WORDS: NICK GORDON BROWN

An oral history snapshot of the London house music scene...

Defected has just celebrated 20 years with its hugely successful first festival in its hometown of London. Now, we take some time out to examine the storied history of the London house scene – the DJs, the clubs, the tunes, the record shops, the spirit.

Helping us to join the dots in this oral history snapshot are five DJs / producers all of whom have played vital roles in the development of that scene; all of whom need no introduction; and all of whom starred at Defected London FSTVL.

Terry Farley / Pete Heller / Rocky / Smokin Jo / CJ Mackintosh

We also tapped into the encyclopaedic knowledge of:

Bill Brewster– original Fabric resident; Low Life and Faith party thrower; legendary chronicler of all things dance music

Frank Tope– resident & co-promoter with Basement Jaxx at the famous Rooty parties, house music eminence grise for Mixmag and Muzik magazines, DJ about town, trainspotter par excellence

Nick Halkes– resident DJ at current London party Reach Up: Disco Wonderland – but that’s in his downtime, when he’s not managing the Prodigy, Stanton Warriors and more (oh, and he also kickstarted no less than three essential labels in XL Recordings, Positiva and Incentive).

Andy Thompson– main man behind the counter at pioneering London record store City Sounds before a long stint as Pete Tong’s right hand man at FFRR, then A&Ring at VC and Universal, currently running Foundation Music with seminal London DJ Ross Allen.

“London – we gave you house, to move your body, something to dance about – we make you slam, it’s time to jam – pump up London, word!” (Mr Lee, Chicago recording artist, Pump Up London, Trax Records 1988)

“London is our heartland, and we wanted to stick our flag firmly in the ground on home turf. The cultural and musical diversity in our city grows ever stronger, and we are proud to bring people together through music.” (Simon Dunmore, founder of Defected, 2019)

Pressure cooker – London clubland in the mid-1980s

It is often the gestation period between cultural revolutions where the magic begins. With an eye undoubtedly on the musical melting pot that was early-mid 1980s New York, London was changing. Ex-punks, soul boys and Blitz kids rubbed shoulders in a confused but vibrant club scene where the new sounds emerging from the States (electro and rap predominantly from New York, GoGo from Washington) would be mixed up with old jazz, soul and rockabilly records; and the funk-fuelled Rare Groove scene began to mirror Northern Soul when it came to the energy of the dancers and the passion of the collectors and DJs.

Rocky: Big DJs at the time who were a great influence on me (included) Bob Masters, Bob Jones, Pete Tong, Nicky Holloway, Johnny Walker, Chris Bangs and Gilles Peterson, Westwood, Jay Strongman, Tim Simenon and Simon Dunmore of course. Simon gave me my first ever proper gig at a club in 1986. It was at his Rhythm Zone night at the C&L Country club in Northolt. I warmed up.
Other clubs and nights that we'd go to at the time included Special Branch, The Raid, The Wag, RAW, Delirium, The Mud etc etc. We'd troop up to the West End mob handed on the tube all dressed in clobber that we'd bought at charity shops and customised ourselves. I loved it and knew that I wanted to be in it constantly. 

CJ Mackintosh: Flim Flam (at The Venue in New Cross) was my first ever paid gig in 1985 which became a residency for a while thanks to Jonathan Moore (Coldcut) & Rob Day. (It) was mostly rare groove, funk & GoGo. I did Special Brancha handful of times at London Bridge... Nicky Holloway knew how to throw a party.

As another new sound, house music from Chicago, emerged and begun to fill the import racks of London’s specialist record stores, it intrigued, inspired but also divided capital clubland. For DJs who had long enjoyed disco, electro and New Order, it was a natural progression and easy to programme. For many funk and hip hop aficionados, it was alien. Received wisdom has it that whilst the rest of the UK was embracing house, London was turning up its collective nose. There were certainly clear pockets of resistance:

CJ Mackintosh: I remember me & Dave (Dorrell) trying to play house at RAW (influential Saturday nighter held in the basement of a YMCA building) and no one was interested. One night we started with house and no one danced until we put on some rare groove funk record. I think It was a bootleg breakbeat version of a Jackson 5 record. In all my time DJing, I have never seen so many people rush to the dancefloor when that came on.

