at length about how we were going to run this record label. We were both new, both fledgling, never done it before, and we were given a golden opportunity and a fat budget to go out there and start a record label, backed by a major company like PolyGram. What we agreed to do was, essentially, sign our mates, apportion them a budget and let them make tunes we thought we could go out and sell. That was the premise. At that time the perception was Talkin’ Loud was uber-hip… so hip it hurts. Among our peer group, Gilles was running a very successful night in Camden, the Sunday Afternoon jazz sessions, and, at the same venue on a Thursday night, I was running the most forward house music club at the time in the UK, largely through the connections I had with artists coming out of New York and New Jersey. I would get first dibs on all the dubplates.

So, we pooled this knowledge into Talkin’ Loud, signed up our friends and put out a sampler album, which contained the first tracks from Galliano, Young Disciples, I can’t remember, one or two others who did instrumental-based tracks. But this was a sampler that said to clubland and the music world at large, “This is Talkin’ Loud – this is what we’re about.” We had cool packaging, a cool young marketing guy who understood where we wanted to place our artists. The perception of Talkin’ Loud was so cool that all the young music-makers around the country wanted to sign with us. And a couple of people who came out of the amalgamation, where rare groove morphed into the acid jazz scene… we gave birth to people like Jamiroquai, who I’m sure you’ll all know, 50 million albums later. We couldn’t sign him to Talkin’ Loud for various reasons. I knew Jay personally. Again, the whole point of Talkin’ Loud was to sign our close friends, who we knew were talented, give them a budget, let them go in with a producer and come up with something we were all gonna like and hopefully were able to sell out there.

We had a few artists who were very successful in our first year. That was both a blessing and curse. In our first year of operation we had three national top ten records, which put the focus right on us. I don’t know if you are familiar with a singer called Omar, who sang “There’s Nothing Like This”. I signed that record and made that tune with him, and put it out on Talkin’ Loud. We signed a UK band called Incognito, who still gig around the country, and made a cover of a record called “Always There”, which became a massive chart hit. Another group we signed, it was essentially a studio group, with two DJs and a female vocalist called the Young Disciples. They did a tune called “Apparently Nothing” Seminal records.

We had three hit records out of the bag, which put a lot of pressure on us, because suddenly we had a record company saying: “We want more chart hits like this.” On the other hand, we had our artists saying: “We’re not pop stars, we don’t wanna be making records for pop consumption.” It was a very fine balancing act and, for me, the stress became intolerable. Because we’d signed our friends, it got a bit personal. We were having issues with the management, the usual rivalries you get in big companies. So, after four years I left, Gilles continued it and continued the second phase, which was arguably more successful.

In the second phase of Talkin’ Loud, the latter half of the ’90s, he signed Roni Size – and we all know how big Roni Size became worldwide – and there were a few other acts as well. The importance of Talkin’ Loud, regarding music and UK club culture, can’t be overstated. Even though I was part of the initial set-up, and it’s something I’m proud to have been part of, for me, ultimately, I didn’t want to become head of PolyGram Records. I’m a DJ first and foremost, it’s my first love and I never harbored any intention of making records, which is why I’ve only done about ten remixes in my life. I still get loads of invitations to remix records, but that’s why I never got into the studio to make records, even though I’ve A&Red loads of serious projects and overseen other peripheral bands who’ve made big records. I’ve had an invisible hand in [everything] from Paul Weller downwards, so I do have credentials, but you won’t see them on records.

Emma Warren

We’ll pass it to you guys in a minute, but you were awarded an MBE in 2002. An MBE is an award the Queen gives twice a year out to people she and her government feel deserve special recognition. It’s a national honor, most countries have national honors. I know that you got it, but I know something about MBEs because my dad got an MBE too. But he died before he got it, so I collected it from the Queen, which was a very surreal experience for me. My abiding memory of the Queen is that she speaks like Yoda.

Norman Jay

Yeah. You’re good, you remembered it.

