Back in ‘83, Greg Wilson was the first man to mix two records together live on television under the scrutiny of The Tube audience and a smug, bemused, aviator-sporting Jools Holland. Wilson has influenced the likes of Fatboy Slim, A Guy Called Gerald and Shaun Rider, and was the first DJ to claim residency in Manchester’s legendary Hacienda club before he singlehandedly coined the term ‘Electro-Funk’, hell he is Electro-Funk. Greg hung up his headphones in 1984 and the dance world wept; but now, over two decades later, he’s back with a vengeance and he’s bringing his extensive musical expertise to The Twisted Pepper on Saturday the 21st February. Renowned music collective Bodytonic are teaming up with Barry’s Tea for the ‘Tea with…’ cultural series to bring Greg to our shores for a cosy cuppa and a nice sit down. The 6 o’clock soiree will give fans a chance to get up close and personal with Greg while he shares some of his amazing stories about his life as an iconoclastic godfather of Post-Disco Electro-Funk, before taking his rightful place behind the decks for an extended set.
It’s rare that an opportunity comes around to gain an insight to the mind of such an innovative figure in such a vast realm of musical spheres, so we at Totally Dublin are extremely excited about that. We caught up with Greg to quiz him on all things musical and eh, tea.
You began playing electro-funk in the early 80’s when the style was largely confined to the black British underground scene in the UK. When and where did you first become aware of this movement?
Probably from reading Blues & Soul – which I started buying in my mid-teens – and listening to the weekly Soul show, Keep On Truckin, presented by Terry Lennaine on my local BBC station, Radio Merseyside. Going to The Timepiece in Liverpool, back in 1976, was a big step in identifying this as the direction I wanted to take – this was a predominantly black club in Liverpool, playing mainly Funk and Soul, with DJ Les Spaine – a major influence on so many other Merseyside based DJ’s at the time.
What attracted you to electro over other styles prevalent at the time, like 80’s groove and soul?
I never played Electro exclusively, but always alongside the other strands of black music – Soul, Funk, Disco (or what’s nowadays termed Boogie) and Jazz.
Electro was the cutting-edge black music of the time, fresh out of New York and heralding a whole new era for dance music, laying the groundwork for the coming House, Techno and Hip Hop directions. It had a vitality that swept out the old and announced the new – it was right at the crossroads as far as dance culture is concerned.
You were around at the dawn of the ‘superstar DJ’ era, when the DJ was no longer just the guy playing the records, but something of a celebrity in his own rite. How do you think this impacted on the British club scene?
In many respects I feel it had a negative impact. The music had always been the most important factor, but a lot of DJ’s began to believe their own myth and see themselves above the music. This led to a situation where, quite often, DJ’s were selecting the records they played not because they were necessarily the best records, but because they mixed the best. It was great that DJ’s got the recognition and financial rewards that had previously eluded them, but I feel this went too far, resulting in an e’d up audience affording them shamanic status, which was way over the top, and fed their egos to bursting point.
Dance culture went corporate in the 90’s, with its superclubs and superstar DJ’s. What was once an underground movement was now totally mainstream and, for me, the heart had gone out of it. Of course there were always pockets of people going against the grain, and the Electric Chair in Manchester certainly bucked the trend, providing a wonderful night that had more in common with what was happening pre-Rave. However, generally speaking, the club scene had become somewhat detached from its underground roots.
When you appeared on The Tube in 1983 as the first person to mix two records together, the audience and presenter Jools Holland seemed pretty perplexed to say the least! How long did this reaction last, before mixing became almost omnipresent in clubs? Do you think that there was a consensus that this would be a ‘fad’?
There was a big divide back then between the type of people who went to see live bands and those who went out clubbing. There were lots of people who thought it wasn’t proper music unless there was a drum kit, bass and guitars – for many, dance music was viewed as a lesser form. This was certainly the response when I started doing the Fridays at The Hacienda in ’83 – their regular crowd, mainly students and indie kids, were not at all impressed with the music I was playing and often berated me for playing ‘this dance shit’.
I suppose that Jools Holland’s response on the Tube clip reflects this – he certainly wasn’t the type of person who’d have been au fait with the nuances of deejaying back then. It’s quite revealing that he actually asked me to point out what a turntable was – a lot of people back then would still have known it by its old name, a record player.
Mixing didn’t really become the dominant force in UK clubs until the House explosion some years later, the majority of DJ’s still used the microphone up until that point. I was very much in a tiny minority of British DJ’s who were taking a serious approach to mixing back in the early 80’s, so it’s not surprising that Jools Holland was somewhat bemused by what I was doing.
How much has the DJing discipline progressed since you started in the late 70’s?
The technical side has obviously progressed hugely, given the movement away from the microphone and towards mixing in the subsequent years, but there’s an argument that what was gained on the roundabout was lost on the swings, with the crucial skill of programming degrading in the process. For me, that’s the most important aspect, thinking on your feet in selecting which record to play next. It sounds simple, but, in reality, it’s the key to deejaying. Seamless beat matching of course has its place, and a DJ who is both technically gifted and good at reading an audience is obviously in the strongest position, but the ability to read a crowd is always more important than how well a DJ can mix in my book.
You’ve been hugely influential in the careers of some of the biggest names in dance music today; Norman Cook, A Guy Called Gerald, etc. Do you sometimes feel like a proud father when you see how successful they have become?
I think Norman is only a couple of years younger than me, so I don’t know about the father bit – it’s just that I was an early starter. I hadn’t even realised that Gerald was at Legend most weeks when I played there back in 82/83 until more recently – I knew he was influenced by my radio mixes, but wasn’t aware that he’d actually been in the club during that time, despite only being about 15 years old (wearing a trenchcoat to make him look those all important few years older).
Yeah, it’s good to see that there’s a direct lineage between what they went on to do and what I was doing back then. In turn, this links to what went on before my time – it’s all part of a process that goes back to the 60’s. Younger people don’t realise just how rich a dance culture Britain has, its connections to black music going right back to the 50’s if you trace its roots here. It’s been a very passionate and far-reaching relationship, which has never been properly documented – totally different from how things developed from a US perspective.
Your website, electrofunkroots.co.uk, is a comprehensive biography of your own career along with an impressive history of electronic and funk music on a wider scale. You’ve also written many articles for various music publications throughout the years. What compels you to convey your knowledge of music with the public through this medium as opposed to purely playing music?
I was a young white guy who grew up in an area with hardly any black people, yet I gravitated towards black music and later found myself working in an environment where most of the crowd were black. I absolutely respected this crowd, they were the best dancers and into the most cutting-edge black music, so the fact that they respected me as a DJ touched a deep place within me.
When it became clear that in the documentation of UK dance culture the black scene was being almost totally overlooked, when in reality it underpinned everything that followed, I felt it necessary to share my archive material and personal experience as a matter of obligation.
It’s because of this that people began to offer me gigs and I was able to make a successful return to deejaying. It was a totally organic renaissance, no great masterplan or anything, just the conviction that it was my duty to draw peoples attention to the pivotal contribution of the black community (and the clued-up white kids on the black scene back then) in paving the way for the evolution of club culture as we now know it.
Words by Sheena Madden