However house, whilst not the dominant dancefloor force, was definitely making its presence felt.

Nick Halkes: In London in ’87, for me the main places to hear house music were in mixed gay clubs like Pyramid or Garage at Heaven...whilst Jazzy M was pioneering on radio it was Colin Faver, Ian B, Mark Moore and Justin Berkmann who were leading the house charge in London clubland.

Chicago’s Mr Lee acknowledged this when recording a Brit-friendly version of his hip house track Pump Up Chicago – whilst many UK cities were namechecked, the track was renamed Pump Up London, and referenced a host of pre-summer of love London venues known for championing house, includingDelirium, Pyramid, Café de Paris, Limelight and The Fridge.

1988 – the game changer

The story has been told and re-told so many times. In that re-telling, many of the subtleties and nuances have been lost, influential DJs / tunes / nights increasingly overlooked. But that fateful trip four London DJs took to Ibiza in 1987, and their determination to recreate the feeling they had experienced back in London, cannot be ignored. First out of the blocks was Danny Rampling with Shoom.

Terry Farley: The game changer was what was brought back from Ibiza - that cocktail of MDMA / a ready-made soundtrack / a new easy to do dance / a new outfit and a new spirit and way of thinking that made being cool seem uncool.

Rocky: The first Shoom party that Danny put on at the Fitness Centre. November 87. It was at that point that I thought, this is it. Everything is changing after this night.

Pete Heller’s Shoom pick, courtesy of Frankie Knuckles:

Nick Halkes: I talked to Mike Pickering on my Trailblazers: Electronic Pioneers podcast. He recalled playing a house-centric set at Fever on a Saturday night at the Astoria that reflected what he was playing at the Hacienda at the time and getting threatening notes passed to him telling to stop playing 'this gay rubbish' or words to that effect. Only a few months later the Astoria Saturday nighter (by now Nicky Holloway’s Trip) had fully embraced house music and there were queues round the block.

The summer of love vibe spread like wildfire. Paul Oakenfold’s Spectrum took on Heaven’s huge main room on a Monday night and won. Nicky Holloway’s Trip was the first acid house Saturday night in the heart of the west end. Initially the soundtrack was not exclusively house – the balearic evangelists remained determined to share the wonders of Ibizan pied piper Alfredo’s record box. The body crushing sound of Nitzer Ebb’s Join In The Chant pounded out of Spectrum’s speakers; a slightly worse for wear Holloway got on the mic at Trip to try to explain why he was about to play Well Well Well by indie band the Woodentops; merely by dint of sharing sirens with Todd Terry, a pitched up King of the Beats by electro star Mantronix was huge (when Trip closed for the night, everyone piled out onto the Charing Cross Road and kept dancing - the sound of police sirens echoing the sound of the dancefloor ones moments earlier).

CJ Mackintosh: Our generation growing up was listening to so many different styles of music so there were no boundaries or no restrictions.

House was the peak time clarion call, but DJs still relished the chance to be eclectic:

Pete Heller: In 1988 my sister dragged me down to Shoom at the Fitness Centre off Southwark St and I became a regular. After it closed later in the year, I became close friends with Danny and Jenni Rampling, and we often ended up at my flat in Camden Town playing music into the small hours and beyond. I’d been a DJ at Manchester while a student, so Danny asked me (fairly out of the blue) to be his warm up DJ when it moved to Busby’s in the West End.

Pete Heller’s top 10 Busby’s Shoom warm up tunes – a veritable goldmine of mood-setting curios:

Cultural Vibe – Ma Foom Bey 

Vincent Montana - Heavy Vibes 

Will Powers – Adventures In Success (Dub Mix) 

Shot - Main Thing 

Kechia Jenknis – I Need Somebody 

Koro Koro – No Smoke 

Jomanda – Drifting 

E.O. Crew – Love Turntable 

Kurtis Blow – Back By Popular Demand (Trumpet Version) 

A Guy Called Gerald – Voodoo Ray 

Not everyone caught the first wave of pioneering nights, but within a few short months, there were house nights galore where eyes and ears were opened, and barriers came down. Each in their own way was life-changing for someone.