Emma Warren

She speaks in this very odd way, it was a very strange moment. I was standing there while she was asking me questions but the words were in a funny order. Was that just me?

Norman Jay

No, I had a similar experience. I went, but I wasn’t overawed by it. When I got the news I was being awarded an MBE I thought it was a gameshow hoax. I almost lost it, because you only get two weeks to formally accept it and they hadn’t heard from me, so they presumed I was rejecting it. I was never gonna refuse an honor like that, not because I wanna meet the Queen, but because it’s the highest form of recognition you can possibly get. DJ polls don’t mean a thing to me, but when the monarch of your country decides you’ve done something really positive, for me, that’s the best accolade you can get. I’m now able to use that in a positive way to demonstrate to youths on the street, black, white, whatever, who normally wouldn’t even look you in the eye, come up to me and say: “You’re that DJ, innit? Respect, man.” I get older members of the community who come up to me and say: “I respect what you’ve done,” because to this day I’m still the only DJ in the world who’s been given an MBE for services to music. Even though they created that one especially for me, they gave it to me. It doesn’t matter, I don’t really care.

[applause]

Emma Warren

It’s for you and all the things you stand for, isn’t it?

Norman Jay

Sure. I use it in a positive way – as a shining example to anyone that, no matter where you come from. If you put in the effort and the hard work, ultimately you’ll be recognized for it. That’s the pay-off. I know all you guys love music, but if you didn’t want to be recognized for it, you wouldn’t be here. There’s no point in doing what you do, unless there’s recognition from your peer group, or a wider audience, saying they respect what you’ve done. That’s even more important than the money. Yes, I make a good living, I’ve had a long career, I’m really fortunate. I’m the last of the old bastards out there who’s still doing it, still on top of my game.

Every day it’s a learning process. The music business is funny, as you guys will know or you will discover. It’s not a joke business, it’s not called music business for nothing. You can have all the music you want, but at the end of the day it’s a business, you’ve got to sell music. I don’t know how your generation is going to do it, because the moment you’ve got music on the internet, you’ve lost the means of ownership, the means of exploiting your labor. I’m thankful I came from an era when you got paid for what you were doing. I’ve got nephews who don’t understand the concept of buying music, they think it’s free, a click and a download for them. I don’t know where that leaves you guys, but as an art form, you must continue to crack on and do what you do. I’m sure that in six month, a year, five, six years from now I’ll be playing music from someone in this audience, someone who’s gone on to massive heights. And you’ll turn around and say: “I remember when you gave that lecture at the Red Bull Music Academy.” If any of you guys make it to where you want to go, I hope our paths cross in the future and you remember this meeting. So, I respect everyone in the room.

Emma Warren

And to you.

[applause]

So, we should pass the mic out for questions.

Norman Jay

This is no time to be shy or coy, guys. If you want to ask a question, fire away.

Audience member

Don’t worry. There are a lot of pirate radio representatives in this room, Rinse FM. The UK is still the only place that has pirate radio culture and, I guess, it’s no coincidence that the club culture is still the strongest. I’m from Portugal, but we no longer have pirate radio. Would you advise me to go back to Lisbon and start broadcasting illegally?

Norman Jay

It depends what the consequences of your actions are.

Audience member

I’d get arrested.

Norman Jay

The next step down is on the internet, but the only problem is that you’ve got no way of quantifying who’s listening.

Audience member

But you can’t listen to the internet in your car, unless you’re on a computer or phone.

Norman Jay

But you should be reassured in the knowledge that someone’s listening, somebody out there is appreciating, and you’re impacting on someone’s life in a positive way, basically giving them music that they hitherto could never hear or access. It doesn’t matter if you’ve got one or one million listeners, it’s still worth doing what you do. Don’t give it up.

