The Monster Mash (Bobby "Boris" Pickett and the Crypt-Kickers, 1962)

There are now triple-CD Halloween compilations for the discerning DJ who wants to make a good impression at bookings in late October. But when I got a fright-night booking in 2003 I had to rake through my old vinyl and do some primitive conversions to MP3 for the gig.

Cumbria is bounded by the sea on three sides, all them a long way from my base in the east near the boundary with Yorkshire. When you say you’re from Cumbria, everyone says “Oh, the Lake District!” But there’s far more to it than that. It stretches from the Badlands near the Scottish border in the north to Barrow in Furness in the south; from the rural and well-named paradise of the Eden Valley in the east to Whitehaven on the Atlantic coast.

The county has struggled economically and welcomes a lot of state investment – ship-building and weaponry for the Royal Navy in Barrow, and Europe’s largest nuclear power site at Sellafield near Whitehaven. My booking was in the village of Gosforth, halfway between the two and 76 miles from my home near Kirkby Stephen.

Construction of the venue, Gosforth Hall, began in 1658 so its architecture lent itself well to a spooky party. Surely there were real ghosts here? The manager had done a fantastic job of decoration for the evening – cobwebs everywhere, candles galore, and a giant TV screen showing horror movie The Crow on a loop. The Goths of west Cumbria who made up the audience had made a big effort with their fancy dress.

My contributions were obvious things like the Specials’ Ghost Town, Michael Jackson’s Thriller and R Dean Taylor’s There’s a Ghost in the House. Spooky has always been a favourite of mine, either as recorded by the inimitable Dusty Springfield in 1970 or in the Atlanta Rhythm Section cover version of 1979. And of course there’s always The Monster Mash by Bobby “Boris” Pickett.

It’s hard not to like The Monster Mash. It was a cheesy novelty record from the outset, but it has some good jokes told over a classic rock’n’roll chord sequence. You can dance and smile to it, and if the mood is right the DJ may even persuade you to sing along with its female backing group. It was that sort of a night in Gosforth and I think I played it two or three times.

I saw The Crow two or three times that night too, and so did most of the customers; it was a smallish crowd and the big screen kept them away from the dance floor. But the whole evening was very good natured. It can be quite liberating, when people don’t need the insistent beat of dance music, to be able to play something different for a change. You become more of a radio DJ and in Gosforth I was more than happy to play requests which would normally have cleared the dance floor for me.

The Monster Mash was a fixture elsewhere, in my repertoire as a guitarist. A year earlier I had joined forces with another musician who wanted to launch a monthly open mic night. We made an unlikely duo, about twenty years apart in age and with a very eclectic range of instruments between us: Linnhe played banjo and acoustic guitar, and I contributed various guitars, percussion, bouzouki and vocals. We played everything from folk music to heavy metal, and our bouzouki/banjo rendition of Smoke on the Water was … innovative.

The event, The Mostly Acoustic Jam Night, ran for at least five years in various formats and venues. It started at the White Lion pub in Kirkby Stephen (now called the Taggy Man). Linnhe and I introduced each evening with a short set of two or three numbers. We made an effort to be seasonal and at Halloween our selection usually included Ghost Town and The Monster Mash.

The latter follows a very conventional chord progression shared by many rock’n’roll hits including Neil Sedaka’s Oh Carol and Elton John’s Crocodile Rock; and as well as getting our audience to sing along with the backing vocals of The Monster Mash we inserted the falsetto “LA-A-A, la-la-la-la LA-A-A” from the Sedaka and Elton songs, to the delight of those present. You could say it was a mash-up.

You’re the First, the Last, my Everything (Barry White, 1974)

Chastened by my first booking at the George in Penrith, when I was told in no uncertain terms to smarten myself up, I made extra efforts to impress for my second, five years later. It was a wedding reception in the handsome ballroom of the hotel and I wore a sober jacket and tie in an effort to pour oil on once troubled waters. If only the wedding guests had made the same effort.

Oh, they were well turned out: the George is an up-market venue. The women wore plenty of gold lamé meringue and the men were in ill-fitting suits of many pastel shades. It was a cross-border affair. The bride – let’s call her Juliet – was from Cumbria in northwest England, the groom – Romeo – from Northumbria in the northeast. Their families were, like their namesakes’, worlds apart.

The set up was hurried – I wasn’t allowed to set up before the wedding breakfast, and I was put not in the ballroom itself but on a tiny minstrel’s gallery overlooking it. There was only six feet of headroom (I am 6’3”) and it was about ten feet above the dance floor. I felt very detached from proceedings down below, which as it turned out was probably just as well.

The couple were of course a lot younger than I, and mercifully they were organised enough to have made up a CD of favourites. Although a DJ’s pride bristles at such interventions – surely he or she is the expert at sensing what a crowd want? – I was grateful for some pointers. It included the couple’s unconventional First Dance, a track by Ben Folds Five, and a rather touching Second Dance, a surprise from the bride to her father: Barry White’s You’re the First, the Last, my Everything.

