Greg Wilson

Exclusive interview with the dance music legend ahead of The Loft with Krivit…

Hi Greg, welcome to DMCWORLD. A massive party coming up this weekend in London town which we will come to later. First off, let’s kick back a little. You owe your love of black music to your older brother and sister who were bringing the likes of Stax, Tamla Motown and Trojan into your house. These records formed the foundation of your record collection when they disappeared to college. One record in particular stood out for you – The Temptations’ “Ball of Confusion’…explain why it did…
 
“I loved The Temptations music of that period, so many wonderful records – ‘Papa Was A Rolling Stone’, ‘Psychedelic Shack’, ‘Cloud Nine’, ‘Just My Imagination’, ‘I Can’t Get Next To You’ etc, all sonic masterpieces, Norman Whitfield’s production at its most innovative. ‘Ball Of Confusion’ encapsulated the time in which it was written, it’s lyrics talking about the social issues of the time – it wasn’t just entertaining, it was educational. I learnt a lot about the struggle of black people via the music that was made during this era. It was great that there were records in the pop charts that could actually inform, which although on the surface were just great tunes, on a deeper level were really saying something. I talk about ‘Ball Of Confusion’ in greater depth in this interview I did for the Sounds Like Me website a few years ago:

http://www.sounds-like-me.com/news/rewind-greg-wilson-on-ball-of-confusion/   
 
The city of New York has been close to your heart for many years. Labels such as Prelude, West End, Emergency, Sugar Hill and Profile provided the music you played back in the early ‘80s and you looked up to the city’s DJs such as Tee Scott, Larry Levan, Francois K and the master Shep Pettibone. Can you take us back to that first step onto New York soil you took and some of the musical memories that still keep come flooding back…
 
“I actually never got to New York until 2005, which is a bit mad considering just how much the city influenced me. The closest I got to going in the early 80’s was in ’83 when The Hacienda, where I was working at the time, put forward the idea of an exchange for a month, with me going to work at Danceteria, and the resident from there, Mark Kamins, coming to Manchester. Nothing ever came of it, but Mark did eventually become the first US DJ to play at The Hacienda. I got to know Mark in more recent years, and we’d talked about the idea of doing a couple of gigs together this year, one in New York, one in Manchester, given that it’s 30 years since this idea was suggested. Sadly, it wasn’t to be, Mark dying in February. There’s a tribute in New York this week, at Santos Party House, with Mike Pickering (who was a big friend of Mark’s), ‘Jellybean’ Benitez and Francois K amongst the DJ’s playing and Konk making their first live appearance since 1986.”

One of the most important experiences of your early career was appearing on The Tube on Channel 4 in 1983 where you became the first British DJ to mix live on national television. The presenter Jools Holland asked you to point out to the viewers what a turntable actually was. These days when our DMC turntablists go on TV and do demonstrations, they are asked by the presenters to explain what this circular black piece of plastic is to the viewers as today’s kids have no idea what vinyl is – never mind what a SL1200 is. If you had to re-write your Mixmag article ‘The DJ Of A New Breed’ that you penned 30 years ago, what would be the basis of a feature on the DJ of 2013…we are in a world now where a kid can make a hit record in his bedroom at the age of 16 and be headling Ultra earning $100,000 six months later…
 
“Yeah, things have come a long long way since I wrote that piece in ’83, although in many respects the rules remain the same. It’s all about making people dance, so the format isn’t the important thing to me, it’s what comes out of the speakers. I like the fact that DJ’s have so many options now when it comes to presenting music, as this allows for greater variety of approach. Having said that, some DJ’s can depend too much on the technology, losing track of the really important aspect of their job, the audience they’re working with – thinking they’re somehow above / separate to the crowd in front of them, when, I maintain, it’s a reciprocal situation. A turntablist is, of course, something different, for the dancefloor isn’t the main focus, it’s their ability to manipulate the music they’re playing in a live environment – it’s all about how they juggle the audio. Making a hit record and being a DJ are 2 very different roles in my eyes. DJ’s are obviously aware of what works in a club environment, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll be skilled at making music, whilst someone who feels at home in a studio may be awkward in a live setting. Not everyone can fulfil both roles. This is most noticeable when, as you say, someone makes a bedroom hit and then tours as a DJ off the back of this when, in reality, they’re a complete novice in this area. The same applies when pop / rock artists supplement their income by playing DJ dates – if you switch that around it would seem absurd, in the majority of cases, for a DJ to think they could just get up on a stage and be a rock star.”
 