Audience member

I guess, a large part of your influence revolved around various radio shows on different stations. We’ve touched on internet radio, but no one really knows where it’s going. There are a lot of people in this room who put out new music constantly. It strikes me that radio seems a lot more important here in the UK than elsewhere in the world. We touched on the States… music on the radio being about paid for. How do you see it in the next ten years, as music is much more accessible? And besides, the niche people in this room that listen to Benji’s show, how do you see that process evolving? Will radio on the FM/AM band still be a relevant means of finding new music in 10 or 20 years’ time?

Norman Jay

It’s a great question and it could take me hours to give you a well-thought-out response to that. It’s a difficult one for radio, in regards to music. I don’t personally see radio playing as important a role in the future as it did before, purely because there are more of us now who have ownership of more music than we’ve ever owned. I might have a warehouse full of music at home and a thousand songs on an iPod this big. They’ll make it smaller. Access to music has never been greater than it is now. It’s weird how it works: the more music you have access to, the more you own, the less you value it. When the roles were reversed, you had to be more proactive and sift, and go out and find what you wanted, that journey would help you meet like-minded people. It’s reversed now, where it’s so accessible as to have little or fast-depreciating value. It will always mean lots to those of us who love it, but there’s less emotional connection with the music. You might put more music on the radio, but less and less people will be listening to it. As there are more diverse strands of music, it doesn’t necessarily make the cake bigger, it makes the slices thinner.

Audience member

So, do you think the internet’s for everybody and that radio will go the way of vinyl…?

Norman Jay

Not strictly speaking, but for underground or less commercial music. Mainstream music will always have a place on mainstream radio. Every year, the music mutates and subdivides into something else, which by its very nature means it’s gonna have even less appeal. If there are only 100 people listening, subdivide that and 50 people are listening. Subdivide that again and only 25 people are listening to it. Each group goes off and listens to whatever it is they are into and the whole lot becomes affected by that. Instead of 100% of the people listening to 100% of the music all of the time, you’ve got little groups that may be good for people who are just starting out, or people who want to create something new. But the logical conclusion is, you want your music to reach as many people as possible, but it’s never gonna do that in a time when people are hearing more and more music, which is becoming less and less meaningful to them.

Couple that with the fact that this generation doesn’t spend as much time as it should doing things – the concentration levels… I just watch my kids and nephews. I would sit down like a geek, really concentrate on it. Now it’s fast-forward, fast-forward, there’s no attention span. You want to make some music that says something? You ain’t saying that in 30 seconds. You might say it in six minutes, eight minutes, but who has got the time or inclination to want to listen to something that long? I don’t know if that answers your question. I just think in the future it’s all about the download, the personalization of music, whereas when we only had one source, everyone listened to the same music all the time.

There are pluses and minuses in there, but the more music you offer, the more you diminish the cake. Unless you get more people to come and stream, and I guess, potentially the internet can do that, because before you were just playing for Londoners, and now the whole world can hear that. But the people at the other end of the world now have the same means as you to make music and broadcast. Why should they be listening to you? When they didn’t have access, they were forced to come round to your way of thinking. Now they don’t have to rely on it – they have the ability to make and listen to music themselves, so why should they be listening to ours? I hope that answers your question, in a roundabout way.

Emma Warren

Any more questions?

Audience member

When you’re saying: “Why should anyone listen to our music now?” They have the means…

Norman Jay

I don’t mean that in a disrespectful way.

Audience member

No, I understand you mean people have the power to listen to what they like, they don’t have to be submerged into a radio station and listen to other people’s taste. But that depends on the artist being creative and making new things. If people are into music and dial into their radio station, maybe they’ll discover this new sound they’ve never heard before, or wouldn’t hear if they just stuck to their iPod playlist. The download is the thing right now, but what do you think comes after that? There’s no money in making tracks for download.

Norman Jay

No, I agree with you. You aspire to make music. The moment your music is on the internet, you’ve effectively lost it, you’ve lost the means of control and exploiting your repertoire. It may be different for big bands, which takes me back to another point you just made. It’s alright to be a creative artist, but in the 21st century there needs to be a lot more to you than that. It’s not simply about making music and you’re the most boring, monosyllabic person in the world. Look at people who are successful, they’re on top of their game in all aspects: the entertainment, perception, marketing. It’s not just about being creative in its purest form.