Do DJs still play Barry White? The track was already an oldie by the time of my first stint as a DJ in the late 1970s, but still a popular request. Although it’s something of a soul-disco classic, the hit started life as a country and western song, You’re my First, my Last, my In-Between, written by Peter Radcliffe, a friend of Barry’s. It went unrecorded for two decades before White rewrote the lyrics, taking it to #1 in the UK and the US.

It had the advantage of working both as a dance track and as a more intimate declaration of love. White’s substantial girth, rich bass voice and luxuriant tusk-like moustache earned him the less-than-kind epithet “the walrus of love”. He died in 2003, two years before Juliet’s affectionate choice for a last dance with her father.

Juliet’s wedding disco began more or less as these things do. It was a little hard to gauge the mood from my eyrie but there was a steady flow of dancers on the floor. Two of the guests were from South America and asked me to play a track from a salsa CD they had brought. We were then treated to a thrilling, vibrant demonstration of Latin dancing by the pair. It made the usual plodding disco shuffle of the rest of the guests even duller by comparison.

As the evening wore on, I became aware of fewer and fewer people dancing. This happens at weddings: it’s a long day for the couple and their friends, some of whom have travelled quite long distances, even if not from Latin America. I played everything I could to entice people away from their tables or the bar, but as we approached midnight the ballroom was all but empty. The bar was in a neighbouring lounge.

Then one of the guests – let’s call him Mercurio – stumbled back into the room. His jacket was off, his tie loosened, his cuffs undone and his white shirt spattered with blood. I was playing the Scissor Sisters’ Filthy/Gorgeous at that moment, and in one of the breaks in the music before the chorus, I heard an angry voice bellowing from off-stage: “I didn’t drive two hundred miles to be insulted …” The rest was lost in the track’s triumphant “You’re filthy! and I’m gorgeous! You’re disgusting, and you’re nasty!”

I must have played a hundred weddings over the years and on behalf of romantics everywhere I’m happy to say that this is the only one which ended in rancour. I hope Romeo and Juliet had already left on their honeymoon by then. As I write they should be celebrating their sixteenth wedding anniversary.

 

Favourite Shirts (Boy Meets Girl) (Haircut 100, 1981)

The owner of the King’s Arms Hotel in Kirkby Stephen was not keen on discos. More precisely he wasn’t keen on weekend events of any kind in his function room, because the upshot was almost always blocked or cracked urinals in the gents’ toilets. Local lads, he argued, always became boisterous; and damage inevitably ensued.

It was a pity. It’s a lovely 300-year old coaching inn which still has its courtyard; and the hotel’s function room was the best dance hall in the village. The Masonic Hall, the only comparable space for events, was where my new mobile disco Blame It On The Boogie! made its debut in 1999, at a fancy dress ball raising funds to buy Crosby Garrett Village Hall from the county council.

I once supported a local ska band in the King’s Arms; but most live music in Kirkby Stephen took place in a shop on the high street. Rattan and Rush began life as a furniture store, then diversified into eco products and gifts. Eventually, thanks to the enthusiasm of its owners Penny and Paul, it became a remarkable fixture on the folk music circuit.

Once a month they cleared out as much of the stock as they could so that they could accommodate about thirty paying guests. By knocking through into a neighbouring room, they could find room for another thirty or so with restricted view of the tiny stage, just large enough for an acoustic duo or a soloist. Penny and Paul included a meal in the price of the ticket so that they could raise a little more money to pay the musicians’ fees. But it was very much a labour of love and much appreciated by its audiences in an area of the country otherwise bypassed by tours of any kind.

In time Penny and Paul decamped to the Masonic Hall, where facilities for a meal were better and the capacity bordered on the profitable. If a little of the magic of those cramped evenings in the shop was lost, the larger audiences (and toilets) made the folk nights better for everyone. Blame It On The Boogie! went wherever the bookings were, and on a few occasions that was to another fine old coaching inn, the George in Penrith.

Penrith is a proper market town, and a centre for what we used to call the local green welly brigade, the well-heeled country folk of East Cumbria. The George was quite grand and still offered afternoon teas in the nooks and crannies of its oak-timbered lobby, served (I’m pretty sure) by waitresses in black with white aprons.

Its ballroom was upstairs. My first booking at the George was for a Valentine’s Day dance and I was not allowed to bring my equipment in through the lobby and up the grand staircase. That would have lowered the tone. Instead I had to use a narrow service stair which reached the back of the hall from a side lane. The stair was barely wide enough for my PA system, with corners which challenged my bulky light boxes.

I got set up and began to play a few tracks to the empty room to get myself in the mood, when a stern housekeeper strode across the dance floor toward me. In my unreliable memory she wore a tweed suit, and in a future movie of the occasion she will certainly have a hairy wart on her chin. But actually she was simply a smartly turned-out middle-aged member of middle management. “Young man,” she began. (I was 42.)