Your appearance on The Tube was full of fraught. You spent the entire time hoping the cameraman wasn’t going to bump into the decks, which of course he eventually did. My favourite quote came from Jools Holland when saying to you…” You get records and change them about don’t you? Don’t you think that might annoy the people that made them?”. In the years that followed, did you ever get the opportunity to remind Jools what he had said and point out how mixing had changed the world of music for ever…?


 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77sjud0zLJY
 
“No, I’ve never met him since. I think that, like the audience, he was bemused by the whole thing. Back then dance music was rarely taken seriously by the rock / indie fraternity. Real music to them was a singer, a guitarist, a bassist and a drummer, and it took a while before they accepted club music as something deserving of equal respect. When I was at The Hacienda I remember Peter Hook from New Order telling me, in no uncertain terms, to ‘fuck off’ when I asked him if I could remix ‘Blue Monday’. I didn’t think he’d have remembered this, so it was a surprise when I found he’d written about it in his book, reflecting that, with hindsight, he was wrong to react in this way. He said that, at the time, the idea of someone tampering with their work was abhorrent to him, but later down the line he came to realise that the remix was often better than the original. This was indicative of the times – DJ’s weren’t really taken seriously by musicians, at least not here, and Jools Holland’s comments on The Tube, although they now seem somewhat condescending, weren’t anything out of the ordinary back then.”
 
You stopped DJing between the years of 1975 and 1984. Even during that time you still thought of yourself as a DJ, if you heard a great tune somewhere you’d say to a mate, ‘hey, have you heard this track?’. Why did you stop – and what made you start again…
 
“Not initially, it was a good few years after I stopped that I came to the realisation that, although I was no longer playing music for people in clubs, that I was still a DJ with regards to how I had an inherent need to share with others – something that went back to when I was a child. It wasn’t just music, but films, books etc. It was part of my make up to sit people down and say ‘have you heard / seen / read this’. As I said in the introduction on my blog, this was a real nugget of self-discovery, something absolutely central to my nature. The reasons I stopped are multi-layered, and difficult to go into in just a couple of sentences, so I refer you to piece I wrote explaining it:

http://www.electrofunkroots.co.uk/misc/why_did_i_quit.html
 
What must be remembered is that they were very different times back then, and I’d achieved what I’d set out to do. It would be a while before DJ’s were flown to different countries for gigs – if you got to the top of your field, you worked within a region, which for me was the North and the Midlands. With regards to the financial aspect, even though I was well paid, in a relative sense, it was a pittance with regards to what the top DJ’s would be paid later down the line. A move out of the clubs and towards production seemed to make sense at the time, although it would prove to be a decision that threw me into a rollercoaster ride of ups and downs throughout the next 2 decades. I started again as the result of seeing British dance culture documented in a way I felt largely missed out its most pivotal period, the early 80’s, when dance music was at its most experimental, and new hybrid forms would emerge, resulting in the 3 major new directions – Hip Hop, House and Techno. As I’ve said many times before, this was the crossroads between the old and the new, and the lack of information available led to me compiling my archive material from the time, and setting up the website www.electrofunkroots.co.uk to help document the period, what led up to it, and what came out of it. It was as a result of this that promoters began to offer me DJ bookings, and it all evolved organically from there.”


 
We come back to Greg Wilson’s house for a lazy Sunday lunch. What is the ten Back To Mine tunes you spin us to set the tone…
 
“I did this back in 2008. I prefaced it by saying that I never enjoy selecting a top 10 of anything – there are far too many great records for it to be anything like a definitive choice, and no sooner have I committed to a list than I think of a further 10 tunes that I could just as easily have picked. I decided to go for some 70’s stuff – tracks I never tire of hearing. Had they sub-divided the genres then like they do now, they’d have come up with a term like ‘Deep Mellow’ to describe this type of vibe. Here are the 10 I chose:
 
Parliament ‘P Funk (Wants To Get Funked Up)’
Sly & The Family Stone ‘If You Want Me To Stay’
The Temptations ‘Papa Was A Rolling Stone’
Stevie Wonder ‘Jesus Children Of America’
Ben E. King ‘Supernatural Thing’
Rufus Featuring Chaka Khan ‘Stop On By’
Bobby Moore ‘Call Me Your Anything Man’
Cymande ‘The Message’
Shuggie Otis ‘Strawberry Letter 23’
Marvin Gaye ‘What’s Going On’
 
The world’s press has always cited Danny Rampling, Paul Oakenfold, Nicky Holloway, Trevor Fung and Johnny Walker as the heroes of the day for helping to bring dance music to the UK shores after their infamous trip to Ibiza in the late 80s where they experienced Alfredo, Amnesia and Ecstasy for the first time. I’d like to think Manchester five years prior at your beloved Legend and The Hacienda with the likes of yourself and Mike Pickering entertaining a very cool black audience helped pave the way before we got all smiley?
 