Audience member

Yeah, it’s a little bit antiquated just to make music, artists should transcend in other areas. I was reading about this new thing called non- cochlear sound, which is non-musical music. It’s sound, but it’s not all about the music, it has different sociological aspects, maybe philosophical aspects. It just expands the view of the sound, instead of just listening for the aesthetic pleasure.

Norman Jay

The people who buy millions of records, they’re simply in it for the aesthetic pleasure. They’re not interested in anything further than that. Music is not a science, it’s merely a soundtrack to their lives so they can get on with everything. It’s as simple and uncomplicated as that, which is why the most successful records will be those records. At the other end of the spectrum, it’s deep, introspective, you read into music what you want. For some, music is a science. For others, music is an emotional experience.

Audience member

The most successful artists have to find a happy medium between both.

Norman Jay

Sure, it’s a life balance, isn’t it?

Emma Warren

Do we have any more questions?

Audience member

Everyone knows music sales are down on what they were. Do you think people involved in radio – I’m not pointing the finger at you – down the years should take more responsibility to educate the younger producers? Just because music sales are down, it doesn’t mean you earn any less from music, it just means you earn in different ways. Collection societies, for instance, the importance of PRS. Do you think people should focus their attention on educating people about that side?

Norman Jay

In the first instance, people have to want to be educated. The problem within the business, and the people who are outside, the customers, it’s very easy to lose sight of why people buy music. It’s easy to sit in a forum discussing how to make it. As an A&R man, I used to turn and around and say: “Who are the people who are gonna buy this? Why should they be interested in it? You explain to me why some kid in the arse-end of England should spend his dole money on your record?” And 99% of those people couldn’t give me a satisfactory answer.

Emma Warren

What would’ve been a good answer?

Norman Jay

I’m not particularly looking for an answer, I used to explain to them why. You could give someone a budget of £100,000, £1 million, go away and make the most fantastic record in the world, you can spend nine months making it. I used to say to the kids that you can spend all that time making that record, all that time packaging it, Joe Bloggs comes into a record shop and says: “What’s new, mate?” “An album by this band.” He pulls it out of the sleeve, puts the needle on, three seconds in, next track. “Don’t like that. Next.” Now, that negated all that money, all that effort, all that nine months or the year you spent making that, in those three seconds all that creative work is dismissed. At the same time: “We’ve got a record by DJ Donut.” Crap record, took him two seconds to make, put it on, bosh! This tune is flying out. You can’t work that out so, of course, it’s gonna piss off the creative person who’s put all his time, his craft, his energy into it. DJ Donut pressed a couple of buttons, it’s on all the playlists, suddenly his record is selling, it’s running out the door.

If I knew how to do that, I’d be putting out those records all the time, because it’s those crap records that pay for the failures of the creative people. Everything has its place in the scheme of things. I used to tell people: “I can’t give you a budget, unless Elton John sells half a million records,” because he was on the same label. I have to use the money that he brings in, in order to facilitate you having the money to make your album. It’s a difficult call, that one, when I put it in that perspective, I wasn’t always right. People would go in the CD shop, or when you’re downloading music from a website, what window do they give you? Twenty or 30 seconds to make your mind up whether you like it or not? How are you gonna make an informed decision in that time?

Emma Warren

I think we’ve got one more question… Benji.