Bill Brewster: My favourite night was definitely Troll, because that’s where I had my Damascene conversion to house music. It was the gay equivalent of Shoom or The Trip, I guess, in Soundshaft on Saturdays. Went every week until it closed. (It was the) seminal gay acid house night. Almost every current gay London DJ started out clubbing here.

Counter culture – the record store nerve centres

For decades, there had been a well-established network of independent record stores in London. When the house explosion caught the chain stores just as unawares as it had the major labels, independents mushroomed everywhere – most notably in Soho, a golden square mile for diggers, but also all over the city. These stores were staffed by hugely knowledgeable enthusiasts (many of whom were or aspired to be DJs), all desperate to share their new finds with you daily.

Pete Heller: Groove Records, Red Records, Black Market, Catch-a- Groove, Zoom, Trax, If Music, Quaff, Vinyl Junkies, Phonica, Mr Bongo – they are the ones I can remember!

Andy Thompson: I started at City Sounds in October `87 which was on the cusp of house music predominantly being produced in the US, to it arriving from all sorts of global sources. 

(The store) was owned by Johnnie Wright, whose main business, Greyhound Record Imports, were heavy into importing rock into the UK, but he was steeped in jazz and blues, hence City's was created to become an outlet for such aficionados!  Due to Greyhound's infrastructure, the arrival of electronic dance music from Europe, was easily accessed, and bar I suggest Trax (Soho’s undoubted euro specialist), Citys got a lot of what you may term `Balearic`, before most other shops.

Punter-wise, the shop was renowned for its black music so when the big US tunes landed, we were as good and as upfront as any other, but perhaps slightly lacked the cachet of some of the Soho glitterati, due to being situated on High Holborn, but as soon as the European tunes started landing, our clientele took to it readily, as radio and word of mouth were big on this new wave....more so, I`d suggest, than Black Market, Groove or Reds

Frank Tope: Quaff, that was a great shop, never too cool for school, very real and in touch with the fans - and they had great DJs like Phil Asher, Breeze and Dom Moir working there. Trax records and Flying in that early pre-prog 'balearic network’ period. 1990-91. Vinyl Junkies obviously, also Koobla, the precursor to Phonica, also on Berwick Street. Atlas, Is records… all shops that felt like that they had an aesthetic, that there were certain records they would have and a sound they were pushing that no-one else was and you had to go there to get those kind of records.

Bill Brewster: Fridays and Saturdays in a packed Release The Groove or Black Market, sticking your hand up when they played a hot record and sticking it in your pile. The clamour for imports on a Friday afternoon, getting excited when a white van pulled up outside with fresh promos in it. Perhaps my favourite period was after Fabric opened and Tag became the de facto supplier of music for everyone playing there (or so it seemed). Mark Collings seemed to have a preternatural sense of what music I would like and always had a pile set aside for me to listen to and many of those records I still play today. He had a great ear.

Nick Halkes: I loved the circuit of specialist London record stores and the excitement that would surround the arrival of a major new tune. When Groove Records in Greek Street closed, Tim Palmer (the owner) gave me the decks actually, so sometimes when I'm getting in the mix at home, I think about how much London dance music history those decks have been part of!

London Xpress – classic clubs

The London scene was in full swing. The one thing it arguably lacked was a custom-made venue, designed solely to deliver the clubbing experience in its purest form. Enter Justin Berkmann, one of several Londoners who had immersed themselves in 1980s New York and witnessed the magic of the almost mythical Paradise Garage at first hand (others included Paul Oakenfold and Dave Lee).

Nick Halkes: I remember chatting to Justin (Berkmann) on a plane on the way back from New York, where he first excitedly told me about his plans to start a club in London - the vision that he had was Ministry of Sound…

Somehow, Berkmann persuaded a couple of old Etonians with money to invest to build London’s answer to the Garage – not in the West End, but south of the river at Elephant & Castle, perhaps most famous for being one of the lowest ranking stops on a Monopoly board. Against all odds, it worked. 

CJ Mackintosh (1990s MoS resident): Amazing times which I will never forget. I could go on & on about it….

(hence CJ’s “MoS style set, 90s classics with some new things thrown in” at Defected’s London FSTVL).