“What happened out in Ibiza was obviously really important, and served to ignite club culture as we know it. But all this could never have happened without the foundations already being in place via the specialist black music scene, the lineage of which goes right back into the 60’s. Dance music was very much a part of the UK landscape way before the Ibiza trip, and it would be ludicrous to think otherwise. What was brought back was a little pill and a Balearic spirit, which, when fused with what was already happening, led to the whole Rave explosion. Mike Pickering took over the Friday nights at The Hacienda after I’d left, and by ’86 had a thriving scene, playing early House alongside Hip Hop, Street Soul and even Jazz (a throwback to the earlier Jazz-Funk scene) on what he’d called ‘Nude’ night. Many people are under the false belief that it wasn’t until ’88 that The Hacienda really took off as a dance venue, but this is another fallacy. Prior to this it was the black kids, who were first out of the blocks with regards to embracing House music in the North and Midlands, leading the way. When the scene became invaded by countless white kids, who’d have told you dance music was shit just a few months (and the ingestion of a tab of ecstasy) earlier, the black kids largely moved on. There’s an incredible piece of footage that has surfaced in more recent times of a party in Moss Side, Manchester in ’86, where a black audience are dancing to House. The title is a bit misleading, as it’s Mike Shaft, the legendary Manchester radio DJ, rather than Mastermind, who’s playing at the time:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46jB4yohiKA&feature=youtu.be
 
We all have a moment of really ‘getting’ acid house. Mine was on stage at The Escape in Amsterdam, you had a similar experience I think huddled in a Hacienda alcove with Kermit from the Ruthless Rap Assasins when the DJ spun FPI Project’s ‘Rich In Paradise’ classic. What’s the story there…
 
To quote myself: “My abiding memory of the Haçienda in those ‘rave on’ days was the overwhelming response to the track “Rich In Paradise” by the FPI Project (an instrumental version of the classic “Going Back To My Roots”), which I witnessed during a visit from London (where I was living at the time). I stood chatting to Kermit (then of the Rap Assassins) in one of the alcoves when, while continuing the conversation, he raised his hand in the air as the track’s piano breakdown filled the room. In my heightened state I then noticed that all the people standing near us were giving the same type of salute. As I looked around it became apparent that everyone in the club was sharing this outpouring of togetherness, hands held high in the air! It was the most unifying moment I’ve ever experienced in a club and, although I witnessed similar sights subsequently, everything that followed seemed to be just chasing shadows, trying to re-capture something that was no longer there, at least not in its purest form.”

http://www.gregwilson.co.uk/2012/05/the-hacienda-30-years-on/
 
A massive party looms this Saturday, a special six hour set featuring yourself and Danny Krivit at The Loft Studios in London. Mr Krivit was of course one of the main DJs at the Roxy, New York’s most celebrated roller rink spinning tunes such as Prince’s “I Wanna Be Your Lover’ and The Whispers ‘And The Beat Goes On’ to thousands of cool kids on wheels each week. Why do you think this phenomena never took over in the UK?
 
“There were roller rinks here with DJ’s, but, generally speaking, they were just playing the pop hits of the time, whereas in New York, where Roller Disco, as Danny states, was predominantly the domain of a black / latino audience, the music was much more important. Danny told me “there were certain things about certain genres of music, at the time, that were almost made ideally for skating. What would happen is that a record might be right in that tempo, like 110 or 120bpm, but if it wasn’t the right kind of groove, then it didn’t lend itself to roller skating”. With this in mind, the culture of music in the US rinks was a world apart to what you’d hear here, so that’s probably the reason it never became what you might call a sub-culture in Britain.”


