The man behind it all….
Last week saw the release of A Boy’s Own Odyssey, ‘Acid House Capers & Scrapes’ – a collection of tracks from some of the most influential artists in dance music. The Boy’s Own guys broke artists such as The Chemical Brothers, Underworld, Primal Scream, Happy Mondays and X-Press 2 – and now it turns out that those in charge used to bully Pete Tong! DMC caught up with the Radio 1 selector…
Do you think ‘Special Branch’ which you played at with promoter and DJ Nicky Holloway, helped establish most of the big DJs that are around nowadays?
“Well I’ve always said that when Acid House was happening in say 1987, it was like the equivalent of Punk in how it affected Rock n’ Roll and Progressive Rock that went before it. A lot of people, therefore don’t remember anything before Punk and I think the same goes for dance music – a lot of people just wipe the slate clean and think that nothing existed before raves came along. But just before that period of illegal raves and M25s and all that stuff, you had the Special Branch and the Royal Oak, and another one called The Metropolitan which was diagonally opposite where Turnmills used to be. Those three spots where Nicky promoted parties was where he gathered up the people he found most interesting from the ‘soul mafia’ kind of people. There was me, Paul Oakenfold, Gilles Peterson, Chris Bangs, Paul Murphy – a really eclectic mix of people that had kind of been hanging around before then and working with the legends of the soul era like Robbie Vincent and Greg Edwards, so there was this middle ground where Nicky was doing these shows.”
Looking back to that time Pete, how do you perceive those times concerning your career…?
“I suppose back then I was already part of the establishment and I suppose everybody was curious about me because I still maintained this kind of perverse interest in change. A lot of the Soul-era DJs didn’t want to change, they resisted change and I didn’t really articulate it at the time, I was into the next thing and the next thing – and wanted to make sure I knew what new music was coming along. I didn’t do it in a calculated way, I mean, Soul music is brilliant and it was an amazing part of my life as well as Jazz-Funk which provided the roots of what I am today. But when I first heard a Rap record I liked it, when I first heard a House record (which obviously in the early days paid homage to Disco) I liked it. And I was lucky to be in the right place at the right time. I did go to Paradise Garage, I did go to the Danceterea – I was in New York just at the end of all that and there was nothing quite like that. When the whole rave thing kicked off I was already on Capital Radio. I’ve been around for quite a while and so when that whole revolution happened I was already 10 years in. Nicky looked to me as the most respectable one from the old guard that could come through and endorse the new thing. I was already at a record company as well, so I had it all going on.”
‘It’s all gone Pete Tong’ – where, why, how?
“From my knowledge that phrase came from the Junior Boy’s Own Fanzine actually. It was the Cockney editorial slant of the magazine that coined the phrase for when things went wrong. For me it summed up my whole relationship with the ‘Raid’ guys and the Boy’s Own guys, which was they were always taking the piss out of me! They kind of liked me but they couldn’t allow their radical side to go. They had to pull my leg because I was part of the establishment I guess. They just existed to be bitchy ha! That’s just the way they were- schnidy and bitchy, but they loved their music and that’s what made it a fascinating crew to hang around with. It kind of went with the territory, the fact that I was working at Capital Radio for a start, and because I was an old Soul boy meant I wasn’t going to be allowed to get by without some sort of wind-up. And that’s where it started….”
I was talking to Terry Farley and he said that the Junior Boy’s Own label may not have happened if it wasn’t for you…
” I was working with Tracy Bennett – the A&R Director of Capital Records and Tracy liked dance music but he wasn’t in the dance music world. He was a big supporter of mine and Roger Eames who ran London Records, was a more historic trainspotter of dance music and he supported it as well. But with Boy’s Own, I was running around with these guys and in the thick of it with them, DJing and playing the same music as them, but a label deal was a little bit beyond me in terms of what I was doing, so I had to get endorsement from the company. Tracy really fell in love with them, he just liked their intelligence, he liked their Punk attitude towards everything, he liked the fact that they were so fuckin’ difficult! And he saw something special in that. He endorsed it for me, so I give him credit for it. We were able to make funds available to start this label, but looking back how stupid were we?! We actually signed Underworld’s first record, and it actually came through us even though it was on Boy’s Own. But some records did such as Underworld ‘Hmm Skyscraper I Love You’, but then again we didn’t pick up on the option of the band, I mean The Chemical Brothers? c’mon!”
Where did you first officially meet the Boy’s Own crew?
