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.

The Lady In Red (Chris de Burgh, 1986)

My gig as DJ support for a Shania Twain tribute act in 2000 (when they were still called sound-alikes) was memorable mainly for being the only time in my career when a member of the public tried to flirt with me. I was (and still am) happily married; but even if I hadn’t been, I was quietly warned off during the evening on the grounds that the drunk young woman in question was the wife of the promoter.

She wore a red baseball cap, which she kept trying to place on my head. The promoter was a member of the locally powerful Stobart family, owners of a nationally well-known road haulage business. It would have been personally and politically disastrous if I had been at all tempted to wear the red cap.

I say with no regret that a mobile oldies DJ is not a rock god. It is not a job for someone who wishes they were one, with all the attention that goes with it. His job is to disappear behind the music, to play the music of his audience’s dreams, not his own. I would happily play music I loathed if it made a client and his or her guests happy. Job done.

This is especially true of that crucial last slow dance of the evening. The DJ’s task at that point is draw couples together, to help them fall in love, or at least to make love, if that’s what they want. A floorfilling slow dance is the end of a successful evening – and the loneliest four minutes of DJ’s life. There they all are, lost in each other’s gaze, body to body, heart to heart, while in a few moments he must negotiate the drunks to get his fee, dismantle his rig, pack it into a mechanically unreliable van and drive, still sober, perhaps fifty miles home to a quiet house and a sleeping wife. Rock’n’roll it ain’t.

A good slow dance has a much longer shelf life than most up-tempo hits. It isn’t subject to passing dance fashions; and by virtue of bringing people together it is more likely to become a couple’s “our song”. Chris de Burgh’s The Lady In Red has stood the test of time.

Chris de Burgh was hardly an overnight sensation. The Lady In Red was on his eighth album, Into the Light. Apart from his perennial Christmas hit A Spaceman came Travelling, which was #1 in Ireland in 1975, and Don’t Pay the Ferryman which reached #5 in Australia in 1982, De Burgh had made little impact on the Top 40 before The Lady In Red broke into Top 5’s around the world in 1986. He wrote it about his wife Diane.

Like many success stories, The Lady In Red has attracted more than its fair share of haters. “Only James Blunt has managed to come up with a song more irritating than Chris de Burgh's Lady in Red,” wrote Neil Norman of The Independent in 2006.

I am not a particular admirer of the song, preferring De Burgh’s earlier story-telling songs on, for example, his second album Spanish Train and Other Stories, which includes the magnificent Patricia the Stripper. One of the worst things about The Lady in Red is his fudged attempt to rhyme the very British long vowel of “DAH-nce” with the short second syllable of “ro-MANce” halfway through the first verse. It makes me squirm.

But as a slow last dahnce, it works. It was a staple of my DJ set from 1999 to 2006, alongside Phyllis Nelson’s very smoochie Move Closer and Robbie Williams’ more laddish Angels – the latter best suited to nights when there was less romance in the air because its chorus could be sung with tuneless drunken enthusiasm by a crowd:

And. Threwit. AWLL, she offers me protection,
A lorra luv an’ affecshun …

It’s a really good song, and everyone is happy.

That Don't Impress Me Much (Shania Twain, 1999)

My mobile disco business Blame It On The Boogie! never had a residency, although for one or two hotels in the Lake District it was the go-to if they had a wedding booking. Every gig was a one-off and it was a precarious way to scrape a living.

I was almost always the sole source of entertainment at my gigs, unless you counted the wedding speeches. Only a few times did I serve as a support act for live music. Once I was playing second fiddle to a drag act. Another time the headliner was a local girl who would soon afterwards be whisked off to Los Angeles and groomed for a stardom which never quite materialised.

On one occasion I supported a four-piece covers band led by a would-be guitar hero with a large ego. He strapped on a twin-neck guitar, 6- and 12-strings as modelled by Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin; but throughout the set he only played the 6-string neck. The other was all for show.

Most memorably, I was booked alongside a Shania Twain tribute act in Appleby Market Hall in the summer of 2000. Twain was at the height of her popularity, three years after the release of her enormously successful Come On Over album. The album was a record industry phenomenon – it spent 151 weeks in the Billboard Country Top Ten, entering at #1 and occupying the top spot for a total of 50 weeks.

It is still the best-selling country album in the world, best-selling studio album by a female artist and best-selling album by a Canadian performer. It is the ninth best-selling album in the world in any category. Its status is helped by the fact that Twain released three different versions of the album – the original country take in 1997, followed by pop and international versions with different mixes and running orders – to maximise its appeal to every conceivable marketing sector. To my surprise, while writing this piece, I found a copy of Come On Over on my CD shelves. No one is immune, it seems.

In spite of that, I had never heard of Shania Twain at the start of 1999 when I was returning to DJ-ing. She was “country music”, something I had never much listened to. I came across her as I gradually transferred my operations from vinyl to CD. The easiest way for me to get up to speed on current hits, having stopped buying 45s in about 1985, was to buy the Now That’s What I Call Music! compilations which came out three times a year. Now 44 included That Don’t Impress Me Much in one of the strongest Now collections ever released. It’s still, more than twenty years later, the best-selling volume of the series.

