interview

02/02/04
brought to you by pieman

PieMan: i was a kid in sunderland in '83, which seemed a million miles from the front line.. i'd love to to get more feel for what was going on... although these are very different times, the stuff we play at seen owes a lot to the anything goes attitude and sounds that we know from that era.. now everything is so compartmentalized it seems theres a kind of void where anything which doesn't conform to one particular style easily get lost. but this stuff to me is the most interesting. and the stuff u talk about seems to hold the roots of it all.

GregWilson: As Norman Cook says in his interview on the electrofunkroots site, we used to call it black music rather than dance music. All the various styles came under that one umbrella term. Even on a jazz-funk night, soul, disco and funk, plus tracks that are now termed boogie or Italo, were played side by side along with the jazzier stuff. We never thought twice about this, it was just the way it was. It made sense to play the best of all the available styles and work through a whole range of tempos. Even when I became known for electro-funk, I never played it exclusively, all the other ingredients remained an important part of my nights.

The first schism was probably when the breakdancing scene kicked in; with the UK hip hop movement eventually emerging as a result. The non-breakers, so to speak, would go on to form the basis of the early Manchester house crowd. However, the lines were still blurred (i.e. - Stu Allan on Piccadilly Radio would play hip hop and house together on his own highly influential radio show, and there wasn't anything like the total separation in the clubs that came later). Following the acid-house explosion things began to sub-divide, and throughout the 90's this became ridiculous, with otherwise related styles being separated by what were often minor details.

As a result, a 'DJ set' could often sound like one long record, with only a slight change in tempo (fast to faster) and rarely any spontaneity... what George Clinton would famously call 'making love with one stroke'

An article I wrote, which relates to this subject, called 'A Mixed Up Time' recently went online at the New York site, Perfect Sound Forever. Fortunately change is in the air and now

"a new underground is beginning to emerge that has, as you point out, more in common with the eclecticism of the pre-rave era than it does with the past decade and a half."

PM: u know, growing up in the early 90s, with selective amnesia i came to hate the shiny plastic happiness that the 80s represented to me... so when its influence began to show through again in the last few years especially i went into full denial... but recently, while looking around for inspiration, i'm finding it in what i thought i hated. I guess this is probably typical of a lot of people my generation...

who were your dj inspirations in the early eighties?

GW: I was definitely inspired by the remix DJ's whose names turned up on the records I was playing. Larry Levan, Francois Kevorkian, 'Jellybean' Benitez and Shep Pettibone were the ones I really picked up on. Also Tee Scott, whose name was actually in the title of two records I used to play, 'Tee's Happy' (Northend) and 'Tee's Right' (Michelle Wallace), which was pretty impressive!

It wasn't until a bit later that we learnt more about these DJ's, there were bits of information, but the jigsaw was yet to be put together over here. Grandmaster Flash was obviously another - he was known via the records he put out with the Furious Five, but the culture of hip hop was a mystery until Malcolm McLaren's 'Buffalo Gals' video came along and blew our minds!

Having realised that DJ's were mixing so many of these great tunes that were coming out of New York, I tried to persuade my contacts in the London record companies to let me have a go at remixing myself. Although I knew pretty much everyone within the various club promotion departments it was always the same brick wall - English DJ's don't remix, it's an American thing. It sounds ridiculous now, but that's the way it was at the time. Eventually I hooked up with some musicians and began making original tracks. This is how the Street Sounds 'UK Electro' album came about. I hadn't set out to make my own records, but, being unable to get any remix work, it was the only way I could get into the studio, which is what I'd decided was the direction that I wanted to take.

Remember, this was at a time when the next step up the ladder for a British club DJ was to get on the radio, apart from that there weren't really any other options in terms of career advancement, except to maybe go into club management or something. When 'UK Electro' came out, much was made of the fact that a DJ was involved, it was still regarded as a novelty, and it wouldn't be for a few more years before the first wave of British remixers began to emerge.

PM: we've reached a point now where we can play techno, soul, hip hop and their hybrids together on the same dancefloor and create a party but sometimes its hard work to get new people's interest cos its not a house night, a 'breaks' night or a drum and bass night or whatever. so futureboogie is my dumb attempt to create a new anti-compartment. or something. bah!

GW: And a fine job you're doing! I'm sure that as the year moves on more and more younger people, already completely disillusioned with the current club scene, will find their way to nights like your own. I'm confident that this movement will really start to gain momentum, with people who are doing similar, but currently un-connected nights, up and down the country, beginning to increasingly link up. The very fact that you and I are discussing these things, having never met before, is the perfect example of how this process is already taking place.

The important thing is that the scene, when it properly emerges, stays true to its underground nature, at least until the new ideas I hope will result have the necessary time to fully develop, without mainstream interference. For it's from this fertile ground that a new direction will eventually come about, and that's what's the really important thing is.