In those days I dressed for gigs in jeans and a T-shirt with the disco’s logo on it, which I imagined were appropriate work clothes for someone playing pop and rock, and indeed for someone who had just sweated buckets lugging his gear up an awkward flight of steps. But, “Young man,” said the housekeeper, “if you want to work in this hotel again you will dress appropriately.” “But I AM dressed for work,” I protested. “Jacket and tie, young man, if you want to work again.”

I very much wanted to work at the George again; but I was twenty miles from home and five minutes away from the arrival of the Valentine’s Day lovers of Penrith. In a panic I rang my wife, who was looking forward to a quiet evening in without me, and begged her to drive over with the required dress code. Mercifully the early part of the George’s program was a romantic meal. Until my jacket and tie arrived I could stay out of sight so as not to shame the institution, and I was finally ready for work at 8.30pm. “That’s better,” almost-smiled the housekeeper, appearing suddenly at my side like a familiar.

She was right of course, however much I resented it. Most of my gigs were formal occasions and I always wore a jacket and collared shirt after that, although rarely a tie. In spite of that I only worked once more at the George over the next five years. So if you’re listening, my tweedy housekeeping Valentine, this one’s for you: the clean-cut, smart young men of Haircut 100, and their crisp, impeccably tight debut single Favourite Shirts (Boy Meets Girl). (But if that horn section ever wants to work at the George ...)

 

Hi Ho Silver Lining (Jeff Beck, 1967)

A lot of DJs make the last slow dance of the night the last record of the night. Maybe it’s because I wasn’t involved in the snogfest going on all around me that I always thought that a rather low key end to proceedings.

I always tried to finish on an up-tempo, cheerful note whenever possible, ideally something in a sing-along which people could still be humming on their way to the car park after the houselights had come up. It should leave customers with a smile, and make them less likely to pick fights when they got to the car park.

In my first incarnation as a DJ, from 1978 to 1981, that final record was often Jeff Beck’s Hi Ho Silver Lining. It was a disco standard at the time, more than a decade after its original release in 1967. It made the UK Top 20 then and again on re-release in 1972.

Jeff Beck was one of the best known guitarists of his generation, having been one of the Yardbirds’ two lead guitars. The other was Jimmy Page. Beck’s bass player on Hi Ho was John Paul Jones, who with Page formed the game-changing band Led Zeppelin a year later. Rod Stewart contributed backing vocals to Hi Ho. Page, Jones and Who drummer Keith Moon appeared on the B-side, Beck’s Bolero. 

Beck’s melodic guitar solo on Hi Ho was almost as well known and sung as the words of the chorus; and at many a gig, air guitarists could be seen cranking it out in the darker corners of the dance floor.

It remains Beck’s biggest single hit and not much like anything he has recorded subsequently. He considers it something of a millstone around his neck. But everyone knew what to do with it in the 1970s. The DJ snapped the volume to zero at the start of the chorus, exposing the audience who, knowing that this was going to happen, were singing their hearts out: “And it’s HI HO SILVER LINING”. You had to be ready to bring the volume back up if it looked as if they didn’t know the next line too. These were the final two and a half minutes of many happy gigs at Corstorphine Rugby Club, where our mobile disco Radio Claudine was a regular entertainment. At some gigs they knew all the verses too.

In the days before digital music it was quite hard to cue up Hi Ho Silver Lining so that its famous tango guitar rhythm would start precisely on the last beat of the previous track. The rhythm was preceded by a single chord played backwards, an old recording trick. Instead of being struck suddenly and loudly and fading away, the chord appeared to fade in gradually and rise in volume to a sudden end. On a DJ’s much-played vinyl copy of the record, the start of the fade-in could be hard to hear; and experienced DJs learned to rely as much on the surface noise, the crackle and hiss of their copy, as on the recorded music.

Hi Ho Silver Lining was still appearing on dance party compilation CDs in the mid-1990s, so when I started DJ-ing again in 1999 I looked forward to closing gigs with it once more. But I wasn’t in Edinburgh anymore, and it seemed that my Cumbrian audience didn’t like being exposed in that way. As soon as I dropped the volume, they stopped singing and stared at me as if my amp had blown. My big finish was a busted flush.

I tried a few other tracks. Back in the 1970s when life was simpler and sillier, Zorba’s Dance often worked as a final circle dance, and it did once again at a Tennis Club disco (or was it hockey?) in the King’s Arms Hotel, Kirkby Stephen. British prog-rockers The Enid had a rousing rock-and-sound-effects version of the Dambusters’ March which, being completely undanceable, signalled clearly that “this is fun but it’s the end”. But in the 1990s I was no longer playing for willingly uninhibited students.

The solution was hackneyed, but reliable. A novelty song that you couldn’t dance to but had to sing along with, Monty Python’s Always Look on the Bright Side of Life closed out almost every gig I did between then and 2006 when I quit DJ-ing. Its chorus message was perfect, its mood uplifting. Its simple music was not pop, and couldn’t be danced to like other records. It said, from every angle, “Go now and be happy.” And it worked every time.