A History of House Music

DJ Nashville’s view, Head Of Events, 360Fizz.com

Part 1 - In the beginning…

I was born in South London at the beginning of the 70’s. My parents loved music. We always had the radio on in the kitchen from the moment we woke up to when we went to bed. In our house the kitchen was the place to be when friends came over because: 1 - there was the fridge and 2 - there was the music!

Back then, you were lucky if you could afford a TV. I remember my parents renting one from a store called Rumbelows before they actually purchased one and then, it was broadcasting a black and white picture.

Radio was the main media in our house. We listened to radio stations like Capital Radio, (as we were in London) which was our main source of information. The ‘Eye In The Sky’ gave us the travel update with DJ’s like Kenny Everett and later Chris Tarrant. These DJ’s being the firm favourites playing mainstream pop music of the time.

I remember how the music just made you want to move. Dancing around the kitchen to the likes of T Rex or the Jackson 5 who were very flamboyant, very glam and I loved it! In fact, the very first vinyl 7” record I bought was Let's Groove by Earth, Wind & Fire back in 1981 at the tender age of 8 using my birthday money. Before that, I recorded the UK Top 40 on Radio 1 every Sunday afternoon on cassette tape, trying to hit the ‘pause’ button before the presenter started to speak so I would have a ‘mixtape’ but without the talking in between! It was an art form trying to make that happen! Like most of my friends, cassette ‘Walkman’s’ were how we listened to music while out and about. I remember lying in bed with my headphones on until I either fell asleep or the batteries ran out! For me, everything revolved around music, I was hooked.

I lived in South Norwood, SE25, at the time which had a strong West Indian influence especially on music. You couldn’t escape the sounds of Bob Marley and Toots & The Maytals, not that you wanted to. The Jamaican boys loved a sound system and had regular parties in the area which could be heard several roads down. The influence was all around and had a profound effect on my life for which I am eternally grateful. Very lucky to have been in that place at that time.

My Mum very much loved pop music with elements of rock like Status Quo and Queen. My Dad loved rock n roll music with Elvis being played over and over. He was a Rocker back in the 60’s and often told tales of famous trips to Brighton to have a ‘punch up’ with the Mods. My Step Dad came from that Mod culture but had a love for Pink Floyd and Cream. My Step Dad was part of the Hippy movement before becoming a Mod. The vast range of music influence I was exposed to was fantastic. Such a scale from one end to the other, so much emotion in each genre. I quickly realised that these genres of music gave you an identity, a belonging.

With the 60’s summer of love fading away, the 70’s era was full of hardships and oppressions which gave rise to people wanting to escape the mainstream. This was reflected in music and in the UK, Punk took its place as the underground music of that era. In South London we experienced the Brixton riots, an uprising against power and the racism being experienced at that time which overflowed into this emotional outbreak.

With all this going on, we moved to Carshalton, a London suburb and got hooked on Hip Hop music. It was the voice of my generation. My Mum and Step Dad didn’t like it which was great! It was fast becoming my identity. Bored of the mainstream, I wanted something different, something mine, a belonging of my own. Rap music was the vehicle that swept me off my feet and had messages within the tunes that I could vent my adolescent frustrations through. It used old funk groove samples which I loved and had that underground feel that drew me in. So much so, my best mate Scott purchased his first Technics SL1200 vinyl deck which was a pricey purchase at the time and still isn’t cheap to this day! This was his first move to become a DJ. Together, we formed our attempt at a rap group with Scott DJ'ing and learning to scratch with me on the vocals. I began learning to write, trying to emulate our heroes such as LL Cool J, Public Enemy and Eric B & Rakim.

We became students of music and sound, learning as much as we could from rap music and other genres. We had to explore funk and soul music as we were starting to sample old tracks to create new music. This is when I fell in love with collecting vinyl, always searching through the old rare groove funk records trying to stay up to date with the brand new US imports from the New York Hip Hop scene. This was a culture, a family we now belonged to. We used to take a bunch of vinyl, our sound system and a microphone down to the local youth club and play our music to anyone that would listen. Scott and I quickly realised that the gangster rap messages in the music from the streets of Brooklyn, didn’t exactly relate to two middle class white boys in leafy North Surrey!

With technology moving forward I was starting to hear more electronic music. Music has always had a direct link with technology. As the tech gets more advanced, so does the ability to create music. I remember bands like Depeche Mode, ELO and Blondie having this amazing new sound in the mainstream which started the crossover into different genres of music. We started listening to US West Coast music, Electro, which sounded like it was from the future. I remember collecting the Street Sounds Electro compilations with artists like West Street Mob ‘Break Dancin’ Electric Boogie’. I absolutely loved this new sound and was completely immersed. Electronic dance music was now my passion. Then I found Disco!

Nightclubs at that time were very exclusive. You had to look sharp and more often than not, you would get all dressed up only to get refused at the door! At that time the only kind of music that would fill the room would be live bands. When DJ’s started playing in nightclubs, it was with one deck playing one tune after the other in between bands. The concept of a DJ playing all night in a club at that time was considered suicide for the club. But when clubs like Paradise Garage in New York had a DJ with two decks mixing records together as the main entertainment, this was really the start of Disco.

Paradise Garage was where the downtown New York scene started. People from the industry used to attend nights at the club which gave rise to Disco music. Also, with the oppressions in the city at the time, it was a place for people that were disenfranchised to connect with other like minded individuals. To express themselves and dance, to be absorbed in the music. The pioneer of this scene (the first notable DJ to play in a nightclub all night, mixing two records together) was Larry Levan. Larry was extending the parts of the track that worked the crowd, mixing two of the same records, remixing live which was the birth of DJ'ing. The DJ soon became the main entertainment, the theatre, the focal point. For the clubbers, it gave freedom of expression that was outside of popular culture, especially in the gay community.

Disco exploded onto the scene and quickly went from underground to mainstream, with films like ‘Saturday Night Fever’ hitting Hollywood and also nearly every hotel in the US having its own disco with DJ onsite. It became a caricature of itself, even becoming comical. Disco died an ugly death on the 12th July 1979 by radio rock DJ and anti-disco campaigner Steve Dhal.

Steve encouraged middle class white American rock fans to bring disco records to Comisky Park (home to the Chicago White Sox baseball team) to literally burn the all the vinyl in a night billed as ‘Disco Demolition Night’. The stadium normally held around 20,000 baseball fans but on this night chaos ruled with 50,000 people turning up to the event.

This was seen by most as an expression of racism and homophobia. America gave up on Disco and reverted to very straight White Rock & Roll. Disco was deemed to be for gay Black Americans. This forced the scene to go back underground. Those primal beats returned in different forms, like a rebirth of Disco. Although it wasn’t called Disco...

House music was born…

Part 2 coming soon…

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