Zone Magazine Issue 037 Spring 2023

Hello Jay, first of all please tell us
where you are from, what you do?
Firstly thanks for having me Paul, its generally me
asking the questions over at PHC so this makes a bit of a
change!
I've lived in a town in Suffolk all my life which has
always generally meant travelling if Ive ever wanted to go
out. We're about an hour from London, Cambridge is about
half hour, Essex about an hour. You kind of got used to it in
the early days, distance was never an issue. I now
alongside my regular job run the Progressive House
Classics blog and Facebook group.
Tell us about family life and what
goes on when you are not DJ'ing
and looking after PHC?
We have our hands full and family life is pretty
hectic. Ive got 3 boys with Autism so there's never a dull
moment!
Its the 1980's, your 13, and your just
discovering music, tell us all about it?
I was born in 1970 so Ive got some memories of
the late seventies but I think things became a lot clearer
musically in the eighties. My parents were big music fans
and Saturday afternoons were always reserved for the
playing of LPs, lots of Roxy Music and Elton John. When I
went to 'middle' school the first real band I kind of
embraced was Duran Duran who I managed to see live on
a couple of occasions. Things really changed for me with
the dawn of electro and breakdance though. In 1983 I
picked up the first Street Sounds album 'Electro1' and I
think I can safely say that was the first life changing
experience I had with music, within a year you had
Breakdance The Movie and Beat Street, both made a big
impact. It was the first kind of youth movement that I felt I
actually became involved in. I ended up becoming a keen
breakdancer and would frequent the local youth club and
recreational space with a piece of lino and a great big
cassette deck. We did it religiously every Thursday and
Saturday. Myself and my brother managed to see Public
Enemy, Run DMC, Eric B & Rakim and LL Cool J live in the
eighties. The thing with the whole electro breakdance scene
was it became everything at the time and although it didn't
have the lasting power of house you can definitely see the
roots for the new sounds that were coming through. I think
you could argue that without Electro you'd have no rap and
no house, its integral in the early development of both.
What was your first vinyl record?
First record I actually bought with my own pocket
money was 'The Specials – Too Much To Young' in 1979.
Before that everything was handed down from my parents.
You started off as a mobile DJ, tell us
about the ins & outs of that!
By the time I was 15 I'd become interested in
playing music, we used to have these video roadshows
come to the local youth club and they would be playing lots
of soul funk and DMC mixes along with giving us a bit of
Electro to break too, it sparked something and by about 16
I was travelling down to London buying US house imports.
I then bought this old mobile disco that comprised of a
Citronic Thames II deck with built in cassette player, light
boxes and pin spots. None of it worked properly! I spent
several weekends with my dad repairing everything and we
got it going, what then transpired was me going on the
road. I had a regular Thursday at the local hospital social
club and from that ended up doing weddings and birthdays,
I once got booked to do a birthday and when I set up it
was full of skinheads, ended up getting one of them to go
home and get his record collection so that I could play it,
way out of my depth on that one! The disco worked well
and one Friday I answered an ad in the local paper. The
town nightclub was looking for a DJ, at this point I honestly
thought that was what I wanted to do for a living so I
applied and got an interview. Looking back it was hilarious,
me and about six other blokes all sat on chairs at the side
of the dance floor waiting for our 30 minutes. I played a
load of soul funk and a couple house tracks, no mixing just
blends and a bit of microphone banter introducing tracks. It
turned out none of the others were happy on the
microphone and I got offered the job to support the DJ
upstairs although the manager was not to happy because
of my age and lack of experience, decent personality club
DJs were hard to find so I guess they took a gamble. The
DJ I was supporting was a Liverpudlian guy named Allister
and he was the first DJ to show me mixing two tracks
together on 1200s although I never grasped it and just
stuck with the blends. I learnt a lot about the art of DJ'ing
from that guy.
Why did you step back from the DJ
scene around 2000?
I wouldn't say I conciously stepped back from the
DJ scene but I definitely remember a disitinct change in the
way the whole scene was moving forward. The pinnacle of
that was the Y2K celebrations, its well documented how
everything kind of imploded with costs which in turn had a
detrimental effect on a number clubbing brands. It kind of
signaled the beginning of the end for the superclub brands
but gave rise to the birth of bar culture. I ended up working
in two bars in my hometown across maybe 2 or 3 years
which embraced this. The first bar nights we were playing
were a mixture of prog and funky house which went down
really well but it soon moved in to a more predominent
funky house direction which to be honest wasn't really my
thing, but I was getting paid every Friday and Saturday
night and that at the time was what mattered. I would say
it was around 2003 that the regular weekend work started
to fade out, it was also the time the I left my buyers
position at the record shop.