“We had a meeting with these guys and it was kind of like how a rap crew would do now – you want to meet Andy Weatherall and you want to meet Terry Farley, but they would come and fill the room with their mates. It was like half of Slough! And we weren’t quite sure who did what. But we fell in love with this kind of disorganised collective. Different people would always turn up, but in our minds we thought it was just Andy and Terry. Andy was the dark, creative genius and that’s what attracted Tracy to them, but right at the point when we had to make crucial decisions about our options with Underworld and the Dust Brothers, they fell out and it was falling apart. Andy wanted to become more of a producer, and he’d gone and worked with Primal Scream, he was doing stuff with The Happy Mondays and then he did One Dove which we absolutely saw as the justification for doing Junior Boy’s Own – that was the act that we really wanted. So we really focused with Andy on that record, but his day-to-day involvement with Boy’s Own was falling apart. One day at a meeting they introduced this guy – “here’s Steve Hall, he’s our mate”, so we were like ‘what do you do? What’s your experience in the record business?” – and he said “well I’m an air-traffic controller”. So that went down pretty well and that’s why it got pretty difficult. We were picking and choosing records from them like DSK, we took One Dove whole-heartedly as an act and then we were kind of letting Steve get on with it. To be fair to Steve, he had the Chemical Brothers tape in his pocket, not Terry. And with Underworld, after putting out one 12-inch which obviously wasn’t commercial and there was no edit of it, we couldn’t really do anything with it, it slipped out the back door, so to speak, and we let Steve get on with it. Those first few years were interesting, and expensive!”
What one JBO tune stands out to you from that era?
“For me it doesn’t get much better than the first Underworld tune. I’ll always see the Boy’s Own logo with that record. One Dove was very special to us as I said. I still think it was one of the greatest albums which never really worked. Also the stuff that Steve did after we were no longer involved such as The Chemical Brothers, the Black Science Orchestra, and when Pete Heller was becoming a formidable force. There’s another record at the time that I can’t remember the name of, we all used to fight over it. Andy wanted the label to be a label where ‘Flowered Up’ would come and sign, he was much more into his reggae and his punk and taking it into that direction. Obviously Terry, Steve and Pete Heller were much more comfortable in the traditional house music space.
Do you think ‘Born Slippy’ is the biggest dance record ever made?
“I think most people would agree that it is. What’s great about it is that it’s such an unconventional bloody record. It doesn’t follow any rules in terms of any commercial form. The bit that everyone remembers, ‘The Larger chant’, is actually a very small part of the record, and the fact that it effectively goes into like a 10 minute drum solo. It’s a totally bonkers record, but it’s genius. Without trying to sound too conceited, I do have some bragging rights over that record, when it was on the Trainspotting soundtrack. There were two really weird tracks on the trainspotting compilation, ‘Born Slippy’ and the Bedrock record with Digweed. These were two really inspired calls by Danny Boyle, who is so knowledgeable about music and so open minded. I kept going back to the soundtrack and played ‘Born Slippy’ every week for like six months and I used to berate Steve Hall because he wasn’t having it and he kept saying that it wasn’t going to be a single, it couldn’t be a single because it really didn’t repeat itself and it didn’t have the right form that he wanted in a single. Karl Hyde wasn’t into it, neither was Darren Emerson. So I just kept playing it on Radio 1 every week for about 6 months and eventually they gave in. We then released it and it became their biggest hit.”
What are your thoughts on the dance scene now and then?
“I think it’s different. I always answer that question by saying that it’s relevant to the people who were there in 1987 at the age they were. You can only really ask that question to those people. For me, in a way it is because I wouldn’t be doing it anymore otherwise. I think it would be unfair to say to a 16 or 17 year old that the times we had then were better than the times they’re having now because I think your experience is totally different. They were great times, they’re part of the history. I think it’s really fantastic that people like Defected are doing all this and celebrating the history because it is an important part of the story. I don’t see the JBO Crew all the time, but coincidentally I worked with Terry Farley on Friday and it was so cool. The music was blazing, he had his head down and he was in the backroom, Charlie Chester told me he was there so I popped my head around the booth and shouted ‘Got any Acid House!?!’ By the time I got around the side of the booth he did his normal little laugh and the first thing he did was grab a copy of Faith Magazine out of his bag and he said “This is the new issue!” with the same enthusiasm as did when he gave me a tape back in whenever it was! So he’s not changed. The next thing he said was, “Here’s a great CD” so he’s still doing the same old things which I think is testament to why this is so powerful. Terry’s passion, particularly him, has been the thing that has kept this going. As far as Junior Boy’s Own is concerned I’d say 50% of it is Terry Farley and the other 50% of it now in the era in which everyone remembers it is Steve Hall. Terry was a massively important part of it, and the fanzine was so important to launch a record label. It’s sad now that fanzines don’t have a part to play in today’s age of the internet. I hadn’t seen Faith for a while and it was good to see it hasn’t changed, the bitchy stuff was still in there – ha!”