That Don’t Impress Me Much was the seventh of twelve singles culled from the sixteen-track album.I was suspicious at first. It was said at the time that Twain’s husband and producer Mutt Lange had crafted her vocal track out of thousands of digital edits to make it “perfect”. As a music snob I thought we were hearing more of Lange’s work than Twain’s as a result. As a DJ however I could not argue with success. That Don’t Impress Me Much was a guaranteed floorfiller at gigs. That’s all a DJ asks.

It’s women who dance at discos. On the few occasions when I have played a man’s request, the floor emptied and the man in question stood against a side wall nodding appreciatively or making sporadic power gestures with his limbs. Women love to dance and a song which expresses their feelings, fantasies or frustrations with the world will always be a DJ’s friend.

In that respect That Don’t Impress Me Much sits right up there with Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive and the Weather Girls’ It’s Raining Men. It mocks men who think they are god’s gift to women by virtue of their hair style or the car they drive, and its opening fanfare summons women to join in the mockery in the safety of the dance floor, something they might not always feel able to do at home.

My gig supporting “Shania Twain” was a success, and the singer did a very good impression of the woman and her music. During the fit-up however I made a classic faux pas. The singer had naturally requested that I not play anything by the real Shania Twain and of course I agreed. Then unthinkingly I put on a country music compilation CD which I had bought specially for the occasion. Sure enough, the first track was You’re Still The One, the third single from Come On Over. Instantly “Shania” turned the air blue with her furious reaction. No doubt Shania would have done the same.

Turn Around (Phatts and Small, 1999)

Turn Around was included on Now That’s What I Call Music! 43, which I bought in desperation for a gig in late 1999. At the age of 41 I had no feel at all for the contemporary dance scene and was very apprehensive when I accepted a booking to play for a bunch of 13-14 year old boys who were celebrating the end of cadet camp at the army barracks in Warcop. I was still playing vinyl at gigs, reliant on my collection of old 45s which went back to the 1950s but not much further forward than 1985 – before my young audience had even been born.

Phatts and Small have endeared themselves to me for two reasons. When I started DJ-ing again in 1999 I had some catching up to do. I hadn’t followed the charts for about fourteen years and promoted myself very much as an oldies act. I used to joke wishfully that in my part of rural Cumbria the 1970s had never really gone away. There was a certain amount of truth in that, but people still wanted the current hits.

 I bought Now 43 and Top of the Pops ‘99 Volume 1 (a Now rival which also contained Turn Around) in an attempt to get up to speed. I played them non-stop for a week to familiarise myself with “what the young people were listening to these days” and expanded my two-turntable DJ rig with my domestic hi-fi CD player and my CD Walkman. The set-up looked exactly what it was – cobbled together by someone who had never run a disco using CDs.

 The Now That’s What I Call Music! series has been the dominant compilation brand in the UK since its launch in 1983. It is, in its 107 volumes to date, the nearest thing to an audio history of pop music since then. Inclusion on a Now ensures a kind of immortality for a pop act and Phatts and Small returned the favour by calling their debut album – what else could it have been called? – Now Phatts What I Small Music. A sense of humour goes  long way with me: Reason One to like the duo.

 The video for Turn Around was filmed in and around Brighton, the home town of Jason “Phatts” Hayward and Russell Small. Turn Around was their first and biggest hit, reaching #1 in Britain and Belgium and the Top Ten in seven other European countries. It made #10 in Canada but did not chart in the US or South America.

 The track is a very basic exercise in sampling. The rhythm is a loop of just one bar from a 1980 disco hit, Change’s The Glow of Love. Change were label mates with disco gods Chic at Atlantic Records and showed the considerable influence of Chic in their own singles. The bands used the same backing singers in the studio and – although he isn’t heard in the Phatts and Small sample – lead singer on The Glow of Love is a then unknown Luther Vandross.

 The Turn Around vocals are lifted from the first verse of Reach Up, a post-disco hit for singer Toney Lee in 1986. Phatts and Small mashed vocals and rhythm together and introduced variety by the simple trick of playing around with the EQ – boosting the treble or the bass, a technique pioneered by Daft Punk at the time.

 I was apprehensive as I arrived at the barracks. A soldier on duty at the gate waved me in. I felt I was under surveillance both by the army and by the toy soldiers I was supposed to be entertaining.But the boys were so excited to be getting their own disco and to be going home the next day that they danced to night away.

 They were only too happy to advise me on what to play. Out of 79 titles, my two double CDs had about fifteen credible dance tracks between them. Interspersed with older disco hits I played the chart music over and over again, to the delight of my audience – they cheered Turn Around each of the five times I played it. Reason 2.

 I bought every new edition of Now That’s What I Call Music! from then on as well as seeking out earlier volumes and investing in a proper CD DJ rig. By the time I retired in 2006 I had every ­one from Now 26 to Now 76. At time of writing Now is well into its second century. One man, Ashley Abram, compiled every Now from Now 2 to Now 81. Since the first Now in 1983, all but one, Now 4, has reached #1 in the UK charts.