Benji B

Hello, Norman. I know you’re running out of time but I felt you couldn’t finish the lecture without talking about Notting Hill Carnival. For those of us in London, you’ve been lucky enough to have one of the longest-running static soundsystems, and obviously there are a lot of people here who’ve never been to Carnival, so I thought we should talk about how important that is…

Norman Jay

For me, this will be my 30th year at Notting Hill Carnival. For those who don’t know, it happens at the end of August, the bank holiday. It’s basically a Caribbean multi-cultural festival of a number of static soundsystems, of which I’m one. Soca, calypso, the Caribbean experience in London. When I first went there in August 1980, we were young, fearless, naive, and in those days bringing your soundsystem into Carnival meant you were taking your life in your hands, it was a very risky place to go. But, for me and my brother, it was a real baptism of fire. I was the first person to go in and break the music tradition, which was essentially reggae, soca, calypso. Norman Jay just gets back from a trip from New York and I’m playing electro, hip-hop and disco and jazz, completely against the grain.

For the first few years I faced a fearsome, sometimes violent reaction. But I carried on, because I had a fundamental belief that what I was doing was right. I broke the mold of the reggae soundsystems – I was the first to come in and play disco, soul and latterly house in the mid-’80s, and we were able to grow a massive street following. This August will be our 30th anniversary, and we’re still the biggest attraction there by a long way – anyone who’s been will verify that. We’ll still be there in the streets, playing all the genres we’ve always celebrated. Carnival, for me, the traditional rules of DJing doesn’t apply. I play what I feel my crowds will like, it’s quite an indulgent weekend for me. Most days of the year, I get hired by festivals, clubs, and I go there to do the job they want me to do. If you want house, I’ll play two hours of house. If you want hip-hop, I’ll play two hours of hip-hop. I’ll play whatever music I like that you want me to play. But at Carnival all that goes out the window, primarily because it’s a free event and we’re surrounded by 4,000 to 5,000 people – and it could easily be five times that if we had the space – but we’re surrounded by 5,000 people on both days and it’s the only place in the world with such a huge audience of, not just clubbers, but people with no interest in music, everyday people, who just comes down to experience music with like-minded people, breaking down all barriers. I always said the crowd around Good Times is the best Coca-Cola advert, if they filmed it. You see white faces, turbans, yellow faces, you’ll see Muslims, you’ll see Jews, you’ll see blacks everybody partying down to music. Very few places can create that kind of unity. It’s a great soundtrack. At 12 PM, when I start, you’ll hear Miles Davis. By 7 PM, when I finish, it’s some hands-in-the-air, big commercial tune going down.

I freely say to you, it’s one thing to be uber-cool and up your arses about doing what you do, but the most difficult thing when you’re playing to audiences is knowing when to be obvious. That’s the mark of a really good DJ who’s not frightened to play obvious records when the mood of the crowd needs it. Instead of just: “This is what I’m about – you will listen to this because I think it’s cool.” A lot of DJs are just playing for their peer group and their mates. That’s fine if everyone who’s come has got in for free. But when people pay their money, travel a long way, sometimes have to come through the rigmarole of a wanker on the door who tells them they can’t come in because they don’t look right, having to queue up to put their coat in the cloakroom, comes on the dancefloor and some wanker DJ goes: “This is what I’m about. Like it or f--- off.”

“Give me my money back.”

That’s a DJ who’ll be working in a bar in front of three people in three months’ time. You have a duty of care to please the crowd. It’s like life – it’s a balance. Sometimes they’ll trust you because you’ve given them something they didn’t even know they wanted, but they need it. Once you’ve given them what they want, then they’re much more likely to accept what you want to give them. If kids want to be preached to, they go to school. You’re not there to teach, you’re there to entertain, and through the entertainment you subliminally teach. Saturday night is about entertainment, no pressures, it’s a release. Give them what they want. Sometimes they don’t even know, but give them what they want. If you want to, run a little night on a Monday or Tuesday, the arse-end of the week in a little place where your die-hards and mates will come. That way, you’ll learn your trade, learn your craft, so when success comes your way, you’re ready for the big arenas, the big events because you’ve learnt. It ain’t about coming straight out of your bedroom, being thrust in front of 5,000 people and thinking you can cut it. It’s never happening.

Emma Warren

And on that note of the importance of graft, I think we should say thank you to Norman Jay…

Norman Jay

Thanks guys.