Smokin Jo: MoS was so cool, with an amazing sound system, it was a real big deal to play there and all the big American DJs were regulars.

Bill Brewster: (in the) early 90s when they were bringing in the great American and Italian DJs it was a fantastic place to be.

Bill’s ‘massive at Ministry’ picks:

Todd Terry at the controls, David Morales on remix duties…

…and a classic Farley & Heller remix

Pete Heller’s Ministry memory pick courtesy of Louie Vega...

Ministry was by now the tip of a very large strobe-lit iceberg. The 1990s was nirvana for London clubbers – so many nights, so little time.

Bill Brewster: Wiggle…brilliant in its early years, scruffy, sweaty, underground and a lot of fun. The other staple for me was Trouble’s House at HQs in Camden every Wednesday. I used to go round to Dave Lee’s flat in Crouch End every week, have a few spliffs, listen to new releases, then a gang of us would go down to Camden and hang out there and listen to Paul playing. It was a great social scene, too, all the industry that was connected with that garage scene would be knocking about then, from record store workers to DJs and producers: Ricky Morrison, Abbey, Jeremy Newall, Alan Russell, Zaki Dee, Rob Mello etc etc.. For a time in the 1990s, Paul was the club king of London and his show on Kiss was essential listening. One of the greats!

Smokin Jo: Puscha was totally amazing as they were held in huge venues, stately homes, warehouses with fab production and a mixed gay up for it crowd.

Rocky: Early on it was Yellow Book at the Rock Garden and latterly the Gardening Club where we had our first residency. They were always memorable nights. Then I'd say all those Boys Own parties were off the scale as far as vibe. Incredible parties.

Terry Farley: Danny Tenaglia played (for free) for Boys Own at a free party in Brixton -  played this off a slate, sent the crowd wild.

Frank Tope: Feel Real at the Gardening Club, with Rob Acheson, Rhythm Doctor, Evil O who was wicked, really unusual selection of US imported house and garage that no one else seemed to be playing, cribbed so many records off her sets

Smokin Jo: I was friends with one of the DJ's best mates, and he was off sick one night, so I stood in, unlucky for him I ended up taking his spot because the crowd loved my set. Trade was a monumental club, it was the first club with a late license, so it could go on till 1pm. It started at 3am which was unheard of back then. It meant that after people had gone out, they had somewhere else to go, so you would get all walks of life turning up, it was a great eclectic mix of people, mostly gay, but straight boys and girls too. Lots of DJs and promoters also came along after their sets or nights. It was hedonistic, crazy, drug-fuelled, with the best music. When I played there, it was all underground house, garage and techno. The other DJs were so good, Malcom Duffy, Trevor Rockcliffe and Daz Saund, with Tall Paul finishing off the night. it was a real education and set the tone for all night raving.

Smokin Jo’s Trade 5:

Barbara Tucker - Beautiful People – CJ Mackintosh on the mix  

Alcatraz - Give Me Love

Alison Limerick - Where Love Lives 

Banji Boys - Love Thang 

Gat Decor - Passion 

Flip the script – London changes tack

As the new millennium approached, a number of movers and shakers on the house scene were getting restless. Everything was getting too big or too shiny or too comfortable or too corporate. Ministry of Sound even ran a Pepsi-sponsored tour. The music, felt many, was too safe. The original house spirit was being lost. Enter stage left a new breed of underground parties like Low Life, Rooty and Faith, run by and for heads; and a serious competitor for Ministry’s crown in the shape of Fabric, a club “conceived by people that go to clubs, for people that go to clubs.”

Bill Brewster: Frank Broughton and I had not long moved back from New York and we’d just started throwing Low Life parties in the UK after starting them up in Harlem in 1995. We did our first party in England in March 1997 and, at the time we were doing them in Frank’s mate Skelly’s loft in Kingsland Road, very near to Shoreditch. Capacity was small, about 150 tops, and we were using another loft across the hallway as a bar, so it was a basic set up. Anyhow, Rocky from X-Press 2, who in my opinion was a very important galvaniser in pulling different strands together, was dating Nikki Smith at the time. I knew Nikki from early 90s clubs I was going to. She absolutely loved what we were doing in this loft and she asked me if I was interested in becoming a resident at this new club they were building (Fabric). As a DJ you do get a lot of bullshitty offers about gigs and residencies, so I took it all with a pinch of salt, until she took me to the Clerkenwell site. First visit in early 1999, it was still a building site, there were no proper rooms and there were bricks and dust everywhere. but it was immediately obvious that this wasn’t some small idea, it was impressively large but also coming from people who clearly understood what the underground scene was about in London.