"I think we're undoubtedly in a period of time where we have to go back and re-discover our roots, in order to move on to the next phase."

PM: has the recent revival of interest in you and the music u represent come as a suprise? when did u become aware that things had turned a full circle?

GW: During 2002, when I made the decision to become pro-active with regards to drawing people's attention to the early 80's period (beginning with the article 'Electro-Funk - What Did It All Mean?'), I really thought I'd be something of a lone voice. However, despite this, I felt that it was important that I made this move and shared the information I have, resulting from both direct experience and via my personal archives. Twenty years had passed and it was apparent that the longer the impact of this era was overlooked, the more detail would be lost, so with this in mind, the need to properly document it all became something of an obligation.

I was completely out of things as far as the club scene was concerned, so it came as quite a shock to realise that there was already a growing interest in this period. I was, and continue to be, overwhelmed by just how receptive people have been; I hadn't expected to come across so much like-mindedness.

Now it all makes sense in a what goes around comes around sort of way.

"It often takes the passage of time before the value of certain things become truly apparent. This doesn't just apply to clubs and music, but to pretty much everything. Sometimes you need some distance before you can view things with clarity."

Acid-house arrived with such a big bang, bringing Britain's underground club culture to mainstream attention. All of a sudden it seemed like everyone was into dance music and, amidst the ongoing celebration of the groove, heightened further, of course, by a little pill, people seemed to forget about the true circumstances that had brought this all about in the first place. Instead, a mythology was gradually built up around its origins, which has only recently begun to be properly questioned.

As a result, many younger clubbers are still under he assumption that the dance scene as we know it evolved out of Chicago and Detroit, I've even read articles about electro, which cite its birthplace as Detroit! As influential as these two great music cities were, it was New York that lit the blue touch paper.

As I've said before, the early 80's was the hybrid, a melting pot era when dance music was re-defining itself in the post-disco climate. This coincided with hip hop's emergence as a global force, via seminal figures like Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa, who, having started out at the Bronx block parties in the 70's, were now embracing the technology of the time to create a revolutionary new sound. There was also the whole No Wave punk/funk thing, which created yet another direction. New York was truly inspired, and everything that followed, with regards to dance music, owes its dues to this extraordinary period.

PM: and what has made you want to step up again? is it particular music u've heard? i read u say u didn't want to be known as a wheel 'em out retro classics dj. what kind of thing could people expect to hear from u now? have u got a masterplan? wots next?

GW: No masterplan, but I think I can see where I fit in once more. Music is ever evolving, so to be viewed as someone from a bygone age, coming back to spin the classic tunes for old times sake, was not the route I wanted to take. Every now and again this might be fine, but I didn't want to make a habit of it. At the same time I wasn't prepared to zoom in on one narrow form of contemporary dance music, put a 'set' together, and go out and trade on my former reputation. That was what was suggested to me on numerous occasions during the 90's, but, although I could have done with the money at times, I felt that this would have been contrary to what I believe.

But now, with this new underground philosophy of having a foot in the past, whilst keeping an eye on the future, the conditions are right for me to make a return. People want to hear the type of tunes I was playing back in the day, but at the same time I can include more current stuff, making the link between past and future. This connection is further highlighted by the equipment I use - a laptop (future), a reel-to-reel (past) and turntables (present). Back in the early 80's I was always viewed as being progressive in my approach to deejaying, so I suppose it's just an extension of this attitude. Tradition for the sake of tradition only leads to stagnation; to move things forward we have to be open to new ideas.

PM: can you tell us more about how u use tape edits in your dj sets...

GW: I'm very much into putting my own edits together. I was, as far as I'm aware, the first DJ to re-edit a track in this country, way back in '83 when Island put out a 12" promo by Paul Haig called 'Heaven Sent', which I'd cut-up at home. I seriously got into editing as a result of the radio mixes I did for Piccadilly in Manchester, buying my own Revox B77 reel-to-reel in 1982. Editing was a major part of what I was about when I moved on to producing records, 'UK Electro' was pretty much splice city! So, all these years on, I was especially interested to learn that there's a whole new generation of DJ's who are putting together their own re-edits to play in the clubs, nowadays using a mouse as opposed to a razor blade.

It goes without saying that this is a direction that appeals to me. I like the idea of older tracks being given a contemporary twist, but without losing the essence of what they were originally intended to be (unlike remixed updates, which more than often put square pegs into round holes),

In this way the clubs who play these re-edits, even if they're completely oldies based, cease to be purely retrospective. Rather that simply reviving something. it's more about recycling.

While dance music finds itself at a crossroads and DJ's are forced to re-evaluate their role, this is surely part of a necessary process that will eventually lead to a new post-house era, with dance music once again mutating and moving in new directions, just as it did back in the early 80's.

PM: amen to that

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