 
What is the latest with your ‘Schooled In The Classics, tell us about the project…
 
“Although the label is obviously influenced by the dance music of the early 80’s, I’m not trying to re-create what went before, my intention is to tap into the freeflowing spirit of those remixers who made such a big impression on me (Scott, Levan, Pettibone, Kevorkian, Benitez etc). Back then, when they often only had a night of studio time to come up with a remix, they’d go off feel – they simply didn’t have the time to think about things too deeply. Nowadays, with computer programs enabling you to work at home, rather than having to factor in the expense of a studio, remixes can often be overthought, given that it’s possible to tinker away indefinitely. This can often squeeze all the vibe out of the mix, as everything becomes too precise. It didn’t used to be like this when remixers were working in a more limited setting, with the clock ticking. So I try to work on the main body of the mix in a single burst, rather than being over-meticulous – this is what I mean by tapping into the spirit of those times. The plan is to release 8 tracks on 4 x 12” singles issued during a 12 month period. The tracks will also be available digitally, and I’ll compile them all onto a CD, possibly with an additional mixed CD, at the end of the process.”
 
What is the current top 10 you are spinning…
 
As I said, not keen on top 10’s, but, with Saturday night at Loft Studios in mind, here are 15 edits / reworks / remixes (in no particular order) which have done the business for me during recent times:
 
Neneh Cherry ‘Buffalo Stance’ (Henry Greenwood Rework)
The Smiths ‘How Soon Is Now’ (Billy Caldwell NYC / MCR Edit)
Luther Vandross ‘Never Too Much’ (Fingerman Edit)
Walter Murphy & The Big Apple Band ‘A Fifth Of Beethoven’ (Flight Facilities Edit)
Rufus Featuring Chaka Khan ‘Ain’t Nobody’ (Derek Kaye Rework)
Donna Summer ‘Love To Love You Baby’ (Get Down Edit)
Talking Heads ‘Burning Down The House’ (Late Nite Tuff Guy Edit)
Marina Van Rooy ‘Sly One (Greg Wilson Edit)
Players Association ‘Turn The Music Up’ (Derek Kaye Rework)
George Benson ‘Nature Boy’ (Henry Greenwood Rework)
Sharon Redd ‘Can You Handle It’ (Late Nite Tuff Guy Edit)
Cultural Vibe ‘Ma Foom Bey’ (Peza Rework)
Ben E. King ‘Supernatural Thing’ (Autocycle Edit)
Bryan Ferry ‘Don’t Stop The Dance’ (Greg Wilson & Derek Kaye Remix)
Stevie Wonder ‘I Wish’ (Reflex Revision)
 
Manchester has been steeped in music history for decades. A lot of people assume it all started in ’89 with the dance explosion at The Hacienda, but we can go right back to the 60s and the Twisted Wheel and The New Reno in Moss Side. Last week Sankeys decided to close it’s doors with what looks a permanent move. What are your thoughts on your city musically and clubwise in 2013?
 
“I think Manchester has been going through a transitional period, but it’s always going to be a great music city, it’s in the DNA. I played at 2022NQ on New Year’s Eve and was really impressed with the venue – I’ve a feeling that this will be an important hub for the Manchester scene. Sankeys has had a good run – 2 decades! That’s longer than The Twisted Wheel, The Hacienda, Rafters, Legend, The Electric Chair and other classic venues / parties, that have defined the city’s nightlife. I think it’s time for change, so maybe the vacuum left by the closure of Sankeys, and the scattering of its audience, will enable new nights to evolve.”
 
And finally, it’s your birthday. Which 3 DJs do you ask to play at the party…
 
“I’d have to go for the DJ’s who had the greatest influence on me during my teenage years. These would be Les Spaine, a giant amongst DJ’s in 70’s Liverpool, playing Funk and Soul at The Timepiece – a club that made a huge impression on me. Terry Lennaine, whose weekly Radio Merseyside Soul show, ‘Keep On Truckin’’, was absolutely essential listening back then, whilst his ‘Get Together’s’ at The Hamilton in Birkenhead were highly anticipated. Finally Derek Kaye, my long-time friend, who I met at school over 40 years ago. He started out as a DJ before I did, and was certainly an inspiration. My journey as a DJ really began when I bought his old mobile disco in 1975.”

Greg Wilson will be headlining the Disco Lounge B2B with US Legend Danny Krivit on Saturday 20th April, The Date, Loft Studios.  Tickets can be purchased from: ResidentAdvisor

http://www.residentadvisor.net/event.aspx?440816