Terry Farley: Faith was a reaction to trance and prog ruling the big clubs, and us seeing inspiration in what Body & Soul was achieving in New York – that mix of timeless disco and house alongside leftfield house, techno and disco. (At one) Faith party at Turnmills… we had 1,500 great party people in 5 different rooms, all playing highest quality black music from house to reggae, techno to disco – every room was like a wonderful private party where you either knew everyone or wanted to know those you didn’t. 

Terry’s Faith pick. Kings of Tomorrow - Finally

“Faith all dayer in Brighton, DJ Cosmo playing it off acetate”

Bill Brewster: Fabric stuck their neck out with the music policy. They did something really bold. Their booking policy said: we know these people play great music, so trust us and come and dance. There’s no way that someone with my status as a DJ would’ve got a residency at a place with that much prestige apart from Fabric. Booking big clubs was all about big names. Look at the contrast between Fabric, who had Craig Richards, Terry Francis, me, Jon Marsh and Amalgamation Of Soundz on Saturdays. Yes, they did book Sasha and Tony Humphries, too, but the general policy was not to book household names, but DJs they believed in. It was the first time a big club had opened in London with an underground booking policy and somehow filled it every weekend. They’ve been instrumental in making some fairly arcane characters become pretty big, among them Craig (obviously) and Ricardo Villalobos, whose music is pretty esoteric, for someone who plays in big clubs.

Bill's Fabric pick: Josh One 'Contemplation' (King Britt Funke Mix):

Rocky: We did a short summer residency at Fabric in the early 2000s, just at the time that Lazy was coming out. The first time we played Lazy in a club was at Fabric one Saturday night. We played it twice. Once at about 2am then again around 6 in the morning. The whole place was singing the chorus! We thought we might be on to something. 

Meanwhile, south of the river, a platinum selling act whose magpie like take on the house sound screamed ‘London!’ and had scored them a run of international hits, decided to run a party in the back room of a local pub…

Frank Tope: It was a pub conversation between me and Felix (Buxton, Basement Jaxx) - they had stopped doing the initial run of Basement Jaxx parties after the Remedy album and there wasn’t a club in Brixton playing the music we wanted to hear.

Felix was very good at checking out all the less obvious pubs and venues in Brixton, once we saw the old school pub (The Telegraph on Brixton Hill) with a rave cavern out the back it just seemed perfect. Funnily enough my dad said he used to drink there in the 70s “and there was always some dodgy entertainment on to get the late license,” yes dad, we are now the dodgy entertainment! It’s also namechecked on Linton Kwesi Johnson’s ‘Dread Beat And Blood’ so I know in retrospect there was a strong sense of Brixton heritage there, but that wasn’t intentional. 

We had an email mailing list of a couple of hundred people and sold advance tickets through The Lounge cafe in Brixton and it spiralled from there, but we deliberately didn’t do anything beyond that.

It was a great time for both UK garage and futuristic r&b so that influence was a big part of it as much as the house music. We always stayed away from house and garage for the first couple of hours, until after midnight when people were really ready for it, playing hip hop, funk, r&b, jazz, latin - there’s a certain Latin record I always played to mark the end of the warm up, that the party’s about to begin, then Felix and Simon would come on and the whole place would go crazy. 

It was much more a raucous party than a deep in the groove heads down non-stop house mix - Felix, Simon, Tayo, and me all played house  and there was a lot of great house at the time, especially from France from labels like Roule, Crydamour, Africanism and so on, but also UK garage, techno, cheesy disco classics and out and out US vocal gospel garage. 

The band road tested all their new tracks in The Telegraph, and their subsequent second album was named Rooty.

