The Scene that swept me away

This is me at Haggle Records on Essex Road in London.
It's one of the few remaining vinyl shops on the high street.

I left school in 1981 and went to work for a record distributer called S Gold and Sons. I was there for two and a half years.  At the time, it was the biggest cash and carry warehouse of records in Europe. I was an order processor and it was working there that helped me find soul music. That’s where I got hooked and found the beat. Although I’m still looking for the perfect beat. I was a vinyl junkie.

Working for Gold’s, we used to get tickets for The Embassy in Mayfair. I met Jeffrey Daniel from Shalamar there on the dance floor. I used to put myself about in those days. He invented the moonwalk. It’s a little known fact that he taught it to Michael Jackson. Tim Westwood was playing there that night, I used to like him and listened to him on London Weekend Radio . He was a rare groove buff before he got into hip hop. Every weekend, I would be out at a “boogie” to see acts like George Benson, James Ingram, Frankie Beverly and Maze, Herbie Hancock and we used to go to soul weekenders.  The beat goes on….

I started collecting import vinyl from Groove Records, City Sounds, Bluebird and Music Power Records. I would go every weekend.  My addiction to vinyl drove me to open my own record shop with a friend, Pat. It was called Contrast Records and was on Cross Street, off Upper Street, Islington. We used to run a pirate radio station from a small room above the shop. We would only ever broadcast on Sundays because it was so risky, we didn’t want to get busted by the Department of Trade and Industry and the police. If they had caught us, the shop would have got shut down. At that time, the BBC had a monopoly on the airwaves and we felt that they weren’t playing proper black music so we decided to do it ourselves for the people.

I used to DJ in a pub called the Greyhound on Balls Pond Road. One night I was playing  my signature tune “Silk Fuse One” and a woman from the audience came up to me and said “Do you realise you are playing two records at the same time?” That’s how ahead of the game we were.  I was playing to myself more than the crowd; they were ignorant about these things and I felt they needed educating.   Nobody knew what we were doing. At that time the only way of mixing was one slip mat and a fader.  We used to do things like playing Acapella tracks over instrumentals. Technics decks didn’t exist back then.

A lot of the guys I grew up with on the scene have made it in the music business, have become successful. But I always took it too far. One party too many.

I sold all of my vinyl for drugs in about ’88. I had about 1300 original pieces and bootlegs. I had started off doing coke on the weekends, in the pubs or in my mate’s studio. It was everywhere. I remember the girls with long little finger nails, painted with the Burberry symbol. They would use it to scoop up a line. It was easy to score and use in pubs and clubs back then. Let the good times roll everybody, let ‘em roll before you get too old.   I ended up using heroin later down the line. And that’s when the wheels started falling off. Some guy came into the pub one night and said “try this”. We didn’t even know what it was. We were so naïve. I saw a lot of good people go to waste.

I wouldn’t change anything but I do have a few regrets. There is a lot of guilt and shame. But I have never really done anything bad, even at my lowest. I never crossed that line. I have morals and I live by a code. I just got swept away in the whole scene, the music, the celebrations. I loved being young in the 80s. Nobody was skint back then; you couldn’t spend a pound note. I feel I was born just at the right time to enjoy this. I feel sorry for the kids right now. They have been brainwashed by the computer culture.

Master Jay