For its original fans, jazz-funk was a treasured secret. ‘It was something that no one else was into,’ beams DJ Gilles Peterson. ‘It was a little like listening to pirate radio, which was also a bit elitist. It was difficult to explain to anyone else, which is what made it so special; it had that tribal element.’ Shunned by the mainstream media, it was sustained by word-of-mouth, by the scene’s dedicated pirate station Invicta, and by the enthusiasm of specialist magazines Blues & Soul and Black Music. ‘Blues & Soul was the Mixmag of the day and you couldn’t buy it anywhere,’ recalls Pete Tong. ‘You had to subscribe to it. So you felt like you were in a secret society.’
But what began as a little-documented scene of enthusiasts soon multiplied into thousands. In 1977 jazz-funk staged a coup against the northern soul sound that prevailed in the rest of the country. At a Reading all-dayer Chris Hill led his disciples from their small back room onto the main dancefloor and demanded that the northern DJs give way and play funk. In retaliation a northern fan smashed Hill’s copy of Idris Muhammad’s ‘Could Heaven Ever Be Like This?’ (The pieces were later framed with the inscription ‘Remixed By A Northern DJ’). The next year the tables had turned and Chris Hill and the Soul Mafia were enthroned in the main room with a thousand London-based soul boys.
At its height, jazz-funk approached the fervour, credibility and inclusiveness of the underground American disco scene. At the Royalty in Southgate black met white and urban met suburban, as Froggy (Steve Howlett), newly fired up about mixing, cranked up his behemoth sound system and played fabulously sequenced music.
‘Where Froggy had the edge was he had a sound system which most black kids could relate to,’ explains Norman Jay. ‘Which is why, out of all the Mafia DJs he had the biggest black following.’ Using a variety of Soul Mafia guests, the Royalty created a cross-Atlantic amalgam, where leftfield US productions like Peech Boys, Loose Joints, Sharon Redd and D-Train met the jazz-funk of Willie Bobo and Lonnie Liston Smith, and rising British bands like Level 42 and I Level.
Jazz-funk grew into a huge youth phenomenon, but still retained its essential cultishness. As disco made its presence felt in the UK, it was the jazz-funk DJs whose style and tastes were followed in the new carpet-and-chrome nightspots that sprang up (especially Robbie Vincent, whose radio rise culminated in 1983 in a Radio One show where he tickled the whole nation’s ‘rhythm buds’). Disco’s crash, keenly felt in the US, had its landing cushioned in the UK by the jazz-funk scene, which was peaking just as its American counterpart was declared dead, and which regularly forced records into the charts right through the 1980s. In suburban Britain jazz-funk ensured that disco never went away, it merely added a touch of fusion and a blond wedge, and carried on.
As the scene grew, its early sense of playfulness got out of hand. By the eighties, dancefloors were filled with (heterosexual) men wearing alarmingly tight satin shorts, deck shoes and singlets, and often brandishing cannon-sized air-horns. Customised T-shirts alerted you to an endless army of club crews: the Dunstable Soul Disciples, the Dalston Soul Patrol, Brixton Frontline, Funkmaster Generals, the Black Kidney and the enigmatically-named Worried. Conga lines and party games crept in. Danny Baker observed it all in the NME. ‘I stood in the Royalty a few weeks ago and soaked up the oddest, most anarchic, craziest daftest scenes since 1977. The only way to get more people in is with goose-grease and a hot shoe-horn.’
This zany behaviour might have been more acceptable if the music had retained its edge, but the Soul Mafia’s latter-day sound headed steadily towards the elevator. And if things got out of hand at the Royalty, imagine what happened when they went to the beach. In April 1979, inspired by a gig at a Club 18-30 resort, Froggy and Robbie Vincent came up with the idea of soul all-dayers and weekenders; clubbing mini-breaks fondly remembered as much for the sauciness in the chalets as the music on the dancefloor. The formula, which continues to this day, was put into action first at Caister, then Bognor and various other seaside towns. The 1980 Knebworth Soul Weekender – described by The Face as ‘a much more agreeable use of Hertfordshire than heavy metal,’ demonstrated how large jazz-funk had become, with an event as big as anything the rave scene would later generate: ‘Whoever decreed disco defunct forgot to tell 15,000 tribal conscious dancers.’
Such dominance was undermined only when the new genres arrived. The Soul Mafia’s myopic definition of black music made splits inevitable. Chris Hill wouldn’t play rap or electro, claiming, ‘Just because it’s popular with the black youth doesn’t make it any good,’ and clung stiffly to a uniform sound of ‘real’ soul. Pete Tong was one of the younger jocks who left the scene as a result: ‘It seemed mad to me,’ he says. ‘They were quite happy to keep regurgitating old soul records. When rap came along, me and Jeff Young became the embarrassment on the bill at those weekenders. Chris was like, “Oh, fucking hell, here they are with that old racket!” ’
‘The first huge one was Doug E. Fresh’s “The Show”,’ recalls Jeff. ‘When that record broke, it was absolutely enormous at the weekenders. You’d put it on and people would go absolutely ballistic, but that didn’t go down too well with some of the older members of the community. It was definitely a generational thing. But it split the DJs more than anything else. If we’d finish with Doug E. Fresh, Robbie [Vincent] would come on shaking his head.’
Through 1986 and ’87 Nicky Holloway’s influential parties – the Special Branch and Rockley Sands weekenders – managed to combine house and jazz-funk, but it was soon clear that the soul boys had had their day. Pete Tong recalls Chris Hill’s reaction: ‘When house music came along, that was the last straw.’
To pre-order Last Night A DJ Saved My Life, hit the link below. If you buy from the Heavenly Bandcamp store, each copy of the book comes with a repro copy of Vinyl Maniacs, the in-store magazine from Vinylmania, the historic record shop run by Charlie Grappone and most closely connected with the Paradise Garage and Larry Levan. The issue is full of reviews and charts of the era, plus an interview with Sylvester and a photo story shot at Keith Haring’s ‘Party for Life’ birthday at the Garage that year, full of famous faces from the NYC dance world.
What a great cultural piece of history. Was too young to attend these but did so vicariously via my big brother who went to some of these and introduced me to the sounds via his DIY Jazz Funk tape compilations