Frank’s rootin’, tootin’ Rooty tunes:                          

Basement Jaxx - Where’s Your Head At

Afro Medusa - Pasilda (Knee Deep Mix)

Basement Jaxx – Romeo 

St Germain - Rose Rouge 

Azzido Da Bass - Dooms Night (Timo Maas and Stanton Warriors Remixes)

Wookie – Scrappy

Into the new millennium, and London clubland fractured…another one of those seemingly direction-less but in many ways hugely influential periods. There are few arguments as to who was taking the house scene by the scruff of the neck and shaking it into fresh action…

Bill Brewster: SecretSundaze took London house in a different direction in the new millennium.

Frank Tope: SecretSundaze - definitely a seminal club in keeping the house flame alive through the electroclash and minimal years while still embracing the best of those aesthetics and a big part of bringing both a very cool European crowd out and European style of  open air daytime clubbing  - a little bit of Berlin in Shoreditch.

Terry Farley: SecretSundaze parties, mid ‘00s, those guys ruled London at that time – underground house in what was then still a run down east London, with the best looking crowd in town – Giles Smith and James Priestley and the whole crew really brought London back to life. One party on a roof looking down the Kingsland High Road in the height of summer while DJ Gregory's Elle was playing really was beautiful.

London Calling – a final five tunes that rocked the capital

M/A/R/R/S – Pump Up The Volume

In those pressure cooker years where our story began, London DJs begun to get the opportunity to translate some of the ideas in their heads onto vinyl. Two indie bands, AR Kane and Colourbox, were working on a collaboration that was going nowhere fast. Their stressed label boss asked CJ Mackintosh and Dave Dorrell to come down to the studio to see if they could inject some dancefloor sensibility to rescue the situation. The resultant track captured the sound of 1987 London clubland in a few short minutes – funk and hip hop inspired, but whilst only 114bpm,it had the energy and electronic atmospherics of house. It went to number one in the pop charts on club buzz alone.

CJ Mackintosh: I’m not sure what style of music it was. Quite random really. Mid-tempo but 4 to the floor with hip hop & breakbeat samples. I just always said it was a dance record. 

Bang The Party - Bang Bang You’re Mine  

One of the first UK produced house records. Still one of the greatest ever UK house records. Bang Bang You’re Mine did for London what Voodoo Ray did for Manchester, announcing to the world that house music was now international, and everyone was invited to give it their own local twist.

Frank Tope: One of the all-time great London house records. And Kid Bachelor should be mentioned as a producer, a DJ and an all-time house evangelist.

Lil Louis – French Kiss

Jack Your Body had shown that a raw, instrumental house record could top the UK pop charts. The floodgates were open. Let the bidding wars begin…

Nick Halkes: When Justin Berkmann played French Kiss at Heaven, I sprinted up to the decks to try and find out what I’d just heard. I thought he might have slowed down and speeded the record up himself. It was kinda mind blowing. As soon as I could, I called up the phone number on the record and Lil Louis himself picked up the phone.  I offered him £2000 to license it to Citybeat (we hadn’t started XL at that point), and he said ‘yeah sounds cool man, just wrap it up with my lawyer’. Alas the lawyer then dodged my calls for the next couple of weeks, eventually faxing me (younger readers imagine a paper email!) to say they were looking at offers in excess of £20k, so that one wasn’t to be alas. 

 

X-Press 2 – London X-Press

Hugely respected DJs Rocky, Diesel and Ashley Beedle, encouraged by Junior Boys Own, took to the studio with an eye on creating their own twist on the US and European tracks they were digging. In so doing, they birthed a unique London take on the house sound that struck a chord on floors worldwide, most notably gaining anthem status at what most believed at the time to be the world’s best house club, New York’s Sound Factory.

Rocky: The early ones were made in a little cottage in Bermondsey, so I guess they were always going to have a ‘London’ sound. I think we were just doing our own take of DJ Pierre and Hardfloor records, and in so doing just happened to stumble on something between the two that had its own sound.

Global Communication – The Way, The Deep

Prolific producers recording under numerous pseudonyms, both together (most notably as Global Communications and Jedi Knights) and solo, Tom Middleton and Mark Pritchard’s work saw UK electronic music truly coming of age.

Bill Brewster: The first big breakout British deep house record, played everywhere by everyone in the mid to late 90s.

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